bazoom42

Stored procedures are great for bulk data processing. SQL natively operates on sets, so pretty silly to pass a dataset over the wire for processing it iteratively in a less efficient language, and then transfer the resultset back to the database.

Like any tool, you just have to understand when to use it and when not to.

As far back as we have written records, we have the notion that people in past were better and more honest and the present day is corrupted.

Classical antiquity had the notion of a lost golden age and a heroic age in past, while later times considered the classical antiquity as the lost golden age. Victorians romanticized the middle ages, while we romantisize the victorians.

It is just easier to see the flaws and imperfections in the present. And there is the survivorship bias: Quality products and buildings survive, while low quality crap is destroyed and lost. The swords survive but the pointy sticks are lost. The good music survive but the crap is forgotten.

Why COBOL?

So which one is the quickest to learn? I think Python is easy to learn and C++ is hard, and Scheme is easy and Haskell hard.

> I would first ask what happened such that Denmark owns Greenland in the first place

I think there is some misunderstanding of the issue here. While Greenland isn’t fully independent, many domains, including social services and child protective services in Greenland are managed by Greenland itself, not by Denmark.

But the controversial tests described in the article did not happen in Greenland - They happened in Denmark, but they were considered unfairly biased aginst Greenlandic parents living in Denmark.

The article is about tests administered in Denmark by the Danish authorities. Greenland has its own child protective services ran by Greenlanders, presumably with a better cultural understanding of their own citizens (although cultural differences and different languages does also exist inside of Greenland).

> we all know what education social workers get, ie. 6 months of legendarily easy theory with zero tests.

Social worker is a 3 1/2 year education in Denmark.

Just to clarify, this is about Greenlanders living in Denmark, not about Greenlanders in Greenland.

What about child sexual abuse? Unfortunately many Greenlandic children are victims of sexual abuse.

Note this is not about what happens in Greenland, it is about Greenlanders living in Denmark.

No, it is in Denmark. The stories are about Greenlanders living in Denmark.

> Now it has become the highest-priced comic book ever sold, fetching $9.12m (£7m) at auction.

Who knows, but some comic books characters like Batman and Spider-man are bigger that ever, while others like Tarzan is losing relevance.

Why? Similar comics have been sold for upwards of 6 mill, and this one is better graded.

Your scheme involves getting a fake appraisal for a value higher than the market price. But this does not explain high prices at an auction.

In movies, the characters go through some experiences in order to learn something. You can’t just tell them the thing they have to learn.

While movies usually are not realistic, that part is often true.

This is an even crazier claim. Modern art was created by Braque, Picasso, Duchamp, and many others, primarily in Europe, and it was established as a major artistic movement a long time before CIA existed.

The more realistic claim is that CIA promoted abstract expressionism which is a primarily American 1950s art movement which is of course a sub-movement in modern art.

They didn’t “establish” abstract expresssionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture. It was not like CIA developed art or jazz musicians in a lab, they just realized it was great marketing for US culture, especially as communist-bloc art and culture became increasingly bland and conformist.

It was probably one of the best investments CIA ever made.

A charitable interpretation would be he critizises e.g JavaScripts silent type coercion which can hide silly mistakes, compared to e.g Python which will generally throw an error in case of incompatible types.

Clearly there is some contradiction if you claim the first chapter in a book is the “zeroth” chapter but the first man on the moon in the first man.

So you agree it is a strawman?

It is a strawman because nobody actually equates the ease of programming with the ease of making undetected mistakes.

OK but I’m not sure I get your point then. Are you saying Edwin Aldrin was the first man on the moon because Neil Armstrong was the zeroth?

Can’t you just do the xslt transformation server-side? Then you can use the newest and best xslt tools, and the output will work in any browser, even browsers that never had any built-in xslt support.

The 1x1 pixel gif hack arrived shortly after Netscape 1.1 introduced tables. I belive this was before colored text and tiled backgrounds became available. So the hack is definitely part of the “golden age” of web design.

The patient-0 terminology arose from a misreading of the label patient-O, where O is the letter O.

When numbering discrete elements you usually start with 1, so first is 1, second is 2 etc.

Indexes in C are not ordinal numbers though, they should be thought of as offsets or distances from the first element. So [0] is 0 steps away from the first element, hence the first element. The confusion arise when you think these indices are actually ordinal numbers.

It is just a classical Dijkstra strawman - hiding a weak argument behind painting everybody else as idiots. In fact it is much easier to make dangerous undetected mistakes in C than it is in Python.

It is a bit like architecture is just physics or painting is just chemistry. Technically true in some reductionist sense, but not necessarily the most useful way to think about it.

And Dijkstras argument is actually quite weak if you read carefully. But he has a certain way of writing which make it seem almost like a mathematical proof. And then he sprinkles some “only smart people agree with me” nerd baiting.

It is not obviously correct. The unstated premise is that programming is - or should be - similar to writing mathematical proofs.