# Silicon Valley - Season 3 - Potential Spoilers



## markp99 (Mar 21, 2002)

Happy to see Silicon Valley back.

This year's storyline parallels my best friend's situation very closely. He's a technically brilliant guy on his 2nd start-up. He got his new company funded and rolling (data compression & storage, oddly enough ). They compete with a couple household name giants in their space, but seem to have found a technical niche that provides some differentiation. 

The board brought in a CEO - a very dynamic, high-powered alpha dog kinda guy. This new guy has big vision for this company, but on a track very much different than my friend had envisioned. 

They made my friend CTO and actually almost managed to push him out of his own company last year. He did stay on in his technical role, but does admit this CEO has actually grown and positioned the company very well and they are prospering.

Silicon Valley - as fun to watch as Seasons 1 & 2. Anyone else watching?


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## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

It is satire and very funny but it is frustrating that no one could see a middle ground. Sell them product to Netflix. To MLB.tv. To Amazon. To Hulu. To vudu. 

And also go to individuals.


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

I love Silicon Valley.  The second episode of this new season did not provide as many laughs as the first one, but it was still pretty good.


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## ACoolDude (Dec 11, 2001)

I loved the part where Erlich Bachman is explaining to the guy he is kicking out why kicking people out is almost impossible.


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## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

ACoolDude said:


> I loved the part where Erlich Bachman is explaining to the guy he is kicking out why kicking people out is almost impossible.


Yeah, who didn't see that coming a mile away.

I loved it when "Action" Jack explained to Richard that the product is the company's stock. That's so true of most companies, especially in the tech sector. They don't care if the engineers can build something that would be better down the road, they only care about what will move the needle TODAY.


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

Jan here, they call me Jan the Man...


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## goblue97 (May 12, 2005)

RIGBY was great. Its the simple things in this show that I appreciate.


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## zordude (Sep 23, 2003)

Love this: "Is that a VCR? Why does it have the Pied Piper logo on it?"


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## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

I'm a little confused about the rack server idea that Richard threw out as a bad example and the sales guys turned into the new focus of the company. If enterprise customers are so concerned about putting their data in the cloud, then what's stopping them from hosting their own servers already? And if Pied Piper's compression algorithm is so revolutionary, what is it about an on-site self-hosted server that is so interesting? If the algorithm works, then shouldn't it be usable anywhere? Why would the PP sales team want to get into the rack-mounted server business?


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## Ment (Mar 27, 2008)

DevdogAZ said:


> I'm a little confused about the rack server idea that Richard threw out as a bad example and the sales guys turned into the new focus of the company. If enterprise customers are so concerned about putting their data in the cloud, then what's stopping them from hosting their own servers already? And if Pied Piper's compression algorithm is so revolutionary, what is it about an on-site self-hosted server that is so interesting? If the algorithm works, then shouldn't it be usable anywhere? Why would the PP sales team want to get into the rack-mounted server business?


The neural net cannot work effectively if all its data is siloed within each enterprise install.

Sales people want to sell to enterprise on what PP does now. Richard wants to sell what PP does over time. Think of it like Google's Knowledge Graph: if search was siloed away within each enterprise data set it would never reach its potential.


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## TAsunder (Aug 6, 2003)

I had a totally different interpretation. The rack server is a completely stupid idea but which can be marketed as if it were something interesting. I don't think it actually has anything to do with their compression software - or their software at all. Wasn't it basically an air-gapped rack server?


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## DeDondeEs (Feb 20, 2004)

This is probably a good indicator of my maturity level, but I was rolling during the meeting at the veterinarian.


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

Yes, I was not expecting to see that much horse penis right before bed.  Definitely one of the funnier parts of the episode.


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## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

Also, how funny that the fired Nucleus team suddenly solved the middle-out issue with the compression algorithm, and the thing that triggered the discovery was the masturbation hand motion from the NordicTrak, calling back to the Season 1 finale.


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## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

laria said:


> Yes, I was not expecting to see that much horse penis right before bed.  Definitely one of the funnier parts of the episode.


Sorry to hear that?


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## zordude (Sep 23, 2003)

TAsunder said:


> I don't think it actually has anything to do with their compression software - or their software at all. Wasn't it basically an air-gapped rack server?


I thought it had everything to do with compression, were they pitching it has super high density on prem storage?


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## dtle (Dec 12, 2001)

I still don't get how Big Head got such a big buyout. His contract was "only" $600k/year, but he got $20 million to leave?

Hopefully, it will be explained in future episodes.


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## DeDondeEs (Feb 20, 2004)

laria said:


> *Yes, I was not expecting to see that much horse penis right before bed. * Definitely one of the funnier parts of the episode.


I think I can say with a decent amount of certainty that this is the first time that sentence has ever been used in the history of mankind. At least I hope it is.


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## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

DeDondeEs said:


> I think I can say with a decent amount of certainty that this is the first time that sentence has ever been used in the history of mankind. At least I hope it is.


Wow, are you naïve! Has Catherine the Great taught you NOTHING?!?


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## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

Every episode should open with a visit to the doctor. Comedy GOLD.


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

That guy reminds me of Dr. Spaceman from 30 Rock.


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## markp99 (Mar 21, 2002)

laria said:


> That guy reminds me of Dr. Spaceman from 30 Rock.


Yes! I was typing that same thought.


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## TAsunder (Aug 6, 2003)

zordude said:


> I thought it had everything to do with compression, were they pitching it has super high density on prem storage?


When he jokingly proposed it, didn't he talk about a box with no connections? Then the promo kept talking about privacy and how no one has access to your data.


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

dtle said:


> I still don't get how Big Head got such a big buyout. His contract was "only" $600k/year, but he got $20 million to leave?
> 
> Hopefully, it will be explained in future episodes.


C'mon Big Head constantly failing up hasvbeen the long running gag. The $20 milion is a cherry on top. 
Now we can wait for Big Head's non-conpete period to end ans other companies get into an insane bidding war to hire him.


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## DeDondeEs (Feb 20, 2004)

If someone comes across a printable Conjoined Triangles of Success diagram please let me know. I so want that for my cube at work.


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## jautor (Jul 1, 2001)

DeDondeEs said:


> If someone comes across a printable Conjoined Triangles of Success diagram please let me know. I so want that for my cube at work.


Hooli search to the rescue:

http://i.imgur.com/1vqu5gq.jpg


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## DeDondeEs (Feb 20, 2004)

jautor said:


> Hooli search to the rescue:
> 
> http://i.imgur.com/1vqu5gq.jpg


Haha sweet!


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## TiVo'Brien (Feb 8, 2002)

Anubys said:


> Every episode should open with a visit to the doctor. Comedy GOLD.


Was the doctor guy really short, or is Richard really tall? The height difference between the two of them was massive.


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## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

TiVo'Brien said:


> Was the doctor guy really short, or is Richard really tall? The height difference between the two of them was massive.


Must have just been the perspective. Thomas Middleditch is 5'11" according to IMDb, and Andy Daly is 5'8" according to taddlr.com.


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## cherry ghost (Sep 13, 2005)

TiVo'Brien said:


> Was the doctor guy really short, or is Richard really tall? The height difference between the two of them was massive.


Richard was standing on the little step at the foot of the table.


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## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

Speaking of Andy Daly (who plays the doctor), if you haven't watched his show, Review, on Comedy Central, it's definitely worth watching.


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## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

TAsunder said:


> I had a totally different interpretation. The rack server is a completely stupid idea but which can be marketed as if it were something interesting. I don't think it actually has anything to do with their compression software - or their software at all. Wasn't it basically an air-gapped rack server?


It's also a "physical" device. Something people can actually see. Selling "the cloud" is much more difficult, especially to someone who doesn't get it. And these salesman (who we don't know where they came from, only that "they are the best salesman") don't get selling "the cloud". They want something they can easily sell and that they can show to a potential customer.


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## dtle (Dec 12, 2001)

Spoilers for potential consequences of E03:



Spoiler



First, Google the title of the E03. Or read this.

Basically, the whole tripping and spilling of the plans were all a ruse. Richard is wearing knee pads under his pants when exiting the elevator.


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## Squeak (May 12, 2000)

dtle said:


> Spoilers for potential consequences of E03:
> 
> 
> 
> ...





Spoiler



While that might be true, I wouldn't read too much into the knee pads -- could have just as easily been to protect Thomas Middleditch from the stunt that was coming up.


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## Gerryex (Apr 24, 2004)

dtle said:


> Spoilers for potential consequences of E03:
> 
> 
> 
> ...





Spoiler



I know this is a pretty big spoiler and I don't mind it, but I would have never suspected it. And the reference to Minertzhagen's Haversack I had absolutely no idea what that was. However I did think it kind of stupid and out of character for Richard to bring all those papers, supposedly having to do with the secret project, to work. He said it was because they had no shredder at home but you can buy one at any office store for less then $100. So I thought that whole tripping and dropping of papers odd, but again didn't suspect it was all part of the plan!!


Gerry


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## pdhenry (Feb 28, 2005)

And yet, maybe not...


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## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

When the "Previously On" highlighted some of the jokes about Dinesh's gold chain, I was hoping that meant the guys would continue to rip on it in upcoming episodes, but I don't think there was any mention of it at all in the latest episode. Bummer.

Big Head just can't help but fail upward. Hilarious.

That scene at the end where Erlich couldn't stop coughing but he occasionally could get a word out enough to keep the others figuring out what just happened was classic.


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## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

DevdogAZ said:


> That scene at the end where Erlich couldn't stop coughing but he occasionally could get a word out enough to keep the others figuring out what just happened was classic.


And of course the fact that Erlich was the one who realized it...even before Monica. A reminder that, doofus that he is, he's got something going on in there.


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## supham (Jan 15, 2003)

"We have 20 Million and 36 thousand in capital"


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## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> And of course the fact that Erlich was the one who realized it...even before Monica. A reminder that, doofus that he is, he's got something going on in there.


To me the Erlich character has always been smart. He's the classic schemer, he just doesn't always apply his smarts the right way.

Still loving this show. You know they just couldn't build the box half way. I loved the product design guy or whatever he was coming to Richard and Richard just blowing him off, and then when he builds the thing they hate the way it looks. Classic.


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

How about Gavin Belson not realizing that he just bought the very guys who he fired for failing with Nucleus.... who figured it out after they were given the pink slips. 

I like Stephen Toblowski so much. I wish he was staying around.


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

MikeAndrews said:


> How about Gavin Belson not realizing that he just bought the very guys who he fired for failing with Nucleus.... who figured it out after they were given the pink slips.


I've seen this exact scenario play out in the aerospace world.


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## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

MikeAndrews said:


> How about Gavin Belson not realizing that he just bought the very guys who he fired for failing with Nucleus.... who figured it out after they were given the pink slips.
> 
> I like Stephen Toblowski so much. I wish he was staying around.


I thought he bought the company that kept tricking the guys into telling them their secrets...I can't tell all these people apart myself. I'm CEO material!


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

I just realized that valuing Pied Piper at $250M means that Erlich's 10% is worth $25 million.... and Richard's is much more.


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

Anubys said:


> I thought he bought the company that kept tricking the guys into telling them their secrets...I can't tell all these people apart myself. I'm CEO material!


Yeah, but that company hired the fired Hooli Nucleus crew., who had figured out the middle out algorithm.

We can see that once again our heroes at Pied Piper will prove to have a better product.


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## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

MikeAndrews said:


> Yeah, but that company hired the fired Hooli Nucleus crew., who had figured out the middle out algorithm.
> 
> We can see that once again our heroes at Pied Piper will prove to have a better product.


Oh, yeah...that's right! I forgot about that.


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## uncdrew (Aug 6, 2002)

MikeAndrews said:


> How about Gavin Belson not realizing that he just bought the very guys who he fired for failing with Nucleus.... who figured it out after they were given the pink slips.
> 
> I like Stephen Toblowski so much. I wish he was staying around.


Different strokes, but he bugs me. His characters all seem the same (to me) and you can predict his patterns too easily. I hope he's gone.


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## uncdrew (Aug 6, 2002)

MikeAndrews said:


> I just realized that valuing Pied Piper at $250M means that Erlich's 10% is worth $25 million.... and Richard's is much more.


If Pied Piper is valued at $250M. Not sure they're in the same place in the lifecycle as N-frame.


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## supham (Jan 15, 2003)

Where I work we force the older folks out who then start collecting a pension. We then hire them back as contractors.


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## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

supham said:


> Where I work we force the older folks out who then start collecting a pension. We then hire them back as contractors.


