throwawayjava

The question is: when we find a common class of vulnerability, what's the best way to deal with it?

Lots of small colleges with 100MM endowments using a passive strategy will fail to survive the next deep recession. They need those returns to survive, so they have no choice but to accept the associated risk. But one deep down market without an associated counter cyclical uptick in enrollment numbers and they are dead. Ask any small private college CFO and they'll agree.

On the other hand, the public markets could lose all their value and Harvard would still be able to cover its operating expenses.

Harvard's goal is to survive for centuries. The goal of a college with a 100MM endowment is to make payroll during the next few school years.

Your description doesn't come close to describing the average small city in the Midwest.

Or the east.

Or the south.

Or the west.

Or even most suburbs.

I'd love to know your zip code so I can look at the amazing census data for your area and figure out how to replicate that miracle

Oh, but there is :( `jenv shell 1.8` is muscle memory for me now.

There might be a good reason why code developed under extreme focus also tends to be inscrutable to others.

[1] https://www.additudemag.com/understanding-adhd-hyperfocus/

Is it no longer the case that every programmer has to know SQL? I have always and still do consider knowledge of SQL a minimum requisite for any programming job...

The "not capitalism" of the soviet bloc is not even close to what the article is disucssing

And not just for overpriced knives.

http://www.envisage-project.eu/proving-android-java-and-pyth...

Most software that's correctness critical is not written in Java.

But I could see KeY-verified voting machines as at least better than the status quo (as long as you take it as an assumption that for whatever reason we absolutely need voting machines).

You'd just end up with a lot of noise. The person who wrote this list even has a few scientific publications, which is more background than most people who contribute to the wiki would have.

Perhaps we could create a Foundation that pays a group of scientists a modest salary to spend all their time curating the list. The public can send the Foundation any comments they want.

Of course, the Foundation can't pay enough people to do all the work itself. So they could crowd-source some of the work to people from various fields who know enough about the field to judge what's really under-investigated vs. things that are already thoroughly investigated. Those groups -- panels, let's call them -- could get together and make recommendations to the Foundation.

The Foundation employees could form panels, get their recommendations, and the synthesize that into a list.

And if we're going to all this work to create a good curated list, then maybe the government or donors or whoever could even fund some of the ideas that come out of the final curated list. Not a ton of money -- just enough to hire one or two people to work on the idea for few years. Maybe call the final curated list a Portfolio or something.

IDK what we could call such a Foundation. I guess if the government funds it we could call it the National Science Foundation or something list that. And if it's private, probably focused on more near-term stuff, maybe "VC firm".

Sounds like a really good idea.

That's a promotional video showing you what the most automated parts look like when automation goes perfectly. Not everything is so automated, and everything doesn't always go perfectly.

or naive.

It's possible for something to be over-investigated and also not produce results. See also: the build up to AI winters.

There are easily thousands of people working on building higher-level programming languages/models. A very short and very incomplete list of entire subcommunities of PL working on languages that are higher-level than java/python:

1. The ML family -- OCaml, SML, Scala, F#. I think it's very fair to say that these are "higher-level" than imperative OO languages. And you can definitely get a job writing OCaml or Scala or F#...

2. A whole bunch of programming languages/primitives/paradigms aimed at making concurrency/parallelism/distributed systems easier. Erlang, X10, session types, Manticore, etc. Rust might even belong here.

3. Programming languages that incorporate resource/complexity analysis.

4. Literally decades of work on visual programming languages (which have mostly resulted in modern IDEs and teaching tools like Scratch).

5. behavioral types

6. linear types (again rust kind of fits here)

7. dependent types

8. I would also argue that systems like tensorflow and pytorch are really a sort of programming language -- they have a very different model of computation than the host language. Just because they don't have a parser/compiler/etc. doesn't mean they aren't a programming language, imo.

9. Tons of other stuff that doesn't fit in the major categories above (e.g. netkat).

10. I mean even SQL belongs in this list.

Even for language/models listed above that don't have large adoption, the ideas are often incorporated into more mainstream languages in one way or another. So there are significant projects developed in each of these types of languages (with the exception maybe of behavioral types and session types).

Higher-level programming Languages is one of the most explored areas of Computer Science -- if anything, it's an over-explored field.

This is less a list of "underexplored ideas" and more a list of "over-hyped ideas with over-crowded communities". Every item on the CS list is the sort of thing that an ungrounded undergrad research intern would want to work on.

Some of the descriptions in other fields have a similarly dilettante vibe to them. E.g.,

* Bio: math bio is a huge community and all those folks are well-trained in chaotic dynamics. you can say it's under-explored, but there are probably hundreds of people working on this right now and at least thousands have in the past few decades.

* Math: there's a section on subspace packing with a side-story about a proof assistant and the author doesn't even mention Hales...

