List comprehensions are confusing and violate Pythons "one way to do it" philosophy, if you ask me. They are confusing because they are basically multi-argument operators
I think it's meant as a guiding principle to be aimed for, rather than a strict dogma to be followed invariably. Otherwise there are plenty of exceptions, like:
I think delimiting strings with both " and ' violates Python's "there's only one way to do it". They are confusing because they are basically both doing the same thing, so one of them is redundant, even if it's very useful to have them in some cases (which is also the case with list comprehensions).
Python and Java are the two languages that I know best. I've used Java considerably more than I have Python, yet I write Python applications much more quickly than Java. The key differences to my mind are 1) the interpreter, for 'dir(foo)' and 'help(foo.bar)' {so much quicker than searching the javadocs, especially when you consider non Sun java packages}; 2) the interpreter, for quickly testing code snippets and experimenting; 3) higher-level data structures (compare Python list to java.util.ArrayList), which means more bang for the buck in terms of lines of code required to do something; and 4) the lack of checked exceptions in Python (many supporters of Java's checked exceptions have changed their mind about the wisdom of this, people like Bruce Eckel, who not-coincidentally is now a very big supporter of Python and dynamic typing and non-checked exceptions (after learning python) where previously he thought static typing and checked exceptions were superior (i'm not saying that typing and exceptions are related, but they're both prominent features of java that I feel slow progress).
I'm probably forgetting quite a few things, but probably the most important difference for me is that I remember Python very easily, because it's simpler (compare java IO to python IO for a particularly egregious example), whereas if I don't use Java for a while, then I have to consult reference material a lot. I don't think I'm particularly abnormal in this respect, as I know plenty of other people who've observed similarly.
Actually, I do. Perhaps you are over-generalizing from the selfishness and love of power of most politicians (and most people in general) to all politicians, and perhaps all people?
Do you really believe that there has never, ever been a single decent person who was motivated to willingly enter politics in order to do something positive for society (and that weighed heavier than their own self-interest)?
You may not agree with his beliefs, but I submit Ralph Nader as somebody who has entered politics for a cause other than his own self-interest. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, then went to Harvard Law School. This is a guy who could easily make ridiculous amounts of money in very many ways, and yet he chose instead to become a consumer advocate and and become ever more increasingly involved in politics. His work as a consumer advocate has saved tens of thousands of lives, and he has ceaselessly fought on behalf of the average joe against mega-corporations who operate according to your principle of "self-interest and nothing more." I believe he ran for president not because of some love of power, or purely out of self-interest, but because he actually wanted to do something about the endemic corruption we see in the politics.
There may not be many, but there are some decent people out there. I think those people who argue that everybody is selfish and acts only out of their own self-interest are just trying to assuage their guilty conscience, for if everybody else is a selfish son-of-a-bitch, then I can't be blamed for being a selfish son-of-a-bitch too. Can I?
Perhaps the difference in our points of view lies in what we think computerized NLP must do in order to be considered a success. I would be thoroughly thrilled if we got a computer to read USA Today. This is what I mean when I say that deconstruction is unnecessary in this case. I think you'll agree that people don't deconstruct the news, they just read it.
I too would consider that a worthy goal for computerized NLP, but I'm not so sure that people don't at least partially deconstruct the news. Intelligent, critical readers often intuitively deconstruct things such as news, which embody all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle biases, and sometimes what is conspicuously absent in an article tells us a lot. To a point, of course. I wouldn't argue that intelligent readers create self-reflexive interpretations in which the article is really about the article itself or the act of writing the article.
To answer you directly, if all we are talking about is 'parsing language' (which is what you actually said), then I agree with you, but if we mean extracting meaning from language (as in, extracting more than just the obvious meaning that occurs to an 8-year old), then I believe more is required, since common sense fails for many people to extract more than the meaning that occurs to an 8-year old. Insofar as understanding meaning, and not parsing language, is the ultimate goal, I'd argue that some of the deconstructionist's reading strategies are helpful and perhaps required, and common-sense alone won't cut it for disambiguating semantic (and perhaps sometimes syntactic) ambiguities.
You don't need to be a deconstructionist to parse natural language. NLP is still in its infancy because common sense is often necessary to remove syntactic and semantic ambiguities.
Ummm, those syntactic and semantic ambiguities which require common sense are part of what the parent was talking about. And context and many other things are also often necessary. Deconstruction is agreeing with you here, but saying that there are more factors involved than just your common sense. To repeat, these are the reasons that NLP software is still in its infancy.
I only meant that they staked a good part of their future on the success of things that Microsoft has staked its future on the failure of, so anything that causes Microsoft trouble, directly or indirectly, benefits IBM.