That's pretty unusual, most places I've known about have rules forbidding exactly that sort of thing...


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## pdhenry (Feb 28, 2005)

At my old company there was a ~6 month window in which they couldn't be hired as a consultant but IIRC they can be hired as a contractor immediately.


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## trainman (Jan 29, 2001)

Just watched the entire series (so far) over the past 3 weeks. I didn't work _in_ Silicon Valley, and I'm not an engineer, but I did work for one of the companies whose logo is in the opening title -- so there are a few things that have hit really close to home. Especially S3E1, with Gavin Belson using his announcement of the Nucleus project being shut down to talk about how much leadership he's showing by laying everyone off.


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## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

I am a spaces and Vi man - hate tabs.


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## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

zalusky said:


> I am a spaces and Vi man - hate tabs.


I don't use vi anymore but hate tabs because they never show the same in different editors. Spaces, man!


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## markp99 (Mar 21, 2002)

zalusky said:


> I am a spaces and Vi man - hate tabs.





TonyD79 said:


> I don't use vi anymore but hate tabs because they never show the same in different editors. Spaces, man!


Are you kidding me? Only Tabs!  /ocd


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

I'm so torn on who to side with... I was Team Winnie until she dissed Emacs...


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

Yeah, have witnessed entirely too many indentation style wars. (Which can be somewhat important if you are a python shop)


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

The way they showed her tapping the space bar out every single time was ridiculous though. Just about anyone is going to use an editor/IDE that automatically indents it for you, no space tapping needed.

The complaint that it looks different everywhere is so true! I have code I check out from a co-worker sometimes that looks like a monkey with a typewriter managed the indentation.


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

laria said:


> The complaint that it looks different everywhere is so true! I have code I check out from a co-worker sometimes that looks like a monkey with a typewriter managed the indentation.


To make a point with one of my coworkers that was on a python jihad, I had an entire project where my code was indented with an alternating fibbonacci sequence:

1 space
1 space, 1 tab
1 space, 1 tab, 2 spaces
1 space, 1 tab, 2 spaces, 3 tabs
1 space, 1 tab, 2 spaces, 3 tabs, 4 spaces
etc

The resulting code was ugly if you had set tabs to anything other than 1 or 2 spaces, and was a real test for a good auto-formatting IDE

Fun was setting up Notepad++ to automagically do that for me.

(For those not python savvy, it's whitespace sensitive. Tabs vs spaces syntactically matters)


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

laria said:


> The way they showed her tapping the space bar out every single time was ridiculous though.


I should mention that something like this happened when we had the Sentence Ending Spacing Holy Wars (one or two spaces after a period). Several people in the "two spaces" camp would start exaggerating their "space space" when typing around the leader of the "one space" camp just to piss him off.

(I ended up having to intervene, since having engineers and programmers editing documents to "correct" this was a waste of everyone's time)


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

I hope you intervened on behalf of camp two space, because one space is just wrong.


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## markp99 (Mar 21, 2002)

laria said:


> I hope you intervened on behalf of camp two space, because one space is just wrong.


^
Thank you!


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

laria said:


> I hope you intervened on behalf of camp two space, because one space is just wrong.


I'm actually fine with either, but 25+ years of doing TeX and plain text monospaced font emails has me defaulting to two spaces.


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## mlsnyc (Dec 3, 2009)

Spaces! No tabs! But almost all modern (and not-so-modern) editors have sufficient auto-formatting capabilities it really shouldn't be a big deal nowadays.

As for the 2 vs 1 space after a period, I was vehemently in the 2-space camp until I tried going with 1 space. Now 2 spaces seems ill-fitting. As if the following sentence was floating detached, so far away and disconnected.


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## dtle (Dec 12, 2001)

I have not done much heavy coding, but my preferences are:

spaces, or tab-to-spaces
Emacs
2 spaces after period
Oxford comma
.gif with the hard 'g'

Anybody wants to fight?


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

dtle said:


> I have not done much heavy coding, but my preferences are:
> 
> spaces, or tab-to-spaces
> Emacs
> ...


This is me, although I tend to use various IDEs over Emacs now (that, and never really finding a Windows emacs version that really satisfied me).



> .gif with the hard 'g'


Aside from animated memes, who uses gifs anymore? That said, I prefer the soft 'g', based upon the original authors' preference, and that I drink gin.


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## Jeeters (Feb 25, 2003)

mlsnyc said:


> ... But almost all modern (and not-so-modern) editors have sufficient auto-formatting capabilities it really shouldn't be a big deal nowadays.


Yeah, IDEs do a pretty good job of hiding whether spaces or tabs are being used, so I don't generally care what people use.

It only becomes a problem for me when I copy/paste a snippet of code into an email, or bug tracking system, or an IM window, etc. *That's* when I start griping to myself, "who used tabs?!"


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

Jeeters said:


> Yeah, IDEs do a pretty good job of hiding whether spaces or tabs are being used, so I don't generally care what people use.


Some of them do entirely too good a job at hiding it. The "I just edited one line of code, and now the python script doesn't work" effect happens here a lot, because the IDE in question wasn't smart enough to correctly fix the inserted/edited code.


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

I've never run into a religious war with anyone over tabs versus spaces. Most people just accept that spaces are the correct answer. For we python programmers, we can call on the holy doctrine that is PEP8 to back up our position. I have had encountered the occasional tab-infested python file and had to exorcise the tabs from it, but it's always been the case that the developer who infested the source tree with tabs had already moved on. 

For anyone whose not a python programmer, and doesn't have to deal with indention scoping, they probably don't realize just how awful mixed tab and space coding can be.


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

smbaker said:


> I've never run into a religious war with anyone over tabs versus spaces. Most people just accept that spaces are the correct answer. For we python programmers, we can call on the holy doctrine that is PEP8 to back up our position.


Most everyone here that runs python (including me, aside from the abovementioned my ugly-to-make-a-point code), ends up using 2 spaces per indent level.

We run into format wars in most languages at some point or another. A few of the C people here have had the


```
function () {
  code; }
```
vs

```
function () {
  code; 
}
```
vs

```
function ()  {
  code; 
  }
```
vs 

```
function ()  
  {
  code; 
  }
```
vs, well, just about every other variation on that theme.

And we also have one old crusty programmer[1] that still defaults to K&R declarations....

[1] No, not me, the other guy!


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## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

kaszeta said:


> Most everyone here that runs python (including me, aside from the abovementioned my ugly-to-make-a-point code), ends up using 2 spaces per indent level. We run into format wars in most languages at some point or another. A few of the C people here have had the function () { code; } vs function () { code; } vs function () { code; } vs function () { code; } vs, well, just about every other variation on that theme. And we also have one old crusty programmer[1] that still defaults to K&R declarations.... [1] No, not me, the other guy!


Option 2, please.


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

kaszeta said:


> ```
> function () {
> code;
> }
> ```


This is the only one close to being right but wtf with the space between the function name and the parens.


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

kaszeta said:


> Most everyone here that runs python (including me, aside from the abovementioned my ugly-to-make-a-point code), ends up using 2 spaces per indent level.


Everyone I know I believe uses 4.

The very first python project I ever worked on was 3-space indented. I still find myself lapsing into it occasionally.

Now if they could just do an episode on CamelCase versus under_score, and an episode on agile scrum, they would pretty much capture the industry.


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

The main problem I see here is that anyone even allows the use of python.


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

dswallow said:


> The main problem I see here is that anyone even allows the use of python.


No python, here. 

All my coding is either Java/Groovy or Javascript. Once in a while PHP.


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## pmyers (Jan 4, 2001)

wow....I had no idea! It was still funny to me but I based it on Richard's OCD not some real world coding war. 

I loved the camera work with the clicking of the space bar and then quick pan to Richard, then back, etc.


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## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

I was cracking up with the whole coding thing. We ran into issues with Github and spaces/tabs and had to adjust our scripts. I just loved how he just couldn't date a woman who used spaces.


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## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

pmyers said:


> wow....I had no idea! It was still funny to me but I based it on Richard's OCD not some real world coding war.


Turns out Richard's just a normal guy.

In certain circles.


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## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

Prediction: Watch Big Head fail up again as the blog Erlich bought becomes worth $25 million.


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

laria said:


> This is the only one close to being right but wtf with the space between the function name and the parens.


I was wondering if someone would catch that one.

Yes, we see a lot of that here for some reason.

(Mind you, one of the issues we have here is that most of the "programmers" are actually self taught and haven't worked in a real software shop, so all sorts of weird practices tend to linger)


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## uncdrew (Aug 6, 2002)

kaszeta said:


> To make a point with one of my coworkers that was on a python jihad, I had an entire project where my code was indented with an alternating fibbonacci sequence:
> 
> 1 space
> 1 space, 1 tab
> ...


Hmm...


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## Mars Rocket (Mar 24, 2000)

MikeAndrews said:


> Prediction: Watch Big Head fail up again as the blog Erlich bought becomes worth $25 million.


I thought the same thing. Something's going to happen that drastically increases the value of the blog.


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

I like this one:


```
function ()  
  {
  code; 
  }
```
I like my curly braces to line up. It helps me to find all my sections and make sure I closed everything. Yeah, it takes more space, but bytes aren't at a premium any more.

I also tend to use 2-space indents. I never use tabs. But even with spaces, 8 is far too many! Even in Cobol, the A indent is 4 spaces and B is 8, way back on punch cards!

But I'm a scripter, not a full-time programmer, so my habits are undoubtedly different than most programmers. I use vi, not emacs, because I only have 10 fingers, and because vi is always there, and always works the same, and this can't be said for emacs. When you might log into any of several hundred servers on any given day, and there's no shared home directory, customizing your environment just isn't in the cards.


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

kaszeta said:


> I was wondering if someone would catch that one.
> 
> Yes, we see a lot of that here for some reason.
> 
> (Mind you, one of the issues we have here is that most of the "programmers" are actually self taught and haven't worked in a real software shop, so all sorts of weird practices tend to linger)


My IDE (IntelliJ) actually does this when I let it autoformat blocks of Javascript and I have to go back and fix them because it drives me nuts. I should really figure out what is doing that in the code style settings and turn that off.


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

laria said:


> My IDE (IntelliJ) actually does this when I let it autoformat blocks of Javascript and I have to go back and fix them because it drives me nuts. I should really figure out what is doing that in the code style settings and turn that off.


It probably things you are doing a generic for some reason (e.g. "function ()"), where most style guides I've seen encourage the space.


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## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

Sorry, the only method I use is...


```
function()
{
    code;
}
```
I like my braces lining up vertically and the contained code indented. The braces are indented the same amount as the function name, or the statement that forced the braces.


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

Worf said:


> Sorry, the only method I use is...
> 
> 
> ```
> ...


Finally someone expresses some sanity in coding style around here. 

If you are well versed in C++ and ever are looking for a job, PM me.

:up:


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

Worf said:


> Sorry, the only method I use is...
> 
> 
> ```
> ...


I used to use that method when I was in college, but nowadays with IDEs, it's easier to find the matching opening brace from the closed one. I'm ok with the opening brace on the same line and the closing one lining up with the function/statement.

I know Emacs will do brace highlighting, but I never found it as easy to keep track of as in an IDE. Although to be fair, my monitor is several orders of magnitude larger than it was when I was regularly using Emacs for programming, as well, so more stuff is on screen at the same time.


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

That's probably why that makes perfect sense to me.

I don't use an IDE. I write everything in vi, by hand. SysAdmin vs Programmer differences again.


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## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

I hate extra lines. I am more of a (depending on your language)

if(condition) {
do something

} else if(2nd condition) {
do something else
}

sort of guy.

Another thing that drove me nuts was multiple 5 space indents. AN old friend of mine would call it Indentinitis.


----------



## jamesl (Jul 12, 2012)

zalusky said:


> I hate extra lines. ..


if you really hated extra lines you'd do 
if(condition){do something}else if(2nd condition){do something else}


----------



## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

jamesl said:


> if you really hated extra lines you'd do
> if(condition){do something}else if(2nd condition){do something else}


 - Lets just say I hate that technique as well.


----------



## ej42137 (Feb 16, 2014)

This thread needs a trigger warning; it's giving me flashbacks to combat incidents from my programming days.


----------



## RGM1138 (Oct 6, 1999)

The closest I ever came to "coding" was copying a Basic program from a magazine back in the 80s. It was a wire-frame 3D image of the Atari logo that I typed into my 800 computer.

It took forever and I _hated_ it. Turns out I had substituted an O for a 0 somewhere and it took my young daughter and me a week of trouble shooting to find the problem. So, hats off to anyone making a living in that field. I couldn't do it with a gun to my head.

