another-one-off

What looks bad about the ClojureScript example? I'm obviously a bit slow, but I can't see any practical difference between the two.

I do prefer the ClojureScript because I don't know how to type "λ" and that seems like a usability handicap. Minor complaint I know.

Is any bias towards one gender doing better in the workplace acceptable? If men and women perform equally and we balance outcomes as is a stated goal in many circles, how could a male full-fill their traditional gender norm as a provider?

This HN comment was the first time I've ever heard of anyone talking about 'healthy masculinity' in a context of the phrase 'toxic masculinity'. The entire thrust that I've heard is that having a unique or predominantly male role in society is what toxic masculinity means in practice.

The gender theorists will have their own internal world with a lot of nuance, but the stuff that is leaking out into law and corporate diversity initiatives looks a lot more like true gender blindness. The logical flip side of that, it is quite hard to construct a positive masculine role model. The raw physical differences suggest male strength, but any actual exercise of strength apart from showing off is probably either illegal, uneconomic or low status work (sporting excellence a glaring exception). Compare that to giving birth which is incentivised, an amazing long term economic investment into old age and quite high status (mothers occupy a special place in the world). It is simply a lot easier to construct a positive feminine image than a masculine one in a world where only physical realities make a difference and everything else is expected to be gender blind.

Obviously there are positive roles for males to fill, but the idea that they are masculine in some sense isn't really acceptable. Males can fill them in their capacities as humans, but they can't be distinguished from women. What can 'healthy masculinity' mean in such a world? Adding the word masculine in doesn't add anything. 'Healthy masculinity' is basically 'Healthy femininity'.

Imagine the mucky world of politics; somebody is advocating or willing to consider almost any crazy idea. So any state of law is usually a balance between forces that want to move regulation in some new direction.

If the pro-liberty forces don't have the numbers to quell that sort of law when it is proposed; the question becomes where is the line that it starts to become an issue? Because the pro-safety, pro-conformance factions will keep pushing as far as they can. If they've got the power to start reducing liberty then they are going to keep at it until there is a well supported line that has been crossed. Not a line that an unusually intelligent, educated and thoughtful person would identify a concern but a line where ordinary people start to vote differently.

It is very hard to justify liberty to a disinterested observer until the authoritarians actually start taking power; and by then it doesn't really help. It becomes too hard to organise.

I'm struggling to think of any aspects of masculinity that I could safely class as 'healthy' in the current climate.

For example, traditionally the view that males should be providers for the family would have been considered a healthy aspect of masculinity. That doesn't go unchallenged any more; for example there is a real concern out there that men are too competitive and effective at securing high paid jobs.

It is an anecdote I suppose, but those involved in the gender activist communities don't seem to allow such a thing as 'healthy masculinity' because it supposes there is something positive can be exclusively/predominantly masculine and the girls don't get involved. Bit of a non-starter as ideas go.

Guessing: Got to have a system that is resistant to single points of failure and where the costs of knocking out a communication node is high relative to the benefits the government gets. A website is quite centralised.

I fully support the teachers doing this, but the response by employers is more likely to be to lower the workload than anything else.

The only effective (read: doesn't cost anything to execute) strategy employers have to calibrate how much workload can be achieved in a given time is to keep increasing the amount of work until people start quitting or jobs go undone, then scale back a little bit. There are other strategies that cost more to execute or require enlightened management; but they aren't the norm in my experience.

All a teacher can really do for a class is either 1:1 time with an individual or N:1 time with a group. All the details of exactly what gets done only obscures the fact that there is always going to be a good outcome for students if the teacher puts in another half-hour of unpaid work and that teachers shouldn't do that because it is unpaid.

> You can redeploy the code scheme independently of the data scheme and set up permissions so that higher layers can only use objects from the code scheme and never touch the data.

That all just sounds a touch complicated compared to data in database, code somewhere else (like git). I'm circling back to the same point in a couple of different ways, but pgSQL specialises in the relational model of data. That isn't a great data model for code and there are already better ways to manage code than shoehorning it into the database. Its cool that it is possible, and I'm not saying that someone who does is making a mistake. But I also don't think they are gaining an advantage and there is a really easy opportunity to separate out where bugs can occur from where data lives.

> How often do you plan to migrate to another database? In my experience this almost never happens in reality, but the layers above come and go.

If you are using a database for its advanced general purpose programming capabilities? The chances probably start to get more likely.

Databases that are a store of data don't need to change because they already do their one job (disk <-> relational model translation) really well. If they are pressured to do 2 or 3 tasks like business logic then suddenly it is a lot more likely that there will be pressure to swap databases.

If I were using SQLite and someone wants to do fancy triggers then maybe I need to swap to PostgreSQL. Avoiding that sort of decision making is a great reason to seal the data completely away from the code.

All sorts of things are possible but it misses a fantastic opportunity to compartmentalise the data away from the implementation. If it doesn't make sense to compartmentalise data and logic, why compartmentalise anywhere? Do the whole project in one big file. Of all the surprises a project is going to face 'oh, this data is useful for [new thing]' is one of the most likely. And everyone expects to find a boundary drawn there because it is such an obvious place to draw one; so it saves on confusion.

