lectrick

> Well, I'm confident you could find science that demonstrates positive physiological effects of prayer, too.

No. No, you cannot. At least, I've never heard of any. Stop begging the question.

> The suggested break activities also include giving each other massages, doing "goofy" workouts, and some eye contact exercise that seems kind of creepy.

I would agree that those are a little weird.

Meditation is as secular as informally promoting Apple Macbooks. There's plenty of science to back up the advantages of meditation, which you are free to Google. It is no longer religious hokum.

What's your opinion about bloggers that enjoy getting a bit of ad revenue from their posts?

I just want to take a moment to hat-tip a legendary dev. I've heard of you at LEAST since MORE for the Mac rocked the sales charts when I was a teen (I also FONDLY miss Macworld Expos, attended a bunch of them!) Thanks for being an awesome nerd!

Something something head and shoulders pattern, don't you see it?

It is infeasible (IMHO) to deal with all physical manuals ever in this way, unless you are literally a Manuals Library that is supported by the county or whatever.

I think the only way to go forward is to digitize the shit out of everything.

> intrinsic value

My experience with Bitcoin has caused me to smile every time this turns-out-it-is-completely-bullshit concept is thrown around

All values are subjective. All of them. There is no "real" or "intrinsic" value (except by consensus agreement of subjective values). The emperor wears no clothes, and there is no rabbit in the hat. Unless we consensually believe there is, that is.

> This is the opposite of how useful research and/or data science works. Data should be taken as is and then learned from. It certainly should not be gathered in an effort to directly prove a conclusion that you are already "convinced" of.

Get down off the pulpit. If the data said the opposite, I would instantly change my worldview.

But you are correct, in that my wording or attitude was incorrect. I should have said "I suspect" instead of "I am convinced" and instead of "might support this conclusion" I should have said "might support or refute this hypothesis".

Which is to say, don't scientists at least have a hypothesis in mind before they collect data related to it? Otherwise, why would you be testing at all, and for what exactly? You can't just take millions of data points, put them into a blender and get proven theories out of it!

Anyway, that's what I'd have at this point, a hypothesis. I should have used that wording, my bad.

I am convinced (although I do not yet have enough data to prove it) that continuous exposure to a lack of ideologically-diverse information is actually very long-term-bad, leading to unnecessary deaths (i.e., war, people killing each other over mere worldview differences, media taking advantage of polarizing forces to whip people up and generate ad views, etc.).

I base this only on my Psych-major training and just in thinking about things and observing.

If anyone had any actual evidence that might support this conclusion, I would be grateful.

If Facebook actually understands that it is kind of their responsibility at this point to ensure people's feeds are more diverse than they might otherwise prefer (i.e., gently introducing discomfort), this might mark the first time I'm actually in favor of them keeping their feed ranking algorithm secret (so as to quiet the masses, most of whom seem content to never experience ideological discomfort). But this, of course, depends on trusting Facebook...

Someone ping me when JS removes mutability.

You can theoretically succeed at this as long as you stay within a statistical random probability and can maintain absolute secrecy.

This is essentially what Alan Turing realized he had to do with the information decrypted from Enigma... He had to let enough bad things happen so that German analysts wouldn't see a statistical red flag, signifying an information leak, but he had to divulge enough to steer the war to victory for the Allies.

aha! Yes, OCaml. And F#. Although I think, OCaml was first.

I want to try this game but

> rail shooter

has always been a turnoff for me :/

So folks like WhatsApp basically do homegrown solutions?

As a guy who's been doing Ruby for 10 years, syntax matters very much to me.

> and made all the things that matter harder and more expensive

... Explain?

> Raw Erlang is better for anyone used to more than three languages.

While I can read and write "raw Erlang", I prefer Elixir, for whatever reason. The macro facility alone is far more powerful than anything Erlang can provide, I enjoy things like pipe |> which was taken from... crap, forgot which language... http://danthorpe.me/posts/pipe.html, protocols are a useful addition, and strings are natively-supported UTF-8 binaries and not arrays (well, you have both actually, depending on whether you single-quote or double-quote the string). And while both seem to be roughly as terse, I just find Elixir to be far more readable and more-organized-looking, compare Shannon entropy algorithms here for example http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Entropy#Elixir

Anyway, a lot of it is opinion, but I think it's good from anyone's perspective that Elixir is ultimately bringing more clever people onto the BEAM VM.

Are there any tools to help with "multitude"-level scaling?

It's been my experience (across all langs) that every new order of magnitude of scaling requires a new technology/technique/architecture...

