entropy_

The iPhone definitely did not definitely did not bring tons of people to computing for the first time. By the time the iPhone came out PCs and laptops were pretty much in every home anyway. Let me put it this way, I live in a third world country(Lebanon), and the first time we had a computer at home was in 1996(11 years before the iPhone), and by that point most of my friends in school already had a PC at home. We were not wealthy by any measure(more like lower to middle class at the time).

The iPhone did many things, but that is not one of them. No, what brought computing to the masses was Windows and cheap computers(around the time of the 486~pentium era). While I agree that nowadays it's common for a child's first interaction with computers to be a smartphone, this was definitely not the case when the iPhone was first introduced in 2007 and access to computers was already quite common and cheap everywhere around the world

True, though it's definitely nice to see how that discussion didn't descend into poo-flinging. The poster replied to the criticism and the critic conceded that it would indeed be useful, even for linux users :-)

Quoting(emphasis mine):

"In March, Insys launched a multinational study of 190 children to evaluate cannabidiol as a first-line therapy for infantile spasms"

That does seem to be the solution being pursued it seems

I come from a family of 4 children, but there was a single child nonetheless because we're 3 boys close to each other in age, then a large gap, then a girl. My parents say that in the case of my sister some things were a lot harder because she'd be a lot more prone to being bored and needing entertainment or to being driven over to one of her friends' place. Whereas in the case of us boys all they'd have to do is set us loose in the backyard with a ball(or teach us a boardgame, etc...) and enjoy their peace and quiet until the next meal time.

I'm now experiencing this with my own children to some extent. We have 2 kids so far, a 4 year old boy and a 1 year(and a couple months) old girl. They both wake up around 6:30 in the morning. And whereas before that meant that I'd never get to sleep in past that time, now our son just gathers a bunch of toys, climbs into his sister's crib, and they play until like 8am before they finally get bored and start calling for us. So at least as far as mornings go, 2 kids has proven easier than 1(after that initial 6 months from hell period where you don't get any sleep at all that is)

As others have said, HD is usually not diagnosed until well after you have children. Also, some people can be carriers without actually exhibiting symptoms. It goes like this:

1 - There's a particular sequence of bases that are repeated a certain number of times on a certain chromosome 2 - Below 25 repeats: normal, no HD 3 - 25~35 repeats: no HD but there's a risk of spontaneous increase when generating sperm/ovules 4 - 35+ you have HD with more repeats meaning earlier onset and faster progression

My wife's mother has 40 repeats so she's on the milder side of the spectrum(age of onset ~50 and progression is steady but somewhat slow compared to her brother who started at 38)

Individuals in the 25~35 repeats bracket can have children with HD(especially fathers since it seems that there's a higher incidence of increase for them, for some reason)

In our case, my wife tested for this specifically once we seriously started considering the possibility of marriage and children. I'd decided I'd marry her regardless of the outcome but children were a different question altogether, so in that way I do agree with you, but it's definitely not a solution to the problem in the broad case of HD, but in individual cases where it is known to run in the family some people may choose to not have children if they are diagnosed at an early enough age.

That being said, most people would prefer not to know if they have it when a parent is diagnosed, only ~5% of people at risk actually test for it with the vast majority preferring to live in denial. Humans are weird like that, but having seen firsthand what this did to my wife and her family when her mother was diagnosed I don't think I can really blame someone for not wanting to know. You can't make judgements about something like that until you've been in their shoes

My wife's family has a different disease running through it, though one with very similar outcomes. Huntington's.

It's genetic and dominant (so a parent having it means 50/50 for the children). Average age of onset is 38. Symptoms are a mixture of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (both dementia and motor control issues).

Her uncle was diagnosed at 38, her mother at 50. I wasn't around for the first one, but have been there for most of the latter case (her mother is now 60).

Watching someone you love deteriorate before your eyes and become a different person week by week is one of the most harrowing experiences one can go through.