Putting complex business logic in the database is opening up all sorts of interesting new ways for data to be unavailable, corrupted or complicated to access. It is easy to imagine it working out well for simple requirements where there just needs to be something that works.

PostgreSQL is a piece of software that takes data and enforces the relational data model on it. Great idea. But the relational model of data is really only tuned to relational algebra. Put complex logic in there and all that is really being accomplished is now you can't migrate away from PostgreSQL. Relational databases already have great integration with every other programming language in current use.

I can't quite interpret what you are saying; so I'll say what I hope you are saying:

If the x86 and x86_64 instruction sets became an open standard so that anyone could implement them; that would be great for consumers. If Intel is in a position to halve prices in the face of competition there are obviously not enough players in the market.

> the pieces' powers [don't] mutate [in a Go game]

That comment in particular suggests to me that you havn't spent a lot of time playing Go. The pieces' powers mutate quite spectacularly as the situation around them changes.

> Most interesting problems in the world don't mirror Go's orderly rules

This is true, but it isn't obvious this is going to slow deep learning down. For example, you cite players taking turns which is a significant handicap for a computer. If it comes down to reflexes, robots can win even with worse decision making algorithms than a human.

In the context of deep learning, if the situation mutates in ways that the training regime didn't then an AI will have trouble. However, people love to overestimate both how often exceptional circumstances come up (the correct answer is rarely) and how good humans are at responding to them (correct answer is badly).

My favorite part of learning the training system for artificial neural networks was that it incidentally explains a lot of human failure modes really well. It isn't at all obvious the humans have a sustainable advantage here.

The classic issue here is the lack of evidence could mean it didn't happen or that that the evidence is expertly hidden.

However the American spy network is large, well provisioned, has no compunction about spying on Russians and was controlled by Democrats when the alleged conspiracy took place. If there is no conclusive evidence of collusion then it didn't happen.

The idea that the Russians are better at influencing the American people than the Democrat and Republican campaign machines is jaw dropping. It doesn't make any sense. Trump could have found more capable people to collude with if he wanted to.

> Would you consider them trusthworthy in court, where lives are at stake?

Probably. Human intelligence is extremely fallible - based on the statistics the only reason we trust humans to do half the stuff they do is because there is literally no choice.

If we held humans to a high objective engineering standard We wouldn't:

* Let them drive

* Let them present their memories as evidence in a court case

* Entrust them with monitoring jobs

* Allow them to perform surgical operations

Humans are the best we have at those things, but from a "did we secure the best result with the information we had" perspective they are not very reliable. A testable and consistently performing AI with known failure modes might even be able to outperform a human with a higher failure rate (eg, we can reconfigure our road systems if there is just one scenario an AI driver can't handle).

Basically, you might be dead on the money that they are not 'trustworthy enough', but lets not lose sight of the fact that even being an order of magnitude from human performance might be enough after costs and engineering benefits get factored in. The weakest link is the stupidest human, and that is quite a low bar.

Being bombarded in a trench for days and still being partially functional as a soldier is pretty much the gold standard for courage. Nevertheless 'water behind a dam you call on [with different sizes for different people]' is a very arguable metaphor.

There are vanishingly few people stupid enough to subject themselves to stress and fear voluntarily just because. They either see themselves as having no choice (possibly correctly) or because they perceive a reward to be had (possibly one related to validating who they see themselves as). It basically follows (handwave) that courage is a combined ability to either not feel stress (or fear) in some situation - which does not run out - or to push or regardless of stresses in pursuit of some higher goal.

In the latter case, once someone decides that it isn't worth it they aren't going to come back again, acting a bit like a dam running out of water. But their ability to act courageously will change depending on the circumstance, and in some instances they may be significantly more courageous if they don't really see themselves as having a choice. Eg, a parent defending their child vs a parent defending random strangers would be completely different in terms of how much punishment they endure.

Cheerful concurrence. It is worth remembering that most of history and indeed the present can be described in very bleak terms given a little bit of effort.

Humans have good reason to fear the future. The future is very scary. However, the future has always been very scary, and it isn't any scarier now than it has been since the invention of record keeping, where basically the same threats were present. The past is also very scary to anyone who sits down and realises that the people in the past are basically the same as the people in the present.

The future isn't going to be any bleaker than the past, it will be just as full of hope, success and vibrancy.

Rich Hickey stands for good design. That means saying "no" to a lot if ideas that are good, but not part of the vision, and it means not running experiments on your users in the main releases. Whether he reaches that ideal, I dunno, but he lays out the vision pretty clearly when he speaks. It isn't the only way, but it is Clojure's way.

When he talks about customers and stakeholders, he is talking about people who have bought in to that design. It is very easy to support his position here. Rich knows exactly how he wants to program and the man is a visionary of data-driven programming and thinking. If you don't like that vision, maybe don't use Clojure and find a different lisp.

Great design is a very foreign idea to a lot of mainstream software developers - most of them, sooner or later, go for the "big rewrite" because they didn't get the design right to start with. Things like Python 2 -> 3 spring to mind (breaking changes to print! whoever thought that was a good idea didn't respect the language users). With that rational, he is promising not to do exactly what the Python people did.