zombieprocesses

> This is a legitimate discussion.

Since when did that matter. It's discussion they don't want, legitimate or not.

It happened in your brain. Whether it happened in your mind or even whether the mind exists is up for debate. As we learn more about the brain, the mind recedes and it may disappear altogether. Just like how our increased understanding of physiology ended any serious notion of the soul.

The issue of the mind suffers from the same problems that soul did. Can a soul get old? Of course not. Our bodies get old. Can the mind get drunk? Of course not, our brains get drunk. If you take psychotropic drugs, do these drugs target the mind or the brain? Obviously the brain.

I didn't say it was unconstitutional. The constitution makes it very difficult to repeal for a reason.

It's why only 1 amendment has ever been repealed and that amendment was written nearly 150 years after the founding of the country.

I'm fairly certain that the 1st and 2nd amendment are pretty much untouchable.

But I wish you the best in trying to get it repealed. The more you try to get it repealed, the more people will support the 2nd amendment and remind people that we actually have rights that we need to protect lest it be taken from us.

We need something in the US where we have free speech rights.

That's why we have principles and constitutional rights. So that our rights aren't taken away on a whim of societal change.

I'm from NY and I've never owned a gun and I probably will never do so. But even I would be against repealing the 2nd amendment.

The fact that people here are so openly talking about repealing the 2nd amendment and taking away more of our rights is really concerning. And it's self-defeating. It'll only make americans more wary of losing our 2nd amendment rights and increase gun sales.

What a sad day. Reddit used to be something so special.

If only tech giants stood together and fought the corporate interests and NGOs pushing censorship on them.

I've pretty much stopped using reddit because it's full of political nonsense now anyways. If they are going to be banning subs every 6 months, what's the point of reddit anymore?

Bingo. And it has gotten worse in recent months as they had to censor and cater to the mainstream media.

> Results aren't complete (they probably create a short search table/cache every few hours based on a finite, semantically-defined number of categories)

Also, heavily weighted towards paying customers and their own pet projects. Some days, youtube is just filled with SNL, late night show, movie trailers, logan paul, youtube drama, etc.

> Every day hundreds of people create new channels making interesting, thought-provoking and informative videos, and youtube decides to hide them in favour of clickbait garbage and shitty ads, and take away all means you have to discover them.

I remember just a few years ago, one of the fun things to do was go down youtube's rabbit hole. Now, youtube is just another managed and curated platform to funnel you to certain corporate interests.

Even when stephen hawking pass away, the only thing on youtube was CNN's video of it. What a marked difference from a few years ago when steve jobs passed away.

Sadly, youtube is just becoming a "tv platform" now. Which is a shame.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14506287

Enjoy. If you want to dip your toes in the water, you can go through

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/fsharp/

for a quick introduction.

If you have background in functional languages/programming, most of it should look familiar. If you come from an OO or a procedural background, then it might take some getting used to.

But if you are looking to get a job at a windows shop, I'd stick to C# ( or VB.Net ) as that's where most of the jobs are.

Is there this much money slushing around that startups are now mocking investors?

There are nearly 20,000 startups. Does that mean 19000+ startups told investors to "not diversify and give us your money"? Every day, the media disappoints me.

Korea, Taiwan, Japan and china tried it with spectacular results. Also, latin america is a especial situation because they are within the US sphere of influence. Their economic situation is far more complex because of it.

> exactly like the one in Argentina and Brazil.

Brazil and especially argentina's financial problems were a result of international borrowing, not domestic borrowing.

On a side note, anyone else a bit worried that there being a tech or economic bubble? Reading this thread, I can't help but be reminded of the dotcom bubble when everyone was getting into tech or the "I just became a realtor" craze before the housing bubble crash.

Anyone maintain a list of indicators other than S&P 500 PE ratio or the interest rate?

I'm generally optimistic on the economy because of the tax cuts and the expected infrastructure spending, but still, don't wait to be caught with my pants down like the 2008 financial disaster.

At this point it's all theoretical based on our best mathematical modeling of the universe/physics.

