Great news, our company's has a brand new security-first product, with an easy to use API and a beautiful web interface.

It is SQL-injection-enabled, XSS-compatible, logins are optional (if you do not provide a password, you are logged in as admin).

The json-api has custom-date formats, bools are any of "1", "0", 1, 0, false or null (but never true). Numbers are strings or numbers. Utf-8 is not supported. Most of our customers use special characters.

The web interface is using plain bootstrap, and because of XSS it is really easy to customize everything.

How the hell this product got launched is beyond me.

I messaged a professor at MIT and surprisingly got a response back.

He told me that "generating primes deterministically is a solved problem" and he would be very surprised if what I wrote beat wheel factorization, but that he would be interested if it did.

It didnt when he messaged me.

It does now.

Tested on primes up to 26 digits.
Current time tends to be 1-100th to 2-100th of a second.

Seems to be steady.

First n=1million digits *always* returns false for composites, while for primes the rate is 56% true vs false, and now that I've made it faster, I'm fairly certain I can get it to 100% accuracy.

In fact what I'm thinking I'll do is generate a random semiprime using the suspected prime, map it over to some other factor tree using the variation on modular expotentiation several of us on devrant stumbled on, and then see if it still factors. If it does then we know the number in question is prime. And because we know the factor in question, the semiprime mapping function doesnt require any additional searching or iterations.

The false negative rate, I think goes to zero the larger the prime from what I can see. But it wont be an issue if I'm right about the accuracy being correctable.

I'd like to thank the professor for the challenge. He also shared a bunch of useful links.

That ones a rare bird.

This rant is False.

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

not the worst by itself, except I keep finding them everywhere

if(thingThatIsTrue == true) {
// omfg
}

or it's inbred cousin

if(!thingThatIsTrue == false) {
//herpa derp
}

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

Want to piss off the person reviewing your PR?

don't just return true or false use 1 == 1 for true and 1 == 2 for false.

Watch the glorious rage unfolds 🤘🤘🤘

A day in the life of BoyBiscuit.

PM: Please zip up any local changes and push them to a temp folder on the repo and I will manually check to see what you have changed.
Me: *glaring at the download as zip button*

PM: Who broke the repo?
Me: *checks commit history*
Commit History: *last commit PM*

Me: Could you add the files to your commit before pushing because you've only pushed changes on tracked files.
PM: No not possible, I did 'commit -a'.
Me: ....

PM: Could you all delete your forks so that It isn't anywhere on the web
US: but it's private with only us as collaborators
PM: No because I can see it
Me: srysly?

PM: Could everyone try to write more effective code?
Me: Looks at his code
Code: Boolean b = getbooleanVal ? True : False;

Tl;Dr: PM doesn't know anything about git or working as a team.

See you tomorrow!

This was a fun thing that just happened:

I was sent a timed questionnaire by a potential employer for a software engineer job. I'm like okay, I will do it on Monday (today) because that is when I will have a free minute.

Well I sit down to do the thing and I had had a few beers, because the Ballmer Peak is real to me when I have to answer bullshit programming quizzes.

Well F me right in the A, it is a 38 question true or false logic quiz. And I am no longer a college kid trying to get into grad school so I have no patience for that crap, and apparently less with a little beer in me. Long story short, there was no comment section for me to rant in so I decided to go on YouTube and watch cat videos instead.

My Javascript professor explained Boolean to me using an allegory about pizza: "If I give you pizza, under what condition do you eat it? Your hunger must be true or false. Boolean does the same thing, but with things less exciting than pizza."
It didn't even begin to make sense to me until it became about pizza.
I vote for ALL future computer classes to be taught in terms of pizza.

I have this project I've inherited, yea I seem to do that a lot, but this damn thing, has to run in php5.4, has deprecated functions for php7 everywhere and a lot of them and there's no classes anywhere beyond some libraries.

Everything is procedural with random scripts being injected left right and center.

