threepipeproblm

OMG I have found my people.

If lenders didn't expect to be repaid unconditionally, they would be less likely to lend money to college degrees that were likely to be financially worthless. This is as it should be. Before the modern financial aid situation, some people still managed to get degrees with more of a classical academic focus (i.e. without regard to market considerations). There were fewer of them, but then the odds they had to go work at Denny's afterwards were also probably lower.

That wasn't a big problem before 1998. There are many disincentives to bankruptcy which is why people who are not broke or those with prospects to earn aren't lining up to do it.

If a college actually prepares a student for the job market they would be insane to do this; if it doesn't they may have no recourse.

Very few forms of debt are excluded from bankruptcy. IMO it's far from humane to make college, of all things, in that category. Should those who pay huge $$$ for American degrees and then can't get jobs be forced to pay the bloated costs despite having to go back to a retail job where they can barely survive? The original act takes a civil liberty, which most people enjoy, from a vulnerable group. Young people just starting out who may have made a huge investment that didn't pan out... being unable to declare bankruptcy prevents such young people from getting back on sound financial ground for potentially decades. It's embarrassing that the Clintons haven't taken more heat for this, arguably nothing but an act of crony capitalism.

This seems dramatic. Why not just cancel the Clinton administration's sinister provisions Higher Education Amendments of 1998 (the 1998 HEA) which made student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy? They sold out all the students with that.

But the people who chose a browser for speed already had Chrome. Now the people who would choose a browser that lets them run their software of choice, on which they have been relying on years, have no browser.

There are hundreds of people tweeting about how Firefox 57 has ruined their browser experience, and they are representative Firefox users -- the kind who have been using it all along, and relying on all the software Mozilla just broke. I don't think Firefox will gain market share by alienating all these people, while attempting to beat Chrome at its own game.

I wonder if there is any set of circumstances that would cause Mozilla to realize that making a new browser and calling it Firefox was a bad idea. If market share still continues to tank -- like were they realize for every person like the parent commenters, there may be many pre-existing users who have no reason to use Firefox anymore -- would they then admit it was a mistake? My guess is there is no such set of circumstances... witness the fact that Mozilla originally cited declining market share as a motivating factor for this big change, but then recently we have stories like this https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/new_war_for_mozilla...

But who will protect the users from Reddit's CEO, who has admitted to editing posts to make his arguments look better, and suffered no consequences?

So by daring to say that this behavior might be caused by someone who is characterized by the worst kind of lack of ethics, I'm in the wrong?

This is a phenomenon that studies show occurs at something like 2-3% in the population at large... but more common among CEO's. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/15/silicon-v... Interesting how you ban my argument because I don't have a credential (do you even know which logical fallacy that is?) but when an article in which experts take the same opinion, HN bans it with a different excuse.

Do you think that, just perhaps, this could have an effect on the amount of abuse of people by some companies, that we see day-to-day? Especially when it seems to go to an absurd point, as in this case?

It doesn't require a degree to detect people who are willing to treat those around without scruple, as long as they're not exposed. It's a fairly simple definition and these people disproportionately cause abuse... so censoring mention of this, or suggesting that a degree is needed to even contemplate recognizing this sort of bad actor, means you are acting to ensure people are ignorant about it, to their potential harm. I hope you never encounter one of these people close up, dang.

I'm not all that surprised that HN's despicable form of soft-censorship was used here... as I realize the statement I made was sort of controversial. But I'm looking forward to more people realizing how rotten you guys have become at censorship, at which point the interesting conversation will finally move elsewhere. Unfortunately, you can't keep doing it with such a heavy hand and have people not catch on, over the long term.

In fact, the level of censorship has gotten so high here (or I have finally noticed how bad it is) that I don't want to participate anymore. Maybe this is a marginal case, but I've realized you guys are just rotten overall. I don't really think it's ethical to participate in a form that's so dramatically manipulated, especially so often in the direction of SV companies. I'm going to kill my account, if that's possible.

