Regarding your starred points, apparently copied and pasted from somewhere else because you're missing the hyperlink about the poll:
* Hyperbolic moderation is common in all environments. This is why YouTube eliminated a 1-5 star rating system in favour of thumbs up/thumbs down. As for modding down first? People hold negative opinions more readily than positive ones. That's nothing new; that's a symptom of the sickness of human culture, just like soap operas, tabloids, and Fox News. If you want people to up-moderate first, you need a community of enlightened people.
* Thresholds have a lot to do with this. Someone with a karma bonus may show up at +2 by default; once a post is down to 0 some people may not even see it any more. It's an "out of sight, out of mind" thing.
I apologise for stepping on Dragon unfairly (and agree about RockMelt's Flockiness), but my point was that this is lame as far as articles go. If Dragon is as noteworthy as you say, TFA certainly didn't do it anything remotely like justice.
Sadly, RockMelt is the most significant entrant on the list. #1 is Chromium, #2 is SRWare Iron (the legitimacy of which remains under debate), #6 is just Chrome itself (brilliant list-padding idea guys; include the official branch not once but twice to pad your pitifully short list), #3 is Comodo Dragon (dumb new UI + hardcoded DNS), and #5 is a Chinese thing that throws in the same old IE Mode and mouse gestures that we've seen a billion times everywhere else. There aren't six Chrome "remixes" out there, there are two.
From now on I think all stories that start with a quantity of items being reviewed, or the fragment "top n", are going to be purged vehemently from my system with a bit of JS. Sad, sad, sad.
Inferno is only the first third of the Divine Comedy. (It's also widely cited as the most interesting one to actually read.) What are Purgatorio and Paradiso, then?
This right here is the problem. They've worked their way so deep into culture as a "you must have this product" thing that they don't realise no one really wants it. We buy their crap because we have to, in order to remain current and fulfil social functions; take away the monetary barrier and no one will look back. No one cares about the artists. We're not consuming it for art. When we do get art that we like, fans go to extremes to celebrate it: Daft Punk, Starcraft, Firefly; whatever. Unsurprisingly, these markets are rarely large enough for big names to throw money after them. They continue to misunderstand.
Those are the media that people really care about; they're the ones for which you'd donate to the artists. If people aren't willing to donate, then they don't really care. By not compensating the artists and the infrastructure that supports them, we express this. If we felt differently, we'd recognize our actions as wrong inherently instead of needing to be told with ridiculously ham-fisted and childish propaganda campaigns.
Winning in deliberately vague metrics. It's so much more fun when you get to make up your own. (Personally, I like market share multiplied by average zealousness of the user base. Amiga is still winning in the PC realm.)
I don't know the real numbers, but Android could still be winning. It's not as if all of the different manufacturers have one joint financial statement.
Not quite, although there's a better invention on the market: sunglasses pained black. Because we're all technically always in peril, and life is hard enough as it is.
How neocognitrons (and to some extent the human visual cortex) actually work is that they crunch down a bunch of dots into progressively more meaningful shapes; e.g. if you see three black pixels next to each other on a white background, it can simplify that into a more complex representation that means there's a horizontal line at that position. Over multiple iterations of complexity this loses precision, so that if you show someone a sign (very quickly) containing a bunch of different coloured shapes at the same time, they'll be able to tell you what shapes they saw and what colours they saw, but not necessarily the order, or the combinations of shape and colour.
Well, they have dynamic typing as well (the let keyword introduces a new variable and type is inferred from context), but this is actually a type (option<T>, where T is a normal type such as int) that is allowed to contain either a special nil value or a value of type T. This extra semantic sugar lets the compiler know what should and shouldn't be possible.
I think a serious conceptual assessment needs to be made about the merits of a platform before necessarily falling back on arguments derived purely from sound engineering principles. It's true those things can't be ignored, but if no one ever went out on a limb to see what was on the other side, we'd still be using Fortran, assembly, and COBOL for systems implementation. Rust has some very clear strong points (like concurrency) which definitely have potential advantages to a project like a web browser. Conservatism in a development environment won't lead to good results if it's not tempered. I'm pretty sure that Rust still uses the normal gcc backends for compilation, so it's not as if we're losing all of that experience either.
Really and seriously, I think you're over-estimating how much can be blamed on the language. From a language specification perspective, unlike Ruby or Dart, a lot of attention has gone into giving this rigorously described semantics based on modern computer science. It removes some of the sharp edges from the C family, gives an excellent collection of safety knives, and adds a lot of useful innovations that are still a pain to implement in those more primitive environments. I would guess that the majority of errors come from stalwart C++ developers who are too used to their way of doing things to consider Rust's semantics, or seek out a potentially better approach because it's conceptually unfamiliar.
