jronkone

Please don't compare insurance companies to casinos. In casinos the odds are completely computable and known beforehand to everyone. Not so with insurance which deals with real life.

Does taking input from the outside (e.g. internet) change this?

AFAICT, "good engineers are productive in X" doesn't imply that they wouldn't be yet more productive in Y.

This should become a law, like Brook's, Sturgeon's or Greenspun's.

30 credits doesn't equal 30 hours as far as I know. But still, I think GP should just suck it up and finish his degree, he has only a very limited amount of time to lose by doing so, and possibly much to gain from having a degree. In other words, he has limited downside and almost unlimited upside.

What makes you think that proprietary software doesn't have good commit messages?

I hope you learnt something about using magic numbers.

> Plugins for printf()/scanf()?? Not even remotely the kind of thing that needs to be in the core language libraries.

Where then? As far as I can tell, there's no sensible way to extend the functionality of printf()/scanf(), and compilers special-case their format-strings.

I don't see how unions could save space, care to explain?

All I can see is confusion about what is deemed "non-intrusive" and by whom.

For the sake of argument (let ((my-favorite-programming-language (find-language "common-lisp")))):

I would like to see Lisp and *nix have babies. Take the best ideas of both and make something greater than their sum.

And here I almost thought I was going crazy...

This must be the 9001st time I read a post by a C++ programmer that doesn't understand that the problem isn't that other languages don't have RAII. The problem is that C++ doesn't have finally/unwind-protect and thus requires RAII to approximate it.

> Bellard did this in 15 seconds, in 2004 with a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4

But isn't Linux kernel a lot bigger nowadays?

In other words, automated "now playing" scripts are as annoying and useless on social media as they were on irc and and instant messengers.

The idea seems good, but I think many people would prefer a demo (or more explanation) about how it actually works, preferably without the user needing to supply his/her email.

On the technical side, the scrolling text seems to overlap to the next line on some zoom-settings (I'm using Firefox 8 if it matters).

I think there's a huge pent-up demand for software that makes it easy for artists to publish their own content on their own websites easily and also makes making and collecting payments as easy as downloading torrents.

Probably something like that already exists, but the fact is that most of the content seems to be aggregated in different kinds of services that the artists don't really control themselves.

> I've still no clue why humans procastrinate.

I've still no clue why people consider doing stuff so important.

Consing for control-flow is not normal, but on Python it is. Python - not even once.

Epileptic here, not allowed either.

> I've developed an aversion to anything that doesn't follow the Zen of Python: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

Ok, so which language(s) are you using then?

Saying that "Javascript is fundamentally sound" is like saying "McDonalds serves fundamentally nutritious food". It's technically true, but ignores completely what people actually mean when they use the phrases like "fundamentally sound".

My free sandwich has pickles in it! I hate pickles!

I'll have to admit that that was a stupid example, but my point is still that entrepreneurial people are often profit driven, and when one takes this incentive away, they tend to direct their efforts towards more profitable things. So if we deny the possibility of profit from helping the poor, we are effectively denying them any/most advances made possible by entrepreneurial people.

But what incentive would entrepreneurial people have to help the poor if not profit? It's nice to be nice for the sake of being nice, but it's also important to eat.

> If you can, you will build a much more maintainable piece of software. Instead of 3,000 lines of code, you have 1,000. Instead of a ton of object dependencies where one change means having to find the references to it in all of your objects, you simply change what needs to be changed, knowing there’s no extra dependencies in your code for the sake of having beautiful code.

What? So 3000 lines of code to do the same thing would be "good code", and 1000 lines of code would be "good software".

Anyone who answers yes, should really think about this.

Consider that you're going to meet a successful business man with billions of dollars. You represent to him the idea of helping the poor via technological advances that require money to implement. He seems interested, until you say that you want your ideas to be implemented by a non-profit organization. Then he loses his interest in your ideas. Wouldn't it be better for everyone involved to operate for profit, when the alternative is to let things be?

Why isn't using PHP for security sensitive work considered illegal yet?