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Eric Lippert

 Discussion on answer by Eric Lippert:…

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Eric Lippert
Jan 12, 2024 19:45
@DStanley: No. My position is that if you want to understand the reasons why companies issue dividends -- which is the question that was asked -- you should focus on whether the people making that decision stand to benefit personally from the decision!
Eric Lippert
Jan 12, 2024 19:45
@Barmar: Borrowing against your stock risks you getting called if the stock declines, and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem Bill and Steve had: Microsoft had literally more money than they knew how to spend. Google solved this problem by incentivizing employees to find new lines of business, but Microsoft's internal culture at the time was one of protecting existing baskets of eggs, not finding new ones.
 

 Discussion on question by supercat: P…

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Eric Lippert
Jul 19, 2023 15:21
I don't know the answer to your question, but it reminds me of this 2014 blog post from Raymond Chen that you might find interesting. devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140627-00/?p=633
 

 Discussion on question by Still_learn…

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Eric Lippert
Apr 3, 2020 00:20
That's what I'm asking you to do, to clarify the part of your question where you ask what happens if you define speed as a relationship between two things and then posit a universe with only one thing in it. That's the part that is confusing me. How I define speed is not particularly relevant.
Eric Lippert
Apr 3, 2020 00:20
@Still_learning: You seem to be making a philosophical argument here that again, I don't understand, but yes, speed is a comparison between two things, namely, the rate at which the distance between them is changing. We observe by experiment that this rate has a maximum value, just as we observe by experiment that there is somewhere in the world right now an older brother who is the most years older than his younger sister. But I don't understand the point you're making about "speed cannot exist", so again, it is hard to know how to answer your question; it's very confusing.
Eric Lippert
Apr 3, 2020 00:20
Let me clarify what I'm asking for here by way of analogy. Suppose I said "I define 'seniority' as the difference in time between the birth of me and my sister; my seniority is roughly 2.5 years. But what if I didn't have a sister? What would my 'seniority' be then?" If I posed that problem to you, how would you respond? By understanding how you respond to that problem, we can better find an answer to your question.
Eric Lippert
Apr 3, 2020 00:20
I'm having difficulty understanding the part of the question beginning "delete the earth". You begin by defining speed as the rate of change of distance between the spacecraft and the earth, and then you delete the earth and ask what happened to the speed; well, you're the one who defined speed as rate of change of distance between two objects, so the only person who can answer that question is you; what do you mean by "speed" if there is only one object? What are you really asking here?
 

 Discussion on question by Neil Meyer:…

Imported from a comment discussion on retrocomputing.stackexch...
Eric Lippert
Mar 26, 2020 18:40
@GlenYates: Fun fact, the original version of Internet Explorer licensed some libraries from NCSA Mosaic under a highly restrictive license. When I was working on adding JavaScript features to IE in 1996 I was not allowed to read any of the source code of IE, which believe me made it rather difficult to debug IE/scripting interface bugs. I would occasionally get on the phone with an IE developer and we would set up debuggers on each machine and step, step, step in sequence to figure out where the bug was. It was a bizarre way to work.
 

 Discussion on question by Franck Dern…

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Eric Lippert
Mar 13, 2020 18:21
On a one-way flight, airlines make less than $20 profit per passenger on average. That bag fee makes the difference between profit and loss, particularly when the plane is not full.
 

 Discussion on question by Charlie Her…

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Eric Lippert
Feb 13, 2020 11:15
Remember that the Turing Test is not now and never was a test for humanity. Rather, it was a thought experiment intended to address the question "is there a minimum standard at we might plausibly consider an entity to be as intelligent as a human?"
 

 Discussion on question by Jimmy Vince…

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Eric Lippert
Feb 5, 2020 04:43
This condition is dangerous to the health of any 240V circuits in the house; call the power company again and have them send out someone competent this time.
Eric Lippert
Feb 5, 2020 04:43
@FredLarson: Also diy.stackexchange.com/questions/153916/….
 

