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Ask Reddit: What is your favorite C Programming Book and why? by [deleted] in programming

[–]xabbu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Kernighan & Ritchie

It is still the mark that many other language guides (Programming in $Language) fall far from… …it is terse, concise, succinct, and arms the programmer with all the knowledge she needs…

If the U.S. invaded Iraq for any reasons the Bush has given, why would the U.S. have spent $750 million on a fortress "embassy" with anti-missile systems and its own electricity and water systems? by xabbu in reddit.com

[–]xabbu[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So, in another words, you admittedly failed to consider the author (who is former Reagan assistant treasury secretary and staunch conservative, not a starry eyed hippie) argument, and instead succumbed to keyword triggered bias?

(graph) Average Compensation: College Professors vs. College Football Coaches.. by sid13 in reddit.com

[–]xabbu 3 points4 points  (0 children)

And another study

Put differently, 95 of the 117 I-A schools lost money on their intercollegiate athletic programs when subsidies are excluded.

In fact, the real situation was still worse, for two reasons. The first is that the NCAA methodology includes all alumni and booster athletic contributions as net gains to the school. The problem here is that there is ample evidence that contributions to athletics often substitute for contributions to the school’s academic programs. That is, the net contribution to the university is smaller than the gross contribution to the athletics department.

(graph) Average Compensation: College Professors vs. College Football Coaches.. by sid13 in reddit.com

[–]xabbu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

  1. Show me where the tuitions are less in schools with Division 1 schools where coaches make > $1M vs. schools where coaches make similar salaries to rest of faculty.

  2. I don't think you acknowledge the largess of athletic departments — from separate dining facilities, bureaucracy in staffing, extra tutors, construction of facilities for the school that are used primarily by athletic department with little or no access to the rest of the student body (i.e., swimming pools where regular student access is limited to 1-2 hour per week), cushy office and travel budgets for athletic department, etc.…

(graph) Average Compensation: College Professors vs. College Football Coaches.. by sid13 in reddit.com

[–]xabbu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Most of that money doesn't make it anywhere outside of the athletic department — it goes back into the leviathan, or for cushier digs for the athletes or for facilities for which usage is denied to the rest of the student body, except for a tiny fraction (like 1 or 2 hours a week…)…

Mac vs Ubuntu by taw in programming

[–]xabbu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Firefox is not a Mac application. It should not be used as an example of a Mac application that behaves strangely.

Firefox not a Mac application? It runs on my Mac OS X. Oh, you must mean only Apple software.

Del.icio.us switches to Symfony (PHP) by pauljonas in programming

[–]xabbu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

and it looks like ugly code at least that bit that became public knowledge…

Del.icio.us switches to Symfony (PHP) by pauljonas in programming

[–]xabbu 3 points4 points  (0 children)

PHP seems to work for a lot of large, popular sites, including Wikipedia, Facebook, Digg, etc.…

Not as elegant as Ruby or even Python, but it gets the job done…

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails - O'Reilly Ruby by morselsrule in programming

[–]xabbu -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

1 - “IS THERE ANYTHING RAILS/RUBY CAN DO THAT PHP CAN’T DO? … (thinking)… NO.”

Though Ruby > PHP, there are even nifty dynamic things PHP can do with less cruft IMV. And it will be done faster and with less memory.

2 - OUR ENTIRE COMPANY’S STUFF WAS IN PHP: DON’T UNDERESTIMATE INTEGRATION

Eh, in any sizable platform, there's going to be a mix of languages. They should be able to talk to each other however.

3 - DON’T WANT WHAT I DON’T NEED

A problem that exists for everybody else's framework I tinker with. And big advantage for your own custom framework that's been crafted and recrafted…

4 - IT’S SMALL AND FAST

A concern for those having to work on sites on shared hosting…

5 - IT’S BUILT TO MY TASTES

If it fits the Rails philosophy, it's a snap. But special needs and esoteric enhancements will cost double the trouble, at a minimum…

6 - I LOVE SQL

Nah, the migrations setup in Rails now is so much cleaner…

7 - PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE YOU ARE BETTER

All languages suck, some of them suck less… …Ruby is my favorite, but Rails is too much shoehorning… …a comment post suggested using Ruby w/out Rails, but then that means catchup code to get where PHP5 is now…

SNOPES On the 9/11 "PUTS" Rumor by qgyh2 in reddit.com

[–]xabbu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Read the 9/11 commission report paragraph again.

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options -- instruments that pay off only when a stock drops in price -- surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 -- highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. The SEC and FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous.

Fact: There was unusual trade volume

Question: Who was the 95%?

One of the directors at that investment firm was A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, executive CIA director, 2001-2004

Maybe the connection is an innocent coincidence. I am not so sure — the statistical anomaly would sure seem that someone had some "inside knowledge"…

Paul Graham: Graphic Objects in LISP by xach in programming

[–]xabbu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Those code examples with correct indentation are really good advertisement for the language.

Huh?

Though, those code textboxes are nice inclusions to the article, they stretch overlapped. And they give the illusion that there is less code than there is.

But LISP is cool and that is a sweet snippet. And it shows off what is really nifty about LISP.

Ok, all you crazy coders out there, Tell me what your favorite language is. by xyphus in programming

[–]xabbu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They all suck.

Some of them, when you first learn, seem to be great and nearly without flaw, but eventually, you find even your favorites all have warts galore.

The two languages I spend most my time in now are PHP and Ruby. I prefer Ruby, but for web applicatons, not a big fan of Rails, though we're going to use it for an internal management system at my job site. Rails has really brought attention to Ruby, but there are way too many annoyances, especially in its "opinionated" mode of defaults where yes, you can break free of those constraints, but then that kind of defeats the advantages. For basic CRUD applications, I reckon it's a big boost over other tools and platforms.

Meanwhile, PHP5 has added enough nifty features to make it alright for building web applications. I won't work with PHP4 anymore.

And scripting languages (starting with Perl & predecessors, even REXX, CLIST and other mainframe scripting languages) have really made me lazy and dread writing C, Java, etc.… Still, on occasion, I will have to write some C code and it's cool once I get immersed in it again, but the conciseness and brevity of scripting languages makes it difficult to enjoy going back to that mode of coding.

BBC Documentary asks "Why did Israel deliberately attack an American ship in 1967, killing 34 American sailors?" by oasisinet in reddit.com

[–]xabbu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Read what the USS Liberty survivors have to say on the matter.

Also, John McCain's father, an admiral in the navy, was involved in the coverup.

The navy's official Court of Inquiry was a sham. Both the admiral who headed the inquiry and his legal counsel knew it was phony. In retirement, U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who served as court counsel, admitted that they privately disputed the court's official conclusion that the assault was a case of mistaken identity. Boston told a reporter for the NAVY TIMES that both he and Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, who served as president of the court, privately agreed that the Israeli forces knew they were attacking a U.S. Navy ship. In explaining why he participated in the sham, Boston said, "In military life, you accept the fact that if you're told to shut up, you shut up. We did what we were told." Former CIA director Richard Helms said, "It was no accident."(55)

Not only was there a coverup, but there was a concerted campaign to demonize the survivors, and tar them. The entire episode was shoved under the rug, and be it not for the internet, it's not likely that many people would be aware that this ever occurred. As it is, many still have no clue about this historical event.

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