BugBrother

>>it looks decently typical for a Scandinavian city at its latitude.

I did write "Sweden", not Stockholm, so yes.

(Sure, north Sweden is a different subject.)

(I had fun on Facebook yesterday when the Finns told about their snow. :-) It is very uncommon in June.)

Edit: To move inside Scandinavia isn't really moving to a foreign country, Dewie. I lived in Helsinki a few years, really nice but it was disappointingly non-exotic.

Edit 2: And for Norwegian weather -- check climate of Bergen for rain. (That said, a wonderful city to live.)

I would expect them to not like it, but I assume the people in Copenhagen laugh a lot. :-)

Frankly, the best thing with coming from Sweden is that you get better weather wherever you move (except Iceland, Greenland -- and England). :-)

That said, I'd like to be more in .se in the summers than I can do now. It is so beautiful with the light, the forests and the lakes.

Edit: I don't mind the cold, but: For yellowapple and others -- the lack of sun influences your hormone levels, people are a bit different in the winter. I was amazed when I saw discussion of SAD among Californians; up in Scandinavia, it is just how it is. I didn't even note it, unless I went on a winter vacation.

I assume you talk about the winter?

If you live in a city, the bicycle roads will be plowed regularly. Get a wind stopping jacket and pullover for your trousers. Use two pair of gloves. (You will get warm from bicycling, don't use a too warm jacket.)

And use winter tires for the bicycle, they are pure magic.

Swedes are generally shyer to start talking to people we don't know than e.g. the Irish (or Danes). It takes longer to get friends. This is not only bad.

The Finns are, well, more Swedish than the Swedes. :-) While partying they are more open than Swedes, which makes partying a bit "too" fun, your mileage will vary.

The main problem with Stockholm is rather getting someplace to live. (Probably partly from lobbying and partly from political Moment-22 problems. The press seems to dependent on the political parties to analyze too much...)

(These are generalizations, but they are hard not to make after living in a few places and talking to a bunch of people that moved to Sweden.)

Uh, Aluminium/air batteries are one time use (not "rechargeable", rather replaceable) or there is major new chemistry. See my other comment re Al smelting and energy/CO2.

Edit: This is discussed in the previous thread, abalone posted a link to it.

It seems that the Al smelter generates lots of CO2, so greenhouse effects might just be moved closer to hydropower plants... :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting

Edit: It would be interesting to see how much Al (not total weight of the system) is used/km. According to wikipedia there should be about 1.5 mol CO2/CO per mol Al created (depends on how the process is tuned). Car ads declare how much CO2/km they release, right? Anyone know their car engines? (I live in a city center and only drive on vacation.)

Edit 2: This Al energy source is cool, but what everyone here really want is some hard data comparing it to a normal hybrid energy in costs, how easy it is to use and (maybe also) greenhouse effects. That the articles doesn't discuss that is probably a good answer.

(You wrote it a day later, so I didn't see it for a while.)

Disclaimer: I don't know much about media on sports and even less about the US media and sports.

But if you check Russia's Putin-controlled media, they insist that the slant is anti-Russian in all democracies. Which is a conspiracy theory.

Remember, we are talking about a junta which "can't" lose an election.

Well, not really relevant for either Modern Perl or my point.

(Or that it gets a bit old after a few hundred times on HN, now with newly created accounts. No one want anyone to do the same for other subjects.)

Mid 90s? 20 years ago, just after the release of Perl 5 and before everything else? I understand your opinion... :-)

Old trolling is respected?

Something like religion then, were people hearing voices long ago got followers -- but today generally are locked up? :-)

It would have been bad, if the design had been stupid enough to not make declarations file/package based... :-)

What sane defaults are will change over the years.

Perl kept amazing backwards compatibility by adding extra statements to modify how it worked. So "use strict;", "use warnings;" and "use <other_newer_perl_features>;".

Both new code -- using the best OO system of the scripting languages, extendable syntax, etc, etc -- will run at the same time as most of the old and crufty stuff from before testing took over after the Millennium.

