[HN Gopher] Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong's Sudoku So...
___________________________________________________________________
Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong's Sudoku Solver (2018)
Author : quaintdev
Score : 426 points
Date : 2022-02-02 07:23 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (leetcode.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (leetcode.com)
| dan-robertson wrote:
| As I recall, he did mathematics first and performed very well at
| it but, despite the efforts of the academics who knew him to
| convince him to become a mathematician, he had to go to get a
| practical qualification (something in computer science I guess)
| and then return to Singapore to be prime minister. But that story
| does come from the maths department so is likely exaggerated a
| little.
| capableweb wrote:
| Released under MIT no less (https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/fo
| lders/0B2G2LjIu7Wbdfjha...). Great to see more government
| (employees) using open source licenses :)
|
| Edit: apparently, you can't directly link to the files inside the
| Drive, as the URL doesn't change when you open it in their file
| browser. What's the point even?
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| You can. Right click and get link.
|
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2G2LjIu7WbdNkZ5aW96ODNxNms...
| capableweb wrote:
| Ah, great, thanks for that. One would expect URLs to be able
| to be used for locating resources uniquely on the web, but
| maybe that expectation is too much today.
|
| Edit: That link you put misses the context of the directory
| you're in (unless I'm missing something else unintuitive
| again), for some reason. Seems the UX of Drive is essentially
| broken for files living inside directories.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I don't know for sure, but the "missing context" part might
| be intentional, at least this behavior matches what I want.
|
| This way, you can share multiple files in a same folder to
| different people and they won't see other files.
|
| OneDrive works similarly.
| capableweb wrote:
| Makes sense and doesn't. Ideally, you can navigate to the
| file from a directory and copy the link that is in the
| address bar, and share a direct link to the file with the
| context of the directory. And if needed, right-click to
| share like you did to share that file and that file only,
| like what it does now.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Yeah that's true.
|
| TBF, having the address bar to dynamically reflect
| whatever the user currently is seeing on screen is really
| a relatively "new" idea, so I typically don't expect
| that. It would be great if they have it, of course.
| capableweb wrote:
| > TBF, having the address bar to dynamically reflect
| whatever the user currently is seeing on screen is really
| a relatively "new" idea, so I typically don't expect
| that. It would be great if they have it, of course.
|
| "Relatively" and "new" being very... Relative in this
| case :) I remember writing client-side web applications
| (SPAs before they were called SPAs) in 2008/2009 where we
| did this because tying loading resources based on the URL
| (compared to the opposite of loading a resource then
| manipulating the URL) was so obvious, wouldn't surprise
| me if the practice was older than that as well.
|
| In terms of how fast the web moves forward, I'd say it's
| not very "new", but in terms of anything else, yeah I
| guess it is relatively new :)
| lanstin wrote:
| People went to a lot of trouble to make this feature of
| resource location work in the 1990s, but my front end
| work ended with jQuery so perhaps the idea was lost and
| now is again being found?
| dave333 wrote:
| I'm having trouble following the code - does this just brute
| force the solution by trying all possibilities?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| If you are interested in politics, in particular the relationship
| between the US and China, this is a very interesting interview:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTWKAMyFBY
|
| PM Lee Hsien Loong at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum 2021
| hestefisk wrote:
| He is obviously a smart person. I wouldn't vote for him though.
| He recently sued and won a "libel" case against a blogger who
| reposted a link to a Malaysian web site claiming the PM is
| involved in the 1MDB scandal.
|
| Singapore is a one-party police state with zero press freedom and
| a poor track record of respecting human rights (being gay is
| still illegal).
|
| So whilst it's impressive that politician can code, I don't like
| him, his views, or his political party.
|
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Singapore-blogger-crowdfund...
| jb1991 wrote:
| It's also illegal in Singapore to proceed with any
| investigation of government activity. There are no checks and
| balances. There is no investigative journalism or allowed
| points of view that are not approved by the state. There is
| conflict of interest within the government, and no ability to
| dig into it without prosecution.
|
| Imagine Obama suing a college student for something they wrote
| on their blog. Now, Trump might have done something like that..
| which is the main parallel to draw with the current leadership
| in Singapore.
| lenkite wrote:
| US policy regarding prosecution of leaks, suppression of
| journalists, etc is mostly independent of which President
| sits in the White House. The fact that you believe otherwise
| shows that you have _massive_ blinkers on - propaganda has
| successfully done its job.
| rtpg wrote:
| I don't think the overton window is very far from the worst
| case for the US, but it is documented that Obama
| specifically did not want to charge Assange because of
| press freedom concerns. Of course in the long term it
| didn't matter because every 4-8 years everyone has global
| amnesia and decides to swap for a completely different kind
| of head of state.
|
| The american state is a large behemoth that moves on its
| own for much (and almost always in the wrong direction),
| but it's not like there are absolutely zero differences
| between who sits in the chair (and there is a lot of
| potential for someone who has the will to effect change).
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Getting it out that Obama did not want Assange prosecuted
| is typical of American style politics. When you are on
| both sides of the fence you can address criticism by
| pointing out that you did not want to take the action or
| pointing to the action that you did take to get him
| extradited. It is a win no matter which way the wind
| blows.
| kragen wrote:
| The persecution of Assange continued for several years
| under Obama.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > US policy regarding prosecution of leaks, etc is mostly
| independent of which President sits in the White House. The
| fact that you believe otherwise shows that you have massive
| blinkers on - propaganda has successfully done its job.
|
| As my other comment mentioned, this is not about leaks.
| This is about open questions being raised by citizens of a
| government, who wish to see more investigation into the
| activities of the government. I said nothing about
| prosecution for leaks, nor is this discussion even about
| that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30176959
| lenkite wrote:
| The line drawn is a bit thin there since investigative
| journalism necessarily involves whistleblowers or asking
| pointed questions based on tips. Trump had Obama to show
| him the true way of suppression and merrily followed in
| his footsteps.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/sunday/if-
| donald-...
|
| Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I.
| have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone
| records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-
| conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting
| and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force
| them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal
| cases. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doj-invoked-
| espionage-act-i...
|
| Dana Priest, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The
| Washington Post, added: "Obama's attorney general
| repeatedly allowed the F.B.I. to use intrusive measures
| against reporters more often than any time in recent
| memory. The moral obstacles have been cleared for Trump's
| attorney general to go even further, to forget that it's
| a free press that has distinguished us from other
| countries, and to try to silence dissent by silencing an
| institution whose job is to give voice to dissent."
|
| https://www.cato.org/commentary/vendetta-how-obama-
| administr... Fast and Furious involved a sting operation
| that the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol,
| Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives concocted to infiltrate
| and weaken Mexican drug cartels. The scheme entailed
| shipping traceable guns to the drug trafficking gangs and
| then following the trail to identify and neutralize those
| organizations and the kingpins who ran them. But
| Operation Fast and Furious backfired badly. Law
| enforcement personnel assigned to maintain the traces
| lost track of where the weapons ultimately ended up. The
| cartels received more than 1,700 additional weapons at
| the expense of US taxpayers. Not surprisingly, the Obama
| administration sought to conceal the nature and extent of
| the fiasco. Invoking "executive privilege," Attorney
| General Eric Holder even defied a congressional subpoena
| and refused to testify before a House committee
| investigating the Fast and Furious scheme.
