robot_no_421

"As it master, I should be able to force my machine into giving me access of private fields."

If you're writing the code then you can do whatever you want with it. But if I'm writing the code you're using, I want the power to express "the end user cannot use this private field".

You trying to access the private fields in the library I or someone else wrote would be like trying to change a book someone wrote or a painting someone made. It's not the computer restricting you, it's the author of the code.

EDIT: This response was not my finest take.

The difference between a heap allocated string (String), a static string literal embedded in the binary (&str), and a stack allocated string ([char], but this is more common in C than Rust) is the simplest introduction to manually managed memory.

The complications have nothing to do with Rust but with how computers manage and allocate memory. You might as well also skip C, C++, Zig, and every other language which gives you fine-tuned access to the stack and heap, because you'll run into the same concept.

Not at all, that's why we have moderators. Hacker news is interesting because they stay focused on the right topics. If you let people just talk about whatever they want, you're just gonna get an inferior Reddit. Topic != "Whatever we want to talk about", the topic is very often the technical and technological aspects of a story or article. Talking about politics on HN is definitely "off topic".

Right, but you could theoretically say this about any software or technology (and this argument has very frequently in the past been used to argue against technologies like cars and airplanes). DNA sampling has "flaws" and "bugs" in it too that occasionally lead to false positives. Even police officers and lawyers falsely identify people occasionally. AI technology would just be another tool we collect evidence with for use in making inferences about the world. Imperfect technology never has been a blocker for using or improving that technology until it meets its purposes.

> "you can't think of any uses for facial recognition surveillance that pegs you at specific locations at specific times? You can't imagine a single way how to monetize that data and use it against you or other law abiding citizens?"

Having imagination has nothing to do with staying on track and sticking to the conversation topic. Nothing you said has anything to do with criminalizing law abiding citizen for just existing. Privacy rights are a related but separate topic. We could talk about that separately if you want to. But I don't see how AI knowing where we are, or how AI enabling the monetization of our data has anything to do with criminalizing anything I do on a daily basis.

“There has long been a concern [facial recognition] could invade upon people's lives through expanded surveillance and through the criminalization of just existing within the public sphere,” Mamdani said.

Except, nobody is calling the regular fare paying people criminals. Just the people who aren't paying the fare and breaking the rules.

I say that you're not thinking critically because your arguments are very weak and you don't provide any inference or evidence to support your conclusions. It's irrelevant that "you read both Chinese and English" or that you think "you've critically analyzed every idea from both sides" if you're not using any of those in your logical argument, which you're not. In fact, it's an obvious logical fallacy to use "I have read more about this than you" as evidence that you're right.

>Say what you will, but I won't be able to espouse the virtues of freedom of speech in China anymore.

The real reason you can't "espouse the virtues of freedom of speech in China" is because they will arrest you. Let's not mince words here. The Chinese government would shoot their citizens before they would let them protest or speak their mind freely.

This is a really poor argument. You are equating banning one social media app with the GFW, which is obviously a huge hyperbole which has nothing to do with reality. The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. That is a violation of freedom of thought at the infrastructure level. As an American, you are still free to visit Chinese hosted websites and drink whatever propaganda you want. You just can't use TikTok to find it anymore.

Plus, freedom of speech is about protecting American Citizens from being censored by American Government. Banning an ungovernable, foreign owned business does not stop you from freely expressing yourself on the internet.

Your education was not a lie, but you should still get a refund on your failed education. You clearly did not learn to think critically.

> Is it acceptable to correct the answer to the query "Eminent scientist" from 95% men, 5% woment to 50%/50% or to the current ratio of men/women in science ? Should we correct the ratio of black to white people in answering a generic question to average across the globe or US ?

I would expect AI to at least generate answers consistent with reality. If I ask for a historical figure who just happens to be white, AI needs to return a picture of that white person. Any other race is simply wrong. If I ask a question about racial based statistics which have an objective answer, AI needs to return that objective answer.

If we can't even trust AI to give us factual answers to simple objective facts, then there's definitely no reason to trust whatever AI says about complicated, subjective topics.

