emotionalcode

> And then you have open source software which is heavily used in a lot of commercial products that might get attacked. With this kind of thing there's a big incentive not to report bugs to the project but to sell them to a company who has no incentive to see them fixed...

Then a lot of people need to revisit their own thoughts on exactly why they use open source, and the consequences of what happens if it goes away.

> For example, will we see these companies hiring ex-developers and testers from software product companies, as they might have inside knowledge of where products are weak.

That might happen, but it depends on intent. Products may be realized to be weak afterwards, due to a changing software landscape, so the company hiring them is a good thing - the software gets fixed in some way, and a need was fulfilled.

Then the question becomes: how likely do you think it is that someone purposefully creates a flawed product in order to make a gain later, after the project has been completed, released; after they have left the job; after they have been hired by these testing companies? It sounds as likely to me as people purposefully putting back-doors into software for future self interest. There exists another outlet for unethical intent, but in my opinion, the problem begins with ethics to begin with.

Software is too complex to perfect. There will always be bugs. Regulation of industry and regulation of the regulatory bodies is additionally, very complex. The idea of regulating where knowledge is allowed to flow on top of that horrifies me: i.e., whether a developer is allowed to work at one of these companies eventually, in judgment of prior work.

I wish people had greater incentive to maintain a standardization of ethics, but this is all theoretical to begin with, at least from my direct observations. There is nothing to judge unless it happens, and then the best one can do is act.

Why do you think peer accountability will work? This is a genuine question of mine; please do not infer ulterior intention.

There's stuff you expect (or have read, heard, thought about, observed) science to be about, and there's stuff you don't expect science to be about. The stuff you don't expect science to be about is the stuff that concerns me.

I don't know whether I can convey the change in understandings I've had about science since leaving academia. I don't want it to be typical, nor do I want it to be atypical in that the definition of atypical is dependent on the opposite of what is typical.

I don't know, maybe a survey should be conducted across the scientific body, and some data should be collected.

I don't really know, honestly. When groups are arguing between opposing world views, all of which can appear equally likely depending on data selection, I find that absolutely frightening that our current scientific process of peer review can not help us tell our heads from our asses. Or it does so often enough, that it's doing a very good job at keeping the bulk of knowledge stable. Science can be frightening.

Personally, I think it might take a lot more time than I've been alive to come close to a solution. I don't feel comfortable having an opinion on this, but I'm fine having questions. I don't intend to make implications with my questions, they are not consciously intentionally leading.

I don't have firsthand experience publishing in a peer reviewed journal, but from all my experience in academia, some of which involved very close observances, it doesn't seem to be a perfect solution.

I replied here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595085

My point is that it requires intelligence to moderate and create balance between intelligence(s).

I replied here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595085

No, I mean, that there is some probability that someone intelligent within the system is manipulating the infrastructure of the peer review system for an advantage.

I don't understand why I was downvoted for asking a question. I just meant to imply that there must exist some middle infrastructure, and I do not believe that it is a trivial problem to solve.

Source: I studied computer security systems that attempted to automate the flow of information to maintain security level thresholds on information types. When code 'touches' other code, meaning that it uses code with information at one security level to reason about code with information at another security level, unless you are particularly careful in the structure and organization of the code, information can leak out, structures can be manipulated, rules can be broken.

I am not saying scientists are unethical, I am saying they are human and prone to emotional reaction occasionally before objectivity (unless they are perfect). Combining information inference, intelligence, and an understanding of the flaws of an automated system; they are capable of 'accidentally' tweaking those things in their favor. It's not in the interest of science when this happens, and it requires a substantial amount of real intelligence to moderate. It's basically 'accidental bias'.

What if you can't trust the other scientists to review the work of their peers fairly?

Thank you, you have made me very fruitkerfluffle with your well-phrased response.

I was talking about people who have 'stress induced depression because they have huge goals and occasionally need to be strong enough to be their own motivation because it seems like begging for other people to tell them what they want to hear' mental thing. I didn't call it an illness, I only know that I've experienced it.

I can't ask people to tell me I'm going to be the greatest computer scientist just to get myself to code or learn something new every day. I just have to dedicate my life to it until I am proud of what I am and what I strive to be.

