> I'm happy to accept that I have two apples of my desk if all my friends and the guy I bought them from agree with that definition.
That’s useful, but very vague, and very movable criteria for “exists”. (Approx. Must be based in physical reality + enough people subjectively agree on it)
Do following finite numbers exist: -1, 0, 0.5, PI, 2^300 (more than particles in observable universe), sqrt(-1)? Do individual digits exist? If PI exist, how many digits does it have? Do models and algorithms in general exist? Do model existance depend on limits of your/somebodies capacity to understand them?
I would propose alternative, but useful way to look at this. “Two” and “infinity” are models. Both these models are useful, but “two” is just more common one. (Still, various infinities are useful for bunch of people)
>Problem is that unknown unknows are not actionable.
How about carefully testing something new, especially something that one ingests? As far as I know no such testing is done, if it's done, it's done with the goal of gaming the safety standards that may be expected of the product. You cannot fix an ignorant, corrupt society.
How extensive safety testing of a hammer should be?
Should there be double blind clinical trials for it’s health impact when caried daily on a tool belt?
For most people, answer will differ depending on what the hammer is made of (iron vs uranium vs radium).
My point here would be that a) we must choose appropriate set of tests as they cost in money/time/opportunities, b) the choice of tests must be influenced by what we know and/or suspect.
If unknown is unknown, then we don’t know that we need a test for it.
I can see you’re getting downvoted but I 100% agree. StackExchange is so, so bad at this - they will close a question because there’s like a 75% overlap with a different question.
Well the end the result is now I don't answer questions, except occasionally on HN. The end result of all this mansplaining / geeksplaining is nosplaing. I just hope we can make AIs advanced enough to take over before the wheels fall off.
She went on to accuse a bunch of other people of some other nonsense so it was really a matter of time rather than the manner in which I answered questions.
In the highly likely case where your answers are crap, the world is spared yet another person who thinks they are well-suited to add to the mess. In the equally possible case where your answers are not crap, you are spared having to deal with people who cannot appreciate your campaign medals.
nosplaining is great. Welcome to how most of us live.
"In the highly likely case where your answers are crap" hahahaha.
I think there is a natural impulse to want to help others but there has been a shift of dynamic where the flood of newbs with their entitlement and hostility to those helping them has pushed knowledgeable and helpful people away. And now the newbs can only talk to each other where they can reinforce each others ignorance with the false perception that what they know is correct because they perceive it to be the consensus.
The suggested requirement to avoid the microaggression is to answer both X and Y even when most likely X is irrelevant on the off chance that it isn't. According to some I'm not even allowed to XY probe and must answer both aspects in full to avoid offence. Sure; let me do more free work for you. I used to have some of my code available as open source but got sick of the barrage of questions by those who fail to do even the modicum of effort to understand what they're doing and then get mad at you when you don't provide the exact worked solution to their problem.
People no longer fail to learn, other people have failed to teach them. It's a complete abandonment of personal responsibility. Sure, at this stage I'm shouting into the wind but I think things are going to get really bad really quickly and I feel sorry for those who will have to endure the consequences.
I disagree: I don't think there's a pure natural impulse to want to help others. It's usually coated with a bunch of other stuff, inadvertently (e.g. when dealing with attractive members of the opposite sex: wanting to prove our value; or when dealing with requests for help within an organization beyond what our job descriptions require: we hope that people will recognize that as we stand we are "undervalued").
I don't think the suggested "requirement" (?) to avoid microagression is to answer both X and Y. I think the suggestion to avoid microagression is to avoid using the term microagression in the first place.
Another one would be to recognize that you are fully within your rights to not offer help where it's not your job to offer help. No one cares if you choose not to answer support requests for your open source project, nor will the world suffer for it.
On the flip side, you can't expect those you do help to care enough to show you respect for your help either. If being respected and/or people making special allowances for your tone is something you do care about, well, then don't help to begin with. Contrary to our self-centered worries, the world will go on fine without us. It might even go on better without us; who is to say, after all? Most certainly not us.
Here's a piece of advice I keep hearing from people who are more powerful than me (Usually, these were also people older than me, but that is becoming less true as I grow older myself.): you're owed absolutely nothing. No one is.
Most human beings on this planet live in full awareness of that fact. So its only a matter of time until those who don't, end up learning that too.
