Do you think the people running corporate IT programs are spending their own money ?

No, ok.. well, do you have any evidence that large government run IT programs are more prone to failure than large commercial sector IT programs ?

I think it's more a question of people are not very smart and large scale software development is hard.

> Climate change is either provable or not

Yeah, whatever, I'm sure you're all about the science. No scientific theories are *provable*, gravity, evolution, whatever, they're all theories. It's just that the preponderance of evidence that makes them some theories more likely than others.

How many non-news articles can you possibly print about 3d printing.

I worked for 3d systems in the 90s, it was fun and vaguely novel back then. I have been hearing about this stuff like its the next new thing for over 2 decades, and what are the fantastic advances we've had during that time.. no, don't tell me, please, seriously, don't. We don't get 5 articles a week about virtual reality, or jetpacks, or flying cars,

> I've literally never heard anyone make anything that works using Node

I made a good chunk of the backend of http://www.manything.com/ using node, and it all works .. supporting 100,000 s of customers perpetually streaming stuff to a bunch of servers.

Having said that.. Christ on a bike, I would not use that technology again: it's the most snake pit infested dangerzone I've ever encountered. Writing multiprocess c++ code for transputers with no tool support back in the early 90s was a fucking breeze compared to the extraordinary clusterfuck that is node. Node with javascript/coffeescript on the server gives you new and interesting ways to shoot yourself in the foot and then helps you wipe off the wound with a nice bloody rag you were donated from a leper who died of ebola. It's an exciting environment to be sure, but I'm done with that.

I went down that route. However, I really missed being able to write code like this:

1 do this
2 do that

as opposed to

do_this(function(err,res) { if (err) {something..} else { do_that(res) })

Once your backend gets complicated, may the lord help you.

If you backend is simple, it doesn't matter what language you use.

There is a far superior language you can use on both ends: scala - scala.js is really nice

this guy explained the problem better than i can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And the reason it's bullshit is that it starts from the premise that if you could measure programming ability somehow, its curve would look like the normal distribution.

Programming ability is exactly the kind of thing that does not fall in a normal distribution. It's not even close to a normal distribution. It's more like wealth distribution, there is no meaningful average.

He was Senior Wrangler while at Cambridge. Plus, his son is one of the most productive scala programmers in the world despite only doing it in his spare time. These guys ain't dumb.

Sure, I know. Few things are truly novel and one has to be able to do all of it, including the grunt work. It's just that there's no point doing something original when its faster to copy, so one copies up to the point where either nobody has done it before or its just easier to reinvent it oneself than find and incorporate somebody else's solution I just took that attitude a little earlier than I was supposed to. I wasn't trying to be clever, I just wasn't ready to start working hard at the time.

Do you mean, the repeated code, or the cool professor is as likely as winning the lottery ? Either way, its more common than that.

Same thing happened to me in college, except I didnt even discuss the assignment with him. It was a lisp project and we both decided to do it as purely as possible (which at the time meant no assignments - what today would be called functional style). The end result was about 150 lines of lisp (equivalent to maybe 2k lines of C). Our code was identical except for some identifier names.

The last program I had to write in first year CS was a plagarism detector. Surprisingly easy.. just do a frequency analysis on keywords and that will get you 90% of the way there. So, I actually did this assignment unlike all the others that I had cheated on...

When I did a CS degree I cheated hard through first year.

1. I was young and lazy, my main goal was to maximize time I could spend in the pub.
2. There's no point doing something if someone else has already done it

Fair point generally, but..
> Heart disease kills 600 million americans a year
600 thousand, not million

> we still sell vape kits
vape kits reduce smoking deaths

Leaded petrol has a high correlation with crime rate too.

The nice thing about the abortion correlation theory is that it pissed off both the left and the right.

Saying that we should reduce the number of children born by unmarried mothers and this will bring the crime rates down is something that excites the right and pisses off politically correct lefties.

Saying that a good way of doing that is legalising abortion excites the left and pisses off the right

> "Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people.

Doesn't seem at odds to me.

People who act impulsively for their own immediate gratification are more likely to get divorced than those who plan stuff intricately and have the combined social pressure of all their friends and relatives acting on them. Well, knock me down with a feather.