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Comment Re:Bad Advice (Score 1) 286

by StormReaver (#49106381) Attached to: An Evidence-Based Approach To Online Dating

How is this in contradiction of the age old advice?

Is that representative of who you are? Are those things that represent your personality, or are you just doing those things because someone told you to do them? What happens when you are on your own? Or are you going to look on the Internet hoping to find an answer to every one of your life choices?

If it's not how you would have portrayed yourself, you're going to lose when you're on your own and have to stand on your own personality. You will eventually expose yourself as a fraud.

Make your own decisions about how to show who you really are, and be true to who you are and what you want in a lifelong mate. This article is a "Getting Started In Gaming The System" guide, which is the same as projecting yourself as a liar. I wouldn't have wanted any woman who was attracted to that, regardless of how much I thought I would have been happy with a woman who was attracted to that.

Comment Bad Advice (Score 5, Insightful) 286

by StormReaver (#49104913) Attached to: An Evidence-Based Approach To Online Dating

Anyone who follows this advice deserves what they get.

The age old advice still stands: be yourself.

If someone wants you for who you're not, rather than who you are, you are better off just moving on. Here's what I posted on my blog years ago after marrying a wonderful woman I met on Plenty of Fish:

I was recently reading the front page of plentyoffish.com, a dating web site where my wife and I first met (we recreated a joint account to submit a testimonial), that provided a very long, detailed opinion piece to a young man about how to behave in order to win a girl that he was very attracted to. It was from a so-called dating expert, and contained some of the worst drivel that men cling to in hopes of landing a wife.

The given advice was to act distant, indifferent, and aloof; that showering her with affection made him look desperate and goofy. We men turn to this kind of garbage when we're not having much luck with women. We turn to this crap when we actually do become desperate.

It took me a long time to realize what should have been self-evident all along: the old advice of just being yourself is, by far, the best advice you could possibly get. Being yourself isn't intended to improve upon the quantity of women you attract. It is intended to improve upon the quality of women you attract. Not surprisingly, the exact same advice applies equally to women. Don't follow those stupid "rules" such as not making the first move. All those rules are complete and utter crap, and will just make you even more miserable than you already are.

All the little head games and misdirections that you have learned are intended to achieve one thing: a brief relationship. They are not the doorway to a lasting marriage, but rather just the path to multiple meaningless disappointments. You will not be able to maintain the charade you have built, and will always fail in the long run. She will always see through you eventually. You will eventually slip up and expose yourself for the fraud you are, and you will be back to square one.

If she is not interested in who you really are, then you do not want her (regardless of what your hormones may tell you). It doesn't matter how pretty, gorgeous, sexy, or otherwise desirable she may seem. If she is not attracted to who and what you are, then any meaningful relationship with her is doomed. She will eventually (but usually quickly) tire of you, and move on to the next guy.

I am a software developer, and spend most of my time in front of a computer. When I was dating, I tried hard to hide that from my dates. All the advice I had been given was that women were turned off by the kind of geeky guy who spent that much time with his computer. I tried to list other interests on the dating site (tenuous as those interests were), tried focusing on what I thought women wanted, and every other trick I could think of that was even remotely true (and some that were very much not true when I reached a certain point of disillusion). Maintaining the illusion was very difficult, as that isn't who I am.

In the end, it was those very traits that my wife tells me were the most attractive to her. It turns out that her life had been full of too much stress, anxiety, and drama. An easy-going, caring, intelligent, homebody of a man is exactly what she had been looking for, and couldn't find, for a very long time (we were both in our late 30's). She would not have been at all interested in the man I had tried pretending to be, but was hopelessly in love with the man I actually am. Who we really are is what allows us to connect on a very deep, lasting level.

It took us both a very long time to find each other (strictly speaking, she found me), and we both suffered some horrible emotional scarring in our prior lives apart, but that scarring is what allowed us to appreciate what we have together.