> but the syntax is too weird

Ah, I've finally found someone in the wild who thinks Erlang's syntax is less weird than Elixir's! ;)

I see that appeal of Haskell, and I think the strict focus on typing does catch many possible bugs... but I don't think it catches all the types of bugs that an actual unit test would, so I'm almost afraid that it's leaned on a bit too much.

This is all a bid to control information.

We should airdrop millions of copies of a Chinese translation of "Fahrenheit 451" all over China...

http://ebookbees.com/fahrenheit-451-free-ebook/

As a developer, what this means to me is:

For every piece of code you write, there should be a unit test covering it that you can run fairly instantly with 1 keypress which catches at least internal-consistency errors. (Integration tests would cover external-consistency errors, but when you're refactoring/adding/deleting code, internal-consistency is violated far more often than external consistency, in my experience.)

Once you experience this for yourself, you will NOT want to go without it. It allows you to IMMEDIATELY get back to coding without waiting for test runs to finish and without creating bugs unknowingly that you only catch much later.

I'm of the opinion that argument values should never be modified by their methods, because that would result in what I've been calling "backflow" or premature state propagation backwards up the call stack. I think this not only hurts concurrency but also reasoning about the code and its flow. I think any new state should be via a return value of the method and not via its arguments.

1) I specifically said not a Taser. A Taser has a number of negatives- short range, need for both contacts to penetrate adequately, small chance of death of subject

2) I do not know of one that exists, but I am sure that one is possible with today's technology. Perhaps I should gather a team and build it

I am really disturbed by the difference between the report filed and the video. I almost want to say that we need to start thinking about mandating video recording whenever deadly force is used... for example, the cops could deploy this thing whenever they were dealing with a suspect (although I'm sure its creators never intended for this particular use lol): The Lily Camera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGcH0Bk3hg

Someone needs to invent a "shoot to incapacitate" weapon (that is not a Taser).

That said... we have the technology, today, to make a gun that automatically targets, in a split second and with high accuracy, the arms and legs (and any other part) of a person. So why don't we just do that?

> I think the hard part of writing side effect free code is that it often involves more allocations

Are you saying this in spite of the existing implementation of decent persistent data structures, at least in some languages? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure

I think the cost in more memory (and with persistent data structures, only the difference in memory of the change) is more than made up for by fewer bugs, easier concurrency, and a host of other benefits.

In the light of "mutability always produces more bugs," mutation should be seen as an optimization, after tests are written which cover behavior and side effects.

My path was not nearly that long to getting one. Your healthcare is shitty, dude.

But I can tell you that getting one, if you have serious sleep apnea, is life-changing. Here are the differences in my life 5 years later: Income has doubled. Layoffs are nonexistent (I used to get laid off every 2-4 years, like clockwork). Lost weight. Testosterone went up. I am no longer late to appointments (my "time estimation" seems to have improved!) I have dreams again AND remember them!! Been YEARS since that! Actually have energy in the morning, how the hell did I live 30 years of my life without knowing what everyone else enjoys?? So I can actually exercise (because I have the energy), leading to even more fitness. Leading to better... dating experiences (ahem), and pretty much better everything!

My one recommendation with CPAP is DO NOT let the doc prescribe you the over-the-nose mask... You want the ResMed Swift FX Nasal Pillow mask (google it). MUCH MUCH more comfortable/less "claustrophobic".

wow.

so what I predicted has basically already happened. sigh.

> Why is nobody stopping it?

Why does this generation assume someone else is going to fix the problems they see?

> if they are (1) successful with internet.org

no self-respecting third-world intellectual is going to be satisfied by a catered whitelist of websites they can access. to me this seems like an attempt to repeat what we did with confusing "the web" with "the internet" by having third world people confuse "facebook" with "the web"

> arrogant people like you

I spent 5 years working with ASP (very similar to PHP especially in the ability to create spaghetti code). In PHP's defense, I wrote an eBay-like site in one night using it. I also know Lisp, some Haskell, BASIC, Pascal, spent 10 years (!) on Ruby, know Clojure, Erlang, JS...

I think I know my shit, I'm 43 and have been basically coding since I was 12 on a Commodore PET... And although PHP lets you get something up quick... It will always be a challenge to create a team-maintainable codebase with it.

PHP doesn't even pass its own test suite. And they do not realize why this is bad? This is the hallmark of hubris.

It's not "arrogance" you're seeing, man. It is the cold hard weight of experience building and maintaining large codebases for years in various languages.