I kid you not,

$thisThing = true;
If(x==y)
require "path/to/some/script.php";
else
require "path/to/a/slightly/different/script.php";

If($thisThing === false){
// well it was modified in that small block about 10 different times
}

Those injected scripts then accept data from the parent scope so, looking at file X, you need to have open file A,B, E, and M to understand where variables have been initialised and what there current state could potentially be.

Basically this thing was bandaid after bandaid for feature requests with 0 refactoring.

Here I am trying to implement some basic functionality (should only take an hour or so + a bit of manual testing) but no, I'm literally at the point of hitting the delete button on the entire project and starting again.

Conference tickets are overpriced

true or false?

Do you attend any without being sponsored?

Hello devRant, this is going to be my first time posting on the site.

I work for a gaming community on the side, and today one of the managers asked me to implement a blacklist system into the chat and reactivate the previously existing one temporarily. This shouldn't have had any issues and should've been implemented within minutes. Once it was done and tested, I pushed it to the main server. This is the moment I found out the previous developer apparently decided it would be the best idea to use the internal function that verifies that the sender isn't blacklisted or using any blacklisted words as a logger for the server/panel, even though there is another internal function that does all the logging plus it's more detailed than the verification one he used. But the panel he designed to access and log all of this, always expects the response to be true, so if it returns false it would break the addon used to send details to the panel which would break the server. The only way to get around it is by removing the entire panel, but then they lose access to the details not logged to the server.

May not have explained this the best, but the way it is designed is just completely screwed up and just really needs a full redo, but the managers don't want to redo do it since apparently, this is the best way it can be done.

Anyone else developed a habit to structure verbal allday Argumentations in your head in Code syntax? Helps me alot to follow ones logic. Except when I'm arguing with my girlfriend. Sometimes setMood(angry) gets randomly called (bug?) and then every if statement seems to be valid, eventhough it should return false. An inputstream that contains my outputstream is initialized but .readLine() is never being called. Instead, the outputstream to my inputstream is being overly abused. Once we get dive deeper into our if-statement we will find a while loop with a mysterious flag. Noone knows it's origin. The while loop keeps printing out random concatenated strings until it overflows your own capacity. I would have said its while(true) but in fact there must be a timer in another very hidden thread or something that sets our flag to false. The other and only way I know to exit that loop is to call apology() 100 times (maybe a variable sets the boolean that could be deeply buried in her projectstructure like this CONST.VALUES.getMood().getRealMood().getTrueMood().TRUTHCONTAINER.angryMode=true)..
I wish I could get a stressball so I can continue theorycrafting and debugging. Its 4.30 am now, my better side is snoozing next to me. I bet making this a pseudocode would be fun.

Ps: I love my lady but I had to rent

PHP arrays.

The built-in array is also an hashmap. Actually, it's always a hashmap, but you can append to it without specifying indexes and PHP will use consecutive integers. Its performance characteristics? Who knows. Oh, and only strings, ints and null are valid keys.

What's the iteration order for arrays if you use them as hashmaps (string keys)? Well, they have their internal order. So it's actually an ordered hashmap that's being called an array. And you can produce an array which has only integer keys starting with 0, but with non-sequential internal (iteration) order.

This array weirdness has some non-trivial implications. `json_encode` (serializes argument to JSON) assumes an array corresponds to a JSON array if its keys are consecutive integers in increasing order starting with 0, otherwise the array becomes a JSON object. `array_filter` (filters arrays/hashmaps using callback predicate) preserves keys, so it will punch holes in the int key sequence if non-last items are removed, thus turning arrays into hashmaps and changing your JSON structure if you forget to discard keys before serialization.

You may wonder how JSON deserialization works, then? There's a special class for deserialized JSON objects, `stdClass`. It's basically a hashmap too, but it's an object, not an array, and all functions that would normally accept arrays won't work with it. So basically its only use is JSON (de)serialization. You can even cast arrays to objects, producing `stdClass`.