That said, the right medication helps. So can having people to talk to. I don't like paying to have people to talk to about my people theories, or explain category theory to, because that's what I wind up doing in therapy.

We also tend to make comparisons between ourselves and things that are not ourselves as if they are discrete entities.

The problem is that people who create startups tend to be highly analytical, logical, rational, intelligent in many facets with the perspective that their startup is their whole world and the whole world falls apart if their startup falls apart.

They are not the kind that can be helped by mental health care professionals in a traditional sense. Given the objective outcome, a mental health care professional can either reshape your world view (which I don't desire, because it's a ridiculous vocabulary I don't care to study again) or we can argue back and forth on theories about the human psyche, philosophize about various shared characteristics, and hope that somehow, abstractly, beneath this communication, lays something useful for the startup, code, math, logic, and so on.

The startup, the knowledge, the extending beyond the boundary of humanity TODAY is the goal. If you are completely alone in your life, then a health care professional can tell you objectively whether you are showering daily enough or not. They can not help you do research or build something new. Otherwise, I like the idea of having other people who have been through similar things to talk to.

It may even be possible that the person who created this is probably looking for a way to deal with their depression. People here are looking for perfectly unique solutions to perfectly unique problems. That's a difficult kind of depression to treat, if not impossible, theoretically, and I would say it runs a high risk of increasing the depression, unless the therapist happens to be one of these types themselves.

That implies that (gossipy/social) information is processed in a single way, that doesn't have dependencies on other functionality of the brain (that which we measure for IQ, or the link between successful startup founders and such).

You can analyze it and try to improve the situation, or you can learn to manipulate some of humanities more 'built in' functionality of socializing and survival. Then factor in that everyone around you has this abstract layer of social processing, and it's back to probability / guessing whether people around you will manipulate it, use it for good, for evil, or for neutral.

Explaining things mathematically, logically, and reasonably can be just as useless. It really depends on what you like to talk about. If you don't like gossiping, there is surely some outlet you have that increases happiness and is nonproductive. If not, find one. It might turn out to be an essential part of success for reasons you can't (and I can't) even begin to pretend to understand.

I didn't dismiss it. My point is that theorizing over whether money leads to happiness doesn't take into account the absence of money acting as an obstacle to happiness. The heuristic is psychologically leading in that it does not make the distinction of what happiness is. Happiness can be relatively defined from personal experience. In order to analyze this any further, I'd have to examine the studies to see how the definition and interpretation of happiness is controlled.

I am questioning whether the definition of the heuristics influence the outcome. Self fulfilling prophecies and such.

Specifics are necessary because it can determine whether something is a fundamental property of a thing, how it influences the definition of a thing, how that definition influences the perception of a thing, and the relationships that thing has with other things.

A heuristic requires specifics to be defined, in order for it's definition to exist.

You are judging this from the criteria of an average person living and spending their money.

Plastic surgery might help someone with a physical deformity, and renting out a hotel might be a necessity for a scientific conference.

You can't judge the value of a dollar based on the assumption that there exists an average person that spends it. For every frivolous act of spending you can conceive of, I can respond with a similar 'well intentioned / ethically sanctioned' act of spending, from a perspective you might not have been aware of, given you likely don't have perfect information about the state of everything in existence.

It depends on who you think you are to judge how another person lives their life. What you consider essential and what you can live without is not the absolute for everyone.

Experience: being a woman people have call beautiful; experiencing wondering whether I am persistently being evaluated on a superficial characteristic.

We all can draw abstract lines in the sand and overgeneralize to have opinions and make points. It doesn't mean it tells the entire story, nor does it mean it's correct forever.

Getting ripped to shreds by a lion can be a genuine experience, but that doesn't mean I desire it. If you enjoy something you can buy with money, there is likewise no need to taint the experience bleak simply because it was money that enabled you to experience it. I have no doubt that money changes the attributes of a thing sometimes, but so can any other attribute, including the way you collectively simplify a set of attributes and make a comparison to an ideal.

