TIL three members of the Westboro Baptist Church work as lawyers for the state of Kansas and that the church itself makes nearly all of its money by trolling people into infringing on their rights and then suing the bejeezus out of them.

derpleberries · 2012-05-25T20:41:40.784175+00:00

The definition of marriage would be changed from "between one man and one woman" which has been the deffinition since civilization began

Are there no and have there never been any civilized polygamous or polyandrous societies? I am not suggesting we recognize polygamy, just wondering whether it is sound practice to argue that we should do something “because it has been done since civilization began” when in fact it hasn’t been done since civilization began.

Also, I am in Canada. We have a monarch. Many Americans would take strong issue with the idea that we should do things “the way we’ve always done things in civilization.” The way we’ve always done things is have absolute monarchs who were appointed by the divine right of kings. Over the last few thousands years we’ve evolved to stop always doing things the way we’ve always done them.

Also you wouldn't be able to call the person who your married to "wife" or "husband" which have long been names for your married life partner that symbolize the warmth and refuge of marriage

I have several male friends who have husbands and female friends who have wives. I know of children with two dads and other children with two moms. I am confused as to why ceasing to restrict marriage two a pair of people of opposite genders would necessitate abandoning the words “wife,” “husband,” “mother,” and “father” to mean respectively, a woman in a marriage, a man in a marriage, a woman raising a child, and a man raising a child.

The terms father and mother have nothing to do with marriage in any event. What do you call a single mother, if not a “mother?” If she happened to be married to another woman, why would you stop calling her a “mother?” Motherhood has nothing to do with marriage.

BigBuz · 2 days

Don’t try to win over the haters, you are not the jackass whisperer—Scott Stratten

JimboRSA · 2 days

That was cheesy, but it reminds me of:

“It's true, some wine improves with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.”—Abigail Van Buren

chrisledet · 7 days

They may not be getting much “VC Funding,” and even if they were,the YC investment is typically very small, on the order of $6,000 per founder. I think this is all about the fact that YC has a very specific way of shepherding its startups along and Light Table may benefit from that.

webibiz · 7 days

Schadenfreude is best enjoyed in private.

AristotleJr · 13 days

No Viet Cong ever called me nigger

—Muhammed Ali

homoiconic · 14 days

gcc gives nine, which is what i’d expected from C before being reminded this is undefined. Basically, ++ semantics are supposed to happen before the statement is evaluated, so it could be (wrongly!) considered equivalent to:

i = 1;
++i;
++i;
i = i + i + i;

Peter Cooper disassembled the gcc output to see what it was doing:

https://gist.github.com/2661539

If two widely used compilers give different results, that’s a pretty solid hint that this construct should never appear in production code :-)

homoiconic · 14 days

Certain programming constructs, like this one or swapping two variables without the use of an intermediate variable, exist chiefly as ways of torturing job applicants with demonstrations of the interviewer’s prowess in accumulating hitherto useless bits of information.

http://raganwald.posterous.com/bob-and-carol-and-ted-and-alice

sassybananas · 14 days

In Ian Fleming’s novel “You Only Live Twice,” Blofeld and Irma Bunt buy a castle in Japan and build a suicide garden, loaded with deadly flora and fauna. The Japanese government wants him eliminated, but don’t want to do it themselves, so they get the British to send Bond.

I believe Fleming may have gotten the idea from Aokigahara, although it only became a popular tourist destination in the 1960s, its reputation a sa place of death and demons seems to go much further back.

homoiconic · 14 days

That’s absolutely what happens in JavaScript and many other languages, which I think is much easier to reason about.

Duncanconstruction · 14 days

Are you sure they were hiding the Norden bombsight? From the Wikipedia article you shared:

The supposed great secrecy of the device was also widely promoted, to some degree to invent a mythology to boost its reputation. In fact, the Norden received reduced classification long before the war, was declassified in 1942, widely written about in the press in 1943, and shown publicly in 1944. The basic concepts were well known even earlier, and other air forces had been working on similar designs around the same time, notably the RAF's Automatic Bomb Sight. It was also known that Herman Lang, a German spy working at the factory, leaked the design to the Abwehr in 1938.[4] The Carl Zeiss Lotfernrohr 7, widely deployed by the Luftwaffe, was an advanced mechanical system technically similar to the original Norden bombsight.

Duncanconstruction · 14 days

It wasn’t radar per se, the Germans had radar of their own:

http://century-of-flight.net/Aviation%20history/WW2/german_radar.htm

But as noted, the cavity magnetron was discarded by the Germans as unworkable while the English perfected it. I also wonder whether the English were even more interested in covering up the fact that they had cracked Enigma and knew when the raids were coming before the German pilots themselves.

homoiconic · 15 days

My understanding is that the JavaScript standard says that the first ++i MUST be evaluated before the second, as sub-expressions are evaluated in strict left to right order. Thus, the ++i on the left is evaluated before the ++i on the right, then the results of those two expressions are summed, and only then is the result added to the value of i.

The semantics of += are the most interesting, especially when compared to i = i + .... But I assure you that in JavaScript, the result is six while in Ruby, the result is three (because Ruby doesn’t have ++ so ++i is simply +(+i))

ejrh · 16 days

I’m not sure that “a fully functioning skeleton” is the first thing that must be taught, or that it must be taught independently of some other first thing.

I’m perfectly ok with “Here is a function that does something simple but it has some moving parts. It won’t do anything until we wrap it in this and this and this.” That is also a fine first step.

petdance · 23 days

If you don’t follow-up on the no-hires, you have no idea what your false negative rate is. Evaluating an interview process on the basis of a lack of false positives is fine when you’re in an employer’s market and your waiting room is crowded with excellent candidates, but when the market favours the qualified employee, false negatives will kill you.

linucs · 23 days

The Batter choice of a more civilized age.

linucs · 23 days

Fair enough. But please remember, most of industry using Java started by choosing a Sun product. Now they’re using Oracle products without ever being asked if that’s what they wanted to do, and it’s extremely difficult to call all the IT folks and programmers into a room and tell hem to rewrite all the Java in C# or Python or Haskell or whatever you think is a batter choice if you were starting today and knew that Java belonged to Oracle.

petdance · 23 days

I’m not saying this is a “good” interview question, but I would certainly find it interesting if someone gave me something like that and asked me to clean it up!

homoiconic

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