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The Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Unix Philosophy

#241

Post by yeahdude »

dredmorbius wrote: post #237
yeahdude wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ad homimen would be "people named Eric cannot be trusted". Since you actually wrote this sentence 9 hours ago, it is safe to infer that you really don't know anything about logical fallacies or what you're talking about in general, since you can't possibly have learned all you need to know about them in 9 hours. Given this level of confidence in something that is both wrong and easily checked, why should we trust a…

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html "An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument." http://www.skepdic.com/adhominem.html "Ad hominem is Latin for "to the man." The ad hominem fallacy occurs when one asserts that somebody's claim is wrong because of…

ESR's claims about politics : ESR's claims about technology :: your claims about logical fallacies : your claims about ESR

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#242

Post by dredmorbius »

yeahdude wrote: post #241
dredmorbius wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html "An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument." http://www.skepdic.com/adhominem.html "Ad hominem is Latin for "to the man." The ad hominem fallacy occurs when one asserts that somebody's claim is wrong because of…

ESR's claims about politics : ESR's claims about technology :: your claims about logical fallacies : your claims about ESR

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778371

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9781868

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#243

Post by zvrba »

pdkl95 wrote: post #224
alkonaut wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Text" in a computer is bytes + metadata about those bytes. Without that metadata, it's just bytes. Exactly that is what unix pipes are: a streams of bytes, not streams of text. Ironically, the tools that are happiest about these streams are of course those tools that don't care about text but just stream bytes. The pain occurs when the tools actually need to parse the text. I would agree much more with the unix desi…

see locale(1) and locale(7) This is why you the predefined character classes in regular expressions. For example, setting LC_CTYPE changes the meaning of '[[:alpha:]]' and sort(1) respects LC_COLLATE. A lot of work has already been done to solve these problems.

> A lot of work has already been done to solve these problems.

Not nearly enough. You write a script which expects a 'file' at some place, but it will break in french locale because 'file' will be replaced with something like 'fichier'. Sure, you can run under C locale, but then some other script, written for french locale will break. Not to mention date formatting, number formatting, etc.

In comparison, binary or XML (!) become very attractive.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#244

Post by davidgerard »

Frondo wrote: post #185
twoodfin wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but notice you managed to write something approximating the length of a short essay without once pointing out any "bullshit" in ESR's technical writing, let alone explaining how said "bullshit" must derive from his wrongthink.

I pasted this link elsewhere in the comments; the rationalwiki page talks about ESR's objectionable ideas: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond Now, his attitudes on HIV denialism and IQ and race don't deal with engineering, but they're pretty objectionable. And, you know, we can get good engineering writing and thinking from a lot of places. ESR doesn't have a monopoly on writing about operating systems. I'd…

I wrote a bit of that page, and I still listen avidly to his technical expertise, which is qualitatively greater than most people's. But the rest ...

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#245

Post by davidgerard »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #160
KingMob wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's disingenuous to equate huge numbers of people disagreeing with you on the internet to the government suppressing you with law or force. ESR is free to speak his beliefs in public, and in return people are free to criticize him, not recommend his books, refuse to invite him to conferences, etc. Freedom of speech is about prior restraint, not immunity from consequences.

Is it now? When you can get fired from your job over your private beliefs, when even a Nobel prize winner can have his (and her - completely innocent - wife's) career ended on the spot, when you can lose your home over disagreeing with "status quo", I say something is wrong. Maybe this is how democratic - as opposed to totalitarian - oppression looks like. When you have to avoid discussions out of fear you'll get fir…

The libertarian alternative to discrimination laws is people boycotting those they find reprehensible.

(Of course, if it's a libertarian favourite being boycotted, the same libertarians reliably shit - c.f. Brendan Eich - but anyway.)

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#246

Post by davidgerard »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #60
harkyns_castle wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a surprise to me, I hadn't heard any of that. Not that I've followed things that closely. What I found so far is [1], in which he seems to just be doing a bit of a "show me the data" thing wrt global warming (its fairly old I guess in defense). In [2] he's definitely saying IQ is race-related, and gender related to a lesser extent, in my quick readings. I quite like that he doesn't mince his words, sugar coat…

Regarding [2]. So I guess this quote is the problem: > And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. [...] And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about 85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability i…

"heritable" is the weasel word here. It is applied when the kid matches the parents - but the leap from there to "genetic" is unwarranted, because parents and their children tend to be in the same social circumstances.

For comparison, the Flynn effect demonstrates you can get 20-30 points difference in the same gene pool, with the difference being social circumstances. So any difference under 30 points doesn't necessitate invoking genetics.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#247

Post by davidgerard »

cousin_it wrote: post #73
laichzeit0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding [2]. So I guess this quote is the problem: > And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. [...] And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about 85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability i…

I guess everyone and every group finds certain truths uncomfortable. It's especially sad that the theory of evolution seems to make literally everyone uncomfortable. "Of course humans and chimps have a common ancestor! We have looked at the genetic code, and found that more than 95% is shared. Give up, it's over." The right will hate you for saying that. "Of course there is inherited variation in intelligence, no mat…

Flynn Effect gets you 20-30 points in the same gene pool, therefore via non-genetic factors.

If you see a 15 point difference and immediately attribute it to genetics, you're making an unwarranted assumption.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#248

Post by colechristensen »

peteretep wrote: post #25
colechristensen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really it?

It's unclear whether you're suggesting his views are not sufficiently objectionable, or you're suggesting he has other views that are very objectionable that weren't enumerated above.

> ESR denies AGW, believes that race and IQ are correlated, and was strongly in favor of the Iraq war

The first two are healthy amounts of scientific doubt and the third is a political opinion. (Though it could be highly dependent on how these views are expressed.)

I was expecting hate speech or Nazism, instead I see overreactions to opposing opinions people confuse with moral failings.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#249

Post by fmoralesc »

jalfresi wrote: post #179
fmoralesc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, this is what neovim does.[1] [1]: http://neovim.io/doc/user/msgpack_rpc.html#msgpack-rpc

Thanks for the solid example. I especially like the use of the NVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS environment variable for service discovery of the backend!

They are working on making the servers aware of each other, so calling the `serverlist()` can be used to connect to other servers.

Re: The Unix Philosophy

#250

Post by [deleted] »

Retra wrote: post #222
jimmaswell wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python only lets you have one line in a lambda - the return line. In languages with nicer anonymous function support I can make an anonymous function span multiple lines and branches eg. in C# you could assign to a delegate something like myObj.stringToHash = (s) => {int x = 0; foreach(var c in s) x += ... ; return x;} I find python's restriction in this case fairly strange. If I wanted to do that in python I'd have…

Well, if you need multiple lines, you probably don't need your function to be anonymous. (Your example is just `sum`...)

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