You guys seriously need to fix your shit. Having bill riders is a fundamental government fail.

In the civilized world, a bill has a strictly defined topic, and anything not directly pertaining to that topic simply isn't allowed to be attached.

True, but so what? I can still write less C++ code but get the same performance as C. I don't care that it temporarily expands during compilation and then shrinks during optimization. I care about my code and the output - the IR is less interesting.

I meant, the C Standard introduces new features in ways that won't break anyone's ABI. C11's _Generic is so bloody ugly compared to C++'s overloading, but it preserves the ABI. The fear of introducing ABI-breaking features is making C even more ugly to read.

Well, you suspected wrong. I have quite a lot of experience with C, C++, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, Java, Python, etc. I even started with C as my first real language. I just vastly prefer C++.

I do not think C++ is always the right answer, except when asked whether to use C or C++. The only cases where I'd say use C is when there is no choice, such as cross-language APIs.

Well, the example I have laying around is one I made, just so my bias is clear: http://tinodidriksen.com/2010/...

C: http://tinodidriksen.com/uploa... - 77 lines, 2.4k
C++: http://tinodidriksen.com/uploa... - 33 lines, 1k

The C code is a mess of extra code and checks, compared to the C++ version. The C++ version is as readable as the scripting languages. And C vs. C++ perform almost identically.

Now, that is obviously a tiny example, but I find this to be true for larger codebases as well. If you use all that C++ offers you, you can make the code read like elegant functional or script (or a mix), and still have all the performance of C.

The FQA? Really? Read it, laughed at it, moved on.

Modern C++ is as easy to learn as Python or Java or C# or similar. The code will even look superficially the same.

C++ is only hard to learn for those who insist on learning "C with Classes" and mix in all sorts of silly C'isms, like insisting on starting with raw memory management. If you start out with the high level stuff and containers, it's easy, safe, fast.

Standard C++ has never been a strict superset of Standard C. You have never been able to take all C89 code and just compile it as C++98, primarily due to C++'s stricter type system (e.g. malloc() will need a cast added).

Anyway, sure they share a lot of syntax and basic concepts, but when you compare modern C++ with C, it's like comparing a high level scripting language with, well, C. If you take code in Python, Perl, PHP, Java, C#, and C++, they'll all look mostly alike. If you code the same in C, it'll look foreign and require many more explicit sanity checks. But the C++ and C code will have the same performance, while the other languages will suffer lots of overhead.

I always tell people who want to learn to code to go for modern C++ (preferably C++11 or newer) first, and then if necessary learn some C afterwards.

It is crazy how much more C code is needed to get the same level of performance and security that equivalent C++ has, and C coders know it. Just look at all the extensions that C compilers, and even the C11 Standard, borrow from C++ (generics, RAII) - but in a convoluted ugly way to preserve the precious ABI for 50 years.

And for all those who will say that C++ can't fit in the tight spaces that C can...well, you're wrong. Just disable the parts of C++ that you don't want (usually exceptions), and you can still get most of the benefits of clean code and RAII, with the same or better performance.

I fiddled with Firebug on the Beta site, and made a few changes that amazingly improves the look'n'feel of it:

- Remove article images.
- Remove the CSS line-height property from both submission and comments.
- Distinguish where submitter intro ends and submission begins. "Quotes" are not enough - the old blockquote worked nicely.
- Make the submission text color black. It feels hazy as it is now.
- Let comments flow full-width. Having them constrained by the huge sidebar is awful.

In general, it seems like you're turning Slashdot from a community driven site to a more modern publisher/aggregator style site, which won't work. If the comments aren't the primary focus, Slashdot loses what makes it Slashdot.

I can get up to date news everywhere - I can't get quality commentary anywhere but Slashdot.

I'd love to do that, but getting a package into Debian is a nightmare that I have simply given up on. Even the simple guides are 50 pages long and a mass of not quite up-to-date information.

Ubuntu makes it trivial. Even if you can't or don't want to get into Ubuntu base, you can just make a PPA on Launchpad and get automatic building for all supported editions and archs of Ubuntu.

We have something like that at VISL, but with zero statistical or machine learning or AI aspects.

We instead write a few thousand rules by hand (largest language has 10000 rules) that look at the context - where context is the entire sentence, and possibly previous or next sentences - to figure out what meaning of a word is being used and what it attaches to.

E.g.
Input: "They're looking at writing an AI which can in some sense understand what is being said."
Output: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62647212/visl-eng.txt , http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62647212/visl-eng.png

This kind of system takes longer to develop and refine, but it also doesn't have any of the statistical problems. 95-99% "understanding" of text? Sure, we can do that. Statistics top out long before, and then have to add in rules to get the last 5-10%. And where statistics require giga- or terabytes of text, rule based systems only require a single example of a valid grammatical construct or word usage.

Why yes, yes it is: http://google.com/search?q=cry+it+out+brain+damage

jEdit's only flaw is that it is Java. Asides from that, it is a solid Unicode capable cross-platform editor that can work with files over SSH. Synchronizing your sessions, configuration, and plugins is as simple as copying over your .jedit folder, even between Windows and Linux.

I so far haven't found a single other editor with all those features. Do tell me if one exists...

Sure it does: View -> Compact View

True, that sucks.

It does? I've can't see any ads in Skype anywhere, but then I don't use the Home screen...you can turn that thing off.
I did enable it just now to see if there are ads, and there are not. It looks like a rather plain contact's status updates listing.

It does? Again, you can turn that off, or just ignore it.

But really, Compact View fixes most ills. It makes Skype look like it always has.

Then maybe what you want is DeepDict. E.g., magic is used like http://gramtrans.com/deepdict/lookup.php?word=magic&class=N&lang=eng&top=200 - it is not free, though all words starting with 's' are currently open to viewing for anyone.

It yields info such as: black magic, Orlando magic, ceremonial magic ... magic kingdom, magic roundabout, magic flute ... practice magic, radiate magic ... magic of animation ... etc

(disclaimer: I work on the DeepDict project)

At my job (plug: http://gramtrans.com/ ), we're doing human level machine translation now, if by human you're talking about high school level of quality.

But in difference to Google or Microsoft or all the previous attempts, we're NOT doing Statistical Machine Translation; we make Rule-Based MT.

Google's way is to scan huge amounts of parallel texts for good translation candidates, which works to some degree, but it has an upper limit that no amount of parallel text will help them surpass.

Our way involves writing a huge amount of rules so that our software actually understands the input text, and then rules for how things should be translated. This takes a lot longer to develop as you might imagine, but the results are great and there is no limit to how good it gets...if something isn't quite right, add a rule for it.

However, because it takes so long to develop and that we're only 2 people working on it, we only have a few really good translation chains.