I'm glad supporting people deserving it.
I'll stick to my whitelist on iOS for a non greedy adblocker. Sadly, this is getting about who makes more money rather than offering a better web...
When the state only thinks about money, people will turn into objects. The population will start to see other humans less valuable than their dinner table and will do their best to exploit them. If you go to China you will see beautiful landscapes, the lineage of one of the most advanced cultures and you will see the pain and the loneliness of its inhabitants. The rest of the world didn't cure the infection in time and now has grown to necrosis at the point that sociopathy it's the norm rather than the exception.
I wonder how this state has forgotten to protect who absolutely need protection.
They are people, and I know it, but severe mental impaired persons selling their "possessions" to shady companies, it's not the best thing to leave unsupervised.
The state also seems to consider the economic aids as a salable good. They should be shielded by these companies. Mental impaired persons are the weakest in resisting this type of aggression. The aid should be destined for the well being of people and not their ruin.
As someone that volunteer to share computer literacy to kids, I can assure you that kids are underestimated by a big margin. I saw a lot of kids adsorbing concepts more easily than some adults. I'm not obviously talking about Monads; but the concepts are still fundamental to programming. Kids can get sufficient results to do something on their own and to really enjoy it.
The thing that I see most, and in this activity, the thing that displease me most is: parents that work as programmers and they pretend that their children must be programmers too. They bring them because they tried in all ways to make them interested and didn't succeed. One parent, a programmer, was worried with the quality of the teaching and wanted to be present a day. After the end of the meeting(I like to call them meeting. Kids see school as prison rather than joy, and I don't want to make them feel uneasy) the programmer seemed pleased of the experience and made a praise about the kids being happy and interested. He told me that he would send his son, in the hope that this time he would listen and asked about the price. I told him the truth and true nature of that meeting: they are all kids that really wanted it: When I am the new batch I usually try to talk of other things and wait something that makes me happy: a kid asking me when we begin. This is the clear sign that there is something in the room that is happy to learn. The programmer looked a bit puzzled and I told him my opinion. Are you sure that this is what your son want? If you imprison your son in something, he will totally hate it, wasting an activity that he could have enjoyed at a later time. I finished the speech saying that I'm doing it for free. My reward is making them have a good time and hopefully, giving them a better future.
Kids in front of other people can have problems and feel anxiety. So, Carmack, I'm worried if having an entry bar of all the Internet watching your son, could be a burden too high. Are we sure that this is what he wants? Is he ready to compete?
Kids are precious, they will be the mark of our efforts and their mirror. I think that your son should enjoy as much as he can what he is doing and be kept away from the Internet consumerism for now ...
Feynman QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter;
Penrose The road to reality;
Greene The elegant universe;
Greene The fabric of cosmos;
Greene The hidden reality;
Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach;
Asimov Understanding Physics;
Ivanov Easy as pi;
Boyer a history of Mathematics;
Robbins What is Mathematics?;
Russel principia mathematica;
From the few I have read, I certainly know this is a great list. Am adding others to my queue. Question: Which all amongst these are NOT high on signal-to-noise ratio, if any?
E.g., I did not find Courant/Robbins as high density, though it is a very good book still.
Facebook doesn't understand that humans who did errors are still humans and need to be treated as such. The goal of prison is to rehabilitate the person in order to make them come back to society. I wonder how eliminating their basic rights and cutting them completely out of the world will improve their situation. Maybe the desperate cases cannot be recovered but prisons are also full of people that can be reeducated and one way to do so is to let them be still a part of this world. Isolating them from Internet, stripping their rights and physical isolation will do only more harm in the long run.
What if someone went to jail for civil disobedience, i.e. protesting against some injustice they see in our government?
Stripping them of the right to vote, along with all of the other privileges (mostly by convention, rather than by statute) one loses once convicted of a felony, would be a really convenient way for those in power to insure that their critics are powerless.
