pwnstigator

I agree with the heart analogy.

http://img39.yfrog.com/img39/6247/h807.png

On a more serious note, there are a lot of difficult problems in onlne dating that someone could make a lot of money by solving. The lack of attractive pictures is not one of them.

Cooking seems fun. I'd like to learn it, and will once I live (a) within walking (or driving, outside of NYC) distance of a grocery store and (b) in an apartment with a dishwasher. Unfortunately, these are not to be taken for granted in NYC. Half the buildings don't even have laundry (I'm not joking).

Sad, but accurate. On one hand, some humanities academics are directly responsible for this; the attitude of many academicians that research was the "real work" and teaching was just commoditized grunt work ended up hosing the humanities. Physicists can afford to cop that attitude, because if they're great researchers the university will put up with poor/no teaching, but those in the humanities can't, because the transfer of culture to rising generations (e.g. education) is the raison d'etre of humanities departments.

On the other hand, the corporatization of the university and research world in general has been an unmitigated disaster, and it'd be better for all of us if the trend reversed.

The danger of accepting and encouraging casual sexuality is that it inexorably leads to strong-man polygamy and the subjugation of women, which most people would consider a regression.

Everyone knows I'm right. A society that fails to impel people to better themselves is next to useless.

It makes sense. The contest for status (i.e.. access to women) among men makes men a lot more mean-spirited and despicable than they would like to be, so a woman who is, or seems to be, "above the fray" is very attractive.

This explains the appeal of the female healer, the angel in the house, etc.

The fact that women are even capable of conceiving of short-term sexual relationships is a sign that our society is impotent and dying.

The other half is that a person with a large number of prior sexual partners is more likely to cheat in a long-term relationship, less likely to be sexually satisifiable by one person, and less able to form the intense bonds of trust and love that a relationship requires.

Thus, the "puritannical" stance on casual sex is as relevant and useful today as it ever was. In fact, it's more useful now than it was 1000 years ago; although STDs are much more curable, raising children is considered to be a 20+ year, shared process, making the intact family desirable.

What's disgusting is the double standard-- the stud/slut dichotomy-- that allows men to behave badly with few consequences. My opinion is that women have the power to end the double standard; if women stop being attracted to promiscuous men, for a man to be slutty will be seen as being as foolish and self-damaging as it is for a woman, and the double standard will disappear.

For example, a function that creates a user account with a unique numerical user ID, that isn't known until the account is created, can return the user's ID, e.g.

  (create-user-account "Bob") => 9001

  (defn create-acct-and-immediately-do-something [username]
     (let [user-id (create-user-account username)]
        (do-something-with-acct user-id)))

An androgynous person is one who has a mixture of masculine and feminine traits, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'd generally argue that it's a good thing, because gender roles/stereotypes are limiting and generally bogus. Most people who are worth a damn are fairly androgynous, because there are plenty of worthwhile traits on both sides of the stereotypical gender divide.

When you write

  x = 4 + 5

As I understand it, the only function that has the power to "do" anything (computation or IO) undernormal circumstances is main, which always has type IO ().

The hatred for "side effects" comes largely from a prehistoric tendency of programmers to write highly optimized in-place operations that destroyed the original data. An example would be a matrix multiplication that destroys one of the original matrices, or Common Lisp's NCONC (a faster APPEND that destroys some of the lists passed as arguments).

The general guiding principle of good code is that visible state changes occur only when requested. (For optimization, private state changes can be used, such as caching/memoization, but these are behind a layer of abstraction and don't violate the referential transparency of the API.)

If it'd been voluntary, you'd have been fine. You'd be surprised by what people can do without.

On the other hand, it's a better world when people behave sexually in a manner that is consistent with their public morality. That means that they don't sleep with people they wouldn't be proud to be seen with by their parents, family, and friends and to call a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Men probably have just as many shitty attitudes, but I don't encounter them directly in my dating life (only indirectly, because most women I know have been with some awful men).

I am all for the right of gays to marry, legalized abortion, and 95 percent of the feminist platform. The problem is that we now have a generation of women who feel "empowered" to "try out" a few of the scumbag men that, in previous generations, they wouldn't have dared be seen with. That hurts almost everyone.

I don't have any problem with an isolated casual sexual encounter. As far as I'm concerned, that's none of my business. However, I absolutely hate living in a culture that glorifies it, to the detriment of loving relationships. I also hate living in a world where the vast majority of available women have such awful attitudes as to be unmarriageable.

Those "puritannical attitudes" exist for a reason. Some people take them way too far, and their application is very unjust (e.g. gendered double standards); but they shouldn't be cast aside as relics of "the dark ages". There are many great things about loving, long-term, monogamous relationships and family formation.

It's not that simple, just as there isn't one "magic trick" that can close a sale. It's a complex set of skills that has to be learned over years.

On the other hand, some guys are able to feast because they've mastered a bag of cheap tricks, and there are a lot more men dying to be like them.

Haskell does a pretty good job, by requiring functions that have side effects to show it in their type signature. If you're doing Haskell right, the number of functions that have side effects is very small as a proportion of the number of functions you'll write in total, so most functions you write will be purely referentially transparent. Of course, I'd argue that this is true if you're using any high-level language properly, except possibly in GUI programming.

Empirically, people who lose their virginity early (< 18) tend to be hypersexual as adults.

In my parents' day, "finding a husband/wife" wasn't something most people had to make an active effort in order to do. It happened fairly naturally. So smart people paired off at a similar rate to everyone else.

In the post-"Game" world, wherein breaking through womens' defenses and attracting them requires learning a bag of cheap sales tricks, the big losers are the people who don't learn them. These are the dumb, who are unable, and the smart nerds, who can't be bothered because they find childish social games uninteresting.