BugBrother

Cough... five comments and no one wonder about the possibility of shooting at drones with this rifle?

My first reaction was that it reads to be about American culture (and wonder if 'schrodinger' is Swedish, racism accusations are used as often as "hej" these days).

My second reaction is trying to replace 'white' with 'black'. Also, considering the heterogeneity of different parts of USA...

OK, racist.

>> The ingredients in cigarettes are what actually make nicotine addictive

Uh, that sounds wrong.

"Snus" users get addicted. That is tobacco, even if it isn't burned. But afaik, users of e-cigarettes also get dependent -- that isn't tobacco.

About Bangladesh -- I was really shocked when I first learned of The Enemy Property Act:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vested_Property_Act_%28Banglade...

The shock was less that they implemented it, then that I had never heard of it. During the time it was active, my home country gave a large amount of foreign aid to Bangladesh -- while a subgroup (Hindus) was treated more or less like Jews in 1930s Germany.

This was interesting. Do you have a good overview or only papers as references?

(Not doubting, interested. I have heard quite a few stories from Indian friends about their (female) relatives running away to marry the wrong religion, both muslim and hindu. But India is a special case, if anything is.)

Edit: Thanks!

I don't disagree, of course. All countries started out with dictators and juntas. (We called them kings in the Western world.) There should be a second movers advantage. Most of the clan cultures are gone at least, right?

Edit: Hmm... OK watwut -- the dictators have second movers advantage too? It seems to me that the reason evil juntas get fewer is that without an open society (which is hard without democracy) a country won't get above a certain economic level. The "Resource curse" counteract that and won't end in the Middle East until oil isn't critical.

Cough, the Sykes Picot was from 1916.

It sounds more like the standard way a dictator blame everyone else -- except their corrupt practices and oppression -- to explain why his country is a POS.

Hell, even the traditional scapegoat is officially used, with reprints of Zion's protocols and outright anti semitism in officially sanctioned media.

I.e. the same as we had in the west a few decades to centuries ago. (See kings, dictators, et al.)

Edit: Also, the article do touch the Western influence after the centuries of Turkish oppression, without using "Sykes Picot": "In much of the Arab world the colonial powers continued to control or influence events until the 1960s. Arab countries have not yet succeeded in fostering the institutional prerequisites of democracy—the give-and-take of parliamentary discourse, protection for minorities, the emancipation of women, a free press, independent courts and universities and trade unions."

Edit 2: That was quick down votes. :-)

Edit 3: I never argued that it wasn't a mixed picture -- England was early -- and that some were less primitive than my home country, rayiner.

>> Why is that?

<Cough> Obviously because I'm blind? :-) Thanks.

>> How can you fix [X] without breaking almost all existing [Y] code?

For most cases of X, some form of declaration that is scope bound.

Look at e.g. Perl, it changes quickly in this way, with very good backwards compatibility. [Also see strict mode, of course.]

Edit: That said, new keywords like those let/const/module/extends etc should work fine. Please give me them today.

Edit 2: I have been cursing the lack of multiple returns this week. It is a pain returning a hash/object or an array. That really isn't supported, from browsing the standard? :-(

Why should I define democracy, chemical entropy or anything else which I am not an expert on -- and lots of academics have put much time and energy into defining?

Look up democracy index and freedom index on wikipedia, which I referenced.

Russia has fallen a lot further on the central ones of those, as I wrote. I asked if that ALSO was a Western conspiracy, which the Russian media are full of.

The POINT was -- the paid Russian propagandists aren't allowed to write that. They mostly go away.

It seems the whole internet quality suffers, not only HN, from those Russian astroturf trolls in most languages.

(Israel is not only beside the point -- as I've heard it described, if you put three Israelis in a room you'll find at least four hard opinions on most any subject. :-) The same goes for the media. In general, democracies put under pressure from terrorism aren't pretty: By definition, terrorism scares the voters. That results in that the governments throw out the law books, because they want to get reelected. See Germany, USA, Italy, Israel, Britain, etc.)

