I'm almost never in Sift Talk, but I noticed this too. Used to be that to make the top 15 a video would have to get well over the 10-vote generic "sifted" status, but recently I've seen several occasions when there aren't enough videos with 10+ votes to even fill out the top 15 completely.

I'm not an extremely long-time sifter, I've had an account here for 8 years and lurked for probably a couple before that. But in general, the main reasons that I actually joined the community here when I rarely do anything more than lurk (no facebook / reddit / whatever for me) still apply:

Standard YouTube isn't a community, it is a toxic wasteland. Trolls are the rule, not the exception. By far.

On the Sift, I rarely participate by actually posting videos, but the comments sections on videos here are a massive breath of fresh air compared to other sites (particularly YouTube). That's what drew me here and has kept me here.


That being said, I think we've been losing some of the openness to different opinions that has been a real strength of the sift community. With such a divisive US President, I'm sure some of that is inevitable. But, while we've always been better about that than elsewhere on the internet, I think we're losing some of that advantage.

I think the sift leans left -- not extreme, but noticeably. I used to lean moderately right, although generally more in the middle on social issues. My time on the sift (and also NOT living in the US) has pushed me more to the left, again particularly on social issues, but even on the meat-and-potatoes stuff that I think actually belongs in the realm of government. I'm still to the right of sift average, but closer than I was. Credit for that shift in my viewpoints is definitely in part due to the sane, open-minded, and accommodating debates in comments here.

I recognize that it is hard to be accommodating to some of the sifters that are further to the right than I ever was. A certain basketball coach comes to mind. But even when viewpoints from sources like that veer into territory that we find intolerable, I think we here at the sift used to be better about rationally but firmly voicing disagreement without sort of ... picking a fight. If that makes sense.

Just speaking for myself, I think I've probably been upvoting videos less because a higher percentage of what is being sifted is political, and I get fatigued with the volume of that. That's very much tied in to the current situation and media environment, so there isn't necessarily anything to be done about it, but I'd wager that is partially responsible for the lower traffic beyond just myself.

Is this sweet fish just lonely? Not much entertainment value in that environment ... looks to me anyway.

I've had a variety of fish several times in my life. Many have displayed distinctive personality traits and would be amazingly interactive with me. Elvis and Costello [Oscars] were my favorites as was Jambi [goldfish ... old vids still on YT]. Too bad I dreaded cleaning those tanks though [ugg]. Coupled with the heartache of the eventual/inevitable burial at 'sea' [in most cases], my urge for serenity on that front has been satiated for good.

Yep.

Sugar is basically rocket fuel for your body, it's insanely useful for burning large amounts of energy quickly, and since we evolved in a low sugar environment, your body is trained to want it.

But these days we live in a sugar saturated environment where most people don't do anywhere near as much physical work, so the sugar is never burnt off. It's not meant to be a staple food.

Also, your liver basically treats sugar the same as alcohol. Not only does it make you fat, but it also suppresses your bodies natural "I'm full" reaction. Worst of all are high fructose corn syrup soft drinks.

Basically, if you wouldn't give your kid a beer... don't give them coke either. Coke = beer without the drunkenness.

The difference between smoking and say, drinking alcohol or eating unhealthy food, is that I can drink alcohol or eat cheeseburgers all day and I'm really harming no-one but myself.

"Ah, but people drive drunk and get in fights and do stupid things and cause all sorts of trouble"
Agreed, and we have laws against all those things. If you get drunk and kill someone, off to jail with you.

"Yes, but fat people are an enormous cost on the health system"
This is hard to discuss without going into the whole healthcare mess in the US, but as a broad point, it's nigh impossible to legislate against unhealthy behaviours to ones self. Where do you stop? Eating meat? Salt? Not exercising enough? What about people with disabilities?

But smoking? That directly and provably harms OTHER people in the same environment as you and they really have no recourse. If I walked into a public square swinging a sword around, it's not reasonable to say other people should just get out of my way.

So ultimately, as much as I dislike government legislating what you do to yourself (read my post history, I'm very pro-drug), I am ok with legislating that you cannot do something that harms other people in a public place.

Hell, I'd go further. I'm ok with government legislating that you can't smoke in your own home if, for example, you have kids. They didn't ask to live there, and it was your decision to have them, so sorry, no smoking for you.

And yeah, I'd say the same about alcohol. If your drinking is harming your children, then maybe you shouldn't have kids anymore.

I live in NZ. There's very much a "she'll be right" attitude to H&S here. And in some ways, it's great. It's easier to set up sports clubs, if you want to go in the wilderness, you're pretty much on your own, etc.

But the flip side is the fact that we have a terrible rate of injuries and actual deaths in industry, especially in agriculture and forestry.

And quite honestly, I think this "H&S gone mad" attitude is actually promoted by companies who don't want to pay to keep their employees safe. And that's not hyperbole, there is literally an ongoing investigation into a company that skimped on safety resulting in the deaths of 29 miners.

I agree it can be taken too far, and maybe the UK really is insane, but in my experience, it's one of those things that people whine about when they don't understand the reasons behind it.

PC, we'll agree to disagree.

Smoking: again smoke if you want to, but just not around me. Why should I have to put up with smoke when I'm having a meal? More importantly, why should the staff who have to work there, have to put up with a toxic environment?

As for the competition argument, it doesn't really hold water. A few pubs in Ireland preempted the smoking ban, and they went out of business, because there's almost always one person in a group that smokes. Having it as a law makes a level playing field.

I've been in three countries now when smoking was banned in pubs. Every time, the hospitality industry said it would be the death of them. 10 years later, no one gives a damn. People still go to pubs and a lot less people smoke. It worked.

In those cases, they're being douchey.
I didn't read you to mean a perceived problem meant it wasn't a real problem, now I get you.