It was priceless watching Richard go into a slow meltdown while his would-be girlfriend was pounding out spaces.


----------



## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

Ah yes, the copied programs from books, those were the days. Not. Didn't like 'em then, don't like 'em now. And they even had the gall to charge $30+shipping for a disk with all the code pre-typed in for you!

Code copied from print is actually quite difficult - you've got the 1/l/I, 0/O, and other confusing combinations. Heck, the PGP guys had to create their own font (PGP was under export restrictions - but only as software. As a printed book, it was free and clear) that over-exaggerated the difference between characters so it was easy to read, and easy to OCR and see when a mistake was made. 

Anyone remember the old "computer" font where parts of characters were bulged out? Basically turning them into pseudo-barcodes that could be read/scanned much easier than normal fonts.

Oh yeah, keyboards are also 100000% better these days than the ones you had on the 8-bitters, mostly because there's a keyboard for everyone out there now. Typing on a mushy keyboard only made the whole keying in thing more annoying, plus when you don't entirely know the language and are copying verbatim, well, that just makes life more difficult.

Still, my friend had a book that was like 300 pages thick ... of like 10 programs in smallish font. Keying in those was a nightmare - it took maybe 10-20 minutes per page, times 30 pages...


----------



## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

RGM1138 said:


> *The closest I ever came to "coding" was copying a Basic program from a magazine back in the 80s. It was a wire-frame 3D image of the Atari logo that I typed into my 800 computer.*
> 
> It took forever and I _hated_ it. Turns out I had substituted an O for a 0 somewhere and it took my young daughter and me a week of trouble shooting to find the problem. So, hats off to anyone making a living in that field. I couldn't do it with a gun to my head.
> 
> It was priceless watching Richard go into a slow meltdown while his would-be girlfriend was pounding out spaces.


I did exactly the same thing (baseball statistics program on my Atari 800XL and before that some stuff on my TI99/4A. I realized back then I hated coding, so I never got into it. I'm more a troubleshooting guy than a coder. I can do some simple SQL right now, but learning more.


----------



## dtle (Dec 12, 2001)

Man, I'm old.....

I remember having to program my C-64 from magazine, using code such as this and this.


----------



## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

dtle said:


> Man, I'm old.....
> 
> I remember having to program my C-64 from magazine, using code such as this and this.


I loved Compute Magazine. All that stuff was SO new.


----------



## Demandred (Mar 6, 2001)

Typing in code from a magazine is not "coding". No one enjoys typing in code from a magazine. You might like actual coding. &#128512;


----------



## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

I use to work on Control Data mainframes in the 70s/80s. I remember writing a disassembler for the PP programs they released in binary only. The guys from the org where the software was written said the resultant code looked better than their's.

I also remember writing a real time debugger for the PP programs. You just added my routine and you step your way through memory and change code on the fly. It really helped.

I look back at that code today and realize how much more structured and documented standards were back then. Today its really a free for all.


----------



## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

Demandred said:


> Typing in code from a magazine is not "coding". No one enjoys typing in code from a magazine. You might like actual coding. dde00


It was the debugging he hated.


----------



## ej42137 (Feb 16, 2014)

dtle said:


> Man, I'm old.....
> 
> I remember having to program my C-64 from magazine, using code such as this and this.


Child! I learned to type on an IBM 029 keying in WatFor programs, probably before you were born. The last program I wrote for money was a Python install script with four space indentation.


----------



## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

ej42137 said:


> Child! I learned to type on an IBM 029 keying in WatFor programs, probably before you were born. The last program I wrote for money was a Python install script with four space indentation.


I remember writing drivers from our digital computer to analog peripherals. We had to send signals to the potentiometer motors. We had to read them 10 times and average the answers just to have a level of confidence it was set properly.

I also remember paper tape in addition to keypunch stuff.


----------



## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

TonyD79 said:


> It was the debugging he hated.


The reason we have to debug is because typing code in from a magazine or book is annoying and very... arbitrary. It's completely error-prone and there's often no way to tell when you've made a mistake other than compare every single line one at a time.

And I couldn't ever get those checksum programs to work - you know, the ones that are supposed to print a number at the end of the line to make sure you typed it in correctly.


----------



## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

Worf said:


> The reason we have to debug is because typing code in from a magazine or book is annoying and very... arbitrary. It's completely error-prone and there's often no way to tell when you've made a mistake other than compare every single line one at a time. And I couldn't ever get those checksum programs to work - you know, the ones that are supposed to print a number at the end of the line to make sure you typed it in correctly.


It is not coding. It is transcribing. However, in both coding and transcribing, you have to debug.


----------



## Bob Coxner (Dec 1, 2004)

ej42137 said:


> Child! I learned to type on an IBM 029 keying in WatFor programs, probably before you were born. The last program I wrote for money was a Python install script with four space indentation.


I guess we're into walking to and from school uphill both ways days. I go back to punch cards on the university main frame in the late 1960's. My ears still ring from punching cards for hours. Then taking a few thousand of them in boxes like offerings to the high priest who was the only one allowed to actually feed them into the magic device. Then getting the printout and discovering that one card was out of place and your run was ruined. Or, worst of all, punching 1000 cards and then dropping the box and having to start over from scratch. COBOL and Fortran. It's shocking to me that COBOL is actually still in use.


----------



## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

Bob Coxner said:


> It's shocking to me that COBOL is actually still in use.


https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol


----------



## busyba (Feb 5, 2003)

Maybe I'm confused, but I thought that in the final episode last season, Gavin Belson got fired. Am I missing something?


----------



## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

Enough of all the code talk already, you guys are really something!

How about Jared seemingly able to get laid any time he feels like it? nothing about Danesh and the girl who stopped time just to get a boyfriend, marry him, then restart time to turn Danesh down?

instead, we get 2 mind-numbing pages of coding stories...jeez


----------



## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

```
if (geeks watch show with technical bits); then
   geeks discuss technical bits in great detail
else
   geeks talk about other points of show
fi
```
This should help, Anubys.


----------



## mwhip (Jul 22, 2002)

Anubys said:


> Enough of all the code talk already, you guys are really something!
> 
> How about Jared seemingly able to get laid any time he feels like it? nothing about Danesh and the girl who stopped time just to get a boyfriend, marry him, then restart time to turn Danesh down?
> 
> instead, we get 2 mind-numbing pages of coding stories...jeez


Russ was right about him "This guy effs!"

Jared slowly became my favorite character.


----------



## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

I loved when Richard gave them all ten invites and Jared immediately begins furiously scribbling names, while Guilfoyle freely admits he has no friends by choice, and Dinesh makes fun of him while trying to hide the fact that he also has no friends.

How is someone as screwed up as Jared such a social butterfly?


----------



## robojerk (Jun 13, 2006)

DevdogAZ said:


> How is someone as screwed up as Jared such a social butterfly?


Jared isn't shy, he's friendly, seems like an authentic person, he seems very easy to talk to, and he is confident in what he does. I can see that working for him. I've been to a few professional 'social networking' gatherings and I could see a guy like him with the traits I've listed, having worked at Hooli, now works for Pied Piper, be someone that everyone would want to talk to, and girls fall for.


----------



## mwhip (Jul 22, 2002)

robojerk said:


> Jared isn't shy, he's friendly, seems like an authentic person, he seems very easy to talk to, and he is confident in what he does. I can see that working for him. I've been to a few professional 'social networking' gatherings and I could see a guy like him with the traits I've listed, having worked at Hooli, now works for Pied Piper, be someone that everyone would want to talk to, and girls fall for.


Exactly. Jared is not the most technical but he is smart and knows how to get resources. Very important trait.


----------



## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

DevdogAZ said:


> I loved when Richard gave them all ten invites and Jared immediately begins furiously scribbling names, while Guilfoyle freely admits he has no friends by choice, and Dinesh makes fun of him while trying to hide the fact that he also has no friends.


I don't recall this at all...did I miss an episode somehow?? An excuse to re-watch!


----------



## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

Anubys said:


> I don't recall this at all...did I miss an episode somehow?? An excuse to re-watch!


That episode aired last night.


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

Anubys said:


> I don't recall this at all...did I miss an episode somehow?? An excuse to re-watch!


Last night?


----------



## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

Ereth said:


> That episode aired last night.





laria said:


> Last night?


oh, yeah...it's Monday already...I'm one episode behind...

you know how it is, you wake up in the gutter after a week-long bender and it takes a while to figure out what day it is


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

DevdogAZ said:


> I loved when Richard gave them all ten invites and Jared immediately begins furiously scribbling names, while Guilfoyle freely admits he has no friends by choice, and Dinesh makes fun of him while trying to hide the fact that he also has no friends.
> 
> How is someone as screwed up as Jared such a social butterfly?


And all his friends are women.

It's interesting how pathetic Gavin has become...


----------



## trainman (Jan 29, 2001)

Nice to see Tara back -- after the first-season episode when she visited Gilfoyle, and then she hadn't been seen again, I was wondering what had happened to her. (Gilfoyle's Satanism also really hasn't come up since that episode.)


----------



## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> It's interesting how pathetic Gavin has become...


Become?


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

TonyD79 said:


> Become?


I'd say so. He used to be a total dick, but you could see that this was the guy who invented Google Hooli. Now, he's just a dick.


----------



## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

trainman said:


> Nice to see Tara back -- after the first-season episode when she visited Gilfoyle, and then she hadn't been seen again, I was wondering what had happened to her. (Gilfoyle's Satanism also really hasn't come up since that episode.)


Too busy working at AT&T.


----------



## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> I'd say so. He used to be a total dick, but you could see that this was the guy who invented Google Hooli. Now, he's just a dick.


I was never impressed with his acumen, actually. I think we are just being more exposed to the fool he is.


----------



## Odds Bodkins (Jun 7, 2006)

Eric Bachmann? This is your mom. You are not my baby.


----------



## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

I wonder how many people reading this thread use `Slack` ?


----------



## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

smbaker said:


> I wonder how many people reading this thread use `Slack` ?


I occasionally use it. Somewhat more flexible than some other group chat alternatives.


----------



## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

smbaker said:


> I wonder how many people reading this thread use `Slack` ?


Is that a real thing? I assumed it was one of the made-up companies in the SV-verse, like Hooli.


----------



## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

DevdogAZ said:


> Is that a real thing? I assumed it was one of the made-up companies in the SV-verse, like Hooli.


https://slack.com/


----------



## DeDondeEs (Feb 20, 2004)

kaszeta said:


> https://slack.com/


Do you use it for Ingress? I know that is the preferred method of covert communication/coordination in this area.


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

I use Slack quite a bit. Yes, it's a real thing. 

My company uses it for communication when someone is away from a real computer. We use an IRC type system (telecommuters) normally, but use Slack when someone might have spotty connectivity or be out of the office, because the mobile clients are very good.

I follow a development community on there, as well (Grails).


----------



## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

DeDondeEs said:


> Do you use it for Ingress? I know that is the preferred method of covert communication/coordination in this area.


That's one group that uses is.


----------



## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

DevdogAZ said:


> Is that a real thing?


Yes, I've been using it for maybe about a year now. My first introduction to it was one of those "_why do I need to learn yet another tool to do something I already know how to do_" moments. Now I use it every day, all day long. It's even on my smartphone, so I can use it while at lunch.

I've seen commercials run for it at the movie theater and on TV.


----------



## dtle (Dec 12, 2001)

DevdogAZ said:


> Is that a real thing? I assumed it was one of the made-up companies in the SV-verse, like Hooli.


My take is the only fictional companies are the ones essential to the plot (Hooli, Aviato, End Frame, and of course, PP). The rest are real.


----------



## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

dtle said:


> My take is the only fictional companies are the ones essential to the plot (Hooli, Aviato, End Frame, and of course, PP). The rest are real.


PP isn't real? Damn. I gotta get my money back from my broker.


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

Pied Piper is totally real, it has 3 of its own brand icons in the Font Awesome web font set.


----------



## TAsunder (Aug 6, 2003)

Just caught up on the last two episodes. I am frankly flabbergasted to hear that people are actually hitting spaces to indent as shown in the show. Even if you prefer spaces, the sensible thing is to set your editor to emit spaces instead of tabs when you hit tab, and more importantly, just let the editor take care of it for you. Do people really manually space indentations on every line like that? Man, that would take forever.

Mainly, though, they missed the real issue. If everyone on a team uses different indentation and formatting and anyone uses any modern editor, there's a decent chance that any minor change you make will end up with the whole file reformatted and thus appear to be a bigger change than intended. For this reason, we make every team member use the same indentation formatting settings in the editor.

