kscaldef

Unless the other participants only think the problem is resolved, and you have some additional knowledge which would be relevant.

The re-titling of this article here on HN(#) I feel misses an important point that it's trying to make. While we are all affected by the death of Aaron Swartz as a member of our community, when it comes to issues of prosecutorial / judicial excess, hackers are an extreme minority. Most victims of overly aggressive prosecution are disadvantaged racially, socio-economically, educationally, and are often addicts in need of medical treatment. Aaron was privileged in all these ways which most people in the grips of our legal system are not; and while his privileges don't lessen the tragedy of his death or the injustice of his situation, they are the reason his name has national recognition at this point. Describing the situation as "Aaron Swartz was Screwed by the War on Drugs" ignores the millions of other nameless, faceless people who have also been screwed by it. It's fine to use Aaron as an example. If his privilege can be leveraged to effect greater change in society then there is some positive to be found in it, but I get a bad taste in my mouth when I see many people limiting their concerns solely to other hackers.

(#) EDIT: The original title from The Economist has been restored since I posted this.

I think it's also worth saying that phrasing it as "picking a rubbish superviser" puts an unfair blame on the student. By the time you realize your advisor is neglectful, or incompetent as a teacher, or actually neglectful, you might be a year or more down a research path. There might not be another professor at your school qualified and willing to supervise your research. The choice at that point, whether to tough it out or to throw away all your progress up to that point, is an incredibly difficult one.

(FWIW, my advisor in theoretical physics was merely neglectful. Almost all of my friend in an experimental field had advisors who bordered on abusive.)

That still fails to answer my either/or question...

So, knowing that he was going to take another job, you'd rather he still came to your interview and used up hours of your employees' time? To me, that's the action that would lack integrity.

Your example of the guy who made a mistake is certainly a bummer for him, but presumably he didn't know he was making a mistake when he turned you down. And that's got to be a very small fraction of hiring situations.

So, you'd regard a candidate as lacking integrity if you scheduled an interview with them, but they then cancelled because they'd accepted another offer first?

That didn't actually answer my question, which was about what the reason for that being a "black list" offense was.

What did his accent have to do with the rest of this?

Are your "black lists" based on poor communication, or making an offer to another candidate while they haven't interviewed you yet?

I'm not sure how you can say that "the article misses the entire point" when the third paragraph is entirely devoted to addressing it.

> Linear sequences of steps processing data arrayed in some linear fashion or others is what computers do

No, it's what some computers do. It's almost certainly not what the computer you are using currently does. It's quite possible it's not what any computer you've ever used does.

> So you would rather ...

I'm not expressing a preference. If you think I was, you've misunderstood my comment. I'm making observations, not judgements. I'm not anti-C, it's a fine language for many things; however I do think that the articles author is not being as even-handed as he claims when it comes to some of the short-comings of C.

> Your problem is nomenclature?

Again, I'm not making a judgement. C exists in a paradigm where writing

    x = 3
    x = 4

makes sense. In other paradigms it would be logically inconsistent.

>>there is random access storage of information (with constant time access and update)

>Again, that's just how "the world" works.

That's absolutely not how "the world" works. Again, you've probably never even used a computer where it was true.

> dissing C is just shitting where you eat. The only reasons I can imagine for it are jealousy or ignorance.

I don't think I've made any statement anywhere in this discussion that's "dissing C".

> A stack with C at the bottom

You realize C is not at the bottom of the stack, right?

> Why do you suppose that no serious VMs or language runtimes are written in Haskell (or other functional languages)?

Because Lisp Machines didn't win.

> plenty of systems implemented in C define models in which none of what you mentioned is true

True, but that's the whole point of abstraction. C, in turn, gets rid of some of the "preconceived notions" of the layers under it.

> C is the language that doesn't force any preconceived notions about how the world should work onto you

Some preconceived notions forced upon you by C, off the top of my head:

- problems should be solved by describing a linear sequence of steps (as opposed to logic/declarative programming)

- a variable can have different values at different times in the execution of a program (in contrast to standard mathematical conventions)

- a function can return different results when called multiple times with the same arguments (again, in contrast to the standard mathematical meaning of the term)

- there is random access storage of information (with constant time access and update)

Counterpoints:

Cookbooks: he's recommending specific cookbooks which he thinks will make you a better cook. As he says, lots of them are crap, as are lots of the recipes and tutorials on the internet. You're paying for curation here more than the content itself.

