Without comment in regards to how you approach answering this question, one of the reasons people ask it is that they want to know if you have a future. And further they want to know if they can be a part of it. The thinking goes that if you don’t have a future or your future won’t include them then there is no opportunity for a relationship to develop that will work for everyone. I suppose that can be said, as in the article, as “learn about your motivation and goals.” I certainly consider that framing of the question to be weak and, as you allude to, potentially disingenuous.

Sounds like a good summary, but for much broader meaning of the word “problem” that would seem from it. The book gives a list of questions designed to explore the space around your problem from many different perspectives, hopefully guiding you towards a different problem that’s easier to solve, and will contribute necessary insight or data into your main one.

The idea is called divide and conquer.

What is the actual message to European users of such political statement?

We don’t want your money? We don’t want your data? You do not deserve our technology? We are the Spiders of the Web and you are just a fly?

Btw, as an European I would really appreciate a clear statement on a website saying “we are sorry but we cannot protect your data and respect your rights, please search for one of our competitor that can do it better”.

I’m not ironic.
GDPR defines several important rights for the data subject that imply certain investments in cybersecurity and a basic quality of service. Being able to say “I cannot do this right, please ask to someone else” is a sign of professionalism.

GDPR apply to data of European citizens worldwide and to data of non European citizens collected while they are in the Union.

However, if your registration form have a mandatory checkbox “I’m NOT a European citizen and I’m not going to use your services while in the European Union” AND the such checkbox is uncheked by default AND you block all European IPs, I think no European court will ever annoy you.

I think what voronoipotato may have been alluding to was that aside from that age largely being turmoil for emotions as they learn to deal with them. Teenagers aren’t as battle hardened as adults and having so much attention plastered upon them for it to suddenly turn nasty can be a massive blow emotionally and without the right support can end up dissuading them from continuing.

It sounds like the teen will be fine, with someone like Scott Aaronson on the same team - even if the idea turns out to be flawed they will have all the support they need to continue.

I’m not jealous at all. I don’t have any desire to get into academia or compete in that way. I stopped with a community college degree. The difference a few years can make at that age in emotional development is pretty big. Also they have other past successes however small to fall back on. Some people have one big (perceived) catastrophic failure at the beginning and they give up, and they never come back. More importantly, notoriety isn’t Tang’s accomplishment. Saying that they shouldn’t be forced into the limelight on their first attempt isn’t saying they should never have had the opportunity to submit or contribute to scientific progress.

Yeah I don’t see how that makes it any better.

This was already possible with JS, wasm doesn’t fundamentally change things here

It makes things easier, and the general increase in performance allows more interesting and obtrusive categories of malware than we saw with JS.

Heck, before Meltdown/Spectre was announced, I was in a room with one of the main designers of WebAssembly, and someone brought up SharedArrayBuffer for some reason.

There’s no sane way to have multiple threads and shared memory primitives of which I’m aware that don’t enable timing attacks at this time. The option seems to be to remove them entirely, and the Github link shows that at least a few people are hesitant to do that.

TC39 is not the body that standardizes WebAssembly.

Thank you for the correction–I don’t know if there is a lot of bleedover between the groups. If there is, my concern remains.

This kind of slander is why I rarely post to lobste.rs anymore. I’m out.

That’s my honest opinion, slander wasn’t my intent. This pattern is being repeated everywhere in our industry. If you don’t think it applies in your case, please correct me.

In my haste I plain forgot to list Mozilla. One of many glaring oversights I’ve made today.

That said, my point is that there are really only 4 vendors that matter, since the vast, vast majority of browsers are powered using one of 3 or 4 engines.

Enjoyability seems to me to be a bad criterion to judge a tool on. I may enjoy one hammer more than another, but I still need to use specific ones for specific tasks and the ones I enjoy less are no less functional and suitable.

I don’t think the remainder of your post depends on your remark about ‘enjoying’ a web framework, which I feel is extra evidence for that not mattering.

Of course web frameworks are not optimal. However, I take the leaky abstraction here and there any time over the mess I have seen with non-framework code. I did Python starting with Python 2.3 which was released in the early 2000s. Back then, I didn’t do Python web development much, yet every now and then I wrote something or looked at options how to do things. This was the time of mod_python and still cgi. Nowadays we have Django, Pyramids and if you feel like having a bit more freedom - Flask. I must say I wouldn’t want to go back.

Potentially, if you have very special requirements, that actively go against the typical patterns, no framework is an option, but other wise it isn’t. at least I wouldn’t like to take over maintenance of such a codebase.

That’s actually quite a nice indicator: “If someone would use that advice, would I like to take over maintenance of that code base?”.

I picked up this part of the analogy as well, and if the only intent was to show that symbols take on meaning over time then something like a dove (symbol of peace & religion) could be used, or the caduceus (universal symbol for a medical alert), or many many others.

It is my opinion based on the rest of the content in the article that the author chose the swastika intentionally to evoke a strong negative emotion from readers that they would then transfer onto Google and Material Design whether consciously or unconsciously.

Python is not a product, and you’re not a paying customer, you don’t get to say “do this instead of that” because none of the volunteer maintainers owes you to produce a language for you. Just walking by and telling people what to do with their project is at the very least impolite.

I agree with the general direction of your post, but Python is a product and it is marketed to people, through the foundation and advocacy. It’s not a commercial product (though, given the widespread industry usage, you could argue it somewhat is). It’s reasonable of users to form expectations.

