delluminatus

The end in this case being the ability to decrypt cellphone traffic. And what will that capacity be used for? Spying on foreign nations? Halting nonexistent terrorist plots? Further secret surveillance of American citizens?

If we judge the means by the ends, I do not believe that their end provides sufficient justification for their means. They appear to believe otherwise, however they fail to offer any evidence for their perspective; as an American, I am feeling ever more alienated from the organizations which were theoretically founded for our benefit.

You said yourself that you can believe that sexism is worse in tech than in other professions. That is already a problem worth discussing. Why is it worse? What can we do to correct that discrepancy?

I will go so far as to say your suggestion to "focus on the problem in full generality" -- which is to say, to completely encompass an impossibly complicated issue -- is just a way of trying to pass responsibility and to avoid admitting that there is a problem. Of course, trying to resolve sexism everywhere is admirable. But to use the existence of sexism in other fields as a reason to avoid addressing it in our own is little better than rejecting its existence altogether.

edit for your edit: I think there are specific reasons that sexism is more prevalent in tech, which are not necessarily related to "software people are ignorant". In our culture there appears to be a general bias against women in pretty much all STEM fields, perhaps for historical reasons. I suspect (although this is just my opinion) that this is largely responsible for any greater bias that exists in tech as well. There is a mistaken perception that women are less capable in highly rational pursuits, which affects how women in tech are viewed by their colleagues. I think this is a big reason that women have a hard time in tech.

It seems quite attractive overall, but I think the dark background header and the partially colored text are a little gratuitous. What matters in a resume is the content -- the experience and skills -- not the title or the headings. I would consider moving the emphasis away from the headings and title to the actual content as much as possible.

Also, it is odd that the job experience descriptions are italicized where the education and projects descriptions are not.

Finally, (and you may know this already, but I am just mentioning it for completeness' sake), you should adjust your resume depending on the position you're seeking. So for instance if you are looking for an internship at a company that is not very interested in functional programming, you might want to change or reorder your interests, as well as reword the descriptions if needed.

Homeschooling is interesting, because it has the potential to be a lot better for children than public school, but it can also be a lot worse. It is a topic close to my heart because I was partly homeschooled, and I have seen firsthand some of the sad deficiencies that can dog homeschooled kids:

1. Lazy teaching – parents being unwilling to devote 4-6 hours each day to education. Homeschooling is a commitment that should be treated with the same gravitas as a full-time working position, but many parents have trouble maintaining this mentality over many years of education. This leads to kids that, although they might be bright, just haven't been taught much, which makes them seem dull.

2. Inherited ignorance – if the parents don’t know or care much about history, unbiased politics, mathematics, literature, etc. then the kids won’t either. Obviously, the parent can make a commitment to learn the field at least to a high school level so they can educate their kids, but often this commitment falls through. Because of that, homeschooled kids can lack a multidimensional perspective of the world.

3. Neuroticism – some parents have a tendency to like to make decisions for their children. This can be very dangerous for homeschooled kids, because they don’t learn how to think for themselves or make mistakes.

4. Social gracelessness – a lot of homeschooled kids have very little interaction with their peers. School can provide social acclimatization that parents often don’t know how to give their kids. Especially if the kid is naturally shy, since parents rarely want to put their kids in a social situation where they are uncomfortable. Unfortunately, this can just exacerbate the issue, to the extent that the kids have nervous breakdowns when they finally do have to engage their peers (yes, I've seen this happen).

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I don't want to say that it's impossible for one person (usually, it's just one parent that is home during the day) to provide a well-rounded education to their kids, just that it's hard -- very, very hard. You need to help your kids make friends, and you need to let them be independent. You need to be a committed and capable educator, and you need to give them a dynamic education with diverse experience, not just doing workbooks in the house. Some people are good at this -- they are natural teachers. Other people find it much, much harder.

Meteor -- the JS framework -- uses something much like this, which they call "latency compensation". It's a core part of their ideology. Data is prefetched or given default values that give the user at least something to look at until the actual data is fetched with AJAX.

