Disqus - Latest Comments for SFEley

Re: Mormon church drops antigay policies to ‘reduce hate & contention’ in society

SFEley — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 14:22:00 -0000

This article skips over the most important point. Sure, gay married couples won't be kicked out, hooray, but they're expected _not to have sex._ That part's still a sin and they will condemn you for it over and over in the services you're now allowed to keep attending.

Who could pass up an offer like that? I'm sure all the queer kids who fled the Mormons as soon as they could over the years will come flocking back now.

Re: Staver: LGBT 'rights' sneakily added to anti-lynching bill

SFEley — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 15:45:03 -0000

This guy is completely factually wrong. This wasn't new. Federal hate crime law (Title 18, Chapter 13, Subsection 249) already declared hurting or killing someone because of "religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability" to be a federal crime. Those protections for LGBTQ people were already established. The only thing the anti-lynching bill does is copy the same language and apply the same penalties to anyone who was part of a group with that intention.

There's no new "back door" here. Mr. Staver didn't even read the law this bill is amending. This is (dare I say it?) fake news.

Re: Caitlyn Jenner: Trump has been ‘the worst’ for transgender people

SFEley — Mon, 12 Mar 2018 10:23:57 -0000

Absolutely not. That's defeatist. Instead I'll put my effort into educating "the much greater majority" until they know better.

Re: Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone?

SFEley — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:15:52 -0000

Wait, that's what friendzoned means? ..Then what's the term for "I became friends with this woman and my attraction for her grew, and when I expressed it she didn't feel the same way, and now I feel weird about it?"

Re: Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone?

SFEley — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:10:20 -0000

I don't read this as satire. I don't have any idea why so many people are saying the author doesn't mean it. I haven't read all two hundred comments; did she say "I was just kidding" in one of them?

It reads as sincere frustration to me, and it sounds similar to complaints I've heard from both men and women.

Re: Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone?

SFEley — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:04:36 -0000

Um. I have indeed been resented by women for "friendzoning" before. AND I've been friendzoned. Neither is fun, and neither felt like I was merely playing to a stereotype.

What annoys me about this comment thread is that almost everyone seems to assume some gender-based difference here. And those who aren't are still assuming there's a right answer and a wrong answer.

Wanting to be sexual with a friend, being rejected, and then feeling weird about it isn't a male or female thing. It's a disappointing and embarrassing situation. Acting like it's a non-event (as the original poster seems to want) isn't something everyone can reasonably do. A starkly dismissive "Sorry, the cost/benefit analysis no longer justifies my talking to you" (this is how I read Zombie's position) is something I HOPE most people don't want.

The middle ground? Varies for each person, I guess. Mine is most often "Okay, that was weird. It's fine that you said no, and if I feel rejected it's my problem and not yours, but I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen. If you can hear my feelings and respect them, we really ARE friends. Rock on."

Re: Why doesn't anyone want to build companies anymore?

SFEley — Fri, 11 May 2012 15:38:00 -0000

No, it usually takes a few months or a couple years, for appearance's sake. But it's rare that it doesn't happen.

Re: Why doesn't anyone want to build companies anymore?

SFEley — Fri, 11 May 2012 15:36:12 -0000

Because the people who are building companies to last don't spend all their time talking about it.

Re: http://bigthink.com/ideas/41794

SFEley — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:41:38 -0000

Oops. This was a quirk in Disqus's URL detection -- it thought the closing parenthesis was part of the link. The working link is:

http://bigthink.com/ideas/4...

Re: Concentric CSS: Brandon Craig Rhodes

SFEley — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 20:32:29 -0000

This is a _very_ cool idea. I think part of the reason why it ends up so scattershot is because it's rare (or should be) for any specific class to have more than a small handful of properties. But I think you're right -- having an order in which to think about them can prevent a lot of confusion.

I'm going to spread this around. Thanks very much!

Re: http://bigthink.com/ideas/40708

SFEley — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:04:46 -0000

Big Think hosts a number of blogs, @NixManes -- Mind Matters is one of them, and this post simply represents the blogger's opinion. (Daylight Atheism is another, with rather different views.) This is separate from Big Think's feature articles, expert interviews, etc.

I know they care about blog quality in general, but I don't believe they're exercising any editorial control over the bloggers' individual posts, and I don't think they should.(Disclaimer: I'm a software contractor for Big Think, but I'm not staff and I'm not on the editorial side. Any opinions or errors are my own.)

Re: http://bigthink.com/ideas/40686

SFEley — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:06:10 -0000

Hi Hemant. I'm one of the developers for Big Think. I'm concerned about the missing comments issue, and I'd like to investigate and resolve it. Can you please let me know the timeframe of at least one of your missing comments (i.e., "last Wednesday afternoon" or such) and any words you know it should have contained? That'll help me look for it in the Disqus comment history, if it's there, and determine if it was falsely marked as spam or something. In the meantime, I'll whitelist you to help make sure it doesn't happen again.