Several of my friends have faced felony charges for various protest activities (non-violent civil disobedience, mostly). It is not at all theoretical that our state would use the criminal justice system to effectively muzzle critics; a combination of jail time, plus the crippling effect a felony has on your ability to work and earn a living, plus the inability to vote, plus the ability of the justice system to suck you back in much more easily from the moment you've been convicted of a felony, adds up to a very powerful set of tools for silencing dissent.
Voting is the corner stone of democracy. How is it fair to stop someone from voting for a mistake they made that isn't necessarily violent or even have a victim? A mistake they may have made early on in their lives, the lessons of which they have learned.
And that's ignoring the disproportionately higher incarceration rate of black men in america.
It’s not supposed to be fair, or a crime deterrent, or even a punishment, really. The clear reason for disenfranchising felons is to tilt elections in the favor of the Republican party in a way that has some political cover. It’s part of a range of efforts both official and unofficial to suppress the vote among young people, poor people, and minority groups, including voter ID laws, restrictions on voting by mail, improperly purging people from registered voter rolls, intentional underfunding/understaffing of polling places so people will give up in the face of long lines, discouraging/threatening/misleading junk mail, etc., not to mention all the absurd redistricting schemes.
All the tiny efforts taken to suppress voting end up making quite a dramatic difference in close elections.
Hm? This has been going on for decades, and isn’t about Clinton per se (personally I detest the Clintons), but affects every type of election from local races on up.
For Republican politicians and operatives, it’s smart political strategy (at least in a short-term zero-sum kind of way, assuming the only goal is to win the next election rather than to govern effectively or build a stable society). Likewise, it’s smart political strategy for Democratic party politicians and operatives to make voter registration and voting easy and convenient, because on the margins the additional votes tend to go to Democrats.
On the bright side, voting rights for ex-felons have actually been improving somewhat over the last 20 years, even if that improvement is patchy and has regressed in some places. Unfortunately, many other types of voter suppression have gotten worse.
Deterrents don't work. The US has the death penalty. You can literally lose your life if you commit certain crimes, yet people still do it.
The US has a fetish for punishing evildoers for their wickedness. Rehabilitation and crime prevention are secondary concerns at best. If you committed a crime, you're a criminal. If you have been convicted, you're a convict, forever.
The only way to understand how a country can be this fucked up is if you consider that it was founded by puritans. To this day, US politics are still more based on Christian extremist morals than basic human rights. Let's not forget that the Prohibition -- the banning of alcohol on purely "moral" grounds -- happened less than a hundred years ago.
Sure, the US is not as bad as Saudi Arabia -- it's not literally using religious scripture to derive its legal system -- but the mindset of a large portion of the population is dangerously close.
>You can literally lose your life if you commit certain crimes, yet people still do it. //
Your argument is poor - deterrents aren't 100% effective in eliminating crime but that doesn't mean they don't work.
I'm not saying they're the most effective answer in all cases.
From another angle "deterrent" literally means something that deters so it's truistic that they work, they're not deterrents otherwise. That's more semantics than anything though.
Is there any proof that higher punishment works as a deterrent for any crime? I would assume that some punishment works better than no punishment at all, but here's probably a point of dimishing returns.
I know there have been studies on the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring crimes where the death penalty is either the given punishment or a punishment option. All of the studies have found little to no effectiveness in the death penalty being a deterrent.
As for other crimes and punishments I am not aware of any specific studies. Although I would say that for the most part the threat of a jail sentence for any length of time is a deterrent in my opinion. If it were not a deterrent society would see much higher crime rates than we currently do as simply no one would be deterred by the threat of going to jail. That's just my opinion though.
Yeah, I've read the death penalties studies, but I was hoping for something more general. Instinctually, I agree with your opinion, but I think this is teh kind of thing that really needs to be verfied. We are basing a very important part of our society in this assumption, and it could just be wrong. Maybe people who don't do crimes do it simply because they believe it's wrong.
EDITED TO ADD: To note I do agree with you that what if jail/prison is not a deterrent then we are doing it wrong. To some extent this is a true statement. It has been shown that some collateral consequences of punishment can actually lead to increased crime. A collateral consequence being one that is not handed down by a judge but is the result of another law, policy, regulation, etc.. For example, if you are arrested for DWI the judge may sentence you to 30 days in jail. The collateral consequence is that your driver's license may be suspended by the Department of Motor Vehicles.
