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  • What are the worst examples of moral failure in the history of software engineering?

    - by Amanda S
    Many computer science curricula include a class or at least a lecture on disasters caused by software bugs, such as the Therac-25 incidents or Ariane 5 Flight 501. Indeed, Wikipedia has a list of software bugs with serious consequences, and a question on StackOverflow addresses some of them too. We study the failures of the past so that we don't repeat them, and I believe that rather than ignoring them or excusing them, it's important to look at these failures squarely and remind ourselves exactly how the mistakes made by people in our profession cost real money and real lives. By studying failures caused by uncaught bugs and bad process, we learn certain lessons about rigorous testing and accountability, and we make sure that our innocent mistakes are caught before they cause major problems. There are kinds of less innocent failure in software engineering, however, and I think it's just as important to study the serious consequences caused by programmers motivated by malice, greed, or just plain amorality. Thus we can learn about the ethical questions that arise in our profession, and how to respond when we are faced with them ourselves. Unfortunately, it's much harder to find lists of these failures--the only one I can come up with is that apocryphal "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" story. What are the worst examples of moral failure in the history of software engineering?

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  • Do you have any tips for comments to keep them in step with the code? [closed]

    - by Rob Wells
    Possible Duplicate: How do you like your comments? G'day, I've read both of Steve McConnell's excellent Code Complete books "Code Complete" and "Code Complete 2" and was wondering if people have any other suggestions for commenting code. My commenting mantra could be summed up by the basic idea of expressing "what the code below cannot say". While enjoying this interesting blog post by Jeff about commenting I was still left wondering "When coding, when do you feel a comment is required?" Edit: Oops. Seems to be a duplicate of this question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/121945/how-do-you-like-your-comments so sorry for the noise. Thanks to my, seemingly, SO shadow for pointing it out - wouldn't have thought I was that interesting. Now off to read the original post and see if it is relevant. Edit: I meant to emphasise the best appraoch to ensure that your comments will stay in step with the code. Maybe expressing an intent rather than the mechansim for instance.

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  • what's an option strict and explicit?

    - by Ygam
    I saw this post: "Typos… Just use option strict and explicit please.. during one software development project, which I was on as a consultant, they were getting ridiculous amounts of errors everywhere… turned out the developer couldn’t spell and would declare variables with incorrect spelling.. no big deal, until you use the correct spelling when you’re assigning a value to it… and you had option explicit off. Ouch to them…" what is an option strict and explicit anyway? I have googled it up but can't get the idea (because mostly it's Visual Basic, I'm doing PHP)

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  • Zipping with padding in Haskell

    - by Travis Brown
    A couple of times I've found myself wanting a zip in Haskell that adds padding to the shorter list instead of truncating the longer one. This is easy enough to write. (Monoid works for me here, but you could also just pass in the elements that you want to use for padding.) zipPad :: (Monoid a, Monoid b) => [a] -> [b] -> [(a, b)] zipPad xs [] = zip xs (repeat mempty) zipPad [] ys = zip (repeat mempty) ys zipPad (x:xs) (y:ys) = (x, y) : zipPad xs ys This approach gets ugly when trying to define zipPad3. I typed up the following and then realized that of course it doesn't work: zipPad3 :: (Monoid a, Monoid b, Monoid c) => [a] -> [b] -> [c] -> [(a, b, c)] zipPad3 xs [] [] = zip3 xs (repeat mempty) (repeat mempty) zipPad3 [] ys [] = zip3 (repeat mempty) ys (repeat mempty) zipPad3 [] [] zs = zip3 (repeat mempty) (repeat mempty) zs zipPad3 xs ys [] = zip3 xs ys (repeat mempty) zipPad3 xs [] zs = zip3 xs (repeat mempty) zs zipPad3 [] ys zs = zip3 (repeat mempty) ys zs zipPad3 (x:xs) (y:ys) (z:zs) = (x, y, z) : zipPad3 xs ys zs At this point I cheated and just used length to pick the longest list and pad the others. Am I overlooking a more elegant way to do this, or is something like zipPad3 already defined somewhere?

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  • How can I get the source code for ASTassistant?

    - by cyclotis04
    I'm trying to develop an application similar to ASTassistant, and in the article the author says that he included "the source code with the binaries." After downloading the ZIP folder, however, I've found no source. The program is written in REAL Basic, which I don't know anything about. Do I need to purchase REAL Basic to view ASTassistant's source code, or is it somewhere I haven't looked? Thanks

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  • posmax: like argmax but gives the position(s) of the element x for which f[x] is maximal

    - by dreeves
    Mathematica has a built-in function ArgMax for functions over infinite domains, based on the standard mathematical definition. The analog for finite domains is a handy utility function. Given a function and a list (call it the domain of the function), return the element(s) of the list that maximize the function. Here's an example of finite argmax in action: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/471029/canonicalize-nfl-team-names/472213#472213 And here's my implementation of it (along with argmin for good measure): (* argmax[f, domain] returns the element of domain for which f of that element is maximal -- breaks ties in favor of first occurrence. *) SetAttributes[{argmax, argmin}, HoldFirst]; argmax[f_, dom_List] := Fold[If[f[#1]>=f[#2], #1, #2]&, First[dom], Rest[dom]] argmin[f_, dom_List] := argmax[-f[#]&, dom] First, is that the most efficient way to implement argmax? What if you want the list of all maximal elements instead of just the first one? Second, how about the related function posmax that, instead of returning the maximal element(s), returns the position(s) of the maximal elements?