The longer I remain a software engineer the more I hate relying on computers. Maybe the people closest to the technology are the ones to first realize how superficial and downright damaging these innovations actually are.

> It’s a bit nonsensical to compare the number of words in English to the number of packages in PyPi, but we can agree that both English and Python are very rich languages, and no single person can reasonably understand the full scope of either language.

If I were editing this article, I would tell the author to remove the entire paragraph leading up to this snippet. Why would you insert a section that's so bs that even you immediately criticize your own point?

Truthfully, I read this article and came away with the conclusion that writing code is nothing at all like writing prose.

Yes, in the sense that if P = NP, it would conceptually be a lot easier in theory to break a lot of public key encryption, which are NP hard problems.

>Probably more of those, but the stories are far less dramatic.

Evidence shows that having an excess of resources actually leads to more financial irresponsibly, not less. Or as the Illustrious Notorious B.I.G. eloquently put it: "mo money, mo problems":

"The CFP Board of Standards says nearly one-third of lottery winners eventually declare bankruptcy, and lottery winners are more likely to declare bankruptcy within three to five years than the average American."

https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-th....

>Where management is helped more by having resources than it is by understanding it.

There are many examples of lottery winners, athletes, and celebrities who came across considerable resources yet still went broke because they didn't understand how to manage it or the concept of exponential growth.

A fool and his money are easily parted, as the saying goes. People who don't have financial literacy will lose their money over and over again regardless of how much you give them.

I'd argue that you're not really using the credit on your credit card as a credit card. You're using it as a charge card.

Exponential growth is a fundamental concept of financial literacy. If you want to invest in the stock market or plan your 401k it helps to understand exponential growth. The reason why it's impossible to get rich off a wage is because of the difference between exponential vs linear growth.

>I don't spend money I don't have.

You've never taken out a mortgage or opened a margin account? Plenty of responsible people make money by spending money they don't have every day.

> Using a credit card isn't very abstract.

To use a credit card responsibly you need to understand the concept of exponential growth, or you might accidentally turn a manageable $500 debt into a burdensome $5000 debt. Same goes for understanding good debt (mortgages) vs bad debt.

It might not be solving a polynomial per se, but I don't see how you get to understanding exponential equations without at least understanding algebra.

It's way, way more than just a tool that improves thought. It's a necessary tool to organize your life. How can you even budget or use a credit card responsibly if you don't know algebra? You need algebra to know how long a paycheck can last you.

My dad didn't graduate high school and even he knew enough algebra to work out how much money he needed a month for cigarettes (until he eventually quit once he really thought about the numbers).

The CMF was designed by people who don't like math and prioritize the "human experience" over physical reality. When you read through the CMF, you begin to see all sorts of hints that their ideology is inspired by Continental philosophies such as Marxism, Existentialism, and all of the other ways of thinking that find "facts" and "reality" offensive. For example, I lost count of how many times they mentioned the word "authenticity" in the CMF.

To sum up the whole CMF in my words, it's Critical Theory applied without critical thinking used. Proponents saw that minorities were struggling in math class, so they proposed a solution to handicap math classes. That's literally what CMF is. Proponents would rather see everyone fail than some people succeed. Especially if those some successful people are not minorities.

Why we should learn math from people who clearly have no respect for facts and reality in the first place is beyond me. Bertrand Russell, one of the founders of set theory, would have outright rejected most of the philosophy that inspired the CMF.

A linter or IDE can only "suggest" that you don't access null objects without a null check. You as the developer can choose to ignore the linter or IDE and write bad code anyway.

Enforcing behavior via the typing system prevents bad code from even compiling and running in the first place.

When you stop thinking of Optional<T> as a inconvenient wrapper clumsily wrapping a T and starting thinking of it as a first class datatype with its own members and methods, then it becomes a lot more clear to reason about the logic.

Article is subscription locked, so I just read the (patronizing and reductive) headline.

The problem never has been lack of housing. The problem has always been lack of land. You can only build new homes on existing land and nobody wants to repurpose existing land to build new houses. Where exactly in NYC can we build new houses?

