If you had expressed yourself in a different way, I might have felt some sympathy for you. As it is, I have none. My best advice for you would be, stop reading English websites like Slashdot and go read the equivalent in whatever language you prefer.

Any opportunity to express an anti-American sentiment, I guess. Whatever floats your boat, hater.

I have had three notebook computers in the past 20 years:

- A Kapok brand cheap-o generic PC thing that I bought in 1998, and which lasted 7 years with no problems
- A Panasonic toughbook Y2 that I bought in 2005 which lasted 7 years with no problems
- A Retina Macbook Pro 15 inch that I bought in 2012 and which I am using to this day, four and a half years later

I now expect all of my laptops to last 7 years with no problems. Lasting 4 years isn't really anything to write home about in my book. We'll see if this mac makes it all the way to 7, it's starting to show some troubling signs of premature aging at the moment ...

Additionally, given that there is no such thing as a "gene that makes kidneys" or a "gene that makes neurons", only "genes that make proteins", I expect you'd have to very subtly change a whole lot of genes in order to actually selectively stop just one kind of organ generation, and even then you'd probably get an imperfect version of that organ.

I thought they were just trying to make the pig "human enough" that its kidneys would work, as piggy as they still might be, in a human.

But you know, I really ought to actually do some research because clearly you know more about this than I do ...

But it sounds like they're not doing the experiments in the right order. They're starting with human cells which end up leaving more questions unanswered because they can't carry the experiments out the way they would be able to with pure animal cells. If they started with pure animal cells they could answer the more fundamental questions quickly and this could lead them to more quickly answering the remaining questions using human cells.

I guess they could do all this in parallel though, which I hope they are doing.

Many of the issues they appear to be studying do not require the use of human cells. For example, they talk about not knowing what would happen if the animal were to complete gestation since pigs only gestate for 112 days, but human embryos gestate for 9 months.

Well, then use two different animals that have vastly different gestation periods, and see what happens. You don't need to use human cells to find that out.

They also talk about not knowing whether or not the cells would migrate to the brain.

Again, use something else. Like, a mouse and an elephant. Or whatever.

It seems premature to be using human cells in these experiments if they haven't already answered these questions with other animal chimeras.

Which makes me wonder, why are they using human cells at all? Are they just going for headlines or what?

And other people will happily live where they want to. Why do you feel the need to look down your nose at them? I think you're not as confident about your life situation as you are trying to pretend to be.

The weather comment was meant as a joke. I should have put a smiley in to make that clearer.

What I wear has no bearing on this discussion.

The simple fact is that when a place has expensive housing costs, it's because there is a lot of competition for that housing. And the reason for a lot of competition for housing is that a lot of people want to live there. And believe me, people have reasons that they want to live in a place, it's not "peer pressure" or whatever reason you're making up because you can't think of one.

I'm genuinely happy that you like where you live and that it's an inexpensive place to live. Many young people, especially those who are "upwardly mobile" because they work in a high paying industry, really want to live in an urban place with alot of "action". When they get to be old guys many of them lose interest in that and the equations change, and they move elsewhere. I'm quite certain that you've seen this pattern already even if you don't recognize it.

You sound a lot like my dad, who I feel is very lucky to have the mindset he does: he really loves living in one of the cheapest places in the U.S. (northeastern Ohio). His cost of living is absurdly low and he was able to retire to a comfortable life of doing whatever he wants, alot of which involves outdoor activities like boating, fishing, and hunting that are plentiful and cheap in that area. It's the lucky person who naturally wants to live in the place that many other people are fleeing, because their cost of living will be so low.

Well he bought a house in Florida recently because he couldn't stand Ohio winters any more, but half a year in Ohio and the other half in Florida really is the best of both worlds for him, and it's all doable because of the low cost of living of the areas he lives in.

Now I could spout off about how I cannot comprehend how someone would want to live in a place where the housing is cheap because it mostly sucks there, but I won't. I recognize that different people like different things and I'm not going to assume that other people are unjustified in their choices. That feels alot like a superiority complex trying to get out.

The bay area is a lot bigger than the SF city limits. Not sure why you conclude that, because, in your opinion, SF city is child-unfriendly, that the entire bay area is not a place for kids at all.

I have a 10 year old and 8 year old in Cupertino and we're doing pretty well.

"Yes, the weather is generally nice"

You're a liar. You've never actually been to San Francisco.

Also, why do you think it's worth your time to pontificate on why you don't understand why someone else likes something that you don't? I mean if you're really "just another old guy" surely you've gathered enough wisdom in your time on earth to realize that a lot of different people like a lot of different things, and if you can't understand why someone likes something, the reason is probably NOT because they are deluded, but it's actually because you're just not familiar enough with the thing to know it's good qualities, or maybe it's just fundamentally not your cup of tea.

I mean, seriously. I think your entire post was just to make yourself fell better about your house payment. That's how it reads anyway.

Yeah but at least with Add I know that a function is being called, whereas overloaded operators are exactly and specifically designed to make operations that have "normal" functionality pre-defined as part of the language, actually do something else, without any indication at the point of usage that this is occurring.

Sure if you are intimately familiar with the types involved you will not be caught off-guard very often. But "it doesn't usually bite you if you know what you're doing" is not a great argument for a language feature if you ask me.

I have written code with matrix math and I actually found it clearer to spell out what's going on more explicitly than to use overloaded operators. But that's a personal choice for sure.

The index() form makes it very clear that a function is being called.

Overloaded [] does not.

Pretty simple really.

The worse of all is overloaded ->, which is an operator which can normally be applied to a dereferenceable type, so you would really have no idea to even look for an overloaded operator to see if something unexpected is happening, versus [] which if you know the type is not a C style array, must be an overloaded operator.

In my experience, if there are bad paradigms available in the language, people will use them, even celebrating their ability to do something "clever" and obtuse, and eventually they will make their way into the code base. Very often it may not even be in your code base, that you have control of, but in some open source software that you have to read and understand.

Absolutely, the intelligent and rational use of language features is the responsibility of the programmer; but it's pragmatic to recognize that in a world of imperfect programmers, it's better to not have language features that generally lead to hard to understand code.

a + b for complex types isn't really the trouble, since we know that the compiler can only accept that syntax if the + operator has been overloaded.

What's worse is overloading [] or -> and competely fooling the programmer who has no way of knowing, without exhaustively scanning all source files, whether or not those operators are doing something unusual.

Information hiding. It's bad.

"so why does Nim need a feature only useful in video game inner loops"

yeah that is a bit of a straw man, I admit. We never established that operator overloading is a feature only useful in video game inner loops.

But I will say that I think it's generally only useful in a narrow and small subset of programming problems: those for which mathematical constructs already exist and for which math operators are meaningful. Most people don't write code using quaternions and matrices. General control logic and data flow algorithms are far far more common.

The worst kind of overloading in C++ is overloading for things like brackets and parenthesis and dereference. You're taking an operator which implicitly only has meaning within the language, since these are not mathematical operators, and allowing the meaning to be changed. I can buy that in narrow circumstances there is value in overloading the math operators, but the rest of them, forget it. Way more rope than necessary to hang yourself and anyone else who is unfortunate enough to read your code.

That's only because of some weird syntactical rules of the functional language you are using in your example.

So in:

'let a = 5 if a = 2 else a'

the variable 'a' from that point on in the scope will I guess refer to this *new* 'a' introduced by the let expression, instead of the 'a' that was passed in? That's freaking confusing.

And the 'a' in the right hand side of the let expression is the function parameter 'a', not the 'a' being introduced in the left hand side of the let expression?

Sorry that's just obtuse.