|
| But yes, Obama==GOOD, Trump==BAD
| nojs wrote:
| The picture you're painting doesn't reflect the reality of
| the country. Singapore is consistently rated as one of the
| least corrupt countries in the world.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| This Wikipedia section paints it the best, in my admittedly
| unqualified opinion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore#Politic
| a...
| LeanderK wrote:
| I don't think the comment was about corruption but about an
| oppressive political climate
| MisterSandman wrote:
| Even Hitler's Germany was considered well-governed by some,
| until it wasn't.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > The picture you're painting doesn't reflect the reality
| of the country
|
| As someone who has spent much of my life in that country,
| yes it does. However, I think that you are conflating
| orthogonal concepts.
| nojs wrote:
| I'm surprised to hear that as that hasn't been my
| experience living there (I'm not Singaporean though).
| jb1991 wrote:
| It's actually a very nice country for an Expat to live
| in. Much of the gain with little of the negatives, and
| usually a limit on your overall exposure to these things.
| And most expats are much more focused on their individual
| experiences than the long-term effects of a government.
| yostrovs wrote:
| You got that last comparison backwards:
| https://pressfreedomtracker.us/blog/obama-used-espionage-
| act... I don't believe Trump jailed any reporters, unlike the
| record achieved by Obama.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Also, during the unrest of 2020 dozens of credentialed
| journalists were assaulted by government forces, including
| in many places by state and local police that were
| backstopped with federal agents.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| kordlessagain wrote:
| > Attorney General Eric Holder directed the Department of
| Justice to aggressively prosecute government employees who
| discussed classified information with reporters. In 2012,
| after news organizations reported on U.S. drone strikes and
| attempts to disable Iranian nuclear reactors, Holder
| assigned two U.S. attorneys to track down the journalists'
| sources.
|
| I've found some talk about a Fox News reporter being
| _investigated_ , but I don't see anything anywhere (yet)
| about any reporters being _arrested_. Can you cite your
| sources, please?
|
| > jailed any reporters, unlike the record achieved by Obama
| [deleted]
| jb1991 wrote:
| You are referring to something different, a _government_
| attack on leaks of classified info. I don 't have an
| opinion on that.
|
| What Singapore's PM has done is _personally_ sue people,
| such as college students, for speculation on their blogs.
| Not at all the same thing -- no leaks of government
| information, instead, open questions attempting to
| investigate and raise awareness of conflicts of interest.
| Some students have gone bankrupt by these attacks.
|
| Trump _is_ also that petty.
| yostrovs wrote:
| No comparison is ever perfect. No, Obama didn't jail a
| college student blogger. He did go after Assange,
| Manning, and many others. He attacked more people willing
| to uncover government activities than any other
| president. But you're right, it's not an exact same thing
| as suing speculating college students. It's much worse.
| We live in a democratic republic supposedly.
| pell wrote:
| It was Trump who actually went against Assange at the end
| of the day. The extradition was started under his
| administration. Obama's administration did decide not to
| go forward with it.
| yostrovs wrote:
| Obama couldn't extradite a man out of an embassy of a
| country that was not cooperating.
| pell wrote:
| According to all records on this, the reason he was not
| charged by Obama was that his administration was afraid
| the case would not hold up in court. If they felt
| differently, I don't see why the extradition request
| wouldn't have been made, whether he was still held up in
| the Ecuadorian embassy or not. After all, Ecuador and the
| US have had an extradition treaty since 1872 and all that
| the US had to do is pressure Ecuador and wait/influence
| them till a new government was in place.
|
| It was Trump's administration that according to all
| information simply felt differently about the case
| entirely. This is why his Justice Department went
| forward.
|
| >President Barack Obama's Justice Department had
| extensive internal debates about whether to charge
| Assange amid concerns the case might not hold up in court
| and would be viewed as an attack on journalism by an
| administration already taking heat for leak prosecutions.
|
| >
|
| >But senior Trump administration officials seemed to make
| clear early on that they held a different view, dialing
| up the rhetoric on the anti-secrecy organization shortly
| after it made damaging disclosures about the CIA's
| cyberespionage tools.
|
| AP(1)
|
| I mean if you have sources to the contrary, please share
| them. But all that was available so far doesn't really
| help your assumption there. Also, is this really
| surprising? Trump promised (but thankfully failed) to
| "open up Libel laws" after all.(2)
|
| _____
|
| (1) https://apnews.com/article/north-america-ap-top-news-
| barack-...
|
| (2) https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
| meter/promises/trumpomete...
| typon wrote:
| It sounds like people are arguing about which President
| to blame for the jailing of journalists when both parties
| in the US hold the same position on the matter. The
| details are circumstantial.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Amazing how you can take recent victories of liberties in
| certain places and then start judging other countries when they
| don't abide by them.
|
| Give them time! Don't assassinate them for being who they have
| been for years upon years and how they still have not changed
| as much as you would be pleased.
|
| Honestly, the world will start to see a backward shift on woke
| culture after the PR disaster that the far left wing
| administration in the US is becoming.
| hestefisk wrote:
| Seriously, comment was flagged?
| hestefisk wrote:
| Human Rights Watch have a very good write up on Singapore here:
|
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/12/12/kill-chicken-scare-mon...
| throwaway4good wrote:
| And Singepore wasn't invited to Biden's summit for
| democracies ...
| hestefisk wrote:
| Source?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| You can google it.
|
| The point is; Singapore doesn't toe the US line on China
| and therefore gets HRW and similar thrown after them.
|
| Which is absurd as Singapore is by far the best-governed
| country in the neighbourhood.
| teh_klev wrote:
| I don't normally do this but...it's "toe the line".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Thank you.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I suspect there's a reasonable argument to be made that
| under certain circumstances, democracy is a substantial
| barrier to optimization of governance. Between Soviet/CCP
| long-term planning capacity and the fascists' making the
| trains run on time, industrial totalitarianism has a
| track record of getting the job done.
|
| That said, all that job-doing is at the mortal expense of
| anyone who disagrees, stands in the way, or can be
| scapegoated for standing in the way. Also, woe be upon
| you if your leadership selection process picks a dud
| (compare the damage an incompetent megalomaniac leader in
| a limited democratic system can do to the same result in
| an absolutist dictatorship).
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Singapore is a democracy, claiming otherwise is just an
| idiotic insult.
|
| You see the pattern of the same group holding power for a
| very long time in some countries, in particular in times
| of high growth (rather than oscillating between blocks
| like the US).
|
| For example LDP in Japan or the socialdemocrats in
| Sweden.
|
| It really doesn't mean that they are not democratic.
| pell wrote:
| >The point is; Singapore doesn't toe the US line on China
| and therefore gets HRW and similar thrown after them.
|
| Human Rights Watch isn't part of the American government.
| They've criticized the US numerous times. So much so that
| they are concluding that the US is trying to discredit
| them.(1) Singapore might simply not have been invited
| because they're not a real democracy.
|
| >Which is absurd as Singapore is by far the best-governed
| country in the neighbourhood.
|
| Best governed (according to you) != democracy.
|
| _____
|
| (1) https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/10/23/us-seeks-
| discredit-human...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I found this: https://www.state.gov/participant-list-the-
| summit-for-democr...
|
| Wow, I was surprised to see that Sri Lanka was not on the
| list. Does anyone know the story behind that? Also, Nepal
| and Bangladesh are missing. That is also strange. All of
| them are certainly (proud) democracies!
