All of them.

It's more important to learn paradigms than to learn just a language. Each language will forcibly teach you new paradigms which you can then use when writing in other languages. Knowing both Python and C, for example, makes me a better programmer in both languages.

It also lets you choose which language will most easily meet the needs of each task, and even open you to the possibility of mixing languages in different areas of one project.

Unchecking the "email me that report" button almost certainly doesn't stop them from collecting that information and using it for their own nefarious purposes.

I don't think there's anything wrong with forming an opinion based on incomplete knowledge.

The problem lies in refusing to change your opinion when exposed to additional knowledge, which is probably tied to not wanting to flipflop after making an initial statement that turned out to be inaccurate.

There's also the problem of not actively educating yourself if you need to make a decision with significant consequences.

I have a recurrent nightmare that I have to interface with a computer network protocol that is written to use little endian, with named, variable-sized fields and no schema.

... Programmers might not be human.

I'm working on the mypy static type checker, for PEP 484

Today I rebased two interdependent patchsets (testsuite driver enhancements and xml reports) into a different order. I'm also working on a separate patchset to efficiently add column-tracking info and generally improve the error message system.

I don't usually like having so many outstanding patchsets, but the maintainer is on vacation.

I hate "proprietary". As someone who learned everything about programming through the open-source world, why would you advertise "vendor lock-in; incompatible with everything else"?

What I find missing on this site is a distinction between several related, but different, categories:

* Whether an action is morally acceptable.

* Whether an action is morally optimal.

* Whether an action is morally required.

* Whether an action is ethically acceptable.

* Whether an action is ethically required.

* Whether an action is what you would do if you had time to think.

* Whether an action is what you think you would do if you had to act quickly.

* Whether an action is actually what you would do if you had to act quickly.

(Note, in this list I have deliberately left out some possible wordings, such as "ethicially optimal", which I believe don't exist.)

As a user of this site, I have an interest in the continued existence of this site.

Illegal activity is over the line, you can't just "ignore it and wait for it to go away" like you can with normal trolls.

"If you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy?"

TL;DR: you can no longer unpublish your own packages, but we can still do it against your will.

I think this is the k-tuple conjecture that the article talks about, but:

Look at the odd numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, ... every third one is a multiple of 3, every fifth one is a multiple of 5, every seventh one is a multiple of 7, etc.

The same exact pattern holds with any stride: 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, 91 ... because if α is a multiple of β, then α+βγ is obviously also a multiple of β.

I originally thought of this in the context of twin primes. Since every third odd number is a multiple of 3, twin primes can only happen in the gaps, but the gaps are more likely to get hit by being a multiple of some other odd prime the further you go.

Now, with a stride of 10 (but still considering multiples of 3), we know that adjacent primes are much more likely if they don't have to cross the multiple of 3 gap (or rather, don't have to cross it very often). But, at the same time, there are many other smaller strides which might generate a prime even closer. While each of them is also vulnerable to the 3, their strides are smaller so they are more likely to have something* escape.

It's important to vote in the primary, not just let it happen.

Most people who don't vote in the final election do it because by that point, it's a vote for the lesser of two weasels.

That's called "having good evolutionary instincts."

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the the Ubuntu/Gnome approach is often worse. It tries to simplify everything down so much, but ends up being extremely inflexible if you need to do anything slightly complicated.

For my distro, I use Debian Testing That way I get the latest releases instead of 6 months late, but at least it has 10 days of testing to stop critical bugs. Having continuous updates means that I don't ever have to work through a whole bunch of problems at the same time.

For my desktop, I use KDE, which aims to be more of a "power user" interface instead of treating users like they're retards.

Another great community I've found is: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/

You really want to make it easier to the government to compromise the VMs?

I was lucky enough to be born smart enough that I never had to really put any effort into learning. But on the downside, that means I never learned how to put effort into learning.

That said, I've noticed that the biggest difference between me and my classmates was simply the way of looking at problems.

