zimablue

I use sets a lot, sample size of one. I do data science/engineering stuff, sets of columns/sets of keys. I'm very sceptical of your claim that most developers don't use sets.

Do you own your ancestors?

Great post, sets have nice properties that dictionaries don't have. Making them act similarly seems like a trap

In my country tuition is a loan. It's not archaic to say that if parents control your money, they can control your life. Some might not use that, many will. And what do middle-upper class parents control when they have the power to? Start with the most important things in your life and work down - who and how you date, what career you pursue, where you live, on and on. If you've never met a person whose parents held the purse strings and used it as power over them then you have a lucky group of friends.

I expect society to severely tax and regulate wealth, and also the most harmful methods that the wealthy use to game meritocracy. Eg. for private education - tax the hell out of it, legislate that each next stage somewhat accounts for the last one being rigged (eg. colleges forced to push down people from expensive schools) and seek to promote meritocratic alternatives (eg. online education).

I'm not even American, and for the record I got a couple of K a year at uni which I'd have survive without and never a dime since. Having to live under the control of your parents (which is fundamentally what happens when they hold the purse strings) past the age of 18-21 depending on taste is messed up. I know plenty of people from both camps and it's definitely bad for you to have your parents controlling your life past 21. It's different when you're younger, but even that is painful - at 15 I was ready to operate independently and my parents having some control over me until 18 probably messed up our relationship a lot. Not everything which is cultural is also arbitrary, as humanity advances we tend to promote individual freedom to the maximum extent we can support (and this is coming from a lefty). This isn't even bringing it how it will perpetuate class-systems, even for the beneficiaries I think it's incredibly harmful.

Because it replaces meritocracy with oligarchy if wealthy parents are required to get a foothold in life.

"let go" the notion of individual freedom, and replace it with your parents having control via financing over your life for most of it. Yeah I'll pass. Alternative proposal - vote for parties who will reverse intergenerational inequality: reform the housing market, dispose of the (corporate and literal property) rentiers, introduce a wealth tax, equalise pensions (it's insane that one generation is going to get pensions and the next basically isn't).

"Let go of the idea that you can live as an independent human" have a word with yourself.

I agree that non-STEM fields are less credible, but the "X% of field X are conservatives" argument seems totally pointless to me. Your political leanings shouldn't matter, otherwise it's not truth-seeking. And most of these fields don't seem truth-seeking to me, but that's a consequence of them being harder to do test-and-iteration that's the core of finding out truth about stuff, and also they're not valued in society so they don't get the cream of the crop.

So political distribution is 1. Not that cause of the problem, 2. Probably not even a symptom, it's more to do with the fact that most science is state-funded and right wing ideology broadly seeks to diminish the state. The right are also anti-science in broader ways (religious, climate change etc etc). It's a trend across science, not just in bs subjects: http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-...

I just think whenever you're having this discussion, which is important, throwing political distributions in muddies the water and polarizes it for no upside.

Alembic is an amazing db migration tool imo. I only use it in small-scale (80(?) tables, 2 developers), but it's so amazingly hackable by design.

Maths on your side != mathematical convention on your side.

THanks for a serious reply. The cached function computation argument is an interesting one, which resembles the answer by evanb here https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/86189/why-do...

I hadn't seen it before, basically if I understand it right treating all vectors as lisp s-exps which are themselves 0-indexed (0th element is 'list' , because you're doing a lot of symbolic manipulation. It's the best argument I've seen for 1-indexing, I'd say two criticisms - 1: I don't know how homoiconic Julia is, if it's not very then the actual use of this seems very low relative to slicing. 2: It seems to be mixing up indexing a vector itself, and indexing the expression that the vector is (like macro-quoted vs unquoted). I can see how it would smooth things in some way but it feels like a fudge that might cause more pain somehow later.

Hey, thanks for trying to reply substantively. You haven't understood what I was saying, which is fair enough because I didn't present it very clearly probably. The line where you start talking about something else is this: "So you’re saying I have a 1-dimensional, ordered set S, whose elements are real numbers". No, I'm not saying that. Firstly to define the question as Djikstra does: we're arging about, if I have a list L, and I write into my computer L[a, b], which elements of L are returned? My argument is kind of a physical metaphor, take the real number line as a physical axis (like you're doing physics), and take a load of toy trucks that each have length of 1 (I guess you choose your coordinate system to make the length 1) and put them down end to end. If I was a physicist, and I asked you to pick up 3 trucks starting at 0, and I was using real numbers and a vector I'd say it like this, pick up the trucks in the range [0, 3) on my axis.

