> Someone who has never seen the type of problem that would make a given abstraction useful would not be able to understand it easily.
Whether or not someone is sufficiently motivated to study something should not affect their ability to understand it. Vector spaces and linear maps are actually much easier to understand, and I think that at some point in mathematics (probably your first analysis course) your motivation has to come from the beauty of the theory itself rather than some real-world application.
My point was not that someone would not be motivated to learn the abstraction, it was that the abstraction would not make sense without a reason to use it. That reason could very well be an entirely theoretical application, but why would the concept of expressing a linear equation as a matrix make any sense to someone who has never dealt with more than 2 linear equations at a time?
Sure, but verroq was talking about vector spaces and linear maps, not matrices. The theory of vector spaces over a field is more general and can be applied to much more than systems of equations.
There is nothing quite like trolling a bunch of nerds with the opinion that the entire study of pure mathematics has been a wasted endeavor for mankind...
Newborns don't come out with all knowledge in their heads already. I'm simply alerting younger people to facts, there's absolutely no reason to get mods involved. Otherwise most of HN should be banned (since a lot of it is not completely fresh news). Why alert the mods, are you a scared pure mathematician?
> About one in four adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. That means if you think about your 10 favorite people in the whole world two of them could be at risk of suicide.
No, that means on average, an arbitrary set of eight adults contains two with a mental disorder. (Presumably this refers to adults in the U.S.)
> The issue isn't that people are voting up comments or submissions that don't fit with what HN is supposed to be, the problem is that those submissions and comments are being made.
If people stop voting up such comments, people will eventually stop making them.
> If people stop voting up such comments, people will eventually stop making them.
That's like saying, "If we start putting people in jail for using illegal drugs, people will eventually stop using illegal drugs." Unfortunately that's just not how it works - some people comment (or use drugs, etc) because they can't help themselves, rather than for karma/recognition/trolling/attention. Idealism is a good place to start but but, long term, you have to recognize it as such.
Using your analogy, some people do drugs because they can't help themselves. But there are also a significant number of people who don't do drugs because they know its illegal and are afraid of getting in trouble and what it would do to their reputation.
In the same way, some people will make stupid comments. But there are also a significant number of people who won't. I know I'm far more hesitant to make dumb/funny comments on HN than on other sites because I know that they won't be tolerated, and will be downvoted.
Just because a system isn't perfect, and won't fix the whole problem, doesn't mean it won't have a significant impact on mitigating part of the problem.
> Using your analogy, some people do drugs because they can't help themselves.
It's not my analogy; that's just drug addiction. If you don't believe in the addiction part of drug addiction, then that's where we would differ, I suppose. I think that drug and alcohol addictions are true addictions for some people (as opposed to just bad habits).
I have to confess that I don't understand how the rest of your comments relate to my post.
You analogy compared doing drugs to posting comments. Specifically when you said "Unfortunately that's just not how it works - some people comment (or use drugs, etc) because they can't help themselves,". Yes, drug and alcohol addictions are true addictions for people. I don't think that commenting is a true addiction.
The discussion was on using this system to deter people from posting "bad" comments, and you compared this to threatening people with jailtime for drugs.
My experience is the opposite. When I first came here, I made a funny remark, which was downvoted due to lack of content. I don't make funny remarks here any more.
...some people comment (or use drugs, etc) because they can't help themselves...
And under the proposed system, those people will never achieve a high karma score and so never have disproportionate influence over the site. That's precisely why it's an improvement.
> That's like saying, "If we start putting people in jail for using illegal drugs, people will eventually stop using illegal drugs." Unfortunately that's just not how it works
If you believe this, then what is the purpose of putting illegal drug users in jail?
My guess is he doesn't believe putting illegal drug users in jail has a valid societal purpose - I know I don't. Treatment not incarceration.
However I think his analogy is flawed, and that a system that successfully penalizes poor comments and submissions does have a valid societal purpose here, mainly because posting is nowhere near as addictive as most illegal drugs. And for those whom it is - perhaps we can get a treatment program going :)
>If you believe this, then what is the purpose of putting illegal drug users in jail?
The moral majority (or a vocal minority with the necessary clout) imposing it's ideas? Bureaucracy inventing roles for itself using some early 20th century myths about drugs? A convenient mean for controlling ghetto populations (like blacks, latinos, etc)? Sheer stupidity? All the above?
>
Mostly, when I come across complex equations in CS papers, I tend to skip over them and only go back to look at them if there are parts of the paper I can't make sense of without them - it is very rare to find that they are necessary at all.
Obviously any equation can be expressed in words, but those who are familiar with the notation are able to read the equations and understand the ideas in a paper in a fraction of the time. This is important for those who read papers regularly.
You are comparing en.wikipedia.org with their redesign of www.wikipedia.org. Notice that the latter is, with respect to content, the same as their redesign: languages, search, and sister sites.
Secondly, in the screenshot you are looking at, the content of the article has obviously pushed down due to the activation of the “quote” mode. Honestly, I doubt you do not realize this and I can’t help but wonder what motivation you have to criticize their work so unfairly.
The funny thing is that most of these APIs wind up with what's essentially a "this" pointer at the front of every argument list so you're really doing OO anyway.
Do you have much experience with non-OO programming? Or even OOP, for that matter? How can one honestly believe that every instance of passing data into functions is automatically OOP? Did you even consider the fact that this has nothing to do with objects?
Time objects are a really bad example because time calculations are exactly the kind of hairy mess you want to hide behind some kind of abstract API.
You miss his point here. Time not being an object would not imply that it can't be abstracted into an API. Just see Clojure's clj-time library for an example.
I'm sure that GP is referring to point number 2 of the article -- which explicitly says that time should (or at least could) just be data with no associated methods.
I winced at the naïveté in that section myself. It sure seems like he's arguing that OO programmers muddy the waters when they make something as "simple" as time and dates into an object with methods for storage and retrieval.
No personal attack. You used your experience to justify your position, which really means nothing. You then went on to describe practices that, if written accurately aren't in anyone's book of good things to do.
If you take it personally, thats your issue, not mine,
Whether or not someone is sufficiently motivated to study something should not affect their ability to understand it. Vector spaces and linear maps are actually much easier to understand, and I think that at some point in mathematics (probably your first analysis course) your motivation has to come from the beauty of the theory itself rather than some real-world application.