Good point. I think there's real value in replacing even just the verbiage of "Closed as duplicate" with something like a "Related Questions" section. It would remove a lot of the hostility, intentional or not, felt by newcomers making their inevitable mistakes, which goes right to the heart of one of the major goals Joel mentioned in the article.
I'd take that a step further, in that adding a link to a related (or even duplicate) question shouldn't _close_ that question, it should be a potentially valid answer to this person's question.
If enough people upvote the link to the originally posted question, or even if it gets selected as the answer, then SO can simply _not index_ this question. But the poster doesn't feel rejected, and can in fact choose to continue engaging in his question in cases where it's subtly different.
It does work like that to some extent, since closing as a duplicate require a certain number of votes. But this could probably be improved as per the suggestion, as it seems many people have experienced inappropriate "closed as duplicate". It seems to be one of the major complaints in this thread.
Sometimes the duplicate is blatant, but in many case it is really a judgment call. In my experience I more often vote for "reopen" than for "close", so there are definitely different attitudes to what is considered a duplicate.
Alternatively, it could be the decision of the one asking the question. Just as they select the "accepted" answer, they could choose to accept or reject the duplicate as appropriate.
Here's something I've never really understood: What is the downside to leaving the question up, even if it is an actual duplicate? Instead of "closing as duplicate", just answer it with a link to what you feel is the question it duplicates. If that works, then the original will score higher on Google, and if it turns out it's not a duplicate, the asker is able to provide more information as to why that answer doesn't work for them.
They actually do that, too, at least for some period of time. I've searched for a particular question, had a SO result pop up as a result, then clicked on it to find it has a header that says, "This is a dupe of question xyz" with a link to the original. The dupe is still up and may still have answers. So it seems to me that they already do this.
Well if the question is a legitimate duplicate then it is clearly a win for everyone, not least the one asking the question, since now you have a link to answers to your problem which have already been written. Which means now your problem is solved.
I'm not sure a strong case can be made that Google should be obliged to do that. There already exist TLD suffixes reserved for testing. ".dev" just isn't one of them.
I would beg to differ. As you've mentioned, there exists an official TLD suffix. However, de facto, .dev is the testing TLD. I've never seen .example or .invalid in real life. I've seen a tiny bit of .test. At every job that had a test dev, we used .dev. In many cases that decision was made by other developers. Judging by the comments here, and the article, it seems that many people have been using it.
A case can be made. How strong it will be remains to be seen. I hope Google can see the greater good in this. They have a lot of good will to win amongst the developer community.
This.. seems to resolve every issue I might have otherwise had with the story, including the impulse to yell at Google about it, but the author himself makes a fair case for not doing that.
It turns out that part of the way the internet is declared to work includes reserved TLDs to be used for testing. So the burden of responsibility for avoiding a situation such as the article describes lies on the developer to use one of those reserved TLDs instead of ".dev", which anyone could (and now, has) come to control.
I guess we're wandering a bit from the topic, but I used to feel the same way about, of all things, that childhood pastime of spinning around with your arms out. I spent more time than I'm comfortable specifying believing that every revolution put me in a slightly different universe, and that in order to get back, I'd have to perform exactly as many counter-revolutions in the opposite direction.
While this may sound insanely OCD, I remember thinking that I didn't have to get the number of counter-revolutions exactly right -- within a half-dozen or so should be "good enough".
Haha, wonderful. It's a an appealing thought I must say. What if the the "right" maneuvers in space actually open inter-dimensional portals. Sounds like we could've made good friends.
I apologize if this is too far off-topic, but all this talk of "focus" lately keeps reminding me of A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge, where a much more sinister (and more sci-fi) version of it is called exactly that - they forcibly "Focus" a group of people into the office equivalent of slave labor.
Just that, when you run '$ git nonstandard-subcommand', then the git executable looks for anything executable in the path that is named 'git-nonstandard-subcommand'. Then it runs it. That's all. But at that point, git could have been doing something to the environment before invoking the custom script.
I'm one of those underrated engineers who has had trouble getting past nearly every phase of the hiring process at various times. It's frustrating because I'm pretty smart and very passionate about building software, especially tools.
This bias against having the wrong keywords on your resume is incredibly unproductive,I agree, but I would guess it's a result of how little you can actually tell about someone from just a page or two of their work history, which is all most companies have to go on from a resume alone.
I am dying to get some company to take a chance on me, to someday have the benefit of a real mentor, and to be given a real opportunity to feed all this ambition that just won't go away.
I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that, either. We're here, we're waiting, and we are legion. It's time for a solution to the problem of how to put us in touch with all those hiring managers that complain about how hard it is to find talent.
I co-organize the EmpireJS/EmpireNode conferences in New York City - besides just those sponsors for the conferences, there are plenty of great places here looking for your attitude and outlook.
OK sure, there's the appeal of "Smart? Any human is as a lowly slug to the cosmos!" but in the context of a job application it would be dancing around the common use of the word. If the meaning is "I'm probably in the minority of humans who could solve this problem" then it is definitely a good attitude to have in the context of applying for a job.
Now if you say "I'm hardly ever wrong" that won't go over as well.
She's right about squaring on each iteration, though. And granted, a square root is much more expensive, though done only once. Which method is faster would depend on the number of iterations.
The latency for sqrtss on broadwell is 11 cycles with a throughput of 4, where mul is a latency of 3 and throughput of 1. So, using some concrete numbers, sqrt is more expensive, but not polynomially or even an order of magnitude.
I honestly haven't looked into it in that much detail, but if I had to guess... probably. I'm not sure what the implementation used in hardware currently is, but at very least it's constant bounded,
Conversions are still somewhat expensive, but I do know compared to polynomial time or a large enough constant, it can be a better choice for an optimization. For example, computing log10 of an integer.
