vitd (u/vitd) - Readit News

vitd commented on TV Loses Grip on Eyes and Ads That Want Them bloomberg.com/gadfly/arti... · Posted by u/petethomas

dexterdog · 9 years ago

I think the quantity has gone way up because there are so many channels but TV is in a golden age with so many series that are better than most movies. If you are cherry-picking shows to watch from the catalog, now is an incredible time to be watching.

vitd · 9 years ago

It depends on what you mean. The OP was talking about prime time programming on the 3-4 major networks. That's very different from what's being produced on pay channels like HBO or Showtime, or on Netflix. I agree that the high quality stuff is better than 10-20 years ago, where everything was a Friends or Seinfeld ripoff. But I think most of the high quality stuff is on non-major networks these days. Though maybe that's just my perception. I find myself watching less and less stuff on those networks, and more and more on the other networks.

vitd commented on Stack Overflow Outage Postmortem stackstatus.net/post/1477... · Posted by u/gbrayut

randominion · 9 years ago

I can tell you how.

A shitty Belkin KVM in certain configurations can allow this to happen.

There's a bug which keeps generating chr(32) characters when you activate the keyboard shortcut (scroll lock twice), and try to switch to another machine.

It will keep pumping out those spaces on whatever fields was selected at the time, so if you take your time before you switch back, you are going to be in for a lot of fun.

Haven't read the link yet, but wanted to share this sooner than later.

vitd · 9 years ago

Nice find! Another one I heard about was that Microsoft's Windows keyboards, when used on a Mac, will sometimes insert a Control-P into the middle of your typing if you press the Windows key. Most apps just ignore it, but apparently not all!

vitd commented on Mossberg: I just deleted half my iPhone apps theverge.com/2016/7/20/12... · Posted by u/antr

catpolice · 9 years ago

I've read a few articles like this that start with the assumption that storage space obviously needs to be conserved. I always wonder what these people are keeping on their phones. I always buy the version of the phone with the least storage, and I do zero things to manage how much space I'm using and I've never run out. Is it like large offline media libraries? I don't spend a huge amount of time outside of wifi range and don't really have a problem just streaming everything.

vitd · 9 years ago

I personally don't want a bunch of personal data, like photos, in the cloud where hackers can steal them, the cloud provider can go down, or decide I don't deserve access anymore. And I also travel on planes that usually don't have wifi. So I keep my podcasts and music local on my device. (I'm less concerned with keeping music in the cloud since it's not that personal in the way that a photo of my family is.) I was just running out of space on my 64GB device when the 128GB model came out. I upgraded, and find I'm just a tiny bit over 64GB 9 months later. So I guess I found my equilibrium (at least until I decide to start keeping something else local!).

vitd commented on Ori – Robotic transformation of interior spaces orisystems.com/#welcome-h... · Posted by u/jchoong

svantana · 9 years ago

I like the idea, but I get wary at the thought of getting home at 3 AM (perhaps with company) and finding out that the bed extruding mechanism has failed... It seems the robotic part is a bit overkill, couldn't it just as well be mechanical/manual?

vitd · 9 years ago

That and if you have a spouse/roommate/etc., you're boned if you want to use the "living room" and they want to use the "bedroom."

vitd commented on “Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB” [video] undo.io/resources/present... · Posted by u/DebugN

stcredzero · 9 years ago

Because if so, that's a terrible way to debug.

If you're in a codebase composed largely of side-effect free functions or well encapsulated Object Oriented code, it's a very good way to debug. I had great success with such debugging and even coding and new development in Smalltalk environments for over a decade.

On the other hand, if your codebase is full of side effects and doesn't have good encapsulation (perhaps there's a lot of fiddling with globals) then you're going to have a bad time. But to me this isn't because the debugging method is bad. To me, it's because your codebase is designed with lots of tight coupling and side effects. You have an architecture that makes it harder to reason, debug, and refactor your code. This isn't just spouting. I'm basing this on many years of experience. And yes, I saw both kinds of Smalltalk code, and the effect is exactly as I described. Guess which codebases were more productive?

vitd · 9 years ago

Well, I have to use OpenGL for my development, and it's a giant state machine that works mainly via side-effects. It's notoriously frustrating to work with, but that's life. I realize not all code works that way, but I'd bet the majority of code does. So I stand by my statement that it's a terrible way to debug, maybe with the caveat "unless you can work with only pure code and no state."

vitd commented on Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer medium.com/@Svenskunganka... · Posted by u/Svenskunganka

abraae · 9 years ago

There's a weird effect where people become disgruntled with the current terminology because its offensive/demeaning and come up with new words to take their place.

