tmptmp

>>And familial obligations (especially filial obligations, e.g. obeying your parents) serve to prime people's acceptance of external authority, such as adoption of framing devices and conceptual models.

Can you elaborate a bit on framing devices and conceptual models? I didn't quite get it.

>>In any event, like a Zen Koan if you think to literally about the problem--filial vs individual vs community obligations--you'll miss the forest for the trees.

By forest exactly what are you referring to? BTW, we must not miss the parental and other familial obligations too.

>>Obviously how you qualitatively and quantitatively measure things will strongly dictate where the optimum is, and different religions will counsel different equilibriums for identical circumstances.

Very well said. I liked this very much. So much for the people (especially some religion apologists) who insist that all religions are equal as their core messages are same.

>>Who criticizes any great general or conqueror in history for leaving his family behind, and why not?

Many people (mainly pacifists) criticize such great generals for being war-thirsty or violent.

I think, Buddha is rightly criticized for not performing his duty towards his family and then going on preaching other people to care for all other people.

Other point, I think, Buddha is rightly criticized for is to do with non-violence: too much insistence on non-violence actually resulted in tolerance of even the intolerants and which is not good.

It reminds me what Obama rightly said while receiving Noble peace prize: "But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason." [1]

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-presiden...

Such apps are menace. It seems that these apps cannot even do anything better than simple string search. They should learn a thing: Let Google do the search for them not their app.

A joke for the people who know little bit of programming: Hope they are not using strcmp to find the video file with title "Michael Phelps wins gold after thrilling final!" :(

edit: a typo

>>If efficiency is not a prime concern, using C++ is hardly justified.

Well, yes and no. Yes, I agree with you as C++ gives you more control than most other high level languages out there, e.g. more control over how you manage your memory. I can hardly imagine someone writing kernel in managed languages, like, Java.

No, I don't agree with you because sometimes, when very low-level aspects of machine also become prime efficiency concern, using C++ is hardly justified. See my point about C++ not forcing any abstractions on you, given at the end.

It reminds me what someone once half-jokingly said about C and assembly: "C gives you all the power of assembly language with the same ease of use".

In the kernel world, it becomes a joke, as the level of abstraction provided by C is very high as compared to the one provided by assembly language (e.g. mainly due to struct, union and cleaner subroutine syntax) and the cost of this abstraction is extremely low.

The benefits of using C are tremendous: e.g. code portability and readability.

>>Nor does C++.

Yes, but when you don't use any non-c abstraction provided by C then it reduces, almost entirely, to C (barring templates).

Templates are extremely good mechanism to provide abstraction (especially as compared to inheritance) but their cost (e.g. cost in terms of code bloat and in terms of the cognitive load if one actually wants to dig deeper and see/tweak the generated code to investigate/address some performance issues) seems prohibitive at least in the performance sensitive kernel programming.

The kernel hackers have found a neat-but-not-so-neat way around it: by using C macros. Macros are in fact C's templates. I am not saying macros lead to cleaner code and so on but when you compare them to C++ templates, their cost-benefit equation in the kernel programming world seems justifiable.

>>and that's perfectly fine, if one feels more productive in a certain language, more power to him, but please let's not spread FUD.

I agree with you whole heartedly about one's choice of language. I personally would have chosen C++ and even Python over C to implement an application like git or its parts.

Not to play advocate for Linus here (he doesn't need a half-witted advocate like me), but he seemed to be spreading FUD about C++ because, supposing C++ were allowed, he seems to feel that many people will start using its abstractions without being aware of their costs. It's very easy to get tempted to use available abstractions and if the abstractions start leaking (as he pointed out) then fixing the code that relied on those abstractions becomes a difficult issue.

Please provide some links.

>>Sorry, but I take it personally when me and my colleagues are called substandard programmers.

I don't know what kind of programming you do, but he is talking mainly about kernel programming. He is mainly criticizing the people who want to bring C++ in the kernel world. Anyone is welcome to prove him wrong.

