Yeah, pan handlers may be good at looking sad, but its actually fairly lucrative. A common fallacy is that poor people "need" money more, and your buck would go further helping them. Unfortunately, many people are poor because they are bad with money. Many pan handlers will blow their take on drugs or alcohol, or splurge on a stay at a motel when they could easily afford to use that amount of money to make rent and groceries if they had the budgeting sense.

I wish it was easier to find ways to help people... I would look at supporting the social services workers, or supplies for teachers in schools. Even in fairly good neighborhoods there are usually always low income parents that need regular assistance with books and field trip payments and stuff like that.

--
I support public education; I married a teacher

Obligatory:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BN...

From:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Progra...

Is there a good reddit area for slashdot refugees to have tech discussions?

The only other alternatives I see are http://arstechnica.com/ (though the discussion engine is pretty limited and somewhat heavily moderated), http://theregister.co.uk/ (doesn't seem to spawn many useful conversations somehow), and maybe http://fark.com/ (good discussions, but but pretty light on tech coverage in a pretty basic discussion engine)

Ha, well, I have a lot of trouble with Kibana since it uses Lucene. Specifically it does this silly thing where all wildcard searches get converted to lowercase, so can't do wildcard searches for anything with capital letters.

For work I end up debugging a lot of ruby and chef, so I'm always searching for help with cookbooks and recipes and gems. Somehow I manage to stay sane. I think.

Oh, yeah, I fucked up... Good catch! I failed at simplifying an example where lim x->1 (x^2 - 1) / (x - 1) = 2
from https://www.mathsisfun.com/cal...
which ends up being a pretty innocuous-looking line with a "hole" at x=1 , y=2

But yeah, that's exactly my point that all div by 0 operations might not be "approximated" as +/- infinity , but under certain not-uncommon circumstances, 1 or 2 or any number could be a possible "approximation" of something that would otherwise throw a div by 0 error. But it's much more trouble to code for those special cases than just bailing out. And that was the point I was trying to make to troll for some mod points :P

Thanks for reminding me about L'Hopital's Rule... I vaguely remembered that there was some way to do it using derivatives of the numerator and denominator, but forgot what to actually search for ;-D

5 mod points to the AC

Oh, yeah, I fucked up... I failed at simplifying an example where lim x->1 (x^2 - 1) / (x - 1) = 2

At least I know what to do to get lots of followup comments now ;-)

It's mathematically possible to do some form of 0/0 using limits and the calculus.

lim x->0 x/x = 1

Also lets you do some interesting other things, like:

lim x->0 x^2/x = 2
lim x->0 sin(x) / x = 1

Shouldn't be too hard to get a function that gives you the correct "approximate" value of the function near the indeterminate point, if there is one. It's just a bunch of special cases that you have to check for every time you do an operation that might possibly result in a div/0 error, right? Go ahead. DO IT! I'll wait.

Yes, sheesh, I've never had any problems just throwing my search engine some extra terms for context. The irony in this Ask Slashdot cuts so deep it hurts.

Here's some obligatory XKCD:

What the poster will get if he he actually gets what he asks for: https://xkcd.com/979/
What the poster actually wants out of a search engine that "doesn't think for him": https://xkcd.com/1185/ (mouseover text)