SHIP IT NOW culture produces shit like Discourse
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The MR company I was at for the longest did huge amounts of business with H-P's consumer printer division.
There's your problem...
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Here's an example of a research project that was done well by everyone involved. Anheuser-Busch came to us with the nifty idea that they would repackage Budweiser in red, white, and blue for 4th of July and create big displays of the stuff in stores that made U.S. Flags out of the boxes.
Someone had the thought that people might a) find this offensive or b) not want to buy the beer off the display because they might see it as disrupting the flag.
So we ran 2 studies simultaneously. One was targeted only at people who do or have bought Budweiser in the past. One was at people who have never and would never drink the stuff. They each got a slightly different set of questions. But the basic idea was to find out if either of these groups were likely to get all patriotic about the whole thing and start a public mess about how the whole thing is just awful.
It was a very specific research question. We targeted exactly the groups that we needed to. We got in and out fast with a short survey that was easy to respond to. Everything worked exactly as it should. It's a textbook case of how these things are supposed to work. A very nice upshot of research project design like that is that you don't even have to twist the data's arm when it's all done. The results were incredibly clear and unambiguous.
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But, if you know nothing but riding a horse, how could a person explain a modern car to you?
It's a big metal horse fused to its own cart which drinks gasoline and has thrones for innards
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I'm curious. How often does one actually need to deal with square roots of negative numbers, logarithms of negative numbers, etc. from Javascript? Are there any real use cases?
That's backwards. Everyone uses IEEE arithmetic because that's what you use if you're dealing with floating point math. Why? Because that's what there's good libraries for and good hardware support for. Anything else requires oodles more effort.
Yes, some of the users need to deal with those sorts of operations you mention and so the capability is there, but it's really incidental to the core concept of not spending a few years going off and reinventing this particular wheel just for shits and giggles.
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I'm curious. How often does one actually need to deal with square roots of negative numbers, logarithms of negative numbers, etc. from Javascript? Are there any real use cases?
The only use-cases I can think of are detailed mathematical simulations of things like airflow or black holes. Which won't be written in JavaScript.
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Square roots of negative numbers come up in quite a few places, like engineering. By then end they tend to cancel out but steps in calculations do need them
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Square roots of negative numbers come up in quite a few places, like engineering. By then end they tend to cancel out but steps in calculations do need them
They either cancel out or lead to interesting oscillations (because of the intimate relationship of complex number exponentiation and harmonic functions).
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Sure, I might not know EXACTLY what I want, but I can give you a good idea of what sort of features I use in existing products and how they don't suit my needs, or detail an elaborate workflow that's mostly made of work-arounds that you can simplify into a better product.
In some cases, perhaps. But most of the time people can't even think coherently about how to improve much of anything in their everyday life. Partly because they're so close to it and have trouble looking at assumptions and partly because they're not aware of other things that are possible.
This works both ways, of course. Users will use your product in ways you never imagined.
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In some cases, perhaps. But most of the time people can't even think coherently about how to improve much of anything in their everyday life. Partly because they're so close to it and have trouble looking at assumptions and partly because they're not aware of other things that are possible.
This works both ways, of course. Users will use your product in ways you never imagined.
That's why we're moving to a model of embedding software engineers with the team that wants what they will provide so that they can both observe what's really going on and iterate rapidly. There's some evidence that this model can work (especially for the kinds of things we do) but we'll see how sustainable it can actually be.
We seem to have some management buy-in to at least try it, so it's hopeful…
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@Yamikuronue said:
FTFYYou forgot the inevitable part three: "abandon the project But don't announce you're doing that. Just vanish off the face of the internet instead. Unless you're Google, in which case you just pretend the project never existed"
FTFY
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[NaN] I'm curious. How often does one actually need to deal with square roots of negative numbers, logarithms of negative numbers, etc. from Javascript? Are there any real use cases?
parseFloat('user-entered text')
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JavaScript:
{} + {} NaN
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Well... garbage in, garbage out.
What did you expect? That it threw an exception? :-Ρ
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How about an empty object?
[] + {} "[object Object]"
Oh, no, sorry, that's what you get when you add an object to an array. My bad, What was I thinking?
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Nobody gives a crap HOW their car or software work so long as it does
Unless you use Git, then you have to know how it works because it doesn't have a single abstraction that isn't leaky as hell.
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But left out of your story!
People never tell more pertinent part of the story on this forum! Where the hell do you weirdos come from? Do you do this when telling anecdotes at parties, just move on to the next one before you've finished?
I still wanna know if whatsisname got that free drink from Pizza Hut.
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I still wanna know if whatsisname got that free drink from Pizza Hut.
I am thinking no. I imagine the employees were too flabbergasted by the whole idiotic situation. I also like to imagine that the guy at the register said, "I gave you a free pizza and you complained until I let you pay, I am not falling for this shit again. Get the fuck out of here...weirdo."
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I still wanna know if whatsisname got that free drink from Pizza Hut.
Even after everyone else pointed out the obvious, he came back and said. But I'm not going to spoil it for you. You should go read it yourself.
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It's a big metal horse fused to its own cart which drinks gasoline and has thrones for innards
And this is my boomstick!