So although it may hurt in the short term, it's better to be rejected by women for who you are than to be accepted by women for who you are not. You will eventually find that woman who will love you for who you are, even if you have to go through many painful rejections along the way. The women who accept you for who they want you to be will always desert you. No exceptions.
AI

The Robots That Will Put Coders Out of Work 266

Posted by timothy from the uber-drivers-will-be-replaced-by-robots-oh-wait dept.
snydeq writes Researchers warn that a glut of code is coming that will depress wages and turn coders into Uber drivers, InfoWorld reports. "The researchers — Boston University's Seth Benzell, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Guillermo LaGarda, and Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs — aren't predicting some silly, Terminator-like robot apocalypse. What they are saying is that our economy is entering a new type of boom-and-bust cycle that accelerates the production of new products and new code so rapidly that supply outstrips demand. The solution to that shortage will be to figure out how not to need those hard-to-find human experts. In fact, it's already happening in some areas."
Patents

Algorithmic Patenting 85

Posted by Soulskill from the monkeys-at-typewriters dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Venturebeat reports on companies using software to "create" patents. They say a company called Cloem will use the software to "linguistically manipulate a seed set of a client's patent claims by, for example, substituting in synonyms or reordering steps in a process, thereby generating tens of thousands of potentially patentable inventions." The article says, "There is reason to believe that at least some of its computer-conceived inventions could be patentable and, indeed, patents have already been granted on inventions designed wholly or in part by software."

Comment Re:If they don't allow it... (Score 2) 166

by StormReaver (#49064457) Attached to: Cubans Allowed To Export Software and Software Services To the US

That said, open source is probably the closest the world has ever gotten to true communism.

Communism is centralized control of production. Free Software and Open Source are exactly the opposite. Patents and copyrights are much closer to Communism, as the Government issues directions for who gets to produce stuff.
Medicine

Unearthing Fraud In Medical Trials 80

Posted by Soulskill from the cap'n-crunch-won't-actually-grow-you-a-replacement-kidney dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration holds a position of trust among citizens that few government agencies share. So when NYU professor Charles Seife found out the FDA is not forthcoming about misconduct in the scientific trials it oversees, he and his class set out to bring it to light. "For more than a decade, the FDA has shown a pattern of burying the details of misconduct. As a result, nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses. The FDA has repeatedly hidden evidence of scientific fraud not just from the public, but also from its most trusted scientific advisers, even as they were deciding whether or not a new drug should be allowed on the market. Even a congressional panel investigating a case of fraud regarding a dangerous drug couldn't get forthright answers." Seife suggests the FDA is trapped in a co-dependent relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, and needs strong legislative support to end its bad behavior.
Government

FBI Can't Find Its Drone Privacy Reports 78

Posted by timothy from the loaned-them-to-the-IRS dept.
v3rgEz (125380) writes "Programs run by the federal government are typically required to undergo a Privacy Impact Assessment if there's a chance they'll veer into monitoring the activities of citizens: The assessments help balance the risks and benefits of the program, and help guide any oversight to prevent abuse. But despite being legally mandated, the FBI and Justice Department have had a tough time producing the assessments done in conjunction with the Bureau's domestic surveillance drone program, first telling privacy advocates to file a FOIA request, and then rejecting that request, before ultimately claiming they now simply can't find the documents altogether."
Medicine

Low Vaccination Rates At Silicon Valley Daycare Facilities 580

Posted by timothy from the they-like-contagious-ideas dept.
Vaccination rates across the U.S. don't neatly correlate with religiosity or wealth; Wired reports that one conspicuous pocket of low vaccination rates, according to California's state database of daycare records, is a place where you might not expect it: Silicon Valley — specifically, the daycare centers at some large tech companies. A WIRED investigation shows that some children attending day care facilities affiliated with prominent Silicon Valley companies have not been completely vaccinated against preventable infectious diseases. At least, that’s according to a giant database from the California Department of Public Health, which tracks the vaccination rates at day care facilities and preschools in the state. We selected more than 20 large technology and health companies in the Bay Area and researched their day care offerings. Of 12 day care facilities affiliated with tech companies, six—that’s half—have below-average vaccination rates, according to the state’s data. ... And those six have a level of measles vaccination that does not provide the “herd immunity” critical to the spread of the disease. Now, this data has limitations—most critically, it might not be current. But it also suggests an incursion of anti-science, anti-vaccine thinking in one of the smartest regions on Earth.

