unclesaamm's comments

This discussion seems like an apt place to drop Morris Kline's "Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty" (https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Loss-Certainty-Oxford-Pap...). As a non-mathematician whose only exposure with a lot of these ideas is through that book, I can't help but see these discussions as falling very much in line with the competing schools of thought described in the book.

The book is a non-academic tour of the history of mathematical foundations, and the way mathematicians struggled to rediscover "truth" or the purpose of their work when new crises were reached. For example, the book spends a good deal of time explaining the centrality of Euclidean geometry to people's worldviews, and the way that the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries shook people. Not just because they didn't assume other geometries could exist, but because people believed geometry to map onto Euclidean physical reality because it was God's way of revealing Himself to the world.

The other main crises that the book toured were the discovery of quaternions, Cantor's theories, and Godel's theorem.

Kline ends describing the arc over the last two hundred years of math as a splitting-off into four different schools: set theorists, intuitionists, formalists, and logicists. Each camp tried to reassert math on "solid ground". I hear echos of those debates in this thread, where some are asserting that there can possibly exist multiple foundations, which from my reading of the book is a very formalist idea (our rules of math are a formal system, and any internally consistent set of rules are just as valid as objects of study).

Not being a mathematician, I don't have a sense of where those schools played out to the current day. I'd be curious to hear if they're all still around in different forms, or whether some have more or less died out.

I've read most of those books, and while I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading them, I don't think it's a great reading list either. You'll have to dig through a bit of cruft to get to the gems.

Partly, it's that programming books have such low lifespan that the ones that still get recommended after a decade are often deeply assimilated into programmer culture already. For example, when I read Clean Code and Pragmatic Programmer last year, I didn't find any of it to be interesting or remotely surprising - but I have been working at "agile" shops for a while, and perhaps those ideas were more revelatory when the books first came out.

Here's a more fun reading list, based off my own tastes. Maybe some of these are on the list, but I found it hard to scroll past a certain point as well:

- Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets

- The Nature of Computation

- The Little Schemer

- Programming Pearls

The article echoes something I've been thinking lately, which is we won't win unless we go on the offensive. We need to rally around collectivizing the entire infrastructure of the Internet as a public good. Clearly the corporate interests are going for the kill. We can't be fighting every year just to maintain the same ground - we need to tackle this problem at its root.

> This is just another nail in the oligarchy coffin we are actively sealing ourselves in.

Or rather, that we're being sealed into, since this can hardly be called democracy.

My impressions after familiarizing myself with Stan, BUGS, JAGS, and a few Python libraries for Bayesian inference:

Probabilistic programming languages are designed to specify and evaluate statistical models. They usually sit somewhere between declarative and imperative languages. They're basically DSLs in the sense that they come with built-in primitives for various statistical distributions and linkage functions, and the model is sometimes but not always lazy evaluated, but they also often have procedural components like variable assignment and loops, and in some software like Stan, the model has to be specified in a certain order since it is evaluated procedurally.

The languages are also de facto coupled with the engines that run them -- I don't know of any probabilistic languages that have been formalized without a corresponding sampling engine, though there have been cases where a language is "forked", and separate engines built for the same language (like WinBUGS and OpenBUGS).

I know some folks who graduated from Galvanize's Data Science program. They were told that historically 90% of graduates find jobs in 6 months. She is 6 months out, and only half of her cohort has a job.

Tyson's Corner being "in the middle of Virginia" is the perfect Northern Virginian equivalent of the New Yorker's "View of the World from 9th Ave"

Although I disagree about the value of hedge fund managers, it is true that the rise of these "supermanagers" is a huge component in income inequality trends in the US. Here's a thoughtful and spooky comparison with the corporate structure of Nazi Germany, where I first heard this term: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-supermanagerial-reic...

oh you're right! it must have been cached.

The most annoying part is still there -- of the home page morphing into the search results page as soon as text is typed. It is a totally nonsensical design.

1) Type stuff into google.com 2) Delete all the text

You are now on a totally empty results page. Why is this a sensible design?

This article buys way too much into the concept of "democratic efficiency", that "being heard" leads directly to government action, and therefore lack of action (or the wrong kind of action) is _caused by_ a lack of "being heard". This is so, so, so wrong, and is just further setting the stage for net neutrality to be repealed and for the blame to be cast at activists' feet. Net neutrality is one of the most popular policies in recent memory, and for it to be constantly assaulted by the same handful of large ISPs is a perfect encapsulation of why capitalism is failing our society. We're going to get tiered Internet not because the "Day of Action" was unsuccessful, but because there is no way that Ajit Pai would have satisfied himself with anything except a repeal of net neutrality. Do you really think he's going to sit there reading the comments, and think, "I have been wrong my entire career!"

The issue at hand is clearly about a government that is utterly unresponsive to its people.

Congratulations, I think you managed to set a new record for ableism on Hacker News. I'm actually struggling to formulate a response because disqualifying people from discussing their issues because of mental illness is so extraordinarily low.

You literally just said, "I'm all for being compassionate and helping people through tough times," then proceeded to shit on her for undergoing exactly that.

For one, I hope you aren't in a management position in a company, because discriminating by mental illness is illegal. Second, I hope you never get mentally ill -- which can happen to anyone -- because you would have to confront people with attitudes like yours and you would realize what garbage this is.

A crucial element that wasn't mentioned here was the lack of play-testing. Having a dozen people play the game and give feedback would have informed the makers that it was too hard, and where.

It ties in with the lack of time and resources too -- if you don't structure your development to have time to do user testing, you won't magically find that you have time to do it at the end, either.

Surprised nobody has mentioned turning the heart back into a star.

There is a broad coalition of people who are excited about socialist ideas. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No, they're making the point that anxiety is both sociological as well as biological, and that the sociological dimensions of anxiety have worsened. I'm not sure I agree either, but is that so hard to gleam from TFA?

Here's a book that adds to this point that mental illness "spreads" in a social contagion sense: https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization-American/...

This isn't true -- there are worker cooperatives, where workers own the means of production and sell the goods to others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

Which isn't to say that Sparkfun is a coop -- I don't think it is, just a bootstrapped company where the equity has stayed within the hands of founders/employees.

GNU Radio is another example of this succeeding with manipulating flows of data.

But I agree that's an intrinsically different problem than what OP is describing, which is essentially a WYSIWYG editor.

If said bar friend were to offer me free drinks forever, I would make the shit out of that website

Somehow you think the expenditure of money is exempt from moral consideration. This is the most amazing thing I've read on HN in a while. The "cause he believes in" is banning same-sex marriage... in other words, homophobia.

And that's because the death penalty is unjust.