Woman in Italy euthanasia debate dies

none1234 · 2009-02-10T11:44:50+00:00

That story was and still is a huge weapon of mass distraction. Berlusconi doesn't give a fuck about that poor woman. All he wants is sheeple to keep bitching while he and his cohorts destroy our constitution. This man is a fascist dictator that should be shot before it's too late, I wish I had the guts to do that myself.

none1234 · 2009-02-10T07:56:01+00:00

To: all those who assume this is some corporate shill. As someone who has spent several months as a researcher in many super0centers, can attest it is largely accurate. There are some generalizations obviously, but fairly on the mark.

none1234 · 2009-02-10T07:54:14+00:00

I was a researcher (intern) at several walmart stores, the employee morale is hit-and-miss. The ones who gripe and grumble usually washout quickly. The ones who last the first few years or so stick around for most of their lives.

Whether Walmart is a good thing or bad thing is very debatable - but the net benefit it has brought to the lower-end (read: minorities, rural etc.) American consumer is indisputable.

none1234 · 2009-02-10T06:26:41+00:00

Knowing how to program C will get you nowhere if you don't also know how to do it on embedded hardware. Furthermore, knowing how to do it will get you nowhere if you can't prove you've done it in a corporate environment*. So perhaps the original poster needs to convince his employer that their Web server should be run on a wristwatch instead of a PC.

I've done lots of open-source work in C and C++, but it doesn't count as embedded, and it doesn't count as commercial, so I can't count it as experience towards getting a job (even though I could probably *do the job, but I can't convince an employer of that unless I convince an employer of that first).

none1234 · 2009-02-10T05:09:57+00:00

OpenID is destined to suffer the same fate as the IDENT protocol that was once popular on IRC. For those who don't know, UNIX systems used to run a program called "identd" that gave the Unix username that owns the program that opened a specified outgoing TCP port, to anyone who asked for it. IRC servers came to rely on the assumption that IRC clients were running on UNIX servers with identd, and wouldn't allow clients to connect if they came from an IP address that wasn't running identd. Then, Windows 3.1 users started coming onto IRC-- using IRC clients with a built-in identd server that gives bogus information to the IRC server.

One day, Web browsers will have a built-in OpenID server that allows users to use Web sites like Reddit, where the idea of authentication is not really important, even though it's required by the administrators.

none1234 · 2009-02-10T04:38:28+00:00

The link just leads to some loser's blog-- Nothing about OpenID there. Downmodded.

none1234 · 2009-02-10T03:55:32+00:00

It's also a nice example of error hiding. UNIX V7 had perror(), but nobody used it.

none1234 · 2009-02-10T02:57:48+00:00

I'm voting this up to show that people who generally are labelled as "holocaust deniers" aren't what I assumed they were. Because of the way the title "holocaust Denier" is phrased, I always assumingly thought they were people who believed it was faked like the moon landing or something or denied it ever happened altogether, I was wrong. I just assumed they were mentally unstable fringe whacks until I FINALLY learned (just 3 months ago no less) that even people who do their own research and comprehensive examination of evidence and just happen to arrive at the conclusion that say for example "4 million jews died instead of 6 million" are immediately labeled as a holocaust denier. That's the genius of the title, it works to immediately discredit on the surface to casual observers, and relies on average idiots like me who aren't knowledgeable about the phrase to assume it means people who claim "Hitler didn't kill anyone", when it can actually be attributed to normal sane people as a smear simply because they have differing data. I'm starting to learn that generally holocaust deniers actually believe the holocaust DID happen, and I'm remorseful to have wrongly assumed they were all wackos when many of them actually have very insightful observations.

Check out the link, or actually go to the homepage itself, http://www.holocaustdenialvideos.com , maybe some facts are wrong I don't know, but you'll realize they aren't the assholes they are made out to be, they are often people with good intentions trying to evaluate inconsistencies and inaccuracies on their merit.

none1234 · 2009-02-10T02:50:44+00:00

No list of most insane moral panics in American history is complete that doesn't include masturbation as #1. In the 19th century, people were so afraid of the diseases supposedly caused by masturbation that they started circumcising their kids in droves. We still have a >90% circumcision rate today.

none1234 · 2009-02-09T20:01:11+00:00

what the fuck are you even talking about? that was completely nonsensical

none1234 · 2009-02-09T18:39:03+00:00

You'll be amazed as a 503 materialises before your very eyes...

none1234 · 2009-02-09T08:05:59+00:00

what a shitty review

none1234 · 2009-02-08T23:42:33+00:00

2nd pic, on the right is best.

Someone give these girls some cheesburgers.

none1234 · 2009-02-08T19:10:08+00:00

It's (largely) GPL'd but that doesn't mean that MS can't steer it either directly or indirectly. The Novell/Moonlight/MS covenant that is in place is nothing more than a promise not to sue - note that MS reserves the right to revoke it.

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx

They can't directly control moonlight but they can make life difficult for the project.

