bsdpufferfish

They are not at all random. In fact almost everyone’a insurance is more expensive because insurance companies are not legally allowed to use the highest predictor of risk besides age.

when a technology is so good, you have to force other people to use it

There are also ethnic/cultural circles as well (Chinese students come to us to study with Chinese professors who only cite other Chinese papers).

SEO spam is worse than ever. The only thing Google figured out is to raise the cost of website above 0 such as by requiring ssl and well written English.

Companies hire few of these people too (bad culture fit).

> mood was that academia was increasingly hostile to smart people who just wanted to do research.

Exactly these people are more likely to be spending their time speed running Mario.

Of course they aren’t familiar with the literature. Most of the papers rediscover existing math and physics in a worse way (harmonic analysis, etc)

Most CS papers are theoretical, and this is another reason why HN is wrong about requiring papers to publish code.

This is not even close. Pure math is often complete clueless about how it applies. For example Developing algorithms to compute properties used in the most basic pure math is a massive pursuit.

If we were looking at data we wouldn’t be

- banning plastic bags and straws - buying expensive electrical vehicles - ignoring other risks in our circle of influence - listening to public figures and scientists who gave us “point of no return” dates several times in the last 30 years

Exactly people are even using phrases like “when shit hits the fan”.

Nope.

Just use C and guarantee your sanity. The whole reason to adopt C++ is to support huge projects and libraries all of which are going to use the “bad” stuff.

> the JVM often competes in language performance closer to C++

I don't think it's even close. Benchmark game is one (biased) reference. And it's even worse because optimized Java is not canonical Java. Canonical C++ is pretty fast.

If Clojure is a lisp, so is JavaScript.

If it was about ethics then the signal wouldn’t come from prominence in the media (do you scrutinize ceos of your everyday products, tesla is an org far beyond Elon, etc).

> mileage shenanigans

Sour grapes

Enemy centered mindset. You both lose, but he doesn’t know you exist.

Being selective means they can start further, go faster, and expect motivation.

Even if the value is coming entirely from your fellow students, that has no effect on deciding which school you want to go to. You want to be in that environment, and also get the status from the exclusivity.

So your claim is that a new language could define a spec to a degree that it would not have similar problems?

A few points.

- The founder's didn't even believe in the Bible, likely including George Washington.

- Stated vs revealed preferences are complicated among politicians.

- being jewish clearly has an influence on politicians and businessmen who identify that way, and they often make reference to it. Can you give an example of a president or supreme court judge revealing that kind of influence? George bush doesn't even believe religion is the root issue in the conflict with the Middle East.

> jawns wrote of Catholicism, bsdpufferfish and throw__away7391 wrote of Christianity.

The claim that is addressing is that religion is the mean of popular belief. How does that account for the Catholic experience? Catholics are obviously a minority among American christians and have less political power.

> The latter, broader, category is the majority of the population across the USA.

Indeed. However they are not organized in any way. The percentage who has been to a church more than 3x in their life is probably significantly lower.

So where does this enormous power exist in the US? What powerful institutions or media influence do they control?

How would Catholicism represent the mean of public opinion?

There is a specified rule and popular posts are constantly removed for allegedly breaking it.

This post and the commments it attracts seems more appropriate for /r/atheism. It’s not technology (what about a stripe scam pastor?) and it’s not something interesting that wouldn’t be peddled in gossip journalism.

Exactly. A huge component of Christianity is separation from the world and standing out against a crowd.

There is certainly a popular folk religion, but this is not the essence of religion.

Yes the CPU is vendor defined behavior. However they usually write a spec.

The point is “undefined behavior” is more about gaps in the standard than bugs in programs.

Competing languages don’t have spec, so their entire operation is unspecified. If they wrote it down then they would also have UB.

> You just need to prove that non-existence leads to a contradiction.

Indeed however this is the exception, not the rule. The general way to do an existence proof is to construct it.

If you read old cybernetics writing it’s hard not to see a striking analogy with the excitement around machine learning. They had all kinds of medical experiments showing the usage of feedback mechanisms on the body and brain and how they were just on the edge of unlocking artificial humans.

> leading to overcomplication and obscurantism

Mathematicians attempt to express ideas in the most readable and clear way possible.

It's actually code that must be obfuscated by the constraints of the language and computer. Mathematicians have no constraints preventing them from presenting something in the way that makes the most sense.

The part that can be called "Obscurantism" is when they use a high-level abstraction you are unfamiliar with. This is mostly driven by the audience.

> Indeed, 99% of pure math is non-constructive

Citation needed?

> the algorithm converges in O(N) steps

That doesn't sound non-constructive. Even the group example is usually done by constructing such a group.

Also the best part about math is you can use it to approach the problems you want with constraints you want. Knuth uses math to solve real CS problems.