100% population literacy is neither reasonable nor attainable. Yet, functional literacy has drastically improved throughout the past century.
To say programming is never to attain such a characteristic is making a statement against the trends of history in all other academic disciplines. Focusing on the present state is an ignorance of underlying trend.
A couple thousand years ago, groundbreaking advances in trigonometry were made by some of the worlds smartest people. Today the average high schooler knows soh cah toa.
But if these advances take centuries, from a purely personal perspective they don't matter much. By then, I, and everyone I have and will ever know, will be dead.
Security wise Nano is DOA. Currently any attacker can effectively DDOS the network with trivial resources. I’ve personally proposed a complete solution to this problem over a year ago but it’s implementation is complex and would require a network split and my proposal has effectively been ignored in favor of other mitigation’s that fall far short of protecting the network. I’m not a security researcher and hell I’m not even in the CS field anymore so if I could figure out and implement an network wide attack on my own the barrier to entry is low (to be clear I have not executed any such attack). If you want to read further, the issue is a precomputed PoW attack. Nano’s very benefit - speed - is it’s biggest pitfall.
I'd be interested to know more about your proposal to solve the precomputed work attack vector. Also, I think if you can easily create an attack that would DDOS network, you should absolutely try it on the Nano test net. That's what the test net is there for. To my knowledge, the precomputed spam attack has been mitigated by the Dynamic PoW feature that was added in v19. See my other reply with more details on that. I would like to know more about your proposal. You can email me at purplewumpus@protonmail.com
I simply do not have the time nor motivation to conduct an attack on the Nano testnet. I've responded to your other reply with the technical shortcomings of the mitigation, my proposal is still open somewhere in github's issues but I've since moved on from cryptocurrency as a whole.
Nano is an interesting cryptocurrency, but it’s very benefits are attack vectors. Currently Nano has no way of dealing with a precomputed PoW attack which means a single attacker has the ability to effectively ‘DDOS’ the network. This is briefly discussed in their white paper, and AFAIK I’m the only one to have proposed a complete comprehensive solution to their problem, but the implementation appears to be so complex and would require a network split that the nano team has moved on to less comprehensive mitigations. Currently any actor, including myself with my trivial resources could easily DDOS the entire network, which is a major concern I hold to the cryptocurrency and cannot advocate its usage at least until this has been appropriately addressed.
Nano implemented Dynamic Proof-of-Work in V19 to mitigate spam attacks causing congestion on the network [1]. When the network gets congested due to a spam attack (or other reasons) the PoW required to send a transaction is dynamically raised. This should prioritize real transactions that will do the new, higher PoW, while the spam transactions that have a lower precomputed PoW have to wait to get processed until the network's PoW requirement dynamically lowers. Doesn't this mitigate the precomputed PoW attack vector? This tweet [2] also shows this dynamic PoW feature in action.
[1]https://medium.com/nanocurrency/dynamic-proof-of-work-priori...
[2] https://twitter.com/GenMeasures/status/1149855971457454081
The current mitigation enables attackers to raise the difficulty at whim and effectively disables any cached PoW's by large entities. This hurts Nano's primary feature - speed - for the end user. Also, while it certainly makes it harder for an individual attacker to attack the network, it is still very doable given enough time and resources. My proposal (which was shortly after the blog post you've cited came out) included a concept of leniency while making any possible attack exponentially more difficult both to plan and execute over a period of time while maintaining a constant ability for entities to precompute PoWs. However the biggest issue would be the introduction of synchronicity in an asynchronous network through probability and is not exactly trivial to implement. I've since moved on as I don't have the time or motivation to further pursue this (I am not exactly very hyped on the idea of cryptocurrency anymore).
Your argument is a misnomer, equal access is just a restatement of belief in equal rights. Equal opportunity is the belief that everyone should be given a level playing field.
> Consider that most people here on HN have some level of privilege simply by being in the tech field.
I have to disagree with this statement. My view on "privilege" in its contemporary usage is that it is any advantage which comes "naturally" without any (or at the very least a relative minimal amount of) effort. Being in the tech field is something you have to work for, develop your skills for, etc. That isn't what privilege is, that is the result of your own work and ambitions.