| throwaway4good wrote:
| It is all about China.
|
| They also somehow managed to censor Audrey Tang of Taiwan
| (another computer scientist turned politician) live on
| video-link.
|
| Just goes to show how carefully orchestrated all this is.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Woah! AT (Audrey Tang) [1] is an amazing person. For
| those unaware, she is a "minister without portfolio for
| digital affairs" (a mouthful!) in Taiwan. I tried to
| Google about this but couldn't find anything. Can you
| share a link?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
| throwaway4good wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/13/us-appears-
| to-...
|
| US appears to cut video feed of Taiwanese minister at
| summit
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Why would a "Summit on Democracy" matter other then to
| show who the US are pals with and which ones (by
| omission) would rather be pals with other (opposing)
| powers?
| moron4hire wrote:
| In general, I think it's very dangerous to assume that
| politicians--especially ones who can secure premier positions--
| are stupid. It makes it too easy give up against them, to
| explain away the evils they commit as "whaddayagonnado?"
| gregoriol wrote:
| One can be smart in a field and not in another: negociations
| is more important in politics than coding.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I have long been banging on that software is a new form of
| _literacy_ (and will have similar deep far reaching social
| changes)
|
| I completely agree with you about the Singapore PMs political
| views. But this is a turning in the weather - all of us must
| become coders - the "elites", our leaders, our children, our
| accountants etc. And one country has now got one "literate"
| leader. He will make different decisions because of his
| literacy.
|
| We might not like those decisions, but software awareness will
| affect his decisions (although probably less than local
| politics, economics, bribes etc)
|
| We are seeing chnage happen
| robjan wrote:
| I would say it's less important for our leaders to be at the
| coalface and coding / learning to code than for them to know
| what's possible.
|
| During the last industrial revolution, the leaders who we all
| hear about weren't directly involved in building the machines
| which automated processes. Rather, they were experts at
| leveraging skills of people who could do it.
| [deleted]
| pempem wrote:
| The most important line of this was "we may not like those
| decisions" _and_ "software awareness will affect his
| decisions".
|
| It's not difficult to project how software might affect the
| decisions of someone who allows for no checks/balances aka
| some form of democracy.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Singapore is an island nation with a tiny population (~7M) and
| has loads of national security concerns including destabilizing
| forces spreading misinformation.
|
| So, no, suing for libel in a personal capacity does NOT equate
| to exercising state power as you assert. Unless you claim the
| entire Judiciary and state apparatus which has a long track
| record of issuing rulings both for and against public
| personalities is somehow flawed.
|
| This is HN, i wouldn't have expected a comment such as this to
| go unchecked this long.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Correction: Singapore has a population of 5.7 million. Were
| you thinking of the 7.5 million that live in Hongkong?
|
| Also, I don't understand this part: <<has loads of national
| security concerns including destabilizing forces spreading
| misinformation.>> I think the ruling parties (including
| opposition!) of _every_ sovereign state on planet Earth could
| /would/does make the exact same claim. Claims like that feel
| like "The War on Terror" which makes no sense on so many
| levels. See also: Countries that are permanently in a
| "revolution". Example: Iran's Supreme Council of the Cultural
| Revolution (SCCR; Persian: shwry `ly nqlb frhngy)
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| You don't understand or you don't agree?
|
| The sentence and the security environment in the region are
| well documented and covered in the security posture reviews
| routinely covered by official press.
|
| What specifically is your argument?
| rabite wrote:
| friedturkey wrote:
| Wild that there are people who take enough time out of their
| day to pass laws against it.
|
| I only ever think of gay men when I'm made aware that some
| countries have laws against them. Otherwise I'm never aware
| of any "public displays" because I don't care what boys are
| doing with their mates.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Yes, I feel the same. And the same can be said for those
| who are unwilling to repeal remaining laws. It is
| disturbing that MPs in Singapore regularly refer to Section
| 377A of the Singapore Penal Code as "dead letter". If it is
| truly dead letter, why not skip lunch, and repeal it?
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _It is disturbing that MPs in Singapore regularly refer
| to Section 377A of the Singapore Penal Code as "dead
| letter". If it is truly dead letter, why not skip lunch,
| and repeal it?_
|
| The PAP needs to keep their Christian vote.
| rabite wrote:
| You're not aware of public displays of homosexuals? Gay
| pride parades? Drag queen story hour? The Folsom Street
| Fair? You've never heard of any of these things?
| msla wrote:
| You seem obsessed with male homosexuality. You should
| work on that.
| friedturkey wrote:
| I don't go searching for those things because I'm not
| interested in men in that way.
| rabite wrote:
| friedturkey wrote:
| I lived in the second gayest city in America for a good
| while and I wasn't walking in on gay orgies. I don't
| recall a single instance of gay public affection despite
| being outside often, but I also don't recall any straight
| instances either because I don't care about it. I have
| good success finding desirable partners and don't hold
| feelings of jealousy or anything so any instances of PDA
| leave my mind because I don't care about them.
|
| It seems like either a personal problem, or a problem
| with lawlessness in general. Would you be happier walking
| in on straight orgies? Is that legal in Singapore? Seems
| wild that they'd allow that, but your post implies it.
| rabite wrote:
| I specifically named Folsom Street Fair. It is on the
| street. You can trivially find video and imagery of what
| is on display on San Francisco streets via search
| engines. Do you think this behavior is acceptable on
| public streets?
|
| No, I would not be happier walking in on straight sex
| events, but for some reason this stuff seems to be
| completely unique to homosexual behavior.
| friedturkey wrote:
| It's not hard to find videos of public straight sex on
| the internet. Homeless encampments are full of that.
|
| You just seem fixated on gay men to a degree that's
| beyond odd.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Don't be so quick to dismiss. There are lots of great
| community fundraisers in San Francisco that feature drag
| queens. Sure, the audiences will be, on balance, more
| queer people than average, but these events are still
| lots of fun for any human being.
| causi wrote:
| Gee, I dunno, probably the same reason everybody else insists
| on the right to exist?
| rabite wrote:
| causi wrote:
| Male homosexual activity is illegal even in private, and
| is actively prosecuted:
|
| https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-
| crime/governme...
|
| Same-sex marriages have no legal recognition and gay
| couples cannot adopt children. No laws exist to prevent
| discrimination against gay people in employment or
| housing.
| rabite wrote:
| causi wrote:
| Overheard conversations, social media posts, someone with
| a grudge. Figuring out whether or not someone is
| abstinent is not impossible.
| macintux wrote:
| In a police state, privacy is elusive.
| oblio wrote:
| It doesn't need to be a police state. Even in democracies
| there are nosy neighbors and plenty of horror stories due
| to that.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Pink Dot SG exists:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Dot_SG
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| When you wrote "bridge", I assume you meant either the
| "Johor-Singapore Causeway" [1] or "Malaysia-Singapore Second
| Link" [2]. There are two bridges that connect Singapore to
| another country -- both lead to Malaysia.
|
| Are you familiar with LBGT rights in Malaysia? Just a quick
| look at the Wiki page [3] says: <<Penalty: Up to 20 years
| imprisonment with caning, fines, and deportation. Muslim
| citizens may be charged in Islamic court. Vigilante
| executions and beatings are also tolerated.>> That doesn't
| sound like a good place for LGBT people.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johor%E2%80%93Singapore_Cau
| sew...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia%E2%80%93Singapore_
| Sec...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Malaysia
| [deleted]
| pupdogg wrote:
| I wonder how often a person tagged as a "smart person" by our
| personal neural network turns out to be not true?