Account literally created a few minutes before posting.

YALT -- yet another languagewar troll.

OK, some more specifics...

For the strange opinions you just don't find -- e.g. conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media.

Then there were claims about Ukrainian right wing extremists (which got really few votes in the last election) and other strange things you only see in Putin's media.

Arguments were often just not relevant for Sweden. Like "but what about USA in Iraq" -- that only works in USA (and maybe Britain), if that. Even the Swedes that condemn the Iraq invasion, not so few, of course have no problems ALSO condemning that Russia starts to treat Europe like Hitler in the 1930s; military threats, destabilisation, annexations etc.

The Russians avoids all questions about where they were writing from and none claimed to not be Russian. If it was proved where they came from (e.g. logs from the proxies they use, or something), it would automatically be news in Sweden.

Then we have the obvious bad Swedish, the first month a lot seemed to be from Google Translate. The bad voting scraping (one comment posted a bit down in a comment tree -- 10-15 top votes in seconds; never happened otherwise).

I also posted a couple of links here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214

And so on...

Edit: And about a state's trolling/astroturfing being high quality: First, note the low quality of conspiracy theories from Putin's junta. The personal envoy of Putin, Sergej Markov, yesterday claimed that Sweden, Poland, Finland and the Baltics had Russophobia -- and threatened with a new World War if the countries joined NATO!! And other crazy stuff. That was worse than before 1991 -- and note that it wasn't for internal consumption by Russians only reading Putin's media! Also, see that about starting with Google Translate. There are lots of quite small languages in Western Europe. How do you to a reasonable cost quickly find enough people that know Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, etc, etc? Then you have to train them (or give them stuff to translate and post).

Edit 2: I hope the above is readable. Ask otherwise, I might have the energy to continue.

Edit 3: The main difference compared to spam is that spam has much less resources, it is much less work intensive. There are maybe one message per 100K receivers. With astroturfing in the end, most (probably not all) comments will be at least partly written individually. If the same comment is posted in many places, e.g. something like Disqus can detect them directly (or Google, for that matter).

The problem with biological attacks is that the agent can be designed for years, then spread quickly and the process to stop it after it has been spread is hard; the virus/bacteria has to be found, analysed and then some specific solution/treatment must be found/designed. In days or weeks.

That is why I selected biological methods as an example. There will of course probably be many other areas where it might be easier to make an attack than to defend against one.

My point was -- this discussion will almost certainly get more intense, because of more extreme threats. [In some areas, the technological development will make it harder for the attackers, in others it will be much easier. And attackers choose how they attack.]

Edit: Clarity.

The point is, this will obviously get much more dangerous -- not better. We have only seen the start of this discussion.

Edit: A bit of bad humor: As an old misanthrope which had to accept that all humanity's problems seems to get solved soon (energy from solar or fusion in a few decades, electric cars, better health, etc, etc) it is good to think everything is back to normal! Jingoism from nuclear states (Russia, China and soon Iran) and an impossibility to have humane, liberal societies... "The Road", here we come! :-)

>> I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people.

Always nice to find a kindred soul. :-) But I really prefer people I don't agree with, arguing teaches me more.

>> A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it.

There was a story on HN recently about CIA (NSA? Some TLA) wanting an irony/sarcasm detector. C Stross had lots of fun with it. I guess such a detector would need a full damn General AI -- and probably not even that is enough.

Some form of accredited user accounts (HN/slashdot style) could vote for if something should be flagged. I can't see anything better, really.

Re the Russian subject, I saw these on FB some time ago:

http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-rus...

Edit: On consideration, re a detector: This is a type of spam, the comments seem to be written and then translated. The problem is that detectors need to recognize new comments/angles at least every week, maybe more than once a day. And quite quickly it would be rewritten to fool the detectors. I don't believe in automation here, but please prove me wrong.

This is a minor problem now, but it will get much worse if you consider technical development.

Every individual gets more and more power and capabilities with time. In not too many decades, hackers will be able to design bacteria for hobby at home, even if they probably will send for a lab to synthesize the DNA etc. Now, it is still quite expensive to make artificial life.