Now if you choose 0 indexing + (closed, open) for your slicing, then a (python) programmer would say to another programmer, take the slice [0:3] to get the 3 trucks. So the slice numbers correspond perfectly to the vector description of the space that the items occupy. That's why in this slicing system taking L[a, b] then b-a = the number of items you get. Because it's matched perfectly with a real-number vector description of the space the items occupy on a real number line. All the other advantages like (I can describe an empty interval: [0:0]), I can describe taking the last element and it feels right [-1: 0] follow from this physical-space homomorphism. That last one: in a circular (modular?) space, walk left 1 and then come back right 1 and pick up the element you pass over. In 1-based: [0: 1] = the last element? I don't know if any languages do this but either you can't and that's sad or you can and it is incredibly counterintuitive.

I'm pretty sure that they just copied Fortan, which was written most of a century ago.

That's the second time you've ridiculously misrepresented my statements: "anyone disagreeing with you is an idiot" "deep faith will lead you to the conclusion" (and not deep faith + thinking about the actual problem, several convincing arguments and some ability)

I guess, because often you're not arguing in order to convince your opponent, you're arguing to sway the crowd (and sometimes, decide yourself).

And I don't think they're idiots, I just think that they're wrong. Not many people have read Djikstra and (?) and have deep faith in mathematical beauty, or have even thought about this much, doesn't make them idiots.

If you're going to give a counterexample, please give it.

I thought about my post after I read it and came to this- given Djikstra's (only system which can describe an empty interval and interval with first element without "unnaturals" ) and (?)'s argument that it creates a nice homomorphism between real-number intervals and integer slices then it's inarguable to me that 0-based is more mathematically elegant.

Where I guess there's space to disagree is this, I believe (to almost a point of faith I guess) that mathematical/logical elegance is important, and moving away from it is normally a mistake which leads to more pain in the long run.

Much like turing completeness, you can build systems with any choice that "work", so an argument always has to be from aesthetics, which can include simplicity and "uglyness", but these aren't totally individual (you can get 99/100 people to agree on which of two schemes is "simpler"). Simplicity and beauty aren't something that even mathematicians dismiss as they can be trying to tell you something.

There's another argument, I can't remember if I originated it or read it but it's the one I find most convincing.

Consider that you have finite units of equal length 1 stretching away from you in a line. How would you specify to someone (using real-number measurements) to retrieve the first N=6, or describe the vector they occupy? You would say, take everything between [0.0, 6.0). If you use zero-based indexing, the numbering scheme specifying the interval is identical across both systems: [0.0, 6.0) => (python)[0: 6]== 0<=x<6. In real numbers the interval could be open or closed for this argument to work, because for there to be any elegant translation the integer upper bound has to be open. That's the only way you can keep the elegant transformation with 0 and 6. Caveat that thie works because you're numbering the real-number origin as 0 but try telling physicists that they're not to do that! O=(1,1,1) is an even more indefensible position.

So there's another mathematical argument that I either came up with or read elsewhere that feels deeply convincing to me. If there's 2 there's probably more, and here's the list of languages on wikipedia, you tell me which you'd rather work in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_lang...

Sorry for the irate tone but I really think that on reflection and fair consideration this is an obvious one.

Work

It's not bikeshedding because: 1) it is pervasive and fairly importsnt 2) it's kind of a deep indication that something is amiss. It's like a language written in 2019 that has default dynamic not lexical binding, not in terms of importance but in terms of it's an argument that was had and decided 20 years ago. If this is wrong then you can probably assume that lots of other things which are important, decisions which can't be "proven" correct but have both convincing arguments and weighty empirical evidence are wrong (I'm not having that argument here but google why 0-based makes sense by Djikstra).

I might have to learn Julia at some point but 1-based indexing was a fairly heavy indicator to me to hold off.

Instead of the weirdly alarmist nature of the article, it would be a more fair point to make that colons are now very overloaded in python syntax.

In the void of enforcing a speficic one, you allow people flexibility to do custom things.

For instance linters not understanding type specificatins beyond a certain complexity but still using them in your code and some custom decorator to check them at run/dev time

Thanks, I've read arguments both ways and am trying to study logic/logic programming.

https://airbladesoftware.com/notes/relational-databases-are-...

