When I read this type of stories I cannot help but think that the world would be better off if we banned that type of predator-like behavior, those super aggressive strategies that aim at getting the concurrence out of business by lowering the price more and more until you get a monopoly.
No-one can deny that what he did was a huge innovation, the fact that it is still being used 60 years later is a testament of that, but how much innovation was killed in the egg when competitors were forced out of the market?
Well, you could look at it the other way. How much innovation was enabled when everyone in the world who wanted to build an electronic gadget had the parts available earlier for less money?
You see less supplier innovation. I see more customer innovation.
If the innovation is worth something, even if the company is forced out of the market, it can be either reused in further endeavours of the shareholders/company owners or the research can be continued under the guidance of some other company. Businesses don't just "forget" about their past research (unless we're talking trillion dollar companies).
This exchange is a very good illustration of what happened with the #metoo movement: a woman explains the toll that street harassment has on their life, and a man that has never experienced that brushes it off with a #notallmen.
While I agree that having small talk with strangers once in a while could be very healthy, I also try to remember that a woman has to unwillingly interact tens of times a day with male strangers just by walking in the street, sometimes with very scary outcomes, and being like "yeah but I am different" is not an appropriate response.
I'd also point out that commenting on the quality of the chicken noodle soup while on line at the supermarket (that's small talk) and randomly walking up to someone and tell them how sexy they look and suggest they sit on your face (that's harassment) are wildly different things.
Or do you believe they are exactly the same thing?
You say that you don't brush it off at all, but just before you said "But IME, those folks are few and far between.". Your experience does not really matter here if you are not a woman that experiences that type of harassment.
What the person you were replying to was trying to tell you is not that the problem are men who start the conversation with "hey pretty girl, can you sit on my face?", but rather people who start with a polite conversation, and if they feel they are met with a warm reaction think it opens the door to more.
It might be only a small percentage of guys who follow up with inappropriate actions, but when as a woman you get 20+ men a day starting to make small talk with you, you end up with a high probability of having at least some of them being weirdos.
On the other hand if the woman answers coldly to the small talk tentative, some people may take it in a bad way. The line you have to walk to not appear too warm to weirdos and not too cold to easily offended people is very thin.
If you can't understand that under these circumstances some women become anxious at the idea of men starting small talk with them, well that's too bad.
As for what you can do, maybe start with asking women you know how they feel about it. Maybe they are all fine with it. It is also very dependent of where you live. If you live in a dense city women get harassed way more often than in a suburb area, it's kind of a number problem.
You assume bad faith and evil from everyone except yourself.
You read what you wanted to read into my comment and ignored anything that contradicted your view that I'm ignorant/oblivious/probably an evil harassing rapist.
I live in the most densely populated city in the US, and was born, raised and have lived here most of my life.
I am acutely aware of the situation and the issue, but you assume you know know better than anyone else. Which is a bunch of entitled (although entitlement of a different kind than I mentioned in the comment to which you responded) bullshit from an entitled, self-righteous asshole. That'd be you, in case there was some confusion about that.
So, as I should have said (which was my initial impression, given your deliberately obtuse and clearly bad faith response to my comment), fuck off jerk.
Which is what most women I know will say to entitled assholes like you.
Edit: It occurs to me that I didn't explain myself clearly enough. As such, I will. And I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand.
>If you can't understand that under these circumstances some women become anxious at the idea of men starting small talk with them, well that's too bad.
Who said that? Not me. In fact, I said just the opposite.
>As for what you can do, maybe start with asking women you know how they feel about it.
Who says I haven't? I'm sure I've had more conversations about stuff like this than you have. But you seem to be so wrapped up in how sensitive you are to even imagine that someone else could have been there long before you.
>Maybe they are all fine with it. It is also very dependent of where you live. If you live in a dense city women get harassed way more often than in a suburb area, it's kind of a number problem
I am quite aware. But small talk isn't harassment. That you equate them says more about you than it does about the very serious problem of harassment.
Given that you've decided that anyone who doesn't explicitly mirror your talking points, they're obviously idiots, evil or both, shows exactly how disrespectful, self-centered and entitled you are. I definitely wouldn't leave any woman alone with you.
