williamdix

Yes, you are just an aging fuddy duddy.

It's not that NERDTree makes one unproductive. It's that using NetRW on default vim installations allows you to get going without installing NERDTree.

I'm a fairly junior developer at Braintree. I spent two months this summer working in our West Coast office pairing with one of our most senior developers. I spent almost the entire time at the keyboard. The senior developer provided guidance, a sounding board for ideas, kept me from diving too deeply into rabbit holes, provided context about the choices made in the project, etc. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had as a software developer.

Another thing to mention is that we generally rotate pairs fairly regularly. A developer will work with others with very different levels of experience both in general and within Braintree.

I agree with the OP, not because I am trying to prove to others/convince myself that I am not racist. I agree with them precisely because I recognize that I benefit from privilege as a white male, and that I suffer from biases towards those that are different from me. I believe that I need to think critically and deeply about the privilege I enjoy and the bias that I possess, and I encourage others to do so.

The margin of victory does not correctly sort.

Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden-- In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain To seek another's profit, And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden-- No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper-- The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go mark them with your living, And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden-- And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard-- The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:-- "Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden-- Ye dare not stoop to less-- Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden-- Have done with childish days-- The lightly proferred laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!

People with Ph.D.s are not that frequently called Dr. Also, if there is one source that I am pretty sure would know how to refer to professors and Ph.D.s, it would be the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I have used both and the only real difference for me has been the availability of music. However this is probably just a result of a US Rdio account and Swedish spotify account. I have found finding new music to be slightly easier in Rdio.

I think Ratatouille may in fact be the most productive academic endeavor in 10 years. 7 papers from that film! Did Ratatouille produce more papers than the LHC? I hope so.

I thought this site was very cool, but some of the problems could be explained more clearly. I was getting things without any idea why my answers were incorrect.

I'm not sure that the dictionary definition of currency really matters here. I assume/hope that there is a legal definition of currency. Also, I think it will be very difficult to discuss this constructively without legal opinions on the definition of currency.

I'll try to post the original article in science once I get to work.

I think it's very worthwhile to read the original article in this case as it supports something far less strong than what the Ars article does. It's argument is pretty compelling when you get to what it's actual argument is/should have been. But it hardly topples what it claims to.

I mean something along the lines of if head-first and complement-first are the only possibilites for phrase rules and that they must apply to all phrase rules for a given language, i.e.

  for all X, s.t. X is a grammatic category which can be the head of a phrase ; XP := X _

or

  for all X ; s.t. X is a grammatic category which can be the head of a phrase; XP := _ X 

Then, modulo processes which change a sentence from its underlying form to its surface form, we would only see forms characteristic of head-first or complement-first phrase structure.

In the second case, I intend dependent as the article means dependent. That is co-appearing because of the same underlying feature. To use the genetic analogy, co-appearing because one gene (the head firstness gene) determines them.

The Ars article way over-states the significance. It should really say something like "Chomsky was wrong, languages are not only head-first or complement-first, and they only appear that way because of cultural inheritance, not universal rules" But that's not very exciting, is it?

I think Ars and maybe the authors of the original article are way over-stating the significance of this article. I think the evidence presented in the article is convincing but it is not convincing as a refutation of UG. It seems at best to argue that head-firstness or complement-firstness are not actually features of languages.

So here is the issue that the actual article discusses. In generating sentences, you have grammars with rewrite rules like

  PP(Prepositional Phrase) := P(Preposition)NP(Noun Phrase).

In such a rule, the preposition is the head. There is an assertion that languages have the property head-first or complement-first. In this case, the complement-first rule would instead be

  PP := NP(Noun Phrase) P(Preposition)

So in head-first languages, we would see:

  PP := P NP
  The man is PP(in the house)
  VP := V NP
  I VP(ate the bird)

And in complement-first languages, we would see:

  PP := NP P
  The man is PP(the house in)
  VP := NP V
  I VP(the bird ate)

The article states that if head-first and complement-first were robust, universal features of languages, then we would expect the evolutionary model to show that the appearances of word orders demonstrating these features are dependent on each other across language families. However, it does not show this across the language families. It only shows that certain word orders created by head-firstness or complement-firstness are dependent in certain language families.

I hope this was a decent enough explanation and easy for others to follow. I was a Linguistics major, so it can be hard for me to explain it well and in an easy to understand way.

[edited in an attempt at formatting] [edited to provide more examples]

Oh yeah! Working at a university pays off again. I'm glad you raised that point, I was about to start commenting about the text of the article and now I realize that everyone may not have access.

I have spent probably 30 minutes trying to figure out exactly how I wanted to respond to this post. I want to be able to justify the huge amount of money my parents and I spent to attend the University of Chicago. I can't really compare it to any other university, because its the only one I attended. I can't really argue that other universities would have served me better.

I feel like I got good value from the money we spent. There were other students, professors, events that I would never have encountered at another university. Unless something unforeseen happens, everything will be paid off in a few years.