imakesnowflakes

He is looking for help from people here. And you are sending him away to a doctor? He ask here, because he think he can find people here who can identify with him, who have faced similar situation and he wants to hear how they came on top of such situations. He is looking for motivation and encouragement from like minded people. But people just shrug off and say "Nah man, you are just depressed, just go see a doctor". I understand that some people are genuinely concerned. But I think they are missing the point. I think OP should be getting more responses like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736526..

I think we can consider the OP's case as falling under

> Depressed mood may not require any professional treatment, and may be a normal reaction to certain life events...

I think measures like that should be only considers IF you can't figure out WHY you are depressed. If you know why you are depressed, taking anti-depressants will only cure/suppress the symptoms, and without coming to terms with the actual fact that is making you depressed, you will be dependent on drugs for a long time.

My argument is that, we as a society, should grew some form of resistance against such manipulations. Why? Because when a society responds to manipulation and marketing much better than the actual quality of the product, where is the incentive for the companies to improve the quality of the actual product? Hence all the efforts that should ideally go towards the creation of a better product goes into more aggressive marketing.

One can already see this happening with the blockbuster movies. Big studios start hyping up big releases as early as 2 years and continue to maintain the hype by releasing trailer and trailers of trailers, articles about how the director is a master of the craft and how the movie is going to be insane. But when you see the movie, it will be often mediocre. But the movie will be a hit regardless.

Another example. When you can influence doctors and can make then write prescriptions of your companies drug, does it make sense to spend more money improving the drug or spend a fraction of that amount, increasing marketing towards the doctors?

So I think if we grow more susceptible to such manipulations, the quality of things will continue to go down..

But the point I was trying to make was a bit different. That post was arguing about how people can pick up cues from real life and use that information to arm themselves with expensive stuff with which they think they can climb up the social ladder. That is a very smart thing to do. But what Ads do is to feed people the same kind of info, only a highly skewed version of it to their advantage.

>As for ads, let children make up their own minds.

Yes let them. But I think we should also help them see things for what they really are. In case of Ads, how it initially appears to tell that 'hey, I have made this product', but how it also is about telling us 'hey, you need this product' creating a need when there is none, and how it can influence people subtly. And then let them make up their minds how much they want to be exposed to things like that.

Yes. product placement in movies and how people are increasingly ok with it, is one of the things that made me ask this question. And you are right that we cannot avoid them all. But I think the important thing is not simply to tell to avoid all ads, but to make future generations aware of parts of human behavior that can be taken advantage of. So that they can identify and grow some kind of resistance against such manipulations early on in their life.

I mean, we teach kids about a lot of stuff. But the most important study of all, the study of themselves, the study of man, or even the possibility of such a study, we leave them to figure out themselves. I am not sure if it is feasible to teach kids about such stuff...But may be, we need to figure out a way.

Seriously. Following /r/lolphp is a must for anyone unfortunate enough to have to work in this horrible language.

> Once you're aware of the gotchas (and keep your head stuffed with this useless info the whole time you are working with PHP) its not as bad as everyone makes it out to be..

First, you need to be aware of the gotchas. But this is not possible because,

1. We are still counting (take a look at /r/lolphp).

2. Even experienced (8+ years) php programmers know a very small percentage of the php gotchas. See this http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/2zhg6z/how_true_is_this.... You can see one commenter. who is an experienced php programmer who was not aware of that at the time. I myself had 8 years of experience when I was bitten by this bug..ahem..feature. So unless you haven't gone through all of /r/lolphp and commited the relavent ones to your memory and check them for every single line of code you write, you are bound to be bitten by one of those.

3. And documentation does not help. Even php core develpers agree that some of the important parts of documentation is incorrect but NO ONE CARES about things like that. Every one is out to implement flashy new stuff that fanboy can brag about. Even the existing documentation is does not go much deep into details. eg this is the php.net page regarding exception handling

http://php.net/manual/en/language.exceptions.php

compare this to Pythons documentation

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/errors.html

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#try

If you want to find how a return statement behaves inside of a finally block, the info simple isn't present in the php's documentation. Because "who cares because we copy stuff from java, so we probably does not not what is important to document anyway."..

I mean, it is very subtle and the recent 'facelift' that php received makes it hard to see its truly shitty nature for newcomers. When they look, they see all the shinny new features (often half assed) and think that php is on the same level as Python or whatever....

Yes. This should work provided you have a system with memory > 8GB, but you might face some issues when using a folder shared from windows. If something involves symlinks, then tread carefully. And file access to a shared folder is pretty slow too.

I am not going into how bad of an idea is going back to php since you have already considered it. But I will just say that php is every bit as bad as it was. I recommend /r/lolphp for an updated list of php gotchas...

May be each incarnation of a non trivial consciousness (soul) is invocations of some kind of recursive function call in some cosmic machinery. Nirvana is attained when the base case is reached and there wont be any more incarnations of the soul, and the result goes all the way back to the source of the call..

And may be our bodies are like a main function in Haskell where the IO operations of the result of some computations are just carried out. That would explain the concept of fate...

hehe..I always loved to think about this stuff...

That is what credit cards are for..To buy things you don't really need, with money you don't really have...

How about the mobile network providers first stop robbing them blind with numerous scams and offers with hidden costs and ambiguous claims?

"New offer! Reduce your call charge to .9 Rs per 60 seconds when when you charge[1] for 350 Rs".

--Charges with 350 Rs.--

"Congratulations. Now you just need to charge again to enjoy the offer you just paid 350 Rs for!!"

