zbuc

Very confusing, at first I thought this was about https://github.com/kvz/phpjs

I volunteered for when they come to Detroit!

First step to making it better might be fixing the awful scrolling. Chrome on iOS is slick but it stutters like hell when scrolling large vertical pages. Safari has no problem.

Seriously, it's tiring!

I want a link titled "Is Betteridge's Law Ever Correct?" to wind up on HN some day.

I haven't had a chance to really read it yet but it looks like it describes thread locals well.

That would make it a lot easier to maintain thread state, e.g. an open database connection, without having to use a singleton.

That's the end goal, unfortunately there are plenty of cargo cultists that don't really understand it and think the process is the important part.

I've worked on scrum teams before, it can be done well if no one takes it too seriously IMO. Once you start guilting the team over the artifacts of scrum, it's fallen apart and become a detriment to your goal of Getting Shit Done.

I prefer the "getting shit done" methodology.

Find the least amount of process necessary to get your work done and make sure everyone knows what's going on and has reasonable expectations.

It's honestly not hard to do this, and you don't need a crazy methodology to do it.

Is that so?

> And the non-judgmental, you're all special snowflakes, do whatever, is also.

Oh? How are you so sure?

I wonder if this same argument was made when computers first had mouses and GUIs introduced...

It's a silly, pointless argument. Absolutely without merit.

> I've never seen a plumber upset that not everyone they meet knows how to do basic plumbing. Chefs don't get mad that people they meet can't cook a fancy souffle. Why is it that so many programmers expect the world to understand computers?

You haven't? Man, every "car person" I know gets pissed off whenever someone goes to a mechanic for an oil change or tire change...

You could come to realize the nature of reality, in Buddhist thought. The three marks of reality in Buddhism are anatta(not-self), annica(impermanence), and dukkha(suffering/dissatisfaction).

The basic teachings of Buddha say that all things share those attributes.

So, in practical terms, all things will pass, and things aren't necessarily what they seem, and attachment causes suffering. Even more practically -- don't take everything so seriously.

MBSR is becoming increasingly common in cognitive behavioral therapy as well -- it's interesting (to me) to see how much intersection there is between meditative practice and what cognitive behavioral therapy is discovering. Different paths to the same conclusions.

Thanks for the reply...

> Reality can be defined as the set of results which are determined to appear from the problems that things in the world have. Because these results are determined in a fixed principle, someone who knows Buddha's teaching can easily recognize an discuss any field of study at length without difficulty, even if they've never studied it before, because they can realize how it works and thus recognize the problems (matters) involved in the field through the person they're talking to.

I don't agree with this. My perception of reality is: examining without adornment, recognizing anatta and anicca. That is, to look at all things without coloration from judgement and to recognize them both in their selves and not-selves(in other words, the simultaneous existence and non-existence of a phenomenon, related to its dependent origination from the surroundings).

I don't think it has anything to do with an egotistical human view of "reality" -- such as being able to understand any subject without having been exposed to it. Of course you can't understand anything without having been exposed to it... you are still a human, you still have a brain, you still have memories and collected knowledge.

Reality isn't, to me, about words or concepts, but instead it concerns the inherent nature of phenomena.

> So a truly enlightened being can point out things in reality exactly as they are and can tell the law of how the world works.

That's one of the points of meditation, though, is it not? To "perceive things as they actually are in reality"?

> The problem is that the assertion that Turing killed himself because of oppression is not founded on facts. We'll never know why he killed himself--we may not even be sure he did kill himself. I believe gay rights are an important issue, and certainly evil things were done to Turing. No truths need to be bent to support this cause--and no cause benefits from illusory bolstering by half-truths and semi-lies.

You admitted that terrible things were done to him -- which is enough. It doesn't really matter whether he killed himself over the oppression or not, the argument isn't predicated on that, but whether or not awful things were done to him, which they were, and which are undeniably documented.

But, yeah, I agree that if it's not known whether or not he killed himself specifically over that it shouldn't be brought up -- but there is plenty of substance in what we do know happened to bring up.

Yes.

Isn't it even more disheartening to know that such a thing could happen in an "enlightened" society to someone who had such great accomplishments? It was a complete lack of respect of basic human dignity, and people shouldn't forget that, especially presently when the issue(of gay rights) is finally entering the mass public eye. People should be aware of the results of oppression, it makes them more compassionate.

> 4. The article also likes to try to downplay everything negative. For example, "It is often repeated that the chemicals caused him to grow breasts, though Turing is only known to have mentioned this once." The second clause seems to be the most important.

Well, thank goodness, maybe he didn't actually grow breasts. Must not have actually have been that bad being forced to take hormones for no good reason.

There's also a very, uhm, disheartening tone that a lot of commenters on that blog post are taking -- what sort of people is ESR attracting? People are suggesting that Turing's castigation was a preventable result of his homosexuality he should have predicted and avoided. "Just stay in the closet and shut your mouth."

Gross. Really, really gross. ESR should be ashamed.

If they were going to take that approach, it should have returned 0 then.

I think of this as "garbage in, garbage out". The function will return a numeric value -- if you give it proper input.

On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

"Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines generally correct?"

...how many users are you seeing on IE 5? IE 6, even? It sounds like a waste of time.

And now this will be deleted because it's not what this site is for.

It's fine to want to have a meta discussion about the board, but there's nowhere on HN to do so, by design.

A) it's a site for posting interesting links and discussions, not meta-conversations about the site itself B) I don't think the moderators/administrators really care, and nothing engenders them to listen to you

So, this is a fine thing to talk about, but this isn't the place to talk about it. Start an off-site discussion, start your own site, do whatever you want, but making this post won't accomplish a thing. It will be deleted.

The policy is listed and clear. They didn't honor the policy as it was written for whatever reason(bad/new support person?) and corrected the problem and upheld their policy, which doesn't forbid RMA if you install a different OS.

Well, that's undeniably pretty fanatical.

I have only read his technical articles that get posted to news aggregator sites -- I don't particularly care about what strange political beliefs some washed-up developer has -- and hadn't noticed anything so vile as this.

I think he still (occasionally) makes good points about development and open source, but his political and sociological views are very immature.

ESR doesn't strike me as particularly fanatical from what I know of him. Are you thinking of something in particular?

Uncited articles on "wisegeek.com" -- a good place to learn the definitions of words and terms.

It has a diminishing return/marginal utility, trust me :P

They are fine things to have, and it can be fun to try to make more money just to see how high you can push that number. It's foolish to think that hitting $150,000 will be much different from $75,000, or will bring you any more real happiness.

Keep it light, keep it fun, keep non-emotional in the treadmill and see it for what it is.

How many people do you know who have left to "find themselves", and how many people do you know who have "found themselves"?

Everyone has an unhappiness inside them -- and they act it out in different ways. Some people strive for more zeroes at the end of their bank account. Some people search for love. Some people try to escape through drugs.

The commonality to all this is that you can't fix that unhappiness via something to be found or something to be avoided.

One of my least favorite things is the behavior of undefined constants.

Use an undefined constant:

Get an exception? Nope. Get an empty string? Nope.

PHP will put the name of the constant in the rendered HTML. Arg.

> When the patients received ketamine, their depression symptoms significantly improved within 40 minutes, and remained improved over 3 days. Overall, 79% of the patients improved with ketamine, but 0% reported improvement when they received placebo.

So they only checked up on them for three days. Bipolar depression is generally chronically recurring. Sufferers will feel "better" for a short period of time, and then slip back into depressive mind-states.

This would be much more interesting if it was a longer-reaching study.