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What I'm curious is understanding how people can arrive at radically different conclusions and thought processes when operating in the same world and same society.

There seems to be a parallel thought process and definition of words that the "woke" operate by that are completely different than what is commonly accepted as the definition of a word.

Words like "racist" mean something completely different. Things like "it's impossible to be racist if you are black" and making people feel ashamed of themselves for the skin color they were born with (if they are white).

In the original story, seems like their decision is clearly racist and also sexist but it seems like these definitions are only selectively applied. It seems like "diversity" to them means no white people not having an equal distribution of races. They are doing the very things the are arguing against but it doesn't seem to register. How is this possible?

You can start with the Ethereum whitepaper. https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/

You might be interested in Proof of Stake based blockchains then. They don't require the crazy electricity. Check out Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cardano.

I personally shy away from investing in Bitcoin in favor of those.

Bitcoin also does not provide any mechanism for "smart contracts" either so it has even less utility in my mind.

Well, there are alternatives consensus mechanism that look just as good if not superior like Proof of Stake that don't require all that electricity.

They both require large financial investments don't they? And both PoW and PoS have pooling options if you want to invest less.

I'm not seeing much difference in terms of accessibility. In theory PoS is easier because PoW requires actual hardware and/or more technical knowledge.

It's already being done. There is a ton of financial transactions in the DeFi space happening on Ethereum right now and other protocols on other chains are rapidly being developed and rolled out.

They are known as "proof of stake".

The way it works is that "validator" nodes confirm the blocks. The validators are randomly chosen based on the percentage they have staked.

You stake by owning the coin and locking it up using a staking mechanism tied into the protocol. This locks up your coins for a set period of time.

If a validator does not validate correctly or fakes the transactions then they run the risk of being "slashed". Slashing means they forfeit what they have invested.

Usually you need to stake $10K+ USD but there are also pools where people can combine their money.

Both pools and proof of work mining farms suffer from large groups consolidating the validation power.

One of the newer blockchains (Caradano) introduces the concept of a penalty for large pools in favor of having lots of smaller validators to make the network more resilient to a single group having too much validation power. This encourages decentralization.

A lot of the interest in BTC is driven by media and the fact that it is the oldest and original blockchain solution. The newer solutions like Ethereum, and even newer like Cardano and Polkadot are game changing because they use proof of stake instead.

Bitcoin can be used as a store of value (among other garbage text that people have thrown into the blocks as a joke) but the newer blockchain solutions also allow from "smart contracts" which BTC does not.

Personally I don't see why Elon Musk invested so much in BTC instead of things like ETH which are much better solutions and stores of value.

A transaction or a block? Multiple transactions are recorded in a single block. The massive computational power is used to certify and lock down blocks at a time, not individual transactions.

Unless BTC changes to a "proof of stake" model like the majority of other new cryptocurrencies that are out there, it will see a large chunk of its marketshare replaced.

There's already a big shift from BTC to more technically sophisticated solutions like Ethereum (ETH).

tThe newest protocols like Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT) are even more efficient in terms of number of transactions that can be securely handled per second.

Bitcoin also suffers from long wait times because you need to wait for the current block to be finalized. The sheer amount of electricity required just to confirm a transaction is not a viable long term solution for e-commerce.

I wonder what is different in the Second Edition. I own the first and absolutely love it.

Also loved the nand2tetris course.

We have been seeing deplatforming happen more and more these last few months. Seems like this is going to accelerate a decentralized Internet.

It's going to be exciting times with a lot of societal questions and problems to be answered as these new technologies take off and the old model of advertising and free services for personal data get replaced with a new model.

For something about HCI why is the font so ridiculously oversized? Very hard to read.

I left the bay area in 2020. Neither of those 2 really were on my mind. I haven't heard any horror stories about tech companies trying to enforce any kind of non-compete outside of CA so it never really popped in my mind.

Biggest issues were 1) no state income tax, 2) money goes a lot further, 3) gov't policies unfriendly to businesses and middle class, 4) more moderate political climate, 5) better social life.

What I miss the most is the more temperate weather and being able to grow food in my backyard.

I would much rather see something more decentralized. It seems like politics is increasingly looking like whichever party is in power uses their power to get more power.

There is definitely an argument to be made that the Internet is so much ingrained in society that denying people Internet access is like denying people access to grocery stores and electricity.

Sure it wasn't the sole cause but it was definitely a strong contributing factor. Listen to the interviews of the people that were there.

It's human behavior when people don't feel like they are being heard and understood they raise their voice, become less agreeable, and when something is important enough to them and there is no peaceful way to resolve things they become violent.

Acknowledging what someone else says and repeating back to them what they are saying works amazingly well for disarming conflict.

When dialog ceases to be the means by which people can peacefully resolve their differences then violence is inevitable.

Censoring and banning people further escalates conflict because it takes away people's ability to feel like they are being heard and understood.

If instead the dialog going something like "well why do you believe that, what evidence do you have to support that claim, did you consider X, here's why I disagree with you, etc" then maybe people would have changed their minds.

Instead, by and large, the approach taken by the media and tech companies was "you guys are wrong, you're an idiot, and we are going to silence you". I don't think that helps and only further escalates things.

