noamyoungerm

It's totally possible (and a relatively frequent occurrence) to have pdfs where the order of characters in the code has no relationship at all to how those same characters are laid out visually on the page. Anything marginally more complex than a series of paragraphs with no formatting at all basically requires you to render out the whole pdf and figure out the order that you are actually supposed to read the characters in.

the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking

This says much more about how we dismiss ancient civilizations as inferior than it does about ancient civilizations themselves.

The fact is, the geocentric model was an excellent one, able to explain all observations at the time in a sensible and straightforward way. Admittedly, more data helped to develop the heliocentric model, but there were valid scientific criticisms against that model at the time. In particular, it took Kepler to provide truly sensible and strong arguments in favor of heliocentrism.

The geocentric model is so good that even today it is often the sensible model to use when thinking about some astronomical problems. I hate to hear it being dismissed as 'wrong' - because from a physical perspective the two are simply geometrical transformations of one another, they are both 'right'. It's simply that one of them is simpler than the other for most problems.

But most of all, I hate hearing people say it 'held back thinking', because I assure you that the people doing the thinking back then were just as capable of doing good, logical, rational thinking as we are today, and didn't need anyone to claim they were too stupid to think critically for themselves about the scientific understanding of the time.

Notice that 17 days is basically what is needed to add the issue to the next sprint, complete its development along with everything else for that sprint, and deploy to a live site. To me that sounds fair.

I would argue that the surveillance isn't in how the data is used, but rather in the fact that NYC has that data at all.

Limits on acceptable data collection are more straightforward, enforceable, and fair than limits on acceptable data analysis. What would you say if a human had reached the same conclusion as Palantir by analyzing the same data?

I once made a moderately interactive widget using pure CSS, and it was a relatively interesting experience. The widget itself had buttons that let you choose several parameters (about 400 combinations overall) and would render out a 'demo' of our product.

Some stuff I learned: 1. Most of css3 is supported in IE8, so we felt fine with using the widget in production.

2. With any reasonable LESS / SASS syntax, it's easy to generate complex stuff so long as it's limited to a discrete number of states. Stuff like tic-tac-toe are easily doable if you treat them as a state-machine.

3. It's way faster than JS, and there's a good reason for it. CSS can be totally figured out in one round of parsing, and so long as no JS is used to change it, the same parsed state can be used for all of your states. Even though it adds tens of kilobytes to the file size of both CSS and HTML, it's still faster than executing code.

This definitely isn't the right solution for all problems, but I think it's important to think about whether you problem can be solved in pure CSS, and to strongly prefer it for static sites and nearly-static sites.

There are a large number of issues for which there exist equally well-informed arguments for both sides, or that there is no actual 'true' answer to be chosen.

Why aren't kids able to read text written in rows like everyone else? Programming languages just for kids seems mostly like a way to limit them.

Well, we're all familiar with https://xkcd.com/221/ or http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25

The possibility, however remote, exists that you will randomly select a sequence with patterns and order. In cryptography, we define the term 'pseudorandom' in order to discuss a class of functions that look random. Pseudorandom sequences are sequences where, given the first n bytes of the sequence, an adversary cannot guess the n+1th byte with probability significantly higher than 1/2. Basically, it's important to distinguish between blindly selecting a sequence out of all possible sequences, and finding a particular sequence with no discernible internal order.

CMSs are dying and static sites are replacing them - there's absolutely no reason to run a complex backend when the entire site is supposed to hold some text and maybe a space for comments.

Things like Jekyll or Hexo are straightforward and easy to work with, but because static sites are really just tools to transform markdown into HTML, something like Metalsmith could probably even handle online shops.

willingness to put ones life on hold for a predetermined amount of time.

That is almost the definition of a degree. During a degree, every class expects you to devote time and resources to learning. The degree programs we see today are structured in such a way that they expect you to drop everything else and learn (or research, in graduate studies).

If you can't 'put your life on hold' in order to study you won't be able to do it quickly or coherently enough to generate the large body of knowledge that a degree represents.

Subscription models and micropayments are not mutually exclusive, as in Spotify - you pay a subscription fee to listen to unlimited music. In practice that is the same as paying a fraction of a cent to the artist each time you listen to a song.

