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cderwin

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The typical prerequisite for measure theory is a two-semester real analysis course, a la Rudin or any of its alternatives (I particularly like Pugh's book). A solid topological background is also a good idea, although you can probably get away with whatever you learned in real analysis. Two standard measure theory texts are Folland's Real Analysis and the first half of Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis.

Say I work at a business that uses python exclusively. If I see my coworker get fired for suggesting we use haskell (or some other very different stack) for performance-critical code, how likely is it that I would later suggest we rewrite some stuff in go? or even python 3? or use https?

The opinion that biological differences between the sexes result in different career preferences isn't exactly wildly uncommon, extreme, or nonsensical.

That's the argument alt-right folk who actually deserve our hostility are trying to use Damore to make. Damore, however, is instead arguing that those biological differences make women less likely to pursue engineering as a field, not that those difference make them inferior.

I don't really think it is debatable. Just the fact the the memo and the firing were so controversial, in both directions, implies that a number of strong critical thinkers are on both sides of this issue. Assuming that is the case, it's not reasonable to use the memo as evidence of a lack of critical thinking.

And I think we all know Google didn't fire him because they believed him to be incompetent. In fact, Google didn't even claim as much, they fired him for "advancing harmful gender stereotypes." How can we ever have a genuine conversation about the under-representation of women in tech if people with a certain "undesirable" opinion get fired for expressing it?

Sure, that makes sense in the short term. But if everyone did this, over a long period of time, two things would happen:

(a) Diversity programs would at some point stop being ineffective.

and

(b) Identity politics would achieve cultural hegemony.

I agree that it would be wise to shut up if doing so had no long term effects (as in your example of a manager asking about religion), but that clearly isn't the case here. And in the case of (b), I would say that long-term effect is extremely undesirable, for both businesses and individuals.

Namely that people of color benefit from it; that itself does not have racist implications.

You are of course correct that I should not have presumed the community agrees with me -- my apologies for making that assumption.

The commenter is quite clear that he or she is calling into question the competency of the Ghanaian space program because "its not even a new design, they literally just used the cubesat platform and launched it from United States."

Similarly, the connection between calling this article the space-race equivalent of "affirmative action" and the alleged racism of the author of the comment is unclear.

If you actually believe the author of the comment is a racist, you should make your case. The author's racism doesn't seem "blatant" to me, and presumably wouldn't to most of the hn community.

Likewise,

Hacker News: where anonymous cowards call others anonymous cowards and make baseless accusations of racism

Apologies for the meta-discussion, but this sort of comment is unbecoming of hacker news. Instead of calling anonymous commenters names, we should discuss their ideas.

If "expanding your brain" is really what we want to optimize, why not learn Haskell? Or for that matter, why not learn something even more strongly typed, like Agda or Idris? Or even a theorem prover like Lean?

Most of the reasons the author presents would either be expanded in one of those languages, or is immaterial to the goal of maximizing learning. After reading the article I have no more reason to consider learning Clojure over learning any of the languages above.

I'm more or less in the same age bracket as you (graduated high school in 2015) and your spot on about the utility of computers for research and the importance of learning how to effectively use a search engine (this is a skill most of my peers lack).

That said, there's a huge difference between getting your first computer at 12 and getting your first computer at 3 (or at least largely unmonitored access to one). It remains to be seen how interaction with technology at such a young age affects social development and maturity, whereas technology's impact on our lives occurred after that development had mostly finished.

This is correct. I am not a fan of net neutrality and the level of "protest" that has appeared today already makes me uneasy. It's easy to claim that google is so monolithic that blocking its services for a day would be a crippling blow to the anti-net neutrality crowd, but it's really just blackmail. I don't think the public would be responsive to such a threat, and there are plenty of alternatives (even if the quality isn't quite the same). I'm sure one of those alternatives would be content to not force its politics on its customers.

Vietnam was not a very popular war, they did it anyway.

It was extremely popular when LBJ started the war. Less than 25% of the public thought sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Similarly, only 23% of Americans thought sending troops to Iraq was a mistake at the outset of that war. Popular opinion overwhelmingly supported both of those wars. The notion that "it's very clear that the majority of Americans do not want more war & nation building" and "the globalists + military industrial complex go ahead and do what they want anyway" isn't just misleading, it's false -- if not an outright lie.

A couple comments who knows absolutely nothing about how this works:

* They don't need to reach price parity to be financially successful. I'm sure there are people out there (former vegans/vegetarians or those considering veganism/vegetarianism) who would pay a marked up price. People already pay marked up proces for things like grass-fed beef and uncured meats.

* Is there any evidence that these price decreases hold at scale? There's a world of difference in being able to provide a market niche with artificial chicken at low cost and being able to produce enough chicken for the whole market at those marginal costs.

Scala Native v0.1 9 years ago

Rust's is almost the exact same size (3.46 MB). It's probably just that the libraries that are statically linked by default (jemalloc, std, etc.).