I agree that it's weird. Usually when people get violently upset about the confusion in semantics between assignment and equality, they go off and do something like invent:= or ==. A let solution, by contrast, is a lot more verbose. Of course, it's still an expression in Rust (IIRC from this morning), not a hard-and-fast statement, so like some twisted abomination of Algol-60 (as is the case with the rest of the language) you can still stick it inside of things... that, BASIC would never let you do.
Actually, the absence of proper growth factors is a pretty fair thing to worry about. I don't know enough about stem cell treatments to make a proper comment, but having been exposed to my share of developmental biology I'm often surprised at how well these things actually work, because when a baby worm, human, or mouse is developing, there are a lot of growth factors that are responsible for directing the cells' development, and no tall of them are entirely inside of the cell. (For a basic example, think about puberty: that's the result of a few very specific pituitary hormones. Not totally sure if every organ in the body would be able to develop from stem cells properly without going through its own simulated puberty.)
Languages evolve phonological abberations all the time; just because some are weird doesn't mean it isn't possible! We know that all of the natural languages come from one common root because they have a lot of words that are related. This page is a great place to start if you're interested in the topic further.
As for the use of native American languages in World War II, those languages happened not to be ones that used any clicks. When the code talker idea was first thought up in World War I, it was in the middle of the Battle of the Somme. Hitler actually prepared to deal with code talking, even going so far as to send thirty anthropologists in the 1930s to acquaint themselves with native American languages, but there were simply too many to study all of them. Nevertheless, the strategy wasn't employed as ubiquitously as, say, the Enigma machines.
I've made the argument that "Linux" should be pronounced "Lye-nucks" based on the proper English pronunciation of "Lye-nus Tor-valdz." In fact the man himself used to pronounce it "Lee-nooks" but since then he's apparently changed his name from "Lee-noose" to "Lin-is." The/ee/-to-/ai/ shift is normal for Anglicizing the pronunciation of words and dates back to the sixteenth century, during the Great Vowel Shift. (As they say, every time you pronounce the letter "i" as "eye," God kills a Roman orator.)
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding your starred points, apparently copied and pasted from somewhere else because you're missing the hyperlink about the poll:
* Hyperbolic moderation is common in all environments. This is why YouTube eliminated a 1-5 star rating system in favour of thumbs up/thumbs down. As for modding down first? People hold negative opinions more readily than positive ones. That's nothing new; that's a symptom of the sickness of human culture, just like soap operas, tabloids, and Fox News. If you want people to up-moderate first, you need a community of enlightened people.
* Thresholds have a lot to do with this. Someone with a karma bonus may show up at +2 by default; once a post is down to 0 some people may not even see it any more. It's an "out of sight, out of mind" thing.
* Thresholds again. No one hears your screams.
* That's kinda subjective and up to debate.
I apologise for stepping on Dragon unfairly (and agree about RockMelt's Flockiness), but my point was that this is lame as far as articles go. If Dragon is as noteworthy as you say, TFA certainly didn't do it anything remotely like justice.
Sadly, RockMelt is the most significant entrant on the list. #1 is Chromium, #2 is SRWare Iron (the legitimacy of which remains under debate), #6 is just Chrome itself (brilliant list-padding idea guys; include the official branch not once but twice to pad your pitifully short list), #3 is Comodo Dragon (dumb new UI + hardcoded DNS), and #5 is a Chinese thing that throws in the same old IE Mode and mouse gestures that we've seen a billion times everywhere else. There aren't six Chrome "remixes" out there, there are two.
From now on I think all stories that start with a quantity of items being reviewed, or the fragment "top n", are going to be purged vehemently from my system with a bit of JS. Sad, sad, sad.
Nothing is funnier than a computer making a fantastically bad guess at an everyday human problem. Like this one time.
I too await with bated breath the day that Microsoft goes toe-to-toe with the Business Software Alliance. :)
Country Approximately North of America and Dozens of Additional Areas?
Inferno is only the first third of the Divine Comedy. (It's also widely cited as the most interesting one to actually read.) What are Purgatorio and Paradiso, then?
This right here is the problem. They've worked their way so deep into culture as a "you must have this product" thing that they don't realise no one really wants it. We buy their crap because we have to, in order to remain current and fulfil social functions; take away the monetary barrier and no one will look back. No one cares about the artists. We're not consuming it for art. When we do get art that we like, fans go to extremes to celebrate it: Daft Punk, Starcraft, Firefly; whatever. Unsurprisingly, these markets are rarely large enough for big names to throw money after them. They continue to misunderstand.
Those are the media that people really care about; they're the ones for which you'd donate to the artists. If people aren't willing to donate, then they don't really care. By not compensating the artists and the infrastructure that supports them, we express this. If we felt differently, we'd recognize our actions as wrong inherently instead of needing to be told with ridiculously ham-fisted and childish propaganda campaigns.
Exactly what I was going to say. Comcast has already started buying up chunks of the traditional media. They're not the company you wanted to include on that list.
