EliAndrewC

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!

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".

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.

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();
    }

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.

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.

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/)

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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."

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!

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.

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".

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/

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.

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

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.

Your assertion that we may never know whether anyone was murdered was a surprise to me, which is why I responded. It seems relevant because whether the good outweighs the bad depends on how much bad was actually done. (Technically what's relevant is how much bad one would expect to have happened in advance, but what actually ended up happening last time will affect our guesstimates of what is likely to happen next time.)

Strong agree that those documents had the potential to lead to the murder of informants - this alone convinces me that the mass release of those cables without any edits or redactions was irresponsible.

However, I've previously assumed that we (incredibly) made it through the aftermath of the leaks without any of those potential murders taking place, for the same reasons listed in the grandparent comment; the media would have reported it, and the government would have surely cited it at Chelsea Manning's trial. So I'm skeptical but intrigued by your assertion that informants may have been murdered, but that there's be no way for us to know whether this had happened. My (uninformed) expectation would be that we WOULD know, since:

- we had (previously but not anymore?) informants in those places in the first place

- such murders would be (easily?) dicoverable after the fact, especially since the Taliban would have motive to tout them

- the government had a strong motive for wanting to portray the leaks in the worst possible light, and therefore would want to discover and verify such murders

Your observation that we have very little knowledge of these places does make me more uncertain about whether any murders occurred, but at this point we're far enough out from the leaks that the burden of proof lies with anyone asserting that murders probably DID take place, for the reasons listed above. (As opposed to the question of whether the leaks were irresponsible in the first place, which for me is a resounding yes even if we somehow made it through without any murders.)

There are 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 possible 128-bit keys. So if you had a machine that could check a trillion possible keys per second it would take over 10 quintillion years to try all possible 128-bit keys.

Can you clarify why the master password isn't offering any protection? It encrypts your other passwords so that they are not stored in plaintext on the filesystem; this alone seems like it's offering a little security, since my (perhaps mistaken) assumption is that it's more likely for someone to be able to read a file on your filesystem than to read in-memory passwords stored in RAM.

EDIT: Your other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173111 probably explains your view on this; that there are few attacks in practice which would be thwarted by encrypting passwords at rest, and that the false sense of security on the part of the user would be disproportionately high.

I'm aware that many people don't use ORMs and feel they cause more problems than they solve. However, I'm struggling to think of a popular web framework in any language that doesn't include or suggest a specific ORM.

So out of curiosity, when you do web development, do you use an ORM-less framework, or do you simply not use the ORM that's included/recommended?

Couldn't they pick a more sympathetic guy to talk about

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken

My familiarity comes more from Slate Magazine, and especially it's sister publication DoubleX, where the child-care aspect was heavily emphasized both in articles and in their bi-weekly DoubleX podcast.

However, I strongly agree with your analysis of her nursery as a CEO perk, which might like her high salary is simply much better than what normal employees have access to. This is why I disagree with the claims of hypocrisy, as I alluded to in my original comment.

>That seems more like a rhetorical tactic than a genuine issue?

I ascribe it to something else; Mayer is a female CEO, which I think causes many people to assign to her responsibility for championing women in the workplace. When she fails to live up to this standard which has been imposed on her, people cry foul.

Another relevant example is her interview awhile back where she mentioned she didn't really consider herself a feminist. This was met with far harsher criticism than I think any man would have received for making the same statement - "Oh really... which of your equal rights do you want to give back?!"

This is why I don't think the claims of hypocrisy are just a rhetorical tactic. People are genuinely disappointed in her failure to live up to the standards they've imposed on her, which they imagine that as a female CEO she has also set for herself and is implicitly broadcasting to the world.

Perhaps the most common and controversial aspect of Mayer's decision was the claim of hypocrisy regarding child care. Staying home with children to avoid the cost of a full-time nanny is a common reason for telecommuting. Some claimed hypocrisy for her installing a persona nursery next to her office for her own newborn while making Yahoo significantly less family friendly for its employees.

Although I never agreed with these criticisms, I'm annoyed that she apparently said, "I need to talk about the elephant in the room" and then avoided addressing this complaint at all. Unless she did and this was simply bad reporting which omitted any reference to it - I'd appreciate a link to the fill keynote transcript if one exists; I can't seem to find it.

> Why do you imply that the members of this panel are being disingenuous?

The original article claimed, "To balance things out, Farhad invited Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, but he dropped out, so it was just the three of us." Saying that Alexis "dropped out" is simply wrong, so the statement is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.