The most curious thing to me is that #96 "unknown" is listed as taking 17 minutes to crack, and yet "princess", "baseball", "juventus " and "qweasdzxc" all take less than 1 second. Ideas?
A really good book I read was "Bridges out of Poverty", aimed at social workers etc, but very informative to the lay reader. One of the several things I learned: If a poor person 'comes in' to some money, they are likely to give a decent portion away, because other people know about it and hit them up ("I need glasses and you just got some money"), and in order to be helped themselves by their community when they are in need down the road, they need to be responsive when they have 'extra'.
A poverty mentality is about 'today'. Food, rent, clothes. So education and planning for the future get pushed down in the stack of what's important.
Also had interesting stuff about humor among the impoverished, the middle class and the rich.
A personal observation: The poor in my community don't know how to 'work' the system. There are free (used) computers available to school kids, but the parents don't make use of them. Super-low cost internet access is available, but I saw one family succumb to an 'up-sell' to TV and Cable access, which they couldn't afford (oh yeah, installation cost too, we didn't remember to tell you about that) and in the end, default on the payment, which disqualified them from the low-cost program for a year. Living with three families/12 people in a two bedroom apartment means the child qualifies for benefits for the homeless, but no-one knows, the benefits don't get used.
That might be true for you, but way back when, I took a course in programming and thought it was the most fun I'd ever had. Couldn't believe that people wanted to pay me to do it. Spent the next 40 years making a great living. The only jobs I disliked was the ones where there were "glass bowl" bosses and co-workers. Problem solving was always fun. Not saying I didn't enjoy being paid well, but it wasn't the major consideration in whether I wanted to stay in any particular work environment. Here we're talking about the potential for huge schedule and technical pressure and low morale. A whole lot more money wouldn't keep me in those circumstances.
@gershy: Very fun, thanks. Now that the rush is past, are you still reading Hacker News comments? Is this the right place to give feedback and suggestions?
I just now have been hoping for a match, and the display says "Two players matching" which implies to me someone is out there besides me waiting to play", but I never got matched. Does this seem like a bug?
Also, it would be handy to have a chime when a match occurs. I'm willing to have my 'matching' state be long term in a separate tab, as I surf.
Others mention how pies call for different apples. In the same vein, my father's cousin, a farmer and now sadly no longer with us, had a strong opinion about apples that were best for applesauce. Sadly, I don't remember which variety. He lived in rural Ontario, Canada, and knew the only farm in the area that grew that variety, so that's where we'd go to buy apples when it was time to make applesauce.
OOP, hands down. Though I never learned Functional (and never learned Smalltalk, for that matter. I think the OOP I learned wasn't half of what Smalltalk offered.)
I learned to program on punch cards, and the options were 'top down' ("The best way"), and bottom up ("The bad way").
Top down was hideous, because it ended up being decomposed as the next level as (1) Initialize things (2) Do what's needed. There was no clear path to subdividing the functionality.
Bottom up was worse. Ya' know you're gonna need a routine to do such-and-such, so go ahead and write it. You get to feel productive. The huge down-side was that you couldn't figure out in advance precisely what was needed, so those routines always got re-written to be amenable to what was needed at a higher level once the higher levels were written.
OOP gave me a way to think about the middle layers of a program in a way that isolated some element of what was needed and let me code it 'usably'. I could sit and think about an what kind of interface I wanted to provide, and get it right. It was also a big win to realize that even C (NOT C++) could be used in this paradigm, in terms of a boundary around the interior or some piece of functionality.
The code he gives, and the explanation of the busy beaver problem, strikes me as pretty poorly explained. If I didn't already know about the busy beaver problem, I don't think I could get it from this explanation.
I never used Clippy. Reviled? You mean Microsoft took the idea of 'context appropriate useful suggestions' and bungled the user interface? Inconceivable!
Not 'just' quicker. Easier. Less frustrating. Important elements. This is my experience of using the long-spacebar technique for placing the cursor.
Digressing: An AI noticing that someone has moved the cursor several time without ever typing anything could pop up a "Want me to show you other ways to move the cursor?" dialog, and teach the 'hard to discover' technique. I await the day ...
The use cases he cites are corner cases, as others have argued.
In my mind, a far more common use case calls for memory pools, where memory can be allocated and not explicitly tracked by the application. The memory pool gets freed at the end of some unit of computation. This interface is already nicely supplied by an Apache memory pool library.
