tkahn6

Maybe you think you and others are a target of 'whimsical retorts' not because you are the target of 'whimsical retorts' but because you have a poor grasp of what legitimate rhetoric is.

Your claim is that there is manipulation of reddit. Manipulation implies that there is a 'non organic' illegitimate entity or group of entities working to exert their influence - a conspiracy to influence reddit. You are asserting that there are conspiracies to influence reddit and therefore you have a conspiracy theory and therefore you are a conspiracy theorist.

I could go on from here and tear down the other ridiculous accusation that I am maliciously 'shifting' the discussion, but this should be sufficient enough to encourage you to reconsider your position.

And yes, reddit is left of center and the left tends to be anti-Israel. What of it? Does that imply that there are no members of reddit that are not left of center? Does that imply that there are no people who are left of center that also are not anti-Israel? Does that imply that all rhetoric that does not strictly echo traditional left of center views is illegitimate?

More things to think about.

So it's impossible for people to find that little factoid about Mountain Dew genuinely interesting and therefore it must be a corporate conspiracy that it reached the front page of /r/TIL?

Absolute pure insanity. And why then is reddit's obsession with Neil DeGrasse Tyson not an orchestrated conspiracy by NDT's publicist or book publisher to sell more books? Oh, because you like NDT and therefore support for him is organic and genuine?

Supreme narcissism.

Ah yes there is 'flood' of pro-Israel comments so it must be a conspiracy.

And what about the 'flood' of anti-Israel comments?

How very reddit of you.

You live in a Western country. The Holocaust was perpetrated by a Western people, people very similar to you. It was systematic and calculated, not a result of wild raping and pillaging. It was not the result of famine. That's why we focus on it more heavily.

Here is archival footage from Night and Fog of people very similar to you calmly waiting to board trains as if they were going on vacation. Look at what they're wearing. All are wearing nice clothing, their bags are packed with a week's worth of clothes. You can see them then being crammed into the cattle cars. Most of these people were gassed immediately upon arrival.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8Da7lxpk&t=4m56s

Is there anything else like that in history? Genuine question.

That's orthogonal to my point. Teacher quality or competence in assessing quality, doesn't have anything to do with whether they assign grades in the ways I've enumerated. I've had absolutely amazing teachers that have graded in those three ways.

Even if they're good judges of quality, it's still a matter of how they determine your grade. Is it good quality relative to what they think your skills are? Is it good quality relative to the rest of the class? Is it good quality relative to what they believe constitutes mastery of the subject? And some teachers curve and some don't.

And I haven't said whether I think teachers should be required to meet standards. I don't even know if it's possible to create good standards.

These are orthogonal issues and thus can both effect the value of a report card. Beyond that, I agree with your point.

> The report card.

Grades are assigned in three ways

1) Relative to the skill your teacher believes you have

2) Relative to the rest of the class

3) Absolutely based on what the teacher individually believes constitutes mastery of the material.

The report card is almost meaningless.

Formal education, in a lot of ways, is a very dehumanizing experience.

Vanishingly few students give an iota of a damn about critical thinking, about understanding the implications of what they are reading or studying, trying to make connections to other facets of knowledge. The emphasis is on throwing some shit hastily onto a paper (gotta reach that word count), memorizing mathematical algorithms (just because you can integrate a function, does not mean you understand what you're doing), passing the exam, and moving on to the next topic.

SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html...

I had to do that. You have 25 minutes to write an essay. But you're not graded on the quality, you're graded on the quantity. You're rewarded only for getting as many words as you can onto the paper. Purposely writing like shit is an absolutely horrible experience. It's like intellectual suicide. Why aren't there congressional hearings about this? Why is this acceptable?

Occasionally getting a good grade and learning the material are one in the same pursuit. That's an amazing feeling. You feel like you're not wasting your time. You feel like you can trust the system to educate you and you can see your progress and knowledge reflected in your grades.

I don't know if there's a better way to do education. It's not an easy problem. If you want to maintain your intellectual integrity, the best strategy is to learn what you can from valuable classes, teach yourself on the side, and get decent enough grades to get you into a college with a decent brand, rinse and repeat there. And if you don't care about your intellectual integrity then you can Google for guides on how to get into Ivy Leagues and follow the steps there. Note that that is not to say that no one who attends an Ivy League has intellectual integrity.