I can't tell if I'm happier now. When I was a grad student I was always stressed over money, and my health was very bad (this is atypical, I should have been on more responsible about my health rather than dismissing it to promising to see the doctor after the next deadline). I have to work harder to learn new things, and I don't have access to a community that is intrinsically connected to the computer science research community.

My health is better now, and I can depend on myself to provide for myself, but sometimes it does just feel like there's a hole that money can't fill. I often feel like I have to continually keep my mind focused on not giving up on higher education or the act of responsibly confusing myself with too much study, just because I happen to be good at software development in a different regard. The ability to be totally lost in a class way beyond the depth I saw myself capable of surmounting was a luxury I took seriously for granted.

What is brilliance, to you, then?

Woman here. My college had a 4:1 male:female ratio. I got used to it, I suppose, but, I'm only honestly beginning to understand the difficulties I encountered. If an idea cropped up in my head that made me feel as though I had it rough for being female, I squashed it immediately. The last thing I ever would be willing to do was blame something I could not control. I didn't really see the depression I had, as something connected.

I hopped from computer engineering, to electrical engineering, to get a bachelors in Art. I worked cross discipline between Art and CS, to publish academically. I got my masters in CS. I was accepted as a PhD student in CS, but at that point, I was so isolated that I essentially collapsed from stress, overvaluing my work, and undervaluing my health.

I work as a software developer now, in the interim of 'not really knowing what to do with my life', being that I've seen so many facets of where I can go, what I can do, and once again, haven't got the faintest clue aside from a small amount of intuition to guide me in what to do. That, and an obsession with everything related to technology, and enough technical/logical/mathematical books to build a house with.

I don't know so much if it's that my surroundings changed that tempered my feelings, introspections, and feelings of isolation, or the experiences I've been through. I'd say it's easy, but it isn't. I'd say it's hard, but it isn't. I just sort of imagine everyone in life goes through something similar once in a while, even if on the surface, it looks totally different.

People are not engaged. They are fixated on numbers, models, and abstractions, with the assumption that the numbers, models, and abstractions have actual meaning tied to them. They don't, aside from creating more students that create more systems that define more numbers, models, and abstractions. Some of these students get pissed off and try to create the opposite.

This is why the humanities are important. You can have the soundest logical systems, with the most elegant mathematical models, and completely miss the point. People get so caught up in the minutiae of measurements that they forget to see the big picture. Measurements don't mean anything when the measurements are used to measure themselves.

I swear, sometimes I really wonder whether society has it's head up it's ass. If these systems can model 'theoretical students' under 'better conditions', then why aren't the 'theoretical student' models running the world? Oh, that's right, because there's a gigantic difference between data and theory. How do they even know what a better student is? How can anyone in their right mind, define that? How can anyone even pretend to know what a great student is?

> When I went to school, the people who made these judgments were my parents. You can't make these judgments by formula, and you can't make them if you don't know the details of each individual case.

When I went to school, I used to think my grades meant something more than being a very complicated way of validating someone else's world view, in a way that tricks everyone into thinking we've made any progress at defining or understanding intelligence at all.

> To me, the fact that so many schools are fixated on "data-driven" student evaluations means that parents are not engaged.

The parents may be extremely engaged, but they just don't know whether to call their kid smart or not. If the kid complains about the book they read because it was boring, is that appropriate? If the kid programs a calculator to do 4 years of standardized test math homework, is that appropriate? Education is doing a fantastic job at driving the personality out of people by forcing them all to sit in the same box. The parents don't know, the teachers don't know, the government doesn't know, society doesn't know, yet we all pretend we know.

I don't think I'm right or wrong. I still have problems asking people for help.

Your point about this is poignant:

> Then you make the toolchain so long and complex that you need 5 years before you even gain the first feeling of accomplishment.

> I know when I was a kid, I was smart enough for BASIC and Pascal but C++ just looked weird and complex and hard. HTML, CSS and Javascript were awesome and I jumped into that instead.

