Yeah re-reading the wording now I think you're right. It's this part that throws me off:
> could determine that, in the absence of any undefined behavior
"could determine that" based on the code example shown
vs
"could determine that" based on static analysis performed on some preceding code
It would have been a lot easier to wrap my head around if it were an example where cond could be 0 or 4 or something along those lines. It would really underscore the compiler's desire to reuse the cond as the index.
I found it odd that the author seems to think that empathy for the individual is somehow at odds with caring for the many, instead of being closely correlated. As if removing empathy would somehow get people to care more about each other, rather than less.
What I think wikipedia needs more than anything is a new way to propose an edit without actually committing it, and to be able to solicit feedback or have others fix it for you before having it finally approved and submitted. It needs to be something where an inexperienced editor can make a good edit proposal without having to be completely versed in wikipedia's editing policies.
Talk pages are a horrendous way to implement this. Making an edit proposal should be extremely new-user friendly.
I think a proposal and dialog format would do a much better job at absorbing new content than what happens currently, which seems to be a revert if you run afoul of any editing policy.
Making self-driving cars safer than people-driven cars is trivial. The hard thing will be handling the tidal wave of FUD when the inevitable happens and someone dies as a result of one. Google or Nissan or whoever will need a mountain of good PR and safety statistics to be able to push it back. That alone is enough reason to motivate the creation of "hyper-efficient safety mechanisms".
I think an interesting implication of this is that people may feel satisfied having purchased something useless that seems to have enough "stuff" in it.
I think the idea is that if the manufacturer was the only one selling, that they could inflate their prices higher than what the middleman overhead would be since they're the only one offering that product.
Why he thinks competition between brands isn't enough to counteract this I have no idea.
I really think Android should add another layer of protection here, similar to the "This app wants to use your location" prompt in iOS. I'd like to be able to install an app that might need to access my phonebook in some use case but be able to deny it when it attempts to access that information when I don't want it to.
For example, I'd want to be able to use the facebook app and many users might even want to have it scan their address books in order to find friends. However, if the app attempts to read my address book when I'm just checking someone's status update that is clearly not okay and I want to be able to block it.
The free pass to pillage my phone upon installation doesn't sit well with me.
If the author wants us to discuss the point he should get to it faster rather than droning on about apple stock and product pipelines.
300 words isn't so much that it's cumbersome to read, but it definitely primed me to think that his point was somehow specific to apple and investing when it wasn't at all. I'm not surprised that people have decided to nitpick it.
I think Machinarium is a good example of how you can preserve the fun frustration of adventure games without pushing people to cheat. They would allow you to play a mini-game in order to reveal some extra hints which would push you in the right direction enough to figure out the rest on your own.
In Monkey Island I would sometimes get annoyed and google for what to do out of angry frustration. It was easy for me to throw my hands up and say "I don't give a shit any more, time to move on!" Lots of times the solutions made zero sense to me. In Machinarium I still got a sense of frustration and puzzlement, but I would try to forego the hints out of pride for as long as I could which made for a much more enjoyable experience.
I'm curious what exactly it is about pointers that makes them so hard to understand.
Many new programmers seem to warm up to Java "references" just fine, and they have mostly the same semantics of C pointers.
Maybe it's because passing by value is conceptually harder to grasp than passing by reference, and in C you must understand both in order to use pointers?
The causation could easily be backwards. Who wants to marry a depressed, unsatisfied drinker?
> Isn't it generally sound to assume causation until the position can be falsified?
Not really, no. Would you assume causation in the case of cereal consumption typically increasing 30% on the first Tuesday after a heavy rainfall? There are many similarly insane correlations that you wouldn't be so quick to assume causation about. It's biased to assume causation (based solely on statistics) when you want it to make intuitive sense.
On the contrary, I think people who are already comfortable with vim have a harder time identifying the pains of learning it.
There are many problems that started out as pains but are second nature to us now, so we don't think to optimize them.
I remember spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out link and include paths to add a new library in visual studio when I was a new programmer. Doing so now is so easy I hardly need to think about it, but in reality it hasn't gotten any easier. I am simply familiar with the process.
Really, installing a new library should be as straightforward as installing an extension in a web browser. There is little essential complexity there, and yet this process has not become easier (in C/C++) for decades.
Anyone who knows enough about how to solve the problem has already groked it and isn't interested in solving it anymore. This is the problem I see with wanting an improved vim from someone who is already a vim expert. The problems they have with vim are disjoint from the problems a new programmer would have with vim.
What I will say is that if you are going to create a new editor, by the time you are done you should have become an expert in all the major text editors. You're absolutely right that any new editor should have seriously considered the features available in vim and emacs and others. However I have no problem with someone who isn't an expert getting inspiration to create their own editor out of their frustrations with vim. Many great things were stared in similar ways by people who weren't experts (yet).
> could determine that, in the absence of any undefined behavior
"could determine that" based on the code example shown
vs
"could determine that" based on static analysis performed on some preceding code
It would have been a lot easier to wrap my head around if it were an example where cond could be 0 or 4 or something along those lines. It would really underscore the compiler's desire to reuse the cond as the index.