But I think, C++ is more suited for applications programming, where efficiency is not a prime concern and abstraction-costs are justified.

Even in such cases, (e.g. git, which is an application program) an excellent programmer like Linus can be very well productive with C and does not need the (sloppy/non-sloppy) abstractions provided by C++.

>>You can abstract yourself in a corner in C as well. In C++ you are more likely to pay less for abstractions.

Agreed. But the point you seem to be missing is that C doesn't force any abstractions on you. The STL/Boost abstractions are much more inefficient.

Linus talks about these inefficient abstractions and that's a solid argument because C++ abstractions come with various sorts of hidden costs. (e.g. even name mangling can be a significant cost factor in Kernel.)

>>Considering that the linux kernel is strongly tied to the specific C dialect supported by GCC and is not portable at all, this argument is bullshit.

The issue of portability to different compilers is not an important concern for kernel programmers. If they find a particular tool (e.g. gcc with some C dialect) perfect for their purpose, why should they bother with other tools?

Remember, for Linux kernel programmers gcc is just a tool to produce their product, the kernel.

edit: added point about portability

Yes, but his opinion counts more than some John Doe's as Linus supports his case with solid arguments.

Harris has never called for killing people (Muslim or otherwise) in middle east. What he is calling for is: fight the vicious ideology of Islam, period.

What he is demanding is there should fear-free, public discussions about various evils of Islam: e.g. pedophilia practiced by Islam's prophet Muhammad, Allah's misogyny and Allah's very existence and so on.

How does this justify your claim?

edit: removed quote copied from parent.

>>I wrote that I considered the wave of terror attacks in Germany and France to indicate that a ‘low level Islamist insurgency’ was now taking place in those countries. A few hours after placing this posting, my account was ‘disabled.’

This is very scary for the freedom lovers, humanists and liberals. Mainstream media already practices self-censorship when it comes to discuss the topics related to the vicious ideology of Islam as described in mainstream Islamic scriptures Quran and Hadiths. The social media also following similar practices. It's sad how Facebook is behaving here.

The liberals/critical thinkers have attacked earlier and do attack now also various bad and evil aspects in other religions (Christianity/Judaism/Hinduism) and our free society never suppresses their thoughts. Islam should not be an exception and hence Islam should not be given special treatment. Else we may have to lose the hard earned values that we cherish so much.

I guess, some Islam apologists (whether bought and paid for or not) are hunting down any thoughtful and legitimate criticism of Islam, its prophet Muhammad. They are using various types of pressure tactics for this. For example, labeling any criticism of Islam as racist attacks on Muslims or Islamophobia. Who knows Facebook may have been threatened with some financial consequences by fanatical Islamists (e.g. some Saudis) with deep pockets.

The freedom lovers, liberals and humanists must understand this threat posed by the vicious ideology of mainstream Islam. These views by Bill Maher and Sam Harris may help understand this point in a better way. [1], [2], [3]

The USA and the west now must also invest similar (if not more) efforts and resources to fight this vicious ideology as those that they invested to fight another vicious ideology called communism. We must realize that this is an ideological war and must be fought on the ideological war-front. This can and must be done by supporting liberal minded humanists (like, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins) who are exposing the viciousness of the ideology of Islam and upholding the modern humanist values like freedom of expression and separation of 'mosque and state'.

It should however be noted that there are many people who have been Muslims just by birth and they do not necessarily follow the vicious ideology to its core.

So the fight must be against Islam and not against all Muslims, per se.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E1u9lQeAsY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL8rZTuGfZo

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46nh8_BK7ok

>>So by saying you should attack Islam (with no qualifiers to that statement), you are indeed saying you should attack Muslims.

That is your way of interpreting it.

I never said we should physically attack the Muslim people. I am not against Muslim people, per se. All I am saying is we should attack the vicious ideology of Islam.

