No. Celebrities are, by definition, well known. To pull an example from the article, Ted Bundy certainly qualifies as a celebrity who would generally not be considered beloved.
Absolutely. Syntax highlighting for me is much more about what not to read than it is about what to read. It can be skipping over 'for' for the billionth time but often it's also reading only a couple key tokens to get the gist of what the line does and only going back to read it in full if non-obvious details matter.
I think comparing text and code actually makes perfect sense but you have to compare the right text.
Pick up any reference book. A dictionary, a textbook, a phone book, whatever. Leaf through it a bit. You'll find they all use text formatting to highlight things. The dictionaries I've used typically use bold for a word and its different forms, italics for parts of speech, and such. Phone books similarly use different weights and sizes for names, addresses, and phone numbers. Textbooks use bold and italics to highlight important terms and concepts and students will often mark up the books to further highlight certain things.
Code is usually not meant to be read like you would a novel; it's much more like a reference text. For me, at least, syntax highlighting is a tool that supports the ability to more easily find what I need and understand it in isolation. Maybe it would be slower for me to read a syntax-highlighted file token-by-token end-to-end than an un-highlighted one but that's not a use case I ever need.
I have to agree with you on that! My bad that I didn't specify what kind of text I was refeering to! I thought of example that was provided in the post.
I actually crawled through enough of those links to get an idea of what happened and I still don't see anywhere that YC/dang really went wrong. I'm sure it's in there somewhere but I've already put in more effort than I really wanted to.
The brokers reaching out to the students doesn't mean entrapment, even if we took the case where the brokers actually were government agents. To be entrapment, someone working on the government's behalf would have to do something that would even convince a lawful-minded person to commit the crime.
> To be entrapment, someone working on the government's behalf would have to do something that would even convince a lawful-minded person to commit the crime.
As a lawful-minded individual, if multiple government websites tell me the institution is accredited, and the head of the institution tells me that work-for-credit is sufficient for student status, I am reasonably convinced that it is legal for me to enroll and apply for a visa.
Just how deep into the letter of the law do I have to dig to discover this isn't legal?
I think the difference here is not that it was entrapment, but that it wasn't a crime at all. Unless the law says this crime is strict liability, then the prosecutor would need to show that these individuals intended to commit the crime they were committing.
For example, say you have a bucket in your yard, I go and stick a sign up saying 'Free bucket to good home.' and someone else comes by and grabs the bucket. Focusing only on the third person's actions for a moment, even though they took a bucket that they had no right to take, and they would likely have to give back, they never committed a crime because they never intended to steal the bucket. They only intended to take a bucket being given away freely. (This is different from 'ignorance of the law isn't an excuse'; that would apply if they did intend to steal a bucket but thought stealing wasn't illegal.)
(Now there is still an issue with the government doing something similar with strict liability laws and I'm not sure how that one works out.)
That is a very different line of reasoning from that to which I was responding. IANAL so I'm not comfortable speculating too far but "it's entrapment if the government asks you to do it" is something I know to be a common misconception.
If I were to speculate further, though, I'd say that if someone justifiably believed it was legit because of the government sites, that somebody hadn't committed a crime in the first place and thus couldn't be entrapped.
> The brokers reaching out to the students doesn't mean entrapment
Especially since the brokers are the ones being charged with the crime.
The students aren't be charged with a crime (they are, however, being subject to non-criminal immigration proceedings, but "entrapment" is a criminal defense.)
In short, infinities are complicated and intuition doesn't work well.
In slightly longer, you're talking about the difference of the rate of growth of two functions rather than actually about the cardinalities of the sets.
We define two sets as having the same cardinality when we can create a bijection between them. We can list the primes in order from smallest to largest and number them with the natural numbers. So we'll have 2 match up with 0, 3 with 1, 5 with 2, 7 with 3, etc. Every single prime number will correspond with a natural number AND every single natural number will correspond with a prime number, no exceptions. So they must be the same size. They are also the same size as the integers and the rational numbers but the set of real numbers is a bigger infinity.
> Would you design mathematical notations based on the opinion of 5th graders?
It's not their opinions. It's about how they naturally think.
And, yes, if I could change mathematical notation in a manner that made it easier to learn without introducing a more significant disadvantage, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Things are the way they are for a reason but that reason isn't necessarily that the way things are is the best.
It's not just about non-programmers being insufficiently precise. It's also about the different ways they express precision compared to how you have to do it for existing programming languages. For example, the paper talked about how the participants tended to talk about doing something to everything in a set in vectorised terms whereas scalar languages tend to be more common outside of scientific settings.
> The list of things they taught kids for the PacMan study also seemed very... well, technical.
What list? Perhaps I'm just missing it or there's another link I haven't seen but they don't seem to mention having taught the kids anything--especially anything technical--before the Pac-Man study.
