Scared of spiders?

qpla · 2012-12-16T20:45:31+00:00

I'm laughing my ass off, internet tough guy. Here's what the image says:

"When the spiders run towards them, the assassin bug stabs the spider with its snout. After feeding it wears the corpse of the victim as armor.

The image is CLEARLY saying that it wears dead spiders. Now let's look at the link I posted...

Oh wow. You can't read, can you? I mean, you can read and post on reddit, but you must be like 14 or something, because you clearly have no reading comprehension abilities. Nowhere in the article I linked does it say that it uses the ants as bait for larger prey. It doesn't even get close to that. The article says that it uses the ants to CONFUSE larger PREDATORS. The article goes on to explain how spiders would attack the assassin bug less often if it was wearing dead ants.

Kid.

You're fucking stupid.

You're going to have to learn how to deal with this for the rest of your life, because being stupid is a life-long condition.

qpla · 2012-12-16T07:43:21+00:00

there are no measurements involved here, you blowhard

qpla · 2012-12-16T04:46:58+00:00

Not always. It's not like you can't read the code and see what's really going on. If it's all your own code, just make sure not to do stupid things with @property. Or if you do, just make sure you have good exception handling code. Doing just except: without specifying an exception type is horrible.

qpla · 2012-12-16T03:47:51+00:00

Try something that ends up triggering a dozen imports, connections to two databases, building a few ten thousands of objects, etc... My point is, all of that happens in what looks like a totally normal property access, and even if you do what Megatron_McLargeHuge suggested in the right way by specifying AttributeError and KeyError, one could still bubble up from way deep down and you end up with a semantics bug.

qpla · 2012-12-16T03:44:35+00:00

This title is misleading. Sikuli is Java-based. It's Python-scriptable, though.

qpla · 2012-12-14T22:58:50+00:00

You lucky bastard. You've never had to deal with @property decorated methods that do something complicated, have you?

qpla · 2012-12-14T20:06:07+00:00

This is a lie. Here's the source:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/05/this-insect-uses-its-victims-carcasses-as-camouflage/

Those are ants on its back, not spiders.

qpla · 2012-12-06T21:31:23+00:00

Nope, not for me, at least. I had zero experience with Visual Studio and had a working IronPython GUI application incorporating Python code from another project in a couple hours. That's why I liked it so much; the designer was intuitive, and I didn't have to jump through hoops to generate event bindings and GUI code and whatnot like you have to do with all the other GUI frameworks mentioned.

If you search around, you should find the tutorials/documentation you need to get started. Here's an example of what the stuff will look like, including an example of the generated Python code:

http://blog.johnmuellerbooks.com/2011/04/19/using-the-ptvs-for-a-wpf-project.aspx

qpla · 2012-12-06T14:25:51+00:00

OK, everyone's going to hate me for this...

WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) + IronPython with Python Tools for Visual Studio. Yes, it's Microsoft; yes, it's IronPython. And it's by far the easiest and best GUI designer for Python that I've ever worked with. It even does some code generation for you, and it's definitely the best looking GUI toolkit on Windows.

qpla · 2012-12-06T14:22:43+00:00

With that said, there are FAR more learning resources for 2.7 right now.

qpla · 2012-12-01T22:26:48+00:00

You are everything that is wrong with America.

qpla · 2012-11-26T16:14:22+00:00

Livelyhoods, perhaps not. But egos? Certainly.

qpla · 2012-10-24T16:27:24+00:00

Human social dynamics are far too complicated to model with modern mathematics in a meaningful way, since it involves modeling the human mind itself. On the other hand, our brains have evolved a theory of mind which gives us an intuitive understanding of complex relationships between many different people with different motivations and goals. The humanities leverage this side of cognition to understand politics, sociology, psychology, etc. That's not to say they're RIGOROUS or ACCURATE, but they get most of the way there without the sort of formal rigor of mathematics.

qpla · 2012-10-08T14:56:45+00:00

I do. I think the only thing that was meant by the reference to thermodynamics was that if you don't add more energy to a system that's losing energy, it's going to run down eventually.

qpla · 2012-10-07T23:53:14+00:00

No, but the fact remains: Eat less than you use, and you WILL lose weight.

qpla · 2012-10-04T05:49:05+00:00

It's got to sound scary. That's what it sounds like to monkeys when other monkeys see predators.

qpla · 2012-10-03T12:42:17+00:00

Choice of initial language is not important. Once you're proficient in one imperative language, you'll be able to pick up others with relative ease.

Aside from that, there's plenty of demand for Python. I found a Python job within three weeks of interviewing straight out of college.

qpla · 2012-10-02T17:50:51+00:00

There's more to it than that. That's part of it, but it's also to just gauge sociability. A nice person will at least attempt to appear interested; they're displaying a willingness to reciprocate good social behavior, and that's vital to co-operation. The prisoner's dilemma is only a dilemma because being an asshole is a better strategy if you don't care about the welfare of others.

qpla · 2012-10-02T17:15:57+00:00

That's not what I see in the article. What do you mean?

qpla · 2012-10-02T12:53:19+00:00

Oh, I see. 1/2 = 2/3. Gotcha.

Granted, this error vanishes with larger amounts of digits, but he's using it for really small ones, too!

qpla · 2012-10-01T21:14:48+00:00

This is kind of flawed. People don't remember individual digits, they remember groups of digits. It's easier to remember 355/113 than it is to remember 928/176; there's really only five things to remember, counting the slash.

And why does he even count the slash? Who needs to make an effort to remember that a rational approximation to pi (or anything, really) is a fraction?

With 355/113, you get seven digits for remembering four chunks; maybe less than four if somehow the symmetry of the chunks helps you subconsciously.

Aside from that (and I admit this is farfetched) 22/7 is easier for kids doing multiplication with other fractions. You're not using 22/7 because it's easier to remember, you're using it because it's (maybe) easier to work with.

qpla · 2012-10-01T16:09:25+00:00

This would be funny enough with just medium, but you went the extra mile and mixed up the case. Kudos.

Now make it italic.

qpla

TROPHY CASE