Beyond just using spinners, Meteor will populate the fields with client-side cached data that might be a little old, and then when it receives a response from the server it updates the client-side DB with the new data and refreshes the view. If the data hasn't changed at all, the process can be completely transparent -- just an instantaneous UI update.

Because the Meteor framework encompasses both the client and server side, this can be "abstracted away" from the app developer. The abstraction isn't perfect of course but it makes it much easier to implement these kinds of ultra-responsive Web UIs.

I think that's a false dilemma. In my mind, part of "fighting" cancer is trying to mitigate its impact on your everyday life, and acceptance probably plays a key role in that process. It's not like being angry and afraid makes you any better at fighting a disease. If anything "fighting" and "accepting" could be said to go hand-in-hand, especially with respect to illness.

It depends on your usage. Sure, source files are (hopefully) not going near that size, but many people regularly open multiple-MB log files or data files.

Also, for me at least, it's the principle of the thing -- we are talking about a measly few MB of text; if you can't even open that, IMO something has gone horribly wrong.

I remember that feeling in my upper-division math classes in college -- PDEs, abstract algebra, etc. It seemed to me like I was struggling (which was a new experience for me in math class) and to make it worse, I sat next to this guy who always seemed to know it cold. I would score in the 80s on almost everything, and I would look over there and this guy would have perfect scores all the time. It definitely bothered me.

About halfway through the semester I ended up spending more time with this guy and I realized that he really lived and breathed mathematics. I mean, he did all the exercises in every chapter. (Who does that?) He would study for hours and hours before tests. Anyway, it kind of taught me a lesson. If you want to belong, you have to work for it. Nobody's just going to move over to make a space for you. You have to carve a space for yourself.

I thought this was going to be a humblebrag -- and boy, it sure started out that way -- but I was pleasantly surprised by the end.

It made me think about how some tools, libraries, or frameworks seem to prefer to use buzzwords or neologisms to make simple things seem complicated. As though by obfusticating the problem domain, they can make their solution seem that much more magnificent. As though the docs should make you feel stupid.

And the reason they do this is because in our industry, it works. Things often seem impressive to the degree that they seem complicated. People are "advertising" their stuff by making it seem like a special snowflake instead of a simple thing.

Far be it from me to blame people for doing something that works. But there is a bit of an echo chamber, especially in this forum, where developers -- developers, not marketers, not "suits" -- prefer to use buzzwords over plain language, and they would rather you think they did something complicated than something simple or something solid.

I think your analogy has confused some people but yes, that's what he's saying. I believe he's confused "800 rounds in a minute" -- which is impossible -- with "800 rounds per minute" -- which is a rate of fire that can be reached but only for periods much shorter than a minute.

Oh well. I guess if you want "neologism" to mean "any word invented in the past 300 years", that's your prerogative, but I take a very different meaning. One interesting side-effect of that interpretation is that "neologism" becomes autological, since it was itself coined in that period.

It's true that there are sometimes nuances lost in the conversion from large to small, but there is far more nuance lost once your partner doesn't know what the hell you are saying. For you, Brobdingnagian might have some special nuance (I'm picking on that word because it is ridiculous to me), but to your partner it has no nuance or flavor -- they have no associations with that word, nor any grasp of any subtleties of meaning -- in fact they don't grasp the meaning at all. So if you are trying to get something across, it's simply a bad way to do it.

I mean, don't get me wrong -- I don't want to deride big-word-users. If you want to do to because you like it -- that's obviously fine. Also, if someone does happen to have a thing with Brobdingnagian, I guess you might have just made their day a lot better. But at some point, you have to acknowledge that obscure vocabulary is more of a hindrance than a boon to communication.

Ah, another person who talks like a book. I also get that quite regularly. I have a bit of a personal rule, though, where I never use a more complicated word when a simpler one would work. After all, conversation is at heart a means of communication.

Although we might get a bit of a thrill from talking over people's heads, it doesn't really mean much of anything. And all it takes is one misuse -- for example, calling Brobdingnagian a neologism -- and we tear ourselves down more than we could hope to build ourselves up.