Wow, that was a very measured response to my comment.
From what you wrote it looks obvious to me that you completely missed the point I was trying to make, but I share the responsibility for that at least as much as you do, it is not easy to get points across through HN comments, especially when you have no clue who you are talking to (+ I am not an english native speaker in case that was not obvious yet).
I could try to re-explain things better, but you have shown that you are not in a state to take in anything that I say anymore, so I hope you will eventually find a friend who can explain it to you better than I did (and that you will refrain to insult them just because you feel attacked).
> > the sole real seat of power is the office of the presidency
> is plainly wrong. The president still can lose their majority in parliament, they still can have an hostile prime minister, and they still don’t control the judges. There are many examples of the 3 powers slipping away from the president at various times after De Gaulle. A minority president is also becoming more and more likely as the candidates struggle and the parties keep shooting themselves in their respective feet. Not a great start.
Since 2002 you are wrong. The reason being that the president is elected every 5 years, and the parliament is also elected every 5 years, only a few months after the presidential election. This means there is no such thing as "losing their majority in parliament". If people elected a president, 2 months later they will vote for the parliament the president wants as there is no time for the president to f*ck up in the meantime and make people change their minds.
When the presidency was 7 years then the president could indeed lose their majority in the parliament.
Does France not have snap elections or delays for some reason or another - or if there are, it always affects the presidential election too?
Or, lower probability sure, what about by-elections? Say you have a majority of one, someone resigns/dies/does something awful, vote goes the other way in the by-election?
This rarely happens if the parliament is elected right after the president is. Electing members of the parliament becomes: "do I want the president to be able to rule the country, or do I want nothing to happen in the next 5 years?".
The clearest example of that was in 2017, when Macron was elected, and people voted in over 300 people that had never been elected before, often were completely unknown to the public, the only thing they did was declaring : "I will vote for whatever the president asks me to vote for" (not an actual quote, but in order to get support from Macron they had to sign a paper saying they would vote "yes" for every proposition emanating from their group, and "no" to every proposition from the opposition)
See my other reply upthread. I agree that this change was designed to ensure a majority for the president. But the political landscape has changed lot since then, in ways that were difficult to foresee. It is not unimaginable to end up with an unpopular president elected by default, even as their party gets ~30% of the seats at the parliament. Then, the opposition has strong incentive to hammer out a coalition government.
The 5th republic is founded on the premise of strong parties. In 2002, the landscape has been dominated by a right-wing coalition (UDR, RPR, UMP and their satellites) and a left-wing one (SFIO, then PS) for half a century. The candidate of both mainstream blocks polling below 15% was very hard to imagine.
Coupling both presidential and legislative elections might not be enough to avoid further splintering in the future.
> * sometimes, a candidate that would win against all others has a too low score at the first turn to pass to the 2nd turn (this is what happens in 2007 where all polls said that François Bayrou (who was center/moderate and more consensual) would have won both against Nicolas Sarkozy and against Ségolène Royal, but couldn't get enough votes to pass the 1st turn)
I am surprised you chose this example when an even clearer example was the Jospin/Chirac/LePen situation during the previous election
I loved the first paragraphs but then they lost me with their list of examples.
Those are not examples of asking stupid questions. Those are examples of asking good questions in a stupid way, almost like he is trying to look stupid, for no good reason. Why don't you give your interlocutor some context so they can help you better? Is your goal to instead make them look stupid? I truly don't understand.
Never mind that bosses like the pieces of the puzzle to be interchangeable, no single point of failure. Sometimes bosses are threatened by a senior subordinates mindshare and will let them go in the next riff.
The author seems to believe people either mock everything or don't mock anything. Obviously using mocks for all your tests is a very bad idea, but that's not how things are done generally.
Unit tests allow you to validate a unit's behavior very quickly. If your unit test takes more than 1 second to run it is probably a bad unit test (some would argue 1/100 second max so your whole unit test suite can complete in a few seconds). In unit tests you use mocks not only to keep the test hermetic, but also to keep the execution time as low as possible.
Then you should have integration & e2e tests where you want to mock as little as possible, because you want a behavior as close as production as possible. For those you care less about how long they take. That's because you usually don't run those tests at the same stage as unit tests (development vs release qualification).
