This is literally comic. The plot of the live action comic book movie "Danger: Diabolik" [1] has a segment where the a country's tax records are destroyed, thus making it impossible for the government to collect taxes from its citizens.
One section is "Hacker News People". When I find someone on HN who writes well, I subscribe to their comments in a RSS feed, so I can read everything they write. Very often they comment on a link I don't see on my main HN page, which is useful.
App http://hnapp.com/ converts names to RSS feeds. Example: `author:nickjj`
First job out of school was manufacturing systems support in COBOL and finance systems support in Assembler. As someone who has dealt with 40cm deep line flow stacks of source code for both the COBOL is way easier to hold in my brain. YMMV.
The Life Scientific is a wonderful and engaging podcast. The episodes delve into a scientist's field of study, but really bring out their human side. Hobbies, interests; scientists are people too :)
I read this book many years ago and it made a big impression on me.
His view is that normal, rational, intelligent people... can have fictional stories in their heads about how things work. It takes energy and focus and research to fix these wrong stories, so often we live with them or don't recognize them.
Many times I've been casually talking with someone, say something, then realize that doesn't make any sense. My wrong story made sense in my head, but not when I speak it out loud.
By practicing the scientific method, we can gradually weed out the wrong stories in our heads.
Now I'm going to re-read `The Demon-Haunted World`
I believe we all carry massive mythologies that are tough to displace.
My Kagi-fu fails me. Its by an environmentalist who says any, say "avoid poisoning fish" advice stands against a massive "the line must go up" mythology. He compares it to the geocentrism of the Church; how the Sun, Moon and starts rotate around us and provides for humanity; and how heliocentrism also had to stand up against this massive mythology.
Depth psychology would suggest that mythology is an emergent phenomenon of the psyche; there is no removing it.
Better to understand that it is there and how it works. It is precisely due to this myth-making faculty that in the absence of a legit mythos (i.e. that of Christianity, which was the dominant cosmo-conception / worldview in the west for most of our history) the vacuum of power that is left by the absence of a God figure will be replaced by the nearest approximate/surrogate the psyche can find. This is how we elevate celebrities like Trump to the status of a God-king who can do no wrong.
> "This is how we elevate celebrities like Trump to the status of a God-king who can do no wrong."
I've long wondered about that even as I've watched the shift intensify over the decades, but in the context you describe, the MAGA death-cult starts to sorta come into focus a bit more. As they've abandoned "God" (as evidenced by so many of their actions going directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus in their own bible) they need a replacement god-figure to worship (one more in-line with the baser desires that they're choosing to embody).
I still find it genuinely insane that their worship of one man leads them to fully embrace the downfall of civilized and thoughtful interaction so completely that it becomes a literal existential risk for humanity.
> "Better to understand that it is there and how it works."
This is the way to overcome / work around so many of our basic human "design flaws". Understanding and being aware of those things allows you to take actions to adjust in beneficial ways. This is one of the "special things" that truly separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom; Our ability to outright defy our "baser instincts" (at least some of us, anyhow).
Thats the actual term and its missing from public debate and school curricula.
Most people that consider themselfs atheists are actually undecided, so more of a skeptic then a strong believer in none-god. Questioning your beliefs is the crucial skill skeptics practice and some "rationalists" lack.
I feel like the current generation of young people don’t have anyone like Carl Sagan to bring a sense of wonder to science and exploration. It makes me sad.
> "I feel like the current generation of young people don’t have anyone like Carl Sagan to bring a sense of wonder to science and exploration. It makes me sad."
The closest I've seen in modern times is maybe [Neil DeGrasse Tyson][1].
Oh yeah, duh! I totally forgot about YouTube... Tons of great science communicators on YouTube! I should know better. I've learned truck-loads of great "sciencey" skills and knowledge from YouTubers.
Your reply is not very HN, but you have a point. Many things cannot be settled with a scientific argument because we rarely disagree about the mass of an electron or the spectrum of Helium. In our daily discussions, almost nothing can be decided by science. Most of it boils down to different values, and different ways to think about the world (Weltanschauung). Finding common ground in those cases is hard work which requires inderstanding, openness and fairness of both sides. Or the acceptance of authority.
Everything is subject to fallibility, even things that appear true by definition (if they attempt to say something about reality). Not only matters of worldview, moral values, and philosophy, but science too. It's not simply adding bricks to an edifice that is permanent and final. It's all wrong stories, of quite steadily improving similarity to reality. The goal at any point in time is to be wrong in the next way.
That's understood. Science is never the definitive answer, but I added the "authority" bit for a reason: if you don't know what the mass of an electron is or how you could go about finding out, you end up having to accept authority. But there are many things that are (currently) not open to a similar objective scientific approach. And those are our daily concerns, and the most contentious topics. The scientific method isn't going to help there.
A while back, a junior asked me a question. They wanted to do X, they had code, with error Y. So they searched for it, got a page on Stack Overflow, pasted "the answer", then got a new and different error.
They:
- didn't understand the original code
- didn't understand the original error
This is fine. They then searched for the error and found a relevant page.
This is also fine. However, they:
- cut-pasted "an answer" from SO _without understanding if it was relevant or not_
The junior was hoping to work with a Puzzle: adding information will gradually give them a solution. In practice they are working with a Mystery: more information makes the task harder since they can't distinguish between different aspects.
I focused them on a few relevant details and let them go to it.
I had the identical reactions, and like you it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Java: "stiff", awkward, verbose. Gets the job done but ugh.
C#: "soft", flexible, has possibilities
Although to be fair I programming in Java a long time ago, and haven't done much with C#. C# I see as a "corporate Python", vs Java I see as a language designed by committee and not for use by humans.
Java gives me similar feelings to what people say about Go: it may be a little verbose, but you always know exactly what to write and how to write it, and looking at other people's code you get a very good sense of what it does because it follows very familiar patterns.
The "brotha, eugh!" feeling comes from the enterprise frameworks, which tangle all that up in a mess of factories, DI autowiring, and inversion of control. COBOL may have been a lot to type, but its execution model was straightforward, like a BASIC program. Java EE's execution model is NOT straightforward. And it's no wonder why so many attempts to "modernize" old COBOL code using Java EE fail.
In my case it helps that I've been poking at Java since the very beginning, having discovered a bug in the 1.0.1 runtime, and compared to contemporary C++, it was a delight except for the performance problems.
C# doesn't feel too different from Java to me, aside from being more "Microsofty".
"Proper" generics, value types, LINQ, operator overloading, excellent native interop etc make a big enough difference to me atleast to prefer c# over java. Is being "Microsofty" a bad thing and "Oracly" or "Googly" a good thing?
As a counterpoint, I find coding assignments refreshing:
- I always learn new things
- learn and experiment new ways of doing a task
- get to see how a different team thinks about projects
During the walk through, I can demonstrate my organization and documentation skills, in addition to having an interesting back-and-forth about different tradeoffs.
If an assignment takes too long, then I make sure a subset is implemented. Then the rest is stubbed out, to be handwaved on the walk-through. In theory. Sometimes I get carried away and work too long on an assignment.