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| bncy wrote:
| Don't get me wrong but I think that's one of the reasons why
| Singapore is one of the fastest growing countries in the world.
| throwaway48375 wrote:
| Fastest growing is always a BS stat.
| pennaMan wrote:
| Can you expand on that?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Don't get me wrong but I think that's one of the reasons why
| Singapore is one of the fastest growing countries in the world.
|
| It's not. (Unless you have a really expansive view of "one
| of".)
|
| Whether you mean population or economy.
| skywal_l wrote:
| That and the tax heaven.
|
| /s
| secondaryacct wrote:
| Singapore is as much of a tax heaven as Hong Kong is. When
| you live there, it's not.
|
| Now if you re a chronically over spending under budgeted
| country and look at Singapore you're like "how can they be so
| rich with so little tax, they re robbing us", but that may
| hide a few things you could try on your side.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Does it really matter for 99% of us who are just working
| class people. If Singapore can be a tax heaven and the
| profits are distributed more in the public sector i'm all
| for it.
| zytron3 wrote:
| "Race to the bottom" tax policy is only really good for
| multinational corporations.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Its a race to the bottom sure, but if it isn't you there
| are many others that will deliver the Tax Haven service.
| martneumann wrote:
| You take taxes away from other countries where the
| profits would be distributed - and where the actual
| companies operate.
| unwind wrote:
| Sorry for being That Guy, but the word is "haven" [1], Google
| defines it [2] as "a place of safety or refuge".
|
| As a Scandinavian, the idea of someone being "safe" from
| taxes is ... alien, to say the least. :)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven
|
| [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=haven+dictionary
| markdown wrote:
| The US (multiple of your states) is more a tax haven than
| Singapore. By far.
| nathell wrote:
| It'd be great to learn about other code by prominent politicians.
|
| Off the top of my head, I only recall one other example: COBOL on
| Wheelchair [0], a web micro-framework for GNU COBOL, written by
| Adrian Zandberg [1], a Polish MP.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zandberg
| TMWNN wrote:
| John Poindexter
| (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter>), Reagan's
| National Security Advisor:
|
| * First in his Naval Academy class
|
| * PhD from Caltech
|
| * Reached flag rank
|
| After leaving office because of the Iran-Contra scandal (during
| which Poindexter reportedly set up a secret communications
| channel on the IBM PROFS system the NSC used), Poindexter
| became a software developer!
| dom96 wrote:
| That's really cool, but COBOL on wheelchair sounds kinda
| offensive, seems risky for a politician.
| pzduniak wrote:
| 1. His political party is on the fringes of the left,
| advocating for very high taxation (reaching 55% at income >=
| $63k/yr, 75% at >= $125k) - this combined with the general
| Polish lack of trust towards politicians (and our ~20-ish%
| total income tax loopholes) practically guarantees that they
| won't ever get any real power.
|
| 2. Current government openly admitted to spying on the
| opposition and introduced an anti-abortion law that already
| killed a couple women, as hospitals decide to play it safe
| and wait until the fetus dies. And they dismantled the
| separation of powers. And probably already stole hundreds of
| millions of dollars, with independent investigations
| confirming at least tens. Our politics are so messed up that
| absolutely no one will bat an eye at a 7 years old non-PC
| joke.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Read question: I am baffled by the democracy situation in
| Poland. How can the situation be explained to outsiders?
|
| When I was a child in the United States, Lech Walesa
| regularly celebrated as a hero by helping to lead Poland
| into democracy as head of the trade union
| Solidarity/Solidarnosc. I always felt he was "Une Hacker
| Originale" by forming a worker's union in a (nominally)
| Communist state! It was like they back-doored a democratic
| institution into a unfree state. Amazing stuff to read
| about.
| ed_balls wrote:
| > was "Une Hacker Originale" by forming a worker's union
| in a (nominally) Communist state
|
| nah he was just a puppet/poster boy for a good story. The
| real reason why communism fail in Poland were:
|
| - coup d'etat by deep state. General Kiszczak did an
| excellent job. System has changed without a bloody
| revolution.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czes%C5%82aw_Kiszczak -
| communism was inefficient. Trading barier made it worse.
| As a result Soviet Union was weak and didn't have enough
| influence to keep the system stable. - Kissinger managed
| to convince China to counter Soviet Union. In 1969 they
| had to throw and enormous resources at the border.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Feels relevant https://youtu.be/IT2UH74ksJ4
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| I think it's meant to be a quip about Ruby on Rails.
| samatman wrote:
| It is clearly such a quip, fortunately the joke has been
| done better, albeit not by a politician:
|
| http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
|
| I don't happen to think the "wheelchair" is offensive here,
| you can tell yourself it's ageist and ableist if you need
| to, but the punchline is clearly at COBOL's expense.
| [deleted]
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Our prime minister is really active on Facebook, does that
| count?
| gyc wrote:
| Beto O'Rourke, former U.S. Congressman, was a member of the
| Cult of the Dead Cow [1].
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-
| poli...
| ZetaZero wrote:
| If only Bill Gates would run for office. What a code legacy he
| would have...
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Audrey Tang is a minister in the Taiwanese government:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
|
| https://metacpan.org/author/AUDREYT
|
| (And of course she is the initiator of the PUGS Perl 6
| implementation project)
| fsh wrote:
| Angela Merkel's dissertation lists five programs she wrote for
| various physical chemistry calculations. Two ran on an HP
| 9810A, two on the east German Robotron EC1055 mainframe, and
| one on the Soviet BESM6 mainframe. Maybe the listings are still
| on a shelf somewhere.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Hat tip on this post! I found her PhD thesis online here:
| https://vdocuments.net/reader/full/angela-merkel-
| doktorarbei...
|
| Scroll down to page 150: "Anhang A1: Das Programm FPROJ".
| Google translate tells me that "Anhang" means "Appendix" in
| German. I will not soon forget the term "das programm".
|
| I must admit: You nerd sniped me good on this one!
| dagw wrote:
| Former US Senate and Presidential hopeful and anti-vax poster
| child Herman Cain had a bachelors in mathematics, a masters in
| computer science and wrote ballistics software for the US Navy.
| Although he never actually succeeded in holding elected office,
| so I don't know if he really counts.
| mohn wrote:
| Adding on in this vein: I'm curious if the late Presidential
| hopeful Ross Perot wrote any noteworthy software, or if his
| role in tech was only that of a salesman. He's another case
| of not winning the races for elected office, but 18.9% of the
| popular vote in 1992 and a fortune of approximately $4
| billion in 2019 is nothing to sneeze at.
| adventured wrote:
| He was an IBM salesman after the Navy and prior to founding
| EDS, it's very unlikely he ever wrote any software. I've
| read a fair bit about him over my lifetime and have never
| run across a mention of him being technically inclined, an
| engineer, writing software, etc.
|
| He understood how the IT services industry worked - from
| his time on the inside of it at IBM - and saw an
| opportunity. He likely had a good salesman's grasp of the
| structure of the industry technologically (what was
| selling, what wasn't; who dominated what segments; what
| companies were spending on various segments). He got
| started from spotting a market inefficiency that IBM wasn't
| interested in pursuing (leasing unused compute time), so
| Perot formed EDS and the rest is history.