I would be willing to pay for a service that tracked each site I visited and billed me at the end of the month at a price-per-pageview comparable to CPM prices today.

EDIT: This is very distinct from asking me to pay 20 cents each time I want to open a particular page. The time I would spend considering whether to open a particular page or not isn't worth 20 cents, without regard to the fact that 20 cents/view is easily 100 times over the going rate for a page view.

A friend-of-a-friend of mine built the Red Alert [0] app that sends a push notifications when a rocket is fired from Gaza. Alerts can be as short as 15 seconds, so if you want your Alert to be effective, you have to figure out how to send out several thousand notifications in seconds.

[0] https://redalert.me/index_en.html

Mere exposure does not make you learn/enjoy a language

Then how do babies ever learn to speak? The most fluent speakers of foreign languages are almost always immigrants, because exposure is the key to learning to speak.

IIRC, the workflow in Photoshop is this: If you open a photo file, and when you press save there is only one layer in the file, pressing ctrl+s will not change the file format. Generally this means that minor changes (crop, recolor) preserve file types, while larger ones require you to export.

This is the type of question that quickly runs into problems wrt incompleteness, but there are a few key points that show that there are infinitely many theorems

For any given statement P and any given theorem T, P OR T is a theorem, meaning you can generate infinitely many theorems from one.

More worryingly, there are infinitely many theorems that are true but impossible to prove. From Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, we know at least one such theorem must exist. Any theorem of the form Unprovable AND TRUE can be proved only if you can prove the unprovable theorem.

From a more general perspective, it's worth remembering that theorems can always be described as a finitely-long string of symbols in some formal logic system, and so running out of theorems to try and prove is like running out of strings.

I live in a country that has bomb detectors in every doorway. It's not that bad - at the very least, everybody preferrs a bomb detector to another suicide bombing.

I think that when terror is something that can happen constantly for months at a time, people learn to keep living their lives without fear, but also to take measurable actions that really prevent the next attack.

Also: Scots is a mutually intelligible language

On the other hand, just like trying to explain programming to someone who only knows how to use MS Word, trying to explain linguistics to someone without formal training is bound to end in misunderstandings and inaccuracy.

I'm not sure whether the distinction between sub-categories and their parents was treated correctly in this analysis. There is a huge gap between the popularity of HTML and HTML5, CSS and CSS3, and Javascript and its assorted heap of technologies.

My guess is that if you like HTML, you will mark yourself as liking both HTML and HTML5. However, it would be odd to like one and not the other, and pointless to dislike them both.

In that case, it might be more correct to count people who liked/disliked at least one of HTML or HTML5 as being HTML-positive/negative people, but I am not sure that this won't distort the data in some other way.

Gifted people always end up turning out average. Because they aren't special. Nearly every school catering to the middle class and up has a 'gifted' program. How many kids is that? Millions per grade. Everyone who passes through that filter gets to think of themselves as a 'smart person'. In a given K-12 grade, there are 60000 students in the 99th percentile (whatever that means) per criterion.

But that's not enough - parents want to make sure their kid is special. The kind that wins Nobel Prizes. We have to find some way to filter these million above-average kids into a few hundred people who truly make a difference. So maybe your next filter could be some competition. Being accepted to [0] means you are in the top 1500 at doing a hobby science project. We have a long series of K-12 filters (olympiads, languages, music, early university, chess, etc.) and each one ends up with its own few (100-10000) best.

We want to set up our kid for success, but the only way we can have any sort of prediction is by putting the kid through filter after filter after filter and hoping they pass all of them. And if they pass the first three and not the fourth? Then now you have to deal with the fact that our prediction says that they will spend the rest of their life with a regular family and a regular job rather than being something spectacular. And if they pass every test they meet? Well there are 50 other people who matched the same set of tests as they did. How do we select which 49 will end up being normal adults? And what if the next Linus Torvalds ends up being someone who passed some of the filters, but not all of them?

There is no predictor for success. Kids should be encouraged to try and prove themselves, but only so long as they enjoy it so much they continue to choose to pursue this during their own free time.

[0] https://student.societyforscience.org/intel-isef

Why do you think old people and young people should behave differently?

These are two separate concepts. The sponsored stories by outbrain are just your regular old "lose 100 pounds per second" blogspam.

