naradaellis

In the show West Wing they called it taking out the trash.

I have too. I find it a great tool once I understood it.

Thanks so much for sharing your perspective. You've put words to some half-formed thoughts I've been having since a recently failed relationship. Live and learn

My dad could easily beat up your dad

No rss feed? :(

BTC can be used in electronic black markets - not many currencies can be used for that, and that fact gives BTC huge value to many people. It is analogous to how USD is the only currency the USG will accept taxes in, which you have mentioned. Not to say that this black market might become unviable whatever reason down the track, but right now it's a big driver of value.

I don't necessarily disagree with you that there are problems with the DOM API. However, would you rather that higher level APIs were designed by standards committees, or would you rather they were worked on and "de facto" standardized in the wild - the situation we have now. The situation we have now is a case of worse is better I think.

And they are plowing (at least some of) the proceeds into public programs, instead of private companies.

Also there is more bang for the buck making sure babies are raised well and healthy, over trying to fix maladjusted and unhealthy teenagers and adults years later.

Ctrl-scroll wheel. I used to only do it with uncomfortably small text, but now I just do it on probably 50+% of sites, even if I could read it without zooming. It just feels nice. Puts all that horizontal whitespace on a widescreen monitor to use.

Forex can sting, true. Managing a foreign bank account is not great fun either though. I'm not going to underestimate the significance of this business, I think it's going to be great for the Australian market.

Who knows what was going through his mind when he decided enough was enough. I think your comment lacks compassion, and that is a shame because one might argue that lack of compassion is getting to the root of the reasons behind his suicide.

I don't get this argument. So the farmers, the truckers, the shopkeepers etc., will all quit right? This will cause supply of food to fall. But there is still demand for food, as always, thus prices soar.

And now, because of BI, all the people demanding food have money to pay for it. Thus, huge market opportunity to start a farm and get ahead?

Or perhaps, the farmers, truckers and shopkeepers wouldn't actually quit like you suggest.

I'm curious, what's the difference between the two: being told how to do it, and being told where to go to be told how to do it?

Functional programming is not just about first class functions and I disagree with the idea that using first class functions means you are doing "functional programming".

See the second paragraph of the article for the authors take on this. Specifically, the concept of values is very important.

The author "promisify"s a callback-based API in the article - which is worth a read by the way.

I'm interested in your opinion RE: his argument for why callback APIs are imperative - because I think he has a very good point and has supported it with a solid argument and you haven't offered any rebuttal.

I didn't downvote you. I agree with the Microsoft tax, but I think "Successful or well-known .Net programs are invariably closed source" is an unfair exaggeration.

I don't think I can buy the victim-blaming argument. Is a woman who is born into a culture with female genital mutilation, or forced arranged marriage "cooperating in their own oppression"? Both of these acts can occur at young ages.

The endless tiny bars, restaurants, shops in Japanese cities made me realise how vibrant huge cities can be. I wish my city Melbourne was more like that. For sure in the case of Japan it is to do with limited space and dense population, but zoning rules, cost of rent, cost of liquor licensing etc. surely all influence the viability of such tiny businesses...

Melbourne does alright but could be better. The way liquor licenses are designed skews the market towards fewer, much larger bars.

EDIT: I wasn't really thinking about your larger point when I wrote this - but I agree with my sibling - the tradeoff is a feature, not a bug. I think Tokyo and Kyoto are remarkable cities because they are not winner-take-all markets: the amount of niches the cities support is incredible.

It's useless noise - the parent's intention was clear

My first thought was Bachelor (of) Arts Query Language

It has become a pretty diluted term.

Could you explain what you mean, for someone who does not know much about java?

Why has this comment been downvoted?

It is a little hard to read because of this bias -- but some of the ideas presented are still compelling.

A main reason that it is hard or impractical to refactor a part of an OO system is that you cannot reason about its side-effects on the rest of the system without scouring all of its source.

When you are guaranteed that a subsystem has no side effects, you can gut its internals and as long as the interface behaves the same - your system will behave the same.

edit: a _stateful_ OO system anyway.

Force of habit from writing too much TeX?

The graph is designed to convey comparative information and so units are not really important (if the method is sound).

Are you not allowed to call bullshit on something unless you can do better? I believe the contrary; I think that reading around and saying "You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. Here are citations to show you're wrong" is actually a very valuable contribution to science and society -- what are the point of such models if they don't work?

The difference between Newton and the securities traders that Taleb dislikes is that Newton actually managed to predict things with certainty. A large part of the Black Swan is Taleb pointing out that barely any retrospective review is done on predictive models.