| trollied wrote:
| Boris Johnson is great at brainfuck
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| He does speak it as a native.
| sereja wrote:
| Leonid Volkov, a Russian oppositionist and the chief of staff
| of Alexei Navalny's 2018 campaign. The Russian government wants
| to arrest him for being a key member of the Anti-Corruption
| Foundation, which it brands as "extremist" (he fled to
| Lithuania, along with others).
|
| He got an ICPC bronze medal in 2001, and before getting into
| politics, he was at an IT company for about 10 years, working
| his way up from a software engineer to the CEO. The company now
| has 9k employees and $200M revenue.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Volkov_(politician)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corruption_Foundation
| rabite wrote:
| throwaway48375 wrote:
| I'm not sure that Pravda is a reliable source.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| You're comment is so obvious propaganda it's actually
| funny. Give our best to whoever's paying you for this low
| quality BS and tell them to try harder.
| hacliff wrote:
| the user you're replying to has delightful previous
| comments such as "the US media is controlled by people
| eligible for Israeli citizenship" which is more dog-
| foghorn than dog-whistle
| pessimizer wrote:
| Consider my comment propaganda too, then. The only major
| difference that Navalny has politically with Putin is
| that he wants his job.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Well, Russians are quite well known to make terrible
| choices for their leaders so I'm not surprised many of
| you think you're the good guys and the west owes you.
|
| There's millions like you who easily fall for the (very
| effective) Russian propaganda.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Do you think we as Americans ever fall for propaganda?
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Yes, you massively do as well.
|
| I was particularly picking at the GP saying there's
| practically no difference between Navalny and Putin.
|
| I wanted to bring up murdering your own citizens to win
| elections, killing journalists and dissidents worldwide
| as an example of difference between the two but then I
| realised GP probably doesn't even know about that or
| chooses to believe it's evil western propaganda.
|
| Not much point in discussing facts of life with
| brainwashed people.
| bonzini wrote:
| Technically one of them hasn't had the chance yet to show
| off.
| SXX wrote:
| This is bullshit from Putins propoganda. He is nationalist
| and have a specific positions on immigration, but it
| doesn't make him extremist.
| twic wrote:
| Bulgaria's minister of e-governance:
|
| https://techblog.bozho.net/i-have-been-appointed-as-e-govern...
|
| is a top Stack Overflow contributor:
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/users/203907/bozho
|
| as well as a moderately active HN user:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bozho
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Holy crap! This is amazing. I have lost count how many times
| I have read amazing, thoughtful answers authored by him on
| StackOverflow.com! I think he has even answered some of my
| own questions... I wish him good luck!
| nathell wrote:
| This is great! Previous HN discussion on him becoming a
| minister: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540771
| lostlogin wrote:
| Your comment led me to this gem from antman:
|
| Lets remember his answer on stackexchange regarding how
| many Greeks pay high taxes vs Greek owners of Porshe
| Cayennes, when he not recognized and was asked for
| references for his figures: "Hi, can you provider
| references for your figures? - Skiiv The figures come
| directly from SQL queries I executed on the General
| Secreteriat for Information Systems database.... - Diomidis
| Spinellis" https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/6883
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550277
| jeff_vader wrote:
| Ah this reminds COBOLUnit[1]. I'm still not sure if it's a joke
| or not.
|
| [1]: https://sites.google.com/site/cobolunit/home
| moron4hire wrote:
| Why would it be a joke?
| jeff_vader wrote:
| Look at the logo. Looks like a play on Cobol being
| "ancient" technology and unit testing being something
| "hipster".
| moron4hire wrote:
| I read it more like self-aware, tongue-in-cheek humor.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I did a double take when I read your comment, but the more
| I think about it: You are right. Assuming this is not a
| joke, it is probably a good idea! There must be lots of
| legacy software from 60s/70s/80s that runs on mainframes
| for gov't/military/banks/insurance. It won't be replaced,
| but it would great to add tests when making changes to
| code.
|
| Edit: Great HN username!
| TMWNN wrote:
| >There must be lots of legacy software from 60s/70s/80s
| that runs on mainframes for
| gov't/military/banks/insurance. It won't be replaced, but
| it would great to add tests when making changes to code.
|
| Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_ describes in some
| detail the job position of programmer archaeologist (
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_archaeology>).
| Set thousands of years in the future, such archaeologists
| search archives going back to the early days of Unix for
| useful code.
| chkuendig wrote:
| Wordtris ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordtris ) was
| developed by Armen Sarkissian - the current president of
| Armenia
| imadethis wrote:
| Former president, actually. He resigned about a week ago
| unexpectedly.
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| Following a scandal revealing he's secretly a citizen of
| St. Kitts & Nevis. Can't make this up...
| dnautics wrote:
| holy crap I played that game two decades ago.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I vote Josh Wardle for US President!
| adw wrote:
| He's British, so that'd require some dramatic geopolitical
| developments!
| rossriley wrote:
| Yet the current British prime minister was born in the
| US, we need some reciprocity here.
| blululu wrote:
| America being a former colony illegalized this
| possibility 230 years ago. The British being the the
| former global superpower lack such laws and they will
| thus eventually be ruled by a foreigner with an Oxbridge
| education.
| imron wrote:
| Thomas Massie
| https://mobile.twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1082457242...
| boredumb wrote:
| This is actually quite cool, I figured someone bugged him
| about a github or something and I scrolled down to see....
| twitter has to be dangerously close to 100% comprised of
| political propaganda bots repeating the talking point of the
| week and calling one another bots these days.
| Graffur wrote:
| That's awesome. Really impressive. Is he a good PM?
|
| My country's current PM is a school teacher but unfortunately
| doesn't seem to bring any of the good traits associated with that
| to the country. The last PM (and who will be PM again soon) was a
| doctor. Unfortunately he was is just a media/attention addict who
| won't tackle any big issues like housing costs or homelessness.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Is he a good PM?_
|
| Singaporean here. Not if we take the recent performance of our
| COVID task force into account -- it's run by a bunch of
| bumbling ministerial clowns (one who might potentially become
| the next prime minister) that can't seem to agree which
| direction to take Singapore, end up toeing the middle line
| between endemic and COVID zero, and wrecking everything
| including the mental health of most Singaporeans staying in
| their small public flats.
|
| Lee Hsien Loong's main involvement during the pandemic/endemic
| (Singapore still can't decide how to treat COVID) seemed to be
| encouraging people, especially the elderly, to get vaccinated.
| swyx wrote:
| i mean, have some sympathy, easy to criticize from the cheap
| seats. (and yes, they are paid a lot, so what, decisionmaking
| under uncertainty is still hard)
|
| in retrospect, LHL distancing himself from covid policy is
| pretty brilliant/convenient, as whoever proves a credible
| leader through this mess will have demonstrated the qualities
| we'd probably want for PM
| sssk wrote:
| A current minister in the Government of India was "a member of
| the architecture teams that invented the 486 chip and later,
| Intel's signature Pentium chip" -
| https://magazine.iit.edu/fall-2012/ahead-curve
| pratik661 wrote:
| The former Indian Prime Minister Narasina Rao used to code as
| well. https://princeezraj.medium.com/the-indian-prime-minister-
| who...
