Welp, I'm convinced!
Thanks :)
2,565 karma · joined April 29, 2011
Thanks :)
If someone said that to me, "I don't believe in homosexuality", I wouldn't call them bad or evil, though I might try to convince them they're wrong. Sexual preferences exist whether you believe in them or not.
> "Unless there's scientific proof, you will never change their minds."
You limited the terms to genetics. It may not be genetic. If it were, I suspect these same people would seek the "cure".
There's plenty of research on the subject, working theories and all. Can't claim to be up on them, to be honest.
The most interesting research I've read was into health aspects of homosexuality. By far the greatest risk discussed in each paper was depression related to discrimination and homophobia.
It's a preference. As long as people with aligning sexual orientation can express this under conditions of consent, where's the problematic element? Where's the harmful or damaging part of this?
What's that now?
> "to kids"
Ah, "think of the children", the rallying cry of the oppressor.
So this is what the pair programming experience is like!
I like to imagine the next scene is the two >1000 hacksaws explaining ssh, remote X and basic Cisco admin to the yank-happy cord monster.
Ever been on IRC? It's exciting stuff:
I had confused it with LabView...
And this time it's going to be done right!
Well, you've gone over my head, but given me plenty of reading material. Thanks.
> Instead they like to emulate statement based languages with cute but not very abstract or reusable boxes.
Indeed, though they're rarely cute.
> Text based representation of computer languages is rather archaic when you think about it.
As a workaday sort of guy, it's not really. The code I'm writing at the moment is built on so many abstractions of the underlying storage, the atoms of functionality on the processor and other realities, that I am able to fairly naturally "think in" the language. My run-time makes decisions about sorting, searching, filtering, iterating and so on for me. The typing and context assumptions it makes, the terse nature of it (without golfing) - the attempt to divine my intent without so many words spilled, means I never feel like I'm doing busy work - the boiler-plating, the exception trapping and so on. Someone else's implementation of any given task I need to perform is probably a single command away from being available to me.
I may have twisted my imagination to its will, but we get on well now. I don't find it tedious and don't find I need an IDE or related tools to count the pennies.
Do you have a vision for a "next gen" (not quite Star Trek Next Generation - "Computer, extrapolate" level) programming paradigm? Are we talking an overhaul of computer architecture or will there always be some clever person writing our C for us? Abstractions all the way down...
Also, an AST for some given procedural code, when represented graphically, might look (superficially) like a Jackson Structured Programming diagram, which would have been created by hand... Maybe text is the wrong tool :)
I'm not trying to claim some complete, graphically represented program will have as many operations (or boxes) as the equivalent C code. It won't, however, require less cognitive overhead than crafting the program in the language of your choice without making most of your choices for you (and in the process becoming much less powerful, not general purpose at all).
edit When a computer is smart enough to derive intent, then a picture will be worth a thousand words. Until then...
The problem is, you still need to have control at a "line of code" level of granularity (though not quite a line of assembler mnemonic) if you want to have general purpose programming power. You could probably, with some work, make a graph tool for something like ifttt[0] and do powerful things relatively simply. It's not quite programming though.
I've used state machine UML code generation systems in which you "program" by moving blocks around (something akin to a flow chart). Even when the system's purpose is something extremely limited, e.g. handling a phone's menu transitions, there's still a mind-bending amount of complexity to handle.
I believe ImageJ[1], a freely downloadable image analysis tool, is among the tools with this sort of UML functionality built in if you want to play with it.
To be clear, I'm not arguing against using Tcl in favour of Perl or anything else. It's just that my experience with a language with great encoding support doesn't jive with what's claimed here.
If I open an ISO-8859-15 or UCS-2 file in a Tcl program, how is this handled? Does it seamlessly detect encoding and translate to UTF-8 or is there more to this issue than what's stated in the article? Also, are the strings stored in a canonicalised form? If not, how simple is it to perform normalisation?
I brought up Perl because it's my experience of a language with excellent encoding support and helps make the point that the issue is probably more complex than just how strings are stored and manipulated internally.
No it doesn't... unless machine translation is "there" and built into Tcl.
> Every string is internally encoded in utf-8, all the string operations are Unicode-safe, including the regular expression engine. Basically, in Tcl programs, encodings are not a problem - they just work
Really? Perl's Unicode support is pretty much second-to-none, IME, but you still need to know the encoding of your file handles and so on. Once it knows this, Perl will Just Work(TM). How is this handled in Tcl?
Its money is better spent on a decent malt. Is it as carefree with my resources as it is with its own?
(Yep, it's a joke on HN).
Does it ever send individual invites without explicit and clear consent or without explicit action by the user?
Not much different to getting CGI working. If you need it working well, FastCGI is as much effort as PHP-fpm. SUexec is as much effort as SUPHP.
Any language could supplant PHP in terms of ease of deployment, there's little out there that doesn't have some CGI library to handle the mucky parts.
Not that I am advocating use of CGI for anything non-trivial.
I doubt it. I worked as a Mainframe programmer (in this century). Revision control consisted of printing your full current version of the code and inserting it into the project's binder.
I was once that "someone else" - I once left a many-thousand line script behind me which consisted of hundreds of undocumented (and very similar in many cases) regexes and not one instance of the word 'sub'. "It just sort of grew like that", "I was young, a novice!" I tell myself, but still jerk awake in a cold sweat from time to time after fevered dreams of 30 levels of conditional nesting.
My last gig where I took over for "someone else", a fairly new system which still managed to have "legacy issues", I understood the gravity of my crime. I tried to atone by crafting concise, readable nuggets for my successor but I am still haunted.
I met the chap who took over from me recently. Regarding my "someone else" he asked: "How did you maintain your sanity?" "I didn't". He also complimented the parts I left behind, but I still have those restless nights.
"Someone else"'s worst crimes were committed using Ruby on Rails, but the Perl system was constrained by an existing, strongly defined framework. With absolute freedom, there's no telling what damage "someone else" may have wrought.
printf "/" ; openssl rand -base64 32 | sed 's/.$//'
The leading slash was a nice tip someone gave me to not echo if you accidentally paste the password into IRC... Though if the password itself contains a slash then your client won't consider it a command and will echo it anyway, so do what you will.
Anyway, each new account gets a new password you couldn't beat out of me, though you could probably get my password safe phrase, so do what you will.
Generating long passwords like this highlights providers who enforce password length limits. Paypal's limit is ludicrously short. Hetzner's is limited too.
edit more guff.
So is this on-call service something all paying AWS customers can expect or only those with rapport?
But yeah, like yourself, just pointing out that a Wordpress instance that can take a battering is eminently achievable.
Even on a cheap VPS I've configured it to handle tens of thousands of requests per minute.