Then I readily retract that claim. Y'learn somethin' new every day.
You are thinking too deeply about this problem.
Winning in deliberately vague metrics. It's so much more fun when you get to make up your own. (Personally, I like market share multiplied by average zealousness of the user base. Amiga is still winning in the PC realm.)
No, but I know someone who writes grant applications. That's pretty much the same, except lives are at stake.
I don't know the real numbers, but Android could still be winning. It's not as if all of the different manufacturers have one joint financial statement.
You sound like you have a serious axe to grind. Care to share what's really under your skin?
I noticed already. :)
Not quite, although there's a better invention on the market: sunglasses pained black. Because we're all technically always in peril, and life is hard enough as it is.
How neocognitrons (and to some extent the human visual cortex) actually work is that they crunch down a bunch of dots into progressively more meaningful shapes; e.g. if you see three black pixels next to each other on a white background, it can simplify that into a more complex representation that means there's a horizontal line at that position. Over multiple iterations of complexity this loses precision, so that if you show someone a sign (very quickly) containing a bunch of different coloured shapes at the same time, they'll be able to tell you what shapes they saw and what colours they saw, but not necessarily the order, or the combinations of shape and colour.
Wait, clarification: the "LET" keyword is only used for declaration of local variables. In BASIC it could be used for any assignment.
Well, they have dynamic typing as well (the let keyword introduces a new variable and type is inferred from context), but this is actually a type (option<T>, where T is a normal type such as int) that is allowed to contain either a special nil value or a value of type T. This extra semantic sugar lets the compiler know what should and shouldn't be possible.
I think a serious conceptual assessment needs to be made about the merits of a platform before necessarily falling back on arguments derived purely from sound engineering principles. It's true those things can't be ignored, but if no one ever went out on a limb to see what was on the other side, we'd still be using Fortran, assembly, and COBOL for systems implementation. Rust has some very clear strong points (like concurrency) which definitely have potential advantages to a project like a web browser. Conservatism in a development environment won't lead to good results if it's not tempered. I'm pretty sure that Rust still uses the normal gcc backends for compilation, so it's not as if we're losing all of that experience either.
Really and seriously, I think you're over-estimating how much can be blamed on the language. From a language specification perspective, unlike Ruby or Dart, a lot of attention has gone into giving this rigorously described semantics based on modern computer science. It removes some of the sharp edges from the C family, gives an excellent collection of safety knives, and adds a lot of useful innovations that are still a pain to implement in those more primitive environments. I would guess that the majority of errors come from stalwart C++ developers who are too used to their way of doing things to consider Rust's semantics, or seek out a potentially better approach because it's conceptually unfamiliar.
I agree that it's weird. Usually when people get violently upset about the confusion in semantics between assignment and equality, they go off and do something like invent := or ==. A let solution, by contrast, is a lot more verbose. Of course, it's still an expression in Rust (IIRC from this morning), not a hard-and-fast statement, so like some twisted abomination of Algol-60 (as is the case with the rest of the language) you can still stick it inside of things... that, BASIC would never let you do.
Actually, the absence of proper growth factors is a pretty fair thing to worry about. I don't know enough about stem cell treatments to make a proper comment, but having been exposed to my share of developmental biology I'm often surprised at how well these things actually work, because when a baby worm, human, or mouse is developing, there are a lot of growth factors that are responsible for directing the cells' development, and no tall of them are entirely inside of the cell. (For a basic example, think about puberty: that's the result of a few very specific pituitary hormones. Not totally sure if every organ in the body would be able to develop from stem cells properly without going through its own simulated puberty.)
One might even say that the points are of premium quality and available for a very affordable rate.
Languages evolve phonological abberations all the time; just because some are weird doesn't mean it isn't possible! We know that all of the natural languages come from one common root because they have a lot of words that are related. This page is a great place to start if you're interested in the topic further.
As for the use of native American languages in World War II, those languages happened not to be ones that used any clicks. When the code talker idea was first thought up in World War I, it was in the middle of the Battle of the Somme. Hitler actually prepared to deal with code talking, even going so far as to send thirty anthropologists in the 1930s to acquaint themselves with native American languages, but there were simply too many to study all of them. Nevertheless, the strategy wasn't employed as ubiquitously as, say, the Enigma machines.
I've made the argument that "Linux" should be pronounced "Lye-nucks" based on the proper English pronunciation of "Lye-nus Tor-valdz." In fact the man himself used to pronounce it "Lee-nooks" but since then he's apparently changed his name from "Lee-noose" to "Lin-is." The /ee/-to-/ai/ shift is normal for Anglicizing the pronunciation of words and dates back to the sixteenth century, during the Great Vowel Shift. (As they say, every time you pronounce the letter "i" as "eye," God kills a Roman orator.)
That's pretty much what Rust does. There's a special union type called an option, which can be of type T, or undefined.