"You pick up the phone, you talk to your mom, you don’t have to say anything. It’s a mom". My wife had to go through discovering motherhood without that and she still can't adjust to the fact that her mother is not the same person anymore, it's a constant heartbreak.

I'm just glad there's a simple test for this and that both my wife and her one brother tested negative. So I'll never have to go through what Robin did but that possibly was something I had to contemplate for a while and just the thought of it (and those 2 months waiting for the test results) almost broke me

Perhaps we have different definitions of ugly but seems like quite an elegant kludge to me :-)

Just a small correction. The Robber(or Thief) in Catan doesn't allow you to steal half another player's resources, you just steal one card. However, if any player has 8 or more resource cards in their hands when '7' is rolled, they need to discard half rounded down.

I made the mistake of reading Digital Fortress at some point. The entire plot is predicated on the existence of a computer at the NSA that can defeat any encryption through brute force without even knowing the underlying encryption scheme. You give it ciphertext it outputs plaintext. Not satisfied with how ludicrous that is, as in it can be proven impossible by anyone with even a passing familiarity with what encryption is, he also goes into all these actual numbers like it can break 2k long keys in under a second so even using much larger keys it's only a few minutes. Completely ignoring the fact that key spaces grow exponentially with key size and instead assuming it's linear... This is all in the first couple chapters so I'm not even spoiling anything

Researched his books are not... At least that one wasn't, because if he'd consulted even a first year CS student they could've told him it's all wrong.

That whole experience turned me off of Dan Brown books (even though I had previously read Angels and Demons and enjoyed it, knowing his research was so shit in areas I'm knowledgeable in makes it harder to read books about things I'm not because I know I will be coming away with wrong ideas stuck in my head)

The apple store binary format is really horrible when it comes to keeping the size down. Especially if you need to use libraries and whatnot. What it comes down to is this:

1 - The binary format itself isn't very efficient. Compressing it usually yields at least a 50% reduction in final size, often more

2 - Even though .ipa is a zipped format, there's no actual compression on the binary itself because it's encrypted before compression. I have no idea why they do this, I can't perceive any security benefit(Any jailbroken phone can be tooled to output the unencrypted binary. And you can bet anyone trying to reverse engineer your app will be using a jailbroken phone for their work)

Basically, if you're a large company with lots of apps and shared dependencies(Google, Facebook, etc...) doing the "right" thing and writing shared library code across projects ends up bloating your binary size immensely. And since binary size(rather than resources like images) dominate the final app size, you're in trouble if you want to keep app size down.

Source: I work on the iOS app for a music streaming service, despite our best efforts, our app downloadable size is ~35MB(~45MB installed size). Our android counterpart, almost effortlessly has the same app functionality with a 14MB downloadable package(they did some cleaning a while ago and got it down to 10MB at some point). Thing is, if we do proper compression(no binary encryption, single architecture) we end up with a 19MB .ipa file

PS: The compression issue doesn't affect installed size, but I believe the issue here is simply that (1) the binary format they're using is just too damn inefficient by default

At least as far as I'm concerned, the biggest wart of all is variables that are global by default. That just makes no sense at all...

I did that, and it worked for a while, but then the issues were back something like a month later. Adding more padding causes the back panel not to close properly so that's not an option. I'm stuck with the display getting weird every once in a while now(replacement is not an option, the watch is almost 4 years old at this point).

Wasn't aware of that one. Significantly fewer people affected though(I think red-green is something like 10% of males)

Use blue, the most common types of color blindness are red-green issues(there's a really tiny percentage that doesn't perceive colors at all but really really tiny. And other than those, nobody has trouble with blue)

Source: I'm colorblind(protanope) and red would definitely be an issue. Android studio, for example, is really annoying for me because the particular red they use for errors is very hard to distinguish from black

"Ignoring if you push the speeder all the way down, and accelerating the car at an efficient pace instead."

That has the potential to be really dangerous though, at least where I drive(a third world country). If a car doesn't do what you expect it to when you provide a certain input, that's a recipe for disaster.