You're strawmanning, I never stated that the impulse was pure - i.e. solely to help. I would suggest that if helping is discouraged that the proportion of those doing it to self aggrandize will increase as for those people the signaling effect increases with the added risk. Then you're left with an environment the vast majority of those who remain are doing it for self aggrandizing reasons which is probably why young people start with that as a prior assumption.
I'm aware I'm within my rights to keep quiet and have stated as much. HN is the last place I continue to post and eventually I will stop posting here as well. I do this for my own sake, I live in a cloistered environment protected by wealth, and others who are similarly wealthy, where it continues to remain the 1990s. I engage with people outside of my environment to help myself better understand the cultural phenomenons I see occurring around the world, make a few statements for posterity, and perhaps let some people know it wasn't always like this.
"So its only a matter of time until those who don't, end up learning that too." - yes you will win, but what are you winning really. If future generations cannot learn enough quickly enough in order to produce sufficient value to support their lifestyles then why would they remain entitled to a future brighter than those from 3rd world countries who are quickly catching up with the knowledge work. How do they expect expected to stay ahead of AI. The 1st world middle class is going to be sacrificed on the altar of financialization - I see young people clinging to hope that the specter of communism will come and save them. They can't all be commissars and baristas - someone has to man the work labor camps.
Wanting to help others isn't being discouraged. You helping others is being discouraged (apparently? that's your claim, because you believe the market has expectations that you believe should not apply to you?).
What? This isn't "me", winning. This is the age-old reality of "you are owed absolutely nothing", and that "if you are owed something, you will know because people will be paying you for it". This is capitalism at its core.
When it comes specifically to helping others:
1) you are either paid for it by an employer, in which case you ought to do it based on the employer's requirements, and all extraneous complaints are null and void unless
2) you create your own business off of your expertise, where you get to choose what precisely you offer people, and people get to choose whether they value your expertise; or
3) you do it for free, because you get something out of the experience which is entirely unrelated to how others treat you. If you're doing it for free to establish yourself through "loss-leader" tactics, but you cannot turn your losses into said leadership, then you can't complain. The world considers you to be an overvalued commodity. End of story.
Welcome to reality! You can rage if you'd like. The world will not care. There's business to do, money to be made, and entertainment to be had in the form of people who think they are worth more than what the market prices them. Either they are right and they eventually get movies made out of their life stories ("rags to riches!"), or they are wrong and they serve as living comedy (which can also be converted into money).
This is hardcore Reaganomics I am suggesting, not "youth-communism" (lol, wtf? where does that even come from...). Either you are rich enough to earn respect, or you are sensible enough to know you're not worth any. Which one is it?
If you believe you can be rich enough to be shown respect, then why are you wasting your time commenting on HN, instead of turning the apparent coming-doom into a business opportunity? The wealth you earn this way can then be convert into concrete respect if you so choose?
Might be abit too dramatic regarding consequences.
Mentoring is force multiplier in virtualy all scenarios, but there is a fraction of people who are self starting eager readers, that will manage to get out of the newbie stage on their own (as long as they are not actively sabotaged).
Btw. You sound overburned. Btw2. I find being selective of whom to help, very healthy for me.
> The X answer is a lecture on language theory including the construction and inversion of finite state automata.
To be helpful and educational, one must describe/illustrate the failure mode of X. For example just demonstrate how unwieldy pure regex is for more constrained question like “regex to check if there is no ‘ab’ within 3 char string”. “a[^ab].|.a[^b]|[^a][^a].”. (Solution complexity grows with length of the string within which we are searching)
> (Solution complexity grows with length of the string within which we are searching)
No it doesn't. It's something like '([^a]|a[^b]|a$)*'.
In general it scales like '([^a]|a([^b]|$)|ab([^c]|$)|abc([^d]|$)|...)*' (ie, quadratically with the length of the needle, if I haven't overlooked a optimization), but the complement of a regular language is regular, and fixed strings are always regular, so it's always a pure regular expression (including being independent of haystack length).
And, proving that any curt correction of a silly error will likely contain its own silly error, I think that should actually be '^([^a]|a[^b]|a$)*$', since grep defaults to searching rather than matching.
This combination of words seems strange.
Like: proof of ‘zero’ or proof of ‘left’.
All of them have definitions, not proofs.
(Qualitative distinction of different infinity types has a proof though)