hash collisions

[Rebel]

The bottom line, don't say things (insults) safe at home behind the keyboard you won't say in real life face to face. That's fake, cowardly and hypocritical.

[hgm]

Suite yourself. I would say it is prudent, and good strategy! Insulting is one thing, killing someone another. Especially if you expect the person that might feel insulted to be mentally unhinged, it seems kinder to not put him at risk of self-destructive behavior. He might throw himself on your knife...

BTW, what makes you think that, when you would behave like a raving maniac in my presence, I would not advise you to stop behaving like a raving maniac, face to face?

[Rebel]

Suite yourself. I would say it is prudent, and good strategy!

Moderator moderate yourself, if you can't resign.

[Ovyron]

You know what worked great on the Rybka Forum? Drama Llama: a subforum created for member insults, where people could say anything to each other without repercussions, and when people started insulting each other, their discussions were moved there, to a place where anyone wanting to see those posts could add themselves to the board (unlike posts moved to Talkchess moderation.)

It turned out that when fights were allowed, there wasn't much interest in fighting, and the main threads of the board were free of insults, those that insisted on attacking each other could do so without bothering others, and everyone was happy.

(at least until the legendary battles between Alan and bob, that became a mess that couldn't be moderated due to volume, but those led to the forum basically dying anyway, so few people remained to care about it on the aftermath)

[chrisw]

I think that the plethora of angry words is evidence that we have run out of logical arguments.

Actually, and coupled with mobbing encouragement by the pair of Bob-hgm, it’s evidence of bullying. Bullying is disturbed behaviour by fearful people. And, btw, I don’t get angry, I get forceful and assertive, also quite enjoy observing how groups behave badly. More meta than “in it”. I don’t think pair Bob-hgm were angry either. Something else.

Some think robust code is a good idea.
Others think core dumps are fine.

Well, of course, the techical content was nothing much to get worked up about. There’s possibly even a consensus position on it by now.

It seems convincing the other camp is not in the cards.

Social camp had beforehand decided to agree with itself, it just had to know what to believe. Principally itself. And not the enemy. Isn’t that how it works?

Anyway, the entire discussion was not about the content. Content became a vehicle for expression of other stuff. I think it’s useful to look at the content of hostile comments in a form of negation-inversion, They tend to focus on core identity, which is a pretty good sign that the abuser’s own core identity is a fragile construct.

We all have goals when we write software.
We can have different goals. That is fine. And with open source software, I can fix the problem if it is important to me.
And with closed source software, I can preprocess the data with tools like the one that Les made for me.

Indeed. Most solutions in stuck worlds come from left field.

So everyone is a winner

[Ovyron]

Anyway, the entire discussion was not about the content.

To me, it has. As someone that has been greatly disgusted by bob's actions in the past, as someone that has suffered hgm's abuse of power and being insulted by him without deserving it to the point of quitting Talkchess for a while, as someone that can't wait for other people to be elected as moderators, agreeing with them on a single subject tells volumes about the content.

To me, this has never been about the characters taking part on these discussions, if it was anyone else saying what you were saying I'd have been saying the same things, who we are doesn't matter.

[bob]

Now that was pretty rambling and uninformative. What bad thing has happened in this thread. There is zero doubt that no software is bug-free. Too many giants in computer science harp on this. There is little disagreement that bugs that produce execution issues (crashes, hangs, bad/illegal moves, etc) should be fixed. There is some debate about other small types of accepted bugs. One simple example is pseudo-legal move generation. You can search at one illegal position for every pseudo-legal move that is not legal. Is that seriously different from what HGM wrote? NEITHER causes any bad move to be displayed nor any crash, etc.

Why we have to argue about actual facts that are well-known is food for thought. But of course, feel free to show me any computer science authority that says large programs can be written 100% bug-free. THEN there would be room for debate. I've not seen any, but that doesn't say there are none. Just like not seeing any evidence of bugs doesn't mean there are none. (sound familiar).

[lauriet]

To Chrisw,

Sorry but you are trying to avoid the responsibility.
YOU own the company and NEED this job. YOU must write this software and YOU MUST meet the specification.
A professional software engineer will accept the specification and meet the clients expectations.
You cannot hand ball this to an underling. Its YOUR responsibility.
You MUST write this program to keep the client happy.

He doesn't care about your ethics, or your philosophies, or your attitude, or your principles. He can't read computer code. He only wants to sell as
many units of this program as he can. He can only do that by it being the strongest program around with the highest ELO.
If you cannot meet the spec he goes to another company.....sorry he shows YOU the door.

You go broke, your kids starve, your wife leaves you because you are a bad provider. She hooks up with a hedge fund manager and moves to the
caribbean, taking the kids with her.

Bottom line: A professional engineer accepts the clients spec and meets it. The client doesn't give a rats ass how.

[Rebel]

It's all about the demand.

Compilers can't afford to produce buggy executables.

Financial programs can't afford flawed numbers.

NASA can't afford buggy software when they launch people into space.

Boeing can't afford buggy software and sometimes it happens anyway with devastating results.

Does bug free software exist? Of course. Because that's the demand. But not after tireless testing.

Bug-free chess programs is not a good example because there is no demand. Nobody gets hurt by a bug.

[hgm]

Suite yourself. I would say it is prudent, and good strategy!

Moderator moderate yourself, if you can't resign.

In what way does the quoted posting violate the charter, then???