Don't choose classes based on what you find easy or fun. Take them based on what will be useful, even if only peripherally. Knowing about some things will make it easier to do related things - for example, I took a CAD class even though I knew I was going for a CS degree.

It is not important to finish all your homework. It is important to be able to prove, at any moment, that you could complete the homework. It's better to spend that time learning the material, or related material. Do not take this as an opportunity to just be lazy and do other stuff, it is very easy to not learn anything in that case. As a self-check, do a random sampling of each homework assignment's problems (not the first ones, since they are usually the easiest - in particular aim to do either the hardest or second-hardest).

Remember that teachers are not always in it to teach you accurate information, sometimes they're in it because they love to be unquestioned. As someone who was smarter than most (if not all) of my teachers and could pick out their lies, this was a problem for me. I'm not sure what I would have done differently, but it is really important to recognize that not everything you're taught is actually true.

If you have friends that are dropping out of school, drop those friends. Any friends you have now you'll rarely talk to again after high school. And the high school social environment is very harmful. Don't get involved - you'll never see these people again for the rest of your life. Don't go to parties, and especially don't go to bed after 10 PM or so. Sleep is how the brain stores knowledge.

It is okay to have hobbies that interfere with your study time, but only if those hobbies produce something, rather than consume. Nobody cares if you can name all 151 pokemon or do the jump on Rainbow Road. They do care, if but for a moment, if you're good at basketball, or if you can do something artistic, or write computer code like I do. Having a hobby that produces something is a great way of managing procrastination.

Eh, not that many people actually care about FPH being banned.

I still think the biggest feature missing from tags is something like StackOverflow's "tag wiki".

This is possible for personal tags, but obviously not for public tags. Perhaps, on public tags, since Hubski rejects the idea of moderators (though filtering out a community tag is a rough approximiation - e.g. #spam - I'm not sure how sustainable that is though), top taggers could enter a one-lline description for that tag.

Speaking of tag descriptions, when you tag a new/edited post, you should have a popup with tab-completion and some of the summary. Among other things, this would minimize tpyos.

From the numbers I've seen, if we seized all that money, it would pay off the entire national debt and a third more ($20 trillion illegal money, $15 trillion debt).

Of course, I'm not sure if it's legal to seize all the money, or just the unpaid taxes. My instinct is that it's legal to at least freeze it all.

Also, who would have guessed I'd one day be cheering for the PATRIOT Act?

Favorite out of context quote:

Chance has some special properties. It is a swift, consistent, and (unless your chickens all die) relatively cheap decider.

But consider also http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141241

That ... sounds better than the status quo, and is at least imaginable. But who are you going to trust that the state will protect, not persecute, the minority?

Of course, if the state's protection disappears, would that be any worse than the status quo? I'm not personally involved enough to be able to answer that.

Educate people to stop being afraid of guns.

Seriously, a knife is far more likely to kill you. A gun, even if it manages to shoot you, probably won't kill you, especially if the shooter is distracted.

What's curious to me is: why are men primed to think like women not having anywhere near as significant a penalty?

If I find a search doesn't work well on DuckDuckGo, I just prepend !g to it.

Honestly, bang searches are what made me switch, not the privacy thing.

You're probably right, I'm more familiar with takedowns under Copyright law.

But "wait until somebody sues us" is still a terrible plan.

Personally, the very first thing I did was disable Hubski's emails because there were too many of them.

If any mails are sent, it should be only in aggregate form.

It's still scary that free sites are being strong-armed by the mafia though.

The whole point of America is that the government doesn't get to decide for us, the people do. My problem with the NSA is that it is answerable to no one, especially not the people. That's not freedom.

Quoting the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

I think the current generation of young(ish) people is particular disconnected from the older generation. There are all sorts of technological stuff that we know and use without thinking, but the older generation knows more about some practical things, especially about interactions with the business world, which seems to be taboo in the school system.