If you are arrested and convicted of a felony drug charge, serve your time, and get out a collateral consequence can be that no one will hire you because of your conviction. Many states, counties, and cities are starting to realize this actually creates more crime and are passing Ban the Box laws that prohibit asking about criminal convictions on job applications and delay background screening.
"the studies reviewed do not
provide a basis for inferring that increasing the severity of sentences generally is capable of enhancing deterrent effects."
I find it very disturbing that this is not included the basis of legislation and investigated further.
I think the telling statement in the whole report is:
"Research to date generally indicates that increases in the certainty of punishment, as opposed to the severity of punishment, are more likely to produce deterrent benefits."
I am not saying that plea deals are all bad or that they should be eliminated. I think they serve a purpose with first time offenders or to secure testimony in cases where there are significantly bigger stakes. But some plea deals are just absolutely absurd and destroy the certainty of punishment. If people knew that there were guaranteed consequences I think we could reduce jail sentences to some extent. Instead we have increased jail sentences because we have increased the plea deals. What used to be a guaranteed 30-day sentence now has turned into 90-days because with the plea deal and good time the person will only serve the original 30 days.
Voting is a right, not a privilege. The right to self determination tempered by the rights of others.
The right to vote is taken away under the auspices of having broken a social contract by committing a crime. But taking away the right to vote is also tearing up that social contract. Is your response to someone breaking a contract to tear up the contract?
It is not a deterrent (the death penalty it seems, for some, is not even a deterrent). But even if it were, it would be a pretty fucking dumb deterrent, as deterrents go.
And surely someone under the direct control of the state should have more of a say, not less, in who runs that state. Voting in prison should be mandatory.
Seems like a legitimate deterrent for committing a crime.
If that's the reason, then it's doing a piss-poor job at deterring crime - the US incarceration rate is around five times that of other western democracies (and 10 times that of places like Norway)
Prison is supposed to be the deterrent. Taking away a person's rights, for life, because of a crime that they already served their time for is ridiculous.
I have no problem with stripping rights as part of the punishment, however, the problem arises when the term of the punishment is complete and those rights are still stripped. Take for example, voting rights. When an offender completes his/her sentence they are expected to become contributing members of society and not recommit crimes. As part of this, common sense would say the individual should get a job and work hard at that job. So you expect an offender to get up go to work and pay taxes, but you don't expect the offender to have a say in how those tax dollars are spent by being able to vote. There are also political motives for permanently stripping voting rights, but that is whole other conversation not suited for HN.
We live in a society where punishment for breaking the law becomes a moving goal post. Offenders are set up to fail in reentry in the US legal system, thus the high recidivism rates we experience. Fortunately there are many programs that are working to reverse this trend, but the fact of the matter is that until we stop moving the goal post on when the punishment ends the problem will never be 100% solved.
Facebook? How about the entire country. When people laugh about being raped in prison it is because most people assume they deserve it. Not a very humane outlook.
I don't feel like its fair to say "well sure, the stated goal of prisons is to rehabilitate, but they're not doing that now, so why would we even pretend like that is their mission anymore?"
It's like saying, "The war on drugs is to protect our children." Even if that's the official mission & goal statement, I would scoff at anyone who said that to my face and proceed to explain to them what a ridiculous farce it is.
So when someone makes the statement "USA's Prisons are for rehabilitation" to my face, they'll also get the same scoff from me followed swiftly by an explanation of the ridiculous ineffectiveness of it all.
Both of those mission statements are so far divorced from reality that I could not let them go unchallenged in any conversation within earshot. I'd have an overwhelming urge to verify that the person who made the statement understands how much of a failure those missions have been and I'd suggest that the real mission, for anyone actually paying attention, is that of oppression & profit.
____
preemptive: And please don't anyone reply with that tired rebuttal of "Only 8% of prisons are for profit", that's been covered several times ---https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562786
Whose to say that one of the (many) reasons it currently isn't successful is that by feeling disconnected from friends and family it further makes them feel separate from society?