Children will be children, but can still be incredibly annoying to some, even if they're well behaved....like a baby on an airplane, it's often not the child's fault. I can support them thinking that all children are annoying (at times), and even communicating it to each other with, say, a knowing wink, but the open, blatant derision is uncalled for.....usually.

That said, there should be child free zones in public spaces imo. Just Tuesday we used our once a year passes to the United Airlines club in SFO to have a nice, quiet place to relax between long flights, and a family came in with two <5 year olds and instantly turned it into the loud, raucous environment everyone there paid to escape. Their children weren't being bad, just being loud children in a quiet place. That's the parent's being douchbags imo. Just as the childless shouldn't insist on no children in public, parents shouldn't insist they must be allowed to go everywhere. Don't take a baby to an adult movie.

As someone who doesn't have, and doesn't intend to have, kids...

Bill is missing the point. Yes, it's great for the environment, but we don't need a day for single or intentionally childless people, because EVERY day is "I didn't reproduce day".

I can sleep in every weekend. I can go out on any given school night.

Good quality Japanese blades are carbon steel, with no concessions to stainlessness at all. In a humid environment (my cellar, for example) carbon steel can grow that much rust in a week, easy.

I understand where you're coming from, but I stand by my previous posts.

Full disclosure, I never got professionally employed as a programmer / coder / software engineer. However, my Bachelors Degree was in CS, and I have many friends working in the field.

In the show Silicon Valley, Richard Hendriks is working for a large corporate entity but has an idea / personal project that he ends up spinning into a new company. He is trained as a software engineer (CS), NOT with any business or management background (MIS), yet he becomes sort of the de-facto boss / CEO (at least early in the show). He hires a small team to help him develop his product.

Given that scenario, I think the show portrays things very accurately or at least completely plausibly. He's a coder, not a manager. Programmers may understand the importance of formatting and style standards, but at least tend to not have the correct personality type to be comfortable with formally dictating those standards to a team (an activity which would generally be more in line with an MIS background).

Also, his company is small -- just a few other programmers. They are all specializing on different components of the product. So they generally aren't working on each other's code. Standards for function arguments / helper functions / etc. would have to be agreed upon to get their individual components to interact, but that is a separate issue from tabs vs spaces. It would be wise to set a style and naming convention standard and have everyone conform to it, I agree completely. But Richard isn't built for the manager / CEO position, so he either fails to recognize that or doesn't feel comfortable dictating standards to his team.

One more thing to consider is that he (Richard) essentially is the product. He's the keystone piece, the central figure. He's John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, or Steve Wozniak. Even in a very large team / corporate environment, I'd wager that more often than not the style standards that end up getting set tend to fall in line with whatever those key guys want them to be. Don't touch an id Software graphics engine without conforming to Carmack's way, or the Linux kernel without conforming to Torvald's standards. Especially if they are building something new from scratch -- which is again true in the Silicon Valley show scenario.

The show isn't a documentary on how to properly run a startup company in the real Silicon Valley, but it is generally accurate enough that it has a lot of nuances that people with a programming background can pick up on and be entertained by (even people that don't actually work professionally in the field like me). And more important, the general feel of the show can be entertaining even for people that know absolutely nothing about programming.

In a closed environment you should use what you agree on and stick to it. Whether it's tabs or spaces doesn't really matter, depending on what language/editors are in play. VIM vs Emacs is a waste of time, as professionals have to use something like Visual Studio anyway.

We use tabs.

@lucky760 -
I still think Judge is actually presenting the situation pretty accurately. If you look up online forum posts about tabs vs spaces, the file size thing is brought up as a pro for tabs very regularly.

While it is technically true, you're right that it doesn't make much sense because the difference is *tiny*, so conforming to the standard of wherever you are working is vastly more important.

BUT, that doesn't stop individual programmers from being (irrationally) passionate in their preferences.

Another dynamic that is (correctly) displayed in the show in my opinion is the difference between a big corporate environment, working as an individual in a large team of programmers as compared with having a project that starts out as a the brainchild of one person and grows into a small team.

The show is about the latter. In that scenario, a programmer / software engineer ends up trying to also be a manager of a team, in spite of the fact that he isn't really built for it. In a big corporate environment, they are well aware that style issue conflicts can turn into big time wasters unless they set out guidelines clearly at the outset. But that sort of micro-managing is NOT what a pure engineer type is comfortable doing.

Basically, I think that tabs vs spaces is completely a personal preference issue if you're working alone OR on a small team that don't interact with each other's code much. And even on a large team, either choice is fine BUT it becomes important to conform to the standards of the team as a whole.

I thought it was pretty clear in the show that he knew she was using spaces instead of tabs because of the sound of her repeatedly hitting the spacebar at the beginning of each line (which depending in your editor/IDE might be done automatically).

They are in a small environment, (loosely?) collaborating on code. He's anal about tabs vs spaces, and can tell that she's using the "wrong" one because of the repetitive (and annoying from his perspective) sound.

Put programmers together in a confined space, and they'll grate on each other over style issues / noise levels / music / whatever. I find the show extremely accurate in portraying the general atmosphere or feel of software development, if occasionally accenting or misportraying some details in the interest of making it good TV.

I have been playing a lot of Far Cry 4, so... wow, now I see where they got all their art and environment cues from.

I hear you, and would have completely agreed with you, right up until Windows 10 restarted for an update in the middle of me playing a full-screen game. Apparently it was a similar message as what he had, but I couldn't see it behind the game. So that sucked.

That was before the Creator's Update, back when my Windows "active hours" were deemed too long by Microsoft standards, which is just crap. That is fixed now.

I keep my machine updated, but it seems like my work environment has more control over Windows updates than I do as a home user (running Win 10 Pro).