arcsin's comments

I think there's two factors. One is the nonlinear utility of money, and the other is the cost/value of losing/winning.

In general money has a diminishing utility, your first dollar is worth more to you than your millionth dollar. In order for it to be worth it to play a -EV lottery not only does you utility graph need to be nonlinear, it cannot decrease monotonically. At some point your nth dollar needs to be worth more (to you) than your first dollar. For example, you have one dollar and a life saving drug for your terminal disease costs 1 million dollars. You would see a sudden spike in utility at the 1 million dollar mark. It would be rational to play the lottery in this case.

Another possibility is that the event of winning money or even just the thought of possibly winning that money gives you more value than simply having the money alone, and this tips the scale. This would be like the opposite of insurance. For some people the experience of losing, or worrying about the possibility of losing money is so negative that it still makes it worth it to buy insurance.

One reason is that comments get stale. People need to maintain them but probably won't. Second reason is that they think the code should be self-documenting. If it's not then you just need better names and code structure. Many books like clean code advocate this approach, and that's where I first learned the idea of don't write comments as well.

Personally now I've held both sides of the argument at different times. I think in the end it's a trade-off. There's no hard and fast rule, you need to use your best judgement about what's going to be easiest for the reader and also for the people maintaining the code. Usually I just try to strike a balance that I think my coworkers won't complain about. The other thing I've realized that makes this tricky is that people will almost always overestimate their (or others) commitment to maintaining comments, and/or overestimate how "self-documenting" their code is.

Regarding masks I don't think you can really compare what is happening in Japan to America. People screaming and getting kicked out of stores and airplanes. The reasoning is different also, I imagine in Japan it's mostly about laziness but in America it's more about freedom and not being told what to do.

Of course in the ideal world only the people that are correct would think for themselves or everyone would be correct all the time. But it doesn't work that way, usually people that think for themselves are wrong. When a culture has more people willing to go against the grain sometimes they will be right and make things better but more often they will be wrong and make things worse.

I think it's the difference between an individualist and collectivist culture. I'd guess that especially the kind of people that would come to hackernews will have a hard time seeing the upside of collectivism and the downside of individualism (subservient having a strong negative connotation), but I think it's really mostly a tradeoff. Yes individualism is probably better for generating entrepreneurs. But you don't see things like people refusing to wear masks in Japan. There's lots of stories of things like Japanese people taking a long trip to return a lost wallet or picking up after each other at sports stadiums. I would say that in general there are more social obligations but also as a result more social trust. Probably if you grew up in a collectivist society then a lot of the things that you can see happening in the West will seem dysfunctional. Also I doubt more people are lonely in Japan than America, and some brief skimming the internet, research seems to support this.

When a variable can be reassigned it adds the complexity of time dependence. Meaning that if you don't keep track of the order of values that variable was assigned then you probably can't understand the program. The problem is compounded by the size of the scope that variable exists in. That's why we avoid using global variables, globals force us to track the order of updates from potentially anywhere in the code. The problem is further compounded if there are multiple globals that depends on each other. Then you need to track the relative order of updates across all globals. That's the worst case scenario.

In OOP you try to limit the scope of state, private variables inside an object can update its value but can only be directly accessed from inside the object. But still those objects are inherently stateful. In order to understand an object, how you can use it, whether it is working correctly, you are still forced to understand where/when it is in the timeline of updates.

Purity means that if you understand a variable or object in one place in your code then you understand it from anywhere in your code. You don't need to know how it was used before because it can't be changed. If it were changed then you would know because it would now be a different variable or object.

> but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great... that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there

I'll try to put this as objectively as I can. There is now a cultural overlap between those that support varying degrees of "censorship" and progressives, and between those that support "free speech" and, let's say, anti-progressives. This makes sense because now racism/sexism is more likely to be censored than extreme progressivism. Probably if it were the other way around (if extreme progressivism were more likely to be censored) then those same progressives would become staunch free-speech advocates and anti-progressives would be fighting for more "content moderation".

