Not only does it affect the peanut allergies in Israel (less than 1%), this snack was, in fact, the tirgger that started this particular research.

The story according to the local papers is that the researcher was in a conference in Israel, and, as usual, asked who here has a child that is allergic to peanuts. Unusually, however, hardly anyone raised their hands. That triggered discovery of Bamba.

In fact, during the research, Bamba is what they fed the non-control group children.

Shachar

Excuse my nit picking, but the Nazis hardly used gas chambers in concentration camps. Mostly, they built special camps dedicated for murdering (mostly Jews, but it depends on the camp), and gas chambers was mostly used in those. These are, generally, refered to as "Extermination camps".

There were gas chambers in some of the concentration camps as well, but their use there was relatively marginal. Most people who died in concentration camps died from the cold, starvation and diseases, as well as direct murders (i.e. - getting shot).

Shachar

What game theory has to say about that is to point out that these systems only work so long as the number of participants is small enough. Once the number of participants gets too large, it is impossible to effectively punish the leachers, and the entire system falls apart.

I guess we need to add to GP's original question the criteria of "works on a large scale"

Shachar

If it has an intermediate C step, how do they handle exceptions?

The original C++ compiler, Cfront, was abandoned precisely because of that reason: there was no sane way to handle exception without incuring costs at the good path. C simply doesn't have the facilities.

Shachar

When I interview, I start by asking the applicant about their general background. What projects they have worked on.

I then try to pick something from that specific knowledge domain and ask about that. I typically ask them to describe, in detail, a project they have been involved in, or ask a question about it.

My personal experience: most know nothing about the specific domain in which they have participated.

Some of the answers I've received were embarresing. People volunteering knowledge in C++ STL and BOOST, working with smart pointers, who have no idea how shared_ptr works or what its drawbacks are. People saying they used multiple inheritence and virtual inheritence (I would never bring it up on my own as I know many people consider it a niche) who don't understand how virtual inheritence actually work. People who built communication platforms for VOIP who cannot answer why/whether/when UDP is better than TCP.

So, no, programmers suck even when you ask them about their own knowledge domain. I usually end up recommending someone without experience but with the right spark in their eyes, figuring my time is better spent growing a bright newbie than fighting with bad habits by a someone with good-for-nothing "experience".

Shachar

Shachar

Siddesu called it "the easiest way to lose weight".

If it's so easy, how come 95% fail it?

I have a regime that would allow you to live to 100, but it is so difficult to keep that it's not possible for you to stick to it. Is it your fault, or the regime's? Of course it is the regime's.

The human endurance is part of the equation. Ignoring it is precisely the failure of science this article complains about.

Shachar

You keep trying to seperate the habits (human behavior) from the results.

Of course 95% revert to their old habits. Why is that a reason to discard them from your working set? If you have a regime that would save lives if it people would stick to it, but 95% fail to do so, why not see it as part of the problem?

Scott Adams talks about it. Fats are bad, but if you eat certain fats you are less likely to eat other stuff, which, as an aggregate, is even worse. This means that fats are actually not that bad.

Good science needs to factor the human aspect of things into the equation. Simply ignoring it just guarantees failure.

Shachar

The difficult part isn't losing weight. The difficult part is keeping it off.

And for that, neight science nor anything else has any solution. About 5% of the people who successfully lose weight manage to keep that weight from coming back with compound interest.

Shachar

Forgot to add:
The second point above might seem petty. After all, that's why D distinguishes between structs and classes, right?

Then please consider the following:
void func(lazy bool e);

void otherfunc()
{
SomeStruct s;

func(s.isTrue());
}

Since func receives a delegate, s is allocated on the heap (despite this not being immediately obvious to people not versed in D). As a result, s's destructor is not going to get called. Ever.

Shachar

Due to compiler bug, the following:

Up until recently, s's destructors would not be called.

In the language definition proper:
auto s = new SomeStruct;

The destructor is never going to be called, even when s's memory is reaped by the GC.

Shachar

By "one platform" I did not mean it was unsupported. I meant it was unused.

You don't find many uses of Objective-C outside of the Apple echo system.

Shachar

When doing low level system programming, there aren't that many viable choices out there. C, C++, possibly ObjectiveC (not familiar enough with it to tell for sure). That's about it. Of those, ObjectiveC is, pretty much, a one platform language. C++ is used quite extensively, but it is way too complex, resulting in most C++ programmers not knowing what the 1@#$@!# they are doing. Also, some C++ features are not suitable for some low level scenarios. For example, you probably wouldn't want your kernel code to throw exceptions, or do iostream formatting, in kernel code.

C, on the other hand, is a very simple language. It has no expensive features (though, to be honest, that mostly means that if you need something expensive, you'll need to do it yourself). As such, it is without competition for what it offers. The most it loses in market/mind share is through scenarios that used to require low level system programming but no longer do.

As for D....

D advertises itself as supporting this mode. My employer chose to develop a low-level high performance low latency system in D. I've been programming it for the past half year. I'm not overjoyed. I don't hate D, but my personal opinion is that we'de have been better off going with C++ (though, to be honest, I love C++ like few of my peers do).

I have two main gripes with it on that front. D has a horrid GC (though no GC provides the latency requirements we need), and though it claims you can do without it, you really can't. At least, not without giving up on much of the language features and almost all of the standard library. When comparing to C++'s ability to use custom allocators with the standard library, D's phobos seems deathly pale.

D also claims to support RAII semantics. I happilly went about implementing a reference counting pointer, only to find out that there are cases where you cannot use a struct with a destructor, and there are cases where you theoreticaly can use one, but in practice find that the compiler will not call your destructor. All in all, RAII is an untested unutilized option in D.

Shachar

The D syntax may be more readable than C++, but to claim that it is simpler is just farcical. The number of language constructs, their specialization and their focus is staggering. For a language that set up to simplify matters, it has done anything but.

When you do:
A a;
a.something;

"something" might be a member. It might be a property. It might be a method with no arguments (which gets called). It might be a function defined outside the class with a special property. It might be any of the above on a member of A, specially defined (subtyping). I will not be surprised to hear I missed something.

How is that simple?

Shachar

You're missing a ton of background, but this is increasingly getting off topic.

If you like to know why that would not work (as well as some good reasons why Israel cannot do that, at least not in the literal way you wrote it), email me (your email is not public).

Shachar

Personally, I don't think it is as big a part in solving that problem as you seem to think. My personal take on this is that it is a very convenient straw man to use ("we're only doing this to help the poor Palestinians", with no limitation on what "this" is). History suggests that very few Muslim and Arab leaders care much about the actual Palestinians. Should that problem magically (because no other option seems likely at this point) disappear, Muslims will just pick (manufacture?) another one.

Regardless, I'm curious. How do you get peaceful resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? I'd like you to try to limit your suggestions to things that had not been tried before (as those, obviously, do not work).

Also, saying that solving one problem is a key factor in solving another means that if the first is impossible, so is the other.

Shachar