figglesonrails

Err, no. I was hoping you could clarify what is meant, like I said. I get the idea of "casual [xxxx]ism", where something is so internalized and normalized that it doesn't even register as shitty.

However, I was specifically asking if you thought it was possible to have discussions on sensitive topics in a civil way or if having a discussion, e.g., "the pros and cons of slavery in America" or "was the prophet of Islam a fraud?" itself is some kind of expression of privilege over the person who would be offended by said discussion.

I'm not too worried about censorship in general, but sometimes the whole "don't be offensive" seems like an open problem and at odds with "have and discuss an opinion that disagrees with others". Just wanted your thoughts on that...

I'm not trying to challenge you, just curious: what is an example of discourse that would be interpreted by someone with said privilege to be civil, yet interpreted by someone else without it to be barbaric, small-minded, offensive, etc.

I get that you could have an objective discussion on religion that might be offensive, but does the fact that someone can find it offensive make it "offensive" in general, or does it make the person who isn't offended "privileged"? I'm just not sure exactly how to apply your statement to such scenarios -- could you explain a little more about what you mean?

Would (could?), for example, objective data (e.g. CSV file, scientific study, statistics) have these qualities or just people's opinions on the objective data?

I don't really understand why you are being down voted for a technical question. It seems like answering it without giving a downvote as a snarky "ISN'T IT OBVIOUS?" would be sufficient.

+1 for the DocumentBuilderFactory. I was trying to figure out why such an idea was implemented. I saw it sort of like having multiple implementations of DEFLATE on the same system. Seems like you really only need one...

There is also a lot of Java stuff dealing with dependency management. Not all of the principles are unsound, but they do have more long-term effects and make the code clutterly in the interim.

While it is important to know low level details if you are going to understand how the high level language is built, it is not necessarily important to know how the high level language works if such details don't readily aid you in your task.

It might be nice and it might be cool, but it doesn't matter so much. Or to put it another way, how many people learned how tracing JITs work to do JS form validation? Would it matter if I did/didn't know this? Would it make a better form validator? Eh.

There seems to be some limit to the benefit that knowing such LL details provides. It's icing, but it is most definitely not the cake, and when your time/budget/skills are limited, you want cake, not icing.

Unification of storage and computing...what does that even mean? I get that having nearly unlimited, fast, persistent storage would be awesome, but that's not a conceptual merging of storage and computing -- but I definitely agree about the simplification.

Can't wait to see it: You wouldn't steal a Library of Congress...

OK- Look at people trying to make 3D games for the web. GPU performance is a concern, but if you can't even run the physics simulation or cull your object database fast enough to push triangles to the GPU, your performance will be hurt and the GPU will be idle. People want games based on WebGL to have comparable performance to native apps -- well, you're going to need to take all of the libraries that games use and convert them too. This is a good solution to allow such SIMD optimization that have been present in native libs for years to have a chance to surface in JS libraries.

OK, it's not that HSA isn't useful, it's that coordination between the CPU and GPU is still stupidly hard and has a lot of CPU-side overhead, making it impractical for small workloads. The problem is that a large number of small workloads still can't be done by a GPU. I'm seriously doubting the limits of "coherent memory access" -- unless the GPU can snoop into the CPU's cache (or the GPU/CPU share L1 cache -- eeek), then you will still need cache flushes and fences. Let's hope that "HSA" is a lot lower overhead than current CPU/GPU combos from AMD/Intel.

That made my day brighter. Sorry you're getting so many downvotes for that. :(

Just no.

Well-written software (i.e. clean code, clear functions) is great and a joy to work with, but is absolutely not a substitute for documentation. Public APIs are double-triple-extra not exempt by merely being well-written, especially not C/C++ APIs, which have complex meta-details like "is this thread-safe?", "does this allocate memory?", "can I call this twice using the same object?", etc.

I get that if code is clear enough, it should be self-documenting. That alleviates the need to write as many comments. //Comments//. It's not a user manual. It's not an explanation of architecture. It's not a help guide. It's not an example of how to use it. It's not best practices. It's not how to write a plugin for your system. It's not an explanation of why the software is needed or where it fits into the business's plan. It's. Just. Code.

I've inherited enough undocumented code to take new stance: if I quit tomorrow and people are unable to train a new person to fully understand my code without me to train them, then I'm doing it wrong. "Wizards" are also liabilities.

Climbing the tallest mountain in the world?

+1

"Things aren't fun/good/interesting if hundreds do it."

Pardon me if that doesn't sound a bit like the stereotypical hipster excuse not to do something - a fetish for being original. To each their own, but my goodness does that make my jaw drop.

[Wavefront] OBJ is dead. Long live OBJ!

I agree it does not if you do.

It would be if Mozilla Corp (an employer) fired him or told him he must resign, hence the part "pressuring people to force him to resign". You can demand and complain all you want, but until management responds to that opinion with a loss of employment, no it is not abuse, and I would agree. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

I wish I could give this post 10 upvotes. There is a reason that the US has employment laws [Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Section 703(a)(1) & (2)] related to discrimination -- and its to stop precisely these sorts of questions from ever being questions in the first place.

"What abuse?"

-> Demanding that he resign and step down and/or pressuring people to force him to resign? If that comes to pass, that he is forced out of his position against his will, then that isn't free speech at work, it's tyranny of the majority. He will have been effectively fired for his religious beliefs.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Section 703(a)(1) and (2)

"(a) Employer practices

It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -

(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or

(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."

