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patrickcollison.com

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Re: Questions

#331

Post by ____a »

tzs wrote: post #322
trimbo wrote: post #191

> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unaccept…

Death rates are probably better than absolute number of deaths for comparison. Here are death rates per 1000 workers of some well known construction projects: 80 Transcontinental Railroad 80 Suez Canal 50 Brooklyn Bridge 17.46 World Trade Center 6.4 Sydney Harbor Bridge 4.47 Hoover Dam 3.37 San Francisco Bay Bridge 3.33 Eiffel Tower 2.67 Titanic 2.5 Sears Tower 1.47 Empire State Building 1.17 Trans-Alaska Pipeline Sy…

Are you on mobile? Or something else might be breaking formatting for you. The chart linked does have numbers for the Panama Canal (408.12) and Burma-Siam Railway (385.45).

Re: Questions

#332

Post by leoedin »

nikki93 wrote: post #217
rsp1984 wrote: post #163

Why are programming environments still so primitive? In different ways, Mathematica, Genera, and Smalltalk put almost every other programming environment to shame. Atom, Sublime Edit, and Visual Studio Code are neat, but they do not represent a great improvement over TextMate circa 2007. Emacs and Vim have advanced by even less. Why pretend IDEs don't exist? For my C++ development I couldn't be happier with Qt Creato…

C++ IDEs and Smalltalk / Lisp visual environments are in very different leagues. It’s worth giving, eg. Pharo Smalltalk, a shot.

I've heard great things about the productivity of Smalltalk. Is Pharo the best way to explore the language?

Re: Questions

#333

Post by jstimpfle »

uxp wrote: post #258
jstimpfle wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program? > Because you use C or one of its derivatives instead of Lisp or one of its derivatives. In Common Lisp you can not only debug a function without restarting your program, you can redefine classes without restarting your program. It is truly awesome. You should try it some time. There is no technical reason why it shouldn't be possible in C, if you are wil…

There is no technical limitation why it is impossible in C, however the raw details of how C is implemented make it entirely impractical. A super generalized description of a C function might check if a register contains a positive value. If so, it will then jump to address 0x42, which is a memory offset, which is the beginning of another function. Its near impossible to "swap" out what lies at 0x42 since that was de…

Your point is moot. C doesn't "run on raw registers". That's just common practice but has nothing to do with C per se. You can easily run it on the C#'s virtual machine.

Furthermore, it doesn't matter whether you are running on a virtual machine or on bare metal. What matters is if you have turned on optimizations (such as hardcoding of function addresses, or even code inlining) that remove flexibility (such as hot swapping of code). Visual Studio can hot-edit C code as well.

And as I stated, it is pretty easy and common practice to hot swap object code through DLLs or shared objects even on less high-tech platforms. It's easily done with function pointers (as you described) and a simple API (GetProcAddress() on Windows, dlsym() on Linux). Why shouldn't it be possible in C?

Virtual Machines bring portable executables and nothing more, I think. Well, maybe a slightly nicer platform for co-existence and interoperability of multiple programming languages (but then again, there is considerable lock-in to the platform).

Re: Questions

#334

Post by raldi »

ball_of_lint wrote: post #328
raldi wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.

The value of a human life is not infinite, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth more than a certain amount of time spent on a construction project. The people who make executive choices about construction projects should not decide that it is acceptable for x people to die on this project in exchange for y fewer months construction time. Accidents happen, but we should not plan to trade lives. Consider if by sacrific…

Sorry, let me clarify: I meant my question literally. May I ask what your answer is?

Re: Questions

#335

Post by drawnwren »

ddevault wrote: post #90

>Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? I'm no historian so this is probably misguided, but I feel like this is an indicator for a society on the decline. Corruption is increasingly rampant in both the public and private sectors, and money is being siphoned off at every step. If we don't figure out how to fix it, mounting costs and inefficiencies could…

Do you have any good starting points for p9? I have always wanted to check it out, but man is the documentation poor

Re: Questions

#336

Post by kryogen1c »

jacksnipe wrote: post #307
erikpukinskis wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming a lot. I’m assuming your OP thinks “better safe than sorry” is stupid because it doesn’t actually help you make decisions. I would much rather drive on a bridge of someone whose motto is “do it right.” This isn’t the Apollo program. We know how to make safe bridges. It’s not a matter of being cautious and talking to every stakeholder. It’s a matter of hiring actual engineers,* letting them work, belie…

I believe you are either arguing in bad faith, or not giving the post you are replying to enough credit. Better safe than sorry MEANS do it right. It means that human life is more valuable than material wealth. If you are hiring amateurs to build your bridge, or you are “crossing your fingers”, then you are not being “better safe than sorry” — in the sense that what you are doing can not be an implentation of “better…

> Better safe than sorry MEANS do it right. It means that human life is more valuable than material wealth.

This is not accurate on both accounts.

First, material wealth can be converted into quality of life in multiple different ways. Consuming additional millions to push death rates down by a few percentage points is taking away from other places, ostensibly hurting others.

Second, better safe than sorry does not mean do it right. Mistakes will happen, and acting like nothing will ever go wrong is a fools errand. Planning for failure is a significant portion of project management and engineering in general. The goal is 0 mistakes, but severe negative overreactions in response to failure can have a net negative impact.

Re: Questions

#337

Post by Bekwnn »

CM30 wrote: post #173
unixhero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…

> Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads o…

As an anecdote, a lot of programmers and heavy gamers I knew in high school lived on remote islands and took a water taxi over to ours for school. They couldn't do after school activities without sleeping over at someone's place. Their islands had even less to do on them than ours.

Soft forms of isolation certainly seem to lead to solitary activities.

Re: Questions

#338

Post by Karrot_Kream »

kryogen1c wrote: post #336
jacksnipe wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are either arguing in bad faith, or not giving the post you are replying to enough credit. Better safe than sorry MEANS do it right. It means that human life is more valuable than material wealth. If you are hiring amateurs to build your bridge, or you are “crossing your fingers”, then you are not being “better safe than sorry” — in the sense that what you are doing can not be an implentation of “better…

> Better safe than sorry MEANS do it right. It means that human life is more valuable than material wealth. This is not accurate on both accounts. First, material wealth can be converted into quality of life in multiple different ways. Consuming additional millions to push death rates down by a few percentage points is taking away from other places, ostensibly hurting others. Second, better safe than sorry does not m…

A net negative impact on whom? A net positive impact on whom? How do you quantify this impact?

Re: Questions

#339

Post by alexashka »

I think one interesting observation to make here is to think how one would group all these questions, into a meta question. What's the common thread among all these?

As far as I can tell, it's 'why aren't things better?'

The answer is simple: because you don't want it to be better, really. If you simplify the question down to 'why are Americans fat?', it'll become much clearer. We all already know the answer, most just want it to be some other, more pleasant explanation - hence never-ending fad diets. We want to believe, more than we want to face reality oftentimes :)

Re: Questions

#340

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

drawnwren wrote: post #335
ddevault wrote: post #90

>Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? I'm no historian so this is probably misguided, but I feel like this is an indicator for a society on the decline. Corruption is increasingly rampant in both the public and private sectors, and money is being siphoned off at every step. If we don't figure out how to fix it, mounting costs and inefficiencies could…

Do you have any good starting points for p9? I have always wanted to check it out, but man is the documentation poor

http://fqa.9front.org/

Just install it and try to work normally, and when you find something hard you should research the specific thing you want to do.

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