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MadWombat commented on We are destroying software   antirez.com/news/145... · Posted by u/antirez
stefanos82 · 7 months ago
As soon as I finished reading the article, the very first thing that came in my mind is Dieter Rams' "10 Principles of Good Design"; I have been following his principles as much as I can, as they match, more or less, those of UNIX's philosophy:

     1. Good design is innovative
     2. Good design makes a product useful
     3. Good design is aesthetic
     4. Good design makes a product understandable
     5. Good design is unobtrusive
     6. Good design is honest
     7. Good design is long-lasting
     8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
     9. Good design is environmentally-friendly
    10. Good design is as little design as possible

MadWombat · 7 months ago
It seems to be one of those "pick any two" jokes, but those usually only have three items on the list. And yet pretty much everything on this list feels mutually exclusive.
MadWombat commented on Firefox on the brink?   brycewray.com/posts/2023/... · Posted by u/alexzeitler
whakim · 2 years ago
I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well. What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes? It's a browser, after all. And why do you think that such features aren't being implemented due to lack of resources or muddled priorities - surely Mozilla can walk and chew gum?
MadWombat · 2 years ago
"What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes?"

XUL extensions maybe? The reason I gave up on Firefox after literally decades of using it was because they kept removing features I was actively using without fixing any of the problems. What's the point of using a niche browser if it is exactly like the non-niche browser, but with more compatibility issues?

MadWombat commented on My students cheated... a lot   crumplab.com/articles/blo... · Posted by u/benjyhirsch
MadWombat · 3 years ago
shrug perverse incentives. For a lot of college students, the actual learning or lack thereof, while still important, does not affect them directly. But getting a bad grade does. Drop in average grade might affect their scholarships, various arrangements with their families and possibly future employment prospects. So while not learning the material properly is bad in a somewhat abstract and theoretical way, getting a bad grade might have a very practical adverse effect. And I am not even going to mention the social stigma of getting bad grades.

So yeah, getting a good grade is more important than actually learning and let's be honest, cheating is a more energy efficient way of getting good grades.

MadWombat commented on My students cheated... a lot   crumplab.com/articles/blo... · Posted by u/benjyhirsch
peoplefromibiza · 3 years ago
> HOW do you measure knowledge?

This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.

You DON'T measure knowledge.

You should measure the satisfaction of the students.

Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.

> maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.

pity that academics and teachers often disagree and, most of all, that schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.

Teachers are not doctors, doctors practice medicine, teachers do no operate in such a stressful environment, they "educate" young people and is is often the case that it means they impose or suggest their opinions (because they can, nothing prevents them) and families see that kind of "education" unfit for their kids.

And they have all the rights in the World to be listened too, even if they are technically wrong or I disagree with them (I completely disagree on catholic schools for example).

The experts are there to find a solution to their problems, not to build hypothetical perfect solutions in a void.

Also: teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead. In my country (and practically all other countries in Europe) they are like bus drivers, they are fulfilling an obligation required by State laws under the State government but also offering a service the people paid for to the State.

Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland.

CONTROVERSIAL

On a last note, there's a topic I believe it's the most important, that will quite certainly cause uproar.

If your youngest students die in school shot by someone just a bit older than them, the society you live in have failed in every possible way.

The fact that the system is broken is a joke compared to that.

MadWombat · 3 years ago
"You should measure the satisfaction of the students"

OK. Then how do you measure competency? Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?

MadWombat commented on What Happened to Perl 7?   blogs.perl.org/users/perl... · Posted by u/davorg
codeflo · 3 years ago
The “neither” choice happened with Python 2/3 as well. The current re-emergence of Python as a machine learning/data science languages is basically a new trend. Long before that, before the Python 3 transition, there was a significant amount of buzz around everything from web frameworks to desktop GUI applications. The way I remember it, almost all of that attention was killed during the transition, when people tried Python and found a significantly lacking and confusing ecosystem.
MadWombat · 3 years ago
"The current re-emergence of Python as a machine learning/data science languages is basically a new trend"

This new trend is about a decade old by now. Pandas was released in 2011, numpy in 1995. Google released Tensorflow to the public in 2015.

MadWombat commented on What Happened to Perl 7?   blogs.perl.org/users/perl... · Posted by u/davorg
giantrobot · 3 years ago
> I never liked Python much, until I got forced to use it on a new team. Now I'm convinced that it has a really distinct advantage -- there aren't too many ways to write Python, so an experienced Python developer can figure out code pretty quickly.

This is why I picked up Python many years ago. I had been using Perl 5 for my scripting and system administration needs. While it worked just fine any project larger than a few hundred lines needed a lot of discipline to keep maintainable. Perl encouraged too many line noise shortcuts, reading unfamiliar code was too often an exercise in looking up uncommon operators.

It's elegant when writing but frustrating when reading. Python not only read a bit more like it executed but didn't lend itself to unreadable shortcuts. If your code is elegant to write it tends to be straightforward to read.

When Perl 6 was still Perl 6 the DSL stuff sounded interesting until like you I realized it would just turn large projects into unreadable messes. It wouldn't help the small Perl scripts be more readable nor would it help the large projects be more maintainable.

MadWombat · 3 years ago
"It's elegant when writing but frustrating when reading"

As a person who used to use Perl 5 rather extensively back in the day for all sorts of things, I fondly remember the joke that Perl is a "write-only language" :)

MadWombat commented on Keep the web free, say no to Web3 (2021)   yesterweb.org/no-to-web3/... · Posted by u/memorable
MadWombat · 3 years ago
Web3 is not going to happen. The crypto economy is failing. The promise of crypto was (and still is among the devoted) to provide a viable alternative to government backed currency. At this time, crypto accounts for a fraction of a percent of global economy and is already plagued by so many technical issues to make it almost impossible to actually use for anything.

Also, I highly recommend the video on YT called Line Goes Up. https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

I don't agree with the video author on 100% of things, but I do agree with a lot and he is very comprehensive.

MadWombat commented on A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar   jenson.org/tesla/... · Posted by u/radley
MadWombat · 4 years ago
"This is why automotive UX is so hard. It’s the context and the severe consequences that make it far more impactful..."

I see what you did there :)

MadWombat commented on ISO should make all standards Publicly Available   docs.google.com/document/... · Posted by u/yegle
MadWombat · 4 years ago
DO NOT CLICK THE LINK Whatever document was there before have been vandalized.
MadWombat commented on How to permanently delete your Facebook account   facebook.com/help/2245628... · Posted by u/gigama
nobody9999 · 4 years ago
>being defiant by deleting WhatsApp doesn't accomplish anything because others don't care to switch to reach you.

I disagree. It accomplishes at least one thing -- WhatsApp isn't tracking/recording your messages any more. That's what I would care about.

MadWombat · 4 years ago
So you prevent them from recording your conversations with friends by having no conversations and no friends.

u/MadWombat

KarmaCake day398May 19, 2010View Original