> If there are truly separate "universes", then by definition wouldn't it be the case that there would be no way to test (or falsify) whether they exist or not

By definition? No. Extremely difficult and maybe impossible. Yes.

Keep in mind that before powerful telescopes, the outer planets were "guessed" at by mathematical modeling. Astronomers mathematical calculations led them to believe that there should be planetary bodies like uranus and neptune out there. It took further advances in technology/physics to corroborate the mathematical calculations/model.

The same thing for hereditary genetics and the proton/electron/etc. When the first theoretical/mathematical models were first made, we had no conceivable way of "seeing" a proton or DNA.

Have you considered retirement? 20 years of IT is enough for you to retire on.

Do you have any careers you want to get into?

It can't be exploited if the security "best practices" are used. But I've come across situations where people were using "sa" as the account for production SQL Server connections because they just didn't know any better. Things are much better in the linux/bsd world where there is generally more competence and people tend to know what they are doing.

Having said that, things are getting better. IT/developers are much more mindful of security concerns today than 10 years ago.

Agreed. I wish helicopters were banned or only allowed on high rise helipads. They are so loud that it hurts your ears if they are anywhere near your vicinity. Noise pollution should be a consideration as any form of pollution. Also, if helicopters fly by your building, you can feel it. It actually vibrates the building. It really gets on your nerves and affects your quality of life.

Helicopters and horse buggies in central park are two things we don't need in nyc.

This is such oft repeated nonsense. Creativity exists in authoritarian systems. Creativity existed during slavery. Creativity existed during the dark ages. It existed during the age of kings. It existed during religious tyranny. It always exists.

> Maybe I'm naive and romantic about the Canadian/Western style of education and China will inevitablly dominate AI through force of will.

What is canadian/western style education? It's so funny how we mock our education system as producing factory drones incapable of thinking but whenever china is mentioned, we pretend like our education system fosters creativity. People constantly regurgitating the trope about "creativity" and "china not having it" just shows how well brainwashed we are. I wonder how the chinese built their own unique civilization if they weren't creative?

> Would be very curious to hear others thoughts on this, perhaps from people further along than I (still a lowly undergrad).

It's a simple matter of wealth. If china can develop enough and get enough money to be able to spend time doing the research, then they will make progress.

It's simply a matter of wealth, people, resources and stability. China has the people obviously. They have stability so far ( I doubt anyone is going to invade them and destabilize them a la opium wars ) and they appear internally stable as far as any can tell. They have a large enough territory. So it's simply a matter of wealth. Can they get wealthy enough to build universities, companies, etc to fund research?

Creativity, research, etc has nothing to do with the political system. The authoritarian soviets were able to send people to space. Nazi germany was able to advance research on everything. So did imperial japan. The authoritarian and tyrannical european colonial powers ravaging most of the world made great contributions to science/knowledge. So did we while we were busy exterminating the natives and enslaving blacks.

The system doesn't matter. People are just as creative in china as they are here. The system doesn't matter. It's a matter of wealth/funding and stability.

Alphabet wasn't broken up. It is 1 company. There is a difference between reorganization within 1 company and breaking up a company into separate companies. Not sure how else I can explain it.

Standard Oil was broken up into separate companies - which eventually become exxon,amaco,mobile,chevron,etc. Alphabet just reorganized their corporate structure. Meaning after the reorganization, google, youtube, deepmind, etc remained part of alphabet. Exxon, Amaco, Mobile, chevron, etc were not part of standard oil after the break up.

If advertising isn't manipulating and brainwashing, what is it? As far as I can tell, advertising is precisely that.

Regular expression is useful for sure. What is terrible is that every language, shell and platform has different "styles and implementation". On windows, cmd, powershell, C#, sql server, etc all have their own styles. It's similar enough and at the same time different enough to drive you insane. Throw in linux with their shells, vi(m), perl, etc all using their own variants.

