hairy_man674

The design is clean and free of clutter. Please keep it this way.

Sadly, though not your fault, the rate of cumulative quantity of garbage output from news companies, and the general public is becoming a cesspool and the good stuff is getting harder to find.

Herr Einstein once said, “Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors [...] is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”

Some really great essays and articles are not necessarily contemporary but are random citations and footnotes on Wiikiquote and GoodReads that I found out incidentally.

Some examples:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/priva...

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Poincare_Intu...

http://www.bartleby.com/130/1.html

Some of these articles are "heavy reading" but the kind of material that HN people might read as a bedtime story. :)

Hopefully, the premise here is to create a garbage filter for news and reading material. We need news but curating lesser known but significant writings is also imporant IMHO. We seriously need to apply ourselves to this problem so good luck.

"Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

In South Africa, our family troll past-time at parties was to re-label wine we brought. We used the same wine everytime (our personal favourite) and disguised it with some fake fancy label.

That is an ok thing to desire. Personally, I would find living in a homogenous community preferable. I want a peaceful life, among reasonable people who moderate themselves. I am tired of conflict, and having to tolerate those who impose their beliefs on others and me.

Diversity is a social problem not a cause for celebration IMHO. Is it wrong to want this?

Not ought but must. It's a fundamental concept in system security known as as Kerckhoffs's Principle. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

The rationale is to allow anybody to audit the system, so that soundness of the design can be proven against an adversary with perfect knowledge of it.

And yet Americans let companies enforce intellectual property rights over systems whose security (flaws) could change your vote...

update: Bruce Schneier on security of electronic voting: https://www.opendemocracy.net/media-voting/article_2213.jsp

> “I’ve never seen a server set up like that.”

Probably only uses Microsoft Windows Server 2012.

> It feels like we’re often treating symptoms like problems

Agreed.

A just society requires that we assign positions on the basis of merit. But to obtain the skills and knowledge that constitute merit requires fair and equal opportunity to institutions and resources.

The "discussion is broken" because it ignores the systemic causes namely socio-economic problems like inequal access to education, which are then confused with race, gender and identity politics.

Maybe I was wrong but here are the reasons for the condemnation

1. propagating falsehoods, or flaws in published work without correcting or refuting their validity, claims etc. by your strong admission that everyone knows of such work (which is subsequently used and cited) yet "completely wrong" there must be so much crap getting published. but there is disinclination to do anything about it

2. witholding of information necessary for reproducing results of experiments as a means of discouraging co-operation with peers you view as rivals or adversaries.

The second is really serious because it effectively subverts the scientific method, undermining scientific consensus and progress. That these are "norms in the field" means nothing save for everybody's indifference and lack of cooperation.

Is the above correct?

That in a nutshell is why I said Java is a horrible language.

That said, people with a strong preference for a particular language are comparable to religious fanatics. A good engineer doesn't let language preference and emotional attachment to something get in the way of building something better.

If learning something else is too uncomfortable or seems unecessary to you then you are no better than a religious person.

btw, before I get downvoted the "religious person" analogy was what a senior developer said of me when I was a .NET guy a long time ago.

note: the same applies to the religious sects who worship libraries and frameworks (Mostly front-end Javscript web developers)

... thereby exonerating Facebook from the racial discrimination imputed to its advertising problem.

Are you really suggesting that platform providers are fully accountable for the abusive use of their services?

Java? What a horrible language.

I don't use FB (privacy concerns and commercialization of human beings) so give the interested source benefit of the doubt.

So FB has made an oversight. The engineers and designers should do the politically correct thing here and add white people as a category. Most importantly, the special creams advertisers...

Caucasians are a category that can be selected from that list too, right? So, the article lead should be ammended from:

"Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads."

To this:

"Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude white, black, Hispanic, and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads."

This is a good example of lying by omission. Ethically, there is nothing wrong with this system if the exclusion can be applied equally to any ethnic group.

And besides, we need this for practical reasons: there are special creams for people of certain pigments that won't work for my vanilla face...

Here is the ideal of what every site should look like:

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

edit: Seriously, why does a site need to be like a fucking pop-up book?!

>keep the "secret recipe" to ourselves >Everyone will have a list like that

You and/or your publishers are terrible human beings.

