EliAndrewC

6 lat temudiscuss

Just wanted to say how cool this was. It's been awhile since I've done any C/C++ programming but the pointer syntax and work really takes me back!

EliAndrewC

8 lat temudiscuss

At my job we say "hit by the lottery bus" to make it clear that we're using a euphemism for "what if this person quits".

EliAndrewC

9 lat temudiscuss

Last time I checked, their hot wallet had less than 5% of the bitcoins on their books. A catastrophic data break would leave most of their customers without either their bitcoins or any way to be made whole from the loss.

EliAndrewC

10 lat temudiscuss

Alternate title for the article: "Lists of lodash features replaced by ES6 if you don't mind throwing an exception when given invalid input such as null or undefined".

All kidding aside, a lot of our lodash code ends up looking something like this:

    function (xs) {
        return _(xs).pluck('foo').filter().value();
    }

That code clearly expects that xs is an array of objects. However, we might occasionally end up with xs being undefined, or with xs being an array but one of the elements is null, etc.

Most of the time, we want our function to just swallow those errors and return an empty array in such cases. This is exactly what lodash does, but if we tried to call xs.map(...) in that case we'd get an error. Similar caveats apply for grabbing the foo attribute if one of the array elements ends up being null or something.

For this reason, I recommend continuing to use lodash almost all of the time, even when there's a native Javascript method available.

EliAndrewC

10 lat temudiscuss

I was on the "Python 3000" mailing list while it was being planned, and the prevailing attitude seemed to be "it'll probably take 5 years before the community moves to Python 3". (That's paraphrased and not a direct quote, though I saw people say that sort of thing almost word for word a few times.)

This was optimistic, but at least we see that the community is indeed gradually moving to Python 3, even if it's taking a few more years.

EliAndrewC

11 lat temudiscuss

Here's the standard argument, as I understand it:

- There are something like 100,000,000,000 neurons in the human brain, each of which can have up to around 10,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. This is basically why the brain is so powerful.

- Modern CPUs have around 4,000,000,000 transistors, but Moore's law means that this number will just keep going up and up.

- Several decades from now (probably in the 2030s), the number of transistors will exceed the number of synaptic connections in a brain. This doesn't automatically make computers as "smart" as people, but many of the things that the human brains does well by brute-forcing them via parallelism will become very achievable.

- Once you have an AI that's effectively as "smart" as a human, you only have to wait 18 months for it to get twice as smart. And then again. And again. This is what "the singularity" means to some people.

The other form of this argument which I see in some places is that all you need is an AI which can increase its own intelligence and a lot of CPU cycles, and then you'll end up with an AI that's almost arbitrarily smart and powerful.

I don't hold these views myself, so hopefully someone with more information can step in to correct anything I've gotten wrong. (LessWrong.com seems to generally view AI as a potential extinction risk for humans, and from poking around I found a few pages such as http://lesswrong.com/lw/k37/ai_risk_new_executive_summary/)

EliAndrewC

12 lat temudiscuss

> What about people that can separate their personal from their business? Eich never did anything at all at Mozilla to push his point of view on gay marriage. If #1 is true, then that plays to him not doing so as well as CEO.

Right, we definitely had (at least) two different signals about how Eich would behave as CEO with respect to LGBT employees. And how he behaved in practice is arguably a much stronger signal than his political donations, especially when coupled with his statements of support for Mozilla's inclusive culture and promise to maintain it.

The strongest counterarguments I've seen go something like this:

- Eich was never previously in an executive leadership role; being CTO is important but not in the same way as CEO. So his past behavior is less of a signal than his supporters would have us believe, especially since we don't know about every interaction he's ever had with his LGBT colleagues.

- It's easy to accept that Eich had no plans to e.g. try to roll back domestic partner benefits for LGBT couples; with Mozilla's current culture, that would have zero chance of happening anyway. But given his political donations, are we 100% sure that he wouldn't be in favor of it if the culture shifted? If not, then it's reasonable to oppose him as CEO.

- Even if we expect zero policy changes driven by Eich's beliefs, as CEO he would be making decisions about people's roles within the company. It's reasonable to be concerned about how fair-minded he would be, particularly if someone felt they were being marginalized.

I'm not sold on these arguments, but I think they're sincere and I cringe every time someone categorizes them as a "witch hunt".

EliAndrewC

12 lat temudiscuss

grellas makes two basic arguments in the post I replied to, which I will attempt to summarize:

1) Refusing employment based on beliefs has been historically bad, e.g. Christians refusing to hire or do business with Jews, and blacklists for suspected Communists. Such things are in fact SO bad that they outweigh any/all good that might be done by applying such filters in cases where we feel they're justified.

2) Startup culture specifically is about joining together diverse people to build great things. Even if we stipulate that filtering out business leaders with "bad" political beliefs had some benefit, there's disproportionate harm done by the startups that will not succeed because they handicapped themselves in this way.

I'm not sold on either of those arguments, though I think they both have merit.

EliAndrewC

12 lat temudiscuss

grellas' argument doesn't sit right with me either, but I disagree that his argument was tactless or intended to derail anything. When grellas writes:

> Principle is more important here than a particular outcome. What happens with Ms. Rice is not the issue here.

I get why you'd see that as trying to derail more specific discussion, and why you'd disagree with that statement in general. However, I see it as part of a good-faith argument that blocking employment based on political beliefs (or even actions) is generally harmful to society, even if we feel we have valid reasons in a specific case.

EliAndrewC

12 lat temudiscuss

Debates on Brendan Eich and Condoleezza Rice seem to boil down three separate questions:

1) Is there any belief or action not directly related to someone's job that should disqualify them from their position?

2) If the answer to #1 is yes, does this specific issue cross that threshold?