The author does not make the distinction between different types of testing, the resulting article is of pretty poor quality imho.
I've certainly seen people who mock almost everything to test units at the smallest scale possible because they think that's what they're supposed to.
E.g., I once saw someone test a factory method like:
def make_thing(a, b, c):
return thing(a, b, c)
with a unit test where they mocked `thing`, and ensured that calling `make_thing(a, b, c)` ended up calling `thing(a, b, c)`.
They write just a shit ton of tests like this for every single method and function, and end up writing ~0 tests that actually check for any meaningful correctness.
harkens back to the early obsession with "100% code coverage" and java robots were coding tests on bean getters/accessors.
100% code coverage was a bad breadth-first metric when unit tests should be depth based on many variant inputs. Also, "100% code coverage" ignores the principle that80% of execution is in 20% of the code/loops, so that stuff should get more attention than worrying about every single line being unit tested.
Well, unless you were in some fantastical organization of unicorn programmers that had an infinite testing budget and schedule...
A good exercise is to get 100% coverage for anything that uses ByteArrayInput/OutputStreams. The language enforces handling IOException for a bunch of methods that could throw one for a generic stream but never for a ByteArrayStream.
You should see the opposite of this. Where every module of code is unit testable with zero mocks and just a small subset of untestable IO functions packed in a neat corner.
I've seen a lot of tests where people just mock everything by default without thinking. Smart programmers at a good company. It's an issue that does deserve more recognition. Abuse of mocks is bad for tests.
I know which company you are talking about :). I agree that abuse of mocks is bad for tests 100%. But when I clicked the link I was hoping to read an article giving a nuanced description of mocks, with some analysis on when to use and when to avoid mocks. Instead the article is just an opinion piece that just says "Stop using mocks" as if that was actually an option.
>The author seems to believe people either mock everything or don't mock anything.
The author is saying that people frequently mock things that it would be more economic to just run because you've got the real thing right there. Building a model for it is an expensive waste that probably won't even match reality anyway and will demand constant maintenance to sync up with reality.
If you're overtly concerned with the speed of your test suite or how fast individual tests run then you're probably the kind of person he's talking about. Overmocking tends to creep in with a speed fetish.
When I am developing a feature, I want to know very fast whether or not my code's logic is correct. It is not rare during the development cycle to run the same test dozens of times because I made a silly mistake (or a few), and obviously if the test takes 30 minutes to complete it completely wastes my day of work.
Having a set of very fast running tests is absolutely necessary in my opinion.
Once I have validated that the piece of code I wrote is doing what I intended, then I want to run other tests that do not use mocks/fakes, e2e tests that can possibly take a whole day to complete and will allow me to see if the whole system still works fine with my new feature plugged in. But this comes AFTER fast unit tests, and definitely cannot REPLACE those.
This sounds exactly right to me. You write mocks for the things that could take too much time to run frequently with the real code. (And I'm assuming you'd also write it for things that you don't want to make actual changes somewhere, such as a third-party API that you don't control.)
But if it could be run locally, quickly, you wouldn't bother mocking it.
If that's all correct, I think you and I would do the same things. All the people screaming "no mocks!" and "mock everything!" are scary, IMO.
Mocks mean your code is too tightly coupled. You should be able to unit test your code by creating only fake data.
Things like dependency injection increase coupling to the point where you have to mock. Avoid dependency injection and other complexity within complexity features.
Because of an unfortunate house-sharing issue I ended up without any electricity at home for almost 2 months.
I still had a phone that I was charging at the office, and still used the computer at work, but all my time at home was spent mostly laying in the cold dark (it was winter time) letting my mind wander and reflecting about life.
After a few weeks my co-workers asked me why I was not moving, and were very surprised when I told them that the situation was actually pretty nice. You get to think about so many things that you would never usually, just because you suddenly have the time to do so.
I also believe I had my best nights of sleep during those 2 months as I was not going to bed right after spending 12 hours in front of a screen.
No-one can deny that what he did was a huge innovation, the fact that it is still being used 60 years later is a testament of that, but how much innovation was killed in the egg when competitors were forced out of the market?