| sva_ wrote:
| Perhaps we should send some of our politicians through the
| LeetCode hoops.
| alephnan wrote:
| "Obama became the first president ever to write a computer
| program. It was a very simple program -- all it does is draw a
| square on a screen--but that's the point"
|
| https://www.wired.com/2014/12/obama-becomes-first-president-...
| t8y wrote:
| I almost had a heart attack when I read this. I've been using
| bitwise operations to speed up the Wave Function Collapse
| algorithm... and the prime minister of Singapore has done
| something very similar years before!
| jb1991 wrote:
| It's a very common technique when seeking performance, so don't
| have a heart attack please.
| martneumann wrote:
| When I read posts like this I'm reminded I actually studied
| computer engineering, not computer science ;)
| pelasaco wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm sure Olaf Scholz don't know even how to write an
| email.
| hestefisk wrote:
| My comment on the PM and his relationship with poor human rights
| in Singapore was flagged. It got 70 upvotes. Seriously. :/
|
| --- Here it is: He is obviously a smart person. I wouldn't vote
| for him though. He recently sued and won a "libel" case against a
| blogger who reposted a link to a Malaysian web site claiming the
| PM is involved in the 1MDB scandal. Singapore is a one-party
| police state with zero press freedom and a poor track record of
| respecting human rights (being gay is still illegal). So whilst
| it's impressive that politician can code, I don't like him, his
| views, or his political party.
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Singapore-blogger-crowdfund...
| dang wrote:
| Reposting flagged comments like this is doing an end run around
| moderation. That's abusive. Please don't do that again.
|
| Btw, upvotes are one factor in the system here. They are not
| the only factor. Indignation, sensationalism, flamewar, and
| other bad-for-HN things routinely get tons of upvotes. It's not
| a reliable signal of goodness, which is why countervailing
| mechanisms like flags and moderation are also necessary.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Was the comment "bad" because it got the extremely homophobic
| response from rabite? I'm in the same boat as GP - I don't
| fully agree with him, but at the same time I don't see how it
| was any different in tone or substance to many other
| acceptable HN comments.
| chana_masala wrote:
| Why didn't you restore the original comment? It doesn't seem
| to break any rules. The most frustrating aspect of HN is that
| there is no easy way to have meta discussion about the rules
| or the actions of users.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >The most frustrating aspect of HN is that there is no easy
| way to have meta discussion about the rules or the actions
| of users.
|
| Honestly, HN seems worlds better than any other forum in
| this regard. Just the fact that dang responded to this post
| with information about the moderation process rather than
| banning the guy shows far more restraint and respect than
| any other internet moderator.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| This should be the top comment, sad to see HN mods deleting
| this instead of arguing with it on its facts.
|
| As it stands, the top comments are all "Oh wow, cool!" which is
| exactly the reaponse you are cautioning against.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Singapore is a one-party police state with zero press freedom
| and a poor track record of respecting human rights (being gay
| is still illegal).
|
| Singapore is a real, functioning democracy. It's a city-state
| not much bigger than Chicago. Is Chicago a "one party" state?
| When was the last time San Francisco voted for a Republican
| mayor? Singapore is an Asian country with a significant Muslim
| population. How they exercise their democratic self
| determination to structure their society is none of our
| business.
|
| Frankly, bringing up individual rights in every discussion of
| Singapore strikes me as a very privileged take. As someone from
| Bangladesh, I wish Americans and others in the international
| community would focus more on understanding how Singapore
| turned itself from a poor third world country into an affluent
| one in a single generation. How it managed to crack down on the
| corruption and political instability that plagues fledging
| democracies. Studying those lessons would pay far greater
| dividends in terms of improving the human condition in Africa
| and Asia than imposing western notions of individual rights.
|
| For folks who do care about this issue, reading Lee Kuan Yew's
| thoughts is fascinating. https://paulbacon.files.wordpress.com/
| 2010/04/zakaria_lee.pd.... This interview, in particular, is
| great. The interviewer. CNN's Fareed Zakaria, is one of the
| most insightful observers of international politics in America.
| zenithd wrote:
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Singapore is a real, functioning democracy._
|
| Singapore is a "democracy" where the system is heavily
| stacked against opposition parties, and where supposedly
| apolitical institutions funded with public money like the
| "grassroots" People's Association [1][2][3] are heavily
| biased towards the dominant People's Action Party.
|
| [1] https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/explainer-
| perennial-is...
|
| [2] https://theindependent.sg/wps-sylvia-lim-has-to-use-void-
| dec...
|
| [3] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/jamus-lim-
| reiterates-...
| yes_really wrote:
| So it's like in the US, where tech companies and mainstream
| media censors conservative views and where the FBI,
| universities and NGOs funded with public money are heavily
| biased towards the left?
| lostlogin wrote:
| > bringing up individual rights in every discussion of
| Singapore strikes me as a very privileged take. As someone
| from Bangladesh, I wish Americans and others in the
| international community would focus more on understanding how
| Singapore turned itself from a poor third world country into
| an affluent one in a single generation.
|
| I sort of agree, but both should occur. Letting
| transgressions slide because economic progress is made should
| not occur. Letting the bad happen and excusing it as 'growing
| pain', 'we are bringing them to the table' etc has all
| occurred in the past. The next thing you know, they are big
| and powerful and don't want to change.
|
| It doesn't take much reading about Singapore to be fairly
| alarmed at the state of human rights and government control.
| They are listening, recording and require you to register for
| things like public speaking. This is apart from issues like
| gay rights, workers rights, flogging of criminals and
| executions. Government opposition parties are under active
| surveillance and quickly sanctioned should they push too far.
| I'm surprised anyone argues for it, however those I know from
| Singapore strongly defend it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Singapore
| rayiner wrote:
| > I sort of agree, but both should occur. Letting
| transgressions slide because economic progress is made
| should not occur.
|
| That assumes that these things are uncorrelated, and I
| don't think you can make that assumption without proof. For
| example, Singapore is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious
| society with a delicate balance between Chinese
| (Confucian), Malays (Muslim), and Indians (Hindu). This is
| a mix that in many countries could devolve into perpetual
| ethnic conflict. Indeed, Singapore separated from Malaysia
| due to conflict between the Chinese and the Malay.
|
| Part of that grand bargain is that the culture of
| government is Anglo and Confucian, but the government
| otherwise avoids intruding on the culture of the other two
| groups. Homosexuality is simply not accepted in Islam and
| among Indians. So a push to legalize it would be seen as an
| attack by westernized English-speaking Chinese upon the two
| other cultural groups.
|
| Lee Kuan Yew was, in fact, extremely westernized (he spoke
| English as his first language), and opposed the law against
| homosexuality. But he was not about to upset social
| stability and unity in the country over that issue:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-
| homosexuality-i...
|
| In America, we take social stability for granted. Imposing
| social change without broad public consensus creates social
| strife and more than a little dysfunction even in America.
| In a developing country, such conflict could be fatal. The
| calculus of individual welfare versus collective welfare is
| simply different in a developing country. Singapore's
| infant mortality dropped from 35 per 1,000 to 2.5 per 1,000
| from 1960 to 2000. Anything that sets back economic
| development, no matter how well intentioned the goal, means
| literally tens of thousands of dead children. That's the
| cold hard reality people in wealthy countries don't have to
| deal with.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's hard for me to over-emphasize what "economic
| development" means in the context of a third world
| country. When my dad was growing up in a village in
| Bangladesh, 1 out of 4 kids would die before age 5.