To be a chemist you need a lab. To be a programmer you don't have an high entrance fee. You only need a PC and you are ready to go. You don't need a job to be a programmer. You have a lot of time to build a lot of programs. Invest your time wisely programming and have patience and you will go far.
I don't see anything exceptional about this. There are a lot of tutorials and a lot of sites guiding you through building a site like that.
You should never put yourself in a situation to ask for something. You must put others in the situation to ask for you. Making a website like countless others and having no substantial code to back off what you are claiming, won't put you in front of countless of other talented people that are a lot more humble than you. Talented companies have talented eyes seeking for talent, don't put only a good mask on. I wanted to say this, because I want you in a good company and I hope that you will get the best of life. Keep working on your path: mastering a framework is tenfold valuable than a "simple understanding". Regards
I agree though. This is not exceptional or very impressive. I don't really get why this has more upvotes than the 14 year old kid who posted a relatively way cooler site that utilized a bunch of APIs, etc.
He is young, surely, but in this very moment, there are silent young people on GitHub with exceptional projects. There are some people in their early-20 that are proving to be exceptional in the startup and the programming world. Maybe we are stuck in time when we started: back in the days Internet was more like a myth than a resource. And this feat would have been amazing. Nowadays you can nearly be a programmer without knowing how to program. Today the entry level was lowered exponentially... Back in the days there was an obscure manual and in a lot of cases written in another language with the need to go to the university and be laughed on the face, because you were too young, with a question that neither the professor was able to answer... And this was the easy part. For the hard part... Let the reminiscence kicks in and be amazed to how far we have gone. Learning alone like 20 years ago, could be outlawed as torture now lol
I'm 27 years old (am I still young?) and started self teaching 2 years ago. I'm creating an API for poets/poetry because it doesn't exist. I'm implementing my own API to serve the poems and let users metaphorically match their favorite poems to their favorite alcoholic beverages; poetryandalcohol.com (not up yet). I'm also working on something similar to Yummly and BigOven, however, not only let's users plan their meals, but incorporates the USDA food prices API to let them know how much their grocery list will be for the week or whatever.
I have no reminiscing to do. The internet has ALWAYS been a resource for me. But in different ways.
The feat this gentleman has made is no less than that of twenty years ago. You still need a degree to get an entry level job of the same sort as ten years ago. In fact, I'd argue that twenty years ago, people didn't care if you had a degree or not in computer science, so long as you had the experience/could prove you can do the work. Today, it's not only a degree/experience, which this person has BARELY showed (aw crap, I forgot he's 19), but you also need side projects, open source contributions, and a penchant for motivation. I'd say it's still torture for us self-taughts who work in a warehouse 9-5 filling orders for computer fans at a median wage.
Well, okay. I see where you're coming from but you can absolutely teach motivation. It is, however, extremely harder, because motivation is not as tangible as talent in the case of the individual. I mean, I'm not sure I'm not alone in wishing my own motivation at 19 was matched by this very motivated person.
I think, however, that is the idea of this community. The I-Wish-I-Executed-My-Idea-At-19 types Even-Though-I-Only-Have-Words-And-College-Classes-To-Show-For-It. Maybe I'm wrong.
Sometimes a mentor is not someone that you will meet in person...
The entire Internet is my mentor. This site has taught me more things that I can number. Choose a good list of sites and invest your time in high open source quality software. If you will turn out to be one of the best programmers, you will discover that most of the work you had done, will be the work that you did alone. If you emulate others you will be only a robot. The highest point will be the one when you will turn around and you will see the mountains you built alone...
Getting the wisdom is not the problem - getting the right wisdom in the right dose at the right time, is. That's what a mentor is for. The internet does not provide this.
Mentors are not just for knowledge, they provide connections, confidence and motivation based on what they know about you. The internet has lot of knowledge but it doesn't know you deep enough to tell you what is good for you.
I'm glad supporting people deserving it. I'll stick to my whitelist on iOS for a non greedy adblocker. Sadly, this is getting about who makes more money rather than offering a better web...