ebcode

> Is it normal that I don't have close friends and that I'm solitary? Am I missing out on anything?

Given your interest in type theory, it's definitely normal for you to be solitary. Most mathematicians are. A lot of writers, too, I imagine.

But you are missing out on something, as a lot of us "programmer-types" are, which is a healthy social life. We can connect with others online, but I think we'd be fooling ourselves if we thought that being social online can replace being social IRL.

My recommendation is that you put some work into making a good friend with similar interests to your own. There's got to be someone at your school who is also interested in programming. Find that/those person/s and befriend them. You'll be glad you did.

Not just US-specific, but anywhere where the police force believes themselves to be separate from the folks they are policing. The police force in the US arose from "slave patrols."

So in Germany, you might have "Germans policing Germans", but in the US it's basically "Whites policing Blacks".

Fiskars, Nokia, BP

ኾᥱΛ᜶ұ, you don't?

> I recommend everyone to read the Cypherpunk Mailing List archives to understand the situations.

https://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/

I'm seeing some really interesting JavaScript techniques in the turtlevm.js[1] source.

This line in particular stands out: const code = String(work).trim().split("{").slice(1).join("{").slice(0, - 1).trim().replace("/0/", _turtlevmapi).replace("/1/", strCode);

It looks like the author is injecting the turtle code written by the user into a "work" function that removes dangerous objects (XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, etc).

Can someone with experience writing a VM in JS point to a good reference on the topic?

[1]https://turtletoy.net/js/turtlevm.js?v=56

> I then did the most chaotic neutral thing I could and created the longest possible repository name.

This sentence just made my day. Thanks for posting.

It is relevant because the parent made a disparaging remark about Indians on Quora, while having a username with a borrowed word from India. I dislike the antipathy shown towards Indians online (and off), and I try to combat it where I can.

There are more civil and polite methods of expressing dissatisfaction than the kind of blanket statement that gurumeditations has resorted to above.

Yet you have the Indians to thank for your username: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru

> Let’s make 2019 the year we push back against the forces subverting the open spirit of the web.

I used to like TBL, but I can no longer take him seriously when he says stuff like this, after his decision[0] to allow DRM/EME[1] into the web standards. It just rings hollow.

[0]https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/

[1]https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/

When the Roman Empire found Jesus and slowly devolved into the Roman Catholic Church over the next thousand years, its "war on paganism" spread throughout Europe and Asia, with a death toll that is hard to estimate, but easily in the millions if you add up all the crusades and inquisitions.

Unsurprisingly, many pagans chose to convert to Christianity, rather than be murdered on the spot.

So maybe we can stop using this word "beacon", and use something more appropriate. How about "fortress"?

What's your show?

Just found this from 2016: https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled

That post also implies that the figure is stable.

Your second paragraph is a perfect example of the kind of attitude that I think is problematic. Yes it's more work to accommodate non-JS users. But so is building ramps for people in wheelchairs. The discrimination gets "baked in" to your/our development processes, and you/we justify the discrimination based on the idea that the only ones who will suffer from it are a "small minority".

It's like assuming that everyone uses a mouse. Clearly some don't, and if we develop the web based on that assumption, we're going to leave a lot of folks in the lurch. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard[0].

[0]https://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist

No I don't, unfortunately. But I imagine that this figure will be fairly stable for the foreseeable future. There are always going to be people with disabilities who turn off JavaScript for accessibility reasons, and privacy-conscious individuals and corporations that have it disabled.

I think the parent comment's exaggeration of the number is bad form for web developers, and goes against the spirit of the web, which I believe is based on the principles of universal access and inclusiveness.

Out Of The Crisis.

>You think the 0.001% of people who browse with JS disabled are the primary target for such a website?

Because you obviously grabbed this number out of thin air, I would like the HN community to know that the actual percentage of users without JS is much closer to 1%[0].

[0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...

But a geek trying to save face and get more bandwidth at the same time is the very best worker.

Thanks for sharing these links. I first came across David Ackley watching the Artificial Life II Video proceedings from 1992, where he was demoing an agent-based simulator. So it's interesting (and quite amazing) to see how far his research has expanded in the past 26 years.

That's a familiar argument, but I just realized that it mistakes scale for evolution. I imagine that if there are aliens, they are closer to the scale of a human than an ant.

> What is missing in much of the recent discussion about engaging with the Pentagon is the simple fact that there probably wouldn’t be a Silicon Valley as we know it without government defense contracts.

Times change. The DoD is not what it used to be, and neither is the technology being developed. When the DoD was funding SRI and Douglas Engelbart, as I understand it, that money was going to "basic research". So the money was flowing, and the researchers could go in whatever direction seemed the most promising.

Now, the contracts are more specific, and what the DoD wants has transformed from something like "do what thou wilt" into "do what we say."

The government nowadays is always trying to do "another manhattan project", but the trouble with that is that during the original manhattan project, our country had the moral high-ground -- because we were fighting actual nazis -- and that was the entire reason that the best and brightest minds of that generation were able to come together to work on the bomb.

But anyone who, today, thinks that our country has the moral high-ground is either 1) closer in their thinking -- ideologically -- to the original nazis, or 2) they just stepped out of a time machine from the 1940s.

I had the login page cached in my browser, so there's a bit of javascript that pops up an alert.

They suffered a major DDOS attack a while back, and I'm guessing that their servers being down intermittently is going to be part of their normal operations.

It's down for me. Getting this message on the login page: "ProtonMail cannot be reached right now, please try again later."

I believe the word you're looking for is Jobsian. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jobsian

This looks awesome, and I'm really happy that the inventor is getting funding for this and bringing it to market. Some of you may remember this from the arduino website when it was called OpenCat: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/petoi/opencat-845129

Yep, definitely click-bait to make it seem like a sweep that just happened. Recommending the following headline instead: "Google has fired 48 employees since 2016 due to sexual harassment".

> Dumb people are incapable of learning unless they get burned on the stove a few times.

I'm having a hard time not applying your statement to the entire human race. Not that I think we're all "dumb people", but we all seem to be exhibiting a serious lack of concern for the environment and the planet's future.

Also called "learning the hard way." Maybe we do need to get burned a bit to learn how to take better care of ourselves.

The Sieve of Eratosthenes is one of my favorites, and surprisingly has yet to be mentioned.

I imagine I would spend many days researching prime numbers if I hadn't read "The Mystery of the Aleph" in time. I'm keen to keep what sanity I have left.

The "good memory" referred to is the cpu cache. Search for "L1 cache", "L2 cache" online. Here's a starting point: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-L1-L2-and-L3-cache-of-a-mi...

I think you have to look at "Silicon Valley" as a kind-of short-hand for the FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) companies, along with Microsoft and Intel. It's more of a "state-of-mind" than an actual state.

So the author's point is that the "monoculture of thought" that pervades The Valley (and elsewhere) is in fact a problem, and one that needs to be addressed.

There are different words for the monoculture. Here on HN you might see it referred to as "the hivemind" or "groupthink". Or HN itself might be called an "echo chamber".

I think this is a valid concern, expressed by a voice in the minority, and is worth the time to attend and reflect upon.

To answer your original question, I would say that the harm that Silicon Valley is causing the world is the creation of the hivemind itself. It's not overt; it's insidious.

Try "Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery". It goes year-by-year through each major scientific discovery up until the mid 1980s, when it was written. Highly enjoyable.