Slack is huge. Several companies I interviewed with recently even use it as their primary group collaboration tool. And they just released the ability to hook into it pretty easily, so many developers I know are making their apps slack-aware.

With the exceptions dtle noted, almost every company, process, software, or concept discussed in the show are real and are at least somewhat accurately represented. 

When we were doing a huge binge on the show, we happened to watch the episode where Jared introduces the SWOT analysis the same day someone at my work mentioned using one (we had been using them occasionally for a while) and the same day we took an online course relating to parenting where they mentioned using a SVOT (replacing weakness with vulnerability) to analyze your family dynamic. It was kind of eerie.

My cousin played the DA in this episode. I was really excited when they stood up because I so badly wanted to see her standing next to TJ Miller -- he's over 1 foot taller than she is and it would have looked very funny.

Why wouldn't the accountant be liable for the money he stole? I am confused why they made it sound like they'd have to go after the people to whom he disbursed money. Is this an "accountants are crooks" joke I missed or something?


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

TAsunder said:


> Why wouldn't the accountant be liable for the money he stole? I am confused why they made it sound like they'd have to go after the people to whom he disbursed money. Is this an "accountants are crooks" joke I missed or something?


I think the problem is he doesn't actually have the money he stole...he used one client's money to pay off another client.

So I suppose he would indeed be liable, but it doesn't do any good if he doesn't have the money. I'm not even sure how that would work legally...I guess the original client would be able to keep Big Head's money, and the accountant would owe Big Head, which wouldn't do Big Head any good because the accountant is presumably broke (which is why he keeps moving around his clients' money).


----------



## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

I understand the DA forcing them to pay their debts. I don't get how she would ignore such a crime and even allow this accountant to continue working.


----------



## TAsunder (Aug 6, 2003)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> I think the problem is he doesn't actually have the money he stole...he used one client's money to pay off another client.
> 
> So I suppose he would indeed be liable, but it doesn't do any good if he doesn't have the money. I'm not even sure how that would work legally...I guess the original client would be able to keep Big Head's money, and the accountant would owe Big Head, which wouldn't do Big Head any good because the accountant is presumably broke (which is why he keeps moving around his clients' money).


Ah, maybe that was the DA's point. That the clients couldn't legally keep the money, but good luck going after it?


----------



## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

TAsunder said:


> Ah, maybe that was the DA's point. That the clients couldn't legally keep the money, but good luck going after it?


Her point was saying what would they get out of it. Prosecuting the accountant was difficult, probably wouldn't pan out, and what would they get out of it other than revenge? They wouldn't get their money unless they took it from other victims, which I doubt they could do that anyway.


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

TAsunder said:


> Ah, maybe that was the DA's point. That the clients couldn't legally keep the money, but good luck going after it?


Yes, she made a point about how unsympathetic they would appear to a jury, the idiots who threw a million dollar luau getting their money back from someone else who was stolen from.


----------



## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

Anubys said:


> I understand the DA forcing them to pay their debts. I don't get how she would ignore such a crime and even allow this accountant to continue working.


She made the point that prosecutions are expensive and resource intensive, so the DA has to make hard decisions about which crimes are worth prosecuting.


----------



## uncdrew (Aug 6, 2002)

Anubys said:


> I understand the DA forcing them to pay their debts. I don't get how she would ignore such a crime and even allow this accountant to continue working.


Too many such cases to go after, and you pay a ton and get nothing back. DAs go for either big buck cases or headline/PR cases. These mundane ones are really not worth it for them to pursue.

Sad, but I've had this explained to me by real life DAs.

We had a case of white collar crime at my last job where someone embezzled about $2 million. We had proof and he was dead meat. All that ended up happening? He got fired. He's already working somewhere else and never paid back a dime.


----------



## MikeAndrews (Jan 17, 2002)

trainman said:


> Nice to see Tara back -- after the first-season episode when she visited Gilfoyle, and then she hadn't been seen again, I was wondering what had happened to her. (Gilfoyle's Satanism also really hasn't come up since that episode.)


I love Gilfoyle's bearing. "She's the bartender." "She's a bartender who codes." 
He knows Lily! Lily has a pet snake!


----------



## Bob Coxner (Dec 1, 2004)

TAsunder said:


> Ah, maybe that was the DA's point. That the clients couldn't legally keep the money, but good luck going after it?


The government managed to claw back a major portion of the money disbursed to innocent investors by Bernie Madoff, although that's probably the exception that proves the rule.


----------



## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

The New Yorker had an interesting article on how "Silicon Valley" nails Silicon Valley. Including having to tone down reality in order to make it... more believable. (Season 1 - viewers complained the shown TechCrunch Disrupt event wasn't diverse enough. The problem was, the footage was taken from the real TechCrunch Disrupt event)

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley

Perfect thing to read on a lazy Sunday day...


----------



## Demandred (Mar 6, 2001)

Ep8 -

Erlich got hosed selling his shares. But what wasn't explicitly said was, what happens when the other main guys want to cash out? Does the deal they signed with Russ (who sold to Laurie) screw them as badly? I would assume so. 

No good can come of the Belson/Barker meeting. I did laugh when Belson got to the roof and no one was there.


----------



## DavidTigerFan (Aug 18, 2001)

Demandred said:


> Ep8 -
> 
> Erlich got hosed selling his shares. But what wasn't explicitly said was, what happens when the other main guys want to cash out? Does the deal they signed with Russ (who sold to Laurie) screw them as badly? I would assume so.
> 
> No good can come of the Belson/Barker meeting. I did laugh when Belson got to the roof and no one was there.


I wonder if Richard is going to get smart and somehow get laurie out of the picture. She certainly seems to be a calculating *****.


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

Demandred said:


> No good can come of the Belson/Barker meeting. I did laugh when Belson got to the roof and no one was there.


I laughed when they realized they were both going to the same place for the same length of time...and instead of saving fuel by riding together, they made an internet playdate for the journey. 


DavidTigerFan said:


> I wonder if Richard is going to get smart and somehow get laurie out of the picture. She certainly seems to be a calculating *****.


I don't think she's a *****. That would be too human.

She's just calculating, with no sense of emotion or morality.

It's neat the way all the pieces fall together in this show (how the seemingly unrelated stuff from earlier in the episode combined to spur Erlich to his huge mistake).


----------



## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

That was a pretty cold and calculating move by Laurie to step in and force Erlich to sell way below market. I'm surprised the terms of their deal allow for that, rather than Russ/Laurie having first right of refusal to match any purchase offer. 

Also, wouldn't the fact that Laurie purchased 10% of the company for $713,000 put the presumptive value of the company at $7,130,000 unless/until something material changes? I'd think that would be bad for her position.


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

DevdogAZ said:


> That was a pretty cold and calculating move by Laurie to step in and force Erlich to sell way below market. I'm surprised the terms of their deal allow for that, rather than Russ/Laurie having first right of refusal to match any purchase offer.


It does sound like the kind of thing Richard would stupidly/naively/unwittingly agree to, though...I bet after the papers were signed the lawyers said "I can't BELIEVE we got away with that!"


----------



## Mr. Soze (Nov 2, 2002)

DevdogAZ said:


> Also, wouldn't the fact that Laurie purchased 10% of the company for $713,000 put the presumptive value of the company at $7,130,000 unless/until something material changes? I'd think that would be bad for her position.


Wasn't it a point made a few eps back (by Erlich as it happens) that Gavin had paid $250MM for a similar company and they could point to that for a comparable value? That makes his selling for $713K way off. He should be able to borrow against his shares, and even heavily discounted for lack of liquidity, that's a low value.


----------



## Demandred (Mar 6, 2001)

Mr. Soze said:


> Wasn't it a point made a few eps back (by Erlich as it happens) that Gavin had paid $250MM for a similar company and they could point to that for a comparable value? That makes his selling for $713K way off. He should be able to borrow against his shares, and even heavily discounted for lack of liquidity, that's a low value.


Should have been, but it sounds like due to the deal they signed with Russ, Laurie can change the terms of any deal. (Not sure if that could happen in real life, but this is TV)


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

Demandred said:


> Should have been, but it sounds like due to the deal they signed with Russ, Laurie can change the terms of any deal. (Not sure if that could happen in real life, but this is TV)


It's not that she can change the terms, it's that she can veto any deal. Which means basically, she can name her take-it-or-leave-it price, and if you're desperate enough, you have to accept.

So she vetoed Erlich's deal to sell half his shares to somebody else for $5 million, and offered him $700k for all his shares. Since he needed the money, he had to say yes; otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to pay off his debts.


----------



## RGM1138 (Oct 6, 1999)

I have a feeling that Bachman will end up back on top, even if he fails up into it.

It was funny hearing Pied Piper by Crispian St. Peters at the end of the show. I don't think I've heard that tune since the mid 60s.


----------



## Queue (Apr 7, 2009)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> And of course the fact that Erlich was the one who realized it...even before Monica. A reminder that, doofus that he is, he's got something going on in there.


I like the idea that if he weren't high all the time he would be an excellent CEO.


----------



## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> I laughed when they realized they were both going to the same place for the same length of time...and instead of saving fuel by riding together, they made an internet playdate for the journey.


Says all you need to know about modern culture doesn't it? On a smaller scale, I notice that when my daughter stands on the bus stop before school there's about 5 other kids, and they don't talk to each other, just have their heads bent looking at their phones, probably texting each other. Here you have two execs that would rather communicate on the internet than fly together to the same place. This cracked me up.


----------



## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

RGM1138 said:


> I have a feeling that Bachman will end up back on top, even if he fails up into it.
> 
> It was funny hearing Pied Piper by Crispian St. Peters at the end of the show. I don't think I've heard that tune since the mid 60s.


He's now the marketing guy, so there could be all kinds of funny coming out of that


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

I've had that Pied Piper song stuck in my head since Sunday.


----------



## RGM1138 (Oct 6, 1999)

laria said:


> I've had that Pied Piper song stuck in my head since Sunday.


Catchy, isn't it?  I've found myself humming it every so often over the years.


----------



## Queue (Apr 7, 2009)

I'm a .net developer by accident and a Python developer at heart.

Spaces over tabs. vim over everything. Screw Visual Studio. Give me the command line with tmux and I'm in heaven.


----------



## pmyers (Jan 4, 2001)

Steveknj said:


> He's now the marketing guy, so there could be all kinds of funny coming out of that


I believe it is PR, but point still taken.


----------



## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

pmyers said:


> I believe it is PR, but point still taken.


CEO

Chief Evangelism Officer


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

I love Pipey!

Great episode... especially the ending credits.

Is Jared independently wealthy, or are the off-shore people he's hiring dirt-cheap?

Also, the "Tables" ad was bone-crushingly horrible... something you'd expect Hooli to put out... or Evil Corp from Mr. Robot.. not Pied Piper.


----------



## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

Hank said:


> Is Jared independently wealthy, or are the off-shore people he's hiring dirt-cheap?


The latter, although also realize that through the episode Jared was being cagey about how much money they had left.


----------



## DeDondeEs (Feb 20, 2004)

In the credits they listed Bill Hader as a Guest Star. I didn't recall seeing him, was he the voice of Pipey?

I thought for sure the reported low number of Active Users was going to be due to some math error in the reporting software where the number was off by an order of magnitude or something and actually after the math error was fixed it would be the most actively used app ever.


----------



## Azlen (Nov 25, 2002)

Hank said:


> Also, the "Tables" ad was bone-crushingly horrible... something you'd expect Hooli to put out... or Evil Corp from Mr. Robot.. not Pied Piper.


Or Facebook


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Oh snap, I forgot about the Chairs ad! 

I knew it was a little familiar, but didn't make that connection. thanks!


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

kaszeta said:


> The latter, although also realize that through the episode Jared was being cagey about how much money they had left.


Do you think he's using PP money to do that, or his own?


----------



## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

I thought by the time Richard was about to close down the company, they'd pretty much burned through all the money they had left.


----------



## zordude (Sep 23, 2003)

DevdogAZ said:


> I thought by the time Richard was about to close down the company, they'd pretty much burned through all the money they had left.


They had 150ish K at that point I think


----------



## TiVo'Brien (Feb 8, 2002)

Hank said:


> I love Pipey!
> 
> Great episode... especially the ending credits.
> 
> ...


This is a spoof on Microsoft Clippy, right? At least that's how I saw it. Amusingly awful either way.