* physics: Building machines to automate experiments is definitely the sort of thing people get paid to do whenever there's a large enough market (and even sometimes when there isn't). similarly, Nuclear-powered propulsion is underexplored... as long as you don't count the militaries of the major nuclear powers, that is.

I'm opposed to back doors, but the door analogy is a bad one.

Furthermore, realizing this gap exists is not synonymous with claiming that "you can only talk about things you have personal experience". Where in my above post do I say that?

Imagination is powerful, not magical.

Maybe logic can be useful in the way you want it to be, but first you'll need to figure out how to serialize a person's entire life experience into some sort of sequence of symbols.

> Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme.

But you don't know what it is like, and logic alone cannot help you know what it is like, because the full range of human experience is not expressible is any extant logical system.

hell, you can't even beat SoTA object detection if you don't have tons of actual experience in the form of labelled data.

And object detection is trivial compared to "being a human".

Is it really so hard to believe that you need actual experience in order to really understand how someone experiences the world? Or that your experience might make certain completely true things seem false to you, in a way that would make others experience your view of the world as akin to that of a child?

> So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion.

Sometimes that's true, but very often it is not true at all.

Very often, conversations about social/political topics end exactly when someone refuses empathize and instead imposes what they view as "logical" based on their "obvious experience of the world". E.g., "being gay would make me feel bad, and no healthy person wants to feel bad, so therefore gay people must be somehow sick". Completely logical from the priors, but immediately ends the conversation because the speaker assumes their experience of being a human in society is the only valid one.

> If a persons feelings trump logic...

Try replacing "feelings" with "experience". And then consider all those annoying arguments where someone says "but A is of course true and A clearly implies B so B must be true!" Even though you can go out and verify -- with reproducible experiment -- that the earth is in fact really, really not flat. i.e., that B is false.

And look: in this case, logic does not matter! If you can check with experience that B is false, then you don't need to look through the chain of logical deductions that resulted in a derivation that B is true. When people say "logic doesn't matter", what they usually mean is "your conclusion is prime facie false based on how I experience the world"; not "I'm not a blind child, you're a blind child!"

This doesn't mean that there is no room for logic. It just means... when talking about topics that involve how other people experience the world, try walking in other people's shoes.

And if they come to different conclusions that you do when you try to empathize with them, consider that perhaps they're not just dumb children. Perhaps you're not using enough synthetic training data to really understand where they are coming from. Or even that you can't do this task of imagining the other person's experience with purely synthetic training data.

Logic is a bad tool for solving social and political problems. Empathy is a much better tool. Especially empathy grounded in the realization that even empathy isn't quite enough to really understand how other people experience life. Logic can sometimes help you empathize, or explain to yourself why you need to empathize, but logic is just a tool for thinking. And it's not even always the best tool.

We have always been in an "age of conformity". For example, Obergefell v. Hodges was decided less than 5 years ago. There are still children who are homeless because they aren't sexually conformant.

What is changing is not the degree to which society demands conformity. All that is change is who has to conform, and the standards to which they have to conform.

Conformity is not bad. Abstaining from wanton murder and theft is conforming to social norms. What matters is whether the norms are good ones.

> The Hacker culture from which everything we have today in tech arose.

This is a nice origin fantasy, but it's really not true.

The uniforms at DoD and the suits at IBM/Intel/AT&T/Xerox/etc. played a huge role in envisioning, organizing, and bankrolling all that work.

Also, that work was done by of hundreds of thousands of white-collar and blue-collar professionals. Many of those engineers and technicians were not self-described "hackers" or "nerds". A lot of them contributed by digging ditches and climbing polls. A lot of them were brilliant engineers who at 5pm turned off the computer screen, went home to their families, and didn't think about work until 9am the next day.

> The culture which makes this site "Hacker" news, is one in which doing something interesting is more important than anything else... why aren't you doing something interesting?

Because some times boring things are important to help society function or to make money. Examples: Attending city council/school board meetings. Being a middle man. Running warehouses. Selling advertisements. Giving away vaccines and moz nets. And honestly 99% of other work done by companies, nonprofits, and active citizens. Including software companies. Boring, not interesting, and yet to varying degrees important. In fact, some of those things are super interesting (ad auctions, for example, are wonderful fun for math nerds) but not nearly as important as the boring things (passing out vaccines or setting up moz nets or taking minutes at a city council meeting -- seriously, not fun).

> But maybe it's this fear that leads us rushing back to deep moral systems likes religious fantastics when their faith is questioned.

We all have our convictions and stories in which we find meaning.

We're all unreasonable defensive about those stories we tell ourselves.

...In fact, on that note, one more thing to add to the list of boring things that we for some reason feel the need to do: political arguments on a news forum that financially benefits VC by tapping into a fantastical ethos about the origin of modern computing.

Now, tell me no one here is going to get unreasonably defensive about that ;-)

That's quite bleak.