Yes, that is the kind of exploitation that can happen with things like this, and there is not one damn thing that the poor can do about it.

[1]. Around here in India, "Charging" refers to adding prepaid talk time to a mobile connection often by purchasing a coupon.

'using php appropriately' involves keeping a large number of gotchas and weird behaviors in your head, when you are writing every single line of PHP.

I am sorry, but bolting on a ton of 'modern' features on a broken language does not make it not-broken. If it does anything, it is to put up an appearance of being modern, while remaining rotten on the inside, and hence all the more dangerous.

Remember, the most broken aspect of the language is also reason for it's very defining feature (No or very little learning required to get started). Hence one cannot hope that PHP will be fixed at some point in the future. Because fixing the language thus will actually involve killing it and designing it from the ground up, at which point you can just use Python 3.

And that is even considering that the PHP community is competent enough to identify the flaws of the language. But I think what happens inevitably is that, people who can really see how broken the language also see the hopelessness of the situation and immediately switch to something else or use it only to pay their bills.

If you think I am not familer with modern PHP, here is a tool I wrote some time back in php, for php programmers to deal with the pain of working with namespaces and also provide intelligent auto completion for editors like vim..

https://bitbucket.org/sras/cliche

I think the lack of some things like this, is a sort of reminder to the programmer that says, "hey you, you are writing Python. Not Haskell. Do not go that way because we don't have stuff to deal with what you may find further down that road".

Nothing ruins a language like adding a bunch of poorly thought out half baked features, that does not fit well with the rest of it...

You call the car company and talk to their engineers. One of them ask. 'Did this happen on a Friday evening, when it was raining?' You say 'Yes, how do you know?'

The engineer replies.

"Our brakes does not work on rainy Friday evenings. If you REALLY want to brake on a rainy Friday evening, you should also pull the lever under the dash board that is normally used to open the hood. It is very clearly printed on our manual. Didn't you read it? Our car is not the problem. You are the problem"

You were enlightened. You came back home. You never took the car out on rainy Friday evenings. When Somebody asks about the car, You said. "Yea, it is a great car. But you got to know how to use it".

You took great pride in knowing how to drive this car, which can easily kill someone who hasn't read the manual. When you hear that someone got killed while driving this car, you simply said. 'That car is Ok. but you should really know how to drive it, sadly this guy didn't. He was the problem, the car ain't...

http://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/comments/2md8c0/new_safe_cast...

Just saying....

Oh yea? How about this,

http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/2zhg6z/how_true_is_this...

Not sure if I made that clear. But I was talking about the result of the rebase. Once you rebase, all the commits that were in different branch ends up being back to back, and hence become interleaved...

If you are concerned about reading history, then a merge can give you more context regarding the commits. With re base, commits will jump between features. For example, You are looking at commit for feature 1, but the next series of commits are for a bug fix in feature 2. Next series of commits belong to minor tweaks in feature 3..

Not sure what you mean by 'deal with a single conflict at a time'. To rebase or merge, you will have to resolve all conflicts that merge/rebase produce, right?

This is quite subjective. A more probable reason is that git is popular because of github..

And once git gained some popularity, people started viewing other DVCS as inferior because they were doing things differently from Git. For eg, the branching in Mercurial. People are appalled when they see how named branches can be done in Mercurial. Without going into any thought or reflection on how Mercurial's named branching can be useful in certain situations, they call it braindead. But actually git's branching is quite simple and less powerful than the methods offered by Mercurial. Less powerful, because Mercurial offers multiple methods to make a branch so that you can use the right one for a particular situtation. Note that this actually asks for more experience from the user. He needs to have experience with using each of these methods and should know how each of them may be useful in the future. It also stores more metadata and tools like revset which lets you to build powerful queries. So in that sense, Mercurial is also more complex than Git. But that is in a good way and unlike git's, it is not the complexity that gets in your way.

So in short, I think git is actually quite simple than Mercurial, but hides that simplicity behind a complex interface with non-intuitive naming and weird combination of flags and stuff. This causes the 'Aha' moments when one can finally see the simplicity that hides behind that interface, which trigger a huge release of Dopamine and prompts the user to write his own set of Git revelations that (used to) flood the internet, which in turn increases the popularity of Git...

I refuse to do that out of principle. I think Mercurial should have taken the place of git as the widely used DVCS. And I try to be THAT change I want to see.

That being said, It would be great if someone can get the hg-git plugin to work seamlessly with newer versions of Mercurial on Windows and Linux, so that I can keep using Mercurial even if a project I am involved in uses git.

People has recently become quite reluctant to 'hate' on php, as if it is some kind of deformed being who needs emotional support. It is like criticizing Christopher Nolan.

You just don't 'hate' on it with out sliding in a few praises. I know that criticizing the language will result in heated (often irritating) debate with the php fan boys (I call them fan boys because other php users will not come justify the language, with things like, "every language has faults so it is ok"). But I think we can use a little less sugar coating. I am not telling that the language should be killed right off, but please just don't romanticize it's faults and send people who are serious about programming down a path they have to (hopefully) come back 9 or 10 years later (When they are finally disillusioned).

EDIT: he..he..downvotes!

Wouldn't Scripting languages allows one to gradually build that understanding. Suppose you end up with a lot of complex code? Ditch it and build it from scratch. Usually takes around 1/10th the time it took first time with much better results.

So I think by the time one can think up and build the perfect abstractions in Haskell, one can write 3 or 4 iterations of the program in a dynamic language. Each time with better abstractions and neater organization....