Did you even read the article? Because what you say is a direct contradiction of the article. The article even explains why the reforms didn't work in the US(TL;DR; they weren't properly implemented) while they did work elsewhere, like Japan which is the example the article uses. Given that their statements are backed by evidence while yours are not, I think I'd rather believe them.

As an aside, no one is saying that there is no place for practice in math teaching. What they're saying is that it needs to be balanced with time spent actually learning the concepts and exploring on your own rather than just practicing and drilling. From the article:

"Similarly, 96 percent of American students’ work fell into the category of “practice,” while Japanese students spent only 41 percent of their time practicing"

Those students still spend just under half their time practicing, which is still significant, just not the overwhelming majority of their time as in the case of American schools.

Some notation systems do exactly that. For example, the notation used for byzantine chanting: http://www.byzantinechant.org/notation/Table%20of%20Byzantin...

That's not true. 5 nines, ie 99.999% uptime means that the maximum downtime in a year is about 315 seconds:

60x60x24x365 x (1 - (99.999/100)) = 315.36

Wikipedia confirms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...

So yes, 2hrs of downtime would most definitely violate the SLA. The 8 hours you refer to is the figure for 3 nines.

How violent an action truly is is irrelevant when deciding whether a murder was premeditated(first degree) or not(second degree). If I swing a hammer at a wall and someone happens to be passing by, I hit them in the face and kill them, it's going to look very gruesome in slow motion. That doesn't mean I intended to kill the person. If a jury is more likely to think I had time to notice the person passing by because of slow motion and thus believe that I intended to kill the person, then that's an error.

Probably not, most, if not all, non-compliant XML/XHTML is either written by hand or by very bad generation tools. In the case of HTML/2 it's a protocol that needs to be implemented by browsers and web servers and there are only so many of those. In the case of XML/XHTML any person throwing up a website or sending a document does the generation with a different set of tools(or by hand)

You are definitely not alone in that. My native language is Arabic, but if I switch my phone or computer to Arabic I wouldn't be able to use it. I dread testing translations of apps I'm working on because it forces me to switch to Arabic. It doesn't help that there's a lot of jargon that just doesn't translate that well. For example, the translation of "Tap" to Arabic is the equivalent of either "Peck" or "Perforate". It's just that that's what's generally agreed on as the proper translation and everybody uses it, however, if I didn't know that it would take me a while to figure it out for myself.

I definitely would like to see an open tournament. My friend and I are going to be participating but neither of us are students. Just doing it for the fun and educational value.

I learned Math in a french-system school and yes, that's definitely a much better notation in my opinion. The difference between [] and () is not immediately clear, whereas [a,b] versus ]a,b[ makes it obvious that one includes a and b while the other does not. It also makes it easy to remember "open" and "closed" and what they mean in terms of whether or not the interval bounds are included or excluded

To me, by far the biggest advantage of generics is that it makes it a whole lot easier to understand function signatures. I develop on both Android and iOS and I can't even begin to count the number of times I've read a function definition, seen that it takes an (NSArray *) as a parameter and had to trudge through 5 layers of indirection(either upwards to find the construction, or downwards to find the use) to figure out what that array is supposed to be filled with. Contrast that with Java on Android, if a function takes a List I can immediately tell what type of list it's expecting. It's true that if the code had proper tests and a good architecture this shouldn't be an issue, but when was that ever the case? You just get handed a git repo your predecessor left and are expected to read the code and understand it.

SEEKING WORK - Remote (Lebanon)

Most of my professional experience has been with mobile development(iOS, Android and openGL ES) but I also have experience with nodeJS, python and C from personal projects. I'm also a polyglot and an avid learner so I will not list all of the technologies and languages I've picked up over the past 10 or so years I've been programming, these are just the ones I have most experience with and could get up and running on immediately.

I'm mainly interested in freelance part-time work(10~20hrs/week) though I might be open to full-time work.

My native language is Arabic but I speak both English and French quite fluently and have excellent communication skills.