And what houses are we talking about? Single family houses that are not a good use of land? Huge multifamily complexes that further stress the crumbling infrastructure?

Housing costs are not my top priority for my QOL. Building more houses will likely impact me only in negative ways.

And again, the article is subscription locked so all I can do is read the headline.

"In hight school your math teacher may have started a treatment of linear algebra by making you solve a system of linear equations, at which point you very sensibly zoned out because you knew you’d go on to program computers and never have to solve a system of linear equations again (don’t worry, I won’t be talking much about them here)."

No offense but I stopped reading there. Too many software developers have this weird superiority complex when it comes to math. When they struggle with math, I've seen devs criticize everything from naming conventions to curricula to it being "useless". A lot of them seem unwilling to acknowledge that math is sometimes... simply hard.

If your attitude to math is "I don't need any of this useless stuff, so I'll zone out", then I kindly suggest you first at least try to learn Linear algebra for mathematicians first.

3 is the following function: 3 == lambda x: 3*x

But I think that the technical, mathematical way to think about it is:

The monoid of linear functions L:R->R is isomorphic to the monoid (R, *)

Meaning, the structure of 1x1 matrices under multiplication is exactly the same as the structure of real numbers under multiplication.

I'm a Python dev who uses this feature frequently. But the more I use Python (and the more I use Rust in my spare time), the more I realize that I use it only because it's what Python expects me to do. If it was up to me I'd much rather use

  if my_container.empty():
      # do stuff

than

  if not my_container:
      # do stuff

The second implementation behaves the same if either my_container is None or if my_container is empty (or if my_container is 0 or ""...), whereas the first implementation allows me to handle those cases differently. The first implementation is also more explicit and easier to understand on a first read.

It's also easier to debug. Is users supposed to be None in your example? Possibly, but your code doesn't give me any hints. Is my_container supposed to be None in my example? Probably not based on the way I explicitly used the .empty() method.

> What’s important is what kind of operation you want for when implementing algorithms, and False is what I always want in cases where I do “all”.

Why would you want "all" to produce results that are inconsistent with logic and mathematics? Consider this tautology, which is a result of De Morgan's laws: for any list L, we have that

all(L) == ~any([~x for x in L]).

In other words, if all([]) == False, then you would also logically need to accept that:

False == all([]) == ~any([~x for x in []]) == ~any([])

which means that we'd require any([]) == True. And that's definitely an illogical result.

Well at least I have more than one bakery in my neighborhood, so it could be worse.

>I'm sure you're aware that the term "lame" is offensive, discriminatory, and should really be avoided?

I get a strong feeling that you were bullied in school when you were a kid.

If you live in an area where there's only one bakery in town, then there's no pressure at all for that bakery to improve their process. What is your point? I live in a city where it's common to see multiple bakeries on the same block and where I could visit a new bakery every week for the rest of my life.

Again, it sounds like your little town or wherever you live is just lame. If there is no competition, there's no reason to innovate. I'm sure every business in your (real or hypothetical) town is years behind the curve in every metric if your only factor for patronizing a business is "well, it's the only one close by".

Instead of me trying to explain it to you, maybe just try it yourself.

You saying "I've never needed this and I never tried it, so I don't understand why anyone else would" isn't exactly a robust argument. In fact, why would I bother listening to your opinion on a feature you've never even tried? Most websites have info about hours, prices, products, FAQs that are up to date. Your mental model of what's in a website is wildly off, especially in 2023 when everyone's on social media.

The last thing I bought from a bakery was a $50 dollar cheesecake for a birthday party. And you can bet I looked up reviews from at least 5-10 different bakeries. And also visited their websites. But sure, whatever you think.

You're just doubling down on your own stupid argument and not providing any interesting rebuttals to what I'm saying. The reviewers are wrong, Yelp is wrong, the internet is wrong, bakers CANNOT benefit from using the internet! Go get your birthday cake from the first bakery you see, I don't care. You're not really raising good points. If anything, you're just highlighting how little you know about using the internet to find new businesses. The fact that you've never visited a baker's website just means you either don't care or know about picking high quality products when it matters. It's a you problem, not the baker's problem.