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Comment Re:Good luck with the barnacles and weed etc. (Score 1) 67

Oh if your flying floating fishy thing was lurking at the bottom of say... the Taiwan Straight or the South China Sea, waiting, just waiting; and had a choice between making an arial or subsurface - let"s just call it activity - that might be VERY interesting to the US Navy.

Comment Re:Advertising is not a freedom of speech issue (Score 1) 195

This case is about the share button, when you buy something and the court is getting its knickers in a knot about nothing.

In German culture, it would be crude and crass for someone to put that into their social media feed or send an email. The number of people who do this kind of thing is astonishingly small. That they actually felt the need to forbid it is the odd part. Then again, it should not surprise me that they'd mandate social norms. You are not allowed to give you kid a nontraditional name.

Comment Re: People actually *like* Python whitespace? (Score 0) 339

I'll bite: It's called Cognitive Load Management

Let's presume that your editor is not doing something stupid and is configure to use a fixed number of white spaces in tabs and you are not doing something stupid in your git commits.

You've written an algorithm that does X. A year later, when you are no longer on the project, I have to look into that code to fix a bug or add a new feature. Or... a year later, you are still around and have to do it. Before making any changes, that maintainer is going to have to read through the code to understand what it does and how it works. If you used significant - and consistent - whitespace indentation to enhance readability, the maintainer has to devote fewer "brain clock cycles" to understanding your coding style and has more to devote to understanding how it works and what needs to be done. This means that the change gets done faster and with less risk of regressions or other bugs.

  - If you are using such a style anyway, then semicolons at the end of lines are moot.

- If you are using such a style anyway, then curly braces don't add much either. At best, they are irrelevant. At worst, they get used to space out the algorithm in such a way as to make it less readable and increase cognitive load.

Comment Re:Wrong, I don't (Score 2) 339

If you are not going to bother to write code that is easy for humans to read, then I don't want to be one of the people who has to maintain it. I'll take easy to read code over clever any day of the week, because at some point in the future - be it days, weeks, months or years later - someone will have to go back through that code and try to understand what it does.

Over the years, I've seen too much code where nobody understands how it works and won't touch it. Nine times out of ten, it was because of "obfuscation through laziness".

Comment Re:Good and Bad Outcomes (Score 1) 265

Ahhh... raging against the beauty of the free market! Its quite simple. Service is a transaction and the server makes a calculation of their time against the likely payoff. If you are a cheap tipper, then the time spent serving you forces them to incur opportunity cost; as they can't be serving a better tipper in that time. Your average waiter or cab driver may not use the language of an economist, but you can rest assured that they are making that calculation.

Or to take a game theory approach, with reviews, tipping is now a repeated prisoner's dilemma affair. Without reviews, the only strategy that the server can take is to cooperate and the customer is free to defect. With reviews, you are playing a repeated prisoner's dilemma with a generic waiter/cab-driver. It is well known what people do when playing a repeated prisoner's dilemma against habitual defectors; the only rational strategy is to defect.

Either way, it sounds like you are going to have to be less of an asshole to people in service jobs.

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