 Discussion on question by user6760: I…

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Eric Lippert
Jan 19, 2020 19:14
@marshalcraft: Right, Apollo burned from lunar orbit so as to lower their perigee to within the atmosphere, and then used thrusters to orient the craft so that the humans were behind the heat shield, and the atmosphere did the braking.
Eric Lippert
Jan 19, 2020 19:14
You're welcome. As other commenters have said, spending some time in sandbox mode in KSP will likely help. The planet Jool in KSP is ideal for setting up interesting gravity assist scenarios because it has a large number of massive satellites.
Eric Lippert
Jan 19, 2020 19:14
@user6760: That's correct; the implication here is that the burn from, say, Earth to Jupiter has to be carefully planned so that the craft encounters Jupiter at exactly the right time to fly in front of the appropriate moon. The implication here is that for this technique to work, the target planet needs to have a very massive moon you can use; that's not true for, say, Mars.
Eric Lippert
Jan 19, 2020 19:14
Can you explain what you think a "gravity assist" does, because I suspect it does not do what you think it does. Are you are thinking of braking assists by using, say one of the four big Jupiter satellites to do a Jupiter orbital insertion?
 

 Discussion on answer by dwizum: My bo…

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Eric Lippert
Dec 13, 2019 21:44
@ErelSegal-Halevi: The value you bring the company is almost always in one of two forms: either you reduced a cost of doing business, or you increased revenues. If you optimize a program so that it uses 10% less electricity, and that program is burning $10000 dollars worth of electricity a year, then you've reduced the cost of doing business by $1000 a year forever, but if your fee was $100000 then that was a bad deal for the company. If you make a software package that can be sold then you've increased revenues; how much depends on sales.
Eric Lippert
Dec 13, 2019 21:44
I think this answer is good but the concept that "compensation should be based on value delivered" is not the whole story. Ideally it should be, yes. In practice, it is slightly more subtle. A more accurate way to put it is "compensation cannot ever be more than the value you bring", which is a more pessimistic way to look at it. But even more pessimistic is the observation the compensation is unlikely to be significantly more than replacement cost.
 

 Discussion on question by jhcoates: H…

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Eric Lippert
Dec 12, 2019 12:27
This question has far too much distracting detail. We don't need to know the specific issues that you're pointing out in a review.
 

 Discussion on question by hmmm: How c…

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Eric Lippert
Dec 1, 2019 15:23
But don't stop there. Figure out how you can use your ignorance to add value. We will be onboarding a new team member soon and I will share my glossary with them, and they'll get up to speed much faster than I did, for instance. There are other ways that your team can use the perspective of a new person to their advantage; help find them.
Eric Lippert
Dec 1, 2019 15:23
I recently joined a team where everyone on the team but me is a statistician, and I have a hard time following along in meetings, but the problem isn't with them for using statistical jargon, it's with me for not knowing it. Start by changing your attitude. You have an opportunity to learn something new. When I hear a term I don't know, I write it down in a glossary and research it later; my glossary file now has several hundred entries and I know much more about statistics than I did six months ago.
 

 Discussion on question by Jimmy: Why …

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Eric Lippert
Oct 10, 2019 19:21
I strongly encourage all developers to get better at statistics, probabilistic reasoning, and calculus. This is the future of programming.
Eric Lippert
Oct 10, 2019 19:21
"If people are going into roles which require that level of mathematical knowledge, what are those roles?" I design programming languages; I use theoretical computer science concepts every single day at work, and I have had multiple weeks where I did nothing but read research papers. In particular right now I'm working on programming languages for inferring probability distributions implied by control flow. My mathematical training is barely adequate for this task and I'm spending a lot of time reviewing my statistics notes from 20 years ago.
 

 Discussion on question by FlyingLemmi…

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Eric Lippert
Aug 20, 2019 03:29
I am reminded of the first book of Cities In Flight, which was published in 1950, before it became clear that transistors were going to be a thing. There's a minor plot point where one of the spaceships cannot have a computer on it because the vacuum tubes will all be crushed when it enters the atmosphere of Jupiter or some such thing.
 

 Discussion on question by gaazkam: Wh…

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Eric Lippert
May 8, 2019 17:51
In short: getting the math right is literally the simplest possible implementation problem, and even that is still pretty hard, but newbs to this space behave as though the math is the hardest part. Do a review of attacks against professionally-implemented security systems, and see how many of them failed because of a flaw in the implementation that was not a flaw in the math.
 

 Discussion on question by AnonOP: Why…

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Eric Lippert
Feb 27, 2019 17:41
The question asks us to make a prediction about the future choices of someone we don't know. Questions about the future choices of unknown people are not on topic for this site. I'm voting to close the question.
 

 Discussion on question by Ron Dotson:…

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Eric Lippert
Feb 26, 2019 15:53
Topology is extremely practical. How many topologists does it take to tile a bathroom floor? Only one if you stretch them thin enough.
 