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  • Telling someone to "let the world judge their development practices" without being condicending?

    - by leeand00
    There's a person in management on my team, that: Doesn't ask questions on Stack Overflow. Doesn't read development blogs. Doesn't use development best practices. This person is about to make some major decisions about the technology stack that will be used throughout the company. (I asked him what the technology stack was they were planning to use was, and it included many things that are not even development tools). How can I tell them to "Let the world's experience" judge their development practices, before they set them in stone; without being condescending or upsetting them?

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  • Using static variable in function vs passing variable from caller

    - by Patrick
    I have a function which spawns various types of threads, one of the thread types needs to be spawned every x seconds. I currently have it like this: bool isTime( Time t ) { return t >= now(); } void spawner() { while( 1 ) { Time t = now(); if( isTime( t ) )//is time is called in more than one place in the real function { launchthread() t = now() + offset; } } } but I'm thinking of changing it to: bool isTime() { static Time t = now(); if( t >= now() ) { t = now() + offset; return true; } return false; } void spawner() { if( isTime() ) launchthread(); } I think the second way is neater but I generally avoid statics in much the same way I avoid global data; anyone have any thoughts on the different styles?

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  • php functions new php developers should be aware of

    - by John
    Can people suggest a list of common or popular php functions that new/junior programmers should be aware of so that they don't "re-invent-the-wheel" so to speak? For example, I've seen a lot of new coders try to write their own date parsing functions when a combination of date(), strtotime() and time() can do everything their looking for. Any other ones you guys want to add to this list? Thanks

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  • How to number the ls output in unix?

    - by Snehal
    I am trying to write a file with format - "id file_absolute_path" which basically lists down all the files recursively in a folder and give an identifier to each file listed like 1,2,3,4. I can get the absolute path of the files recursively using the following command: ls -d -1 $PWD/**/*/* However, I am unable to give an identifier from the output of the ls command. I am sure this can be done using awk, but can't seem to solve it.

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  • F#: how to find Cartesian power

    - by Nike
    I have a problem with writing a Cartesian power function. I found many examples about calculating Cartesian Product, but no one about Cartesian power. For example, [1;2] raised to power 3 = [ [1;1;1] ; [1;1;2] ; [1;2;1] ; [1;2;2] ; [2;1;1] ; [2;1;2] ; [2;2;1]; [2;2;2] ] I use following code to calculate Cartesian Product: let Cprod U V = let mutable res = [] for u in U do for v in V do res <- res @ [[u;v]] res And trying to calculate Cartesian power. I use following code to calculate Cartesian Product: let Cpower U n = let mutable V = U for i=0 to n-1 do V <- Dprod U V V Visual Studio said: Error The resulting type would be infinite when unifying ''a' and ''a list'. I will thankful for any help and links.

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  • The next step & technology towards web services.

    - by webzide
    Hi, My name is Dennis and I am pretty ambitious of creating the next big thing for the web. I have ideas but now I gotta get to work to learn the tools. I am learning Javascript. I don't know if next step for me to take is PHP or some suggests RUBY on Rails. What are the pros and cons. With your experience, I wish you could hint me to the right direction. Thanks. I don't mind working hard. My goal is to create a comprehensive and secure web service platform as well as a fast and user friendly UI.

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  • Explain ML type inference to a C++ programmer

    - by Tsubasa Gomamoto
    How does ML perform the type inference in the following function definition: let add a b = a + b Is it like C++ templates where no type-checking is performed until the point of template instantiation after which if the type supports the necessary operations, the function works or else a compilation error is thrown ? i.e. for example, the following function template template <typename NumType> NumType add(NumType a, NumType b) { return a + b; } will work for add<int>(23, 11); but won't work for add<ostream>(cout, fout); Is what I am guessing is correct or ML type inference works differently? PS: Sorry for my poor English; it's not my native language.

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  • Conventions for the behavior of double or triple "click to select text" features?

    - by John Sullivan
    Almost any mature program that involves text implements "double click to select the word" and, in some cases, "triple click to select additional stuff like an entire line" as a feature. I find these features useful but they are often inconsistent between programs. Example - some programs' double clicks do not select the ending space after a word, but most do. Some recognize the - character as the end of a word, others do not. SO likes to select the entire paragraph as I write this post when I triple click it, VS web developer 2005 has no triple click support, and ultra-edit 32 will select one line upon triple clicking. We could come up with innumerable inconsistencies about how double and triple click pattern matching is implemented across programs. I am concerned about how to implement this behavior in my program if nobody else has achieved a convention about how the pattern matching should work. My question is, does a convention (conventions? maybe an MS or Linux convention?) exist that dictates how these features are supposed to behave to the end user? What, if any, are they?

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