You would think. But every time someone mentions here in HN about how USA slavery was bad there are always people coming out and saying that other countries used to do it too and imply that since others did it it was OK if the US did it. Horrible thinking of course but there you have it.
I have a nagging feeling that that represents the feelings of a sizable chunk of the white USA population. Hope I'm wrong.
You have a nagging feeling that a sizable chunk of white Americans feel slavery is OK?
Based on what you interpret as an implicit acceptance of slavery in comments on HN, which I guess you just sort of assume must be made by mostly white Americans?
Hate to break it to you but that makes you a racist and nationalist bigot. If I were to say I had a sneaking suspicion that Indians were for the most part lazy and incompetent, how would that seem? Or that American blacks seem to be disproportionately violent?
>>Based on what you interpret as an implicit acceptance of slavery in comments on HN, which I guess you just sort of assume must be made by mostly white Americans?<<
Occam's razor says that it probably is white Americans.
I'm guessing here but maybe one of the reasons why white Americans gets so defensive and angry when this comes up could be that they feel they are being attacked and so they respond by trying to point to other instances where this happened. I grant you, that does not mean that people believe that slavery was OK but if so you should not try to excuse it.
Slavery existed in my own country, Mexico, and it was wrong. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. No excuses. To believe otherwise means that you should not object if other people try to enslave you or people you love. If I'm wrong then correct the error in my logic. I'm willing to learn.
I'm not sure if this is too simplistic or not but whenever you are unsure about whether something is OK or not simply imagine you are the one on the receiving end. If without lying to yourself you still think it is OK then maybe it is OK.
I seriously doubt anybody would make excuses for slavery with a straight face if they were the slaves, regardless of the era.
And now I feel like I'm being patronizing; sorry for that, not my intention.
Occam's razor suggests that your sample size is too small to make any generalizations about what a typical white American would think about anything. Occam's razor also suggests that the nationality of posters depends a great deal on where in the world it happens to be working hours.
Slavery doesn't come up that often on HN. Responses in those threads are biased towards users who care enough about the subject to want to engage in conversation about them. And I would be willing to bet the comments you're describing don't account for the bulk of thread contents. So you're making an assertion about white people and Americans based on a sample size of, what? Maybe a dozen posters, if that? Bear in mind that posting on HN at all is atypical.
I've got no issues with your plea for empathy but you're not making a strong argument that the comments you're talking about (whatever they are) necessarily defend slavery, or that the people making them necessarily believe that slavery is acceptable, or that they're evidence of what what white Americans believe about slavery as an institution, in general. You're literally arguing from the premise that the racism of white Americans can be taken as a constant.
It is really annoying to hear so many opinions here choosing to believe an alternate version simply because it sounds better to them rather than because of any actual evidence. (Are we still in Hacker News or is it a Sunday thing?) It feels like I'm reading opinions by creationists.
Even the us government agrees that the $ symbol is a peso sign. [1]
Here is the relevant piece:
>>What is the origin of the $ sign?
The origin of the "$" sign has been variously accounted for, however, the most widely accepted explanation is that the symbol is the result of evolution, independently in different places, of the Mexican or Spanish "P's" for pesos, or piastres, or pieces of eight. The theory, derived from a study of old manuscripts, is that the "S" gradually came to be written over the "P," developing a close equivalent of the "$" mark. It was widely used before the adoption of the United States dollar in 1785.<<
It's basically a Spanish symbol by all accounts, with plenty of evidence of usage prior to the Independence of the US. The "real de a ocho" remained legal currency in the US for many decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar
Although it looks like the Peso sign I'm not sure it really is. Why would you put the Peso sign in a coin. It probably is something else and du to wear and tear now it looks like a Peso sign. Look at this other coin for example:
>>No idea why the pesos sign became the dollar sign, but I'd image it may have something to do with the Spaniards being around long before the English in the Americas
That is the whole point of this article . It tells you where the sign came from.
>>I've been following Jonathan Blow for a while now. He has a reputation for being condescending. If you follow him a Twitter then you might come to the same conclusion.
I think that's neither here nor there in the context of this article.
I am a Jonathan Blow fan and want to encourage people to watch his talks. He's not nearly as antagonistic as Phil Fish but does say things that rub people the wrong way. Please don't interpret my message as being offensive.