Bonus PHP trivia:

Many functions return nonsensical values. `preg_match`, the regex matching function, returns 1 for success, 0 for no matches and false for malformed regular expression. PHP supports exceptions, so it could just throw one on errors. It would even make more sense to return true, false and null for these three cases. But no, 1, 0 and false. And actual matches are returned by output arg.

`array_walk_recursive`, a function supposed to recursively apply callback to each element of an array. That's what docs say. It actually applies it to leafs only. It will also silently accept object instead of array and "walk" it, but without recursing into deeper objects.

Runtime type enforcing is supported for function arguments and returned values. You can use scalar types, classes, array, null and a few special keywords. There's also a `mixed` keyword, which is used in docs and means "anything". It's syntactically valid, the parser will accept it, but it matches no values in runtime. Calling such function will always cause a runtime error.

Strings can be indexed with negative integers. Arrays can't.

ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor: "Creates a new class instance without invoking the constructor". This one needs no commentary.

`array_map` is pretty self-explanatory if you call it with a callback and an array. Or if you provide more arrays of equal length via varargs, callback will be called with more arguments, one from each array. Makes sense so far. Now, you can also call `array_map` with null instead of callback. In that case it treats provided arrays as rows of a matrix and returns that matrix, transposed.

Stupid HTML checkboxes! It's always annoyed me that you can't just set checked to true or false, but have to remove the property altogether to uncheck a checkbox. Better still would be if you'd only need to set the value to 1 or 0, and the checked or not would sort out automatically. Yes, there are frameworks to handle it, I know. But if checkboxes had been designed right from start, a framework or any sort of special cases would not be needed. You've got love HTML, but things like this make it ugly.

Spent hours trying to figure out why API calls to a third party service weren't working.

Hit up their support and find out the following:

"Hi there, we can only take true and false as strings."

"Uhmm... Does it take anything apart from true or false?"

"No, but they must be sent in as strings"

"Any reason why you don't take booleans if it's just true or false?"

*crickets chirping*

GFG

Your choice. Select one
1.
foo (bar) {
return true;
}

2.
foo (bar)
{
return true;
}

3.
foo (bar) { return true; }

4.
foo (bar)
return true;

5. Collapse
|-------------------|
| foo (bar) ... |
|-------------------|

6.
#define foo boo
#define bar par
#define ( `
#define ) '
#define return go_home
#define true false
#define { ☞
#define } ☜

6-1.
boo `par' ☞
go_home false;
☜

6-2
boo `par'
☞
go_home false;
☜

6-3.
boo `par' ☞ go_home false; ☜

6-4.
boo `par'
go_home false;

6-5.
|--------------------|
| boo (par) ... |
|--------------------|

Select and Comment below.
Or add your own.

Worst fight?

Stubborner against stubbornest.

About a focking fact that was trivially true or false. Fun fact: it didn't matter anyway.

Boy, did we raise our voices and attract the attention of everybody in the room. Lesson learned.

OSC, or open sound protocol, does not have a Boolean type. instead, the Boolean true has type true and the Boolean false has type false.
what.
well.
at least the problem wasn't in my code?

'17:15' < '09:45' === false
'5:15pm' < '9:45am' === true

I either need a language with a stronger type system, or coworkers who understand that comparing raw time input in validation is a bad idea 😡

First time I was screaming out of anger while looking at code.
I'm doing a group project in my university.
We are developing a indoor navigation Android app.
And a team mate of mine just merged this…

/*Method for help-feature.
Sets all the TouchEvents that are at least 400 ms long. This is made for all the relevant buttons or editTexts, which are seen on the mapView.
The case for mapView is needed because otherwise the other buttons, etc. wont work properly.*/

public void setButtonsForHelpDialog(){
View v = mapView;
switch (v.getId()) {
case R.id.mapview:
mapView.setOnTouchListener(…);
case R.id.buttonUp:
buttonOn.setOnTouchListener(…);
case R.id.buttonDown:
buttonDown.setOnTouchListener(…);
…
case R.id.description:
description.setOnTouchListener(…);
}}

The code is really aligned like this - no breaks. And it's even worse. There are if statements like if("constantly false var" == true). Which is highlighted by Android Studio.
This is done in a own class. The views are set via public member variables of this new class. The constant vars were added in the actual class holding the buttons and also stuff like this useless method
public void getDoStuff() {
doStuff()
}
And I could continue like this.