Or, since it looks like HN is too arrogant implement this feature https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7841742 I'll just, you know, stop using it and monitor the potential security hole for the rest of my life.

There is a book called Political Ponerology, with a fascinating provenance, which basically claims society at large (macro scale) goes on sawtooth pattern like this. The argument is that during the good times, people stop taking the steps needed to keep these people from attaining high positions... they remain in denial and make excuses for pyscho behavior. Then people finally take action only when it's just blatantly obviously necessary again. Which, if you think about it, is also the basic story of good & evil presented in Harry Potter :)

IIRC the book was written by the scientific wing of the Polish Resistance movement during authoritarian occupations of the 20th Century. Apparently, many of the people involved in sourcing the data (and, oh yeah, who had secretly diagnosed many of the Nazi/Communist leaders as psychopaths) were killed, when the first edition of the book was discovered in progress. And that first manuscript was destroyed, but the lead author wrote it again -- not once, but two more times -- and ultimately, had to wait for the fall of Communism in order to get it out of Poland. It was finally translated and published during the Bush administration, by New York liberals.

There are by far more small companies using Haskell & FP than large ones. I mentioned large companies because they are recognizable. So what is your point?

Psychopaths sometimes have trouble recognizing stuff that is supposed to make them ashamed, i.e. stuff that would reveal their character were it exposed publicly.

Maybe that seems like an over the top comment, and on any individual case, who knows? But I think it explains a good number of these sorts of scandals. Sometimes, the people who get on top are not "ambitious"... sometimes they are actual monsters.

SQL may be an outlier because not that many people refer to themselves as "programming in SQL".

Conversely, there are plenty of weekend Haskellers who enjoy discussing it whenever possible.

I believe that in your real life, they don't.

In the bigger picture functional programming has made huge inroads. Facebook has a Haskell team whose product handles up to 1 million requests per second, and it's also in production at AT&T, Microsoft, Google, Barclays, New York Times and many smaller outfits. The other day I read about a Haskell-like language being used for high-speed, low-latency trading for a hedge fund.

But there are probably at least 100x more SQL developers out there.

I love Haskell, but... Haskell is about as popular as SQL? That makes no sense.

Some people get face tattoos.

Good question, simple answer: They have domain knowledge that is basically impossible (or very unlikely) for foreigners to their home country to have. But they have a preference for American talent to build their product, partly because they feel the supply of good programmers is better here (a sentiment I am probably oversimplifying, i.e. maybe they have a complex notion of value. The point is they want to start up here.)

This is to the best of my understanding. They have made some explanatory statements to me, but usually we are working. And they are very polite, not feeling it is really on them to criticize. I know they have used a large number of freelancers in my area, for various tasks.

While this story may not be stereotypical, everyone has their own story and our current immigration policy seems to limit entrepreneurs in many unexpected ways.

I believe this hurts some clients of mine, who were looking at it as a possible answer. They have been spending significant $$$ in the US economy, developing a product that it's unlikely any domestic firm could, and struggling to find a way to stay here so that they have access to American talent. They are currently here on a importer's license or something, which makes it illegal for them to visit their home country.

While I don't want to be taken for one who is just losing their mind over Trump (since they have all typically seemed pretty lame to me), xenophobia is actively harmful to US economic interests.

Reddit's core value seems to be "the end justifies the means."

Good point. I would insert "short-term" here... because I doubt it's any these corps long-term interests.

While Reddit seems less than competent to prevent this kind of manipulation, it does apparently violate Reddit's terms of service.

"You agree not to interrupt the serving of reddit, introduce malicious code onto reddit, make it difficult for anyone else to use reddit due to your actions, attempt to manipulate votes or reddit’s systems, or assist anyone in misusing reddit in any way. It takes a lot of work to maintain reddit. Be cool."

Wasn't this issue basically a driving force for Google creating Go? Or at least, a major design goal for Go was to get rid of O(n^2) compilation?

Am I missing something? I translated a bunch of articles from the current Czech Google News page and didn't see anything remotely fascist.

