Get a ticket how? Because you let your dog crap openly on the street while a cop was watching? What kind of disincentive is that?
I live in the police state of New York City, and yet on my block alone I regularly have to dodge between 4-5 piles of crap every time I walk down it. Not even by the curb, right in the middle of the sidewalk.
In fact, I was kind of surprised Zed got so worked up about SF fecal matter. Although it seems like there's slightly more human excrement around in SF, the shit-factor in his previous home is pretty competitive with SF.
Or maybe Zed wanted to assert passive aggressive dominance against SF by 'talking shit' about it (yow!)....
I had a hard time understanding this article, but it was really due to translation issues, and my own lack of understanding about grammar.
I had to read up on the English concept of active- versus passive-voice. For example:
The cat ate the mouse.
is active, because the cat is the subject of the sentence, and is doing the eating.
The mouse was eaten by the cat
is passive, because the mouse is the subject, but is "having something done to it", i.e., passive.
So in the case of "He was disappeared", the point is that you are implying that he did not make himself disappear, but that it was done to them.
However, in Chinese, the language is so flexible that there are many far more common ways to express the same concept. So when someone specifically uses the passive voice in this way, while it is grammatically correct (or at least, is a grammatical invention that follows existing rules), it is obvious to other Chinese-speakers that it's an unusual way to say something.
The examples given start making more sense when you forget about the fact that "suicided" isn't a real word. It's not supposed to be a real word, instead it is meany to be a translation into English that preserves the 'strangeness' of the phrase.
In the case of the Chinese, use of the passive voice in this way is kind of like a shibboleth in that someone who agrees with your politics will know what you really mean, but you still have plausible deniability for those that don't.
I see the comments in this thread (several of them) are going off on the issue of the author's description of the 被 construction as "passive voice." It really isn't. The author was writing for an English-speaking audience and tried to make an analogy to something familiar to English speakers. But the Chinese language actually doesn't have the category of voice in its verbal system at all, and the 被 construction is better described as an "adversative" construction. I learned this from the authoritative Chinese grammar textbook by the late Chinese linguist Y. R. Chao while an undergraduate student of Chinese.
In Chinese in the most recent century, mistranslation of Western writings with passive voice constructions by the 被 construction (whether or not the Western passive constructions have an adversative meaning) tempts a lot of casual observers to suppose that today's Chinese uses 被 simply as a marker of passive voice. But I have many times tried out, as part of personal linguistic fieldwork, newly composed sentences that use 被 as a straight-up translation of normally grammatical sentences in English, and the Chinese sentences are regarded as ungrammatical unless the 被 construction can plausibly be construed as adversative.
(I just Googled for a good Web reference about this, but didn't find one quite to my satisfaction.)
Yeah, it's pretty messy. 被 is usually but not always adverse. And while 被 is the most common, there are at least half a dozen possible passive markers such as 讓,弄,給,叫,據說, etc... The topic comment construction of Chinese further complicates things, since it's very common for passive constructions to lack any passive marker at all.
For example:
The article has been finished.
文章寫好了.
The meeting has been postponed until Monday.
會議延到星期一舉行.
Are you not a native English speaker? I'm a native English speaker, and the meaning of everything was immediately obvious to me. In fact, I've heard similar constructs used in English before.
If you're having trouble understanding passive voice, then think of it this way:
The passive voice means that you don't actually have to put in the person/thing doing the action, and the sentence will be gramatically correct and complete.
See these examples:
Active: The burgler robbed the bank.
Passive: The bank was robbed by the burgler.
Passive - doing person: The bank was robbed.
Note: You can't do this with the active voice, unless you say "someone robbed the bank".
Active: I ate the cake.
Passive: The cake was eaten by me.
Passive - doing person: The cake was eaten.
I'm particularly irritated with the distasteful attitude the author took when he was mad a couple of hacker news readers didn't think it was fair to charge $0.99 for this.
I see how packaging up an existing bookmarklet and selling it is an app could indeed be construed as unfair (although, a point could be made about the added value of the package itself). Creating an original piece of software, on the other hand, and making it available to the public for a fee, is the very definition of fair play in my book.
Absolutely right! Bookmarklets are software like any other and deserve to be treated both by their creators and their users with the same respect and expectations that any other software gets. Great work, by the way-I'm happy you took a craftsman's approach and made something worthwhile.
