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YouAreGreat

171 karma · joined October 20, 2017

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YouAreGreat··on YouTube Just Demonetized Anti-Vax Channels
> a right not to have idiot parents interfere

The only reasonable default assumption is that even "idiot" parents have more interest in the survival and well-being of their own children than the vaccination industry equivalent of the Sackler family.

YouAreGreat··on Why I Prefer Dynamic Typing Over Static Typing (2017)
> All of your data structures have types ... Static typing just means that you annotate ...

Programs have (static) types, data does not. Static typing removes correct programs from the language. Try this in some ML-like language:

    let selfapply f = (f f) in
    let identity x = x in
    selfapply identity 42
If you transcribe this to (e.g.) Lisp, it will return the number 42. The program is short, simple, and safe, but well-regarded static type systems can't cope.
YouAreGreat··on Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller (2015)
> traits that are highly correlated with climate denialism

Sure. Since it is socially so much easier to be a secretly skeptic climate congregationist than an open climate denier, I'd bet one such correlated trait would be extreme honesty.

YouAreGreat··on Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
> "Darwinian Fairytales" by David Stove

The search engine coughed up a PDF. I randomly opened it (p. 173) and read up to this author-provided "TL;DR" on p.176:

The main reason, however, for thinking that sociobiology is false, is the simple one I gave at the beginning: that it is obvious that human beings are the most intelligent and capable things on earth. But genes are not human. Therefore (etc.).

Uhhhm. Really?

YouAreGreat··on German town votes ‘No’ to street names
The source frames the issue as merely "street names, or not."

That glosses over the question of how to name the streets, a question quite conductive to nasty political fighting. Maybe that already happened.

YouAreGreat··on How Hacker News Stays Interesting
> how moderation works

Crowdsourced via the flag button, which acts as a "superpowered downvote" even though it's not presented as such.

YouAreGreat··on Fearless Security: Memory Safety
True if you don't cooperate at all with the collector, but easily avoided in many cases. E.g., when using Boehm, try using gc_malloc_atomic() for data that you know cannot contain pointers, like your encryption buffers.
YouAreGreat··on A Founder's Farewell
> argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others

> see if he was misrepresented

Did you find out whether or not he was misrepresented?

YouAreGreat··on Thank u, next
> To me, Rust is nearly the same thing as steveklabnik

That widespread perception could have been part of the problem.

YouAreGreat··on Untyped Programs Don’t Exist
> semantically inaccessible, not syntactically inaccessible.

You can give the semantics of everything that happens in a safe d-t language in terms of church encoded tag-value pairs and yet the programmer can't break the abstraction because abstraction-breaking operations are syntactically unavailable.

It should count as testament to the success of dynamic typing that the abstractions are so safely enforced that you can squint and suddenly the whole language is semantically founded on them.

YouAreGreat··on Untyped Programs Don’t Exist
> "A type system is a syntactic method for enforcing levels of abstraction in programs. " [1]

> What syntactic methods are used in dynamically "typed" languages?

Interesting. You may have unwittingly provided one of the best justifications for the term "dynamically typed" I've seen so far.

That's because operations that violate a (safe) dynamically typed language's chosen set of abstractions (built using bits, church encoding, whatever) are syntactically inaccessible.

YouAreGreat··on Untyped Programs Don’t Exist
> All languages are typed, either with rich types, or they are unityped

Almost all languages. There is one language that can be typed without a type, the empty language.

Since the empty language contains no programs, it follows that "Untyped Programs Don't Exist".

YouAreGreat··on A scientist makes the case for the power of DNA
> struggling to understand how this doesn't wind up being a proxy for racism

Here's the gist: Human bad. Capital good.

YouAreGreat··on Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without her noticing (2017)
Wherever you can publish text or media (eg, on a cooking site) speech crimes can be committed under your account.

Fancy a prison term in one of the more enlightened European jurisdictions, or Canada?

YouAreGreat··on Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java (2012)
> Most Haskellers write out the types

Maybe that's partly because Haskell can easily become a bit too elegant. Between all the currying and combinators, the type helps to understand code "top down", i.e. when you don't have studied and memorized all "bottom up" component parts.

YouAreGreat··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
> flagging is not like "downvoting", this isn't reddit.

"Flag" on HN has devolved into an overpowered downvote button.

YouAreGreat··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
> our human minds have not sufficiently evolved

They're also not evolved to deal with TV news.

YouAreGreat··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
> "trigger the conservatives" to force them to attack the actions of private companies

Conservatives will come to understand that big capital is not a conservative.

YouAreGreat··on SQLite updated Code of Conduct
Thanks for that link!

Hipp:

> ... also learned that apparently no one feels the need to help novice CoC writers feel welcomed or safe.

Apparently! Good to see he's still got a sense of humor.

Then, a very enlightening response from a Social Justice Entrepreneur:

> There are folks who you could have hired to help you write and implement a code of conduct.

Hey, it's a living!

YouAreGreat··on This Old Lisp
> enough to write statically typed code in Lisp

Certainly not in the way "statically typed" is usually understood.

Containers (outside of specialized arrays) aren't parameterized, so every time you extract a value from a list or map, the "static type" is the top type. SBCL remains essentially unityped with islands of type propagation for better performance of (mostly) numeric code.

YouAreGreat··on IQ Matters Less Than You Think
When I looked (decade ago), your description would have characterized their online haunts but not IRL meetings.

Maybe being online turns anything into Reddit/HN.

On the other hand, word was most members are inactive and only a small percentage turn up at IRL events at all, i.e. strong (self) selection effects.

YouAreGreat··on Brexit is already damaging European science
That's like saying a woman can't leave an abusive marriage until she's secured a new husband.
YouAreGreat··on Why I’m done with Chrome
> it sucks it leaked to nutty Brietbart and not a real new organization

Lack of reporting from others is no reason to believe Breitbart was first to know, e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/jacknicas/status/1040014678263386...

> Doesn't that bother anyone?

I think it actually helps insulate Google from closer scrutiny of its monopoly position and deplorable business model. Why would any self-respecting country suffer an all-powerful ad-financed private Alphabet Agency? Because they think Evil is "on our side".

YouAreGreat··on The evolutionary mystery of gigantic human brains
> Human brain is like a peacock tail

I don't think so. Curious detail about that tail: The females don't have it.

YouAreGreat··on Criticisms of EU plans for copyright censorship machines removed from Google
Wikipedia says there's a "lack of consequences for perjury in claims" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmca).
YouAreGreat··on Microsoft Closes US Surface Factory, Moves Production to China
Please don't write "humanity" when you mean "capital". It's confusing.
YouAreGreat··on Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
People who honestly believe a lie can convincingly tell it.

Analogously, people who don't get tripped up by bullshit might be better (more convincing) at spouting self-serving bullshit.

Framed that way, I can believe it.

YouAreGreat··on My experience with Sarah Jeong, Jason Koebler, and Vice Magazine
> reflects very poorly on the New York Times

The alt-right was on the verge of defusing the "racist" accusation as an effective weapon in the culture wars.

The NYT's Sarah Jeong stunt effortlessly made alt-right types literally crawl over each other to be first to accuse the NYT of "racism", in the process affirming the supreme moral severity of the accusation to themselves.

Very smart play on the part of the NYT.

YouAreGreat··on Firefox’s Trusted Recursive Resolver DNS feature is dangerous
Why would Google's own Mozilla do this... unless Google is planning to buy Cloudflare.
YouAreGreat··on How to explain infinity to kids
> It's the smallest number you can't count to

Funny. If explaining infinity to a kid had been my problem, I'd have tried hard to avoid calling infinity a number.

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