this seems fixable by rebranding
1,602 karma · joined October 25, 2018
One piece of code from a well established tech company would just crashloop if authentication failed. I've seen others just die if the RPC service couldn't make a connection.
So in practice, yes I do have to spend my time tracking down nil pointer runtime bugs both from colleagues and also from other organizations.
Go programs crash at runtime. In general, program failures and bugs should surface as soon as possible. Ideally no later than compile time. Instead, Go makes you wait until the app is running.
For an app that has a lot of configuration options, for example, there can be a latent bug that crashes the binary for some options. And that bug may not be detected for months because nobody was using that combination of config options.
The only real defense of this is to pepper your code with a bunch of nil checks. But these nil checks are also hard to test, so Go devs just learn to ignore missing code coverage. In fact, your code coverage metrics look better if you don't check for nil.
I'm sure at some point Go or a library will offer a version of optional types that is well-adopted. But my point is that by the time Go was designed, null references were already widely considered a bad idea and the source of a huge class of computer bugs. Go still deliberately designed them into the type system.
I'm sorry you're bored and also annoyed in the possible universe where GoKart is your project. But it seems like this is a thing people want to talk about in a post about Go static analysis tooling.
I don't see why you're trying to police HN conversations.
If you don't need to manipulate pointers then nil really just represents a degenerate or optional value. For optional values these can be encoded any number of ways depending on the type system. One common pattern is an optional type. Another is to annotate the type to indicate that it might be null.
The idea is that if a programmer doesn't check that an nullable or optional type is missing then the program should fail at compile time instead of crashing at runtime. Golang chose to crash programs at runtime.
So for whatever reason, Go has decided that null pointer dereferences are not a big deal. But God help you if you try to comment out a variable use without assigning it to "_". Then the program fails to compile.
It still boggles my mind that Go decided to force programmers to worry about nil pointers.
They are different logics in general though. 3-value logic is more like the A is True, False or None/Unknown.
Another interpretation one can put on intuitionistic logic is game semantics. Here a statement is true if the verifier has a winning strategy to prove the proposition. It's false if the falsifier has a winning strategy. Then intuitionistic logic corresponds roughly to the idea that some games don't have a winning strategy for either player.
So here (and in the proofs example I gave above) is that we get an idea of "neither true nor false" that is represented by the lack of an explicit rule for concluding truth or falsity in some cases.
In contrast, 3-valued logic gets at the idea of "neither true or false" by introducing another symbol (e.g. "None" or "-1") together with new operators that operate on sentences with that symbol.
So we get one from classical logic by deleting something (namely the law of the excluded middle) and the other by adding something.
This is useful for practical applications, but it's not the same as knowing the fixed point for mathematical applications.
E.g. you may want to prove that some function preserves the irrational number pi. But you may not be able to prove it, only show that computations make your conjecture more and more likely.
Intuitionistic logic is a logic that is weaker than classical logic in the sense that there are some proofs in classical logic that don't work in intuitinistic logic. Specifically, the law of the excluded middle (either A is true or not A is true") does not hold.
You can convince yourself that this is a reasonable type of logic by interpreting "A is true" to mean "I have a proof of A", and likewise "not A is true" means "I have a proof of not A". Then it's pretty reasonable that you neither have a proof of A or of not A.
I haven't read Godel's proof, but my understanding is that he uses intuitionistic logic in some of the key steps. Since facts in intuitionistic logic are also facts in classical logic, then I believe the incompleteness theorem holds in both logics. But I'm not at all an expert here, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
"Intuitionism" also refers to a specific philosophy of mathematics. But a lot of people just use the word to refer to the logic that came out of that philosophical school.
Intuitionistic logic is also very common in type theory, so a lot of proof assistants use it.
As you mentioned, it's also not intuitive. It's by now well-digested, but it's a fairly surprising theorem, even to Brouwer.
Finally, it's not constructive. Generally you can't figure out which point is fixed. If I recall correctly, frustration with this fact fueled Brouwer's interest in intuitionism, which gives us a type of logic where some propositions are neither true nor false but essentially undecidable.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "particle" in your sentence. If you mean to go down to the quantum scale, then I'm sure all sorts of things go wrong in trying to apply the theorem. For one, even talking about the position of a particle at all is very different from talking about a point in Euclidean space.