If the sentiments of some (potentially radical or not-so-radical) Muslims get hurt due to the thought attacks on the ideology of Islam, so be it. These Muslims should learn to get offended and learn to respect the freedom of expression and learn to respond to such offending expressions in more civilized manners and not by killing people.

You should be telling and encourage these Muslims to learn the fundamentals of free and open society.

If some Muslims are getting offended because some people draw cartoon of their prophet, so be it, these Muslims must learn to live peacefully in a free society even if they get offended by other people.

If some Muslims are getting offended because some people raise the issue of the pedophilia practiced by their prophet Muhammad, so be it, these Muslims must learn to live peacefully in a free society even if they get offended by other people.

The liberals/critical thinkers should not be suppressed just because expression of their thoughts in a peaceful manner hurts the sentiments of some Muslims.

The liberals/critical thinkers have attacked earlier and do attack now also the Christianity/Judaism/Hinduism and our free society never suppresses their thoughts. Islam should not be an exception and hence Islam should not be given special treatment.

Once again let me make it clear that I am not against Muslim people, in fact, I do have many Muslim friends and they are open to such thoughts.

The examples given there [1] seem to be only for LAN.

Any experts here please explain how to use it to expose a local site to the Internet from a NAT'ed machine running behind a proxy that requires username:password auth to connect to Internet and there is a firewall that prevents SSH traffic from/to the Internet?

Accept my apologies if this comes as a complete noob question and please give me a clarification if I have missed something obvious over there.

[1] https://github.com/fatedier/frp#example-usage

>>If you understand what Islam is, and what a muslim is, this statement makes no sense.

If you mean to say that "Islam and Muslims are the same" I beg to differ. Islam is a religion not person and Muslims are persons.

Let me clarify, Islam is a religion/ideology whereas Muslim is a person who is either practicing Islam (religion/ideology) or who is labeled as Muslim because he/she is born within a family who practices Islam.

By "the fight must be against Islam and not against all Muslims, per se", I mean the fight must against the ideology/religion and must not necessarily against all Muslim population.

So it was a big mistake by USA to attack Iraq as a reaction to the 9/11 attacks on USA, instead the military attack (only small surgical level) should have been restricted to Taliban/Osama in Afghanistan and then along with that small military surgical attack, the USA should have actually opened a war against the vicious ideology of Islam.

The Iraq was not a big threat to USA. Millions of innocent lives could have been saved in Iraq and elsewhere, if the USA had realized that this is an ideological war and must be fought on the ideological war-front. This can and must be done by supporting liberal minded humanists (like, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins) who are exposing the viciousness of the ideology of Islam and upholding the modern humanist values like freedom of expression and separation of 'mosque and state'.

>>and dialog become impossible.

The dialog becomes impossible because of many other important reasons, too, including,

a. the opposition by liberals/leftists/Islamists to bring forward any critical review of some extremely troubling vicious aspects of Islam and Islamic scriptures (Quran and Hadiths) under the phony reasons of islamophobia

b. the reluctance of Islamists to accept the notion of freedom of expression even if it means some of the expression offends the Muslims (e.g. discussion regarding pedophilia of Muhammad or someone drawing cartoons of Muhammad)

These views by Bill Maher and Sam Harris may help understand this point in a better way. [1], [2], [3]

In fact, the freedom of opinion is under attack because of Islam, even in the free western world to a large extent.

The freedom lovers, liberals and humanists must understand this threat posed by the vicious ideology of mainstream Islam. The USA and the west now must also invest similar (if not more) efforts and resources to fight this vicious ideology as those that they invested to fight another vicious ideology called communism.

It should however be noted that there are many people who have been Muslims just by birth and they do not necessarily follow the vicious ideology to its core.

So the fight must be against Islam and not against all Muslims, per se.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E1u9lQeAsY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL8rZTuGfZo

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46nh8_BK7ok

>>wherever Islam is a majority religion or "near to majority" the oppression exists. At least women, "unbelievers" (in Islam) or both. And Islam stands nowhere there for a "freedom of expression," quite the opposite. And the reason for that are both the basic religious texts and the practice through the history.