Ironically, it works if you disable Javascript.

edit: seems to be working anyway.

The thing that struck me about it was that the $scope.displayName() function shadows itself by setting $scope.displayName again:

        $scope.displayName = function () {
            if ($scope.anonymous()) {
                return;
            }
            $scope.displayName = $scope.name;
        };

I have no idea how that's related to Angular, though. It looks like it's just bad programming practice.

While that may begin the process, I think (obviously, I have no proof) that this nostalgic sentiment is "hard-wired" into humanity, because it seems like throughout history mankind has always looked at the past and felt longing for the simpler times. Therefore, I believe this sentiment will only be completely overcome once we begin to literally change the nature of humanity, for example using cybernetics or biological modification.

Yeah, it totally sucks. That is one of the reasons that, in projects that I expect to be maintaining for a long time, I shy away from frameworks with inversion of control, like Angular or Rails. I prefer the wiring to be exposed, so to speak, because it makes it easier for everyone to know what's going on. It also makes it easier to drop or upgrade your 3rd party dependencies without rewriting everything.

I don't think you always need to know exactly what's going on. Angular is a lot like Rails in my mind -- there is "magic", but it makes things easier.

Personally, I never thought Angular was very hard to understand. The main problem is that the documentation is sometimes outdated. If you are familiar with server-side MVC, I think Angular will come naturally to you.

But, if my post sounds biased towards React, it's because I prefer it. I would use Angular for things you want to do in four days and never touch again, but that's about it.

I've made applications using both React and Angular. Qualitatively, Angular is way easier to get started, but React "feels nicer" (it's hard to explain, but because you have to handle a lot of the eventing and message passing yourself, you feel like you understand your own app a lot better. Angular is a framework, with inversion of control -- React is just a library).

IMO, you should use Angular, unless you:

1. Need good performance with over 1000 data bindings

2. Are making a literal SPA (i.e. don't really need URL routing or multiple controllers)

3. Plan to build a long-term rock-solid application (like a backbone for an enterprise)

4. Want to understand exactly what is happening in your app.

There are my idle thoughts on the matter:

I have also caught the nostalgia bug, but I suspect that in the future we will come to see this as a bug in people, not in technology. And, eventually, I suspect that we will "fix" that bug, for better or worse, by more tightly integrating our consciousness with the hyper-reality which we have created.

In the end, we won't have evolved beyond the online world -- we will have evolved beyond the "actual" world, or put another way, we will have evolved beyond the human sentimentality that values reality over hyper-reality.

Personally, I experienced this with programming. When I learned to program in high school, it never struck me as a chore; it was always just interesting and I enjoyed it.

However, I think the only reason I was able to enjoy learning programming was because of how adept I already was with computers as a "power user", because it gave me the physical skills and conceptual underpinnings required to appreciate the field.

To me, this raises an important question.

If you lack the physical skills or are a novice in a field, it can be frustrating or intimidating to learn even if you would otherwise enjoy being competent. For example, learning to draw: should one accept their dislike of basic beginning drawing practice to imply that drawing is not an appropriate vocation for them? Difficult question; probably depends on the person. The only way to know if you love drawing at a competent level is to reach that level. In a sense it begs the question: how can you tell if you will enjoy doing something until you have the ability to actually do it?

I don't think there is an easy way to solve this problem; you simply have to put the effort into practicing new things even if you don't enjoy the practice. That's where you get into willpower, commitment, etc. My experience of the world is that you simply cannot expect to be successful by only doing things that don't feel like work; sometimes, you have to actually do the work.

I quite like F# - it's similar to Haskell, but since it's a .NET language, you have an extensive STL and tons of 3rd party libraries. It works great with C#, so you can switch between functional and OO programming depending on your domain, while keeping the same STL and technology stack.

Also, you get the full power of Visual Studio (they recently changed it to be completely free), which can really help with productivity in my experience.