Where is the simple html option? I don't see it in mozilla 1.5, and i looked through every option? I just saw something about images and javascript in emails, but this wouldn't disallow downloading a css stylesheet that could be used to register a live address.
I'm sure they, like every other (for-profit) corporation out there are not doing it out of altruism, but that they are doing it is the important thing. They are probably doing it mostly because it makes sense to them business-wise -- both because of cost savings and because of the example it sets for other companies to follow (in which case the IBM consultants will be sitting there waiting to sell them services and extras) -- and perhaps to spite microsoft too, but that again is in their business interest.
Oh, if you are willing to fork out a few bucks ($83), then the following book is packed with more cases than you will want to read: _Software and Internet Law_ at publisher or Amazon. This book was the source of many of the readings in the syllabus noted above.
There are many important cases in the syllabus to a cyberlaw class taught at Boalt by Pamela Samuelson, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the few undisputed cyberlaw luminaries. She is less well-known to the general public than, say, Lessig, but at least as well known within the field. The syllabus is here: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/courses/cyberlaw 02/. That should keep you busy for a semester or so;-).
You are conflating the following two types of scenarios: 1) I have faith in the homeless guy who lives on the steps of my apartment building when he tells me that Elvis is alive and on Venus and communicates with the guy via 'X-Raydio' signals that interact with the chip the government implanted in his tooth; 2) I have faith in my doctor who tells me that smoking cigarretes is causally related to cancer, emphysema, etc..
I have absolutely 0 evidence in either case, and the only way you can say that one of these is justified and one isn't is to distinguish between kinds of faith. Yet, you seem to have a simplistic notion that 'faith' is an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, singular phenomenon -- the same in every case -- and that any time somebody believes anything without empirically testing it, they are taking something on faith, exactly the same as taking on faith that Jesus rose from the dead or homeless Zeke is communicating with Elvis.
I would submit that there are different kinds of faith, and some are more justified than others. One characteristic that I would argue makes a faith more justified is that one could test it empirically if one wanted (conclusively), and that plenty of others whose opinions are generally respected have *already* tested it and found it satisfactory.
Well, the Greek origin is 'atheos', which means 'no god' (a theos). Atheism, as I understand it, is the belief in 'no god', or the denial of the existence of a god, though it has also come to mean 'not asserting belief in God.' Adeism isn't a word, as far as I know, and deism is distinct from theism.
atheism is more than the rejection of the concept of "god", but rather the rejection of any religion. I take that to mean that an atheist takes nothing simply on "faith", but instead requires imperical evidence.
I disagree. Early Buddhism rejects the notion of any kind of a god, and also argues that nothing should be taken on faith, but rather tested and considered in light of empirical evidence. Buddha himself said that nobody should ever accept his words on faith, but should rather analyze very carefully and only accept them if they stand up to the light of reason. And yet, many people consider Buddhism a religion. Though to be fair, some say it is just a philosophy, so who knows??
You are wrong. Atheism, etymologically, and in terms of common and scholarly usage, means exactly what the OED says it means: "Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God." Note that it can mean 'not believing in' as well as 'believing in the non-existence of.'
Yes, I was conveying just *how* bloody impressive the original argument was!! 100 years, yet I have seen such wit just this one time. Verily, this Internet, and this slashdot in particular, is a place of miracles!
Beautiful argument! I am in awe of your skill in dialectics. That is quite possibly the greatest retort I have witnessed in my five score of life, and I have heard many.
Please, do you offer lessons? I am willing to be an unpaid apprentice to learn the wisdom of your art. My life would be complete if I could just die with your wit on my tongue and your rhetorical skills in my mind -- truly, I should be ready to do intellectual battle with the Deity himself after drinking at the fount of your wisdom.
However, there is an important difference between the two cases.
The reason the guy who plays NBA Live doesn't have the reflexes of Kobe Bryant is because basketball is a sport that requires a high level of physical training. And catching the ball instantaneously is a purely physical reaction.
The same *cannot* be said about blowing somebody's head off at close range. First, this requires no skill whatsoever. Secondly, the important aspect of the reaction of the conditioned psycho boy is not physical: it is mental. The key thing that happened is not what occurred physically, it is what went through that boy's head when for whatever reason, he decided, "I'm going to go outside, get my gun, and blow that fucker's head off!". Once he had the *thought*, everything follows, like in the videogame.
If you really want something that is analogous to the basketball situation, I would suggest something like somebody sneaking up behind the kid, putting their arm around his neck, and he instantly flips them over his shoulder and breaks the attacker's arm in five places. That is a purely physical action, analogous to Jordan's reaction to a incoming basketball, and I think we all agree that without martial arts training, the video game couldn't cause this reaction, and the reason why not is because the kid doesn't have the *physical* skills. In the case of blowing off another kid's head, however, somebody who's never even shot a gun has the skill required to do this at close range. What they need to learn, however, is just that whipping out the gun is a valid reaction to humiliation or whatever.