There is another, more benign phenomenon, where a company's PR department writes an article about the company, sends it off to a reporter, and says "Hey, we think you might be interested in publishing this (plus, we already did all the writing for you)" and then the newspaper edits it and publishes it as a regular article.

They see it as a sort of win-win situation. Reporters get an article to publish without any work, and companies get free / cheap PR.

I don't get why people always think that "programming for kids" has to be done with blocks and drag-drop interfaces. It feels like it limits the complexity of what you can build to what fits on a screen, and makes applying anything beyond basic programming logic (like functions) more complex. It also feels like talking down to them instead of letting them experience an actual challenge.

I think it would be far more pedagogically correct to build a simple scripting language than to limit kids to these interfaces. If it weren't for the sheer age of it, I'd still recommend http://tedfelix.com/qbasic/ as a way to wrap your head around the basics.

The average person doesn't have the time needed to learn how to build a house, either. As a society, we solve this problem by delegating the construction industry to a group of people who specialize in it, and whom we can trust to do things properly.

There's no way around the fact that security is complex. If it's too time consuming for the average developer, then they shouldn't be doing it at all.

While it is true that in practice, the size benefit of both compressing and minifying is optimal, the LZ77 algorithm is nearly the same as a minification algorithm, so running both has only marginal benefit.

My first thought was "Try describing the internet to someone 100 years ago - your claim that there is going to be an interconnected global network of electricity-powered adding machines that transport pictures of moving sex by pretending they are made of numbers is going to sound stupid."

Because you're limiting yourself to a single sentence. How about this: "The internet is essentially an expansion of the concept of a telegraph - it is already possible to pass any type of information between two distant people almost instantly. The internet combines this system of information transfer with machines that know how to respond to messages without human intervention - under the condition that the messages follow a certain set of rules. By defining these rules in advance, the telegraph system, which up to now only transferred individual letters, can be co-opted to send things such as pictures and films. The machine can tell who is speaking with it, and perform tasks for that particular person upon request."

This does not sound stupid - it might take some explaining, but anyone with a brain between their ears can understand the basic concept of fast information transfer. They might not think of all of the possible uses of such an invention right away, but I bet that they would easily understand the uses if they were explained in terms of things these people already know.

The competition is basically a huge science fair, and there are no direct constrains on the projects you can submit, but there are several things to take into account. First of all, research has to be conducted entirely in a twelve month period, so already even the best participants can't do work equivalent to a masters degree. During the judging process, the real world impact is given much importance. This contrasts with an emphasis on basic science and theoretocal research - both approaches are fine, but this is a conscious choice. Finally, the judges generally don't actually read a long manuscript but rather rely on a poster and a quick 15 minute interview/pitch where you broadly overview your project - meaning that the competition wants to emphasize scientific speaking (this also is a boon to international participants who wrote their work in another language).

Because the scope of research one can complete in a year is so limited (and has to be balanced with school), and the amount of experience everyone has is small, the scope of the work can't really compete with academia.

Source: participated

Your idea is basically a smaller version of a Kibbutz (excluding the shared finances). Interesting to see that kind of approach pop up in the US.

30 years may have passed since the Model M was released, but typewriters have been in use for much longer. The fundamental structure of a keyboard is not new at all, and as such the mechanisms underlying the highest-quality keyboards can't have changed too much either.

LaTeX is pretty dead outside of science, and it makes sense that this is the state of things.

Using LaTeX effectively requires the same ways of thinking needed in order to write code. For people who aren't used to doing this, adjusting from Word to LaTeX is not going to be easy.

In the professional publishing fields, editors have overcome the shortcomings of Word in a completely different way - using advanced GUI tools that have hundreds of options and settings that you have to learn, but that let you have instant feedback on your decisions. Admittedly, programs such as InDesign can actually make prettier documents than LaTeX, but the comparative amount of effort you need to invest makes it rather a bad tradeoff for someone who already knows LaTeX.

LaTeX is good at making consistently beautiful documents fast, while professional publishing tools let you invest lots of effort into getting something even more beautiful, or downright ugly. For the scientist, LaTeX wins easily, but for someone whose primary job is to make things as pretty as they can be, it is not so.

Who do you suspect is going to hack you?

According to my experience:

1. People I know in real life

2. People who execute phishing attacks

Your strategy is harmful in the first case, though irrelevant in the second