Hacker News readership can be a tough crowd, but I wouldn't want to have it any other way ;) Thoughtful comments (i.e. where the reader took the time to do a little bit of research before commenting) make it all worth it.
"If there weren't real fundamental problems with the security, stability and performance of Flash I don't think we'd be having this conversation at all."
But that always seems to be the way one technology gives way to another, because it improves on various aspects that were lacking in its predecessor.
I think an apt comparison is RealMedia versus RTSP audio streaming. RealMedia had a significant market share (for the time), but the mishandling of the product led to people finding/building/demanding better tech.
It's arguable whether Adobe is mishandling Flash at the same level, but Flash could easily go away in favor of HTML5 and Javascript.
The only thing lacking right now is the tools, and the Flash IDE would not be difficult to improve upon. On top of that, there's already precedent in the Palm Web OS IDE. Make a similar kind of interface for building easily deployable standards-based web applications, and Flash could end up as a bad dream faster than you think.
Could you (or anyone else) elaborate on the issues with super() as described in this article? I'm having a hard time understanding what's going on between the complex details of the problem and the author's cumbersome syntactic choices.
The super() is magical. Functions aren't supposed to magically know what class or instance they are in unless they are explicitly passed on in Python. That's why you see the "self" argument in methods.
And in the 2nd example, he shows that if you copy super to another name, then it doesn't work. Presumably meaning that super which looks like a function, actually acts like a compiler keyword in certain cases.
Behold the power of an open market (assuming Apple is okay with it) where you-too can create an app with basic functionality and charge money for it. I have no issue with these types of apps as I know many people who will pay for simple, effective apps.
I'll admit that I didn't read this article particularly thoroughly, but how did he get through an entire overview of 'Table Oriented Programming' without mentioning Lua?
Just because you wrote it doesn't mean it's doing what you think it is.
And users really can not be counted on to report errors. Even if they do, the average bug report reads something like "So I put in your address into the google, but when i got there nothing came up! I tried over and over, but every time I clicked on the google, nothing happened! I asked my brother's boss' kid, who's a real whiz with computers, and he told me I should 'eat my cookies' or something, but I'm lactose intolerant!!"
You are missing the point. At a small startup with limited resources you have to make tradeoffs. The tradeoff I've settled on is more functionality in place of 100% quality (if there is such a thing). I think people early on waste a lot of time trying to nail every single bug when some bugs just don't matter in the grand scheme.
Also, I'm not a junior programmer that needs someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I've implemented a spec correctly. Saying it doesn't do what I think it is doing is like saying that I may not exist even though I think I exist.
I have seen many senior programmers who think their code is doing X when it is really doing Y. I've seen a very small number of programmers whose code is always doing what they think it is doing. Every member of the latter group of programmers spends considerable energy double-checking themselves.
Therefore if you're taking short-cuts, the possibility that your code is doing something other than what you think it is is realistic, not ludicrous. Now it may be appropriate for you to take those shortcuts. But you shouldn't take them without being honest with yourself about the risk.
But what do you consider a short-cut? How much testing is enough? Doesn't the situation dictate what is enough and what is really a short-cut? What needs to be tested at a startup IS NOT the same as what should be tested inside a large corporation.
And what "risk" are you referring to? As I've stated, I decided to side with "more features" than "100% test coverage". Sure there is "risk" that there are bugs, but a) there are bugs regardless of how much testing you do and b) I've decided I'd lose users because I don't have features that stand out above the competition rather than because a minority of those features have minor bugs. So to me, the bigger risk is not developing more features.
This is interesting, I had an idea to do the same thing years ago. I ended up just taking a few of the really nice things from Drupal, and making a new framework around those.
I loved Drupal when I was limited to building sites in PHP. It worked around a great deal of common problems in PHP, and was well documented with a good community, etc...
Still, most of the advantages came from having a semi-regulated environment to use to implement CMS projects in PHP. Once you have a sane language like Python, it would be a huge waste to do a direct port. The result would be profoundly unpythonic, and give you no particular benefits because of it.
If you adapt it to make it more pythonic, then you lose the benefit of familiarity for new users. As it is, it's not really like you'll ever be able to use existing Drupal modules in a Python reimplementation; even if you could, it's hard enough keeping modules working across different versions of Drupal, much less entirely different platforms.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/joe-hewitt-developer-of-fac...
They released 3.1 almost immediately after that, but there hasn't been any significant updates since Hewitt left.