If you don't mean to go down to the quantum scale, then lots of maps have fixed points. Rotations an reflections are two large classes of examples.
In general he thinks a lot about tool kits and I think what we're seeing here is the math equivalent to being great at debugging.
In the majority of cases, there's another project that I can move to and I do so as soon as possible.
There are presumably others like me. So when you say it's sustainable, you may not be accounting for the reputational damage it does to your project, which you will almost certainly never be made explicitly aware of because users know it's not worth their time to file bugs.
"Google Play's billing system must not be used in cases where:... payments include peer-to-peer payments, online auctions, and tax exempt donations;"
That is, according to the screenshot in the GitHub PR, the app was removed for using the Google Play billing system when they shouldn't be using it. It was not removed for failing to use the Google Play Billing system when they should have been.
I have no idea how they might have been using Google Play billing. There is no billing code on GitHub that I see. Maybe they turned on billing on the Play Store accidentally, or maybe the screenshot has the wrong policy violation.
Just to be clear, I am neither defending nor attacking Apple. I don't even own any Apple devices.
I'm just giving my interpretation of the dynamics behind what is going on.
I think what we're seeing is Apple betting on using cryptography as part of the product design phase. Apple devices already do weird things like wake up to announce their physical location so that users can find their devices. The thought of a powered down or suspended laptop waking up to announce its location isn't something I particularly want, but Apple users seem to like it.
Anyone who has spent any time on spaces that are strongly encrypted and focused on privacy know how quickly they become havens for the sort of material that Apple doesn't want associated with its brand. How many "Apple protects child predator" news stories do you think Apple can withstand while still remaining a luxury brand?
Apples goal here is to have the reputation for end-to-end encryption and privacy while simultaneously not being seen as a phone for child predators. They don't have a lot of options if they want to thread that needle.
I've thought about this space quite a bit, and all options suck. Client side scanning is really the only choice with reasonable tradeoffs. The other option is scanning encrypted photos on cloud using secure enclaves to do the scanning. My guess is that when the tech makes that possible Apple will move in that direction.
I agree that this isn't the best for privacy nuts like me. But the iPhone isn't a blackphone, it's a luxury handbag. The phone isn't for privacy nerds, the privacy is there to make other mobile OS's look cheap and tacky.
Well they do, you know, keep weapons of war in their homes.
Unless they have 24/7 armed guards and their home is defensible from armed invasion that alone is a pretty sizable risk to public health.
Then of course there is the added factor of what sort of person thinks this is a good idea. If someone is going to have an armed tank, it would be preferable if they also didn't have questionable judgment.
Nobody believes this. You are blinded by your politics.
Some people in tech like to believe that it takes a real asshole to get things done.
That is good, but unless a system like this is fully open source and runs only signed code there really aren't many protections against abuse.
Science converged on heliocentrism as quickly as it possibly could once we had instruments precise enough for heliocentrism to be the simplest model. The only reason the Earth-centric system overtook previous heliocentric theories was that it was most consistent with observable facts.
Do you have some other system you'd like to propose that ignores observable facts? Maybe you'd like to consult a Shaman?
The obesity epidemic isn't created by science, it's created by economic and food policy. The root problem is essentially the same one as with Facebook: scientific information gets crowded out because people stand to profit from misinformation.
Seriously, what alternative to science are you suggesting? Political populism? Let a bunch of outrage-addicted conspiracy theory junkies determine the truth with no regard to whether it matches reality? Do you really think there's an alternative system that better arrives at the truth than making and checking your predictions against reality?
Propaganda used to only be achievable by nation states. Now anyone with money can play.
They aren't democratizing access to truth because search costs for finding accurate information are higher.
They defer to the scientific consensus of people who specialize in understanding how viruses work, how pandemics work, and who have a process for learning facts by interrogating reality.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the fact checkers believe that there is an external source of truth (i.e. facts) which they are checking?
How do you measure and track it? What trends in the measurement have you noticed over time that makes you says it's increasing?
Also, can you say more about which groups think they are the single source of truth?
Is this known to be true, or is it an assumption you're making in your analysis?
Just curious, because I would have expected people who refuse to be vaccinated to also be more likely to socialize in ways that expose them to the virus.