timthelion

As much as the obvious reflex is to think that "oh we should move BACK to a more austere, toy-less environment." It is important to remember, that children that grow up in nature are surrounded by thousands of "toys". I remember camping by creaks as a child, and finding there far more "toys" than in my play box. Rocks, sticks, bushes, leaves, mud, bugs, animals. Somehow, I still managed to focus for hours trying to damn the creak. So I don't really believe that more toys = shorter attention span. It must be something about the nature of these artificially created toys that makes them less engaging.

Why did you take the box away then?

For those wondering, here is a link to underhanded c http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_2.html

"It's just going to encourage more launches" - no it won't. The current missile defense systems do not have a deterrent effect. They are expensive to launch and the 3rd world missiles that they intercept are much cheaper. Even a successful interception is a victory for the agressor.

Only haskell that I use that I'm aware of is arbtt [1].

[1] https://arbtt.nomeata.de/#what

Code bubbles is hands down the most awsome thing I've seen in months! Where can I get it? I'll switch to JAVA for this? Thanks for sharing.

Edit: to answer my question, yes this really exists http://cs.brown.edu/~spr/codebubbles/

Single-file coding is an entire subculture. See leo [1] and org-mode [2] programming.

[1] http://leoeditor.com/

[2] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html#literat...

The Königsberg bridges graph is wrong. There should be seven edges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsbe...

> I'm lucky enough to know a lot of incredible software engineers who happen to be women (and were also CS grads or PhDs), much smarter than me, and I don't like this attempt to associate all women engineers with people who clearly only have a superficial understanding of code.

I don't know that many experienced female programmers, but the ones whom I do know are not advocates and tend to avoid the subject of their gender. So my own experience leads to the conclusion that I made, not about all women programmers, but about those who advocate women in tech.

When you read my comments you have a set of assumptions that you have made about me. You cannot escape that. For one thing, you assume that I know English (which I do). Another thing you probably assume is that since I am on HN, I am a computer programmer. You assume that I know the word "transaction" since you use that word. You don't explain its meaning to me. Neither do you explain to me what a human is. You assume that I know what humans are. You assume that I am human, though you cannot see me. Assumptions are everywhere.

When we meet someone, we begin with a default set of assumptions about them and what they know. You cannot even communicate with a person without assuming something about their level of knowledge, of language, culture, and technology. The question is, whether these in-avoidable default assumptions should differ based on a person's race or gender or nationality. I believe that they should. If I come up to you, knowing that you're from the UK, and start talking to you about the post communist privatization process in the Czech Republic, without first explaining to you what it is, you are bound to be confused. I assume that you do not know about the privatization process.

That doesn't mean that I believe that citizens of the UK are fundamentally incapable of understanding the privatization process. If I ask you if you know about this process and you say you are an expert on post communist economics than my assumptions about your knowledge on the subject will quickly change. But for now, since I know nothing about you, it is safe for me to assume that you know nothing about privatization and that in order to be polite, I should not spend the next 30 minutes talking about the current value of privatization coupons without ever asking if you know what the hell I'm talking about.

But when the basis for my assumption of shared knowledge is gender, this leaves an interesting question. If I know that most women who I meet in technical contexts are not computer programmers should I immediately assume that they are computer programmers and start talking about in depth concepts or should I ask first? Is it more rude to assume that my conversation partner understands what I am talking about or to assume that they do not understand? Especially when many newbies are so eager to show that they do understand, that they find themselves unwilling to say out-loud that they do not.

>> It is harder for me as a white man to talk to a woman or a minority because I am thinking about their gender or race

> is not normal.

Perhaps you don't do so. But how do you know it is not normal? If you don't let me share my internal battles without attacking me, then how can you know the internal psychology of others?

"Judges in the city are paid $100 per election they preside over" For a days work, that's not much for a one off job even by central European standards. It seems to me, that the pay should be increased.

Unrelated to bootcamps, but one thing really jumped out at me in the article. The author's discussion of BigO time:

"The post went on to detail a need for an understanding of BigO time complexity, which is completely fair. No one wants a double loop in production code. What a bulky monstrosity that would be (imagining a giant disgusting swamp monster made of 0’s and 1’s, eeek!)."

"I certainly don’t want to make a messy newb mistake like creating a method with a time complexity of O(n²) or worse (cringe)."

I'm not going to be critical and say that this is wrong and that the author doesn't know what she is doing. But it does seem that this quote demonstrates a tendency I see among female advocates of women in tech, and that is to slightly awkwardly use technical terms in order to try to prove that they are part of the "in group" of people who understand technical concepts.