This. The freedom lovers, liberals and humanists must understand this threat posed by the vicious ideology of mainstream Islam. The USA and the west now must also invest similar (if not more) efforts and resources to fight this vicious ideology as those that they invested to fight another vicious ideology called communism.

It should however be noted that there are many people who have been Muslims just by birth and they do not necessarily follow the vicious ideology to its core.

So the fight must be against Islam and not against all Muslims, per se.

>>I wasn't comparing uptime needs of a hospital versus an airline, but their security needs.

Uptime needs are security needs too for various reasons. e.g. lack of uptime is just another way to get a Denial of Service attack.

edit: a typo

And he/she/it seems happy also to allow arbitrary code to run on his/her/its machines. I may even accept getting occasionally distracted by benign ads (just plain text or images or even videos as on newspapers/TV) but I cannot and will not accept advertisers or their agents running their arbitrary code on my machines at all.

I fully support adblockers.

>>https://pp.vk.me/c635106/v635106753/217e/XWciycs1P1c.jpg

About the traditional dress: It will be more appropriate to say that those were the traditional dresses before the nations came under the rule of Islam. Once Islam takes over as a ruling entity and ideology, things become more and more fundamentalist and women will be the ones to suffer the most under such a rule.

>>Also, fundamentalists just invented most of things they sell as eternal.

The fundamentalists have not invented most of the things they claim and the acts they carry out as Islamic. They do have a support for their views/actions/claims in the very fundamental scriptures of Islam, namely Quran and Hadiths. These views by Bill Maher and Sam Harris may help understand this point in a better way. [1], [2], [3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E1u9lQeAsY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL8rZTuGfZo

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46nh8_BK7ok

>>I wonder how many more good mathematicians we'd have if we taught it well.

Yes, but teaching is just one aspect, what matters for the school going children more though is the overall cultural and societal stance/attitude about math. Unfortunately, it seems that the US society in general avoids/abhors/hates/ignores/undermines/fears math mostly and this attitude gets inculcated in the children too. So such children lack motivation to put in the required amount of efforts to learn math.

It's great that despite all this US is doing well at university level math. Also, the US stood first in IMO 2016, that is also great. [1]

[1] https://www.imo-official.org/results.aspx

Well said. General physical strength and health have a lot do with your appetite and your appeal for sex.

But, I guess, there is another factor too. With easy access to too much and uninterrupted entertainment (TV, internet, whatsapp, snapchat etc) our brains may be getting too tired to bother about sex or our brains may be getting too satisfied to desire sex.

You are right to point out the differences but you are missing an important point. Let me see if I can help you out in the reasoning: when the people say "treat [sex] exactly like you would any other experience" they actually mean to say this "treat [sex] in a more abstract but practical manner exactly like you would any other experience".

So the treatment of sex should be similar to other experiences at a more abstract level than at the experiences level.

To go the other way, we can say that even the different instances of various experiences are not equal. e.g. one eating experience is not exactly equal to other eating experience in one's life.

So what they are trying to say and seems like you might have missed is: the way our society treats other experiences, it must also treat the experience of sex and our society should not treat sex in an extremely special way the way we treat the experiences like murders.

Hope it helps.

>>“When women are leaving, it is because they don’t think they can do it – not because they can’t do it,” said study co-author Bailey Fosdick in a press release.

Very aptly put. It reminded me a quote by Henry Ford: "If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right."

We must encourage the women (and also the men) entering STEM courses to persist even in case of initial difficulties.

Another point, which is not discussed in the article but is somewhat relevant in this discussion (although not directly addressing the gender gap, per se) is: the US school level math has become almost a joke, because it's been watered down so much in the names of various reforms and various (perceived) societal needs and thus it instills false and undue confidence amongst many university entering students. [1,2]

Such students when encounter a subject like Calculus-I in its full glory and depth, they naturally get frightened. Even if they somehow get past the Calc-I hurdle (e.g. after remedial coaching etc), they are not in a position to handle the cognitive load needed to sail through the entire STEM courses.