To me this makes so much sense. A file, the name of which only I know, encrypted on my local disk. Cut and paste from vim. No easy target. (Obscurity IS a security feature of certain system elements. But NOT encryption algorithms, obviously). Every hacker and his brother is pounding away at the on-line password systems. My one-off system on my personal laptop ... not a juicy target.
Thanks so much for digging this out! Very useful to know. So, the notability methodology fails massively, as many have noted. Jesus and Muhammad trailing Britney Spears by a factor of 4 or so is my favorite so far ... LOL. But the question becomes, how can the notability be improved. Of course "AI" is probably the answer here, in the same way it is becoming the answer to so many questions/problems. (Just as the answer to every legal question is "it depends".) Two elements pop to mind: (i) Accessing more things outside of the Wikipedia/Wikidata database. (ii) Within the Wiki world, making associations like Jesus ~ Christian ~ bible ~ best selling books.
The most bizarre thing I found is the 'notability' score for Jesus at 204.5 and Muhammad at 152. Both well behind Britney Spears at 59. Britney's fans will be thrilled, I guess.
Clicking around, the notability of Western pop culture folk generally seem enormously inflated.
A senior trainer for a method of dealing with trauma once said he didn't think the human nervous system has evolved to be able to deal with the quantity of bad news that is pushed at us.
Thinking about it, evolutionarily we probably dealt with bad news from within a 20 or 40 mile radius (two day's walk...). We are inherently disposed to pay attention to bad news (the creature that ate or mauled a guy in the next village may come this way). Put stronger, it's an evolutionary advantage to pay attention to bad news. But here in 2022, the bad news from thousands of miles away is 99% irrelevant to my life or survival, but my eyeballs get pulled in, and my nervous system gets overwhelmed unless I make a conscious choice to pull away, which I personally do.
As some who dipped in to Perl 3 times, each a decade apart and therefore dealt with Perl 3, 4 and 5, it's annoying that now in version 6, the Perlites finally realize that they got the ridiculous way of using sigils wrong.... $foo[2] is (formerly) an element of @foo. Also the joyous talk of brevity (think $_) is nauseating. Having to Google for the meaning of line noise is once, twice, three times a headache.
I acknowledge that every mind is different, and folks are drawn to different languages. I've met engineers who hated syntax coloring. But for the mind behind my own eyes, I love Ruby, hate Perl.
James Clavell's Shogun: The contrast between the Japanese and European cultures in 1600 are delicious, the characters and plot both well developed. I've read it at least a dozen times over four decades. As I age, I find I experience it very differently.
I'm interested what people know about 'net' carbs and ketosis. I'm not all that savvy on this stuff. I'm looking at a package of chia seeds, which says it's got 16 grams of carbs per quarter cup include 14 grams of fiber. On the Web, I see 'net carbs' calculated in this case as total carbs in grams minus fiber in grams: 16 - 14 => 2. Curious if ketosis occurs when you keep these 'net' values below 20. Another way of asking this is: Is the idea of 'net' carbs legitimate, when talking ketosis? Can I eat up to 20 grams of net carbs and have a reasonable expectation of ketosis, even if the 'total' carbs were 10 or 15 times the 'net carbs'?
I read an annotated version of Lolita. I suspect I would not have made it all the way through an unannotated version. The annotations were astonishing to me. Pointing out literary references that were either unknown to me, or that I knew but did not, on my own, connect. I missed a key plot element (being followed), that was illuminated by the annotation. I've also read erotica and a small amount of porn. IMHO, Lolita doesn't come close to being porn. It's just go too much going on _beyond_ the sexuality.
The issue of being drawn to a 12 year old is .... complex. When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, 13 was the age of consent, and Juliet was 13. Evolutionarily, once a woman is ovulating, I assert it's 'natural' to be attracted to her, regardless of how young she is or the age difference. BUT in a modern world, the power differential between an adult male and a 12 year old, or 14 year old (Sue Lyons was 14 when she played Lolita in the Stanley Kubrick film) is too large to condone. The potential for psychological damage to the younger person is vast. So we've made it illegal. But my sense is that it has become tarred with too broad a brush. "Unthinkable that any moral person could have these desires" seems to be the theme in much of the book-banning crowd.
