I have never understood the argument that taxes on e.g. gasoline are regressive and this should not be raised. When we find an externality that is not accounted for in costs, are we to throw up our hands and say we cannot do anything because some of the increased costs will be passed on to consumers? The right amswer is not to avoid the tax but to compensate the mpst affected via redistributive policies like a negative income tax.
Hell, I think that in an ideal world something similar would happen to traffic and parking tickets. More people parking illegally or speeding? More money goes to buses and trains.
Yes, agreed. It is a step backward to manipulate and recombine bytes. "Extracting an integer from a packet, then changing it's internal format" is exactly what is being done, and thinking at that abstraction level is beter than playing with individual bytes. And suppose you hoist those operations into a separate function instead of doing it for every field? Well, congratulations on reimplementing ntohX. If the boundary between internal and external data is not clear, that's a bigger issue that could cause incorrect or unnecessary data transformations, whether we're talking about byte order, string sanitizing, unit conversions, etc.
The problem is that the higher-level abstraction is broken. Specifically, the abstraction provided here is "extract an integer of unspecified size and endianness from a byte stream" (note that the size of short isn't guaranteed to be anything specifically, other than 2 <= sizeof(short) <= sizeof(int)). And ntohs is another abstraction which amounts to, "make the endianness correct for the current system, assuming that it was originally big-endian". Not that it doesn't work - it's just not well-designed, and too easy to use incorrectly.
A proper abstraction is the one where you specify both the size and the endianness at the point where you extract the value - i.e. where you just call a function like read_int16_be(byte_stream).
Every thread about high speed rail seems to have this response to an argument no one is making. NY-LA doesn't make sense, but it is nationally embarrassing not to have the BosWash corridor connected.
I misread the comment as Boston-New York like the route in the article. Boston-New York is slower than the rest of the route. South Station in Boston to Penn Station in New York takes 3:46[1] and those stations are 212 miles apart[2] which is an average of about 55 mph.
My experience in London was much better... sure, a hot market meant you needed to move fast, but no hoops around local guarantors or months of pay stubs. It was easier than most local rentals I've done in Boston.
Skimming the benchmark, I didn't see any negative tests (checking for words not contained), which can be as or more important than the positive case depending on the expected use.
Thinking things through isn't necessarily pessimistic. When I have a contingency plan already in mind, I worry less about the event actually happening.
As a visually impaired user, this is my single biggest gripe with PDFs. Its also annoying that zooming on many websites completely breaks the layout, often overlapping text or pushing important elements off of the screen. I find this particularly sad, since HTML largely supports a separation of content and presentation.
> Venmo was one of the few (maybe only) system that allows you to pay users who are not on their system. Say you need to pay Joe and you were a Venmo user but Joe wasn't. You could still "pay" them on venmo and they would get a text back saying if they signed up they would get the payment.
If someone "paid" me this way, there would be issues.
I agree re: favoring Oxford comma, but I don't think this reasoning supports it. Jane && Tom || Bill && Wendy || Susie && Frank is unambiguous in e.g. C++, as the language specifies operator precedence. The inclusion of parentheses is a question of style, not correctness. OTOH, omitting commas can rely on context and subjective reasoning.
Good point about incompatible goals. One way out is to align the value as perceived by users with the value as perceived by engineers. If users aren't willing to pay for reliability/security/etc. then it's rational for management to devalue those properties.
I'm not optimistic that this will happen. Anecdotally, I expound to acquaintances the risks of unprotected PII or questionably-secured home security apps, but convenience seems to outweigh such concerns.
Regulation is one approach to solve asymmetric information transactions. I don't see how that could be applied in general to software quality, but it could target the cases that have severe or widespread effects.