Consider North Korea and the possibility of a biological analogue to the Stuxnet virus...

Without a 1984 surveillance state, you need some form of immune handling -- everyone as their own bubble boy or intelligent analysis of bacteria/viruses (and hoping that Stuxnet vectors are only oriented towards military installations).

At that time, NSA surveillance like today will literally be trying to stop something as bad as terrorist nuclear weapons. You can't argue analogues about how much liberty costs, since there might not be anyone left to enjoy liberty, if NSA of the 2030s-2040s fail...

I have no clue how to solve this.

That was a not particularly subtle example the other way? :-)

Not that it really is relevant, but the other side in that conflict gets a very good showing in Swedish.

(E.g. Pallywood or torture between Palestinian groups were straight out censored in Swedish media. Swedes in general have no clue that more Jews were kicked out from the moslem world -- just for their religion, not in a civil war -- than the number of Palestinians which fled/was kicked out. And so on. You can fall off your chair laughing if you follow the Swedish news re Mideast in parallel with BBC/NY Times, which is the main reason I know anything about the subject.)

To make a modest proposal, there is a business idea here.

Putin's junta has the Swedish (and other minority languages) comment fields filled up with propaganda.

The Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions (even the left wing extremists in Sweden are upset by 1930s style destabilisation and overtaking of areas in Europe).

But at least half the problem is the obviously bad language idioms etc. You can't just translate arguments and use them in all cultural environments. Also, the fake upvotes for the media which accept them are clunky and obvious. It is just not competently done astroturf.

All this goes for Chinese and Iranian political astroturfing etc as well.

To sell high quality astroturf as a service in different countries should be worth lots of money. Even big countries like Russia struggle to organize the service competently, then they have part time employees which aren't specialized.

Edit: I assume that e.g. China, if they don't go democratic, later will add a minority language/culture as work requirement for their armies -- note plural -- of censors. So there is a window of opportunity before some junta implement this and sell the service to other dictators and equally moral companies.

(For anyone missing the "modest proposal", this is tongue in cheek. At least mostly.)

Edit: Fixed clarity etc.

Isn't that part of an SQL standard (1999?).

As late as 2004? I didn't know that.

'acdha' (in the brother comment) wrote what I meant with "spotty" better and more pedagogical than I ever could. :-)

As bad? I might have had smarter coworkers at different times... :-)

I thought the Unicode support was still spotty (< 3.X)? Or you mean the support is better than in PCRE?

I've cursed over Python's backtracking, at least a few years back. (Why can't they just use PCRE? :-( Any advantage at all?)

Huh, PCRE is universal (almost, not in e.g. Emacs :-( ) and supports (almost) everything?

Edit: Cough, after rechecking... PCRE is not as universal as I thought. It seems I've been lucky. :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_regular_expressio...

Edit 2: "Atomic groups" on that wikipedia link is when you can write a full grammar in a large regexp, right? Answer myself: No, it is the name for stopping backtracking. I've seen it as named "possessive" (perldoc perlre).

>>understanding Obj-C was never the hard part.

It seems important for traction to make the beginning learning curve non-steep. See PHP, Python, etc.

Not really.

I'm no expert (as I wrote), but afaik the app install process (iTunes style) is sidetracked by running a program to install an App on your trusted computer.

Then you run the app.

I only use iTunes when I update the music on the iPhone, not programs. I assume most people do the same these days. (iOS 5?)

(But certainly, there is a possibility here -- maybe iTunes might tell the iDevice to update an application without informing the user? I can't say, Objective C was too much like Java for me. :-) I don't keep music on the iPad, so that is no problem.)

I reluctantly don't jailbreak my iPhone/iPad despite that I of course want shell, emacs, Perl, etc on all my devices.

This is because I want to feel safe with my i.* things while using my bank applications and buying stuff from iTunes.

I am happy to hear that works well.

So maybe I shouldn't be scared of losing all life quality every time I use a knife in the kitchen. :-)