subtenante

I think you are mistaken on the positions of the PCF. Please read the political program for the 2012 elections "L'Humain d'abord" and tell me where it favors "totally state-governed economy" or is "against free market". (It is, indeed, for a greater control of financial transactions, but that does not mean being against free market.)

Extreme left in France is parties like Lutte Ouvrière and NPA (formerly LCR). Besides, extreme left is very diverse, contains trotskysts as well as libertarians (who never, ever have supported the USSR, and some of them think that PCF militants are stalinists and socio-traitors).

You are mistaken, PCF is not considered extreme left in France. The fact that you are placed on the 'far left' on election results does not mean you are extremist. It means you are on a place of the political spectrum where journalists chose to put you, and that they have found no one more radical than they judge you are to put to your left and who presented candidates. But no one really labels PCF as extremists, except some people who have an interest in doing so: those from the right wing who wish to make a coalition with extreme right.

As for your parallel between PCF and extreme right in France (I think you refer to FN), I am truly sad that someone as smart as you are can fall in that kind of ideological trap. Look beyond the labels and actually read what the Front de Gauche proposes, it has nothing to do whatsoever with what the FN intends to do.

The coalition still exists, but the French communist party (PCF) is generally not considered extreme left either, at least in France. They have had ministers in governments in the last decades. They have been financed by the USSR in its time, but have since made a lot of thinking and are not supporting Stalin's 'achievements' anymore. (Georges Marchais said back in the 1979 that the USSR's results were 'globally positive', which was already the premise of critics that were far more harsh in the 90's.)

Of course not. Alexis Corbière (from the same party than Mélenchon) is actually the one who got this analysis of the trailer first. It may have been a mistake from his, but he surely didn't do it for the money. He has already co-written a book concerning Robespierre[1], and is always on the lookout to bring the debate on this question.

[1] http://www.amazon.fr/Robespierre-reviens-Alexis-Corbi%C3%A8r...

This is false. Mélenchon does not wish media to talk about him (his private life is almost completely unknown, people know he has a daughter, but not much else) . He wants the media to talk about his ideas, and he takes any occasion he has to put them forward.

He is not extreme left either. He is from what was considered the "normal, banal" left in the 1980's, which is now tagged extreme just because they have not stopped to use the phrase 'class struggle'.

Well, no, Mélenchon is not a moron, but one the the greatest intellectuals France has at the moment. He is one of the few French politicians to actually develop new ideas, instead of supporting the liberal dogmas which are ruining Europe. And one of the few to take seriously the question of video games. His blog (in French, here, www.jean-luc-melenchon.fr/) is always very interesting read, with in depth analysis of French, European and World situations.

Mélenchon is not a "known soviet Russia supporter" either. Or, known from whom, exactly ?

You are making a very strange use of the word genocide. There was no genocide during the French revolution, since there was no intention to deliberately extinguish any population. There were, though, very hard measures, and of course debatable, taken to try to keep the revolution going against treasons from all places against the republic.

And do not stop there, since even Robespierre was beheaded, shortly after having himself agreed to the arrest and execution of Danton and Desmoulins (which were close friends of him).

> That's, at best, misleading.

I don't think so. Talking about engagement and participation is very well, those are indeed important aspects of a citizen's life, but they can also happen in regimes which are not democracies.

Democracy means the sovereignty of the people. This sovereignty is embodied at decision time, which is elections/votes. Most certainly freedom of speech, good education, political debate, etc. are requirements for a democracy to be healthy, but these traits can be found in other regimes.

> you realize your vote very rarely makes any meaningful difference

It all depends on how you define meaningful, I guess.

Those two things are not exclusive (you can have both, any of them, or none).

A republic means the laws are applicable to all citizens ; it defines a juridic order.

A democracy means that the sovereignty is in the people ; it defines a way of taking collective decisions.

I agree that even in France where I live, and which defines itself as a democracy (under its 5th republic), the democratic principles are not followed to the letter. It does not mean however that voting is useless, on the contrary, it is one of many ways to contribute to the political life and participate in making a better system.

By measurable, I mean objectively. Mattering "as much as a vote can possibly matter" is not objective. Because in that case, all the ones who did not express their vote also had a decisive (non-)vote. Their (non-)vote made the same difference.

All of this does not make any sense. Voting is by essence a collective action, and can not be divided into individual actions.

Well it can, of course, but is has the same kind of meaning as wondering which of somebody's cells triggered his/her cancer, or what is the responsibility of a given car in a given traffic jam (especially those created by slowing cars on the opposite lane of the one having a real accident).

> Your vote may not matter, but the act of voting does matter.

I don't even believe so.

Consider someone who has no family nor friends, and lives isolated 50 miles from the nearest village with a voting urn. Her vote has no social value. Does it have no importance at all?

Your vote matters, as long as it's counted. Thinking in "ceteris paribus" terms concerning votes is completely ignoring the collective nature of voting.

Even if the final count was to have a single vote difference (say 1000001 for X to 1000000 for Y), all the ones who voted for X are as legitimate as the others to claim to have "made the difference". So even in that edge case, there can be no one to be held "responsible" for the collective decision, and all of these votes did matter in the same, unmeasurable, amount.

I find unhealthy this obsession with "making a difference", more precisely the way it is often interpreted as it is in this article.

