Hacker News Reader

cgoreon Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

I'm going completely off of the Wikipedia page you posted, I haven't read the book either, so it could be really misrepresenting the book. But the whole "theocratic -> technocratic society" step seems to be based on that shallow argument.

"Amusing Ourselves to Death" seems like a good book, I have a copy but have yet to read it.

cgoreon Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

In 2003-ish, while I was getting my BS, the professor passed out some of those funny-smelling purple sheets. I hadn't seen them since probably second grade (mid-1980's). Apparently both the copiers were broken, but there was still an old mimeograph sitting in the corner, she tried it, and it still worked.

cgoreon Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Except that is the whole primary thesis of his book, and it is based on trivially falsified premises.

(At the time ordinary people had probably no real conception of the general order of the universe, being uneducated illiterate peasants. The educated at the time mostly viewed the Earth as sperical, because of the ancient Greek philosopher/scientists, and the Earth as the center of the Pysical Universe, again because of the ancient Greek philosopher/scientists.)

cgoreon Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

That is some amazingly sloppy research work on his part, and he just seems to have an axe to grind, so he is okay with the sloppiness. The geocentric model is due to Ptolemy and Aristotle, Greek philosopher/scientists pre-dating Christianity by centuries who were both probably almost completely unaware of the Jews. Copernicus, author of the heleocentic model, was a Roman Catholic and Pope Clement VII found the theory interesting [1]. Galileo, creator of the telescope, was also a Roman Catholic, was also a personal friend of the Pope Urban VIII, the pope at the time of his trial by the Inquisition [2]. Pope Urban VIII supported the heliocentric model, the trial was related to other issues. Galileo's favorite daughter was a cloistered nun, and we have their letters still [3].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Heliocentri...

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

3: http://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Daughter-Historical-Memoir-Sc...

cgoreon Video games kill people? CNN, sensationalism, and how to fix it

My dad first had me shoot the shotgun around 7 or 8, instead of trying to hide it or lock it up, which is a horrible idea for kids that age, since they can and will get keys for anything and be even more motivated to do so because it isn't allowed. He showed me how to properly hold and aim the shotgun, and then had me shoot a watermelon if I remember correctly.

He then explained matter-of-factly that it would do the same thing to a human, and that they would be permamently dead, so unless that is REALLY what needed to happen, not to use it. He then told me where it was kept, and that it was kept loaded and was not to be viewed as a toy. I could use it whenever I wanted, but only with adult supervision.

This actually worked rather well for two reasons. It wasn't forbidden, so I didn't feel a need to mess with the guns just to break the rules. He also specifically chose the shotgun, which has some insane kickback even if you are a fully-grown adult male, and it REALLY HURT when I used it.

I think gun locks are a bad idea for kids over about 5 or 6 because they WILL be able to find the key and unlock it. Just like they know where the Christmas presents are hidden and everything else that the parents think they have hidden from them.

At the age of 8 most kids are capable of understanding things like death, unless the parents have let them be too sheltered. They should have had a pet or two die already, perhaps a grandparent or other older relative, and older people they know through church or the like. I was well aware of the idea of death and that it is permament by that age.

On the flipside, I do recall my dad not liking Doom, and I was around 12 or so then, and didn't want me to play it. Games like that can desensitize people to violence in general, which doesn't go well with an unwillingness in American middle-class society to openly talk about death or experience it at a personal level. People try to insulate their kids from it, but they really shouldn't.

cgoreon Developers and Depression [video]

I have researched this a lot because my mom suffers from schizoaffective depression and has been medicated for my whole life. I would strongly recommend dealing with a good therapist. I am not anti-medicine in general, but the pill-pushing side of psychriatry is very primitive and not really helpful.

Basically all of the medicines work by tweaking how your neurons react to various neurotransmitters, either at transmission or reception. The problem is, these don't target, their effect is throughout the entire neurosystem.

One of the best sources of information I have seen it Sapolsky's lectures on YouTube, he is a professor at Stanford. He does a really good job explaining what is actually going on inside the body, although it can be difficult to read further without a solid grasp of biochemistry. I did pretty well in organic chemistry in college, and got A's in it, but never took actual classes in biochemistry, only read books in my spare time on that, and I have had some difficulty sometimes.

Basically what I am trying to say is be careful, psych meds can really ruin your life if they aren't perfectly balanced, and it it almost impossible to get them perfectly balanced even if you have the best psychriatrists in the world, and you probably won't have the best. Unless your condition is already crippling, don't touch them. But by all means consider going to a therapist.

cgoreon Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

I think judging an author from their tweets is a horrible idea, but what about their blog? That seems reasonable. If anything, the average 'technical' interview is closer to the Twitter idea, with lots of code golf questions, but you can see what a person can really do and really likes to do on Github.

cgoreon Everybody does not need to learn to code.

The best example of this are spreadsheets. There are plenty of people who don't think they can program and don't think they have any need to program, but will write some really insane things in Excel. They just don't realize what they are doing is programming, poorly. The great advantage of computers isn't "better TVs", it is that they are "compute-ers", and anybody who has an office job has a real use for one.

cgoreon Why do we use html instead of json?