Sorry, missed the answer. How can quick tests to see that API (and internal stuff) work not be Unit tests? :-)

But sure, it is a discussion of what we should call the useful tests. I have (also) burned out on > 80% coverage for tests when the specifications aren't written in stone.

So you refuse to criticize the Putin junta for being non democratic? Thanks, that is all I need for an opinion about you.

[I guess it is time for you to use another account to lower the HN quality? :-( A quick browsing through your comment hostory is mostly USA criticism and pro-dictators, mainly Russia. Very little to none of programming or development. ]

How is the weather in Moscow, by the way? (St Petersburg? Some military base somewhere?)

>>Tempering influence? Are you serious? Is it tempering to overthrow governments

"Tempering influence" was specifically about Gaza.

But you know that.

>>100,000 casualties in Iraq

First, let me note I am not defending the Iraq invasion. Not because I cares about the rights of evil juntas, but because it was so badly managed it even increased the suffering.

Second, those in Iraq were mainly killed in a civil war by people also trying to kill Americans. It is not trivial to blame Americans for that...

I think you know that, too.

About drone strikes -- both the Pakistani and Yemeni governments accepted them. In Pakistan unofficially, because the extremists targets polticians/media/etc with the "wrong" opinions.

I think you know that, third...

Etc.

Edit: I might add that I'm not American. Please keep personal attacks relevant at least, propagandist.

I ask one question to recognize astroturfing from the Putin junta:

If you check the larger democracy indexes, they have started to show Russia as "authoritarian" now, i.e. not democratic at all.

Is that a Western conspiracy?

First, let me note that it isn't really relevant to complain about a second party as "answer" to criticism of a first one.

Check http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grozny_ballistic_missile_atta...

Or other information about Russian atrocities in that war. (The whole point with drones is that they are pinpoint attacks, with relatively low civilian casualities.)

And USA is a tempering influence, re Gaza. Consider what would happens if Finland or a Baltic country used rocket artillery against St Petersburg? No, better to not consider that... (shudder.)

The same goes for most of your other examples.

I am not arguing against the integration test point, but I do see a value in unit tests.

When I write/modify a piece of code, I of course must see so it works. I run the new code, feed in some data and see the results.

If I separate UI and backend/model, I can just write code that feed data to the model to see so it works (instead of doing it ad hoc, by hand). Then I save that as a unit test. It is part of the documentation too (a use case).

Cheap, easy and with good value for effort. (Depending on problem domain.)

Edit: I can see where the "test induced design damage" comes from, mocking is bad, but I think code also often get better when it is made testable (dep injection, think about fan out/in, etc)

Blocks could be allowed in one liners. That would make Python a credible solution in that use case.

(And yes, not all one liners need it. I know.)

And list comprehensions seems like a kludge from a lack of real lambdas (map). So that is an extra concept.

Edit: Ruby doesn't have closures?!

Edit 2: 2nd paragraph of the linked article: "In Ruby, Objective-C, and C, functions are not first-class objects, they don't capture closures, and they can't be defined inline." For Ruby, that don't claim there are no closures at all. Got it.

Frankly, perpetual unpaid(?) support reads like a Nigeria letter... :-(

What are the business backgrounds of the ones organizing the competition?

Ah yes, gamma ray bursts got less common because of changing star formation rates? Really interesting.

I had missed the full argument. [Embarrassing :-)] The one I had seen was that closer to the galaxy centre there would be a higher frequency of supernovas per cubic light year, while too far out there would be too little of the heavier elements from supernovas.

See my parallel answer to 'molbioguy'. I would argue against your point (mainly, you don't need that with icbms + fusion bombs; more than a factor of ten in killing the enemy is a waste of money), but it isn't relevant to my point regarding the Fermi paradox.

Yes, but that isn't relevant.

Maybe 10-90% of technological species do make themselves extinct by a nuclear war or an environmental catastrophe. It isn't enough. To explain the Fermi paradox needs a big killer, like an innocent looking physics experiment that sterilizes a solar system.