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

TiVo'Brien said:


> This is a spoof on Microsoft Clippy, right? At least that's how I saw it. Amusingly awful either way.


Of course it is! My family and I joke about Clippy all the time-- "it looks like you're about to go poop, do you need help with that?"


----------



## TAsunder (Aug 6, 2003)

I love a good Clippy joke!

Didn't realize that the Tables ad was a spoof of Facebook. Wow, that is even funnier than I realized. Thanks for the video!

The peer-to-peer aspect doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Maybe it's not supposed to...

Also loving all the "sharding"


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

The Tables ad spoof went over my head, too. I didn't even know Facebook HAD ads.


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

TAsunder said:


> The peer-to-peer aspect doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Maybe it's not supposed to...


I agree it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but just adds to the complexity of "the platform"


----------



## pmyers (Jan 4, 2001)

Azlen said:


> Or Facebook


Wow...totally went over my head but it is even funnier now!

This show must be how my wife felt when she watched The League with me.


----------



## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

Hank said:


> I agree it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but just adds to the complexity of "the platform"


I think that's the point. Bunch of tech guys create the most awesome platform, but it really had no practical purpose for the great unwashed. The scene where Richard was trying to explain it to the focus group was pure gold. I've SEEN whiteboards that looked like that and it made my head spin.

They telegraphed what Jared did at the end. I love Jared's dedication. The characters on this show are great.


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

Steveknj said:


> I think that's the point. Bunch of tech guys create the most awesome platform, but it really had no practical purpose for the great unwashed.


My understanding is that it HAS a practical purpose, and is revolutionary...but it's _so _revolutionary and ahead of its time that it's very difficult to explain to the average person why it's so great and why they need it. The technical vocabulary of ordinary people hasn't caught up with their technology.


----------



## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> My understanding is that it HAS a practical purpose, and is revolutionary...but it's _so _revolutionary and ahead of its time that it's very difficult to explain to the average person why it's so great and why they need it. The technical vocabulary of ordinary people hasn't caught up with their technology.


I should have said...no practical purpose at this time. You're right. I do think the point is that nobody but the techs understand how awesome it is. This point was made more than once. From the VC girl who was the only one who didn't like it during beta testing, to the fact that the only people outside of her who beta tested it were other techies, to the focus group who Richard took forever to try and explain what it was doing. It also seems like the type of platform that would be integrated into apps for instance rather than a stand alone platform.


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

Steveknj said:


> I should have said...no practical purpose at this time. You're right. I do think the point is that nobody but the techs understand how awesome it is. This point was made more than once. From the VC girl who was the only one who didn't like it during beta testing, to the fact that the only people outside of her who beta tested it were other techies, to the focus group who Richard took forever to try and explain what it was doing. It also seems like the type of platform that would be integrated into apps for instance rather than a stand alone platform.


My interpretation (and I wasn't entirely clear from how Richard was describing it! ) was that it is like cloud storage, only the compression is so efficient there is no noticeable download time when you access your files. So it has a intensely practical purpose at this time, if you can get people to understand that it has all the benefits of cloud storage plus all the benefits of local storage.

It seems to me the potential downside of it is that since it is a peer-to-peer system with the files distributed across all users' devices, when it gets to be popular your storage and bandwidth could be eaten up by the bits of other users' files being stored on and accessed from your device...


----------



## markp99 (Mar 21, 2002)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> ...when it gets to be popular your storage and bandwidth could be eaten up by the bits of other users' files being stored on and accessed from your device...


They're called data shards/


----------



## Dawghows (May 17, 2001)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> It seems to me the potential downside of it is that since it is a peer-to-peer system with the files distributed across all users' devices, when it gets to be popular your storage and bandwidth could be eaten up by the bits of other users' files being stored on and accessed from your device...


If the "middle-out" compression they've always talked about is really as revolutionary as they've made it out to be, maybe those bits of files are so incredibly minuscule they don't have any practical effect on bandwidth.


----------



## john4200 (Nov 1, 2009)

The compression thing is obviously science fiction, but other than that, it basically already exists:

symform.com

Evidently it is not a profitable business, however, since symform is being discontinued in a few months.

There is also storj.io and sia.tech


----------



## robojerk (Jun 13, 2006)

I think the p2p works so you can download faster. Like if you're on a hotel's wifi your shards get put on other devices on the wifi. Or if you're in Bluetooth range of another pied piper device it will act as a node and send bits to you via bluetooth. In any developed nation, this is probably overkill, and a lot of people will likely complain about their data usage. But in undeveloped nations this would be an awesome feature.


----------



## pmyers (Jan 4, 2001)

He should have broken it down to how it affects porn....that always works!


----------



## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

pmyers said:


> He should have broken it down to how it affects porn....that always works!


That may be the final solution but it does take me back to that conference they went to.


----------



## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

I saw it as torrent style storage.


----------



## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

TAsunder said:


> Just caught up on the last two episodes. I am frankly flabbergasted to hear that people are actually hitting spaces to indent as shown in the show. Even if you prefer spaces, the sensible thing is to set your editor to emit spaces instead of tabs when you hit tab, and more importantly, just let the editor take care of it for you. Do people really manually space indentations on every line like that? Man, that would take forever.


Not all of the machines I use (e.g. ones I ssh into with a shared account) have the same vim setup, so I don't know what tabstops/tabs-into-spaces/etc. settings are on all of them..

So when editing some things, especially Python that's going to [email protected]#$ complain because the [email protected]#$ indentation is different, yes I will either hit space or literally copy/paste the indentation from another line to make sure it's the same.

So I guess I would say 'no' to do I hit spaces every single time.. But it's not completely ridiculous IMHO.


----------



## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

TAsunder said:


> If everyone on a team uses different indentation and formatting and anyone uses any modern editor, there's a decent chance that any minor change you make will end up with the whole file reformatted and thus appear to be a bigger change than intended.


Had to just read the man page, I think there's some other way I do this too, but.. e.g.

svn diff -x -b ...

to ignore whitespace changes...


----------



## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

mattack said:


> Had to just read the man page, I think there's some other way I do this too, but.. e.g.
> 
> svn diff -x -b ...
> 
> to ignore whitespace changes...


Surely Pied Piper would be managed by git, not subversion.

They should really enable code review. They could get a whole episode out of Dinesh and Gilfoyle maliciously -1ing each others' code.


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

smbaker said:


> Surely Pied Piper would be managed by git, not subversion.


Seriously.  Only crazy people use subversion!


----------



## robbhimself (Sep 13, 2006)

markp99 said:


> They're called data shards/


markp99 with the assist


----------



## dtle (Dec 12, 2001)

S03 Finale thoughts:

It's unrealistic of Laurie to not inform Gavin about the new bid of just $1 more. It's her fiduciary duty to get as much money as she can. BTW, I loved it when she got angry and cursed "FFS, do I have to drag the secretary in here?"

Now that Gavin own the Tech rag, I wonder if he will eventually find out about Big Head spilling the beans. Then Hooli can sue Big Head, and own 50% of PP. (I know we have been speculating this for many episodes.)


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

dtle said:


> S03 Finale thoughts:
> 
> It's unrealistic of Laurie to not inform Gavin about the new bid of just $1 more. It's her fiduciary duty to get as much money as she can.


She said the offer "had a strong 'no-shop' clause" so if she shopped it around to Gavin, the Bachmannity deal was off, and she would have actually taken less than the offer. So I think it's solid.


----------



## markp99 (Mar 21, 2002)

+$1 on the PP offer. How could Earlich/Big Head have known Gavin's offer?

The compression story seems to have painted itself into a corner. I was losing interest, and really did not care see how they made the SW easier to understand and use. Richard's continuous/weekly missteps & recoveries are getting repetitive for me - I'd like a little longer story arc, please.

The slight re-boot to a video conference solution might help to freshen things up. You think PP name will be replaced with "Big Head"? Dunno, but they do have those jackets!


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

markp99 said:


> +$1 on the PP offer. How could Earlich/Big Head have known Gavin's offer?


Lori probably told them. But it's Silicon Valley -- everyone pretty much knows everything that goes on, I'd guess.


----------



## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

markp99 said:


> +$1 on the PP offer. How could Earlich/Big Head have known Gavin's offer?


Richard told Big Head the price that they'd been given in their "going away" scene.


----------



## dtle (Dec 12, 2001)

Hank said:


> She said the offer "had a strong 'no-shop' clause" so if she shopped it around to Gavin, the Bachmannity deal was off, and she would have actually taken less than the offer. So I think it's solid.


Laurie would not consider a $1 increase is enough for a 'no-shop' clause. One phone call to Gavin and she would gotten at least $100k more.

Richard did not screw up this episode. He actually did the right thing by not signing.

BTW, when he was in the other VC office, Monica chewed him out for seeking new funding. What would have been the correct procedure for him? Inform Monica and Laurie first?


----------



## jautor (Jul 1, 2001)

dtle said:


> Laurie would not consider a $1 increase is enough for a 'no-shop' clause. One phone call to Gavin and she would gotten at least $100k more.


She didn't want to sell to Gavin. The $1 increase with a 'no shop' clause would give her the ability to not sell to him (and rub it in later).


----------



## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

dtle said:


> Laurie would not consider a $1 increase is enough for a 'no-shop' clause. One phone call to Gavin and she would gotten at least $100k more.





jautor said:


> She didn't want to sell to Gavin. The $1 increase with a 'no shop' clause would give her the ability to not sell to him (and rub it in later).


Exactly. She was probably glad to have a legitimate offer other than Gavin Belson's so she didn't have to sell it to him. The "no-shop" clause simply gave her the legal cover that she needed in order to accept that offer.


----------



## jautor (Jul 1, 2001)

DevdogAZ said:


> Exactly. She was probably glad to have a legitimate offer other than Gavin Belson's so she didn't have to sell it to him. The "no-shop" clause simply gave her the legal cover that she needed in order to accept that offer.


And no way Big Head (or Bachman) came up with the no-shop clause on their own...

Laurie: "And is this offer open to further bids or are you attaching a 'no-shop' clause to it?"
Bachman: "A what?"
Laurie: "A 'no-shop' clause..." <Laurie spends the next 5 minutes explaining the concept, legal precedent, and probably history of its use dating back to English Common Law>
Bachman: "Yeah, that - we definitely mean that."


----------



## Gerryex (Apr 24, 2004)

I assume Laurie was the Chairman of the Board of Directors, but does that give her the right to arbitrarily dismiss another Board member and then appoint anyone she wanted to the Board. Wouldn't either action take a vote of the Board itself?

Gerry


----------



## midas (Jun 1, 2000)

The whole +1 makes more sense next season when we find out Bachman was sleeping with Laurie.


----------



## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

Gerryex said:


> I assume Laurie was the Chairman of the Board of Directors, but does that give her the right to arbitrarily dismiss another Board member and then appoint anyone she wanted to the Board. Wouldn't either action take a vote of the Board itself?
> 
> Gerry


Depends on the bylaws of the corporation, but that would certainly be unusual for a member of the Board to have carte blanche authority to simply remove a director and appoint another one without the rest of the board having any say. Typically bylaws provide for a process by which a board member can be elected and/or removed, and it usually involves a vote of the rest of the board and sometimes the officers as well.

However, remember that Russ Hanneman instituted some very one-sided corporate governance documents when he bought his equity in the company, and then Laurie took those over when she bought his shares. That's how she was able to screw over Ehrlich earlier in the season when he had a legit offer to sell half his shares and she forced him to sell all of them for significantly less. So maybe Russ had those same bylaws created to say that the Chairman of the Board had sole authority to appoint and remove Directors, and that's how Laurie now has that authority.


----------



## pmyers (Jan 4, 2001)

I like how they ended it with Richard and Erlich.


----------



## zordude (Sep 23, 2003)

Is it because she runs the board, or because the VC firm gets 3 seats and the head of the VC firm has discretion over who fills them


----------



## smak (Feb 11, 2000)

zordude said:


> Is it because she runs the board, or because the VC firm gets 3 seats and the head of the VC firm has discretion over who fills them


I was going to say this.

They get 3 seats, I think the head of the firm can change who votes at any time.

-smak-


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

zordude said:


> Is it because she runs the board, or because the VC firm gets 3 seats and the head of the VC firm has discretion over who fills them


Raviga has 3 seats because they bought out Russ Hanneman's interest in PP. Russ had 2 seats.


----------



## SeanC (Dec 30, 2003)

I do really like this show, but I also am somewhat tired of Richard's mistakes and the recovery from those mistakes.

I'm hoping the new Bachmanity owners will bring better story lines.