So if you are generally for the toleration of ideas, perhaps holding some unpopular opinions yourself, and against censorious tactics, you tend to attract extreme anti-progressives as well. For the most part, racists and sexist do not see themselves as racists and sexists, they see themselves as holding true but unpopular beliefs. Another interesting example of this is Sam Harris somehow having a fair amount of Trump-supporting listeners even though he spends a lot of time ranting about how incompetent and morally-bankrupt he thinks Trump is.

This thread is a really good example of why people like SSC. Personally I have no problem believing biases against minorities exist in this industry. And to whatever extent it does exist I support trying to fix that. But then the discussion starts to get heated and people start saying things that stop making logical sense to me with the implication that if it doesn't make logical sense to me then I'm a racist, sexist or whatever.

Someone in this thread asked how it's not a pipeline problem if 80% of graduating CS students are male, and your response is to just stop caring about CS degrees. But how does that make sense unless you think that there is an equally disproportionate ratio of uncredentialed yet qualified women programmers? And frankly the rhetorical techniques you're using here feel dishonest, implying that if I don't accept your argument then either I didn't think hard enough about it or I'm sexist. Or the "this is my last reply on this topic". If people have genuine questions why not answer them?

And after seeing this kind of discourse so many times there is such a sense of relief when someone is willing to say "let's look at the truth even if it's an inconvenient one" because to come up with a good solution you have to start with what's actually true right? For a lot of people that's what SSC represents and that's why they feel so strongly about defending it.

From the same author as OP: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html

> Even if you want to learn a language, if you can't learn it by using it, do you even need it?

I'm not really into flashcards, but I'm seeing a lot of comments like this, that flashcards are only good for memorization. I think they're more useful than that. You can use flashcards similar to how you would train a machine learning model, large iterations of input and feedback. People who are serious about language learning with SRS don't just study words but whole sentences per card. You could probably use flashcard to train yourself in many things that would be considered skills, not just knowledge. For example, you could put chess problems with answers on flashcards. If the resolution were high enough you could probably train yourself to recognize forged paintings. Things like that.

I think probably the main issue is that a lot of people just don't enjoy studying with flashcards. You could tell them it will literally make them 2x more efficient, and even if they believe you they still won't want to use it.

> "...it's basically a psychological coping mechanism."

I think this isn't quite right. Religion is a social mechanism. It creates the right incentives for its members to buy into a kind of insurance program. When a member falls on hard times the other members will take care of them. Of course this is more appealing to people in financially or socially unstable circumstances.

In order to avoid free-loading, there might be something like a tithe where you actually have to pay money into a shared pool. But if you don't have money to spare then usually membership comes down to costly signalling, i.e. various forms of self-sacrifice. Usually the poorer the members the more extreme the religion.

The idea of divine, absolute laws of conduct and an un-gameable entity that enforces these laws sounds fantastical but it's very effective at getting people to cooperate once they've bought in (which is why costly signals of buy-in are so important). It shifts the prisoner's dilemma payouts away from defect, toward cooperate. And a strange quirk of the human mind is that the more socially useful something is, the more it will prevent us from realizing it's not actually based on something true, and the more socially harmful it is the more it will prevent us from realizing it's actually true.

As society modernizes, people move away from religion because the costs don't seem to justify the benefits. Also without strong social incentives to believe, it becomes too hard to believe based only on the likelihood that it's actually true. Unfortunately I think we do lose something in the process. Modern society is more likely to be disconnected. Religiously active people generally tend to be happier. Looking around a lot of people I know have nothing like a weekly church meeting where they can socialize with a group of people that takes care of each other.

This is fair if you think freedom is the most important thing. Having more money has real objective benefits and most people are fine with giving up some freedom to have those benefits.

Coming at it from a different perspective, I did something similar to this by saving money on a US salary and then moving to a low cost of living country. I spent years at a time not working or even thinking about how to make money. I think almost everyone has felt the pain of financial and social obligation, but very few people have experience a total lack of such obligations for years at a time which leads to things like fantasizing about FU money.

I can tell you that for me personally I don't think it was ideal. Yes, at first the freedom is exhilarating, but it doesn't last forever. There were two big problems. One is that you feel disconnected from society. This is hard to explain but being outside of normal social structures you lose a sense of context and meaning to your actions. Second is that when you don't have any social or financial pressures it's hard to avoid the path of least resistance. It's very easy to fall into bad habits, just watching youtube, reading reddit, bad diet, etc.