In this case, it seems that she is trying to prove that she knows what BigO is. I feel like this is a kind of meta-sexism. What she is doing by explaining to us the gist of BigO is saying "I think that you think that I'm so stupid that I don't know what BigO is, so now I'm going to prove to you that I do."

I know I suffer from the assumption that women don't know how to code. It's a hard thing to get around, since %90 of female programmers whom I meet are women from PyLadies who come to the local python meetup, and really don't know how to program yet. And now our author is suffering from the assumption that I assume that she doesn't know how to code. And in trying to prove otherwise, she trips over herself in her eagerness to prove my assumption wrong.

This meta-sexist thinking and behavior is getting so complicated and convoluted that it is acting to distract us from thinking and communicating on technical topics. I believe that it has become harmful to the cause of encouraging women and minorities to join our communities. It is harder for me as a white man to talk to a woman or a minority because I am thinking about their gender or race. And it is harder for a woman to talk about tech if she is thinking about my thinking about the fact that she is a woman.

Somehow we need to escape meta-sexism and start talking to each-other as equals, without presumption or presumption of presumption.

Maybe in the bay area. Not in the rest of the world though.

But a sketch isn't an end product. It is not a "realization".

True, but if I know that you have been working on the idea for 5 years, and that you have those hundreds of pages of alternate designs, then even just the end result may be valuable enough to me that you would want an NDA.

I agree and disagree with this one. Of course, no one is going to pay money for your game idea, but there are ideas which require an NDA. Those ideas typically take years of development and a person with such an idea would be able to present hundreds of pages of alternate designs and their pros/cons. For example, if I have a design for a 3mm x 1mm mechanism that can actuate a rod by 2mm and I know what kind of power consumption said mechanism will have, that design might be expressible on a single piece of paper, and be worth millions of dollars.

I'm confused, you mean that the bitcoin network takes 3.3GW or it takes 3.3GWh to mine one bitcoin? It seems that google takes the same electricity as the entire bitcoin network.

Here in the Czech Republic there are many discussions about how there is not enough money for the elderly (almost all of whom lost what little they had during the transition away from communism due to changes in currency). Simultaneously, there is a lot of discussion about the lack of spots in pre-schools. And I also see that many elderly people are quite lonely. I think it would be a great idea to create combined elderly pre-school centers. You could attend if you were under the age of 7 or over the age of 70. Morning would be breakfast time, where the elderly and the very young would eat together. Then there would be play time, when the elderly could chat and watch as the children played. Then there could be lunch time. And after lunch, the elderly and the very young could sing songs. Then there could be some excersize time, which would mostly teach the kids to sit still and follow directions, while enticing the elderly to do some stretching. And then the kids would go home. And the elderly could perhaps sleep up-stairs.

I do not think this would harm the children, and I think that many old people would be much happier in such a setting.

"complex software" as far as I can tell, the complexity of problems solved by startups decreases over time. The true hack isn't coming up with a hard solution to a hard problem, but in finding the simplest thing that people will interact with and share.

Gold is also marketing. No one is going yaya over other, similarly rare elements [1]. Tantalum is significantly less common then gold, for example, and doesn't tarnish! And yet gold is 320x more expensive than tantalum [2] [3]!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem...

[2] https://www.metalary.com/tantalum-price/ [3] https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/gold-price/today/kilograms/u...

I have the opposite example. In the Czech Republic, the national railway was sued by the private railways for being too cheep. And the private railways won in court!

I believe the opposite may be true. You may be swearing off marrying or dating a gold digger, but why would you want to? I have a well dressed, intelligent, good looking wife and she makes more than she costs.

I am aware of a real existing portfolio (not mine) which started with a sum slightly higher than 2.2 million in 1997 and invested in 70% medium risk mutual funds 30% lower risk bonds and real-estate. The portfolio has made a very consistent 6% per year since 1997. Almost exactly 3.6% after inflation.

You really ought to read the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) I hear the movies crap, but the book is perfect.

Why? Give an example?

This. I really don't understand why companies are so allergic to human intervention.

If you don't understand it, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are at fault. It could be poorly explained. The existence of others who appear to understand it means nothing. After-all, gobbledygook science papers have been accepted to peer review journals on multiple occasions.

In this case, especially, you shouldn't feel bad if you have to look up terms. Both relational and reactive are clique specific terms.

Not something I've done personally, but lawyers selling form letters is a common passive income source which requires no coding ;).