mercurial

> There's historic precedent for that kind of divorce between actions and consequences, and it is not pretty. There's a certain French doctor you should google: his name's Josheph Guillotin.

I'm not sure what analogy you are going for. Guillotin did not invent the guillotine, and only advertised it as a more humane way of execution. He was opposed to the death penalty.

> It seems that you're implying blatent disregard for the environment and pollution began (and possibly ended) in China.

Absolutely not. What I am saying is that the protection of environment was not, until recent times, particularly high on the agenda of the Chinese government (and that the Maoist period was particularly terrible in this regard).

Obviously, the West, being the first to be industrialized, has been responsible for most of the global pollution until now (and by outsourcing some of its most polluting industries to China, has also a share of responsibility for the pollution in China).

> Turkey will never be part of the EU proper. 'Never' as in: not in a couple of life times. Turkey has been given the runaround for the last 30 years or so not because there ever was a serious push to integrate them into the EU but because of the fear that Turkey would align with Russia.

Yeah, even with a secular democratic party in power they would not have a chance (a 80 million people country, mostly Muslim, at the time where there is an islamist terrorist attack every month in Europe? Never mind the number of terrorists with a Turkish background, nobody would agree to that, and that's not even talking about its own stability problem and the neighbours Europe would acquire). With a proto-islamic dictator like Erdogan, forget about it.

I think paywalling reddit would kill it. It's not like Reddit Gold is very expensive ($30 a year). But I do think that simple friction (needing to hand over one's credit card information) is a barrier, combined with the fact that the Gold benefits are far from essential.

"In China" was implied, not that I'm convinced that there was great environmental concern before that, even if the means to pollute were lacking compared to the post-Industrial Revolution west.

Blatant disregard for environment did not start with western companies, "development" of land was already a disaster under Mao.

Clearly a "modest proposal".

That's not a genocide, that's a deportation followed by forced cultural assimilation. It's bad, too, but it's not the same thing as exterminating a population.

Is it really that much faster? I mean, Rails is a separate problem, but I would have put Erlang in the same perf bracket as Ruby/Perl/Python.

The performance question is a good one. Erlang has never been a performance wonder, so I'd be surprised to hear that Elixir is noticeably faster than Ruby.

> (And even if it was "that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population" still wouldn't justify nuking civilians. War crimes are not excused when they make one win more cheaply).

War crimes are not, in themselves, "programs of systematic and indiscriminate extermination" as claimed by OP, unless they are part of a wider policy. I'd argue if the US had the intention to conduct such a policy, the results would have been very different (as can be deduced by looking at successful genocides).

> Why would they want to annihilate them? They wanted to win the war.

Exactly.

> If anything of the kind was done on their own soil of course, they'll still be screaming bloody murder for all eternity (like Pearl Harbor, even though they purposefully provoked Japan for months before it acted).

I agree that Pearl Harbor needs to be seen in the wider perspective of the US-Japan relationship. And yes, most countries are a lot better at forgetting slights against them than the offenses they themselves committed (ironically enough, both protagonists of the conflict are an excellent example of this problem).

It seems to me that you are arguing that the US disregard the human cost of their foreign policy and have little regard for "collateral damage", not that they have been engaged in some bizarre extermination program of Asians, which is what OP was suggesting.

> You can skin a cat in many ways. For one case where the architects of the genocide did not get away with it there are multiple where they did.

Of course. The US genocide of Native Americans did not lead to the Nuremberg trials.

> I am just pointing out that above is not a rebuttal of it.

It is about giving an example of what a policy of genocide lead by a technologically equivalent power looks like, and contrasting it with the actual behaviour of the US in the same area. Shoplifting and murder are both against the law, but there is a marked difference between the two.

> Why bother when you can just drop some atomic bombs to test on them (to "make them surrender")?

Why the scare quotes? It is still debated, and the fanaticism of the Japanese resistance (for instance, in Okinawa) makes a fairly compelling case that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population.

> Or spray them with agent orange?

It's pretty terrible as a weapon of mass destruction. Don't you think that if the US had wanted to annihilate the population of North Vietnam, they would have employed something a bit more direct?

Comparatively, I don't see the general disregard for civilian casualties exhibited by the Saudis in their ongoing bombing campaign in Yemen as a sign that they intend to wipe out the population wholesale.

> Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?

Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not condoning the US foreign policy. But I don't see the US involvement in the mass killings conducted by Suharto as something racially motivated against Asians. It was a case of "the only good communist/leftist sympathizer is a dead one".

> Every single time that the United States has engaged in conflict with Asian countries, it has waged not war but programs of systematic and indiscriminate extermination.

No. There were no US Einsatzgruppen, there was no US equivalent to the nazi Backe-Plan.

The US occupation of Japan was remarkably benign, for a country concerned with "systematic and indiscriminate extermination". You may wish to contrast this with, say, the behaviour of the Japanese Imperial Army within the Asian-Co-Prosperity sphere, which, while not really engaged in genocide, had a habit of large-scale massacres, gang rape, torture and enslaving the local Asian population which they considered as inferior, for all the propaganda about freeing Asia from the white man's rule.

If you really want to see what a blueprint for genocide looks like, I invite you to read about the Nazi Hunger plan [1]. Nothing the US did was even remotely like this.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan

Virtual machines are a thing.

1) There is a conservative majority in Turkey, which has flourished under Erdogan, both economically and societally. They have no reason to stop supporting them.

2) Not wanting a military coup does not make one a supporter of Erdogan.

But yeah, the secularist block seems to be powerless to do anything (and not even talking about the Kurds).

I am not naive about what the US has done and still does. But reading a "list" is not nearly enough. Studying the US support to anti-Soviet forces will tell you much about how funding various insurgent groups goes, if the fact that US-trained forces have a disturbing tendency to sell their hardware to the highest bidder and have as yet to demonstrate any degree of success was not enough of a hint.

> Assad is trying to hold on to legitimate power where the US is attempt to purge Syria of his government using terrorists relabeled freedom fighters who have destabilized the entire country.

I think you are widely overestimating both the US involvement and its degree of control over the actors it has links to. I'd be surprised if the main sponsors of the various anti-Assad factions (Saudi Arabia and Qatar) had anything like firm control of the factions they are funding.

> out variables are there because people were used to coding like this

This does not invalidate OP's point that it is terrible design. You do not need to take every bad idea in older languages in the name of familiarity.

> but you'd still have to contend with OPC (Other People's Code) and if the language allows it, you just know it will turn up somewhere and ruin your day! ;)

Yes, like the standard library's Dictionary.TryGetValue()...

C++ is notoriously hard to bind. The only high-quality Qt bindings I know of are Python ones (Pyside).

> Of course they do, the actual change has always been done by engineers and scientists

That is demonstrably false. Caesar brought lasting change around him, just like Napoleon did. Alexander the Great, though his empire crumbled after his death, brought Hellenic culture to many areas in the world. And I would like to know how the work of "scientists and engineers" triggered the Arab spring.

French (expat) here, can't remember ever seeing any when I lived in France. Have I always been at the wrong restaurants?

That's why you include a checkbox underneath with the label "Do not show me this warning in the future (insecure)". And then a setting to turn it back on. It's not rocket science.

> And by cheap I mean cheaper than OS threads. The reactor pattern still adds a lot of CPU overhead to each I/O operation.

You need to pay for concurrency one way or another, there is always going to be some bookkeeping overhead. Whether you pay the price in your language's runtime (like Go) or in a library doesn't mean you're getting for free. However, it looks like the design of Rust's futures will let it reach very throughput.

> If you can't correctly write a function that meets a given specification, what makes you think that some random recombination of code you've previously written will meet the specification?

Absolutely. There are three additional issues I see with it.

Most code in our codebase deal with business objects, not with mucking about with integers. Very little of that code would have similar signatures. This would make, in many cases, for an empty pool of candidates.

Secondly, the fact that function X crashes does not always mean that function X is wrong, it may just be a case of an upstream function W sending the wrong input. If you happen to have a "no-check" version of X, the "self-heal" will happily let invalid data get into your system.

But the worse is that, while I don't know clojure.spec, I doubt that it's able to describe side effects. Who wants a program that invokes arbitrary side effects looking for a good candidate because writeData(data: string) -> void crashed with an error?

It's possibly an interesting research topic, but practically, it seems either useless or plain nasty.

Syria was invaded by NATO?

This might be in this particular case, but in a climate where newspapers are struggling, it's not difficult to imagine that journalists would be reluctant to investigate the group owning the paper or one of its main advertisers.

This joke works better with Haskell.

Not to mention that there is a lot of stuff, especially for UI, that is either hard or impossible to write tests for...