If someone writes mountains of code on their own time then I won't have to pay them much to write code for me since they were going to do it for free anyway.

Sure! You want to send me $2000 per month, I'll send you a copy of all the code I write for fun. And hey, perhaps you just happen to have an interest in game bot scripting, or chaotic iterators, or analyzing Apache logs. And this doesn't really count as "programming", but just last week I wrote a Sudoku solver in Excel without using VBA, just to see if I could! I'd gladly throw that in as a bonus for your money.

The guys were racist, they got the hammer of justice thrown at them.

One problem there - In the US, you have every right to hold racist views. You can't act on them in certain protected contexts, but you can rant day in and day out about hating blacks or Jews or Asians or, yes, even Whites.

Now, I have no problem with the university choosing not to support a racist organization - If I attended OSU, I'd much rather the university disband the entire "Greek" system (see? I have a right to that particular prejudice, except I won't find myself homeless a week from now as a result). But talking about expulsion and searching frantically for actual crimes to charge them with, for singing a stupid racist song?

No. We need to collectively get a fucking grip, and move on. Stupid kids doing stupid things.

In a perfect world I want to see some of your code but thats nearly always locked up under contracts.

Any experienced programmer who doesn't have mountains of code they've written on their own time and could show you a sampling of, should raise a huge red flag for you.

Personally, I take a CD "portfolio" of code snippets I've written to every interview. If they ask about it, I hand them the CD. Even better if they don't specifically request code samples, but ask something like "So how would you solve blah blah blah", and I have an example of it I can show them on-the-spot.

HR protects against issues they are more likely to be blamed for

Curious perspective - I have heard HR blamed for a lot of things, but never whether or not a new hire can actually do the job.

In my experience, HR just handles the job posting and the front-line resume filtering. Once they've narrowed the field down to a manageable number of resumes, they pass the pile along to the hiring manager and from that point on, s/he takes all the responsibility for finding the right person.


only bringing up a potential moral dilemma that you'll have to work out in your own way via your own belief system.

Lying to HR doesn't pose any moral dilemma whatsoever. The bigger problem comes from not getting to send one resume to HR and one resume to the hiring manager; so lying to the doorman means also lying to the hottie at the bar.

Ah, good response! Thank you for the correction!

I think that an important question here is how does one defend oneself against this?

Ordinary mirrors just don't work against that sort of power - they still absorb a small fraction of the energy of the light hitting them, which at 30KW would vaporize anything wearable in milliseconds.

Realistically, you'd need some sort of ablative armor, but anything you could actually carry would only buy you a few seconds at best - And keep in mind that whole "equal and opposite reaction" thing - Blocking a 30KW laser through ablation would hit you with the same force as a .45 caliber bullet 60 times a second.

Not going to damage the surroundings.

30KW getting scattered doesn't really compare well to accidentally pointing your green laser pointer at something shiny and seeing speckles for a minute - More like "everything even remotely flammable within 50ft ignites".

As I've said before, if he's really this stand up guy, why did he run? IF he really had good and legal reasons to do what he did, take it to court and face the music.

I know, right? Like how the Sons of Liberty didn't disguise themselves as Indians before dumping a load of tea into Boston Harbor, and then when done, turned themselves in to the nearest British garrison? We need more heroes like those fine, upstanding, nametag-wearing gentlemen.


if you break the law to make your point that the law is unjust you should stand ready to be arrested, imprisoned and tried in court for what you choose to do.

"Ready to be" doesn't mean adopting a Gump level of naivete and making it easy for the government to remove you from the public view. By him fleeing the country (and seeking asylum in a country we traditionally mock for their lack of an open and fair government, no less), we continue to discuss Snowden's actions years later. If he had stuck around, we would all have forgotten about him as soon as the next weekly scandal distracted the media.

I admittedly don't usually look at the submitter. If the FP gets my attention, I'll click through to read the rest of the submission, and, maybe, even TFAs where appropriate.

In Bennett's case, I have to admit he has become a truly master-level troll, in that he has learned to write an opening paragraph that gets my attention but doesn't give away his essential Bennett-ness. By the third paragraph, though, I usually catch on, stop reading there, and just write the obligatory "fuck Bennett" post.

You make it sound like having a non-stupid, modern string class is a monstrosity that needs 16 cores to run.

You can split a string in any language. If you want to write in C++, write in C++. If you want to write in VB.Net, write in VB.Net.

C++ doesn't need to look like VB.Net just because you don't like the syntax.

Slashdot: News from Reddit, Bennett's Blog.

Did you?

Why, I did! Thanks for asking!

"The "mystery" is that nowhere in your code does it mention the word "split".


It's still a stupid argument, because any problem you can solve with a free and common library is not a real problem.

Well, I have to agree with the "stupid" part, insofar as if you can't figure out how to parse a simple delimited string without pulling in multi-MB frameworks, you have no place writing code. Beyond that, though, the whole conversation amounts to a holy war. Do you prefer Emacs or Vi? Top or bottom? Allah or Jesus? Pointy end or round end?


But to get back on topic - Do you prefer extensions or icons? Correct answer: "Why not both?"

Google Wallet / Android Pay. Apple Pay. CurrentC. Samsung Pay.

Competition works well when all players adhere to certain standards. It doesn't work well when everyone does their damnedest to lock out the competition.

Personally, I find Samsung's announcement the most interesting so far; because while Google and Apple require the clearly unreasonable expectation that merchants won't actively disable NFC on their card readers, Samsung plans to work with existing card-swipe readers.

That should lead to an interesting legal showdown, eventually, because CurrentC forces exclusivity terms on their retailers, while retailers can't block Samsung's approach as easily as they could Google and Apple's.

it might be time to admit that users need to understand, embrace and responsibly use the only plain-text, obvious indicator of what a file actually is.

Oh man, good one! You had me going until that line. Beautiful!

I just responded in another thread where actual programmers argued about whether or not it counts as "confusing" to split a delimited string without actually using the name "split" for the method that does the work.

And you want to try to get the average end user to understand the difference between ".XLS", ".XLSX", and ".XLSX.EXE"?

May as well swing for the fences, I suppose.

Three includes! Two methods! A loop! Six lines! And he didn't call it "George" like you would have!

...vs pulling in a massive amount of overhead with something like Boost or QT, complete with their own huge list of dependencies... For a program that may well do nothing more than parse a CSV file.

"What if" if needs to work on UTF-16? No, wrong question by a wide margin - What if it doesn't? Do you always use a CNC to cut a 2x4 in half, just because you have access to one? What if you have 5/4 lumber? What if you have cellular PVC? What if you have rebar? All valid questions - And all completely irrelevant if you just need to cut a 2x4 in half.

We can all agree that building some not-strictly-required flexibility into our code generally counts as a good thing, that will frequently save us time and effort down the road. We don't need to build a tilt-a-whirl for someone that wants a tire-swing, though.