It is not. You are not writing a novel here. Yes, most of the time is spent thinking. Some days there is no coding because it is spent on just trying to figure out what to do.
While emotions may run high, it's important to remember that this is an empirical dispute. It can be resolved simply by looking at everyone's git history. For myself, the least code I've written on any day in the past year is 20 lines. My average is around 100. The most is a tad over 1500. Of course everyone's different and LoC is a terrible measure and it depends on the language, task at hand, etc. But in general, most of my time is spent "honing" code; testing/fixing corner cases and working around issues in other software. "Other software" includes browsers, filesystems, databases, JITs, but mostly browsers.
I personally don't spend much time thinking about software-related problems. At the risk of sounding conceited, I'll admit that most problems I encounter are pretty straightforward. Five minutes of uninterrupted thought is more than enough to get into diminishing returns.
It would be very interesting if GitHub pulled an OKCupid and published some statistical analysis of programmer behavior. They could put many of these disagreements to rest.
I'm curious to hear about how many problems you solve with these lines of code. I guess that's pretty much impossible to quantify though. Also, what languages do you work in?
I'm not that experienced, but I had a notable experience working with a 5000+ loc app that was a nightmare to maintain and extend. The last guy had basically reinvented every wheel. He was even, in my opinion, reimplementing the DOM in places with absolute positioning. Also, the code was poorly organized, with pieces of logic that could have been easily consolidated appearing throughout the app in multiple places so that they could not be abstracted out.
After about a month of trudging through his code and making almost no progress, I basically told my manager that we had to rewrite it (I had been thinking this the whole time, but I didn't want to be the junior dev who comes in and demands to scrap everything).
Me and a colleague paired on it for about 2 weeks and rewrote the whole thing entirely from scratch, leveraging several open source libraries and writing a few tested "internal libraries". The whole thing ended up being around ~800 loc when we were done, and it had the extra features that needed to be added, and was pretty bug free.
I'm not trying to blow my own horn here, in other instances I have spent way too long pondering about code and making it way more concise than necessary.
But unless you are a truly great coder who is cranking out 100 lines of good code per day (and I have no doubt that you are), I would be pretty suspicious about the amount that you are writing. I would worry that you are placing a great maintenance load on those who come after you.
(Note: I don't mean for this comment to be perceived as bragging or showmanship. It's just that... well, you asked about my background.)
Computers have fascinated me since before I can remember. I spend most of my waking hours in front of them. I've been honing my craft for over 20 years. I've written and maintained projects in C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript (both browser and server-side)[1], Perl, PHP (we all make mistakes), Python, Ruby, and a couple Lisps. In my travels, I've discovered and reported bugs in popular software such as Firefox, Chrome, Node.js, Apple's XNU kernel, and libxml2.
I completely agree that some programmers are like machine guns, firing off vast quantities of poorly-aimed code. I try my best to avoid that. I hate sloppy code. I hate repetitive code. Most of all, I hate re-inventing the wheel. If a decent library exists, I'll use it. I have no qualms with something Not Invented Here.
I pair sometimes. I do code reviews often. And I use as many profiling, testing, and static analysis tools as I can get my hands on.
It sounds like your ordeal made you a better coder. Those sorts of experiences are indispensable, but I've found it takes more to keep improving. It's very useful to become an expert on programming, not just an expert at programming. There's a growing body of literature to aid anyone interested. McConnell's Code Complete is still great. Michael Feathers has a book called Working Effectively with Legacy Code. It contains some great techniques for incrementally improving hard-to-maintain projects. Lastly, browsing It Will Never Work in Theory[2] is a good way to stumble into some academic papers that apply to your own work.
1. "JavaScript" is such a nebulous term these days, but I've worked on JS codebases using tools ranging from nothing (vanilla JS) to JQuery to Google Closure to React.
These metrics such as featured in Mythical Man Month are usually based on the SLOC count at the end of the project, divided by the time, not how much code was committed each day. Your churn might be 100+ LOC per day, but hopefully that isn't all permanent additions to the codebase -- bug count seems to be proportional to LOC.
I have a nagging feeling that that represents the feelings of a sizable chunk of the white USA population. Hope I'm wrong.