Bighead is my favorite character. I love how he's just kinda clueless, but he's honest, and he just kinda stumbles along and good things happen.


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

I also really like this show, except for Bachman. He's obviously got some brain cells, but he's too cartoonish to be a real human character. Nobody acts like that IRL. I get the idea of his character, but I wish they'd tone it down to be more believable.


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

I don't think T.J. Miller is capable of toning anything down. It feels like he's always just kinda playing himself.


----------



## Steveknj (Mar 10, 2003)

Hank said:


> I also really like this show, except for Bachman. He's obviously got some brain cells, but he's too cartoonish to be a real human character. Nobody acts like that IRL. I get the idea of his character, but I wish they'd tone it down to be more believable.


I hated Bachman at first, but his character has really grown on me and he cracks me up. I get he's cartoonish and a buffoon, but, that doesn't matter much to me.


----------



## pmyers (Jan 4, 2001)

SeanC said:


> ...Bighead is my favorite character. I love how he's just kinda clueless, but he's honest, and he just kinda stumbles along and good things happen.


Bighead is my least favorite character.


----------



## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

pmyers said:


> Bighead is my least favorite character.


What's there not to like about Bighead? He's a doofus, but he's nice and honest and generally a good person.


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

I definitely like bighead.


----------



## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

Hank said:


> I definitely like bighead.


That could definitely be taken out of context.


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

oops!


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

It cracks me up that Game of Thrones is made by Bighead Littlehead Productions...


----------



## RGM1138 (Oct 6, 1999)

laria said:


> I don't think T.J. Miller is capable of toning anything down. It feels like he's always just kinda playing himself.


I think you're right. Everything I've every seen him in, he's pretty much the same character.


----------



## danterner (Mar 4, 2005)

RGM1138 said:


> I think you're right. Everything I've every seen him in, he's pretty much the same character.


He's been a guest on the Doug Loves Movies podcast (comedians and sometimes celebrities playing movie trivia games in front of a live audience) a bunch of times and he always sounds and behaves the same way there as he does when acting on screen. Could be that he's in character there, too, but I think that's just him. I think he's pretty funny.


----------



## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

DevdogAZ said:


> Exactly. She was probably glad to have a legitimate offer other than Gavin Belson's so she didn't have to sell it to him. The "no-shop" clause simply gave her the legal cover that she needed in order to accept that offer.


I'd like to think this is correct but I keep coming back to this one point that refutes this theory: it ascribes emotions to Lorie; which is simply not possible!


----------



## TonyD79 (Jan 4, 2002)

Anubys said:


> I'd like to think this is correct but I keep coming back to this one point that refutes this theory: it ascribes emotions to Lorie; which is simply not possible!


Oh. She has emotions. She just doesn't know how to express them or how to recognize them in others.


----------



## KungFuCow (May 6, 2004)

danterner said:


> He's been a guest on the Doug Loves Movies podcast (comedians and sometimes celebrities playing movie trivia games in front of a live audience) a bunch of times and he always sounds and behaves the same way there as he does when acting on screen. Could be that he's in character there, too, but I think that's just him. I think he's pretty funny.


He was on Not Safe With Nikki Glaser not too long ago. Dude is hilarious but yea, I think he's more or less just playing himself.


----------



## pmyers (Jan 4, 2001)

DevdogAZ said:


> What's there not to like about Bighead? He's a doofus, but he's nice and honest and generally a good person.


Maybe I just don't remember why...but I just don't see him and Richard being friends. Richard seems to recognize and appreciate the skills of the Pied Piper guys.....but I can't remember seeing one instance of talent from big head.


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

pmyers said:


> Maybe I just don't remember why...but I just don't see him and Richard being friends. Richard seems to recognize and appreciate the skills of the Pied Piper guys.....but I can't remember seeing one instance of talent from big head.


Are you forgetting all of Season 1? 

He and Richard were friends at Hooli. Big Head used to live with them in the incubator and was part of Pied Piper. Everyone wanted Richard to fire him, but he didn't want to even though he was a pretty terrible programmer, because they were friends, but then Big Head decided to take the big promotion and raise to go back to Hooli.


----------



## pmyers (Jan 4, 2001)

OK...so Bighead had little/no skill and betrayed him. Exactly why I don't see Richard, or the other Pied Piper guys tolerating him for a second. 

To me...Bighead is just a useless character being shoehorned in. 

I used to hate Erlich but they actually built his character and showed us he does have some usable skills...even if he just falls into them


----------



## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

laria said:


> Seriously.  Only crazy people use subversion!


git sucks. svn is more annoying in some ways than CVS.. (it does like 3 things better, but 4 things worse). Everything's twice as many steps with git.. (git commit, git push.. and I have to add the [email protected]#$ -a to git commit.. retarded)

Plus, you guys missed my ACTUAL point.. there is a way to ignore whitespace changes in basically all diff-s available now, whether built into tools or separately.


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

mattack said:


> git sucks. svn is more annoying in some ways than CVS.. (it does like 3 things better, but 4 things worse). Everything's twice as many steps with git.. (git commit, git push.. and I have to add the [email protected]#$ -a to git commit.. retarded)
> 
> Plus, you guys missed my ACTUAL point.. there is a way to ignore whitespace changes in basically all diff-s available now, whether built into tools or separately.


I'm pretty sure no one missed it. 

I would rather use CVS than Subversion. At work we did use CVS until a couple years ago and made the switch to Git. I had to use Subversion on a client's project once and it was terrible.

Usually you're not doing doing all the steps twice at the same time... that is the nice part about Git. You do dev locally and commit early and often, and then you push when you're ready to be done. I have seen too many people saving work to commit until it's completely ready... heck I have BEEN that person saving work until it's completely ready. And have been minorly burned by it before.


----------



## TAsunder (Aug 6, 2003)

mattack said:


> Plus, you guys missed my ACTUAL point.. there is a way to ignore whitespace changes in basically all diff-s available now, whether built into tools or separately.


Ignoring whitespace has its own problems. It shouldn't ignore intentional formatting changes such as combining or splitting lines, which it might do if you ignore whitespace. Additionally, even if it handled all of that, there's still the annoyance of either inconsistent formatting or, almost as bad, the formatting changing every time a developer with different settings checks something in.


----------



## trainman (Jan 29, 2001)

On this week's episode of "Maron," Marc Maron's character mentioned that his former intern Kyle was now acting on "Silicon Valley." Kyle was played by Josh Brener, who plays Big Head. So now I'm not sure which universe either of these shows exist in.


----------



## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

laria said:


> I would rather use CVS than Subversion. At work we did use CVS until a couple years ago and made the switch to Git. I had to use Subversion on a client's project once and it was terrible.
> 
> Usually you're not doing doing all the steps twice at the same time...


thats kind of funny, because the negative to me about svn is "the big freaking URLs". Other than that, it is very similar to cvs command wise (IIRC, their slogan at one point was something like "a better CVS"). and the benefit is being able to move/rename WHILE keeping history.

Well, I do integration, and simple bug fixes.. (for git...) So basically everything I do is bump a version, commit, push.. make a tag, commit, push tags.. way more steps.


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

I just realized that Jack Barker was also Dr. Werner Brandes in "Sneakers"... he was the "_My voice is my passport. Verify_" guy. Would have been kinda funny if they kept his Sneakers name in Silicon Valley.


----------



## trainman (Jan 29, 2001)

Seems like Gavin's assistant, who he fired in the last episode (the woman with short red hair), is everywhere -- I've seen her in a Time Warner Cable commercial, and somewhere else I can't remember.


----------



## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Hank said:


> I just realized that Jack Barker was also Dr. Werner Brandes in "Sneakers"... he was the "_My voice is my passport. Verify_" guy. Would have been kinda funny if they kept his Sneakers name in Silicon Valley.


He's also Ned Ryrson (needle nose Ned, ned the head) from Groundhog Day.

In fact he's been in a ton of things over the years. One of those character actors with small parts all over the place.


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Dan203 said:


> He's also Ned Ryrson (needle nose Ned, ned the head) from Groundhog Day.
> 
> In fact he's been in a ton of things over the years. One of those character actors with small parts all over the place.


I know he's been in hundreds of shows and movies... (Just look at his IMDB page). My point was in this case it's entirely conceivable/believable that the early character in Sneakers could have actually been the same character in SV.


----------



## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Ahh.... I thought you were just recognizing him, not pointing out the character similarities. I haven't seen Sneakers in years.


----------



## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

Huh. So Dropbox just open sourced their revolutionary middle-out compression algorithm.

Think the Pied Piper team will have to respond to that in the next season?

http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/14/d...ion-algorithm-that-cuts-jpeg-file-size-by-22/


----------



## Queue (Apr 7, 2009)

Richard would be broken over this.

Tabs significantly slower than spaces on Firefox when used for indentation.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1154339


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Queue said:


> Richard would be broken over this.
> 
> Tabs significantly slower than spaces on Firefox when used for indentation.
> 
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1154339


I suspect most of the code Pied Piper is writing isn't javascript or jQuery, but some form of C,C++, etc.


----------



## Queue (Apr 7, 2009)

Hank said:


> I suspect most of the code Pied Piper is writing isn't javascript or jQuery, but some form of C,C++, etc.


Right, even though Dinesh is a front end coder. But the point was Richard's hang up on tabs vs spaces (Richard was a tabs guy). And here tabs are causing the browser to be slower.


----------



## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Is that really a thing? Are there really people that care? Is this really a geek war like the pronunciation of GIF? I use tabs in C/C++ but usually spaces when doing javascript, they're interchangeable to me. As long as the code has structure I don't care. Now we had one guy who did some code for us that would put several lines of code on a single line with no break, that was annoying. But otherwise, tabs, spaces, who gives a sh*t.


----------



## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Yes, it's really a thing when you have a team of programmers using different standards, it's a problem.


----------



## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

Dan203 said:


> Is that really a thing? Are there really people that care? Is this really a geek war like the pronunciation of GIF? I use tabs in C/C++ but usually spaces when doing javascript, they're interchangeable to me. As long as the code has structure I don't care. Now we had one guy who did some code for us that would put several lines of code on a single line with no break, that was annoying. But otherwise, tabs, spaces, who gives a sh*t.


It's a real problematic issue, not something made up. Review a few weeks back, there was a lot of discussion about it.


----------



## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

laria said:


> It's a real problematic issue, not something made up. Review a few weeks back, there was a lot of discussion about it.


Like, Big Bang Theory level discussion.


----------



## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Dan203 said:


> Is that really a thing? Are there really people that care? Is this really a geek war like the pronunciation of GIF? I use tabs in C/C++ but usually spaces when doing javascript, they're interchangeable to me. As long as the code has structure I don't care. Now we had one guy who did some code for us that would put several lines of code on a single line with no break, that was annoying. But otherwise, tabs, spaces, who gives a sh*t.


use vi. Use a GUI editor. Try to switch back and forth.. You will start to give a ....


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## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

The funny thing is, while these wars go on, there are tools like indent that can format the code in any which way you want.

Just pick the right set of switches and have everyone reformat their code before checkin.


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## ej42137 (Feb 16, 2014)

Worf said:


> The funny thing is, while these wars go on, there are tools like indent that can format the code in any which way you want.
> 
> Just pick the right set of switches and have everyone reformat their code before checkin.


And then you wind up with every line flagged as a change.


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

ej42137 said:


> And then you wind up with every line flagged as a change.


Not if everyone reformats their code before checkin.

But that's extra steps that a lot of people don't want to do. I know I certainly don't. I'll just continue to grind my teeth when my one co-worker checks stuff in that I end up reformatting.


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Freshman year in college (1982), I wrote and released a public script on our UNIVAC 1100 that could reformat everyone's PASCAL program assignments. It had dozens of switches and options, so much that you could take the same source code, and run it twice through the script, and they would look like it was written by two different people.

This was CompSci 101 where the instructors were trying to teach good coding style.

After a few weeks of everyone using the script to format their programs, the TAs and professors caught wind of my little script (which they really didn't know existed, it was calling a utility buried on the mainframe that I found)... the teachers made an announcement: _Anyone using my script to format their programs would automatically Fail their assignments._ But I don't know how they thought they could tell the difference between the script, and someone just being really good at code formatting.

Of course, most people continued to use the script. Only the dumb people stopped using it.


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

Hank said:


> Of course, most people continued to use the script. Only the dumb people stopped using it.


Since the purpose of the class was to teach formatting style, and since the purpose of the script was to avoid having to learn formatting style, I would argue that the smart people were the ones who stopped using it. Because they became the only group that would actually learn the course material that they were paying for.


