Hacker News: cderwin

New comment by cderwin in "A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm"

cderwin — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 17:16:40 +0000

It's not legal to sell it in a store but there's no problem buying directly from the source.

At least that's how it worked in new Hampshire about 10 years ago.

New comment by cderwin in "Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado"

cderwin — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 23:12:57 +0000

Arguably nothing. Look at Comcast's ad campaigns on twitter to promote its own version of net neutrality. Fortunately for now, it seems that there are more powerful institutions in directing the public dialogue.

New comment by cderwin in "Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado"

cderwin — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 23:10:21 +0000

It seems to me that it is unrealistic to expect a company -- even one as big as Comcast -- to compete with the government, with the power of eminent domain and subsidizing costs with local taxes.

New comment by cderwin in "American Democracy Is Drowning in Money"

cderwin — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 21:13:09 +0000

I don't think it's reasonable to call winning via the only electoral system we've ever had not "fair and square."

New comment by cderwin in "Ask HN: What maths are critical to pursuing ML/AI?"

cderwin — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 21:43:04 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "1 in 3 Americans Have $0 Saved for Retirement (2016)"

cderwin — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 09:33:41 +0000

There would also be an increase in institutional spending, which would offset at least some of the deflationary pressure.

New comment by cderwin in "Vue.js vs. React"

cderwin — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 18:37:13 +0000

Vue optionally supports jsx, too

New comment by cderwin in "The Kolmogorov option"

cderwin — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 18:34:18 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "The Kolmogorov option"

cderwin — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 18:28:22 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "The Kolmogorov option"

cderwin — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 16:04:26 +0000

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?

New comment by cderwin in "The Kolmogorov option"

cderwin — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 15:46:01 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth"

cderwin — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 03:17:58 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth"

cderwin — Sun, 06 Aug 2017 20:51:47 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth"

cderwin — Sun, 06 Aug 2017 20:20:09 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "Clojure will affect the way you think about programming"

cderwin — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 14:01:00 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "The digital native is a myth"

cderwin — Sun, 30 Jul 2017 19:20:08 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web"

cderwin — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 14:57:28 +0000

I think this is the crux of the matter. Apple supporting PWA means lower quality apps for its users, and Apple has the market share to demand apps be native code.

New comment by cderwin in "Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet"

cderwin — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 22:09:20 +0000

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.

New comment by cderwin in "Doppio: JVM written in JavaScript"

cderwin — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 13:20:16 +0000

I can't speak to whether it is used more often, but I would bet the java-based Nashorn vm is significantly slower than the c++-based nodejs. In fact, a cursory google search shows this is the case, and it's not even close.

See: http://blog.jonasbandi.net/2014/03/performance-nashorn-vs-no... http://pieroxy.net/blog/2015/06/29/node_js_vs_java_nashorn.h...

(I can't speak to the quality of either of these tests, but the results seem decisive)

New comment by cderwin in "As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail"

cderwin — Sat, 01 Jul 2017 21:20:20 +0000

There are only a couple cities in the US where it is realistic for a normal (i.e. able to afford a car) person to live without a car, and most of those cities are already served by Acela.