But the biggest problem is that regex is prone to "set it and forget it" issue. It's something we use once in a while and forget. Was it brackets or parentheses or braces for defining character ranges? Does . or + signify one or more? And ever try deciphering someone's undocumented multiline regex? Fun times.

Also, "Ad-Hominem and Whataboutism" is the easiest way to spot shilling. The fact that it is capitalized makes me believe it was copied and pasted from a list of talking points.

If you truly believed shilling was bad, you wouldn't support russianlago or thinkprogress. But the fact that you linked to those two makes me believe you actually support shilling. Just the shilling you agree with. Just an observation.

Considering that millions of vietnamese were massacred during the whole war, you are right. My Lai was just a microcosm of an even greater atrocity.

> The Vietnam war was meant to block the expansion of communism which at that time had a fair amount of blood on its hand.

So using that logic, vietnam could invade the US because we have a fair amount of blood on our hands?

Why didn't we invade australia which was wiping out the aborigines?

It just seems like rationalizations just for the sake of rationalization. Like we invaded iraq to bring freedom.

I suppose. Why weren't people worried about this during obama's campaign?

> - The advertisements were not overt ("fake news") - It raises the barrier of entry to the political process - Filter bubble effects

If filter bubble effects are a problem, then we should be looking into traditional media, not social media. I'd say there is more of a filter bubble issues in CNN, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, Foxnews, etc than in social media. When nearly 100% of the largest media organizations are endorsing one candidate and/or espousing one type of ideology, maybe we should be looking at that.

> Or you can believe a story about "elites" and "biased media".

It's not a matter of believing. It's a matter of fact. Foxnews and the right wing were also whining about social media when obama won. Now it's the media and the left wing whining about social media because trump won. The only difference is that the leftwing has a much greater media presence.

It's so funny how both sides are the same. When it looked like trump was losing, he was blaming foreign interference and biased media and fake news. And the media/leftwing was mocking him for being paranoid and a sore loser. Now that trump won, it's the media/leftwing whining about foreign interference and biased social media and fake news. The hypocrisy displayed by every side is rather disheartening.

I disagree. CS algorithms is about the logical/mathematical understanding of algorithms. If you want to understand hardware implications, you are generally taught that in an comp architecture class. Blaming algorithms class for the lack of consideration for real world hardware issues is like blaming the computational class because the turing machine doesn't factor in hardware issues. You abstract it out to make general logical observations.

The guy is a legend. If there was ever an MVP in the C#/.NET space, it's this guy. His books are great too.

> However that's not what has been done, but the a) use of shills and fake personas to pump up opinion b) creation of fake "grassroots movements" and "news articles" with a divisive purpose

This has been done since forever. People supporting Obama did in 2008. Those supporting Ron Paul did it. Bernie sanders supporters did it and so did hillary supporters.

If you go back to 2008 election, the media was praising Obama as the first social media president. Remember how well obama used youtube, myspace, facebook, reddit and the burgeoning social space during his election? It's strange how the media is now attacking the social media space they loved so much because trump won the election.

> Why is any of this news?

I think it's because the media and the democrats and a large segment of the elites need something to blame for trump's win. They don't want to blame hillary or themselves for the loss, so they attack social media.

During the 2016 election, Trump was complaining about foreign interference in the elections. And Obama stated there was no foreigner interference and that Trump was whining because he was losing in the polls. Back then, the traditional media was backing obama and mocking trump. Now that trump has won, the traditional media is the one pushing the foreign interference narrative.

But I guess it is all conjecture. But ever since trump won the election, there has been a relentless propaganda campaign against social media by the establishment. You can't go a day without seeing a propaganda piece on traditional or social media about how bad social media is.

If people have a test machine or a VM to download/install git and create toy projects to learn the basics of git, that would be far more effective. Try branching, merging, diffing, committing, etc to get a better feel of how the source control system works.

If you have background in subversion or other source control ( hell even experience in source safe might help ), then it would help you get caught up much faster.

Also, there are tons of youtube videos on git if you learn better via video.

But at the end of the day, if you don't use it, you aren't going to understand git.