It seems there is a trend of those on the left referring to anything on the right as fascist. IMO this is dangerous because it dilutes the actual meaning of fascism. I'm not saying fascist ideology isn't out there btw.

Can you point out an example?

"It"? In addition to a specific type of exercise, we're talking about a continuous variable here. Are you so sure it's a linear relationship, with the heaviest exercisers experiencing the greatest benefits? Because that seems like a tenuous position.

Good thing you don't decide what gets published, then. The paper is cited by 29 other papers. And...

"Entropy is an extensive property. It has the dimension of energy divided by temperature, which has a unit of joules per kelvin (J K−1) in the International System of Units"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

I believe there have been studies linking higher death rates to some endurance exercisers, and others showing the opposite (esp. among 'elite athletes', who may be especially adapted to this behavior).[0] Sorry I don't have more links... please apply skepticism and look deeper as you like. This is what I can provide.

First, it seems reasonable that, as a stressor, there is going to be a hormetic level of exercise, and then above that, a level that isn't healthy. That's in line with the linked article's advice, and also this summary of early death research from NYT:

'In the largest such study to date, involving more than 50,000 adults and presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, participants who ran between 1 and 20 miles per week had almost 20 percent less risk of dying prematurely than people who didn’t exercise. But those who ran more than 20 miles per week enjoyed no such benefit. They had about the same risk of premature death as those who were sedentary.' [1]

If the above establishes the basic principle that too much exercise is counterproductive, there is almost certainly a level that actually starts subtracting lifespan (that study did not single out the most extreme endurance exercises AFAIK). Ergo, why there are so many deaths during Marathons (running even one M. can cause measurable heart damage).

I haven't checked out this angle, but it's also possible that lower muscle mass associated with endurance athletes is linked to (less) longevity, since, I believe, it is in general [2].

But again, one cannot approach this too simplistically. IIRC there is some evidence among pro bodybuilders of early death. More generally, exercise could have many effects, going in both directions, all with different curves.

This is a concept that seems particularly hard for folks who have learned to push their bodies well past the evolved resistance to high levels of exertion, and who take that unconditionally as a virtue.

EDIT: see also [3] below. I didn't have time to find the actual paper.

0 https://primalcycle.com/2011/09/17/life-expectancy-o-enduran...

1 https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/ask-well-endurance...

2 https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/muscle-ma...

3 http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20140401/too-much...

This would involve a selection bias. For example, evidence is mounting that endurance athletes die earlier than non-endurance athletes.

UPDATE: I have provided a more detailed account, with some citations, below.

This piece is chock full of ridiculous advice.

>> “I’m making a generic version of…”

>> It means: I don’t understand the constraints of the actual problem, so I’m going to design an even bigger problem that we have no way of verifying the efficacy of.

Yes, just tell the non-technical managers that "generic" means technicians have no idea what they are talking about. No matter what the problem is. That should make for a better world.

Whereas "refactoring" is only a "yellow flag".

Run away.

No, 'intravert' is not correct AFAIK

Okay I did some digging

Google n-grams isn't all that sympathetic to my account, in showing a long history for 'extrovert' and suggests 'extravert' is actively dying out.

But the history may not go back far enough: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-dif...

'Folklore has it that when Carl Jung was once asked which was the correct spelling—ExtrAvert or ExtrOvert—Jung's secretary wrote back something like, "Dr. Jung says it's ExtrAverted, because ExtrOverted is just bad latin."'

[...]

'According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "The original spelling 'Extravert' is now rare in general use but is found in technical use in psychology." That's correct. If you look at scientific journal articles, virtually every paper uses the spelling ExtrAvert.'

Eventually the correct spelling is driven by usage, and 'extrovert' is currently listed in dictionaries so... it's correct.

Historically the term was 'extravert' in psych literature. I feel like more technical usage probably still leans that way.

Hmm, I guess 'extrovert' is an acceptable spelling nowadays, even though it's the wrong Latin root.