There is great precedent for taking literal things like 'papers' -- which was synonymous with (sometimes personal or private) information in that day -- and interpreting them in light of the different context in which we live today. Hence, 'papers' is interpreted to mean more today than it did 200 years ago, just like 'speech' in the first amendment means more than it did 200 years ago. Fortunately, interpreters of the constitution are generally not as literal minded as you!
Ummm, there is a Common Lisp implementation: <a href="http://www.kernelthread.com/hanoi/html/gcl.h tml">http://www.kernelthread.com/hanoi/html/gcl.ht ml</a>, but it's getting slashdotted right now.
so what you're saying is that there is no such thing as an inalienable right, since there clearly is no 'right' that has has never been nor could be taken away.
thanks, that makes sense. I wasn't thinking that the value could be somewhere between zero and one. I always wondered why 'srm' overwrites so many times, and now I understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's meant as a guiding principle to be aimed for, rather than a strict dogma to be followed invariably. Otherwise there are plenty of exceptions, like:
I think delimiting strings with both " and ' violates Python's "there's only one way to do it". They are confusing because they are basically both doing the same thing, so one of them is redundant, even if it's very useful to have them in some cases (which is also the case with list comprehensions).
I'm probably forgetting quite a few things, but probably the most important difference for me is that I remember Python very easily, because it's simpler (compare java IO to python IO for a particularly egregious example), whereas if I don't use Java for a while, then I have to consult reference material a lot. I don't think I'm particularly abnormal in this respect, as I know plenty of other people who've observed similarly.
I'd rather live forever on air, myself.. Thus far, I sustain myself on air alone for about, oh, 22 hours a day, but I'm slowly working my way up.
Well said ;-)
Do you really believe that there has never, ever been a single decent person who was motivated to willingly enter politics in order to do something positive for society (and that weighed heavier than their own self-interest)?
You may not agree with his beliefs, but I submit Ralph Nader as somebody who has entered politics for a cause other than his own self-interest. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, then went to Harvard Law School. This is a guy who could easily make ridiculous amounts of money in very many ways, and yet he chose instead to become a consumer advocate and and become ever more increasingly involved in politics. His work as a consumer advocate has saved tens of thousands of lives, and he has ceaselessly fought on behalf of the average joe against mega-corporations who operate according to your principle of "self-interest and nothing more." I believe he ran for president not because of some love of power, or purely out of self-interest, but because he actually wanted to do something about the endemic corruption we see in the politics.
There may not be many, but there are some decent people out there. I think those people who argue that everybody is selfish and acts only out of their own self-interest are just trying to assuage their guilty conscience, for if everybody else is a selfish son-of-a-bitch, then I can't be blamed for being a selfish son-of-a-bitch too. Can I?
I too would consider that a worthy goal for computerized NLP, but I'm not so sure that people don't at least partially deconstruct the news. Intelligent, critical readers often intuitively deconstruct things such as news, which embody all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle biases, and sometimes what is conspicuously absent in an article tells us a lot. To a point, of course. I wouldn't argue that intelligent readers create self-reflexive interpretations in which the article is really about the article itself or the act of writing the article.
To answer you directly, if all we are talking about is 'parsing language' (which is what you actually said), then I agree with you, but if we mean extracting meaning from language (as in, extracting more than just the obvious meaning that occurs to an 8-year old), then I believe more is required, since common sense fails for many people to extract more than the meaning that occurs to an 8-year old. Insofar as understanding meaning, and not parsing language, is the ultimate goal, I'd argue that some of the deconstructionist's reading strategies are helpful and perhaps required, and common-sense alone won't cut it for disambiguating semantic (and perhaps sometimes syntactic) ambiguities.
Ummm, those syntactic and semantic ambiguities which require common sense are part of what the parent was talking about. And context and many other things are also often necessary. Deconstruction is agreeing with you here, but saying that there are more factors involved than just your common sense. To repeat, these are the reasons that NLP software is still in its infancy.
I only meant that they staked a good part of their future on the success of things that Microsoft has staked its future on the failure of, so anything that causes Microsoft trouble, directly or indirectly, benefits IBM.
Where is the simple html option? I don't see it in mozilla 1.5, and i looked through every option? I just saw something about images and javascript in emails, but this wouldn't disallow downloading a css stylesheet that could be used to register a live address.