I never saw code this bad…
I can't even find words for it :/

Fuck everything about Microsoft Dynamics. I'm supposed to use the REST API to make a web front-end. I notice all of the data comes back codified.

null == 0.
boolean true == 100000000
boolean false == 100000001

except sometimes when

boolean false == 100000000
boolean true == 100000001

or other times

string "Yes" == 100000000
string "No" == 100000001
string "Maybe" == 100000003

Hang on. Is the system representing a 1 bit value with base 10 numbers? Did the client set this up like this? Holy crap every number corresponds to a unique record in a table somewhere. That means it only returns numeric values instead of strings and I have to figure out what the number means in the context of the table.

A "key" is user typed? So every time someone starts to make a new record it saves a new "key" without a record? So I can pull a bunch of "0" records if I pull sequentially? So basically I need to see all of the data in Dynamics to have any context at all for what is returned from the Dynamics API? Fuuuuuuuuuu

My man said "What should I return if the True/False field is left blank?"

WHY WOULD A BOOLEAN BE ANYTHING OTHER THAN TRUE OR FALSE???!!!

I'm gonna have an aneurysm. I shouldn't be educating people on best practices for something that's already been written about time and time again. RESTful philosophy has been documented so much, and all it takes is a quick google search, but noooo! I have to take time out of my day as if I'm a regular old stakeholder to explain that I want the exact thing that I sent in an email two weeks ago. Amazing.

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

Someone mentioned being frustrated with people who answer "either/or" questions with "yes". I figured out why. They are not human. They are a robot and their processing of language is failing.

A simple question:
Q: The car is red or the car is green?
A: Yes

Breakdown:
The car is red. Yes, True
The car is green. No, False
The car is red OR the car is green.
True OR False
True || False = True
True = Yes

So they dissected the language like a computer treating "or" as a logical OR. This proves they are a robot pretending to be human. They failed the Turing test.

This is so TRUE!

Or is it FALSE?

Happy Halloween!

Serious question: If a highly intelligent being, better than humans, is about to code something, how would they probably do it?

Will they use the same concepts like control flow, iterations, types, operators, object inheritance, etc?

If they are quantum capable, how can they code with booleans when it can be both true and false at the same time? Will they code truthy and falsy with another dimension like time-space temporality?

Do their code simultaneously modify the hardware or bio-hardware as it iterates over the outcome of the code?

Does input and output even relevant to them?

How do they represent infinites?

Do they have similar github workflows or they telepathically update the source code?

Do they embed their program in their DNA? Then pass to offspring the codes they already created?

Do they code using a language or do they use some frequencies and material science that simultaneously show real world output?

And do they have their version of devRant?

When a programmer plays truth or false, you know he/she will always say true.

True or False?

There is a special place in hell for people that use Boostrap, only to destroy it and recreate to destroy it and recreate for "customisation purpose"

I just spent a whole day figuring out what the fuck was going on with the collapse system that wouldn't trigger or was dying to trying to, only to discover that someone played the smartass by adding or removing a class when the collapse was triggered, so it would put everything in display:none

FUN FACT : ARIA-DISPLAY="TRUE/FALSE" HAS THIS EXACT PURPOSE, FUCKHEAD

Hate my fucking ‘Logic’ class. Teaching us if, or, and, etc statements and when something is true or false so far. Fair enough, part of logic. But fucking 6 classes on the same topic, isn’t helpful. Especially since it feels like the same shit I learnt myself when I was 13 and a junior in High School.

People are all surprised at it, even the Computer Science majors. This shouldn’t be a shock to you on how these statements work if you’ve coded for a few minutes in the University. You should’ve learnt it in your first programming class.