Voting is the essence of democracy. If you believe in democracy, you know your vote makes a difference every time. It makes a difference in how you take part in the decision making, how you are a citizen.

Concluding that "On average, a voter in America had a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election." can not be understood any other way than "your individual vote is useless", and it is completely ignoring the roots of democracy: every one vote counts the same as all the others.

You do not vote to "make a[n individual] difference", but to participate in a collective decision. Voting it is a collective act, not an individual one.

How to think backwards about nature and science. Jellyfish do not "use" formal mathematical models. They do stuff. Our mathematical models may be good approximations of what they do.

map.getPlayer()['hasItem'] = function yes () { return true; };

Win at the roulette <=> run the table.

Large code bases now will REALLY look like spaghetti !

Indeed, you're right. It still feels quite strange to me to use the fact that a function (used as behaviour and not data) is, from the language features, technically a variable to call that kind of construct a closure. But thanks for the effort and occasion to think about it.

But if they're really closures, how can we explain such behaviour?:

http://jsfiddle.net/9uqZg/

It's not very proper to call these closures, is it? Their purpose is not to close around external variables available in the lexical scope.

And I'm ready to upvote the first blog post entitled "the 'considered harmful' meme considered harmful".

Hi HN.

I worked on this project last year and have stopped for 6 months now. I'd like some input from the community to know if the project is interesting to others than me.

I was in the process of rewriting the rendering part to make it closer to a CSS approach (having selectors to apply a given template to the matching nodes), but that was a bit too difficult for me at the time, so I hit the pause button to go meditate. The attempts to use Jison for the selector language appear in the 'cleanup' branch, folder 'etc'. Not very convincing but I'm still trying to find the best way to do that part.

I highly doubt that, given the choice between a sandwich and a lottery ticket, a starving person would choose the ticket. Death from starvation in societies where lotteries exist for the masses is quite low. For example in France where I live, people don't need food to survive. There are enough government subventions for food banks and NGOs to help.

A big bag of money buys your more trouble than food, it buys you restlessness and an insecure future. A regular income from a stable job, for instance, provides food as well, without buying you the trouble of having to secure the money you've got by chance.

And no, that's not presumptuous. We know of plenty of people who were happy with little, nowhere needing the cash that big lotteries pretend you can have.

This is all bad probabilities if you don't take into account the fact that you repeatedly buy tickets. I'd like to see a more detailed study counting the probability of never winning when playing systematically for 20 years, for example.

But nevertheless. Yes, the lottery is a tax for the poor. And if you expect your life to change for the better by winning a big bag of money (that you will have taken to the other suckers who lost, minus the organiser's fee), then you just need to reconsider what makes a happy life. You should also consider how many people get isolated after they have won, not knowing how to deal with such a change, such a "responsibility", such a social pressure from family and friends after they have won.

I'd never play the lottery not because of the ridiculously low chances of winning (I also am a statistician), but because what I would win would change nothing to my human condition. I prefer reading Epictetus instead. It's cheaper and the effect lasts longer.

Oh, on joue à qui a la plus grosse ?

(Yeah, "queue" is French slang for dick. Couldn't resist to chuckle. Then I realized I was ironically half-serious. The sentence above means "let's play who's got the biggest".)

How long have you been training?

I'm not sure what 75% as fast means. Faster or slower? (If slower, what the point?)

I would have chosen not to go the alphabetical order way to attributing dotsies. I'd have chosen single points for vowels, for example. And the consonants grouped by phonetic similarity. You're bound to Ctrl+ to be able to read anyway. So if you're making the dotsies bigger vertically to be able to distinguish things, why use only 5 vertical slots? 6 or 7 would allow more distinctive patterns. 2 dots at the bottom for plosives, 3 dots for fricatives, etc.

Seems interesting as a personal thing, but I'd venture it's hard to teach to someone, way more than you seem to believe. Have you already taught someone in a few 20 minute trainings?

I have a dream.

That one day all the good fellows who have their clue about what being a "kicking-ass entrepreneurial leader who's a real alpha male with big balls and strong heart" will start wanking in silence.

Here is your argument : "I used AdBlock and was happy with it. Then I worked for someone who lived from advertising, so I'm not happy with it anymore."

I call that being a slave of the one who feeds you. From a Marxist point of view, you're only becoming servant of the interests of your exploiter, and now are trying to share this point of view with the world.

Without even thinking one instant that maybe living off advertising has no moral justification. Being exposed to advertising, as you say it yourself (when acknowledging that you don't have to click on the ads), is being unconsciously manipulated by them, and that's exactly what they are trying to do.

Advertising is not work, it is not producing anything useful for the society. It is only trying to either create needs or direct customer's attention to a particular vendor without any objective comparison between products, often creating value out of thin air just by gregarious feeling (so called "brands" making people happy to buy something not for what it brings to them but because they'll be happy to show their mates how cool they are to possess something with a particular logo on it).

So well, I recently installed AdBlock because I was tired of having my speakers start to shout silly songs when browsing the web at night, surprising me and making my heart rate jump sky high. Otherwise I've trained to filter visually the ads and completely ignore them. I don't feel any guilt of having less noise in the pages I visit.

For the ones who feel like they deserve some money for the time they put into their blog, just put a donation button somewhere, be transparent with how much money you make from it, and I won't mind a popup asking to click on it.

Bad illustration in the video, Sarkozy has never been Prime Minister of France (he is the President of the Republic, which is quite different).