I'm sure they, like every other (for-profit) corporation out there are not doing it out of altruism, but that they are doing it is the important thing. They are probably doing it mostly because it makes sense to them business-wise -- both because of cost savings and because of the example it sets for other companies to follow (in which case the IBM consultants will be sitting there waiting to sell them services and extras) -- and perhaps to spite microsoft too, but that again is in their business interest.
Oh, if you are willing to fork out a few bucks ($83), then the following book is packed with more cases than you will want to read: _Software and Internet Law_ at publisher or Amazon. This book was the source of many of the readings in the syllabus noted above.
There are many important cases in the syllabus to a cyberlaw class taught at Boalt by Pamela Samuelson, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the few undisputed cyberlaw luminaries. She is less well-known to the general public than, say, Lessig, but at least as well known within the field. The syllabus is here: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/courses/cyberlaw 02/. That should keep you busy for a semester or so ;-).
I have absolutely 0 evidence in either case, and the only way you can say that one of these is justified and one isn't is to distinguish between kinds of faith. Yet, you seem to have a simplistic notion that 'faith' is an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, singular phenomenon -- the same in every case -- and that any time somebody believes anything without empirically testing it, they are taking something on faith, exactly the same as taking on faith that Jesus rose from the dead or homeless Zeke is communicating with Elvis.
I would submit that there are different kinds of faith, and some are more justified than others. One characteristic that I would argue makes a faith more justified is that one could test it empirically if one wanted (conclusively), and that plenty of others whose opinions are generally respected have *already* tested it and found it satisfactory.
atheism is more than the rejection of the concept of "god", but rather the rejection of any religion. I take that to mean that an atheist takes nothing simply on "faith", but instead requires imperical evidence.
I disagree. Early Buddhism rejects the notion of any kind of a god, and also argues that nothing should be taken on faith, but rather tested and considered in light of empirical evidence. Buddha himself said that nobody should ever accept his words on faith, but should rather analyze very carefully and only accept them if they stand up to the light of reason. And yet, many people consider Buddhism a religion. Though to be fair, some say it is just a philosophy, so who knows??
You are wrong. Atheism, etymologically, and in terms of common and scholarly usage, means exactly what the OED says it means: "Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God." Note that it can mean 'not believing in' as well as 'believing in the non-existence of.'
;-)
BTW, i'm not the original poster that you responded to, but you're quite welcome to foe me if you'd like.
Please, do you offer lessons? I am willing to be an unpaid apprentice to learn the wisdom of your art. My life would be complete if I could just die with your wit on my tongue and your rhetorical skills in my mind -- truly, I should be ready to do intellectual battle with the Deity himself after drinking at the fount of your wisdom.
The reason the guy who plays NBA Live doesn't have the reflexes of Kobe Bryant is because basketball is a sport that requires a high level of physical training. And catching the ball instantaneously is a purely physical reaction.
The same *cannot* be said about blowing somebody's head off at close range. First, this requires no skill whatsoever. Secondly, the important aspect of the reaction of the conditioned psycho boy is not physical: it is mental. The key thing that happened is not what occurred physically, it is what went through that boy's head when for whatever reason, he decided, "I'm going to go outside, get my gun, and blow that fucker's head off!". Once he had the *thought*, everything follows, like in the videogame.
If you really want something that is analogous to the basketball situation, I would suggest something like somebody sneaking up behind the kid, putting their arm around his neck, and he instantly flips them over his shoulder and breaks the attacker's arm in five places. That is a purely physical action, analogous to Jordan's reaction to a incoming basketball, and I think we all agree that without martial arts training, the video game couldn't cause this reaction, and the reason why not is because the kid doesn't have the *physical* skills. In the case of blowing off another kid's head, however, somebody who's never even shot a gun has the skill required to do this at close range. What they need to learn, however, is just that whipping out the gun is a valid reaction to humiliation or whatever.
There is great precedent for taking literal things like 'papers' -- which was synonymous with (sometimes personal or private) information in that day -- and interpreting them in light of the different context in which we live today. Hence, 'papers' is interpreted to mean more today than it did 200 years ago, just like 'speech' in the first amendment means more than it did 200 years ago. Fortunately, interpreters of the constitution are generally not as literal minded as you!
Ummm, there is a Common Lisp implementation: <a href="http://www.kernelthread.com/hanoi/html/gcl.h tml">http://www.kernelthread.com/hanoi/html/gcl.ht ml</a>, but it's getting slashdotted right now.
'Papers' sure sounds like information to me.
so what you're saying is that there is no such thing as an inalienable right, since there clearly is no 'right' that has has never been nor could be taken away.
if you were approaching the car *really( quickly, the light would be blue-shifted. For more info, try googling: doppler red blue shift.
thanks, that makes sense. I wasn't thinking that the value could be somewhere between zero and one. I always wondered why 'srm' overwrites so many times, and now I understand.