Where it goes wrong is when individual users claim that this also means that they need to be consulted or their consultation will steer the project to the better. http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html has an interesting investigation of that.

Adding syntax variations is not done at the expense of performance, different volunteers are working on what’s more interesting to them.

Regrettably, a lot of languages and ecosystems suffer greatly from the incoherence that this sort of permissive attitude creates.

Software is just as much about what gets left out as what gets put in, and just because Jane Smith and John Doe have a pet feature they are excited about doesn’t mean they should automatically be embraced when there are more important things on fire.

I find that “people working on what interests them” as opposed to taking a systematic survey of what use cases are most needed and prioritizing those is a hard problem in software projects, and I find it curious that people think this is not a problem to be solved for open source projects that are not single writer/single user hobby projects.

Python is interesting because it forms core infrastructure for many companies, so presumably they would be working on issues related to real use cases. Projects like numpy and Cython are examples of how people see an important need (performance) and go outside the official language to get something done.

“If you want something to happen in an open source project, volunteer to do it.” is also one of those hostile attitudes that I find curious. In a company with a paid product of course that attitude won’t fly, but I suspect that if an open source project had that attitude as a default, it would gradually lose users to a more responsive one.

As an example, I want to use this response from a library author as an example of a positive response that I value. This is a library I use often for a hobby. I raised an issue and the author put it in the backlog after understanding the use case. They may not get to it immediately. They may not get to it ever based on prioritization, but they listened and put it on the list.

Oddly enough, I see this kind of decent behavior more in the smaller projects (where I would not expect it) than in the larger ones. I think the larger ones with multiple vendors contributing turn into a “pay to play” situation. I don’t know if this is the ideal of open source, but it is an understandable outcome. I do wish the hostility would decrease though.

He did say “please”.

I guess you are saying my grass roots campaign to displace “Should Python have :=” with “gradual typing leading to improved performance” as a higher priority in the Python world is failing here. I guess you are right :)

Yes to all of the above. But not understanding where all the personal hostility is coming from. Apparently having the opinion that “Should := be part of Python” is much less important than “Let’s put our energies towards getting rid of the GIL and creating a kickass implementation that rivals C++” raises hackles. I am amused, entertained but still puzzled at all the energy.

Heh. I think this is an example of the Lobste.rs rating system working as it should :) I posted an immoderate comment borne of an emotional response to a perfectly reasonable reply, and end up with a +1: +4 -2 troll, -1 incorrrect :)

No, my point is that someone ‘intellectually inclined’ could argue that in a way consistent with the author’s argument, which I then expect the author, like you, to disagree with. So the argument seems internally inconsistent to me.

So to explicate: if the author feels this artform is hurt by too much intellectualism (apperently at the cost of inspiration, because the main complaint in the article pertains the lack thereof; the article may as well have been titled ‘lack of inspiration hurts generative art’) then the ratio of intellectualism to inspiration must be lower than it is for other artforms. But if one appreciates the intellectual component, that means they would probably think the other artforms would be short on intellectualism and they could argue that contrapositive with the same argument.

What I think is that intellectualism and inspiration aren’t mutually exclusive and that the author is arguing ‘replacement’ of inspiration by intellectualism to not have to come out and openly say ‘generative artists lack inspiration’.

There’s a video on YT somewhere of a talk by a physicist (IIRC) on why deep learning is so ridiculously effective - it pretty much boils down to the same reason that mathematics is so unreasonably effective in describing physical systems in general, i.e. (handwaving extremely wildly from memory) that physical systems tend to be simple functions of their inputs (albeit with many, many inputs!) where causality is preserved. This is what makes it possible for RNNs and the like to approximate physical systems in various ways, because the nature of said physical systems is exactly what permits approximations of the information content of the system to be at least partially valid instead of being a total loss.

(I tried to find the video, but there are too many terrible ones on the same topic these days. I’ll have another look later.)

Maybe, but that’s not an argument for using a non-integrated, harder-to-check plan if you have the option of building the “plan” right into the program.

I’ve written 100 line TLA+ specs that captured the behavior of 2000+ lines of Ruby. Keeping them in sync is not that hard.

Keeping code in sync with comments that literally live along side them is even more “not that hard”, and yet fails to happen on an incredibly regular basis.

In my experience, in any given system where two programmer artifacts have to be kept in sync manually, they will inevitably fall out of sync, and the resulting conflicting information, and confusion or mistaken assumption of which one is correct, will result in bugs and other programmer errors impacting users. The solution is usually to either generate one artifact from the other, or try to restructure one artifact such that it obviates the need for the other.

For example to increase the number and variety of reviewers and thus reducing bugs.

That seems very unlikely though. Even obscure programming languages are better-known than TLA+. More generally I can’t imagine getting valuable input on this kind of subject from anyone who wasn’t capable of understanding a programming language. I find the likes of Cucumber to be worse than useless, and the theoretical rationale for those is stronger since test cases seem further away from the essence of the program than program analysis is.

Are you thinking of a specific compiler? I agree that programmers think mathematically even when they use programming languages to express their reasoning, but I still feel some “impedence” in every language I use.

I mostly work in Scala so I guess that influences my thoughts. There are certainly improvements to the language that I can imagine, but not enough to be worth using something other than the official language when communicating with other people.

Mainly Spark. Hardware performance/cost is probably worse unless you’re on a really big dataset, but for me it more than made up for it in programmer cost: I found it so much easier to answer questions based on our data when I could use a shell in a normal programming language with access to our data as normal values and just call e.g. .aggregateByKey and pass code to do what I wanted.