I can be reached at raja.e.baz@gmail.com

Honestly, the only thing that has ever been a problem to me in terms of usability as a person with strong protanopia is sites that mess with link highlight colors.

Just leave it up to the browser defaults what color links show up in(visited or not) and all should be fine, I've never had any usability problems aside from this. Actually, no, that's not entirely true, this chart [1] that I saw today is a really bad culprit. I have to focus a lot to distinguish between the "Novels" color and the "Short Stories that appear in First Meetings in the Enderverse" color and even then I'm not 100% sure I can tell.

Honestly though, what I've found is by far worse than websites in terms of color-blind friendliness is games. Lots of games, especially casual ones, where you match things based on color are really hard and sometimes impossible for me to play. Though in this area FOSS games almost always include a color-blind mode of some sort, for which I'm glad.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game_(series)#Chronol...

That's definitely understandable, though I guess a bit sad. Does anyone who's not Polish speak Polish? That hasn't been my experience. I've met a few Polish people and seemed such a foreign language to me(doesn't sound like any European or Slavic language I've ever heard). Does it have any related languages whose speakers would be able to pick it up easily?(such as French/Spanish/Italian for example).

Since you're hiring and working remotely doesn't this severely restrict your hiring pool?

I agree with you on all of the points you listed. However, while all Arabs can understand the formal Arabic perfectly, many struggle to write it or express themselves in it, and that is not just a case of identity crisis.

I consider myself an Arab -- whether I'm proud of that is another issue, but there is not identity crisis. I can understand the news, read the newspaper, official documents, etc, etc, but I would not even dream of replying to a comment in Arabic as I can so easily do in English, and not just because I can't touch-type it, but because I would fail at expressing even simple ideas without a lot of struggling, trying to remember words that differ from the colloquial or(and especially) proper grammar.

While the case of Lebanese people is a bit extreme in this regard, all Arabs are slowly following suit in this regard.

You see, I was not saying that Arabic is so far gone now that nobody uses it, or even that not everybody in the Arab world uses it, that was not the point. I was only commenting on a trend. The parent poster suggested that Arabic was on a course to become dominant worldwide and I find that a laughable idea given the current state of it and its trend(slowly) into oblivion to be replaced by many colloquial languages that simplify the grammar and incorporate foreign languages into it the way this happened with Latin.

You're right, I actually didn't notice that at first. It is weird that Ramsey made a mistake like that, I happen to know the guy(we met when he used to live here) and he does speak Arabic pretty well. He's not like someone with Arab roots who just decided to do a project like that, it's actually a language he speaks.

So yeah, weird.

As a native Arabic speaker, I think you're incredibly wrong about Arabic ever becoming a dominant language world-wide. There are several reasons for this.

First, Arabic itself is an incredibly fragmented language. Almost every country or region that speaks it has its own colloquial version of it which may or may not be mutually intelligible. As a Lebanese person I can understand Syrians fairly easily, Jordanians with a bit of straining and the other person speaking slightly slower than usual, Egyptians with a lot of straining and speaking slowly and Saudis not at all. Theoretically, we could communicate using the formal(written) Arabic, but most people, especially newer generations, tend to suck at that as it's a much more difficult language that's learned only in the context of school and pretty much almost never used outside, at least in Lebanon, that is. The colloquial languages are to the formal Arabic as French/Spanish/Italian are to Latin, basically.

Second, all good universities I know of in the region teach in English or French rather than Arabic. Though the trend is tipping towards English of late. This is because most of the region was put either under British or French mandate after the Ottomans were ousted during WW1. This was detrimental in many ways which I won't go into, but one of the good things that came out of it was that they established many schools and universities. In fact, most of the good ones I know were founded by French, British or American missionaries during that period.

Third, well, the internet(and media in general), English is the dominant language in media most people consume. I learned English from watching cartoons as kid. I've almost never stepped foot in an English speaking country(except for a couple of weeks in the U.S. 2 years ago) and yet I can speak, and write, with almost native proficiency.