brettbender's comments

Love rubular, use it every single time I write or edit a regex, just to test some weird cases while I think through the syntax.

>> No, even in a skill game, it is possible for someone who does not understand the rules to make the perfect play.

> Disagree with your first point

You may, but it is possible for a much better player to lose (even in a "skill game") to a player with very little or no knowledge of the game. You may consider this "lucking out" but even the most skill-based games have an element of luck, and in edge cases new / worse players will beat better / experienced players - this is simply how these things work (and part of what we as humans generally find exciting about contests of skill).

This is why many competitive games limit the element of randomness among professionals by various means. In poker, all players have the opportunity to play very many hands - no single hand decides the outcome (unless they decide to go all-in, for example). Similarly, in 9-ball and tennis (among other sports), professionals at the highest levels play sets of games - because the outcome of a single game is not indicative of the involved players' respective skill levels. On any given day, given enough games, I would beat Jeannette Lee at a game of 9-ball, even though her skill at the game is leaps and bounds above mine. At no time (ever, haha) would I realistically be able to beat her in a best-of-nine game format. That is why she is world ranked and I am commenting on a website.

Saying that "only poker greats will play a perfect hand" is erroneous, many people play perfect hands. The difference is a professional will probably know (or suspect) that they are about to make the perfect play. They also will attempt to do so regularly, and know the difference between perfect, good, and bad plays, whereas bad/new players will not (or will much less frequently).

> If it’s true that poker is a skill game, then only the true greats should be able to play perfectly.

No, even in a skill game, it is possible for someone who does not understand the rules to make the perfect play. It is just extremely unlikely, and it is extremely likely that a more skilled player will beat a less skilled player on average. The greater the skill disparity between two players, the more one-sided the competition should become.

I'm sure Josh realizes this, and I like the blog post as a whole, that quote just struck me as wrong enough I had to post something.

Sorry, didn't mean to get your knickers in a twist, I was only being tongue-in-cheek.

Have you ever used PHP before?

So you did not read the article which actually addresses people who make this argument?

When people talk about 'the objectification of women,' they're not talking about the dictionary definition of the word objectification. It's shorthand for sexual objectification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_objectification

The best part of being in a field that changes so often is that years of experience don't count. You max out after a year.

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And... quit reading.

Thanks a lot! We appreciate your help.

We personally prefer the user experience that we've crafted. Notifications in the app differentiate between new messages and mentions (in the room list), for one. We also feel that the display of messages in each room is superior, and prefer the room listing to the tabbed approach Propane uses.

These differences are largely subjective, though, and some people may prefer Propane's approach (and that's fine). I suggest if you're not convinced, use a promo code and try it out for a day or two. If the promo codes are all used, I'd be happy to email one to you.

We are also always happy to hear suggestions to improve the user experience:

http://getsatisfaction.com/bearded/products/bearded_briquett...

Technically, both Propane and Briquette use a Webkit view, but behind the scenes Briquette actually implements the Campfire API instead of scraping the campfire site for its content. Briquette also supports Growl, multiple sites, customizable message alerts, and drag-and-drop file uploads. Searching transcripts is on the way for version 1.2.

We had been using Propane ourselves when we decided to begin developing Briquette as an internal project. We felt frustrated with the user experience it offered. Briquette is our attempt to provide a client which is more streamlined and pleasant to use. We're focusing mainly on the user experience for business use.

We decided to launch with significantly less features than Propane, but have slowly been implementing more as we figure out the best way to focus on the end-user experience.

Thanks, hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Yes, we've known (and been enraged by) the font-size changing bug as well. Not sure what the deal is with the beachball you've gotten intermittently, but there are a few updates in the pipe (waiting on App store review process). One of them allows you to resize the left column to your heart's delight, as well as fixing the strange styling issues in the message box when pasting rich-text. After the update, you should no longer be able to inadvertently change the style of text presented in the message box.

I agree, it's very important that we never do things that we might not be good at, or people traditionally think don't 'fit' with what programmers in general do. Any chance of failing at being a designer/artist/photographer/whatever is too much. Also, being able to see from a designer's point of view (or at least understand their field/expertise a slight bit better) is not in any way beneficial.

While his statement was definitely prejudiced, don't you think assuming that 21-year-old nerds can't identify lightly applied makeup is also somewhat prejudicial?

Also note that translation is a very different task than parsing, or part-of-speech tagging, for example. Summarization and translation are both open research topics in NLP from what I understand, and aren't really 'solved' in any language.

Love the entitlement evident in his reply, "I'm a fucking Engine Yard programmer for fuck sake. We promote mongrel as a stable deployment stack" - does he think the fact that they promote zed's work means it's okay to ignore zed's rights regarding his own work?

Also, how could anyone take issue with the maintainer of https://github.com/martinemde/dicks and http://dicks.heroku.com ?

If it's that easy, why not just implement it in the first place and give people less of a reason to lambaste your application that supposedly centers around privacy?

At least now the next time a client wants me to do something in .NET I have a good excuse to gently persuade them to something else (until this gets patched, at least).

If you hate researching new technologies and learning new languages, maybe developer wasn't the right profession?