silentplummet

That's a pretty fast turnaround time. 6 minutes! I don't think the Air Force can even scramble jets that fast.

Would you care to point out exactly what part of the comment is "off-topic" pursuant to `the experience of women in tech`?

This is fair, but let's recognize that the discussion takes place in the context of a few well known individuals who have made an enviably successful career as freelance victims, who stridently prevaricate about the persecution they've experienced in the industry, but by all accounts don't actually do any work on technology at all.

One wrote a story for a mediocre video game and claims publicly to be a game developer. Is she a 'woman in tech'? It's like if I painted a mural on a house during construction this one time and went on claiming a career in carpentry. But don't you dare claim I'm not legitimately a carpenter, because hey, stop persecuting me!

The dichotomy isn't false, it's quite real and true, and it seems obvious to me that there are a handful of lamentably visible charlatans who are to blame for it. On the other hand, I could list dozens of women in the industry whose output I greatly respect and they seem to experience great success, but you never hear a peep out of them. It's almost like the more "tangentially involved" one is with tech, the more vocal one becomes about this supposed persecution...

OP doesn't go far enough, it's all he mentioned and an insider contract to move product manufactured by businesses owned by Bush's skull society buddies.

Research who Michael Chertoff is and his role in the Bush administration. Who do you suppose conveniently owns the corporations that manufacture the rapey scanners and other equipment that had to be procured for the security matinee?

>American's apathy and frankly ignorance is what gave scumbags a series of blank checks with immunity. Americans didn't do anything learning about Iraq WMD's, 2008 frauds, Snowden leaks, and so on. Largely nothing but griping.

Hold on, I think you're giving the average American way too much credit here. My mom has at various times said that the police state is a good thing, the FBI should be able to view anybody's data for any reason, and groups the state names as terrorists should be denied freedom of speech.

This is exactly correct. I flagged the submission.

The aviation community appreciates the importance of robust/utilitarian/minimal transmission of information. Look at the format of TAFs and METARs for instance, the raw format of how the weather data is actually transmitted.

It's incomprehensible to the layman because there is an extreme economy of transmitted data. To decode it you have to know a fairly large vocabulary of domain specific symbols and do some computations to retrieve the correct wind speed and direction, which are encoded.

This is so you can always get your weather, one byte at a time if needed.

KDEN 101353Z 33009KT 10SM FEW080 FEW180 FEW220 04/M09 A2985 RMK AO2 SLP079 T00441089

When we use a computer programming language, we are directing an abstract machine to interpret and manipulate data to get a result that we want. We have all the knowledge we need about the machine because we conceived and designed it ourselves.

DNA is like a programming language for a biological computer, a living cell. However, we don't know nearly everything there is to know about a living cell. We can't predict its mechanisms. There is no debugger. The compiler didn't come with an instruction manual. The code bootstraps itself into its own machine and runs in an environment we can't predict. And the syntax has been obfuscated and optimized by a genetic algorithm that's been running in parallel on quintillions of cores for a billion years.

Because the code executes on an unknown machine in an unpredictable physical environment, many features we might expect to see in a programming language are missing. This might be what he meant by "shallow".

A stain on the history of human civilization. A few men will become rich beyond imagination by a skillful appeal to base laziness and apathy. It's the renaissance of the disposable generation. Just toss the cup away. Toss the whole maker away when it breaks, too.

Make no attempt to contemplate where all of this trash ends up.

What's wrong with taking a few minutes to make the coffee and clean up after yourself? Did you know coffee grinds make a great nutritious supplement to household plants and gardens?

It's moot.

The train of the discussion, if you go and read the OP's link and inner links, is like this:

- Singletons are bad - Why are singletons bad? - They're not "real" OO, they're global state, they obfuscate dependency, etc, etc, etc - But what if I just legitimately have a ton of global state? - Use a database! Use a filesystem!

The last point in the chain admits that the first point is mistaken. "Use a database" is just saying "use someone else's code to solve your problem". What if the database is implemented using singletons? What if it uses code that isn't OO at all? All you've accomplished is to say "OO can't solve your problem, use something external". In fact, my problem is solved just fine by using a singleton.

And make 300,000 queries over TCP like getting the list of county names in a state, or getting the list of place names in a county, because my actual use case involves fuzzy matching an arbitrary subset determined by user input, of 18,000,000+ unsanitized data records against geographical place names so they can be assigned geometries?

I'd like the program to finish in 15 seconds or less, please.

Sometimes you really do legitimately have a lot of static, global state. For instance, consider a program that needs to reference local, national, and/or global geography and its metadata, on a wide scale, randomly. All the countries have subdivisions, and subdivisions of subdivisions, and so on all the way down, which are all inter-referential. You can easily hit 100 MB of state that is essentially constant, and needs to be indexed 50 different ways for millions of function calls per user action that would access it.

Why not manage access to such things in a singleton class?

Who cleans up after anything we do, really? Our economic systems lubricate the exchange of work and capital by abstracting away the cost of cleanup, which is rarely well understood to begin with, from view.

Observe any abandoned or unused commercial structure in your town, such as the old building Walmart vacated to build a bigger Walmart 1000 feet down the road. Did the price of building either structure include the cost of cleaning them up?

Thermodynamics guarantees that literally everything we might try to do makes a mess (a net entropic gain), and that includes cleanup efforts. Cleaning up is really just shifting messes around. We spend a little extra energy to make a neat pile but at the cost of producing a little extra poop and carbon dioxide.

We kick the entropy can down the road a thousand different ways every day. And then we do things like shipping cotton across the whole god-#@%^ Pacific ocean, so Chinese slave^H sweatshop laborers can assemble them into clothes, so we can ship them back across the ocean again and buy shirts. The ludicrous inefficiency of our corporate masters sacrificing both natural resources and our country's prosperity to save a buck is conveniently abstracted out of sight by the glorious global capitalism.

Make no attempt to look at the man behind the curtain.

Bit depth is not a measure of quantity, but of dynamic range. In other words, what matters is not only how many quantization steps you have, but how large of a space you are trying to map them over.

The examples in the article point to this obvious conclusion, but don't quite state it explicitly. The relationship between space and quantization effects is demonstrated for a physical dimension interpretation of space by the horizontal greyscale bar that stretches and contracts.

But what if you stretch and contract the dynamic range of your monitor itself? Each bit in the encoding space (naively) offers a doubling of dynamic range in the natural space, so even your 30 bit encoding can be stretched if you display it on a monitor that intends to output a contrast ratio many times greater than what we are used to.

For instance, imagine a monitor that could output light perceptually as bright as the afternoon sun, next to effectively infinite blackness. Will 30 bits be enough when 'stretched' across these new posts of dynamic range, or will banding (quantization) still be visually evident when examining a narrow slice of the space?