OtterCoder

I think that there's a few semantics we could quibble about, "wouldn't anything God did be natural by definition," and so on.

But I wholeheartedly agree with your first statement, and I find it profoundly frustrating that atheist tracts immediately assume that you do believe in a God of the gaps.

Your comment history suggests that your beef with the Mormon faith has only a little to do with the subjectivity of experience. If you really want to talk about it, I will, but it might be a better discussion for another thread or forum.

You assume God's goal is human pleasure. What if it was human growth? A person never grows more than in the struggle of life. What if it was human freedom? Freedom means that evil must sometimes be permitted in the face of overwhelming power. What if it was something outside of human imagination?

You want a God that hands out straightjackets and drugs. I think he has a higher goal than that.

I despise the idea of the God of the gaps. I don't believe in a supernatural God, but in one who presides over nature. Not one who defies science, but even allows himself to be known by personal experiment. Why should a miracle be wrought by magic, when physics would suffice?

My God is never so small as to hide in the cracks in reality.

If there is, it's been a long time coming. The Eternal September started in 1993, and has been repeated across every social site or service ever created since then. The only way to avoid the flood is to leave before they arrive.

Exactly. Everybody wants this incredibly expressive, powerful, functional, safe language that they dream about. We already have Lisp and nobody actually wants to use a language that powerful because it's not actually easier, especially for collaboration.

If you don't want to manage memory, why are you using any systems language? Python, JS, Go, and any number of other languages will be much kinder to you.

I personally feel like Haskell makes a good reference implementation for functional programming. Whenever someone is explaining how to do some interesting FP thing in, say, JavaScript, I usually just ignore them and go read about how the same thing is done in Haskell, which is usually clearer and less burdened with the complexity of getting a mutable, proceedural, eager language to behave like an immutable, lazy, functional one.

Yes, yes it is too much to ask.

I won't judge a body for being a brony, or a never-nude, or a benign cultist, or a thousand other things. I don't expect normalcy from anyone.

That said, there are unqualified evils in the world. Things and acts that slowly crush and rend human lives, making the world a darker place, more filled with despair, jealousy, and hatred. Slavery, including debt slavery, is one. The sex trade, the topic at hand, is another.

To not speak out against evils of that scale and consequence is to side with them.

Changing topics back to your quibble about infidelity: it's also evil, if on a more personal scale. Where there are vows of that weight and import, abandoning them unilaterally is ruinous to yourself, your family, those who know you, and many that you will never know or meet. It may not be a matter for the law, but it's not a silly little quirk to smile and wink at.

If I'm cherry-picking, you're strictly appealing to emotion. Are you suggesting that the gay population, which is between 2-6% of Americans, plenty of whom are also monogamous (75% of male homosexuals, by recent estimates), are a major factor in a 10% uptick in infidelity in the general population?

Are you possibly suggesting that abuse never gets inflicted on prostitutes, and that reducing them to human chattel, as their bodies are bought and sold, has improved their lot?

I'd like to see a citation for the prevalence of adultery. Studies I've seen cite 20% of married men have committed at least one act of infidelity, and that the current percentage is almost twice what it was in the seventies. That seems to me like the vast majority of couples get along just fine in a monogamous relationship, and that culture has more to do with infidelity than primal need.

I take exception to the claim that being against casual sex is to be anti-sex in general. Having a single, dedicated sexual partner as a spouse is plenty sufficient to satisfy the human need for sexuality, and can provide a deeper, richer sexual experience from mutual knowledge, trust, and practice.

I am staunchly against sex work of all stripes. It's degrading, it frequently brings out the ugliest sides of humanity. Sexual motive is among the first considerations in a murder, and the 'profession' attracts crime regardless of legality. Sex work is actively deleterious to the human condition. Standing in opposition to sex work is, in fact, standing in favor of safe and positive sex.

While I agree that the law should, in general, stay out of the bedroom, money IS a matter of, indeed, a direct appendage of law. By bringing cash into sex, you have invited the law in, and saying that a commercial act so tied to health and public safety should be unregulated is preposterous. Would you disband the FDA because they won't let Joe Entrepreneur start a pufferfish sashimi shop with no regulation or certification?

Edit, copied from below to support the first paragraph:

Studies I've seen cite 20% of married men have committed at least one act of infidelity, and that the current percentage is almost twice what it was in the seventies. That seems to me like the vast majority of couples get along just fine in a monogamous relationship, and that culture has more to do with infidelity than primal need.

This is a very new-left way of looking at the issue. This is sensationalist, irresponsible, and actively luddite.

Engineering, in case the author has forgotten, has built the cars that are the leading cause of accidental death. Engineering has budgets that have to factor in a cost of human lives. The Hoover Dam was built on a foundation slick with the blood of workmen, slain like a modern Remus.