Only a year to go and I'm done with academia forever.

/rant

In my experience, the people who talk about America being the most violent, the most corrupt, etc. are the ones who also like to decry 'American exceptionalism'. And if you think that non-Americans don't think about Americans that much, I suggest you listen to the BBC.

How do you know that it is Americans who are pushing that narrative?

Thanks, that's informative. I agree that it weakens my argument

> That's a separate issue from hashtags.

Not when they're trending nationally.

That's a straw man.

The point is that they were trending.

Do you have any examples of racist hashtags trending on Twitter in the US?

Sounds like France is pretty racist and hateful in general. Can you imagine #AGoodJew or #AGoodNegro trending in the US? That's absurd.

I don't see how censoring the tweets will fix that or change anything. So much for fraternité.

Something interesting to note is that the complexity and internal coupling in GCC was an intentional design decision by GNU to make it harder for non-free software projects to make use of gcc.

Here's a pretty good talk about the philosophical motivations behind Clang and the current work being done on it:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012...

Oh wow that's cool.

Is there a reason you chose to drop a class and not just do it in your free time and take a hit on your GPA for the semester?

0.052%

The change in policy means that instead of needing 0.013% of the voting age population to sign your petition you need 0.052%.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28+25%2C000+people+%2F...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28+100%2C000+people+%2...

Please leave the hyperbole and fatalistic rhetoric on other sites.

Swartz is dead, so I don't know what pardoning him now would accomplish other than securing a useless symbolic 'victory'.

There's a difference between international and domestic security policy.

$1MM is not a fantastical figure. Not every lawyer can mount an adequate defense in a federal criminal case and the ones that can cost a lot of money.

As for sentencing, it doesn't matter. He shouldn't have been charged in the first place and it shouldn't be policy to throw an absurd amount of charges at someone knowing that only a few will stick.

As for his socioeconomic status, I am also a white middle class kid who likes computers and so I identify with him. That's why I care more about this issue. That seems to be your point, but it's just a basic reality of human psychology and it's not revelatory or significant. It doesn't change the fact that what happened to him is wrong.

Aaron was charged with a federal crime for what should have been a civil matter. He was charged with 35 years in prison and his legal defense would have cost him over $1MM.

That's wrong. I don't want to live in a society where that is acceptable.

Yes, this issue happens to resonate strongly with this particular community whereas the disenfranchisement of the poor and other issues do not.

That doesn't make what happened to Aaron any less wrong or invalidate the anger that this community feels.

> Think about Kim Dotcom, Bradley, the British bloke you chaps tried to get, copyright stuff, patent stuff, hell, think about damn drone strikes which I assume will begin to happen in the US eventually.

Well there's no common thread that binds those situations so the message is... "things are bad, we are angry"?

No, the focus on this particular case is better than a vague outpouring of frustration.

Yes, he claimed that. It doesn't make it true.

His own father believed that he was involved.

I have something similar in my .tmux.conf file

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/u6JY0.png

Config file: https://github.com/tylerkahn/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf...

Works with OSX and Linux.

I would love to use it but last time this came up (almost a year ago), people voiced security concerns.

Any different perspectives on this now?

The examples you give are idiosyncrasies that shouldn't be in your code base in the first place (IMHO). These are things that vary from language to language and trusting yourself and others who are going to be reading your code to keep track of them correctly is not a good idea.

    a = 5 + '5'

Ignoring the lack of a sigil, in PHP, a = 10.

In Python, this fails to typecheck.

In Javascript, as you note, a = '55'.

(I used an interpreter for each of these languages to verify this)

For me, I could potentially see the usefulness for this in two things: the various meanings of the 'this' keyword in Javascript and the positioning system for CSS. I always have to look that stuff up. Never seems to stick.

Otherwise, the 'factoids' I have 'memorized' are all out of necessity and come from repeated usage. I don't consciously memorize anything.

> With sciences you have citations, peer review, credentials, etc.

You should read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shechtman#Work_on_quasicrys...