Comment Re:What will change now? (Score 4, Insightful) 411

by StormReaver (#49032045) Attached to: Your Java Code Is Mostly Fluff, New Research Finds

I still have visions of layers of adapter classes, which serve absolutely no purpose other than to appease Java.

Those adapter classes exist to make interfaces with lots of methods easier to manage. I've learned and forgotten many languages over my 30 years of programming, but Java is one of those elegant languages that makes programming pleasant. The only thing I truly hate about it is the stupid memory limits imposed by its early life for applets. That one thing makes desktop programming more irritating than it needs to be.
AI

The Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition 83

Posted by Soulskill from the siri-do-these-pants-make-me-look-fat? dept.
An anonymous reader writes: We've often seen the term "uncanny valley" applied to the field of robotics — it's easy to get unsettled when robots act close to being human, yet fail completely in a few key ways. GitHub Engineer Zach Holman writes that we've now reached uncanny valley territory in speech recognition as well, though the results are more frustrating than they are disturbing. He says, "Part of this frustration is the user interface itself is less standardized than the desktop or mobile device UI you're used to. Even the basic terminology can feel pretty inconsistent if you're jumping back and forth between platforms.

Siri aims to be completely conversational: Do you think the freshman Congressman from California's Twelfth deserved to sit on HUAC, and how did that impact his future relationship with J. Edgar? Xbox One is basically an oral command line interface, of the form: Xbox (direct object). ...it's these inconsistencies that are frustrating as you jump back and forth between devices. And we're only going to scale this up."
Education

AP Test's Recursion Examples: An Exercise In Awkwardness 252

Posted by timothy from the best-practice-or-best-illustration dept.
theodp writes "Yet another example of how AP exams are loaded with poor coding practices," quipped Alfred Thompson, referring to a recursive code example that prints the numbers 0 to 6, which was posted to the (closed) AP Computer Science Facebook group. "We are often forced to use code examples that are not ideal coding practice," Thompson notes. "We do that to make things clear and to demonstrate specific concepts in a sort of isolation that we might not normally use. We seem to do that a lot with recursion because the examples that require recursion tend to be fairly complex." So, while asking students to use recursion instead of a loop to print '0123456' serves the purpose of teaching recursion, Thompson opines that it's also a poor example of code practice. "Someone raised on functional programming where recursion is a pretty standard way of doing looping might disagree of course," he adds. "There is a saying that when all you have is a hammer all your problems look like nails. This seems, in a way, to be the case with recursion and loops. If your first tool of choice (or what you have learned first) for iteration is loops you tend not to think of recursion as a solution. Similarly if you start with recursion (as is common with functional programming) you are a lot more likely to look at recursion as a tool for iteration." So, do you tend to embrace or eschew recursion in your programming?

Comment Re:Same answer every time. (Score 4, Informative) 178

by StormReaver (#49001121) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: With Whom Do You Entrust Your Long Term Data?

Once you give your data to "the cloud" it ceases to be YOUR data.

It boggles my mind that people still haven't caught on to this. I'm going to expand on your message just a little bit:

Once you give your data to "the cloud", it becomes the property of government snooping agencies. It doesn't even matter if you're in a country that doesn't actively snoop (if you believe that such a thing exists anymore). Companies change hands, and they do so across political boundaries. Companies cannot be trusted with your data. Period.

Hopefully, this little incident opens some eyes.

Comment Re:How is this an AI? (Score 2) 187

by StormReaver (#48992707) Attached to: The Poem That Passed the Turing Test

I don't understand how this poetry generator constitutes an AI.

That's because it doesn't. This program is on the same complexity scale as chapter 2 or 3 in an introduction to programming book, when it reaches the concept of variables. It's an exercise in triviality, not artificial intelligence.

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