3) Does the answer to #1 change based on their position within a company, e.g. a regular employee vs a CEO?

I've seen well-reasoned arguments for many different combinations of those opinions, and I have a lot of respect for most of the combinations I've seen, e.g.

- Even if a white separatist contributed money to a campaign to revive "separate but equal" Jim Crow legislation, we shouldn't oppose their employment if they have a history of working well with all co-workers/employees in a diverse company.

- Some political beliefs/actions would disqualify someone, but gay marriage equality is not (yet) beyond the pale, especially given the high percentage of Americans who hold the same beliefs.

- Gay marriage is indeed an issue that should reasonably factor into employment positions, but only for a select few leadership positions such as CEO due to the disproportionate power within a company held by people in those few positions.

What makes these debates problematic is people talking past each other without realizing they're debating different questions. This gets worse because each of the 3 questions I listed have many sub-categories.

Since grellas' posted about question #1, I hope people recognize that and tailor their responses to the argument he is actually making, in the spirit of "colleagues trying to reason out the truth together". Because he argued for employment to be belief-neutral, I'll summarize the three arguments I'm seeing on these threads which are relevant to that specific question:

1) Past behavior is a signal for future action, and Rice's position on the Board of Directors sends an unacceptable signal about how seriously Dropbox takes privacy. Even a person against boycotts based on political or religious beliefs has strong reason to oppose Rice's appointment to the Board.

2) Rice is a war criminal who happens to have not been prosecuted. Refusing to do business with a company who appointed a criminal who'd committed equivalently-serious-but-non-political crimes and escaped prosecution wouldn't raise any eyebrows, so why should this?

3) All people have a responsibility to discourage behaviors which are provably detrimental to the functioning of a well-ordered society. General litmus-testing of beliefs (or even actions) causes more problems than it solves, but Rice's behavior was so far over the line that we are morally obligated to marginalize her and all of her colleagues who behaved similarly during the Bush administration.

I'm not sure whether I agree with any of the above arguments, but I respect each of them, and I hope that either Hacker News figures out how to debate them civilly or that the moderators pull all stories like this off the frontpage.

EliAndrewC

12 lat temudiscuss

Guido explains in an old blog post (http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358) that he considers all of the possible implementations of multi-line lambdas to be un-Pythonic:

> But the complexity of any proposed solution for this puzzle is immense, to me: it requires the parser (or more precisely, the lexer) to be able to switch back and forth between indent-sensitive and indent-insensitive modes, keeping a stack of previous modes and indentation level. Technically that can all be solved (there's already a stack of indentation levels that could be generalized). But none of that takes away my gut feeling that it is all an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption.

EliAndrewC

12 lat temudiscuss

Definitely, which means that hospitals soak up a lot of uncompensated E.R. costs associated with people whose long term health issues are not being treated. Those hospitals are not required to actually provide that long-term care, e.g. chemotherapy regimens. (Unless you're saying they are, which would be happy news to me, since I understood the situation to be a lot bleaker than that for the uninsured.)

EliAndrewC

12 lat temudiscuss

> Also I thought the Klingons were part of the Federation at one point during DS9 era? Or perhaps that was just an alliance...

There was indeed a military alliance between the Federation and Klingon Empire against the Dominion. A friend of mine (uncharitably) referred to the war against the Dominion arc as the writers, "exploring what Star Trek could be... if it was more like Babylon 5."

EliAndrewC

12 lat temudiscuss

> War-like cultures would still exist even if the Federation believes they themselves have moved beyond that type of thing.

An alternate take compatible with patio11's irreverent theory: war-like cultures exist only in the sense that some cultures have different LARP preferences.

Supporting evidence: how did the Klingon Empire (who are not actually part of the Federation) make it through their nuclear age without blowing up their planet? How do they continue to keep pace technologically with other species? They steal a lot of technology, e.g. they never invented the warp drive themselves, but that would only get them so far and wouldn't keep them competitive with the Federation.

Patio11's oddball theory of Star Trek as a documentary about a future LARP may not be correct, but it explains away these kinds of questions better than any "real" theory that I've seen!

EliAndrewC

12 lat temudiscuss

A neat trick for helping you write in the style of a particular author: use a list of all the words in their collected works as the dictionary in your word processor. Then you'll see any word that e.g. Jane Austin never used as a misspelling, so it's easy to only write using the vocabulary that she used.

EliAndrewC

13 lat temudiscuss

There are a lot of middle-ground options, such as "buying back" taxi medallions before opening the floodgates and letting anyone run a taxi. This is obviously a tricky approach for a lot of reasons, but certainly there's a middle ground between "taxi medallions forever" and "all taxi medallions are worthless overnight".

EliAndrewC

13 lat temudiscuss

The Slate Political Gabfest is by far the best current events podcast I've come across: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest.html

My favorite comedy podcast is Judge John Hodgman: http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/judge-john-hodgman and I similarly recommend anything else from the Maximum Fun Network: http://www.maximumfun.org/

EliAndrewC

13 lat temudiscuss

The release notes can be found at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/releases/1.6/

Personally, I'm happy that Python 3 is now officially supported, though in practice I haven't had an issues with using Django 1.5 with Python 3.

EliAndrewC

13 lat temudiscuss

Not so, because as others in this thread have stated, the key is intent.

EliAndrewC

13 lat temudiscuss

Asking how to quantify the good and bad that resulted from a thing is something we can ask about literally anything. It's especially hard in this case, because the potential harm was immediate and personal (people being murdered, etc) while the good was broad long-term (a public with greater insight into what its government is doing, etc). But there are plenty of areas with similar tradeoffs; if raising a speed limit lowers commutes for millions of people but raises fatalities by some amount, then that's equally hard to compare.

EliAndrewC

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Apple's Mistake

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