My point was that we could already be more than a one planet civilization. So all the eggs aren't in one basket.

To be clear: That we already could be an interplanetary culture implies that _if_ there is a big killer that explains the Fermi paradox, it is either big enough to take out a solar system -- or it is behind us.

The next stop for spreading to the galaxy would be to get outside the solar system. The good part is that the Oort cloud etc is a good training stop over. And it would also insulate humanity there from what happens closer to the sun.

(And directly a civilization is interstellar, then it really are multiple cultures (communication lag etc). Those will at least partly be "evolved"/selected for tendency to spread.)

Lots of other people since at least Fermi discussed time scales for spreading in a galaxy, it is an old discussion. If you really can't find good references comment and I'll check the usual suspects for references (centauri-dreams.org).

It might easily have gone the other way. The Orion project lost out largely due to politics. If we had built those, we'd probably have an industrial infrastructure in space by now.

So, assume only one of ten civilizations take the expanding choice early. That is still not enough to explain the Fermi paradox.

Unrelated rant/argument:

As a civilization we should publicise "anti heroes" as much as heroes. Those who e.g. destroy something beautiful for short sighted political votes.

Not just the politicians which destroyed our space future. Another example is the present political leaders in Iraq which seems to have caused a war just because they wanted to steal more without interruptions. Would they have done that if they knew their children and grand children would be in the news when their private jets land somewhere? ("Blood billionaires land in XXX, all better restaurants take a holiday. Sorry honest rich people".)

Edit: About the Fermi paradox -- the simplest answer ought to be that there are ET probes somewhere in the solar system and probably with lots of sensors floating around. The scary part is that they don't talk to us; that implies they are studying us and will clean the local infestation out before it spreads from the solar system.

Edit 2: The full argument (I didn't see it in the article?) is that there almost certainly will be lots of civilizations in the galaxy. We have no idea if we are among the first ten or among the second thousand. So statistics say we should probably be in the middle -- there are lots before we existed, we just can't detect them.

I'd settle for new subjects from the trolls, the present ones make tired reddit jokes look good.

Anyway, I thought Guido told 'em to stop, since they're getting a bad reputation?

Sigh, here we go again. :-(

Better OO than the competing scripting languages, CPAN still beats any opposition (check CPAN testers), extensible syntax(!) etc.

And... you don't lose a hype war if you didn't really play it.

And some of all those important specializations have only a few dozens workers on the whole planet...

iirc, he counted the minimum population for a civilization like ours at 100 million. The implications for space explorations are not good.

But not even Stross had any real opinions on how this will change with advanced 3D-printing.

I am an Emacs guy, but even I know that vim do support ctags?!

That blog post reads like a rant, do the author really know anything?

>>For example, Perl's large family of built-in variables with bizarre symbols for names

There has been "use English;" since at least Perl 5.8, which is about a decade old iirc.

Let me expand on what I think is the point of the GP:

I hate operator overloading myself, but at the same time I'm also certain there are use cases where it is a big win. (I assume it is in Swift because it could be motivated well.)

You'll have to specify coding standards anyway -- and make certain that they are followed. Just add a paragraph about having to get a senior developer's signature on any use of operator overloading, on pain of needing to update the CV.

It seems I stepped on some sensitive (Norwegian?) toes here by a sloppy formulation seeming to imply that Sweden == Scandinavia. :-)

If so, I am sorry about your national pride. The countries and weather are really similar, especially from my present viewpoint from far to the south.

(And if you're just a troll wasting people's time, get a life kid.)

Edit: It seemed from other comments you are Norwegian, so I assumed you knew all about the local weather. (I.e. similar, maybe a bit warmer and more rain in Norway, depending on exactly where.)

Or you might not want to mix the people you play Diplomacy with and your friends. :-)

I love the game in theory, but I felt too bad after backstabbing people. (So if we ever play, trust me! :-) )

It was shocking to realize how wimpy I really am.