Interesting Links for 12-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• The Narcissism of Small Code Differences
  (tags: programming coding )
• Virgin Media to launch 152 Mbps service in February 2014
  (tags: uk broadband virgin internet )
• Modern Renaissance Superhero Designs
  (tags: art superheroes viaNeilRodger )
• Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets
  (tags: sweden prison )
• Everything You Know About

Comments

[heron61]

Children discriminate, unless you teach them not to.

Hardly a surprise, especially in the US - deeply embedded institutionalized racism is reflected throughout our entire culture, and children pick that up w/o needing to be explicitly told, just like they pick up all other aspects of culture, including the other vile aspects.

[andrewducker]

Yup - and it doesn't even take institutionalised racism - children will spot any difference and make assumptions about it. Making mental models based on their observations is what children _do_ - and most people naturally form "teams" and then start assuming their team is better.

[heron61]

I'm rather suspicious of this actually - it sounds like you're saying that children create categories and make judgments based on these categories, and I've yet to see good evidence for this. Instead, with race & sex, and pretty much everything else I've read about, they pick up the wealth of subtle cultural cues that person A is different in an important way than person B, and that this difference means something.

In my own experience, except when someone was picked out for harassment for entirely other reasons (at which point everything about them is used as the basis for insults), children never used insults or otherwise marked differences like eye color, which the larger culture mostly didn't care about.

[andrewducker]

"it sounds like you're saying that children create categories and make judgments based on these categories"

Absolutely. Some of the ways that children do this is through cues from the people around this, but children will happily divide things up in any way that seems reasonable to them at the time. If they spot a pattern then they build upon it.

It's _easier_ to form categories when you're getting a lot of feedback from the culture around you. But children will pick up on any difference they see, and bully based on name differences, slight accent differences, slight clothing differences, hair colour that's at all outside the norm. Anything that's different/unusual will be picked up on and used to form ideas about.

[erindubitably]

How do researchers test a 6-month-old? They show babies photographs of faces. Katz found that babies will stare significantly longer at photographs of faces that are a different race from their parents, indicating they find the face out of the ordinary.

I've read studies using similar methodology that claim the exact opposite - that the longer a baby looks at something, the more it 'likes' it (For example.) Can we pick a story and stick to it already?

[andrewducker]

As soon as we can start sticking electrodes into baby's heads, sure!

[erindubitably]

I'm sure we're capable of that now, Andy. It's all those pesky 'ethics' that muddy the pristine and beautiful waters of Science!

[naath]

I'm sure we can, after all we do it on animals. It's just that wretched "ethics committee" and those dreadful "parents" who won't *let us*.

[alitheapipkin]

None of that hygiene thing is news to anyone who has ever studied microbiology. My response is 'we have an immune system for a reason people'.

[usmu]

Exactly. And not only that: being overly clean diminishes your ability to cope with all kinds of germs as it underminse the immune system. It's one of the reasons there's an increase in all kinds of allergies in children. A little bit of exposure isn't bad at al.

[alitheapipkin]

Yes, that too.

[andrewducker]

I'm fairly sure that the majority of my readers are not microbiologists :->

(There wasn't a huge amount in there I didn't already know. But there was enough I thought it was worth sharing.)

[supergee]

One of the things my parents got right was telling me that I shouldn't say one of my kindergarten classmates was the color of mud.

[momentsmusicaux]

Why didn't the first coder just do a 'is the string length less than 5? Yes: pad it with 0s at the front'. Considering only those two cases is brittle (though I admit I don't know the business logic of US postcodes). But the first rewrite is already into total insanity territory.

Better still, use a language that considers that this sort of thing is a frequent use case: http://php.net/manual/en/function.str-pad.php

A case to rewrite the whole project, surely! ;)

[andrewducker]

Because, as it says further down:
"What happened to that piece of code? It was for zip codes, it was only supposed to pre-pend one or two zeros when importing zip codes from CSV files. Anything with fewer than three digits is supposed to be an invalid code."

The point being, you don't change working code to match your preferences for how code "should" be unless you have a good reason, understand _why_ the original developer did it that way, and are prepared to regression test it.

[andrewducker]

Or as the author says at the end:
"As many of you have noted, the post is not about the Agnostic or his code, it’s about the dynamic of programmers eager to rewrite code in their own image, and the hypothesis that our (I am equally guilty of this behaviour) motivation for doing so is to emphasize the small differences between ourselves and others."

[momentsmusicaux]

It's a fair accusation, but there's more to it than that.

If I have code in front of me, I need to understand it. If the idiom the original writer used is overly complex, or badly chosen, or just badly written, and if I have or feel I have authority to rewrite it to be more legible, I will.

Not as drastically as the examples, but things like breaking up stupidly long clauses for example.