Not if you're unfamiliar with Ruby on Rails, I guess. It's a little tricky to characterize because of how much stuff it contains. Basically it has a number of different components, that work together to make a structured environment for developing Web applications. Some of the prominent features include:

* Web server that runs on Node.js

* MongoDB integration

* Custom build tools

* Package manager (supports installing JS packages for either client-side code, server-side code, or both).

* SignalR-style remote function execution (call functions on the server from the client, and vice versa)

* JS client-side database caching

* Data binding in Javascript templates using Handlebars (or something similar, I don't remember exactly).

etc.

Meteor.js is basically Ruby on Rails for Node.js and MongoDB, plus a Javascript library for view-model binding. It's a monolithic framework for building database-backed single-page applications in 100% Javascript.

Like you say, science can't really help with questions of subjective experience. I think this is more about observing an objective phenomenon, which is that "thought" can affect random number generators. The problem, as stated on the site, is this:

  When it comes to "what we are measuring" the story becomes
  more complicated because there is no real understanding of
  the mechanism whereby an REG [Random event generator]’s 
  behavior can be altered by thoughts and emotions or 
  intentions.
  [...]
  We do not know how a mental state such as an intention or 
  emotion is able to inform the physical system to affect 
  its behavior. In addition, all of the robust measures we 
  have providing evidence for the anomalous effects are 
  statistical in nature, and the signal to noise ratio is 
  extremely low. This means that we typically cannot be 
  sure that the "signature" of an effect in any individual 
  analysis is driven by the hypothesized influence of 
  consciousness. The details written in the data from 
  single instances are more likely to be chance 
  fluctuations than consciousness effects. Only in larger 
  concatenations, gathering the weak signals from many 
  separate events, can we be satisfied that trends and 
  structure represent the hypothesized effect. 

In short, they believe they have observed an inexplicable phenomenon -- intention influencing random number generation. The attempt to quantify, describe, and eventually fully understand that supposed phenomenon is the key purpose of their research.

It's a good first step, however unless the experiments are repeatable/independent, it's not particularly trustworthy.

Consider that they may be falsifying or misinterpreting data. The only way to be sure they aren't -- or pretty sure, anyway -- is to have independent researchers be able to follow the same repeatable process in order to replicate the results.

I don't know enough about this case to say whether they have a good repeatable experimental process -- it's possible that the website just smells so strongly of woo that nobody has even tried to replicate their results in the first place. But without that independent verification, the proposed results seem questionable.

It's for Google Analytics tracking of links. The links in the page use Javascript:

  <a onclick="goTracked(&quot;link-external&quot;, &quot;http://octopart.com/bb-bblk-000-circuitco+electronics-26478322&quot;);" class="external" href="#http://octopart.com/bb-bblk-000-circuitco+electronics-26478322" target="_blank">BeagleBone Black is readily available all over the world</a>

then the Javascript function in question:

  function goTracked(action, link) {
    ga('send', 'event', 'exit', action, link);
    setTimeout('document.location = "' + link + '"', 100);
  }

So, if you try to Cmd-Click a link to open it in a new tab (or middle-click, which is my preferred method), the target of the link is opened in a new tab. But the link's "href" target is just a fragment, so it opens the article in the new tab. 100 ms later, the current tab is redirected to the "actual" link target.

I feel like I would think this was cool if I understood it better. I think it needs a more clear statement of value. Since the videos are mostly just a guy talking, I would consider transcribing them into a tutorial or Getting Started format if you want to promote adoption.

Also, the HTML markup in the "paragraphs" doesn't render on my machine. Some of them, anyway.

A lot of things "correlate with IQ" to varying degrees. Education level, length of sleep, size of vocabulary, etc. I don't understand why the relationships you suggested would be socially unacceptable.

But just because those two things correlate with IQ (which is probably true, so let's just grant them as true even without evidence for the sake of argument), that does not imply that they are sufficiently strongly correlated with each other to be interesting for hiring purposes.

To see my point, consider that being red is correlated with being purple, and being blue is correlated with being purple, but being red is not correlated with being blue. (at least not without evidence).

Do you know why? Is it just to encourage people to take more vacation time?

Color me envious. I currently get 10 paid vacation days total per year.