> Most workflows can benefit from multiple monitors.
Maybe some people benefit from this but I’ve always found it distracting and in some cases a bit annoying. I’ve always preferred simply having multiple desktops and switching between them instantly with a keystroke which is great in most Linux DEs/WMs but a terrible experience in Windows. It’s gotten to a point where even though I have 2 displays, I just turn one off 99% of the time.
Same for me. Multiple desktops with tiled windows on a single screen has been a much better experience than the two screen setup I had in every job before.
Example for my desktops setup for web application development over the last couple of years:
1. Browser with the product I'm currently working on, nothing else
2. Shells for all sorts of small tasks like tailing a log to REPLs for quick experimentations
3. Application IDE(s)
4. SQL IDE
5. Music player
6. Communication (Mail, slack, etc.) and secondary browser for miscellaneous things
The greatest thing for me is, that what I'm currently doing is in full focus and everything else basically doesn't exist. No notifications dinging in peripheral vision or other distractions. Also it is nice, that when I switch to laptop only, the workflows are exactly the same just with more limited screen space = less tiles I can use.
If for a given tasks it is beneficial to have things side by side, it is just a couple of key strokes to re-arrange windows and or create an ad-hoc desktop until the task is finished.
Of course I could use multiple desktops and tiled windows on multiple screens, but from my experiments it added more complexity that benefits.
I would rather go for a bigger, higher quality screen than adding another.
Agreed. My major workflows involve a 28" 4K screen with a tiling window manager. The second monitor is often empty or has chat window or music player in it.
Depends on how you run it. A screen is more than just "4k", or 4000 pixels wide. The amount of pixels in total spread out over the physical dimension, depending on the aspect ratio and the distance between you and the screen as well as the rendered density by the computer together make the result.
So, you could use a 27 inch 4k display at 16:9 aspect ratio (which is 3840 by 2160 pixels) in a way that gets you the native resolution which results in much more usable space but the displayed quality isn't all that great. You can run them at 2560x1440 rendering which sacrifices some pace for much improved quality. Works well when you don't sit super close to your screen. Or, if you like more space but still have a little better quality than the jagged mess that is the native resolution, you could run it at 3008x1692. Close to fully usable space but still way better in terms of quality.
The scale of your computer rendered interface and text versus the actual pixel size and density on your display gives you a balance to choose from for space vs. quality. Which one works best is a combination between physical distance to the screen and personal preference (which mostly forms based on cognitive load).
My experience, after buying a monitor for home for the first time in like a decade and getting a very nice 27" HP z27 4K: it's... fine. I think I'd need like 5 more diagonal inches before I could really fit more on it than I can on a lower-pixel-count 16:10 monitor the same size. Because of the way scaling works, what I want is everything scaled to about 1.5x, but that's computationally expensive and/or looks bad, so in practice I run at 2x anyway, so the benefits in stuff-on-screen aren't really that high. I can keep fonts set a little smaller I guess.
I kinda regret not getting 2x 1440p monitors with similar picture quality for less money.
Meanwhile it makes using Linux a giant pain in the ass, unless you go all-in on a major desktop on a major distro, and then also get lucky. Possibly I'd have a better opinion of it if I were using it with macOS rather than Win10 and Linux.
[EDIT] and OMG lacking auto-temp-control based on surrounding light has me really wishing I'd just put the monitor cash toward an iMac. Way more eye strain.
One situation where I've found it invaluable recently is Zoom standups. I like to see everyone at the same time rather than let Zoom decide who I want to look at, and our kanban board has 7 (!) columns. Of course I could just switch between these things, but you don't really notice the cognitive load that causes until it's gone (and I do use a nice tiling WM setup)
We switched to asynchronous standups that just involve writing a short post stating what we did yesterday, what we are doing today and any questions/blockers we have.
Everyone seems to prefer it. They don't have to stop what they are doing at exactly 10am, and they can re-read things that are relevant and skip things that are not easily. There is also a bit more personal accountability because everyone can see what was said in previous days.