As a former philosophy student, I disavow philosophy for its uselessness. Save for ethics and a few niche topics of inquiry where it has practical utility, its only function is to add epistemlogical detail to science's study of nature (historically known as natural philosophy).

To paraphrase what John Locke said to Newton: "Sir, it is the lesser duty of mine as Philosopher and under labourer of the Natural Philsopher, to remove the debris and furnish detail that the latter imparts to our Knowledge."

On replication, this same criticism has recently been directed at physics, chemistry and biology, among others. [1]

Psychology, with view to its practical (non-research) use has not helped me, but at least three people I know say they benefitted from cognitive behavioural therapy. Perhaps in the future, medicine and science will subordinate it to the same role of philosophy to better explain human behaviour and thinking as the latter did in less techical approaches for centuries. [2]

And yes, I am somewhat skeptical of said blog posts that cite some "new study" claiming to explain something only to be refuted or contradicted months later.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...

[2] Wittgenstein conceded that philosophy in the 20th century would only be useful in itsapproaches to linguistics and language

Related to biases are fallacies in argument as illustrated (in a less serious but instructive manner) here: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9

In userspace this is generally true, and it sucks because "good taste" should really be an engineering determination not compromise to human laziness and mediocre slackers.

A professor of mine in my first year of college gave a lecture on Determinism and Free Will. His thesis was basically what you described above: subtle yet gradual determination of how we think, believe what is important to us, what we buy etc through your environment and circumstances. Seriously, social media is a numbing poison to the mind....

I stopped using Facebook and mobile two years ago. I lost contact with people and discovered who my true friends who still wanted my company. I think it was the right decision.

I also agree with you, and furthermore think that we live in the most prosperous and productive period of history and yet we are arguably the most asinine and facile society since the Internet arrived.

> Seems like the kind of thing they'd do

Forced to do by Microsoft C and C++ that mangle names.

C has no such keywords. Why the need for this hackery? Curious also if putting that in a header and including it in a C++ program even compiles without leading to undefined behaviour...

The main misuse, again this is opinion based, is that it hides (obscures) the type of variable. If you have (say) a very large struct containing several member variables and functions, a programmer can be misled into returning it from a function or declaring it on the stack.

Of course there are reasonable uses for it. Contrary, to the above you might use it to intentionally make an object opaque as a way of abstracting its details from users or when declaring use of int/long in code.

Any preprocessor definition that changes the language like that example makes C programmers rage. As a rule, typedef and macros and friends should be avoided for clarity and debugging (opinion). An actual example of this: The programmer who created Bourne Shell, at Bell Labs in 1970s, intentionally did this to make C more like Algol. I think BSD still uses some of the original code. Understandably, not everyone liked the idea.

Physically removed both front and back integrated cameras from my tablet. If the FBI Director is paranoid enough to cover his webcam then that is good enough reason for drastic measures...

Privacy aside, I have an ugly face.

The burden of proof is on you to prove otherwise, sir.

ok sure, if you are freelancing then this applies. at a normal desk job you may be given a probationary period varying from 1-12 months. at AWS this is 12 months.

So we have CPython which has an ffi and a native implementation of the source interpreter.

We have PyPy which is JIT for Python that emits assembly at runtime though not as successful Cpython for its support.

The complexity class of this problem, without type annotations, namely completely transforming an arbitary Dynamic Python program to a static, partially inferred typed language (C++) is O(N): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley–Milner_type_system

The transformations are also not guaranteed to improve runtime performance and might even do the opposite or have side effects for precision and a program that is slower due to generalizations that an algorithm makes.

With type annotations... why, just why? Use C++ or C if you want types and performance gains thereof..nThe potential for bugs and failures is less than relying on an algorithm if you realise the fear and laziness of compiled languages is umfounded.

Here is the opinion of someone who makes a strong normative claim, that not lacking merit, is typical of one who has had more time to think. The naive idealism of motivating us" computer science" people to solve non-trivial problems is in stark contrast to an industry that that is lucrative to the extent that it satisfies the facile needs of millions of relatively unintelligent, complacent users.

As long as there is a market demand for these little apps, enterprise consumers and shitty little ventures millions wills be invested here and greedy companies and stackeholders will profit. Fuck the poor and ambitious ideas. There is money to be made!