 Discussion on answer by Richard U: Ho…

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Eric Lippert
Jan 31, 2019 07:10
I note that Einstein never said that. What Einstein said on the subject was "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience."
 

 Discussion on question by Jfinch: Som…

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Eric Lippert
Jan 25, 2019 00:25
As is frequently the case in these questions, every single thing you have claimed to be true is false. "The person in question is my sugar mother" -- no, "she" is working for organized crime. "She doesn't want any of my information" -- oh yes she does. She's offering me her bank account number -- no, it is someone else's bank account number from which you will be stealing on their behalf. Her picture ID proves who she is -- no, it does not. In the future, try adding "she claims", and see if that makes you feel differently. "She claims she does not want my information" is far more accurate.
 

 Discussion on question by Allure: In …

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Eric Lippert
Jan 24, 2019 18:45
@NicholasPipitone: Indeed, it's pretty bad. In this particular case I'm wondering what the teacher would say if asked a question like "the ESA Gaia probe is in an everywhere-higher solar orbit than the Earth; does it exhibit earth-relative retrograde motion because it is in a higher orbit?" Maybe very slightly as L2 is not stable, but effectively, no. Or we could ask "suppose we had a twin Earth in the same orbit as Earth but going the opposite direction; does it appear to move retrograde relative to Earth?" One hopes the answer is yes, but it is not in a higher orbit.
Eric Lippert
Jan 24, 2019 18:45
When I was in 12th grade physics, I tried hard to explain to my teacher that his idea that the length of the sidereal day was 4 minutes shorter than the solar day, and the fact that we have leap years every four years, had nothing to do with each other. I failed; he'd gotten an incorrect explanation into his head and would not get it out. It sounds like something similar is happening here; if the teacher incorrectly thinks that apparent retrograde motion of a planet is a function of its distance from the sun, it's going to be difficult for them to fairly grade explanations.
 

 Discussion on question by souzan: Is …

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Eric Lippert
Jan 21, 2019 18:36
And yes, you should force yourself to read things you dislike; not for pleasure, but so you can take extensive notes describing what precisely you dislike, and why the element was included by the author. Again with TLOTR: when Frodo makes it to Rivendell there is then a multi-thousand-word chapter describing a committee meeting that introduces unnecessary characters and tells a complicated story completely out of order. Whether you think that brilliant or confusing, how did Tolkien arrive at a point where it was necessary? That level of critical reading will inform your writing.
Eric Lippert
Jan 21, 2019 18:36
You are absolutely correct that TLOTR has pacing problems, particularly at the start; 17 years pass between Frodo getting the ring and starting his journey, which works against a sense of urgency, and Frodo then spends literally half of the first book walking from one house to another, four times. It is interesting to read Christopher Tolkien's analysis of his father's notes. JRRT did not know how TLOTR was going to end when he started, or even what it was about, so he kept doing walk, get attacked, get to safety, repeat, until the story emerged.
 

 Discussion on question by chasly from…

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Eric Lippert
Jan 18, 2019 03:35
Another commenter already noted the similarity to Slaugherhouse 5. I note that this idea is also a variation on the plot of Timequake, also by Kurt Vonnegut. in Timequake, the consciousness of everyone on Earth is accidentally time-shifted backwards from 2001 to 1991 and they helplessly experience the 90's all over again, knowing what will happen but powerless to stop it. As you'd expect, it's depressing and cynical.
 

 Discussion on question by PBeezy: Why…

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Eric Lippert
Dec 6, 2018 08:31
Your question is "how is this safe?" but you have not said what attack you wish to protect against. You ask how we prevent malicious code from running, but we do not seek to prevent malicious code from running. We wish to prevent malicious code from doing harm. Can you clarify your question?
 

 Discussion on question by Jared: My b…

Imported from a comment discussion on workplace.stackexchange....
Eric Lippert
Aug 23, 2018 17:07
I give my management my mother's phone number and tell them that if there is an emergency, they can call my mom and she will pass the message along to me. No one has ever called my mom, even though she's super nice.
 

 Discussion on question by user3163495…

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Eric Lippert
Jul 22, 2018 11:44
The question is based on a completely incorrect premise; it is not in any way true that "the bank technically owns 80% of the house" for a standard mortgage. If your question is about mortgages constructed to get around the prohibition in Islam about paying interest, then state the question more clearly. As it is, this question should be closed as it is based on a faulty premise.
 