Along your point though, should there then be censorship of the ideas that led people to the BLM riots? I don't think censorship is the answer there either.

Who gets to decide what is true and how does that not lead to dangerous concentrations of power?

In order to be a free country there must be freedom, even if you don't like what other people say. This is a dangerous precedent.

We are rapidly getting to the point where elections are not based on merit of candidates but by what the media says and allows to be said.

Having a free press and allowing citizens to be heard becomes crucial to a functioning democracy.

That being said, I'm also in favor of letting companies have freedom to run their companies as they see fit as long as it is legal and moral. But this decision by YouTube saddens me.

If the media didn't keep censoring and banning people I doubt the Capitol would have been stormed. When you take away people's ability to be heard, debate, and participate in democracy, people feel they have nothing to lose. Recent events are the consequence.

Is there any source that has a bunch of the claims and refutations to it?

Just saying fraud doesn't exist doesn't help calm the outrage of those who believe it was stolen. Also based on how partisan the impeachment was it is likely people don't trust the government to have any sense of accuracy and merely attribute it to partisan lines.

The strategy of acknowledging what someone says and then responding to it often calms down difficult interpersonal conflicts. I think the same applies here.

We understand you believe "A", we do not believe that because of proof "B".

Instead the approach taken is largely ad hominem's which only escalate things further.

This is really good advice. Myself personally, I have been programming for decades as well and struggle with the curse of knowledge.

Curious what other people do and what struggles they have had.

Having spent time studying Category Theory I see a lot of value to using it in my code but it is not common knowledge and often confuses others when you start throwing around terms like functor, monoid, monad, etc.

At the same time I don't want to write code that isn't as reusable or to that isn't as maintainable.

Are we as an industry limiting our own potential by deliberately not using knowledge when it is beneficial for the sake of greater communication?

My personal philosophy when working with teams is to exclude some of that stuff but slowly introduce it and train junior developers on some of the concepts in the hope that I can push that knowledge forward.

Curious what others think of this dilemma and how they address it.

What are the pros and cons of this technique? Seems like this pushes a lot of the rendering compute power from the client to the server. I guess that is good for low power devices but now you need more powerful servers?

When something happens at the federal level it affects everyone. Someone in Texas who is conservative is going to be upset about a law that is forced on them that they don't like. However, if that law is only happening on CA and has no effect on them, then they don't care and they can be tolerant of it.

When something affects you personally because it is forced on you it is much harder to be tolerant.

If it only affects the people who want that law then it is much easier to just say "I do me, you do you".

Different states are supposed to have different ways of life based on different value systems. That way people can move to the states that are most in alignment with their values. Laws at the Federal level take that freedom away.

I guess that's a relative term. But hosting bill was around $250K/mo from what I remember.

This is true for the most part. But having the CS knowledge allows you to create much more efficient solutions once at scale.

I've personally revamped core parts of a product at previous companies to be over 1,000x more efficient just by applying some CS principles. This translates to $100K/mo+ in savings for a company that is at scale.

I use category theory quite frequently when doing functional programming. Unfortunately it is not taught in CS programs AFAIK. I rarely implement any tree kind of algorithms other than a simple tree visitor.

An understanding of time/space complexity (Big O Notation) is also relevant to evaluating approaches. A senior level developer will use this to make high level choices.

I also use compiler theory when writing parsers and simple DSL languages.

Honestly, never really had to deal much with red-black trees or linked list algorithms.

This is a good starter list for the more Computer Science skills but I see little in the way of practical skills. It's definitely nice to have these skills but let's be real, you aren't going to use them on a daily basis.

I would add learning a few of the most popular languages and frameworks depending on your area of interest.

Without those practical skills I'm pretty sure you will be passed up during interviews.

When hiring, I look for people who can get stuff done first and foremost. I don't care if they have to look things up and don't have things memorized. Efficient "stack overflow driven development" is real world development.

Then if they have those skills I look to see what kind of theory and architectural understanding they have. Those are secondary.

The more senior the candidate the more I expect them to have CS and architectural background so I would normally forgive not knowing the CS theory stuff for junior developer candidates.

But practical "get it done" skills in the relevant language and frameworks are a minimum requirement for everyone.

One other thing that I would add is to customize your study plan based on where you want to apply. Startups will favor more practical skills during the interview. Larger companies and enterprises will favor more of the traditional CS during interviews.

This bug write-up reads like a suspense novel. I cheated and jumped to the ending.

It's finding bugs like these that give you an immense sense of satisfaction for discovering it once you get through all the frustration.

Well done!

Well, the USA was supposed to be a union of states where they could more or less govern as they see fit based on their own ideology but come together when they need to. But unfortunately the Federal government has gotten involved in far too many things that should have been left up to the states and so there isn't as much diversity or tolerance for other ways of life anymore.

Funny enough, I actually agree with this, at least from an economics perspective. I'd much rather get rid of the income tax and have higher property taxes. That seems much more efficient to me.

Ethnically maybe. But in terms of diversity of opinions and tolerance of those opinions it's actually much worse that other places in the country I have been.

It's people telling me what is good for me that is another reason I left.