And, as others have pointed out, it was rape, which is despicable, and does not 'glorify' the sexuality, but it's done in a complex (literary) way that makes it possible to miss the rape element. !!!
Asking on Hacker News about your psychological problems is better than ignoring them, so yay. But given the picture you paint, I'd advise you to get in-person help of some sort. I'm not a big fan of low cost counseling: most places it's done by interns, who are beginners. If you have access to good counseling, via insurance or ability to pay out of pocket, I'd start there. So often, we are blinded by what we can't see in ourselves, which makes it very difficult to get unstuck via typical self-help books. Another thing to consider: There are all sorts of high-powered processes designed to help you change direction in life, but whether these are suitable for you personally is something only you can know. (Examples include Tony Robbins workshops, The Landmark Forum, the Hoffman Quadrinity process.) Some folks will opine that these are scams (and they certainly don't work for everyone) and others will say they've found them very helpful, if sometimes extremely pricey. YMMV.
The article says the speed of the capsule was increased to 24,229 miles per hour, for the 3 day coast to the moon, but the moon is only (approx) 250,000 miles away. The trajectory was elliptical, so the distance wouldn't be significantly larger. 24,229 mph only takes 10 hours or so to do 250,000 miles. Is the speed number incorrect? If not, what don't I understand?
I find this highly improbable, for multiple reasons. (a) It's unlikely that requirements will stop changing. In the early days of the web, you didn't need to support forms, shopping carts, or phone-sized screens. No one knows what new user interfaces will be invented, or what new uses folks will find for the web, but rest assured they're coming. New frameworks and technologies will be developed to make them easier to create. And the first iterations of those technologies will be amateurish by later standards. (b) Standards of performance will continue to grow. In the early web, you created a site somewhere and expected it to be 'fine' for anyone in the world to access, and if it went down, well, it will be up soon. Now, replicated sites, CDNs, and completely new architectural schemes (AWS, eg.) are possible and often preferred. Again, these will spawn different ways of using them, and evolving architectures. (c) Our development methodologies will also continue to change, often seeking improvement by trial and error. The amount of technology wrapped in to any one project will continue to grow apace.
As someone who started programming professionally at 25, and stopped professionally at 60, here is my experience: At 25, I could do a decent job of "drinking from the firehose". I could learn new things very quickly, and retain what I learned. At 60, the time it took to understand stuff grew longer, and the ability to retain it basically disappeared. I was programming in Ruby on Rails, and learning about a new gem or a new test environment was 'fine', but the next day, I needed to return to the documentation at length to refresh myself. It made being productive super difficult. I still do very small hobby projects, mostly using stuff I learned 10 or 15 years ago. This might not be true for everyone, but guaranteeing that 'anyone' can program at any age is just not true. Especially not in an environment where you need (a) a language, possibly 2 or 3 (b) a framework, (c) a test framework (d) an IDE, (e) a production environment (f) a source control system (g) a problem tracking system. YMMV. You need to check it out for yourself if you're considering it.
When I learned to write FORTRAN IV for the CDC 6400 in 1974, I was told the standard compiler was written as a single routine. Didn't see the code myself, sadly.
My, how our knowledge of how to do things has changed!
I'm guessing that the bureaucracy of such a system would be a significant burden. To avoid having the system badly gamed, you'd need a second evaluation, yes? By a _neutral_ party, (not a doctor working in the same practice, e.g.) At added cost and time. Not to mention I've heard more than one surgeon say "That was more difficult than I expected based on the imaging ... once we got in there we found <>".
I'm also arguing that it's not just a psychological resistance to a data-based evaluation system. That people understand the system would be subject to being gamed, and the overall quality of the work would actually suffer. (A bit analogous to how peer-review and the tenure game has interfered with good science practices.)
In my mind it is not a good system, because if the surgeon is looking at a much-more-difficult than average circumstance, than he could reasonably expect a lower-than-average result, but a result that might be much better than average for a case so difficult.
As a separate observation, any time data is kept, turned into metrics that then become the basis for goals ("I want to have a better-than-average success rate, as a surgeon") then the system gets gamed.
I had a boss once propose to down-rate agile teams that didn't get done everything they took on in a sprint. He apparently didn't realize that teams would immediate game the system by taking on less actual work. They could up their 'point' estimates for each task, and always get the work done.