Ugh, just how I feel about this class. Have to take it to get my degree, otherwise I would’ve dropped it by now >.> Waste of time and money for me.

I spent the whole day coding in python (usually I code in php or perl) and this language is a fucking joke. C'mon, why everything have to be done in such a weird way? And don't say it's python way because it's bullshit way. Want some examples?

", ". join(str(x) for x in array)
to join array of integers. wtf is that?

True|False
why in hell you need the first letter to be uppercase when your own fucking standard says to use lowercase letters in eg. var names and method names. why?

math.isnan(float(x))
to check if a variable (expected to be integer) is NaN. I won't fucking comment that...

Even prolog don't have such stupid things

In the 90s most people had touched grass, but few touched a computer.

In the 2090s most people will have touched a computer, but not grass.

But at least we'll have fully sentient dildos armed with laser guns to mildly stimulate our mandatory attached cyber-clits, or alternatively annihilate thought criminals.

In other news my prime generator has exhaustively been checked against, all primes from 5 to 1 million. I used miller-rabin with k=40 to confirm the results.

The set the generator creates is the join of the quasi-lucas carmichael numbers, the carmichael numbers, and the primes. So after I generated a number I just had to treat those numbers as 'pollutants' and filter them out, which was dead simple.

Whats left after filtering, is strictly the primes.

I also tested it randomly on 50-55 bit primes, and it always returned true, but that range hasn't been fully tested so far because it takes 9-12 seconds per number at that point.

I was expecting maybe a few failures by my generator. So what I did was I wrote a function, genMillerTest(), and all it does is take some number n, returns the next prime after it (using my functions nextPrime() and isPrime()), and then tests it against miller-rabin. If miller returns false, then I add the result to a list. And then I check *those* results by hand (because miller can occasionally return false positives, though I'm not familiar enough with the math to know how often).

Well, imagine my surprise when I had zero false positives.

Which means either my code is generating the same exact set as miller (under some very large value of n), or the chance of miller (at k=40 tests) returning a false positive is vanishingly small.

My next steps should be to parallelize the checking process, and set up my other desktop to run those tests continuously.
Concurrently I should work on figuring out why my slowest primality tests (theres six of them, though I think I can eliminate two) are so slow and if I can better estimate or derive a pattern that allows faster results by better initialization of the variables used by these tests.

I already wrote some cases to output which tests most frequently succeeded (if any of them pass, then the number isn't prime), and therefore could cut short the primality test of a number. I rewrote the function to put those tests in order from most likely to least likely.

I'm also thinking that there may be some clues for faster computation in other bases, or perhaps in binary, or inspecting the patterns of values in the natural logs of non-primes versus primes. Or even looking into the *execution* time of numbers that successfully pass as prime versus ones that don't. Theres a bevy of possible approaches.

The entire process for the first 1_000_000 numbers, ran 1621.28 seconds, or just shy of a tenth of a second per test but I'm sure thats biased toward the head of the list.

If theres any other approach or ideas I may be overlooking, I wouldn't know where to begin.

Because returning true or false is too mainstream

When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.

Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?

Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.

You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.

You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.

They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.

Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.

I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.

Here’s a snippet of code that I found in our production codebase. I found this while fixing a bug. This is not part of the bug though but I see this a problem. Should I say this to my senior that his logic is off here?

First he doesnt have to do explicitly strict comparison since the return type is boolean and it could be true or false. Also the returnUrl will alway be undefined because redirectIfUserLoggedIn is called first before it was set.

He dosent like me. Hell get mad for sure. I think ill let this go.

Snartsheet requires checkbox values of "true" or "false"

Microsoft Flow only passes booleans as "True" and "False" so the API rejects the data.

Someone tell me should I just give up because I'm stupid and simple shit escapes me or tell me bro calm the fuck down the guy is full of shit...

Dude says he can't verify 3rd statement in a nested IF - elseif logic because the third check for a false condition is the True condition in the first 2 statements.