 Discussion on answer by Matthieu M.: …

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Eric Lippert
Jul 17, 2018 00:55
I think you might be misunderstanding the function of the 20% time. That it is attractive to employees is incidental. When Google was a new company they were bringing in money literally faster than they knew how to spend it. In that situation it makes sense to start a few thousand side projects and see which one turns into gmail, google maps, and so on. You hope that your employees figure out how to spend the money profitably by trying a lot of stuff and keeping what works. Without the creation of new businesses out of those projects, the 20% time doesn't pay for itself.
 

 Discussion on question by Arseni Mour…

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Eric Lippert
Jul 15, 2018 13:27
I write compilers for a living; the first thing I do when I'm trying out a new parser is get an intern to write a program that generates a few hundred thousand test cases at random and see what crashes. We have tremendous resources at our fingertips; don't shy away from using them! They are there for you to use.
Eric Lippert
Jul 15, 2018 13:27
You know the solution -- you say loop through every second for the past ten years, checking for any assertion violation, and you then dismiss the solution as being too complex. You're a computer programmer. You're in the business of managing complexity. There are only 315 million seconds in ten years! I have a cheap machine on my desk right now that does four billion operations per second, so get on it. Write a program that tests every second for the last ten years and asserts if there's a problem, and then you'll know if there's a problem!
 

 Discussion on question by JaneDoe1337…

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Eric Lippert
Jul 13, 2018 18:42
Apparently, according to bastion-of-condescending-articles-about-those-wacky-millenia‌​ls the WSJ, it is increasingly common for people to find a new job, simply stop going to the old one, and don't bother to you know, actually quit the old job. Seems like a good way to burn your bridges and get a bad reputation in your industry, but I suppose people have reasons. wsj.com/articles/is-it-ever-ok-to-quit-on-the-spot-146653158‌​9
 

 Discussion on question by Artem Malch…

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Eric Lippert
Jun 5, 2018 08:21
This is why I go into my local hardware store and there is a list of names beside the cash register with "don't accept checks from" at the top of it.
 

 Discussion on question by Fattie: Is …

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Eric Lippert
Jun 1, 2018 16:50
This is the first "is this a scam?" question I've read that was not a scam; congratulations! :-)
 

 Discussion on question by lrey: Rent …

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Eric Lippert
May 25, 2018 12:31
"Again"? You haven't paid once, so you cannot pay "again".
 

 Discussion on question by Eli: There …

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Eric Lippert
May 16, 2018 05:01
@KamiKaze: I think we can agree that the question is confusingly worded. If the question was worded "If you attempt to drink up to three of the four cups, what is the probability of being poisoned on one of the attempts?" then plainly it is 3/4. But that's not the question that was asked.
Eric Lippert
May 16, 2018 05:01
If the poison is not instant death -- if it, say, kills you an hour later -- then yeah, it's 3/4. But if it is an instant death poison then the statement of the problem precludes any scenario in which the first or second cups had the poison, so we must discard those.
Eric Lippert
May 16, 2018 05:01
The downvoted answer of German R is correct; the rest are wrong. You have to be very careful when making conditional statements in probability problems. The answer to the question "if you pick three cups to drink, pour them together and drink them all at once, what is the probability of being poisoned?" is 3/4. But the problem: given that you drank the first cup, lived, drank the second cup, and lived, and got to the third cup, what is the chance you were poisoned on the third cup?" is 1/2, not 3/4. Assuming of course that the poison is instant death.
 

 Discussion on question by Lauren DeGu…

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Eric Lippert
May 8, 2018 15:56
You get a zero for cheating? That seems like a very lenient policy; it says that cheating is no worse than not doing the work. At my school you got minus 100 the first time you were caught cheating, and expelled the second time.
 

 Discussion on question by Carlos Cine…

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Eric Lippert
Apr 29, 2018 21:41
"As the number of balls in the urn increases without bound, the probability that any particular ball will be chosen to be removed also goes to zero. But that's the same for all balls, and therefore no balls will be removed." That argument is obviously nonsense, but it seems to me to be identical to the argument that all the balls will be removed. If my argument is bad then why is the Ross argument good?
 

 Discussion on question by Jet Blue: H…

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Eric Lippert
Apr 12, 2018 14:50
You might want to look into how Infocom did this with Zork and their other text adventures. They designed a virtual machine, compiled programs to the language of the virtual machine, and then wrote interpreters for each target operating system. They could then run the game on many different operating systems, and the VM was small enough that it could page portions of the program in from disk as needed.