mlangdon

You are missing the key quality for which industrial scale produce has been selectively bred over the past century: shippability. The ability to be placed in a box and moved thousands of miles without falling apart is the paramount quality of mass produced produce. Go to a farmer's market, be anything but delicate with a large heirloom tomato and you will understand what I mean.

Bounds and overflow checking, both on array accesses and on arithmetic

I like that one. Anyone know any widely adopted languages that do this?

The big difference here is that states can simply buy access to, e.g., a Cisco Nexus and attack it from inside and out until they find a vulnerability in NX-OS, let's say, a malformed CLI-via-HTTP call.

Whereas, what software does a Google switch even run? What's the architecture, the APIs? You basically need someone inside Google, or for one of these things to fall off a truck. Way more involved and expensive than the 10k you might spend on a Nexus to throw it your lab and set your hackers on it.

Slightly away from topic, but my new burn is "this is so web 2.0." Because that was like 10 years ago. Personally, I think AWS feels pretty "now" with UX only a developer could love (said as a sometime developer).

This is technically true, which is the best kind of true. Swap in nationalist, chauvinist. It's utterly clear what was meant by racism above, in spite of your semantics.

Most reasonably popular languages will have platform-independent open source read-write libraries for Excel. I've used the Python version of this with minimal pain.

The onus is on him to stop inciting (and personally inflicting) violence against women, Muslims, Latinos, and more. That's what's dividing the country. I'm not going to rely on Democrats to lead any kind of thought until they grow a backbone.

Prove it. Let's see some tax returns. In the absence of evidence, it is reasonable to assume that he is heavily in debt with no liquid assets and effectively poor.

He paid a 7 dollar boy scout fee for his son from his "charity."

This is very cool. You had me at David Foster Wallace.

I'll be trying this out:

1. As a sublime plugin for my next blog post. 2. As plain old Python as part of a mass scrape-spellcheck-stylecheck of the corporate website.

Here[1] is (I believe) the originating article.

Meanwhile, the first really popular version of Oregon Trail came out in 1985[2].

Ultimately I just meant it as a jaunty shorthand for the intergenerational window in which I was born. If you were also born then and this does not jive with your experience, it's going to be okay, eventually.

[1] http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/04/oregon-trail-generat... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(video_game...

Yes, some people don't enjoy jokes.

This is well documented.

I'd rather talk about literally nothing than have another political conversation where I am either preaching to the converted or shouting at a stone wall.

It's approximately 1978 though '82. Basically the last generation that has a living memory of the before time, but grew up riding the crest of the wave of everything that happened over the past 30 years, technologically.

Or, people who played Oregon Trail on Macs and Commodore 64s in grade school.

You seem fun!

There's a deeply sarcastic culture of fake rules at my company, in which groove this fake rule fits precisely. Lunch time is generally understood as a time of bullshitting, conviviality and foosball. Every time we have to wait 30 seconds to find out, e.g., how many apple seeds you can eat without killing yourself, we are all richer for it.

I jokingly enforce a no-googling-at-the-lunch-table rule on my millennial coworkers (I'm gen Oregon Trail).

This allows for the type of fatuous speculation that makes for decent conversation.

Occasionally I even give in to the need to know.

This is what I'm saying, only if you think unfettered free marketeering is an unalloyed good would you propose that the antithetical position is that the market is evil.

If I say I want restrictions on the market so that our planet is still liveable in 2100, I am not saying the market is evil. I'm merely stating my moral (in that there is a value judgment) position in contrast to the "free" market moral position. If I say that unfettered markets lead to evil, I'm merely contending with that value judgment, not whether there should a market in general. There's an incredible amount of space between a rampant libertarian market and Communism. It's childish to pretend otherwise.

To pick on one paragraph, it's not that the left thinks "The Market" is evil. It's neither good nor evil (amoral, not immoral), so it's irrational to count on it to be a force for good in the world.

Very cool. Flags I commonly see/implement (curl to Python or Ruby usually) include -o (download) and -k (ignore ssl warnings -- you might want an warning comment if you implement that one).

A note: at the time of the Giant Pool of Money, TAL was distributed by PRI. It has never been a part of NPR.

Before even bringing in synthesis, my biggest request would be more control flow (beyond the goto).

Loops, if statement, variables and incrementers. Maybe a "key change" we can up X semi-tones after a keychange keyword without rewriting the notes.

This was exactly what I was looking for. A survey of the available options.

I looked at supercollider before you answered and found the syntax kind of attractive. Sort of scala-ish, though maybe I am misremembering Scala from that one programming test.

Seems like a sublime text language syntax highlighting file would be more than adequate here.

I've done a lot with Pd and enjoyed the noise-making aspects. I find the composition orientation of Alda appealing, but I would want to be able to pipe in sound from something like a Pd. Any of the above inhabit this middle zone?

I particularly like the idea of visual flow programming for synthesis and markup with control flow for composition.

Is there a larger red flag for the aggrieved tech male to wave these days than whinging about "ethics" in the media?

One of the major problems with police in the U.S. is actually that they are trained and paid too little. Most forces require about a semester of training, which consists mostly of when and how to use force. If there was more and better training and better pay, we might get better cops too.

I'd be willing to pay more as a taxpayer for that (rather than just more poorly trained and paid cops and urban assault vehicles).

Better make sure you get those years right if that's your padding :)

I for one would have loved to have had the author as my AP teacher. Senior year was when I discovered (in the Columbian sense) David Foster Wallace, who would not exist as such without Pynchon. It would be a couple of years and attempts before I could get into Pynchon, but when I got to it, Gravity's Rainbow was an ecstatic experience.

David Foster Wallace writes (in an essay collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) about the connection for him between higher math and logic and writing fiction. About the "click" that happens when things fall into place. For several years, I chased exactly that in fiction, before returning to my teenage passion for programming. I was immensely pleased to find the same "click" in software. The same challenges of world creation, of collecting, balancing and combining incongruent, contradictory and abstract thoughts in my head before committing them to screen.

What I'm suggesting is Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and, let's add, William Gass, are programmers' writers.

On the other hand is the manager with no grasp of the technical challenges who asks the expert with the intention of getting a rubber stamp and acts all shocked and offended at the slightest push-back.

Not that I've been the developer in that scenario...

Fair enough. I guess those will be 5-0 votes, given the response to all this from the hard right.

I know it's popular to suggest there are no differences between the two parties. Obviously, this is the case for some issues that many people here are passionate about (privacy, to an extent, foreign policy). However, I'll be pretty sad when there's a Republican president and a Republican FCC chair and these 3-2 votes start going the other way.

Here's one undeniable difference between the two parties.

For those stuck with windows for some reason, note that Cygwin[1] is a not too painful way to get that *nix feeling. Note that things get a little weird if you start, e.g., running python from Cygwin.

[1] http://www.cygwin.com