[1] http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematically_Correct

>>Every language has implicit fixity and precedence for infix operators. What's different about Haskell is that you can actually define infix operators yourself.

It seems I didn't make my point clearer. I am asking what is the semantic benefit for the programmer of the explicit fixity and ability to change fixity at one's will?

The whole notion of explicit fixity in Haskell exists because of Haskell's fetish (pardon me using this term again) for symbols instead of functions-names with fixed implicit fixity. They needed to support explicit fixity only because they wanted the programmers to be able to define operator symbols arbitrary with arbitrary fixities.

So, now when you wish to read someone's code, then other than dealing with the inherent complexity present in their code, you also have to deal with the intentionally inflicted accidental complexity (to paraphrase Fred Brooks) over there because of their choice of using symbols with arbitrary fixities. [1]

IMHO, Haskell adds to accidental complexity in this way instead of curtailing it just to satisfy their urge on usage of arbitrary symbols.

Let me explain it a bit further: to read someone's code, first I have to see what symbols they have defined and what fixity they have ascribed to each of those. Now I have to keep all that additional unnecessary cognitive load in my brain to just be able to get a hang of their code with their fixity rules associated with their symbols.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

edit: s/symbols over functions/symbols instead of functions/

>>As for your comments on lenses and records, I've been writing Haskell for a good number of years and still haven't really spent the time to grok lenses. I think they're probably great, but certainly mastery of them is not required to be productive with the language.

Give me any non-trivial industry scale web/database application which doesn't rely on the notion of records. The support for records in Haskell is if not pathetic is very poor.[1] (This is a rather older reddit post but I haven't kept track of it.)

I can be productive with Haskell if I restrict myself to math-type pure computations (e.g. DSL compiler) but if you want anything to do with web/database type non-trivial IO using Haskell, good luck.

So, I restrict myself to use Haskell only for doing pure computations that require extremely simple and trivial IO (mostly just readFile/writeFile).

>>This is an oft-repeated criticism of Haskell which I frankly find has no basis. Firstly, symbols are preferred for these kinds of functions precisely because of their ubiquity.

How about Haskell's notion of fixity of the symbols/operators/names?

It seems this almost arbitrary fixity [2] notion just adds cognitive overhead with little to zero semantic benefits. Correct me if I am wrong and please enlighten me on exactly what semantically significant benefits are offered by the notion of fixity and at what cost.

Most other mainstream languages don't offer such a useless flexibility like fixity which causes so much cognitive distraction when used by different people with different semantics, and that too just for kicks.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/k4lc4/yesod_the_li...

[2] https://www.haskell.org/tutorial/functions.html

>>So many people spend so much time learning the ins and outs of JS, which often find use only in JS, yet balk at learning the simplest things about Haskell.

If the lenses for records thing in Haskell is amongst the simplest things for you, I beg to differ. I spent considerable time trying to get this working but could not succeed beyond toyish examples. Combine lenses/records with exceptions, applicatives, monads and monad-transformers as they become necessary once you try to expand your toy-example code and the Haskell thing becomes anything but simplest.

Yet, other languages support records flawlessly and almost out of the box.

The heavy and unnecessary usage of symbols, like, >>, <<, >>=, >=>, <=<, and so on just adds cognitive overload and gives no inherent benefit but most of the Haskell library code is littered with it and due to almost arbitrary overloading of these symbols to mean different things in different contexts (libraries) just adds more cognitive overhead without any benefit. The almost cult-like insistence on the excessive usage of meaningless-to-humans symbols reminds me of the great practical programming language known as brainfuck [1]. Sorry but no sarcasm intended. Some Haskellers harp on succinctness, when talked about this religious fetish for symbolism in Haskell. So I ask, such succinctness at what cost?

