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NOTtheMessiah's comments
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NOTtheMessiah  ·  3232 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What The Next Generation Needs Is Math, Not Programming

To refine your example, as it's hard to talk about powers to children, you must take caution to not introduce how to do something without illustrating the why of the necessity of it and the what it is they are actually doing.

I think when it comes to teaching the numbers, starting with unary (base-1, or a tally system) representations of real-world things, and the operations on them, and then talk about how the operations are isomorphic (without using that word) to those on a decimal system. Bring to context the utility of a representation, you can bring up binary as an example (and learning binary alongside the standard curricula definitely helped add missing context to Arabic numerals for my childhood), but when you teach how unary behaves the same as decimal, they can carry that reasoning over to whatever else they encounter.

NOTtheMessiah  ·  3232 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What The Next Generation Needs Is Math, Not Programming

If you learn a particular language, you can only express yourself (and therefore, think) in that one language. When it comes to languages such as C, the only way you can approach a problem is through the lens of paradigm of portable assembly. When your language is not expressive enough to encapsulate the abstractions you intend to use, it gets harder to overcome the limits of the current paradigm. Some areas of mathematics (particularly category theory) have been applied to programming languages to create abstractions that are capture ideas without contradictions through a type system.

I guess when we talk of mathematics, we tend to think of the curricula that shows up in public schools (the progression of algebra->geometry->trig->calculus), the stuff that you calculate and come up with an answer with little concept of what it means or how it's applied, we might not be aware of areas of advanced algebra or formal logic which provide the means to create abstractions and reason about them.

Not too long ago, Baltimore DHS subpoenaed Reddit for the identities of moderators and users of DarkNetMarkets https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/30tudk/psa_5_reddit_accounts_subpoenaed_by_ice/

Seems in this case the Southern District court is desperately lashing out at whomever they can identify, given that the Judge was doxed by 8chan.

NOTtheMessiah  ·  3232 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Coming Out Simulator 2014

If you liked that, check out Nicky's other games/demos: http://ncase.me/

I recommend Parable of the Polygons and Nothing to Hide

NOTtheMessiah  ·  3680 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Musical Set Theory Part II - Mathematical Musings

Have you looked the Haskell School of Music? Haskell is a programming language that makes much use of algebraic constructions.

I once had the opportunity to show him this comic in a book store, but got scared. I ended up showing it to one of his Secret Service officers. I still wonder if he would have had a sense of humor about it.

NOTtheMessiah  ·  3702 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: GCHQ and NSA intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users worldwide

Straight-up blackmail is not an effective strategy: Hoover failed to blackmail MLK back in the 60's. Their current strategy is to search everything you've done in the past, and find or make up a crime using poorly worded legislation, falsify the investigative trail as to be permissible in court, and threaten you with excessive prosecution, while you rot in pre-trial detention, hopefully milking a plea bargain to serve them political gain or have you turn in your friends. This effectively ends the judicial tradition of presumption of innocence.

NOTtheMessiah  ·  3703 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Emacs Problem

    And maybe, just maybe, someone will succeed in the gargantuan effort to create a usable replacement for Emacs in some other high-level language. Probably not any time soon, I'd bet.
It's kinda a shame, I love the idea of a completely transparent configureable editor. I tried Yi a while back, an editor written in Haskell, and it was uncomfortably slow to use/could use optimization. As languages become more expressive, we may see more projects like it.

EDIT: Tried installing the new version of Yi out of curiousity, maybe they made optimizations or my computer is now fast enough, but as of now it seems more than responsive enough. You can run Yi with Vi or Emacs keybindings.

NOTtheMessiah  ·  3703 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why the FCC can't actually save Net Neutrality

Meshnets and community net infrastructure might work at the local level, and could be an instrumental part of an eventual solution, but our immediate concern should be about things that enable the internet to be a global unfettered network.

I stopped using fish as my default shell when it caused problems with my display manager, so be warned. There's also fizsh, a zsh configuration.

NOTtheMessiah  ·  3704 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Any other reddit exiles ?

It's a different kind of fragmentation, catered to you without having dissociated communities. Tags circumvent a circlejerk.

NOTtheMessiah  ·  3704 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Any other reddit exiles ?

    Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator, started in March 2005. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two three-month programs per year. In exchange, they take an average of about 6% of the company's equity.
They helped launch reddit, DropBox, and Airbnb, and this site is based off of the Hacker News source code.