When I was a kid, C++ was easy and I didn't start learning javascript until a few years ago. I also learned TI-BASIC in AP Calc, and Java (CS II-Honors) was presented at my school as harder than C++ (CS I). A lot of what is labeled difficult is very very subjective. A coworker of mine stumbled over Intro to CS/Programming because he was stuck trying to understand how to program hello world without understanding how the compiler worked first. Without a teacher to talk to, this very intelligent student could be seen as one who can't even grasp 'the basics'. I stumbled over my programming languages class because I confused the machine interpretation of Scheme, while we developed a interpreter in Scheme. I'm still confused over it.

> What drives a divide is when you go build an entire ecosystem and hand it off to a cloistered priesthood.

It's not so much that it's handed off to, it's more that people aren't very vocal about what they don't understand. This leads sort of to a 'survival of the fittest' cycle of development, on a macro scale, with the people who have a direction, at all, making important decisions, and the people who are most cautious, staring blankly in confusion. The reality is that everyone is probably missing some part of what is considered 'the basics' to someone else.

A responsive community dedicated to bringing people into development is also what lowers the barrier to entry. Students that are so afraid of their teachers and the 'scary aesthetic' of the material raises the barrier to entry. If you have someone to ask "what does this symbol mean?" or "am I thinking in the right direction, or am I making this lesson more complex than it was intended to be?" then complex and hard become more approachable (not more simple, however). Sometimes having a person reply back, "I don't know" can actually help a lot.

When I was just learning to program, I was afraid to ask questions, to talk about what I knew or thought. I don't know if many young developers struggle with that today, given how much the landscape has changed. Then I wonder, has it changed so much, or did it just take me about 15 years to become comfortable in chaos?

Just some thoughts.

I was late diagnosed with ADHD. I used to be on Adderall for years. I'm now on a non-stimulant medication, as well as an anti-anxiety anti-depressant.

Adderall helped me in college. It helped me get every homework done, even if the homework was pointless.

I spent some time trying to switch medications, as I personally did not like feeling glued to whatever activity I was doing. I like having the choice to focus, or not focus.

I switched environments, where I could experiment with this new way of approaching learning and working. I don't mind iterative, mundane tasks, because at the end of the day and before I begin them, I try to think about why it's interesting, novel, and different, for me to perform this iteration of task. I try to think that the fact that I have gotten my mind to this state without dramatic intervention is as well novel, unique, and worthy of self praise.

In a world where I already felt distracted and slow, Adderall offers a quick fix. But I would have never built those parts of myself, of my mind, that can find novelty in what superficially appears to be 'boring'. I just try to change everything else in my control, to help myself see 'boring' in a different perspective. If I work in java at work on jsp pages, at home and during my 'web surfing time' at work, I teach myself about unikernals, clojure, the curry howard isomorphism - with serious intent, over long periods of time. And then I begin to see connections in the ordinary that are extraordinary.

As for nootropics, I'm trying to look for research in anything that uses language such as 'relaxing / calming' and 'focus'. I think there is a serious slant in literature that truly believes, and primes it's audience to believe stimulant -> better concentration. Stimulant -> temporary concentration. I am firmly confident that stimulants either prevent or override the creation of neural connections that are less explicit.

That assumes your mind is disconnected from everything you define as not your mind, to begin with.

My first thought is that the drug is showing you what was in your mind to begin with.

I agree absolutely. Categories like these imply discretely definable differences across something uniform. That which initially begins as a uniform definition (human beings, mammals, things that have consciousness, individuals, individual life) is then examined for 'properties', in which a collection of 'properties' define not only a label, but implicitly defined, correlative associations to that label (cultural assumptions).

I think that society might eventually find itself moving past linguistic categorization to process absolute information about reality, if the computational calculation of lots and lots of data about the individual becomes so individually defined, so complex, and so multidimensional, that words can not express meaningful information - both generally and specifically, because it is derived from abstracted layers of object data points [data] and the abstract relations that structure and organize them [composition of theory].

Generally speaking, we need the ability to compose correlations from data in order to infer information about day to day things. This is generally called common sense, or rational knowledge. Sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it's totally irrational. As a ---, I don't see the point in companies pointing out how diverse they are. All I care about is how much I'm going to learn about code, math, and computer science. I want the assurance that I will be treated equally. Otherwise, it's like trying to get a pendulum to stop swinging by pushing it equally hard, the opposing way.