Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
PR comments I agree with, but after believing in unit tests for years I'm drifting slowly into the "waste of time" camp.

I'm convinced that unit tests don't usually find bugs. IMO, most bugs are edge cases that were an oversight in the design. If the dev didn't handle the case in code they're not going to know to test for it. Fuzzing is a much better approach.

At my current position I have the opportunity to work with two large code-bases, built by different teams in different offices. One of the projects has ~70% code coverage, the other doesn't have a single test. Exposure to both of these systems really bent my opinion on unit tests and it has not recovered.

The project with high code coverage is basically shit and has so many bugs that we regularly cull anything marked less than "medium" severity as "not worth fixing". This project was written by a team that loves "patterns", so you can find all sorts of gems like Aspect Based Programming, CQRS, N-tier, etc. well mixed into a featureless grey Java EE goo. We get so many bug reports that its someones job to go through them.

The other project with no tests is a dream to work on. Not a single file over a few hundreds lines, everything linted and well documented. Almost no methods that don't fit on the screen, no recursion. No bullshit "layering" or "patterns". I can't remember the last time we had a bug report, since our monitoring picks up any exception client and server side. Every bug I've worked on was identified by our monitoring and fixed before anyone noticed.

Whats the difference between teams that developed these vastly different applications?? I've worked with both teams for a while, and honestly, the engineers that wrote no tests are of far higher caliber. Use Linux at home, programming since they can remember, hacking assembler on the weekends and 3D printing random useless objects they could easily buy. The other team went to school to program, and they do it because it pays the bills. Most of the bad programmers know what they're doing is wrong, but they do it anyways so they can pad their resume with more crap and tell the boss how great they are for adding machine learning to the help screen that nobody has ever opened.

If your developers are great then tests would hardly fail and be fairly useless, and if they're terrible tests don't save you. Maybe there's some middle ground if you have a mixed team or a bunch of mediocre devs??

Comment · 9 years ago
the more esoteric corners of Java. It's like someone just offered to support windows XP forever. I highly recommenced donating to the Eclipse Foundation, they have made an impact far out of proportion to their size close to Bill Gates, but what they're doing for the good of us all might not be profitable.
Comment · 9 years ago
... Until the first person ports QT or GTK and suddenly WASM is just pushing 60 PNG frames a second into a canvas.
Comment · 9 years ago
holy shit
Comment · 9 years ago
The authors main complaints seem to focus around "but Typescript isn't ES6". I don't have a problem with this because Typescript compiles down to very clean vanilla JS. Unlike C++ to C, Clojure, and Babel the compilation down to JS is extremely good in comparison.

Good enough that I usually debug the Javascript output. Typescript has the cleanest transpilation I've ever seen so I don't have any problems with using it. And if Typescript ever falls out of vogue I'm confident just compiling down to JS one last time and being done with it. Really the language is so easy to get rid of its harmless.

Comment · 9 years ago
Yup for me I would say over 30%. I'm sure Consumer Reports will do a study soon and find that near 50% are counterfeit and the stock will drop like a rock.
Comment · 9 years ago
Because Amazon makes too much money off it to do anything about it. They could easily track everything... but they obviously don't.
Comment · 9 years ago
+1 for B&H. They're replaces amazon for all my audio and general electronics purchases. Generally the same prices without a chance of counterfeits.
Comment · 9 years ago
Or any type of wireless headphones. Not sure the percentage, but never got a pair that was real.

In fact I don't buy anything from Amazon anymore...

Comment · 9 years ago
the website and even the domain name are suspect.
Comment · 9 years ago
Weather is a huge issue for Disney parks. Both are busy all year round and a third park would be no different. It makes no sense to open parks that can only make money part of the year. The data shows the busiest times are December, March, and May so it would be really stupid to put a park anywhere those months have bad weather.

This leaves the South and West Coast. Dallas and Oklahoma City are the only realistic places for another park that's easier to get to from the Midwest.

Comment · 9 years ago
the last part was just for the lulz. I figured a facebook quality post needed some facebook quality comments.
Comment · 9 years ago
I don't think it's anywhere near conclusive yet that more layers = better. It's pretty telling that the current state-of-the-art is combining a bunch of layers together in a pseudo random fashion. Nobody understands how these things work to the point that we can make a formula or equation to produce better CNN's, or even predict which models will be more effective to any accuracy. You think more layers is better, because the best models we have happen to have the most layers? Some deep understanding of concepts there.

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