The excessive and obsessive usage of symbols may give mental kicks to the hardcore Haskellers out there, but sorry, I don't see any incentive to waste my time trying to wade through the gobble-de-gook of brainfuck type code.

So sadly, Haskell and me are not a match. Maybe some most common things in other languages when tried in Haskell seem to be (are) rocket-science (e.g. lenses for records) and/or maybe I am a daft blockhead, but that's so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

It's not to say Haskell is bad, though. I'd be a fool to say so. The above comment is mainly to point out that there are its shortcomings and that it has a lot to improve and most of the times I have seen the proponents of Haskell tend to downplay and to avoid talking about these shortcomings.

In fact, I have learned a lot many good programming practices/principles by spending time to learn Haskell. I do apply some of those in my projects in other languages.

Here are some that I have encountered:

Which string to use? String, ByteString or Text or something else? How to convert between zillions of String types, which are, it seems, completely incompatible even though providing similar functionality? So much for the support of abstraction.

Which library is good for doing X? It seems, like String, the Haskell provides too many experimental and/or incompatible and/or immature libraries to do many trivial things.

Then there are issues of laziness combined with IO and you get a `seq` shenanigan.

Then there are issues of laziness combined with inability to profile/debug and you get a `analysis` shenanigan.

Then there are issues of laziness combined with inability to handle exceptions without great grand-daddy-catch-all-bad-things IO monad and you get a `IO monad exceptions` shenanigan.

So, there are a lot of Haskell shenanigans, too. Take your pick.

Here are some links on the acoustics of road/tyre interaction.

[1] http://www.icacommission.org/Proceedings/ICA2004Kyoto/sessio...

[2] http://www.acoustics.asn.au/conference_proceedings/AASNZ2006...

>>The only real solution is electric cars plus significantly reduced speed limits.

Which isn't a solution as it would be like saying "the only real solution is no automobile (cars/vehicles)", because people will want ever more speeds.

So I guess, we must look for other better solutions. Somewhere I read that some chemistry researchers (AFAIK at Purdue university) are trying to improve the road building material/tyre surface material such that the noise caused by the impact of tyres on the roads is reduced. They claim that the noise caused by the impact of the speeding tyres on the road-surface is a very large noise cause.

Sorry for not being able to provide link.

>>Except that there is a real advantage to using pure functional programming; being able to easily prove theorems about your code and understand different components in isolation.

How much of the Haskell (a pure FP language) library code is formally proved? Just curious.

Also I wonder, if code like xmonad can be proved at all.

First of all a personal heartfelt "thank you" to you for contributing towards open-source project. It's because of people like you, who rise above the personal benefits to a significant extent and contribute to the open/free source movement, the people like me from the third-world can hope to learn anything significant without fearing about the costs involved. So I do appreciate your concern about SO grabbing all the credit due out there, but I politely wish to point out the need of better documentation of various open/free projects:

The most important reason for me at least: The great RTFM famed man pages are the worst place to learn anything about how to use a particular tool for a newcomer because most of the times man pages lack good and varied examples.

To quote Einstein, "Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach." - Albert Einstein [1]

I have suffered endless time trying to learn things from man-pages. Spent time asking questions on forums until the expert people there saw the need to give some examples and offered help. I also thank them all.

SO documentation can add much needed value for the newcomers here as experts can add examples and newcomers can find them at one place.

This one is the greatest reason I support efforts like SO documentation project. Of course, I don't underplay the great work the open/free source contributors are doing. It may be the case that the great experts, may not find time to write down examples that a newcomer may need and the needs vary from one newcomer to another: One size doesn't fit all.

The distributed crowd-sourcing model nature of SO can tackle this problem in a much better way, unless the truly open efforts like archive.org or gnu.org come ahead with hosting solutions like this.

[1] http://www.alberteinsteinsite.com/quotes/einsteinquotes.html