So

If (mode) = manual and then
Data(g) /= Status1
Or else Data(g) = Invalid
Then
Do this thing that sounds cool
Elsif
Data(g) = Status1
And then Data(g) /= Invalid
Then
Do something else equally cool
Elsif (mode) /= manual
and then Data(g) /= Invalid
and then Data(g) /= Status1
Then
Do some less cool stuff
end if

$a = -1;
if ($a) {
return true;
}
else {
return false;
}

true or false?

CodingRoom room = new CodingRoom();

room.lights = true;

// or

room.lights = false;

// how do you like it?

Do you prefer?

var foo = true;
if (some condition){
var foo = false;
}

Or

if (some condition){
var foo = false;
}
else{
var foo = true;
}

Whoever uses "status" as boolean in responses to indicate whether error happened (true) or not (false)??????!!

I have always wondered this: The compiler knows that I need to have semicolon at the end of the line. It complains to me about is missing. Why can't it add that semicolon there by itself?? I mean, clearly it's the smarter one of us two. It knows all those language standards and is able to check them. I know jack shit. Still instead of helping me, it has to be a bitch and just nag.

Also, what's this business with "true" or "false"? How the hell should I know? Most of the time I am like "maybe". I want code like this:

if (myVar =~ true)
function1()
else sometimes
function2()
or maybe
function3()
or instead usually
function4()

if (error = true)
fix it

There is no place like 127.0.0.1

true or false

What do people like more?
if(condition){
return true;
} else{
return false;
}

Or just

if(condition){
return true;
}
return false;

True or false? You know your waiter is making a lot, and your probably being overcharged, when you see her wearing an iWatch.

So I finally decided to take the plunge to dualboot my Windows 10, since I'm using Linux applications more and more than Windows applications.

I just had to choose Fedora out of all distros. It sort of worked. When I tried to install, it won't get pass the login screen (kept getting blanks). I rebooted several times and went with "Troubleshooting" and it got me passed the login screen and proceeded to install at the lowest graphical settings, i.e. 800x600

So far so good, I was able to operate stuff that I wanted but I just can't stand working in a really low resolution. My guess is probably incompatibility with nVidia driver. Tried everything, rpmfusion, the negativo17 repo, the current official fedora repo, the If-Not-True-Then-False guide, and bumblebee. None works.

Makes no sense at all. Luckily my Win10 still works. Now I'm stuck on whether to continue trying to get Fedora distro up or try a different distro and start back from square one...

So at one point I worked on an inherited project that had the worst code I've ever seen. I mean bad, so bad there may no quantifiable measure that can accurately convey how bad. We ended up naming the thing 'the hydra', cause it had a million issues and they just kept growing as we fixed things. To my point, in C++ they implemented their own primitive type Boolean32 as a signed int32 pointer. If that wasn't enough they used it as an octal bit mask. They also switch the value using logical and / or between 2 numbers, 037777777777 and 000000000001. So essentially they only switch this value to 1 or -1 and end up comparing it to their own const true or false. In c++ any value not 0 is == true...apparently not in this code.

Yeah, I have experience qith qorst CS teacher.
Considering that teacher as function (object) no matter what we pass never give results... It was anti boolean function can't even decide true or false because lack of info and throws any exception even on success..
It was like getting tons of errors when code is 100% perfect

MOBBING DICTIONARY - 3 -

Sentence (harsh public remark)
- You always want to do everything.

Purpose
- highlight a (true or false) defect of the target, a lie repeated thousands of time will become true.

Result
- whether or not that is true, everybody will start to see the target with that particular defect. Every action will be justified to correct the defect.

While it is often true that people at time have difficulty to delegate, usually the reason is not that they don't want to, but they don't know how.
The mobber want to remove the person rather than helping on the "how".

This strategy get the best result when the target is self aware, take the mobbing sentence as a constructive feedback and start to effectively delegate. He/she will contribute to make him/herself useless and could be later easily disposed of.

Sure, languages with automatic conversion to truthy and falsy values can be a pain in the ass, but in languages without that feature you need to use foo != true to see whether foo is either false or null. How fucking ugly is that?