Pots: Keep in mind that a "10 piece" pot set is really one 5 pots or pans, which is not that much. Having the correct size pot or pan for the quantity of food that you're heating makes a big difference in how things turn out. (For example, when sauteing onions & vegetables you really want a fairly full single layer.)

Whisk: I'm sorry, but it really is an essential tool

Ice Cream Maker: I completely agree, and I'd be inclined to ditch the whole "desserts" section.

Note, that I think there's some debate about what "minimum viable" means here. The stand mixer falls in this grey area, I think. You can probably get away with a good hand mixer (as he acknowledges) but the stand mixer is more versatile and time saving.

I take significant issue with this paragraph:

    When you write something to be fast in C, you know why 
    it's fast, and it doesn't degrade significantly with
    different compilers or environments the way different 
    VMs will, the way GC settings can radically affect 
    performance and pauses, or the way interaction of one 
    piece of code in an application will totally change
    the garbage collection profile for the rest.

The implementation of malloc & free that your C implementation uses significantly impacts performance (both time and space) just like the choice of GC implementation in other languages. It is not uncommon for memory fragmentation to be a serious problem for large or long-running C programs, and at the point that you have to start worrying about that and working around it, you've broken the abstraction in just the same way that the author complains about for Java, Erlang, Haskell, etc.

Also, as others have pointed out, performance can also depend significantly on how well C's machine model maps to the actual machine architecture you're running on.

C is weakly-typed. You can cast anything to anything else and the compiler won't stop you.

For couple days, 70F shouldn't be a problem at all. Remember that most wine shops aren't refrigerated, and who knows what the wine might have experienced between the winery and the retailer.

You should read part 2 of the post.

To clarify, I meant "hard" in the sense of more fundamental or "lower level". In that ranking, mathematics is more "hard" than any of physics or chemistry or biology. Astronomy is a little less clear but I think it's fair to say that it's a "harder" science than biology, and more-or-less on par with physics and chemistry.

But then there's also relatively more women in Mathematics and Astronomy. There's definitely not a simple relationship between how "hard" the science is and how many women are in the field.

I run AntiRSI and take a 5 minute break every hour. Never had an employer complain about me not staying chained to my desk for 8 hours.

You're assumption is that you get a fixed amount of functional life, followed by a variable amount of less- or non-functional life. OTOH, you might get a variable amount of functional life, followed by a more-or-less fixed amount of non-functional life. In general, I think the second option more closely matches how we understand aging and disease.

(Also, watch the TED talk by the referenced professor. He doesn't ignore quality of life.)

I'm not even sure that the solution is technically sound, as it appears to ignore the possibility that multiple people live at the same location.

    Why do I need to know why laughter improves my health? 

Because otherwise someone else on HN will say: "citation needed!"

    It's no longer a case of "keeping up with the Joneses" - you now have to keep 
    up with everyone you've ever met, no matter what the cost!

I don't understand why so many people don't seem to get that you don't have to be "friends" on Facebook with everyone you've ever met. And you don't have to stay "friends" with them forever.

Also, I see lots of stuff on Facebook that isn't upbeat bragging. Prominent examples just from the past week include death of a family member and a friend starting chemo. Possibly this is an age thing, or a consequence of the fact that I prune superficial relationships from my Facebook, but I have a hard time relating to the experience this writer describes. (Also, while I don't want to diagnose over the internet, it's possible that FB makes the author depressed because he's already prone to depression.)

I think it's still pretty unclear what this function might do, since the inverse of a map isn't well-defined. I think this is a type signature that makes sense and has a fairly obvious most-likely meaning:

    boo :: Map a b -> b -> Set a

I'm not sure how you would conjure up just an 'a' in general.

So, you liked the conventional group-think and life choices of 20-somethings posting photos of getting wasted at bars & parties better?

Also, if you can't take pleasure in the happiness of your "friends", then maybe they aren't your friends and, therefore, shouldn't necessarily be your "friends" either. If you get what I'm saying.

That sounds like a problem with you, not with Facebook. It's important to learn to accept that you and everyone you know will grow older, age more or less gracefully, and eventually die.

Also, FWIW, while having children should, and almost always does, imply more reponsibilities; there's no required connection between the rest of the life events and behaviors you mentioned.

I'm a little confused by your comment, but as someone with an advanced math degree I might just not have noticed what you're referring to. Can you point out what in the course you felt involved a heavy emphasis on math?

Probably not. I don't think that in the large that helps with readability / maintainability. Even in the small, I find languages which don't allow forward references (Ruby, sh) rather annoying. It forces relatively insignificant implementation details to be read first, rather than starting with the big picture of what the program does.