A delayed response doesn’t mean it’s not automated, just that it wasn’t built to not feel automated.
I worked on an automated reply system like this previously and we had intentional delays with randomness as well as variance in our responses to make it “feel more human”.
Fixnum#times isn’t a great example, I only used it since the parent used it to illustrate their confusion and quite frankly a concrete useful example is to complex for this format.
ActiveRecord has changed a lot over the years, but as an example in the original ActiveRecord you used dynamic finders. None of the finder methods existed initially, but if you passed a message to an active record object for a non existent method rather than fail it would determine if that should be a method and then it would build and persist a method to the process for future calls.
It allows for some really interesting and powerful applications in horizontally scaling as well.
It’s not just about practicality. Ruby is using message passing, not method calling. This is fundamentally different and a bit foreign to the larger community. Then ruby layers syntactic sugar on top that hides this.
Behind the scenes everything is a message passed using __send__ and you can do this directly as well, but you generally don’t.
So when you write
5.times { puts "Hello" }
It’s sort of expected by the average programmer that you are telling 5 to call the times method and expect it to exist and do what it’s told.
In reality you have indirectly sent a message that looks like
5.__send__(:times) { puts "Hello" }
What we are really doing is sending a message to 5 (the receiver) and giving it the opportunity to decide how to respond. This is where method_missing comes in to allow responding in a custom fashion regardless if a method was explicitly defined.
So you’re not telling 5 to call the method times, rather you are asking, “Hey 5, do you know how to handle the message times?”
These are fundamentally different things. This is actually super important and honestly hard to really grok _especially_ in ruby because of the syntactic sugar. I came from a C/C++ background originally, then Java and then moved to Ruby. After a few years I thought I understood this difference, but honestly it wasn’t until I spent a couple years using Objective-C where message passing is happening much more explicitly that I was able to truly understand the difference in a way that it became intuitive.
I think you’re right, but I also suspect that doesn’t clear up anything for most people as in my experience they generally don’t grok the difference unless they’ve already spent a significant amount of time in something like smalltalk or Objective-C
No, they would know exactly what they know now. Employers already report your earnings to both the federal and state IRS agencies and pay your withholdings automatically adjusted for your dependencies. So a simple form that says you made X and claimed Y dependencies. Click submit to confirm…
That would be simple enough for most people (1 job, 1 home, maybe some kids) and it doesn’t require the government to know anything additional.
In that most common scenario no tax accounting service should be needed. Honestly a 1040 isn’t that complicated in that scenario either, but is still too difficult for a good number of people and it’s just unnecessary.
Like other's have said; his collaborations with Niven are really great. Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer, and A Mote in God's Eye were my personal favorites.
Agreed. His collaborations with Niven were great. Both were great authors alone, but as a team they were really something special. Footfall, A Mote in God's Eye, and Lucifer's Hammer are a few of my favorite sci-fi reads to this day.
Thanks. I wasn't familiar with this. That's definitely significantly cheaper (transaction cost wise at least), but even then doesn't leave enough room to profit on the transaction fee alone so I'm assuming they must be charging the schools for the service and partially subsidizing with the convenience fees.
My comment/question isn't about Stripe per se, but rather the surcharges of payment processors in general. It seems like 2.9% + .50 is about average, but then I see a site like https://sendmoneytoschool.com/ and they are charging a $1.00 processing fee for credit card payments to put lunch money in my kids' school account.
Is there some way to get super low processing fees if you don't use something like Stripe? Or are they taking money from the school and the parents? I'm just wondering how low of a rate is is possible to get for your ecommerce credit card payments?
Maybe I didn't convey it clearly, but this is what I was trying to get at by different packages and price points. Consider how the 3DS is marketed. I can buy the cheap 2DS, the middle of the road 3DS, or the high end 3DS XL (might even be missing some options).
At the end of the day they all play the same games. I bought the 2DS for my 3 kids because it is cheap, but also because it is the most rugged with it's non folding uni-body so they are less likely to break it.
I bought the 3DS XL for myself because I have poor eyesight and need the bigger screen and I'm less likely to break it.
If Nintendo does something along these lines I suspect people would buy multiple Switches per household. Based on their history it's not unreasonable to suspect that something like this is in the works. I doubt it would happen at launch since, but over time I will not be at all surprised to see different versions of this system offered.
This is the same question that's in my mind. With it's form factor it could potentially replace both.
Part of the issue is going to come down to pricing. With a handheld each person needs their own device. If this can be kept sub $200 it's sort of a no brained. If it is priced similarly to consoles today it's a harder sell.
I am also left wondering if this could end up sold as different packages. It could be packaged as a full console edition and a handheld only lite edition at different price points.
This is a pretty brilliant move in concept. While phones and tablets have encroached on the handheld gaming space, the DS is still a huge success and where Nintendo has continued to dominate the market.
As a parent, I have 4 of the current gen DS systems. One for myself and one for each of my three children.
Nintendo has really struggled to stay relevant in the console space though as seen by the Wii U's underwhelming sales.
If this device is priced right and can continue on their virtual handheld monopoly then they become a sort of defacto console system for the masses. For the first time in ages I'm curious to see what is going to happen with Nintendo.
I worked on an automated reply system like this previously and we had intentional delays with randomness as well as variance in our responses to make it “feel more human”.