terryk88a

Commenters have mentioned both Dunning-Kruger and Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Gell-Mann Amnesia is rather strictly defined by its creator in the journalism domain, but perhaps it could be stretched to include the commentary here at Hacker News.

Still, I think that tagging your answer as "amnesia" does not work - unless you, yourself, manage to forget to be skeptical... on topics where you are not expert and commenters are still show-casing Dunning-Kruger.

And it's hilarious how many of them there are here!

Arrrgh!

The price point is way out of line. $25 ???

comments here that allude to the history of spaghetti code are actually a bit off topic with respect to the article, but the early fortran family (pointedly - F66) had severly limited control structures in the language: a very weak for loop, and the goto statement.

'while' and 'until' showed up in RATFOR (rational fortran) which fits into the lexical ancestry of 'C'. I think that the Algol family had these too.

without the more powerful control statements, GOTO was heavily used, and with wild abandon. Some variants even let you GOTO up and down the execution stack.

trying to trace logic (of course there weren't symbolic debuggers way back when) could be like following a strand of spaghetti.

my most (not) favorite modern examples are coroutines, but let's not forget the evergreen example of enterprise java wherein one can easily achieve stack depths that boggle the mind.

nevertheless, spaghetti code is a frame of mind in which the untutored implement minimally functional software systems that only work for trivial conditions and for which the source code itself can not be reverse engineered except with great magic, epic heroism and extraordinary luck on the attack roll.

to pull one's chain, to see what kind of reaction he'd get from whatever suckers and chumps he can fool with this BS

or he really believes this BS and has narcissistic personality disorder

A while back (seems like it's been about a year) Radio Shack solicited ideas to make their stores more relevant. I suggested they install 3d printers in every store to bring hobbyists back in.

Crickets.

For those who aren't well read (grin) a very good read looking at a dystopian future where 3d printers have displaced manufacturing is Cory Doctorow's "Makers". The Creative Commons licensed book can be downloaded from his website, craphound.com, or purchased elsewhere.

I suspect it may be one of those near-prophetic works of science fiction that will amaze future generations - "How'd he see that coming?"

Absolutely you do not have to subject yourself to his whims. You would be free to walk out the door if you found the grammar test offensive, or the push-ups test, or the rope-skipping test.

You do not deserve respect. Ever. You must always earn it.

Pretty awesome distillation of the history of software tools since, oh, no later than 1980.

Back in the dino days, the rate of change was tiny compared to today's daily delta V. We mostly had monthly and a few weekly rags to tell us about the next big thing; there weren't that many next big things, anyway. Hey, it was a really big deal when cartridge tapes came out and we didn't have to thread a 1/2 inch magtape by hand anymore... Geez, who could forget 1-base-T networking? or 9600 baud modems? Whew.

Don't get me started on software innovations like Oracle SQL\Forms! ManOhMan! Fergit CICS!

Seriously - the barrier of entry is so low now, that the least of us can throw something up on the wall and if it sticks or even just leaves a little residue, the flies are all over it, preaching it up, "This is the best shit ever."

There really isn't much new out there, mostly it's just lots of new flavor wheels. Think "Hudsucker Proxy" at times like this...

I'm really excited to see this concept made real.

Based on comments here, multi-factor (non-wallet) authentication is used to identify the parties. This method of ID verification is a technique that I helped pioneer at Equifax many years ago, and I've been disappointed that it hasn't ever really seemed to take off before. I occasionally see it in use here and there, but now really expect it to be recognized for its value. Not perfect for every case, but a useful tool nonetheless.

Cheers and way to go!

Ummm. Step 1 of any 12 Step program.

Vague indeed.

For example, what does "universal access" mean? How about "free to connect"? Is this declaration demanding that access to the internet be free to all? As in no cost?

The language "access" to this or that has been subverted in recent years to mean that the accessed resource should be free of charge. E.G. universal access to (free) healthcare. That is decidedly not what accessible means.

So I won't be supporting this declaration. I can't tell if it is demanding Free Internet, which is not a universal right.

That's an interesting site, very nice lessons. But one would have to actually read the material to understand the chart (grin). But that chart is getting on toward what I expected to see at the subject of this HN post.

Snnnzx.. wha?

This may best thought of as a lexical analysis of 1300 popular novels. E.G. what is the most popular word following the word "it". The key of a tune 'controls' the chords available, using a typical chord progression. A song in the key of C most typically has the progression C-F-G or I-IV-V in roman numerals signifying 1 for the dominant C, and 4 and 5 for F and G respectively the fourth and fifth notes in the key's scale.

More interesting might be what are the most popular chord progressions. E.G. I-IV-V or II-IV-Im. Which is what I was expecting to click through to.

A million monkeys can write a hit in how many years, now? And BTW "it was a dark and stormy night" don't you know.

Why don't you ask "What's the least efficient way to print a string 100 times?"

Unrolling loops can be a good thing when optimizing code, but you can't get much worse than tail recursion. It's always a win to eliminate this code pattern. The order of complexity is the same, but your stack will blow up for large N.

I don't know what you're looking for when posing this problem. A simple loop is already the most efficient technique.

loop good tail recursion bad

Of course, this is just a homework quiz, right?

take it to reddit

Oh all right. Great job.

dang! don't do this! don't teach anybody how to use emacs!

it's my productivity secret weapon and I don't wanna share!

seems to me that in the last, oh, call it 9 months to a year that Google has been building up speed to jump a mighty big shark. maybe this trend goes back as far as when they realized that gravy-wavy was flopping.

this is just more of the same.

I'd tend to agree since that (having kids) applies to me. There's clearly a filtering effect, probably eliminating more experienced people.

However, he apparently has no shortage of suitable talent available when using this method.

No No NO. There really Really REALLY has never been a satisfactory set of metrics for code quality. Not for COBOL and not for rails.

Heh. My wife was turned down for a product management position because she did not send a thank you note. She forgot because she was (we were) so excited about the position.

The hiring manager went back to the recruiter asking for somebody else "just like" my wife.

(Loved the conversational format. "Bertie Wooster" is an inspired choice for that style of hiring...)