I would assess myself as someone who would be less susceptible to these problems. I consider myself a fairly self-motivated person and definitely an introvert. But after several years it starts to weigh on you.

Today I work in an office. There are often times when it's hard and I have to deal with things I don't want to. But I still think it's better than when I wasn't working. I think if I never had the experience of not working I would probably only see the downsides of office life as the upside is quite abstract and hard for me to articulate. I don't think this is something unique to me, I think it's human nature to want social structure and this naturally comes with social obligations. But for most people not being constrained to social structures was never an option anyway so they underestimate how much it affects their happiness.

No one has mentioned so far that there are many variety of durian, which has different smells. Another factor is how ripe the durian is. For example, probably anyone could eat a montong durian that's not too ripe. The kind and ripeness that is most popular seems to vary by country as well.

Yes and no. I’m someone who took krashen to heart and learned almost exclusively though reading. What I’ve found is that it’s possible to understand everything as long as it’s written or spoken very slowly and clearly but this is a different thing to understanding the spoken language at a normal speaking pace. It’s too fast and at that speed often sound alone is not clear enough to distinguish words. For example if you took a recording and cropped the audio just before and after each word I think there will be many words you will not recognize out of context.

I think the way that we are able to process speech at that speed is that we essentially guess what words are coming next, which is really only possible if you’re able to construct the sentence yourself. If you stop a sentence at a random point a native speaker will be able to predict the kind of words that will come next, if not the exact words. Another bit of evidence for this theory is that if someone says something very unexpected and out of context we often won’t understand what they’ve said.

Now it’s possible that you could achieve this ability only through input and not through production but I believe that it will be much less efficient.

I always wonder what is the reason that they ask for US-based. One possible reason I've heard is that it makes taxes and certain laws easier for them to follow, in which case it sounds like more a matter of being a US citizen rather than actually living in the US. Another reason I've seen is that they still want you to be available to come into the office every so often, which would be a different story.

Are there any people here who are US citizens but living abroad that have applied to these companies? What was the response?

I'm not sure about that. I've seen multiple threads on reddit about cases where someone was overtipped or accidentally transferred money and there's usually a lot of comments arguing why they shouldn't have to return the money.

Knowing CS allows you to build unique solutions from first principles. In cases where you're tied to applying solutions that have already been decided there will be less opportunity to use your CS knowledge. I think the majority of the time for most jobs you're just applying solutions, so it's much clearer how this would benefit you professionally.

Depending on the kind of work you do, the minority of the time where it would be beneficial to know CS might have a big impact both on the product and your reputation in the company. This could help you move up to higher, better paid positions, but it also might not. Teaching yourself CS is a big time investment and if you just want to maximize your salary there's probably better ways to do it.

I think it's really only worth it if on some level you enjoy it and find it interesting. You can seek out jobs where they use more CS, but again this doesn't guarantee you'll advance professionally. But if you're the type of person who enjoys programming as a creative activity, I think CS can be very rewarding because it opens you up to what's possible.

I think this points to the idea that there’s a blurry line between talent and just a really early head start. Lots of the things we call skills are composed of more basic, lower level skills and in general skills can overlap in different domains. For example the skill of programming can be seen as being composed of / overlap with the skill of thinking abstractly, which may be composed of things like being able to visualize, draw relationships between ideas, sit still for long periods of time. Sports skills may be composed of the skill of something like detecting very subtle physical cues in your body. Are these things really skills though? I would say yes because you can train yourself to get better at them, but I suspect low level skill start developing so early on that it’s hard to catch up to others if you start developing them later in life. We think of these skills as innate talent because they can start to differentiate kids at a very early age, but that’s due to these skills starting to develop so early in life.

It's remarkable to me that people think this is a bad thing. I feel like everyone agreed freedom of speech is a good thing until one day I woke up and they didn't. I don't mean whether or not it would be unconstitutional to censor certain topics on facebook. But facebook is a one of the largest communication platforms today. It's bad enough that Zuckerberg actually has the power to decide what can and can't be communicated on that platform, at least he's deciding not to use that power (at least in this case).