Same goes for anyone else who's having this problem. Please either reply here (I'll keep watching this page's comments) or else drop me a line at steve.eley@bigthink.com with details. Thanks very much.

Re: http://staging.bigthink.com/ideas/40088

SFEley — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:15:38 -0000

Test comment!

Re: This Awesome Urn Will Turn You into a Tree After You Die

SFEley — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:41:44 -0000

This is a test comment on localhost!

Re: http://staging.bigthink.com/ideas/40318

SFEley — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:02:27 -0000

Testing Disqus comments!

Re: http://localhost:3000/ideas/39782

SFEley — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:01:52 -0000

And this is a followup.

Re: If you gaze into nil, nil gazes also into you

SFEley — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:27:13 -0000

It's rare that I disagree with you guys, but this is one of those times. Nil is not a code smell. This is evident by the fact that all your alternatives are more complex than the problem they propose to solve. Worse, they require anything that calls your class's public methods to be more complex too, multiplying outside entities unnecessarily.

Ruby already treats nil very elegantly. The solution to the NoMethodError is baked into the core of the language: nil is the only value besides "false" that is false. So tests against nil are almost always simpler and cleaner than any other conditional check. Most of the time I don't even bother with an "if" -- I just use &&. None of your solutions removes the need for a test -- they just move it around.

Ruby loves nil. It expects nil and handled it with grace. If you're going to go against the flow of the language like this, I think you need to make a better case for a problem that genuinely justifies the increased cost and clunkiness of your alternatives. .

Re: http://kylebanker.com/blog/2010/03/28/does-the-driver-support-feature-x/

SFEley — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:18:04 -0000

Thank you! I'll take a look and let you know if anything pops out at me from the drivers or my own code. (The trouble, of course, being that knowing what's missing from the canonical point of reference is hard without a canonical point of reference.) >8->

Re: List of Database Commands

SFEley — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:18:15 -0000

This list seems very incomplete. I was referred here from a blog post by Kyle Banker in which he documents the findAndModify command, and directs us to look at the count command as well. Neither is listed here. Does this need to be updated, or is there an authoritative list somewhere else?

Re: http://kylebanker.com/blog/2010/03/28/does-the-driver-support-feature-x/

SFEley — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:16:17 -0000

The list of database commands you refer to is very incomplete. It doesn't include the findAndModify() and count() commands you directly reference, for instance. Does that page need to be updated, or is there a more canonical list somewhere else?

Re: Crazy, Heretical, and Awesome: The Way I Write Rails Apps | James on Software

SFEley — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:09:02 -0000

To me it just sounds like you're wanting to turn Rails into Java. That would be No Fun.

The specific concerns you mention could have been addressed more easily by implementing the logging as an Observer rather than a callback. That seems like a more appropriate place for it anyway given its less central role. And if you don't want it in the console, have an environment where you remove the observer or set the log to nil.

"Our tests are fast because we're not really doing anything?" Sorry. I fail to see how that's a feature. You still have to test those database parts somewhere. Maybe you have other tests that are faster, but the only reason you had to write those tests is because you have more code. You're testing things really quickly that would have been unnecessary if you'd chosen different patterns.

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Ruby Tuesdays: RBP Chapter 5

SFEley — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:30:52 -0000

Well, it was $5, so that part's been working out fine for me. >8->

The reading experience is actually not that bad. The O'Reilly book apps are all based on Stanza, which looks good and is highly usable. The only annoyance is with some of the code samples -- it doesn't wrap code lines, so if they go off the screen I have to resort to some roundabout tricks to read them. Usually, though, I can get the gist and it isn't a problem.

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Ruby Tuesdays: RBP Chapter 5

SFEley — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:58:26 -0000

Do you get a reasonable take if we bought it on the iTunes app store?

(I bought it there just after you posted Chapter 1, as I knew I'd be unlikely to have the time to make detailed discussion as you'd asked, but I still thought the book was a great idea and I wouldn't have known to look for it if you weren't doing this.)

Re: Scanty on Redis

SFEley — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 11:28:29 -0000

So when will CouchDB, Mongo, or Redis be available on Heroku?

(This is the main thing keeping Heroku from being an attractive spot for many of my little personal projects. I usually want to do at least _one_ thing that's experimental, and Heroku only supports the mainstream tool stack.)

Re: Tagaholic - Mini Irb and Mini Script/Console

SFEley — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:32:31 -0000

This is so astoundingly cool. I was just Googling now to find some tips for adding a quick-and-dirty command line utility to my "hit against some commercial service's API" gem. I was getting frustrated figuring out how to start IRB within a specific module's binding (as opposed to making a new subsession inside the prompt after it starts).

Now I don't have to worry about it. What you've shown here is MUCH better for my needs. Thank you, thank you!