Thus Personnel became Human Resources.

But often the new words are, with the passage of time, clearly just as, or more offensive than their predecessors. I mean, "Human Resources"?!! WTF! Are people really just "resources"? To me, Personnel sounds way friendlier.

Another one is around disability. We would never describe someone today as retarded. Yet really, is disabled any better? I'd rather be retarded (as in, slowed down a little) than disabled (completely stopped).

[close to my heart: we write HR software :)]

vitd · 9 years ago

I recently watched a video on social media that was about raising awareness of people with disabilities and encouraging people to use their votes this election cycle to make a difference. It was very moving until the end where they had "#CripTheVote"[0], and I was like "WHAT?" Isn't "crip" short for "cripple"? And isn't "cripple" considered insulting these days? Is this some sort of "take back the word" movement?

[0]https://twitter.com/hashtag/cripthevote

vitd commented on “Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB” [video] undo.io/resources/present... · Posted by u/DebugN

lucio · 9 years ago

IMHO, In this day and age, a proper debugger should by default show source code and execution point, should allow you to inspect variables, and change its values, you should be able to manually set the executing position, and you should be able to alter code and re-compile on the fly, continuing the debugging session.

I know this is really-really hard to accomplish, but some IDEs do it.

The only thing that's "optional" and a little over the top (but very useful) is time-travel debugging.

vitd · 9 years ago

When you say "alter code and re-compile on the fly," do you mean and continue debugging without stopping the app and re-running? Because if so, that's a terrible way to debug. You now have state that may not be possible to achieve with the new binary you've made, and you may be debugging something that won't every exist in reality. And it may be very hard to tell that's the case. That doesn't sound very useful. It sounds very dangerous.

vitd commented on “Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB” [video] undo.io/resources/present... · Posted by u/DebugN

gizmo · 9 years ago

A broken ncurses text gui debugger with broken navigation and byzantine commands should somehow make us look more favorably upon gdb? We had better debuggers than this in the early 80s. Turbo pascal had a decent debugger and IDE that was right built in!

How come the open source world hasn't been able to create a debugger that's as good as the (still primitive) debugger in Visual Studio 6.0? It's astonishing to me how bad the state of the art is.

vitd · 9 years ago

Amen! And it makes you wonder what it's doing to our young programmers? I first used gdb in college and had I not already been using Turbo Pascal and Lightspeed C's debuggers, I would probably would have decided that debugging was too much trouble. I see this a lot on Stack Overflow, too. People writing fairly complex code who don't know how to check the value of a variable in the debugger. It's both shocking and depressing.

vitd commented on Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and Advertisers research.hubspot.com/repo... · Posted by u/infodroid

cortesoft · 9 years ago

Ok, so no ads at all. Are you ok with no free news websites, only premium TV channels, etc?

vitd · 9 years ago

There are other options. For example, I used to be a poor college student who had no money. I listened to NPR sometimes, but didn't pay. Now I have a good job, and I pay to listen. I don't mind at all that I'm supporting people who can't pay. Some of them will pay eventually, some will continue to get it for free. It's not an either/or proposition.

vitd commented on Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and Advertisers research.hubspot.com/repo... · Posted by u/infodroid

hsod · 9 years ago

> 1) They don't ask for my consent, I'm not going to worry about theirs.

What's your take on this thought experiment:

Imagine a giant barrel of apples on the side of the road with a coffee can next to it. There's a sign that says "Take an Apple, Leave a Penny"

Now imagine you don't carry pennies for moral and/or pragmatic reasons. They're too heavy, or you don't want to support Big Copper, whatever. But you want an apple.

Do you take one?

vitd · 9 years ago

It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.

Let's do a realistic thought experiment that's actually fair:

Imagine you have a movie that you love. It's showing tonight on an over-the-air channel that inserts ads throughout it. You decide to record the show and watch it later.

Do you skip the ads?