postfuturist

If you're poor and sick, you get treatment, and you might end up in one of the following situations: 1. You fill out financial hardship paperwork, have most of the cost written off, have a small debt to pay off, 2. You fail to fill out financial hardship paperwork or aren't quite poor enough to get the cost reduced much, you pay it off slowly over time or file bankrupcty.

I've been in both situations when I didn't have insurance. Economically, it would be much better off if we had universal health insurance, so major sickness wasn't so crushing economically, but we don't "just die".

What is true is that people die sometimes because they don't have insurance and can't afford preventative treatment for conditions they don't know about until it is too late.

As a working programmer who has to use PHP, I just use === all the time and have long since moved on from even thinking about the insanity of PHP's == operator. Kinda like JavaScript programmers.

A great book I started reading recently, Lisp In Small Pieces, also starts with a simple Lisp in Lisp interpreter. It got me so inspired that I haven't gotten much further than the first 20 or 30 pages since I started writing my own Lisp (in C) a couple weeks ago. ( https://github.com/deliciousrobots/lisp ) It's still only about 1600 lines of C. The only thing that was even slightly tricky so far was adding TCO, which turned out to be pretty trivial. It's some of the most fun I've had on a personal project in awhile.

I would never coerce anyone to look through their Facebook account (or email, or personal photo album, or their journal, etc) under any circumstance, especially a job interview where the candidate feels pressured to be obliging. What a shameful act!

The rudimentary nature of poll system on this site cheapens the experience somewhat. I love the community here, but this site is fairly archaic in construction.

Google allows a logout from a GET request, on Chrome of all browsers? Is there a way to run browser tabs completely sandboxed regarding cookies/auth? (private browsing mode and running different browsers is a bit too clunky)

After fiddling with about:flags and using --ignore-gpu-blacklist on the command line, I got chrome://gpu to report that WebGL is fully enabled. It _still_ doesn't work, with this error reported in the console:

    [75:75:1827873622829:ERROR:command_buffer_proxy.cc(110)] Could not send GpuCommandBufferMsg_Initialize.

According to chrome://gpu:

>WebGL: Unavailable. Hardware acceleration unavailable

Chrome sadness.

This works great in Firefox 11. It doesn't work in Chrome 18 which has WebGL disabled (on Linux).

EDIT: I really doesn't work because "NVIDIA cards with nouveau drivers in Linux are crash-prone." Firefox has no trouble, strangely.

Nothing radical here, even for 1994. Not long ago I was watching an old episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (around the same year) in which the commander's son is doing homework on a slightly smaller tablet with a color display. IIRC, he was using a stylus.

When I was using Common Lisp, I printed this out and referred to it all the the time. It is quite useful once you get used to it.

Looks like 'Go' is missing, 'Lisp' should probably be 'Common Lisp' since Scheme and Clojure are also 'Lisp'.

My pleasure. I worked on the visual effects team for a movie with a _lot_ of compositing. This is cut-rate stuff. Can you imagine what sort of things we will believe if someone were doing this sort of fakery with a real budget?

His "shadow" (CG, no doubt) is on the front of the wing, while he is still "behind" the wing.

http://imgur.com/NqgTL

Ignoring impossible feats of physics, the video is fake. There is a comment on the first Wired article which points out incontrovertible evidence of poorly done compositing around the 20 second mark with the guy on the left running "through" the wingtip without bumping it.

Uncut, raw video from the side of complete take-off and landing (since there is supposedly someone taking video from the side) would be enough to prove its real. Too bad this isn't real.

Is Typed Racket not Lisp? Most Lisps support lazy eval through macros and lambda.

Yes, it's definitely by degrees. Some dynamic languages provide a great deal more help than others for common issues listed in the original article. And using the print-str and read-string (with read-eval off) is a fantastic way to serialize data between Clojure processes.

I recently learned enough Standard ML to be dangerous, and I gained enough of an appreciation of ML-style static / type inferred languages to see where the author is coming from. I even agree to some level.

But, in practice, some dynamic languages just don't seem to suffer from hidden type bugs. One of those is Clojure. Instead of packing everything into complicated types, you are mostly working with maps and sequences of maps--just raw data--with higher order functions. There isn't a lot of room for type bugs. Additionally, without any input from the developer, Clojure does some type-inference all on its own. You can enable warn-on-reflection such that the Clojure compiler will tell you anywhere in the code where it's going to have to use reflection to figure out how to invoke a Java method or property on an object. You can fix them with type hints such that you get performance on par with statically typed Java.

Clojure protects you from name typos you might see in other dynamic languages and accidentally clobbering existing variables through the fact that most variables are really not variable at all. You bind a value once in a lexical scope and it can't be mutated. That's more of a benefit of functional languages and lexically scoped languages, than statically typed ones.

It may boil down to a matter of taste, but I don't see the need for fancy refactoring tools like "method extraction" in a language like Clojure. The methods already don't live in classes, so they hardly need to be extracted from them :). If you rename a method in Clojure, the compiler _will_ complain in all the places where you are trying to call a method that no longer exists.

It looks like a PHP extension to embed JavaScript using the V8 engine. The docs are pretty limited. The return value of executing a blob of JS is described thusly: "Returns the last variable instantiated in the Javascript code converted to matching PHP variable type." I supposed the mapping is obvious, to someone :). I'd personally want to know if JS objects come back as stdClass objects or assoc arrays.

It could definitely be handy for a lot of reasons. Seems like it might be handy for embedding a bit of JavaScript testing in your PHP test suite.

Why would their product marketing manager be bashing Git with accusations like Windows support is a "completely separate project" when it's the first download link on git-scm.com?

This is a very thoughtless article full of issues of personal taste and FUD towards Git. I was starting to really like Atlassian since they added free private Git repos on bitbucket.org. We've been considering using JIRA and other paid services from them where I work, but this gives me serious pause.

To solve the clojure script startup time: http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/ "Nailgun is a client, protocol, and server for running Java programs from the command line without incurring the JVM startup overhead."

I only know about since vimclojure uses it (to good effect, so it obviously works fine with Clojure).

An RSS feed would be nice, I think. I'd prefer to keep my email inbox uncluttered.

This is a basic freedom issue. The freedom to run software I control on devices I own allows me to be free in how I share and protect my own private information. Apple and Microsoft are trending toward making it more difficult and less legal to run alternative operating systems or unapproved 3rd party software on their platforms. It has to be fought tooth and nail. Fight it legally, and fight it with your pocketbook.

I used a jailbroken iPhone for 2 years, I never once pirated an application, I still purchased plenty of apps from Apple's dumb app store and a few from Cydia. Mostly, I just used it to "background" apps before that was a built-in feature.

I like Python, but how do they plan on teaching recursion with a language that doesn't optimize tail recursion?

Oh, I see, just give them trivially small data sets: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/labs/lab8/lab8...

seems down, google cache : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7Ikgs4E...

I'm so jealous of people who had the opportunity to take CS classes in high school (none at mine). I've seriously considered volunteering to teach intro CS classes at local high schools, just to pay it forward, I guess. I'd done some BASIC and C programming by the time I entered high school, and I would have taken any programming or CS classes in a heartbeat.

Since you are communicating via email and there is no reason to share your actual age or sex, right away.

The paper describes a completely false dichotomy between powerful and simple. In the context of an extremely simple and powerful language like Scheme or other Lisps, the argument is almost meaningless.

Actually, the bits of SQL everywhere is the #1 problem with the code. We spent weeks just auditing them all to remove SQL injection vulnerabilities. All the SQL are fragile bits of code, difficult to write meaningful unit tests for, since you can't separate database interaction from logic, etc.