Programmers, almost without exception, have reduced that cost in lives. I in no way feel remorse for Elaine Herzberg's death, because those cars have, by the statistics, already saved far more nameless others, who will never be a headline, or a sob story aimed to impede progress.

Would you ask a doctor to mourn and beat his breast and tear his hair at every patient he lost, over every slip in judgement, or slip of the scalpal? No! It would destroy him, and weaken his judgement for the hundreds of patients he may yet save.

To the author, yes, let's grow up and look at the human cost of code. You have a long way to go. As a child, you are fixated on a single sad story. When you realize that the safety and freedom of millions will always cost a life, and that you don't get to pick who lives and who dies, then you may write again about the moral weight of the code we write, and earn my attention.

For whatever my two cents are worth, I would choose a macro over a keyword every day. Keyword clutter can be incredibly stifling once a language has any history at all.

Git is not for deployment. Also, hardcoding blog posts in the repo is a dumb solution, and not necessary for a static site. The user built markup should be separate from the code that generates static pages from it.

I don't understand the panic about this law. Mens rea is appropriately considered in the law. Unless they can prove that you built your site with the intention of facilitating sex trafficking, you still aren't on the hook for what your users do.

And, if you become aware of sex trafficking on your website and you don't do anything about it, you are absolutely complicit. This is hardly rocket science, and it doesn't seem to overreach the way everyone is screaming that it does.

In case you didn't know, the FBI has zero legislative power... They have absolutely nothing to do with legalization of anything, and a law enforcement branch that picks and chooses which laws it enforces is a breath away from a police state.

So, get off your high horse, leave the poor feds alone, and start leading rallies against the real bad guys in Congress.

I'm speaking more from the database/XSS side of things, where a blacklist is about as useful as no list at all.

There are absolutely times where security has to be compromised, even abandoned, in the name of usability, and times where security must be ironclad, even user-hostile. Civil rights law is definitely the former.

In Utah? Perfectly sane. The law just codifies Utah CPS practices. Other states with similar laws? You could have your children confiscated if they weren't in visual range.

The exact opposite approach of good (e.g. network) security. Coincidence? I think not.

Quine, the descriptor in the actual article, is both more accurate, and more appropriate for a forum made of programmers.

The fact that they made it into a quine with non-trivial, useful side effects is actually really interesting, regardless of the language/paradigm.

Grit, I think. It's not a static trait, the way some people talk about it. More something you discover when you need it.

I don't think you really understand the kinds of details that AI picks up on. If that data pool shows that people who apply for loans on a Tuesday and have a salary whose third digit is 7 almost always default on loans, then neural networks will pick up on that, regardless of the connection to reality.

An algorithm, especially a trained algorithm, should be assumed biased until proven otherwise. It's not humanly possible to cleanse and normalize a dataset to a level that will prevent all possible overfitting ever, and even if you have godlike precision in squashing irrelevant data, it still depends on your personal definition of unbiased.

As someone who has been boots on the ground for political surveys, I'd frequently asked surveys that respondents from both parties would comment were biased against their own side. I don't trust human judgement, and I don't trust the judgement of human tools.

This is a surprisingly large scale example of a very, very common problem in small businesses. People forget to invest in the appearance of their place of business.

You'll see Joe's RV dealership with a sign out front that's mouldering and falling off of its post, trying to advertise a million dollars of inventory. You'll see a restaurant with greasy, disintegrating tables and chipped floors, but the food is amazing, and the kitchen is decent and clean.

Your tools and stock are not the only thing you need to reinvest in, and if your shop/store/site isn't clean, professional, and pleasing to visit, you cannot justify drawing a paycheck from the business, because the ship is going down.

What's Q? They lost me there. A is all computable functions in... Something?

Also, if Turing completeness indicates that a language can simulate any mechanical process, and any Turing complete language must be Gödel incomplete, then that means there must be some physical facts that are simply inexpressible?

I was about to quibble with you about the usage of organic, but then I remembered that diamonds are literally just carbon, so, by chemistry, you're right.

Video is usually a huge waste of time, period. The typical reader can take in information something like five times faster that a skilled speaker can talk.

You absolutely deserve to be banned, regardless of ToS. You're wasting thousands of other people's man-hours to demand, however politely, that they fix a miniscule error that likely only bothers you. Even if you provide the fix with the request, it will still take a colossal amount of time to read and review the PRs. This is mechanised pedantry on a despicable scale.

Within the States, I'm really well traveled. I grew up on the West coast, spent two years on the East coast talking to more people than you've ever met, in more towns than you've ever driven through, and have been living in the Salt Lake valley for about five years. There are profound cultural, even psychological differences in all three regions, that can't be boiled down to red vs blue.

As an urban Midwesterner, who has also lived on both coasts, you have less in common than you think.