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Even after everyone else pointed out the obvious, he came back and said. But I'm not going to spoil it for you. You should go read it yourself.
MY JUDICIOUS USE OF THE MUTE BUTTON HAS COME BACK TO HAUNT ME!
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And this is my boomstick!
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I'm curious. How often does one actually need to deal with square roots of negative numbers, logarithms of negative numbers, etc. from Javascript? Are there any real use cases?
Not javascript, but in a C rules engine backend implementation, I used them to be able to encode SQL-style NULLs into what was otherwise double-based calculation code. This allowed using only one variable to carry current value, simplifying the code.
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Damn it, I wanted to pretend I'm smarter than I really am for a while longer, but now you revealed my sources! Curses!
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But left out of your story!
Sorry. The results were that no one really cared much about the whole thing. A few outliers here and there, but not a big deal. So they went forward with the plan. I have no idea if or how it affected sales.
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What's wrong with shipping? It's just harmless fun, writing fan-fiction where two characters- oh, shipping software.
At that moment, when the warmth from the excited chipset, caused by the bustling of the Netflix app, reached the Android OS, a passion ignited. Android would never forget that day.
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Superman: And my heat vision.
Gimli: Well, now you just made us all pointless.
Supes: uh, whaaaaaa
Gimli: Yes, let's have you join. You can just pick Frodo up and fly him over there.
Gandalf: Well.... we do have eagles
Gimli: To hell with 'em. I've been wanting to use this thing.
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But, if you know nothing but riding a horse, how could a person explain a modern car to you?
I know this is beside the point, but the predecessor to a car wasn't a horse, it was a horse-drawn carriage. So you would explain a car as being a sort of "horseless carriage".
Edit: Discourse darkened up the image... Orig seen here.
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I know this is beside the point, but the predecessor to a car wasn't a horse, it was a horse-drawn carriage. So you would explain a car as being a sort of "horseless carriage".
It is beside the point. Try explaining a person that thinks of a horseless carriage as the epitome of technology what a modern Mercedes S-Class is like. Radar guided cruise control, climate control, backup cameras, collision avoidance, infrared cameras, GPS navigation, voice activated controls, Bluetooth integration with cell phones, vehicle stability control..the list goes on and on. ;)
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WTF happened to software engineering that made us think Ruby was a good idea?
Java
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Cruise control: the horse keeps walking until you say woah.
Collision avoidance: the horse tries to avoid a collision.
GPS navigation: the horse knows how to get home.The others not so much... Anyway, just thinking about how high-end carriages had some car-like features - enclosed passenger compartments, glass windows, headlights, brakes, etc. Maybe some had a heater?
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If you are referring to the claim that js is bad, I think it doesn't need a comparison, it's just bad for the tasks we are using it for. Not designed with that purpose in mind. We're far beyond animating monkey images, we need reliable web apps working with important data safely. And javascript's absence of a sane object model, of typing, e.g., isn't some "groundbreaking new paradigm", at least it wasn't intended to be, it's just that nobody thought of those features when designing the language because they weren't needed (for animating monkey images). But they are today, and the way our current web technologies in general (in my opinion) are trying to cope with these (still relatively new) requirements, is stupid, short-sighted, and hacky.
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I am thinking no.
He said no, downthread. If you guys hadn't got all flamewarry, you'd've known that.
Edit: hanzo'd.
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If you are referring to the claim that js is bad
I was not. I was addressing the bigger claim about culture.
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Maybe some [horse-drawn carriages] had a heater?
Charcoal brazier inside the carriage.
Also they had suspension.
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Charcoal brazier
That sounds pretty uncomfortable. I glad I never had to wear one of those.
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you would wear one of these?
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That's backwards. Everyone uses IEEE arithmetic because that's what you use if you're dealing with floating point math. Why? Because that's what there's good libraries for and good hardware support for. Anything else requires oodles more effort.
I'm not doubting that, I just find it interesting that the author chose to make a big fuss over
NaN
to fulfill some use case that's largely imaginary in JS.not spending a few years going off and reinventing this particular wheel just for shits and giggles.
The rest of the industry needs to heed this advice.
The only use-cases I can think of are detailed mathematical simulations of things like airflow or black holes. Which won't be written in JavaScript.
Exactly my point. The first thing that comes to mind are quaternions, but one typically thinks of those as vectors.
parseFloat('user-entered text')
Okay, that's legit. I much prefer the TryParse construct we get from .NET.
Not javascript, but in a C rules engine backend implementation, I used them to be able to encode SQL-style NULLs into what was otherwise double-based calculation code. This allowed using only one variable to carry current value, simplifying the code.
And I'm sure it was an appropriate choice in C.
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And I'm sure it was an appropriate choice in C.
There are no appropriate choices in C, only Event Horizon choices.
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That sounds pretty uncomfortable. I glad I never had to wear one of those.
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It only took 16 hours until someone felt the need to explain it...
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To be fair, @accalia did try, though not very effectively.
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To be fair, all this gossip is not fair.
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To be fair, all this gossip is not fair.
To be fair, is it really gossip when the subject can come defend herself at any time?
cc: @accalia
Filed Under: What did I start?
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