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Ereth said:


> Since the purpose of the class was to teach formatting style, and since the purpose of the script was to avoid having to learn formatting style, I would argue that the smart people were the ones who stopped using it. Because they became the only group that would actually learn the course material that they were paying for.


A lot of us already had significant coding experience, and had no problem using a script to spiff up the code a little bit. It wasn't like we were feeding it raw unformatted code. Sometimes at 3am on an assignment deadline, it was easier to use the script to make sure everything lined up, or was properly cased than to tediously go through it manually. This was in the days when you had to schedule terminal time in the computer building, not work at home from your couch. If your time was up, you had to get off the terminal.

Also, the purpose of the class was to teach basic computer science.. the coding style thing was just a side thing so the TAs could read and grade the code.

My point was it was a joke that the teachers _thought_ they could intimidate people by such an empty threat. If they accused anyone of using the script, I'd say "prove it". It was dumb to even make that threat, and the smart people realized that.


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## TAsunder (Aug 6, 2003)

Ereth said:


> Since the purpose of the class was to teach formatting style, and since the purpose of the script was to avoid having to learn formatting style, I would argue that the smart people were the ones who stopped using it. Because they became the only group that would actually learn the course material that they were paying for.


I would argue that good coding style is everyone using the same thing to automatically format code and not manually making decisions yourself, and therefore to fail people for doing what is best practice in the real world is preposterous.


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

Hank said:


> A lot of us already had significant coding experience, and had no problem using a script to spiff up the code a little bit. It wasn't like we were feeding it raw unformatted code. Sometimes at 3am on an assignment deadline, it was easier to use the script to make sure everything lined up, or was properly cased than to tediously go through it manually. This was in the days when you had to schedule terminal time in the computer building, not work at home from your couch. If your time was up, you had to get off the terminal.
> 
> Also, the purpose of the class was to teach basic computer science.. the coding style thing was just a side thing so the TAs could read and grade the code.
> 
> My point was it was a joke that the teachers _thought_ they could intimidate people by such an empty threat. If they accused anyone of using the script, I'd say "prove it". It was dumb to even make that threat, and the smart people realized that.


What a difference a few years makes. My CompSci 101 was in 1977, and we had to do our coding on either papertape or punch cards. We also learned BASIC, not PASCAL. Formatting techniques on punch cards, in Fortran and COBOL (taught the next 2 semesters after 101) were not optional. (BASIC didn't have any useful formatting.)

We didn't schedule terminal time. We dropped our punch cards off and picked up our output the next day. There were only 5 punch card machines, so you spent most of your time waiting on a machine. There was no schedule. First come, first served. (The Nova minicomputer, which used the papertape, had exactly 4 terminals, so waiting was something you did there, too). Of course we only had uppercase. And a missed period would generate multiple pages of error codes and cost you an entire day because you couldn't submit a bug fix until the next nightly batch run. So most of our CompSci 101 was learning to program on paper, and stepping through that program by hand to find the bugs before you ever punched a single card. Flowcharting, and variable output boxes.

I'm not trying to be insulting or argumentative, but I'm finding the idea that people in CompSci 101 already had significant coding experience to be difficult to wrap my head around. If you already had coding experience, why take CompSci 101? I would think that a lot of people in that class had no coding experience. Unless the world really was that much different in 1982 than in 1977. Most of the people in my 101 class had never touched a computer before. While it's true that the Apple II, and the Commodore Pet, came out that year, very few of us had one or could afford one. We used to go down to the electronics stores and lust over them, but that doesn't count as "significant coding experience".

Here in 2016, having a formatting tool to adjust your formatting seems perfectly obvious and well. In 1977, and I would have thought in 1982, in a class where you were being taught that, it seems like cheating to avoid learning the subject matter being taught. I suppose I'm not a "smart" person in your estimation, because I wouldn't have used it. I'd have wanted to learn the correct habits from the get go, rather than learning bad habits and having a program correct them for me. (Of course, I still write my code in "vi" instead of letting some IDE format it for me, even in 2016, so clearly I'm not the target audience. )


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## kaszeta (Jun 11, 2004)

Ereth said:


> I'm not trying to be insulting or argumentative, but I'm finding the idea that people in CompSci 101 already had significant coding experience to be difficult to wrap my head around.


My 1991 experience with an intro to computer science/programming class was that about half of the class had some sort of coding experience, but mostly self-taught and not formalized, so the goal of the class was two-fold:

1. Teaching basic programming competence in a standard, current language (C in that case).
2. Teach basic concepts of programming and computer science in general (so, once we got past "Hello, World" we started in on basic concepts like sorting algorithms, linked lists, stack management, algorithm design).

The first of those wasn't uncommon for a lot of students to have either C experience, or enough experience in another procedural language (like Pascal or BASIC) to get up to speed quickly. But a large fraction of those students still had no basic idea of how to program well, and little concept of actual computer science fundamentals.

As far as my experiences in 1991, by the time I showed up at college I had self taught myself a lot of programming:

1. Apple BASIC, assembly, and machine code programming from my Apple II (that my father bought in 1979 for the princely sum of $3k!). Mostly self-taught with more than a little help from a few Beagle Bros. references
2. Limited UCSD Pascal experience on the Apple II, as well as a bit of Turbo Pascal from a high school physics class.
3. 8086 assembly from an "intro to EE" workshop I did at ASU in 1989
4. Familiarity with basic Unix and Unix software building tools (since from the ASU workshops I had an ASU SunOS account I could remotely log into)

Despite all that, my intro CS class still remains one of the most useful classes I ever had for "programming" (next most useful was the Algorithms class I took the next year).


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

> I'm not trying to be insulting or argumentative, but I'm finding the idea that people in CompSci 101 already had significant coding experience to be difficult to wrap my head around. If you already had coding experience, why take CompSci 101?


Why take it? Because it's college and a requirement for the major**. It's not like French where you could take an AP exam and place out into a higher level class.

And by the time I got to college, I had already been programming for four years in BASIC, 6502 assembler, DIBOL, and PASCAL (and probably some others I don't even remember). And I wasn't alone. Sure, there were more kids without experience then with. But yes, it's possible to have arrived on campus in 1982 for a freshman CompSci class with plenty of previous coding experience and finding the code formatting "rules" laughable.

** I still learned plenty in the class, especially in CompSci 102 -- when we got to data structures, pointers, and linked lists.


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Is that a smeek? 

wow.


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

I didn't say it wasn't possible. It just struck me that it wouldn't be the most common situation.

Out of curiousity, where were you getting all this programming experience? The C64 didn't have a PASCAL development environment, and didn't even have a 6502 assembler available in 1982. Given the 4 years statement, I'm guessing your parents were wealthy enough to have an Apple II? 

As for smeek... there's a huge difference between 1982 and 1992. By 1992 home computers were becoming common. In 1982 they were still quite rare. 

I also find it unlikely that all these self-taught coders all came up with the optimum code formatting styles on their own, especially as programmers as talented as John Carmack often go back and complain about their own code styles evolving over the years and how what they thought was awesome in the early days became things they'd cringe about later.


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

I meant a smeek with kaszeta talking about his experiences (technology independent) seemed to be exactly like mine, just 10 years apart.

No, my parent's weren't rich enough to afford an Apple ][. My high school had three of them (the original early ones), and I spent every second not in another class in the computer room and until they kicked me out at the end of the day.

My senior year (high school, 1981/1982) I took a year long independent study and wrote an entire library circulation system in BASIC that tracked all the books, students, check outs, check in, overdue notices, late fees, etc. It ran on two floppy disks, but right after I graduated, they upgraded it to a 5MB winchester drive. 3M (yes, that 3M) was actually interested in buying it from the school, but nothing ever came of that. 

Also in my senior year, I was teaching stuff to the two computer science teachers. One was good, the other was horrible.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

laria said:


> Not if everyone reformats their code before checkin.
> 
> But that's extra steps that a lot of people don't want to do. I know I certainly don't. I'll just continue to grind my teeth when my one co-worker checks stuff in that I end up reformatting.


If I was working in a group environment where a certain format was expected I'd just change to that format. That's the "who gives a sh*t" part. Your co-worker who refuses to change his/her style to match the group is a ******. Why not just adapt and save everyone else the headache?

In the show Richard was adamant about tabs being used instead of spaces regardless of the code being worked on or the conventions of the group. He broke up with a girl who wasn't even writing code for his company because she used spaces. Who cares? If she's the only one working on the code then why does it matter?


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Dan203 said:


> In the show Richard was adamant about tabs being used instead of spaces regardless of the code being worked on or the conventions of the group. He broke up with a girl who wasn't even writing code for his company because she used spaces. Who cares? If she's the only one working on the code then why does it matter?


Religion.

Apple vs PC
GM vs Ford
iOS vs Android
Gif vs gif
spaces vs tabs


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Hank said:


> Religion


Never cared for any sort of religion myself.


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## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

Dan203 said:


> In the show Richard was adamant about tabs being used instead of spaces regardless of the code being worked on or the conventions of the group. He broke up with a girl who wasn't even writing code for his company because she used spaces. Who cares? If she's the only one working on the code then why does it matter?


I think if you read this thread, you'll find plenty of examples of the kind of behavior the show is satirizing...

Hell, if you read TiVoCommunity!


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

Hank said:


> I meant a smeek with kaszeta talking about his experiences (technology independent) seemed to be exactly like mine, just 10 years apart.
> 
> No, my parent's weren't rich enough to afford an Apple ][. My high school had three of them (the original early ones), and I spent every second not in another class in the computer room and until they kicked me out at the end of the day.
> 
> ...


There's the difference. High Schools didn't have computers, or computer science teachers when I was in High School. Heck, we had a big controversy because electronic calculators had been invented, and for $100 you could get a Casio that would add, subtract, multiply and divide, and boy was that a big deal in the math department! If I remember right, I was a senior when that happened.

The Apple II shipped after I graduated High School. It was years before I saw one that wasn't in a store.

I didn't mean, at any point, to imply that you weren't good with computers. I was just being surprised at how different your experience in 1982 was with my own in 1977. I wound up not going full time and was still taking one or two classes a semester in 1981 when I joined the Navy and at that point, I still didn't know a single person who owned a computer, and the new students were still totally lost (though the school was no longer using mainly punch cards, but had terminals by then).


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## pdhenry (Feb 28, 2005)

Hank said:


> Religion.
> 
> Apple vs PC
> GM vs Ford
> ...





Dan203 said:


> Never cared for any sort of religion myself.





Rob Helmerichs said:


> I think if you read this thread, you'll find plenty of examples of the kind of behavior the show is satirizing...


I've been thinking that ever since the spaces vs. tabs topic took firm hold of this thread - and the participants in the discussion might not even be aware how much their rigid positions enhance the humor of the show.


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

> High Schools didn't have computers, or computer science teachers when I was in High School


Ok, maybe I mis-spoke. My school had three computers, but not "computer science" teachers.. they were math teachers roped into teaching basic (BASIC) computer programming. I can't think of anything they taught that was actual CompSci.


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

> There's the difference.


Yes, there's a huge (technology) difference between when you went to high school and when I did. There's a much smaller of a gap/difference between when I went, and what kaszeta was talking about.


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## jamesl (Jul 12, 2012)

off topic, but anyone interested in learning C programming should look at 
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x 
also at 
http://cs50.tv/2015/fall/

its Harvard University's Intro to CS course 
and its really good


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## David Platt (Dec 13, 2001)

Mods, can we change the name of this thread to "BBT" please?


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

Dan203 said:


> Your co-worker who refuses to change his/her style to match the group is a ******. Why not just adapt and save everyone else the headache?


There is no "everyone else" and there are no coding standards.  I work for a small company, quite often we are working on things independently, and occasionally pair up with another person.

I have one co-worker whose code is extremely well formatted, it's just not to my taste. I bite my tongue and I don't reformat that.  I have another one whose coding style is not to my taste and sometimes gets stuff checked in with wonky tabbing. Most of the time I leave it alone but if I have reason to be working in the same code, I will reformat it sometimes.

I also will add semi-colons to her javascript because it drives me crazy to see code without them, I don't care if it's not technically needed, and I HAVE been bit in the butt by a missing semi-colon during minification before!


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Ereth said:


> I'm not trying to be insulting or argumentative, but I'm finding the idea that people in CompSci 101 already had significant coding experience to be difficult to wrap my head around. If you already had coding experience, why take CompSci 101?


wow, you're old.. (so am I..)