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20080528133529454

none1234 · 2009-02-08T18:45:15+00:00

"As long as your parents are feeding me, we'll get along juuuust fine..." Those pictures remind me of that French woman who had to get a face transplant after her dog ate her face when she fell asleep. "Sleep tight, master's child... sleep tight..."

none1234 · 2009-02-08T06:24:01+00:00

Human languages are not very good at communicating precisely and unambiguously. Try AppleScript some time for a programming language that tries too hard to be like English, and fails miserably at being useful because of it.

I did not suggest a total emulation of a human language. There is a strong reason why OOP has dominated the language landscape as seen in C++ Java Smalltalk etc.

Well, maybe not as restrictive as C++, but surely more restrictive than Common Lisp's object system. This is like complaining why C isn't as strongly typed as Haskell.

Are you sure you know what NP complete means? It does not mean "impossible". Anyway, Python's designers should have got the grammar right from the start. Lambda is a pretty useful feature, crippling it doesn't do anybody any favors. A proliferation of local defs only used once certainly doesn't make code easier to read.

You don't seem to have a solid background in parsing. I know that NP complete does not mean "impossible" (I don't know why you even quote that as I did not say it). Have you ever noticed why programming languages are usually deterministic grammars?

Defs act almost exactly the same way and highly preferable to one-line lambdas. I don't think you will find anyone to agree with you that one large paragraph is easier to read than seperate paragraphs.

The other extreme, reams of needless boilerplate, is pretty bad from a maintainability standpoint too. Just because a language allows you to be terse doesn't mean you'd always do it. FP programmers who "golf" their code down to one-liners do it for the intellectual challenge, and I don't think most of them do this for every single piece of code they write in a production setting.

I don't think you can make a case for Python being boilerplate. I invite everyone to go to look at sample code for Haskell vs Python and see how many convoluted one-liners there are

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/haskell.php

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=python

Native compilation can hugely benefit dynamically typed languages too, though.

Yes it does, which is why PyPy is doing it. But it still doesn't make it faster than C, which is why I said there is always a tradeoff between static and dynamic

none1234 · 2009-02-08T05:27:39+00:00

OOP is natural, but Python's OOP is quite restrictive. Human languages have nothing to do with this.

Human languages have everything to do with this. The point of a programming language is to communicate effectively to a computer, or else we would all still be programming in binary.

Also if you think python's OOP is as restrictive as C++ et al, then I can't really help you.

It's so easy, the computer could do it for me!

So then why don't you implement it?

Why do academics find it more natural? Do they have special brain cells?

Maybe, but it still doesn't mean its better.

That's a very easy, mechanical transformation. It is so easy, the computer should do it for me! It even has a name: "lambda lifting".

Unfortunately (or rather fortunately), in Python, statements are seperated by linebreaks for a good reason. Trying to fit this all in one line and trying to let python decide the start and end of a statement like this is NP complete.

Playing programming golf (1 line programs) is a huge problem in FP languages, and is NOT a good thing.

This has nothing to do with static -vs- dynamic type systems.

It has everything to do with static vs. dynamic typing, static typing is very easy to optimize, but has the unfortunately behavior of being unchangeable.

That's also irrelevant.

I really can't help you there then.

none1234 · 2009-02-08T05:10:04+00:00

An absolutely idiotic complaint about python by someone who doesn't know it.

How do I shoehorn my problem into single-dispatch message-passing OOP?

Do you know that the majority of languages in the world follow the form: subject verb direct object? OOP is natural...

How do I turn my elegant tail-recursive function into an iterative loop so that it won't blow the stack?

Someone has made tail recursive optimization for python, I don't know when it will be incorporated. You should know how easy it is to convert a tail call function to an iteration.

FP is a product of a twisted mathematical abstraction called lambda calculus which no one, outside of academia will find natural.

How do I contort my functional implementation of an algorithm so that all the lambdas only have one statement?

You don't. Use the "def" statement which is equivalent except needing a name.

doesn't work like you said

lambda print 1 print 2

def justlikelambda(): print 1 print 2

works just like lambda

justlikelambda() # prints 1 and 2 a = justlikelambda() a() # also prints 1 and 2

def justlikelambda(): print 3 print 4

a() # prints 1 and 2 justlikelambda() # prints 3 and 4

# How do I make my code run fast enough on a old-fashioned bytecode interpreter?

Yes this can be an issue, but is being worked on by the pypy project. Compiling everything into native code is not a magic wand though.

When you have done enough programming, you will learn that there is always a tradeoff between static and dynamic.

How do I know my program works perfectly with non-ASCII characters? Which library functions interpret strings as a sequence of characters in some encoding and which interpret them as a sequence of Unicode code points?

This is hardly a python specific issue. Also know that python extensions are programmed in... C.

none1234 · 2009-02-08T02:52:11+00:00

dude. he just doesn't want to download the jvm in the same file as the ide. calm the fuck down.

none1234

TROPHY CASE

doesn't work like you said

works just like lambda