  (html (head (title "Hi there"))
        (body (h1 "Hi there")
              (p "S-expressions are "
                 (b "a lot nicer")
                 " than HTML/XML/etc.")))

cgoreon Quickly navigate your filesystem from the command line

I'll do it all the time in my local shell session, along the following:

  # I make a point to always have the trailing slash,
  # it makes life easier.
  # Also, tab-complete works with this in Zsh.
  a=/some/really/long/path/that/I/dont/like/typing/
  b=/some/other/really/long/path/too/
  cd $a
  # ... do stuff ...
  cp one two three $b
  cd $b
  # ... do more stuff ...
  cp four five six $a
  cd $b/even/longer/path

And so forth. Since it is a normal variable, you can use it anywhere you need the path.

cgoreon Quickly navigate your filesystem from the command line

In Zsh, you can set it so that specifying a bare directory goes to the directory as well, for any directory. Just do

  setopt autocd

cgoreon Gmail Users Have No Reason To Expect Privacy

I got rid of TV completely while at college for my BS, and I was a lot more productive and happy without it. I have a small TV now (19" LCD), but only watch Netflix or downloads on it. After going without broadcast or cable TV, I just can't stand commercials at all.

cgoreon The next Silicon Valley is probably going to be Silicon Valley

The USA is basically accepting Bitcoins and the like as legitimate currency, with the recent FINCEN guidance and with the various positive results in the courts. I would be more worried about the EU banning BTC than the USA, because of all the issues the Eurozone is having financially, as part of a general effort to prop up the Euro currency and the many failed Eurozone banks.

cgoreon Hyper Social is Dying

I think you just made Facebook useful to me again.

cgoreon SQL Injection Galore

Or type slightly less:

  $ git init --bare project_name.git

It will make the directory for you.

cgoreon PEP 8 Modernisation

It's supposed to be an em-space, not two normal spaces, but that is hard to to in ASCII.

cgoreon Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin

The Bitcoin protocol is designed to make it average 10 minutes between each block, so on average the wait is 5 minutes. And if I was Starbucks selling a coffee, I probably would be willing to accept zero-block transactions, especially if the user has one of those rewards cards. Just re-charge them next time around. Only very rarely will they need to eat the cost of a $4 coffee, in exchange for not paying 1%-2% on every single purchase.

cgoreon Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin

If it is a coffee, just accept it at the first block, that should only be a few minutes. For the rare occurance of an orphaned block, it is still less of a loss than the normal credit card processing fees for a typical day at such a place.

cgoreon Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.

You don't get payed for how smart you are or how hard you worked. You get paid for how big of a problem you fixed for somebody, and how much they are capable of paying you. That's why good doctors and lawyers get paid so well. Dying or going to jail are big problems, and people will spend a lot of their money to avoid them.

cgoreon ChessBoardJS

Although, they would probably prefer having computers capable of playing chess sign up than humans that can't.

cgoreon An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

This is rather strange if it is accurate. Everywhere I've worked where they hired contractors as developers, the company always preferred contract-to-hire, assuming the person worked out well. I've had two jobs that way, 6-12 month contract to full-time regular employee. The only time people didn't transition to full-time is if they sucked, basically a 6-month interview. And sometimes they would go full-time even if they did suck.

cgoreon As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

Stallman's definition of 'free software' isn't authoritative, lots of people have other definitions, and Stallman is quite explicit on trying to change definitions to suit him.

cgoreon FP vs. OO, from the trenches

Other than that I would agree with him though. Subtype polymorphism + runtime (single or multiple) dispatch.

Multiple dispatch is one of the things I really miss about Common Lisp. I do like OOP, but often the most intuitive way to think about something is multiple dispatch, and trying to shove it into a single dispatch model can produce some really ugly code. I'm pretty sure that is the main reason there are so many anti-OOP zealots in the world.

Also, I didn't realize Dylan had multiple dispatch. I should take a look at it sometime.

cgoreon The Grep Test

I think the best solution is to have the better ones mentor the lesser ones. It takes time away from coding in the short-term, but it is a good investment in your people in the long-term. Metaprogramming is something that any good programmer can understand if they are just taught well, just like all the other difficult parts of programming that people routinely like to ban: pointers, goto, lambdas and functional programming, C macros, Lisp macros, etc. Using them correctly really helps a lot, using them incorrectly can hurt a lot.

The solution is to learn how to hit the nail with the hammer, not your thumb.

cgoreon Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”

I think all the search engines do Mozilla too though. From my server logs:

cgore.com:80 218.94.63.53 - - [02/Jul/2013:16:40:57 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3708 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

cgoreon Is There Any Point to the 12 Times Table?

People with compasses, in the woods, not getting lost and eaten by a bear.

cgoreon Three Planets in Habitable Zone of Nearby Star

218 years, instead of 220.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+dilation+calculato...