Not GP, but my impression is a bit, that the better things are going, the more farcical stand ups can become. The status update aspect of it could be automatized from the task management tooling, people reach out for help/input as needed and don't wait for the next stand up, socialize outside of these allocated slots, etc.
With every recurring meeting no matter the frequency you have to be quite careful in my opinion and constantly re-evaluate and tweak to keep it useful most of the time, instead it being a dogmatic ritual that has to be done a specific way because somebody learned it as such from an "Agile" book, certificate, course, video.
> The status update aspect of it could be automatized from the task management tooling, people reach out for help/input as needed and don't wait for the next stand up, socialize outside of these allocated slots, etc.
People rarely understand the point of agile and, specifically, standups. Using it as a daily check in, especially as status updates, is contrary to agile's intentions. The real purpose is to make sure that people on the team frequently expose problems. If people are already doing that consistently, then standup as a practice is fairly moot.
For me standup meetings are not a part of agile. The latter is more of a minset, how you go on about things. Everything else, standups, scrum boards, epics, story points, squads, retros etc. are just tools that might or might not be useful for a team. You can be agile without them, and you can not be agile with the entire array of buzzwords.
I think there is an useful status update component to standups. Not to your boss, to have a shared view among the team what the state of the product is. But this has to be aligned with how fast to product is meaningfully changing. Some times this might indeed be daily, but otherwise it quickly becomes just noise.
Of course some managers think the product has to or can meaningfully change every day.
I agree, that if you do them you should make them about exposing problems.
Ya the only value I don’t totally discount in them is the forced socialization. It’s sorta like eating dinner together as a family. As a kid you might not want to participate but at the end of the day there is value in that cohesion. And if it’s not scheduled it’ll not happen much, or it’ll happen among cliques.
For web stuff, I find having three monitors invaluable.
One monitor for code, one for the browser (and devtools window) and a third for everything else (an API document, or a spec, a control for the music I'm streaming or a chat window etc.)
I've found the same setup works really well for any workflow that involves making a small change and immediately seeing the result.
sloppy focus is way more helpful than multiple monitors. You can have your editor largely obscured by documentation (or the other way around) and still type. This is especially nice with modern UIs which seem to think wasting screen real estate with white space and ribbons is an important recent innovation.
I was the same way and ultrawide is the happy medium for me. 1.5x width lets me have 3 columns of windows instead of 2 and then I virtual desktop for more expansion.
I personally find multiple monitors to be very distracting, in fact I get headaches and dizziness when sitting with someone with 2 or more monitors. I'm so used to a single monitor that the fact the mouse cursor doesn't stop at the edge of the screen and goes on to the other one is extremely disorienting.
Now, I'm sure I could get used to 2 monitors, and I'm just stuck in my ways, but for my current workflow I don't see the benefit. I'm distracted enough as it is by emails/chats.
I use a tiling window manager and often have up to 6 editor panels open at a time, spread across 3 monitors. I honestly don't know how people are productive with a single editor window.
I found myself having productivity issues while having two displays because I always have to decide which display the window should belong to.
Then I upgraded to 3 displays, it's much better. Because I have an explicit main display.
So a viable way is, even with two displays, don't try to utilize them. Put the main one in the center, and pretend the other doesn't exist. Once you really want to use the other display, instead of for the sake of utilizing them only, you'll know it.
About four or five years ago, I was finally able to swing my ultimate monitor setup. 27” 5K iMac in the center and a 27” Thunderbolt Display (2560 x 1440) on both sides. All three wall mounted so I keep all my desk space free. The side displays are angled inward by about 20 degrees. Unlike windows and Linux, which both perpetually don’t seem to care about hi-dpi displays and low-dpi displays in the same desktop, macOS seamlessly handles dragging windows across the entire workspace.
Main task in the main display, docs and other references on the left display and email/messages on the right. Works wonderfully.
I’m so used to this setup that when I go to my real job and am constrained to a single monitor I feel like I’m looking through a periscope at my work.
> So a viable way is, even with two displays, don't try to utilize them.
