Well given that this party is funded by taxpayers, for the purported benefit of said taxpayers and their society; I do think its problematic that said party would hold such a view.
> For the latter, you are declaring your opinion as fact. Every language allows redundancy and variation of expression; if it truly provided no benefit, why have we not seen a popular language that only allowed a single expressive style?
It is indeed my opinion (as prefaced by 'I find myself disagreeing..') but the premise that a programming language benefits from resembling or mimicking features of natural languages is also an opinion.
Also I should note that your phrasing of the question isn't quite correct ("if it truly provided no benefit"), something that provides no benefit is unlikely to be excluded from a language (e.g. double negatives "there ain't nothing here to see!") unless there is a clear benefit to doing so, and in fact there are times that there is.
Particularly I would draw your attention to for example more limited lexicon sets (such as those used by dispatchers, rescue workers, climbers, EMT professionals etc.). Those explicitly exclude variation of expression, since that leads to an increased risk of being misinterpretation in often critical situations. It is my inclination that while interpretation of code isn't time critical, reducing variance (e.g. a common coding style does this as well) reduces cognitive load (makes comprehension more efficient).
Curiously I find myself disagreeing quite a bit with Larry.
> If a language is designed so that you can "learn as you go", then the expectation is that everyone is learning, and that's okay.
It's okay if we never reach understanding or agreement on what Faulkner intended by a particular sentence (we can still grasp most of the whole). For a programming language this is explicitly not okay! This goes for ambiguity as well.
> Multiple ways to say the same thing
> This one is more of an anthropological feature. People not only learn as they go, but come from different backgrounds, and will learn a different subset of the language first.
This increases cognative load with no particular benefit.
>However, any possible password with a standard printable ASCII character set will typically be found in Rainbow tables up to 10 characters long making expensive cracking unnecessary.
Umm what? Even assuming a limited set of ASCII i.e. Base64, on what magical medium do you suppose a 64^10 rainbow table is stored?
Interesting comment by Gorhill from the above discussion:
>> I thought web extensions couldn't block that content.
> I just ran a couple of tests, and I believe you are correct.
> Legacy uBlock Origin can block the network request to GA.
> However webext-hybrid uBO as per Network pane in dev tools does not block it. Same for pure webext Ghostery, the network request to GA was not blocked, again as per Network pane in dev tools.
> What is concerning is that both uBO webext-hybrid and Ghostery report the network request to GA as being blocked, while it is really not as per Network pane in dev tools. It's as if the order to block/redirect the network request was silently ignored by the webRequest API, and this causes webext-based blockers to incorrectly and misleadingly report to users what is really happening internally, GA was not really blocked on about:addons, but there is no way for the webext blockers to know this and report properly to users.
> This is what I have observed, hopefully this can be confirmed by others.
Website administrators: Please do not disable everything except google bot in your robots.txt [0][1] - this is a terrible practice making our internet worse.
> I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads,
Firefox on mobile supports extensions, so you can use UBlock Origin / UMatrix. Also the built-in reader mode makes most sites a much better experience.
> but if you can understand written instructions it doesn't matter what you happened to read to get that skill.
Of course you are free to define useful in a way that makes it impossible to argue or to have a discussion. So let's stick to the way it is defined for the purpose of say University admission.
> Why is reading a classic American author important?
Reading difficult work earlier develops higher reading comprehension faster.
> Likewise, what is wrong with using M&Ms for learning math?
I think if by 4th grade you still need concrete pieces to understand integers or denominators of a fraction or whatever they were supposed to represent, that is a sign of a weak math education. In general concrete examples are antithetical to learning advanced math, this leads do the monkey-style ability to solve problems that are similar ones presented in textbooks, but not the ability to reason effectively about an unfamiliar problems.
As you say, they definitely aren't uncorrelated dimensions - otherwise we would have seen ~50 pilots within one stdev for all 10 dimensions. So this simplified metaphor really isn't telling us anything about how statistics apply to students.
This definitely needs a citation. It might not have significant correlation either way, but I cannot find a reference for the former (some cursory googling [0][1]).
Somehow despite all the conversations around education in the US the education system still sucks. I went to one of the highest funded (amount spent per child) public schools in my state, and as far as I am aware it was far behind in terms of curriculum strength compared to what my parents were taught in the Soviet Union at the same age.
I mean we didn't read a classic American author till 6th or 7th grade! And if I recall correctly there were still M&M's in math class in grade 4!
The US may have an education problem but somehow the Soviet Union and China did fine years ago with out all the ed-tech snake oil.
> A qualified peer review would (hopefully :) have caught this and other latent issues if an HN commenter did.
Would the qualified peer-review necessarily be reading the NodeJS code, or just checking the theoretical soundness of the paper? I'm not so certain about the former...
The entire concept of suicide being illegal is appalling to begin with. No one ever asks a human being whether they want to live life, and for any entity to presume jurisdiction over that is ridiculous. This is the legacy of centuries of religious superstition...
One of my primary uses for Skype has been phone-calls to family (international landlines) and it has at least been reliable in that regard. Most recently Hangouts no longer works on Firefox (due to Mozilla switching plugin API's), I haven't experience with the other two, which would you recommend if moving from Skype?
I've been using Skype since 2007 or so. While I haven't found a more convenient alternative, the application quality has always been extremely low. This includes failing to sync notifications / received between mobile and desktop, zombie notifications that keep reappearing (even after being dismissed multiple times) and the list goes on. Why they can't get their shit together is a mystery to me.