| Hundreds of thousands of people were killed during the
| independence war due to conflict between Urdu speaking
| Pakistanis and Bangla speaking Bangladeshis. To this day
| Hindus are fleeing Bangladesh to go back to India, and
| the Hindu population is under 10% now (compared to 30% in
| 1947 before Indian independence). The founder of the
| country was assassinated. His successor was overthrown in
| a coup. We left the country in 1989 during a military
| dictatorship. The current prime minister has thrown the
| opposition party leader in jail. The 10 richest
| Bangladeshis include both sons of both party leaders, who
| are nearly billionaires from corruption.
|
| So caning people for public disorder? Well it's relative.
| If an authoritarian government is what it takes to
| straighten out society and get it on the right track, it
| is what it is.
|
| It's not lost on me that the predecessors of the
| prosperous northeastern states were extremely repressive
| Puritan, Dutch, and Quaker communities.
| qkhhly wrote:
| replace "Singapore" with "China", then instead of flagging your
| comment, the HN crowd would shit themselves over your comment.
| rayiner wrote:
| The difference is that China doesn't have real elections, and
| Singapore does. They're not any less real than elections in
| say California or New York, even though one party always
| wins.
| digianarchist wrote:
| https://newnaratif.com/how-gerrymandering-creates-unfair-
| ele...
| [deleted]
| yaacov wrote:
| One of the most interesting parts of Lee Kuan Yew's book for me
| was when he talked about all the critics he sued for libel. He
| justified it as "of course I sued them for libel, otherwise why
| would anyone believe me when I said they were lying?"
| tmule wrote:
| Libel laws exist in Europe too, including UK. Their
| existence, per se, isn't problematic.
| xxpor wrote:
| From an American perspective they certainly are, but I
| realize we're the odd ones out here with extremely strong
| 1st amendment protections.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Freedom of speech is just as prominent in many other
| places, such as the Netherlands.
| xxpor wrote:
| I could believe that, I know very little about NL law. Is
| there anything in the Netherlands comparable to the US
| Sullivan rule?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sulli
| van
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| One this count, it does seem like the rest of the world
| is correct, even Canada has much stronger laws against
| libel and defamation and there's no real pressure to make
| then weaker.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I once saw a book written by a 90s politician in Singapore
| that, in part, tried to explain why there is no free press in
| Singapore. The reason was that since all press are corrupt,
| the government cannot allow them. I found that amazing in its
| arrogance.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This probably has a lot to do with Singapore's fragile
| existence after founding...after being kicked out of a
| union with Malaysia due to racial reasons, and with
| communist insurgencies in vogue in the 1960s/70s. I'm not
| defending them, just that their history is a reason why
| Singapore is Singapore.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Every country has its unusual and unique histories, but
| most countries make progress in key cultural areas
| through the democratic process. Singapore has basically
| had just one family in power for its entire existence,
| which makes such progress much more unlikely, or at best,
| very difficult.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > but most countries make progress in key cultural areas
| through the democratic process.
|
| I don't think that is true, especially for the SEA region
| they are in.
| digianarchist wrote:
| This is how the PAP keeps the opposition suppressed in
| Singapore.
| xxpor wrote:
| And when that doesn't work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I
| nternal_Security_Act_(Singapo...
| ValentineC wrote:
| These days, it's POFMA [1] and FICA [2], two laws that
| put a lot of power into the hands of the cabinet,
| especially our Home Affairs Minister [3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_from_Online_
| Falseho...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Interference_(C
| ounterm...
|
| [3] https://newnaratif.com/shanmugams-stealth-coup-in-
| singapore/
| jb1991 wrote:
| I was surprised it was flagged and am curious why that was.
| There was a lot of discussion there. I assume that quite a few
| folks must have flagged it for it to have disappeared as it
| did. Unless there was a moderator play involved for some reason
| (or coordinated flagging by Singapore citizens, or perhaps YC
| interests in Singapore). I can't think of a reason otherwise.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| Not saying whether or not your comment should have been
| flagged, but given it _is_ flagged, it 's poor form to just
| repost the comment.
| tokamak wrote:
| Well, fake news are illegal there. It's a different approach to
| the "western" one with pros and cons. As for gay rights, I am
| sure Singapore will revisit policies as soon as the neighboring
| Muslim countries will open up for some changes.
| samuel wrote:
| Different as in completely wrong.
| autokad wrote:
| actually I think its illegal to criticize the government even
| if its true.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Where? Singapore? It's not _illegal_ per se, but _public_
| criticism (not private; I know many civil servants who 'll
| be happy to criticise some of our government's execution in
| person) is highly discouraged if they value a career in the
| civil service or any of the many organisations the PAP has
| their tentacles in.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Living in Singapore sure seems to make people unable to deal
| with perfectly valid criticism.
| [deleted]
| Lordarminius wrote:
| > Singapore is a one-party police state with zero press freedom
| and a poor track record of respecting human rights (being gay
| is still illegal).
|
| "Being gay" is largely a western obsession. Different cultures
| have their attitude towards it (as they should). Polygamy is
| banned in the US and many western nations and accepted in many
| parts of the world, nobody argues it is a human rights issue.
|
| Let the Singaporeans be.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| You can see this easily in stunted cultural production (compare
| Singapore with Hong Kong, for example).
|
| Singaporeans I know are very defensive though and love their
| "benevolent dictatorship" and bring up homelessness in SF or
| dirty sidewalks or something similar.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's a fair comparison. If San Francisco had been an
| impoverished third world place back in the 1950s (as
| Singapore was), would its open and liberal culture have been
| conductive to it become a wealthy city by today?
| umvi wrote:
| Benevolent dictatorships are great, assuming your country
| really has one and that the leader is competent as well as
| benevolent. The problem is the "transfer of power" part.
| That's where democracy wins. It's super hard to keep
| benevolent/competent dictators benevolent/competent across
| generations... And once you are locked into a bad one, you
| are screwed.
| riantogo wrote:
| Which is a sentiment I wouldn't dismiss. If you have visited
| Singapore and SF the contrast will hit you in your face hard.
| To US folks, Singaporeans lack political freedom. To
| Singaporeans, US friends lack a clean habitat, safety,
| healthcare, and bunch of other factors that should be a given
| in modern society. They see the sad wealth gap here (and
| hence the influence of money on democracy), the growing
| idiocracy, and a country once on top now sadly in fast
| decline. So maybe we should hear them out and learn the good
| parts.
| jb1991 wrote:
| The wealth gap in Singapore is immense as well, but they
| have different (and derogatory) terminology to refer to it.
|
| For example, the city is built by immigrant workers often
| from Bangladesh. You should see the living conditions they
| are forced to endure. It's shameful.
|
| During Covid, they don't even refer to these hard-working
| people as being members of the community, and they
| segregated the Covid case counts by those who were and were
| not a part of society, in their eyes.
| riantogo wrote:
| Wealth gap list here. Sort by 2019 Gini. You will find US
| at the worse end of the spectrum (#4) and Singapore is at
| #64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_w
| ealth_in...
| jb1991 wrote:
| Not sure you read all my comment, but Singapore
| explicitly excludes many of its residents in its worst
| living conditions from official tallies.