1987, freshman year, computer engineering. I already knew BASIC (several dialects) and Pascal for sure.. I *think* I had dabbled a tiny bit in assembly by then, but not much.

So I guess by your question not "significant coding experience", but still some programming.


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

mattack said:


> wow, you're old.. (so am I..)
> 
> 1987, freshman year, computer engineering. I already knew BASIC (several dialects) and Pascal for sure.. I *think* I had dabbled a tiny bit in assembly by then, but not much.
> 
> So I guess by your question not "significant coding experience", but still some programming.


I graduated High School in 1976. The only way you had computer experience at that point is if you (or your family) had one of those Kaypro CP/M kit computers, or you were at one of the few schools that were doing early computing connections to universities.

I went to college to be a Math major. A friend of mine suggested I check out a computer class my second semester. It had never occurred to me, because I had never seen a computer outside of Star Trek. The home computer explosion was yet to occur. Wozniak was designing the Apple II, yes, but I didn't know Woz, or the Home Computer Club which was on the other side of the country.

After that first computer class, I knew that's where I wanted to be. I loved math, but computers.. wow, that occupied so much more of my mind space once I discovered them. When I talked to my parents about changing my major it was a rather significant discussion. "Are you sure? Will there be jobs using computers in the future?"

Let us not forget that Ken Olsen - founder of Digital Electronics Corporation, the second largest computer manufacturer in the world at the time - said in 1977, "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

That's the world I lived in. The Nova minicomputer I was learning to program on in CompSci 101 took 45 minutes to boot, and you loaded the OS by filling registers in octal using bat-handled switches, reading in from a printed sheet of paper, until you had enough instructions loaded in that it could read the paper tape attached to terminal 1. Then you loaded several paper tape feeds through terminal one until it then knew how to read the high speed paper tape reader on the front. THEN you could load the operating system paper tape through that high speed reader.

(The schools IBM/360 was being removed that first semester so we could upgrade to a Burroughs 6700, which had a 6-bit word! I didn't get to program on it until the second semester as the upgrade took several months, and students were not allowed to use the computer while the school got everything working. It was a huge upgrade. But still not the sort of thing you would have access to at home or at your local High School). As a reference, my first few semesters of college, Registration was done by physical IBM punch cards. Each class had a stack of cards that matched the number of students they could allow, and you would run from table to table trying to get the class cards for the class you wanted. Once you got your class schedule you'd drop your bundle off to be processed later. It took about 2 years after the Burroughs was installed before we got online registration (online at that point meaning you sat at one of the installed terminals and chose classes that way, instead of running around collecting punch cards).

My school didn't teach Pascal. Or C, for that matter, both languages being too new for them to yet have a programming curriculum in small community colleges in Florida. We learned BASIC (the first time I'd ever heard of it was in 1977 in that CompSCI class), then Fortran IV, then COBOL, then RPG and PL/1. I think there was an Algol class, too, but I don't remember for sure. Note that Fortran 77 came out in (obviously) 77, but the curriculum taught Fortran IV, because the instructors weren't up on a language change that new, and didn't want to try to learn a whole new computer AND a new language while teaching it. As it was, a lot of their assignments didn't actually work on the Burroughs and those of us who were doing well wound up spending time helping the instructors change their programs from IBM/360 to Burroughs 6700 compliant so the assignments would run properly.

It's really hard for me to imagine that a mere 5 years later, so many of you had had access to micro computers and learned multiple languages. Even after the C64 shipped I never saw a Pascal compiler. Or heard of Pascal. Not until Turbo Pascal and that didn't ship until 1983 (though I was in the Navy by then and I don't think I saw it until several years later). I'm not suggesting what you learned wasn't adequate or anything. I'm not being snobbish about the amount you learned. I'm being stunned that you had the opportunity to learn anything at all. The C64 was the first computer I could afford, and yes, you could program it in BASIC when it shipped... in 1982. But you can't have multiple years of coding experience *in* 1982 on a computer that shipped in 1982. So that means Apple II or TRS-80 Model/1 or CBM Pet or kit computer, and all of those were so expensive they might as well have been moon rockets. Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased your schools were able to afford them, and you had that advantage. We were lucky to have overhead projectors that worked. Computers? Might as well ask for Air Conditioning! You weren't likely to get either, but AC would have been far more popular!


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## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

Kaypro didn't come along until the early 80s...


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

You're right, we were lucky to have that access.

But if I didn't have that access in the late 70's/early 80's, I would have spent a lot more time on my dad's PDP-8 learning DIBOL. Oh, I learned it, but it was not exactly the kind of language that's good as "training wheels" with virtual and physical channels and really weird syntax.. not the kind of thing to create a "hello world" program, or even what my first APPLESOFT program did -- take hours and pay rate per hour to calculate total pay. 

But IF that was the only tool I had, I would have figured it out. Luckily at the same time my school got the Apple ][s, I found a hidden BASIC interpreter on the PDP-8 which I played around with a little bit, but the Apple was a lot more friendly than a 12x30(?) CRT on the PDP-8.


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> Kaypro didn't come along until the early 80s...


Ok, so even harder then! Thanks for correcting that. It's been a LONG time...


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## RGM1138 (Oct 6, 1999)

Computers? When I was growing up in the 50s, I built a basic Heahkit crystal radio. As I recall, you tuned it by running a piece of metal up and down a coil of wire.

And we _liked_ it!


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

Hank said:


> But if I didn't have that access in the late 70's/early 80's, I would have spent a lot more time on my dad's PDP-8 learning DIBOL.


You do realize how lucky you were to have that, right? It's not like most kids had a dad with a PDP-8.

I read that and thought "I asked my dad for a loan but he could only give me a million dollars...". . Pretty rarified space. Way awesome. I'm jealous, mind you.

(My own rarified space was in the race car arena. Bobby Allison, of NASCAR fame, had dinner at my house, for instance. My dad designed a suspension for him specifically for the Daytona speedway that enabled him to become the only man to win the two big Daytona races in the same year (500 and 400). NASCAR later outlawed it by name ("Augustine-style suspensions are not allowed."). But I had no interest in auto mechanics or racing. so I didn't really appreciate how rare that was. As I suspect the idea that you had access to a PDP-8 probably didn't seem all that odd to you.)

And now we've gone so far afield from tabs vs spaces that I'm actually embarrassed. So, to get back on track.. "vi rules! emacs sucks!".


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Ereth said:


> You do realize how lucky you were to have that, right? It's not like most kids had a dad with a PDP-8.
> 
> I read that and thought "I asked my dad for a loan but he could only give me a million dollars...". . Pretty rarified space. Way awesome. I'm jealous, mind you.


Well, I'm not sure where the million bucks comes from, but this is exactly the PDP-8 we had in his office.

It had 4k ram and real donut core memory (very cool to see), and a punch-tape reader/writer for printing mail-merge letters (he ran a collection agency).

I'm sure it didn't cost a million dollars.


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## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

The million dollar comment is a reference to Trump, who claimed he didn't get a lot of help from his dad, just a small loan of $1 million.


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

Hank said:


> Well, I'm not sure where the million bucks comes from, but this is exactly the PDP-8 we had in his office.
> 
> It had 4k ram and real donut core memory (very cool to see), and a punch-tape reader/writer for printing mail-merge letters (he ran a collection agency).
> 
> I'm sure it didn't cost a million dollars.


It was a political reference. Without getting too specific (because this isn't the right forum) a politician once commented that they had to start from scratch, because they asked their dad for a loan but he could only loan him a million dollars.

I only meant it as "being given a million dollars isn't something most of us have experience of" any more than having a PDP-8 at home isn't something most of us have experience of. Nothing more than that.


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## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

I guess it was a have/have not world then. I graduated high school in 1972 and we had access to Basic running on HP2000 servers from the Minneapolis school district. I also got access to the Univac mainframes at Univac and all the manuals I wanted just by asking.
Our school district had IBM mainframes and I got to play around in Cobol just by asking.
Cobol sort of through me at first because it was mostly English prose and I kept looking for the code. I never expected code to look like English.

In 1973 I went to the University of Minnesota and got to play with assembly language on the Control Data mainframes. I eventually got hired by the university computer center because they were smart enough to hire hackers rather than try to punish them.


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

DevdogAZ said:


> The million dollar comment is a reference to Trump, who claimed he didn't get a lot of help from his dad, just a small loan of $1 million.





Ereth said:


> It was a political reference. Without getting too specific (because this isn't the right forum) a politician once commented that they had to start from scratch, because they asked their dad for a loan but he could only loan him a million dollars.
> 
> I only meant it as "being given a million dollars isn't something most of us have experience of" any more than having a PDP-8 at home isn't something most of us have experience of. Nothing more than that.


ah. ok. Got it. Or rather, I didn't get it. And I even know of that quote. thanks.


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## Ereth (Jun 16, 2000)

That is awesome. In 1972 I wasn't even in CONUS. We were on Adak, a small island in the Aleutians, roughly 7 miles across. We had just gotten Star Trek reruns on AFRTS which I didn't remember seeing back when I was 7 and it had aired originally so they were a revelation to me. 

All these people with cool access to computers (and I know Doug Swallow is on that list, too). Maybe it was those of us who didn't have access that were the oddballs. Not my experience, but starting to sound that way from this thread.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Altair..


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## midas (Jun 1, 2000)

Ereth said:


> I graduated High School in 1976. The only way you had computer experience at that point is if you (or your family) had one of those Kaypro CP/M kit computers, or you were at one of the few schools that were doing early computing connections to universities.


I graduated high school in 1972. I was in the first computer class offered in the Chicago public school system. I had no real interest in computers before I took that class. The only reason I took it was that the teacher was really hot. And as mentioned by others, she was just a math teacher that got roped into doing it. She had no clue what she was doing.


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

midas said:


> And as mentioned by others, she was just a math teacher that got roped into doing it. She had no clue what she was doing.


As I said, we had two computer teachers, one pretty good and into it, the other, she also had no idea what she was doing. Since I couldn't pick which one I got, yup, I ended up with her.

One of my favorite moments in the class was she was reviewing a homework assignment for a short program in BASIC, let's say it's about 60 lines of code. She starts writing the solution on the chalk board and within 5 or 6 lines of code, I point out that she has a looping logic error. Now she knows I'm pretty knowledgeable about these things, and really doesn't like when I challenge her (she never really liked me anyway!)... so instead of taking my advice, in front of the class she shuts me down and says I'm wrong. Ok, fine, I know she's wrong, but I'll just shut up and wait.

Twenty minutes later, she gets to the very end of the program, filling up three full chalk boards with code, and THEN finally realizes her logic error, and then has to erase the entire board, right up to the point 5 lines in where I corrected her, and start all over again. I didn't have to say a single word. So sweet.


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## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

Jesus...if you guys ever wonder how come you never got any...ahem...action...wonder no more. A date with you all must be a whole boatload of...let's see...fun isn't the right word...gun-eating-inducing?

I used to love this show. Now I hate it!


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

I never had to wonder.


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## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

Hank said:


> I never had to wonder.


sadly, I totally understand.I always knew why as well.


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## TAsunder (Aug 6, 2003)

I pretty much had a similar situation to the one you guys are describing, only it was in the mid-90's, at supposedly one of the 10 best comp sci colleges at the time. It was my first comp sci class at the university. The teacher was a math professor who clearly had never taught comp sci before. Constantly made obvious errors. We were two weeks behind every other section of the same class halfway through the semester, and I was learning nothing from him that wasn't better covered in the book. I ended up transferring to another section - had to get dispensation from the dean and have my adviser get involved. The dean suggested that his errors were intentional and a means to elicit responses from class - which was sadly not the case here. 

Anyway, I didn't regret it for a second - new instructor was awesome and assisted me with materials that I had missed, and taught me tons of stuff not covered in the books, and was very helpful with lab work as well.


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## Malcontent (Sep 5, 2004)

Bump...

FYI,

*Season 4* begins tonight.


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## Hank (May 31, 2000)

Oh thank you for posting. Looks great. Can't wait!


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

Yay!


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## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

Just watched Ep 1. Another home run. This show and Veep are neck and neck for "oh God" moments. I love the rich guy at the wrong school. So many amazingly funny moments.


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## laria (Sep 7, 2000)

I love Russ Hanneman. 

Did I forget that he got his McLaren back in a previous season? I still die laughing every time I see the scene after he's sold his car and is flipping out on Richard... "THESE ARE NOT THE DOORS OF A BILLIONAIRE!"


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## Anubys (Jul 16, 2004)

He was absolutely right! you're not really rich until the doors open UP! everyone knows THAT!


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## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)




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