I did that before switching to single display after having multiples from the first day of my career onwards. But I didn't even had to try. By the end, because of how my work and setup has evolved, the second display was switched off 99% of the time.
So when I have the choice I put the entire budget into an ever better single monitor, rather than splitting it.
I would recommend the same. I usually only put things like Slack or documentations in the off screens - it's pretty 'read only'. I also use ultrawide screens occasionally in my hometown's house. I found the problem with 3 displays is I cannot put one application span across displays or there would be a 'bar' in the center of the application. I have to put them far left or right instead of placing them in more comfort zones.
With that being said, I ended up with 3 monitors in my apartment because I bought them incrementally across 3 years(though they're the same model). And also I play video games from time to time, for most of the games, it's better to have 3 monitors instead of an ultrawide one.
Assigning programs/roles to certain screens helped me there. For example the left monitor is the browser, the center the editor and the right for consoles.
Though when a task only needs one screen for more than a couple of minutes to stay focused shutting off the other screens does help.
I can toggle between virtual desktops with a keystroke in Windows, too! I have mine set to CTRL-WINDOWS-arrow. Let me know what you're having trouble with and I can help you get Windows 10 set up the way you want.
For those on macOS this can be set in system preferences -> keyboard -> shortcuts -> mission control.
I highly recommend using multiple desktops with dedicated hotkeys over alt+tab to switch between applications. Much much faster to press fn+cmd+<h, j , k, l> and immediately bring up the application you want than to tab until you find the application you are looking for.
Could you give me some pointers how to setup virtual desktops and tiled windows that are completely keyboard controllable?
I only use W10 as a secondary OS and never used windows as main since XP/2000. So far never got to dig deeper into this. It seems to me that out of the box a lot of the functionality is there, but there are also a lot of related third party (often paid) tools.
What are some good combination of tools (third party, paid or not) and settings for a more keyboard centric i guess you could call it, setup of Windows? At the moment to me it feels a bit like, that I could do everything with just keyboard but I'm not meant to.
Without weird third party stuff, it annoys me that I can’t map desktops to Ctrl-1/2/3/4 which is how I have it set up in Linux. Hopefully they eventually make all this more flexible.
Where it’s feasible for a given task, I find nothing more productive than just switching to a Linux virtual console and running Emacs in text mode there. The complete absence of doodads gives a huge boost to my focus.
Well that seems awfully close minded. “Good writers” are those who can engage their audience, your perspective of a “Good writer” is simply a reflection of you as a target audience. No need to put everyone in your box.
How do you engage your audience without giving them anything? With just word play? And are we all forgetting the context of GPT-3 and the post I was replying to?
Also Jay-Z isn't every rapper. I'm pretty sure even Jay-Z would agree most rap is not very substantive or saying anything new. It's cookie cutter.
So your point is most cookie cutter rap is good writing?
If engagement is the new measure of good writing, then we are lost. Click bait is engagement. Tabloid material is engagement. Fox vs CNN and political trigger pieces are all engagement. None of it should be considered good writing.
rEFInd can automatically detect linux, Windows, and mac partitions and boot them. You could just install it to a usb stick and use it whenever necessary.
That's a very neat tool! I'm kind of turned away by this though:
> Warning: Your kernel and initramfs must reside on a file system that rEFInd can read.
Can it boot fully-encrypted disks (by chainloading GRUB, for example)?
What you mentioned is rEFInd’s auto detect feature which by design doesn’t work with encrypted disks. rEFInd will automatically detect other .efi binaries so you can just install your other bootloaders alongside rEFInd, make rEFInd the default and chainload into your other bootloaders when you need to boot an encrypted disk.
I have a setup where I moved /boot of the encrypted luks partition to the esp and boot from there using a custom entry in rEFInd
To say programming is never to attain such a characteristic is making a statement against the trends of history in all other academic disciplines. Focusing on the present state is an ignorance of underlying trend.
A couple thousand years ago, groundbreaking advances in trigonometry were made by some of the worlds smartest people. Today the average high schooler knows soh cah toa.