What the hell else do you (rhetorical you) need? Why is anyone suggesting that he should be forced out of his position and that he "should have known that there would be ramifications". Perhaps a shitstorm, but never unemployment. This violates the law.

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/titlevii.cfm

Yeah, I don't think that is how America works. You can hold any belief and support any organization in any way that is legal so long as that organization itself is not criminal or an enemy of the US. Maybe people will think you're a weird duck, but professionally punishing people ("you can't be CEO!") for something that doesn't affect the job at hand -- well, kind of an ass thing to do. He's apparently a good coder and a good leader by many metrics, so let him do his thing. I know that if the tables were turned, and I was the CEO of a company, and a fundamentalist Christian-majority started to yell,"Fire him! He doesn't believe in God and gives to organizations that seek to lure our children to Satan!", I wouldn't want their beliefs to wreck my professional career. We don't fight our battles in the office like that.

If you disagree with him, then disagree with him. And while you're at it, do it The American Way (TM) by boycotting sh*t and blogging and giving money to organizations that he finds morally reprehensible and electing (buying? :|) politicians that support your view.

"bahahaha" in response to something that amuses me. Usually, I just have to click a stupid upvote button instead.

^-- this is generally what I avoid, plz no downvotes. :(

Agreed, trust and confidence //that it can be spent//. I don't think "trust and confidence" against terrible scenarios was a requirement 1,000 years ago, (FDIC formed 1933) yet people still had currency that was centrally issued and sometimes even based on gold/silver.

What you're really saying is "A currecy requires a central authority to absorb losses like the FDIC because it makes consumers want to use banks." I mean clearly, you aren't saying the FDIC should insure cash under peoples' mattresses in case they have a house fire that literally burns their wealth, right? The "backing" you're referring to only counts if you put it in a bank that complies with the FDIC, not by mere merit of owning the currency itself. In fact, there is absolutely no reason a person couldn't create a bitcoin bank and offer THE SAME PROTECTION. But who wants to do that when there is no Uncle Sam to pick up the tab for you?

EDIT: TL;DR: Bitcoin and keeping all your money as cash are effectively equivalent risk. In both cases, if you lose your wallet, you're screwed with no recourse. Hence, it is not by merely being centrally issued that risk automagically disappears.

I fail to see how this is any different than people putting money into bank 1000 years ago and a bank robbery destroy their wealth. Isn't that a perfectly accurate description of what happens when an exchange gets hacked? Isn't that more or less what happens when a bank makes bad investments and loses your money, so that when everyone attempts to withdraw at once (bank run), the bank collapses [assuming no "FDIC"]?

As far as I'm concerned, the biggest problem isn't "regulation" or "central authority" or "is bitcoin currency?" it is "who takes the loss when sh*t hits the fan?"

In the bitcoin world, the winner is YOU.

FWIW, memcpy(&anInt, &aFloat, sizeof(int)) achieves the same thing, is not turned in a real call to memcpy(), and doesn't not break the strict aliasing rule, and does not cause incorrect code to be generated with using `gcc -fstrict-aliasing`.

They are committed to the language because it makes them profit, yes. What did you expect from a company? A bunch of academics who are committed the language on its theoretical merits alone, even if it causes the company to hemorrhage money?

The kind of "commitment" that you refer to is one that results in perhaps wider acceptance (perhaps not), but /definitely/ will annihilate their existing strategy (lock-in).

^-- This is the most important thing said on this whole topic.

Yay, Islamophobia. Forced prayer should be stamped out from public schools. Period. Let's just agree on that without going to extremes like "we'll all be living under Shari'a law!!!!111"

EDIT: In other words, neither myself nor the courts give a flying f* what is popular, the law against religious establishment exists for a reason, and even if every teacher and every student except that ONE GUY supported it, that ONE GUY has a legal right that should be easily defended in court. If it isn't then we should consider that a failure of America and strive to overturn it and commit to doing better in the future.

+1 Popular = important in dealing with other humans, whether you like it or not.

We're not going to convert the whole world to atheism tomorrow, so being able to understand why Buddhists don't drink alcohol or why Muslims say "إن شاء الله" when using the future tense will probably only help you co-exist. A little understanding goes a long way, whether you agree with their beliefs or not.

So what you're saying is, ultimately, the sanitary conditions of hackers left to their own devices merit the government's bulldozing of their abodes. Hrmm... :P

More easily said than done. :\

I don't know about you, but it's rather hard to ensure that your partner has the "right mix". It's hard enough to secure a mate as is! :)

Instead, I suppose the suggestion would, "Well, go adopt!", which is a less than satisfactory answer for probably like 99.9% of all of the public, seeing as how nobody bothers to get a "genetic checkup" before they reproduce, and we're pretty much wired to prefer our own offspring to others when it comes to parental investment. All in all, the only context I've ever really heard these sorts of conversations in seem to be surrounding people who have terrible conditions that they are afraid of passing on, not two otherwise healthy individuals who have no idea whether or not their offspring could inherit some kind of genetic disorder that it latent in them. Yes, that is the problem isn't it? Also, given the amount [read:lack] of effort in "planning" that some people seem to put into reproduction, I wouldn't be surprised if this remains the problem...forever.

i.e. That "robustness" is why we now use VMs instead of native code everywhere.