Computer science is one of the best course in the world.

True or False?

One of the worst practices in programming is misusing exceptions to send messages.

This from the node manual for example:

> fsPromises.access(path[, mode])

> fsPromises.access('/etc/passwd', fs.constants.R_OK | fs.constants.W_OK)
> .then(() => console.log('can access'))
> .catch(() => console.error('cannot access'));

I keep seeing people doing this and it's exceptionally bad API design, excusing the pun.

This spec makes assumptions that not being able to access something is an error condition.

This is a mistaken assumption. It should return either true or false unless a genuine IO exception occurred.

It's using an exception to return a result. This is commonly seen with booleans and things that may or may not exist (using an exception instead of null or undefined).

If it returned a boolean then it would be up to me whether or not to throw an exception. They could also add a wrapper such as requireAccess for consistent error exceptions.

If I want to check that a file isn't accessible, for example for security then I need to wrap what would be a simple if statement with try catch all over the place. If I turn on my debugger and try to track any throw exception then they are false positives everywhere.

If I want to check ten files and only fail if none of them are accessible then again this function isn't suited.

I see this everywhere although it coming from a major library is a bit sad.

This may be because the underlying libraries are C which is a bit funky with error handling, there's at least a reason to sometimes squash errors and results together (IE, optimisation). I suspect the exception is being used because under the hood error codes are also used and it's trying to use throwing an exception to give the different codes but doesn't exist and bad permissions might not be an error condition or one requiring an exception.

Yet this is still the bane of my existence. Bad error handling everywhere including the other way around (things that should always be errors being warnings), in legacy code it's horrendous.

let rant: (Bool, Bool, String) -> Void = { (isRant, isDev, contents) in
print(contents)
}

rant(false, true, "

So, a year ago more or less, I set out to teach myself some server-side programming on the side.

Many (MANY) tutorials, Digital Ocean droplets created and destroyed, coffee mugs and FMLs later, I can say 'Hello World' from Node.js - built from source and not running as a sudoer - using express and forever on Ubuntu, behind another Ubuntu server running nginx - also built from source so to add headers-more and naxsi - using all sorts of goodies to enhance security and talking to each other via SSH. Oh, and taking to the world over HTTPS with a grade A on SSL Labs (I know this doesn't mean much to you. Yeah you, rolling your eyes over there. So why don't you just bugger off before even commenting? Haha)

Feels good man.

")

Okay I always found these js weirdnesses that you see in memes more or less logical if you think about it, but so far I could not find any logic behind this:

true&&undefined
>undefined

false&&undefined
>false

can anyone explain wtf they thought about there? undefined is falsy so why not just convert it to boolean implicitly!

I'm developing an app for a client, but they are responsible for the APIs.

Which turns out is the biggest mistake of my life...

I don't know whether data types are unknown to them or they are just playing a sick game with my emotions.

They have a different data type depending on how they feel, e.g.

- a boolean can be true, false, 0,1 or 2...
- an array can be an array or just a single item...

Who in their right mind can do this?

For me it's about removing grey from my life. I make decisions about things and move on. It's either black or white, there's no grey, true or false. It can be a little odd for new friends. For example, a trak comes on the radio, someone asks me do you like this, well I have to really like it in which case it's brilliant or no it's shite. Why would i say it's ok as its so vague and doesnt reveal my true feelings about stuff. Sorry i am waffling on about bullshit, just waiting for the chemist to open in the pissing down rain.

Doesn't the existence of NULL in a language mean, that there cannot be a boolean type? Because a bool is defined by the fact, that it can have two possible values. Having NULL changes that.

Without NULL a variable of the type bool could be True or False, two possible values. With NULL is can be True, False or NULL, three possible values.

I hate NULL.

How should you override Equals in Java?

We have model classes with lots of fields and the we override the details equals to compare all the fields. I guess like doing a deep comparison.

And in all these classes SONAR is complaining about lots of ifs, complexity, etc.