I relate to this.

I think one of the symptoms is not picking up enough detailed understanding of anything because you keep moving around and don't believe in most external knowledge anyway (eg. don't want to learn [beyond a certain depth] SQL, it's so ugly on some inner level I'd much rather start with datalog and build my own up, don't want to learn economics I don't trust those science cargo-culters). But the other reason you don't want to specialize is that it would be to accept a limit on yourself (OK I'm going to get specialize on getting very good at c++, my upper salary cap is 500k and likely cap 200k, career is mapped out).

One of the things that's slowly curing me I think is running into examples of systems that are genuinely very heavy to understand/improve, and examples of people who are just unarguably higher ceiling in different ways than you.

eg. go watch a SGM play 30 second hyperbullet chess, I don't think I have either the memory or raw processing speed to do what they do, ever. If those guys exist a lot of other people have way higher ceilings. Also realize that chess (and by extension must be a lot of other activities) rely on both a crazy cpu, an amazing memory and an insanely built-out internal database of positions and ideas, and since my cpu is good but not unbelievable, my memory is nothing special and my time is limited there must be a lot of activities I'll never really be good at. Also just getting older and staying unsuccessful relative to your ego, you just start to compromise I think.

>If you own your body => you own your blood => you can do whatever the hell you want with it > If you own your body you own your hands => you can do whatever you want (murder) with them > That argument doesn't stand, I'm saying you can do anything you want with them that doesn't harm anyone else > Interesting, what's your definition of harming someone? If I control all the mechanisms of law and create a situation where every other person is effectively my slave (eg. I own all the land), then where in your libertarian philosophy do we fight that? Or do we just accept it?

I'm telling you with love in my heart, that taking a simplified libertarian view of everything is an intellectual trap and the world is way, way more complicated economically and philosophically than can be managed through libertarianism.

In the same way that gender politics gets disproportionate airtime because 1. it's very feel-good for groups of girls to feel united over and get a thrill of moral superiority from, it works socially 2. it's something for the elites/rich people to focus on that isn't redistribution or reform

Libertarianism gets press because: 1. People love having a single rule for things, because it makes them feel clever and right often without having to do any actual thinking. And it's clever on light inspection and dumb on deeper thinking 2. see gender politics 2.

Except that in cases like this, the people objecting aren't just "voicing an opinion", they're what amount to keen amateur oppo research/reputation and business destruction operatives.

Read the article, they go straight to how do we destroy this person's sponsors, purchasers, kill their following.

Don't mix identity politics with socialism, it doesn't have a left/right axis. Socialist policies to mitigate economic injustice based on rentier capitalism is a very different argument with a different cross section of support to identity politics/cultural appropriation. It's Bernie supporters vs Hillary.

It's not drama that people love, it's a group identity based on perceived injustice, gives one like a thrill of self righteousness. If it was drama, it wouldn't be all about the identity politics we'd be reading some gossip mag to find out who is sleeping with whose ex.

By your own government you mean US or UK?

I have massive issues with UK politics but knowing a few civil servants, they're not (widely) corrupt, and they're not incompetent.

In any department, they will normally be the force for good policy based on evidence, it's politicians who push random expedient ideas. Take grammar schools, the entire department of education knows they don't work and are being forced to push it. Or Brexit, the whole civil service pretty much opposes it, and especially the treasury/trade people in detailed knowledge that it's going to be an economic tire fire.

Finally, regulation != censorship, there's such a thing as a middle ground.

Your statement is just a tiny bit too general and that's where you're missing.

"What about their input and output is" => "what type their input/output is"

The next question is what does the type of the input/output actually tell you about the input/output? In the most popular languages (using interfaces), it basically tells you that the input/output might have a, b and c set (or they might be null), and it could also have anything else set.

So the actual information you have is that you might or might not have (a,b,c) and also might or might not have (anything). Not as foolproof as you think. The natural objection is that aha! I defined this class to require (a,b,c) in the constructor and do a nullity check, so I know much more than this! But this is back to having "types in your head", that constructor signature and nullity check isn't compiler enforced (as in if you change it, nothing will fail in the typesystem at the point of the function that we're checking, as long as those fields remain on the class). So the useful part of the static typing is actually living in your head either way.

If the dude's kid ends up as king it's not a proper revolution in my book, the French knew how to do it.