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CommentMy Hot Take (Score 1)175

Personally, I think that while the language used to teach fundamental programming concepts SHOULDN'T matter in theory... in practice it does. For instance, nobody would advocate teaching them with PHP, or Intercal. One is fundamentally flawed, and the other is a literal joke language. And while using a language designed for academics specifically to teach fundamentals is a good idea on paper, if you expect to succeed in the real world and not just in an academic setting, you should probably learn using a language that you are going to see outside of academia. Yes, most real-world languages will let you get away with bad patterns and can lead to poor programming habits. Guess what? You need to be able to identify those when you see them, because they are abundant in real-world applications, and if you learn on a language that prevents them, you may have a difficult time recognizing them in a language that you pick up later that you may not realize allows for certain rules to be broken.

CommentRe: Want to kill the most popular web framework, M (Score 1)88

Yeah, was gonna say the same thing. You can push a LOT (if not most) of your app logic onto the client if that's your bag, but you will need SOMETHING on the server side to handle data persistence, assuming that the data in question isn't capable of being fully contained by the client or if that isn't desirable.

CommentUgh (Score 1)47

The only thing that sucks about this is now they're going to get sneakier. Instead of just putting them in the metadata, now they'll add spurious citations pointing to them, to throw off automated detection. Granted, this would have the secondary effect of forcing more rigorous peer review to find this bullshit, something that already needs to be happening, but having to contextually cross reference every single citation for validity is just going to make the process more cumbersome than it already is. Hence... UGH.

CommentRe: Three docs that were (Score 1)350

Any doctor that prescribes an antiparasitic drug that works by binding to glutamate-gated chloride channels that are common to invertebrate nerve and muscle cells to treat a viral infection honestly shouldn't keep their medical license. There is nothing about that mechanism of action that would suggest ANY efficacy against viruses (which don't have nerves OR muscles), and there IS a certain level of toxicity in mammals, where past a certain threshold it can pass the blood-brain barrier and have deleterious effects.

CommentRe: When I hear "Air Conditioning", I think COLDER (Score 2)160

It sounds like the big win is that it is potentially MUCH more efficient than driving a phase change system. Much of the energy being removed by an A/C system is the energy pumped back into the system by the compressor. It's also why heat pumps running in heating mode are more efficient than regular furnaces. That compression energy is being shed into the house where you want the heat.

CommentRe: Why should it be? (Score 1)225

When I first read that comment, I was of the same opinion... but now I'm not so sure. Society is very quick to label things as evil, when the definition of evil is entirely dependent on a specific frame of reference. I'm not saying that makes those actions tolerable, just within the framework of what is and is NOT a mental illness... calling something a willful act of evil just because we don't recognize it as a mental illness is ignorant. He's right: people commit crimes because they are either not of sound mind, or because society has forced them to do so in order to survive, or the crime in question is a "victimless" one, or the law itself is actually unjust and the crime is a result of that.

CommentVery interesting (Score 1)187

This idea actually makes a LOT of sense and would explain why GR and QM seem to be perpetually at odds. If time and space simply don't apply to a quantum steady state, and only arise in the form of molecular and nuclear interactions (namely, chemical and nuclear reactions), it makes sense.

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