And it's killing the analysis time... Old issue never fixed because whoever setup sonar was too incompetent to bother asking, researching, or fixing...

Is there a better way to override the equals to get the same result but without triggering SONAR issues?

Pretty sure this is a solved problem. And well if the top of my head, is just create a Util method that uses reflection like
Boolean equals( Object a, b, Class class)
foreach (String f: class, getFields()) {if !compare(class.getField(f,a),class.getField(f,b)) return false; }

return true

We have this C# class which is like the core of our entire business logic. If you are in another class and it doesn't contain an argument in the constructor and/or property of that core class you're gonna have a bad time.
That core class has lots of useful business logic bools, "IsSomething", "HasSomething" etc. However that core class has a parameterless constructor which is sprinkled dangerously throughout our app, meaning the object is often not initialised properly and it's a 2 day mindfuck to make sure your "IsSomething" bool is actually false and not just false because the other business logic that bool relies on wasn't initialised and the bool has never had a chance to be true.
It's difficult to trust even a simple "if' statement. And if you're somewhere were you've had a list of that core class passed in, you need to trace how the list was initialised to make sure all your bools have been set 😴

On science and religion. Inspied by a comment in another rant, credits to @Commodore and @cjbatz

According to Godel's incompletness theorems, aritmetics is incomplete and inconsistent. Therefore, any science based on aritmetics (dude, like, every) is also.
Therfore, as a mathematician, I must accept that there are things that cannot be proven by current science, and that there are statements that are true and false at the same time in current science.

So, science can't prove religious beliefs? It cant prove P vs NP either. It might someday. Science couldn't prove earth wasn't flat for a looong time. Or Pythagoras theorem.
But more importantly, if science can prove something, doesn't mean it can't prove the exact oposite.

This way of thinking allows for any and all ridiculous beliefs, under the shield of "it might be proven one day" or "doent't mean opposite isn't true also" but kerp in mind that there are complete and consistent sciences and proofs in them. Check if something's been proven to exist or not exist without doubt.

A piece of my soul dies when I see code like this:
Y = x ? false : true
I was already mad because the file that contained this line was written in a way that makes it really hard to fix any bugs or add feature that were supposed to be already implemented, then the sight of this just made me feel sad

Primitive variables are stored on Stack
True or False

Funny argument in class today and was curious what you lot thought, cuz Im honestly not sure who was right. student argued false. professor said true.

Question:

(True or False): A preemptive kernel is safe from race conditions on kernel data structures.

When a child experiences extreme adversity, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, neglect and trauma; There are two possible outcomes.

1) Drug abuse, addicition, financial problems, depression, anxiety, isolation, bad grades and unemployment, early death or suicide.

Or if the child manages to survive, go past the adversity:

2) Become a superhuman. Experience entertainment, happiness in small things even more. Utilize dissociative identity disorder by achieving mental and physical prowess by false yet true belief of the persona.

The job of a developer is the most challenging work in this generation ..

True or false?

What do you think, is this bad practise?

boolean isNumber = true;
try {
Integer.parseInt(somestring);
} catch (NumberFormattingException e) {
isNumber = false;
}

Or is it better to create a method to check, even though I only use it at one place in 700 lines of code?

Was working as the only frontend developer ona project having 4 "senior" developers. They use Laravel to make an API feeding the angular app.
Why the documentation sucked?
Half the API call params where missing, and not one time did I come across an example stating that the API expects a boolean only to find out 20 minutes later that they mean int 1 or 0 not true or false. Best part however was sending arrays in POST by sending the elements as comma separated values (e1,e2,e3...). Oh and not documentation but while at it a rant... There are other response codes except 200 for fucks sake

Hey database experts. MySql question:
I have a table with houses, there is the location, color, etc. Shall I make a column for the owner or make a separate table HouseToOwner - where I connect the id's? I have no idea why is it good practice but saw it in few cases. I have the same with the things inside like I would just make a boolean column for a TV-like haveTV - true/false. Tell me why to not fill everything in one table. thx