| riantogo wrote:
| How much of an impact would you say it has on the index?
| If it were normalized for "citizens only" do you really
| think US will fare much better?
|
| If your larger point is about treatment of immigrants,
| how do you feel about US taxing its immigrants as
| citizens after 1 yr of stay, but putting them on a line
| to actual citizenship that could be more than multiple
| lifetimes long? Didn't we fight a war about "taxation
| without representation"? I'm not even talking about
| literally tearing apart poor immigrant families while all
| along extracting taxes from them.
| jb1991 wrote:
| You seem to be talking about a lot of different things
| that are not a coherent part of this discussion. But
| taking one point:
|
| > line to actual citizenship that could be more than
| multiple lifetimes long
|
| I'm not sure what you are referring to: almost every
| immigrant I know in the U.S. who wanted to pursue
| citizenship got it after at most 7 years in the country,
| sometimes less. That's a normal time range for most
| Western countries.
|
| https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/guides
| /ch...
| riantogo wrote:
| It only appears incoherent because you might have
| conflated two issues in your response (wealth gap and
| plight of immigrants). Not saying you did it
| intentionally.
|
| Regarding immigrants, you need to meet more of them to
| get a better idea. The situation in US is much worse than
| most western countries. I encourage you to read up on why
| it is such a massive political issue (Obama's attempted
| reforms and executive orders, Dreamers, Path to
| citizenship etc.). Here is one example:
| https://www.cato.org/blog/150-year-wait-indian-
| immigrants-ad...
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| I have been to Singapore and my take on this is that the
| Bay Area has Valley Fair and Santana Row and the US has
| DisneyWorld too... enforced clean, structured, sanitized
| places are not in short supply in the United States.
| riantogo wrote:
| Not sure how to respond to a comparison of 0.2 miles of
| Santana Row to Singapore. It feels we are grasping at the
| straws here.
| [deleted]
| wdb wrote:
| There are companies that ask you to write a sudoku solver after a
| day of interviews :(
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| I don't even know how to play Sudoku.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| You have a 9x9 grid, subdivided into 3x3 blocks. The goal is
| to ensure that every row, column, and block has the numbers
| 1-9, so that no row, column or block has a duplicate number.
| The puzzle will have some numbers filled in, the rest is up
| to the person filling it in.
|
| I wrote a solver for it back in school, it... wasn't the
| best? But it worked. The one solution I built solved it like
| I did - go through every row, column and block, then every
| number, and ask "is this number possible here" - look for
| conflicts. The next iteration was "is there only one number
| possible in this space".
|
| Of course, the teachers were expecting a more brute force
| approach; I forgot the name, but basically it involved
| iterating over every space, then every number; if the number
| fits, move on to the next square; if no numbers fit,
| backtrack to the previous space and iterate on that number.
| It solved everything within a second or so, but it was really
| brute force.
| xxs wrote:
| constant propagation is the standard way to solve soduku.
| pdonis wrote:
| Some puzzles cannot be solved with constraint propagation
| alone, but require trial and error at some point.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Sudoku is a nice little 'hello world' problem for
| constraint modeling languages, such as MiniZinc.
|
| https://www.minizinc.org/
| mynameisash wrote:
| I tried writing a sudoku solver using what I figured were
| standard algorithmic approaches. It was a mess and didn't
| really work.
|
| Then I wrote one with SAT. I think it was 60 LOC, super
| easy to understand, and ran in about 0.4 sec.
| wdb wrote:
| Didn't know either till then ;) But asking something like
| this after four different interviews, though. I was already
| pretty tired from the other interviews
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| while (!isSolved(sudoku)) { sudoku =
| generateNextPermutation(sudoku); }
|
| Solved (eventually).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| A bogosolver is a valid approach. I mean it'll take
| forever, but it's valid.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I plead the halting problem.
| wccrawford wrote:
| There are a limited number of permutations. Assuming it's
| not choosing them randomly, it'll finish eventually... If
| the hardware doesn't die first.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| You can solve it via brute force if you cut off branches
| that don't satisfy the rules:
|
| https://github.com/tonyedgecombe/Sudoku/blob/master/Sudok
| u/P...
|
| It's not 1ms but it's not that slow either.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| it is not that hard to write an unoptimized sudoku solver using
| backtracking.
| __s wrote:
| That's how I got hired
| idiocrat wrote:
| > It passed all 6/6 test cases with a runtime of 1 ms. Pretty
| impressive for a prime minister, huh?
|
| I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the thing I
| always tell myself is that you can teach programming to a
| microbiologist, but not microbiology to a programmer.
| jptech wrote:
| Just as you can run any program on any machine given enough
| time and resources (memory), anyone not lacking intellectual
| ability can learn anything - some quicker, some slower.
| lanstin wrote:
| The intellectual part maybe but not the praxis. Some
| confidence, some unwillingness to stop searching for causes,
| some taste foe elegance, some ability to simulate things in
| the abstract space of solutions. The combination is as
| elusive to some as perceiving the mood of a room is to
| others.
| garbagetime wrote:
| What makes you think that?
| jptech wrote:
| What makes you think otherwise? Some people's brains are
| wired differently?
| garbagetime wrote:
| Yes my understanding is that different people's brains
| can be wired very differently. Roughly speaking, many
| areas of the brain require specific stimulus during
| puberty in order to develop a particular way.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| While I agree that everyone CAN learn anything, it doesn't
| mean they want to. Motivation is a big factor.
|
| And when it comes to software development, the actual writing
| code part of it, I'm confident you need to have a knack for
| it.
|
| Mind you, there's plenty of jobs in software engineering that
| don't involve writing code. We're desperately looking for a
| manager for example, because our current "self-managing" team
| is far from effective.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Wel gee, _sorry_ that I was hired by a molecular neurobiology
| research group where _all_ my colleages were at least PhD level
| biologists and that I didn 't manage to catch up to their level
| in the two years that my contract lasted, _dad_. At least
| _they_ appreciated me enough to give me sixth co-authorship on
| a paper published in Cell, even though I don 't understand
| three-quarters of it. You want to complain that I'm not an
| Olympiad heart surgeon too?
|
| /s, obviously, my dad is actually very proud of me.
|
| edit: this attempt at a sarcastic jab pissed some people off I
| guess. My point was that sure, the critique that issue of
| "people who understand one thing think they understand
| everything" applies disproportionately to programmers (and STEM
| people in general), but trying to defend against that by acting
| smugly superior about your own domain of expertise isn't going
| to fix that, that just makes you a problem on the other side of
| the coin.
| oblio wrote:
| You probably know where this is headed, but, still:
| https://xkcd.com/435/
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I did but the link is still very welcome :). While we're
| here we might as well add this complementary SMBC classic:
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
| jamessb wrote:
| > I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee
|
| As an undergraduate, he studied maths at Trinity College
| Cambridge. Bela Bollobas said [1]:
|
| > I certainly taught him more than anybody else in Cambridge. I
| can truthfully say that he was an exceptionally good student.
| I'm not sure that this is really known in Singapore. "Because
| he's now the Prime Minister," people may say, "oh, you would
| say he was good." No, he was truly outstanding: he was head and
| shoulders above the rest of the students. He was not only the
| first, but the gap between him and the man who came second was
| huge.
|
| > I think that he did computer science (after mathematics)
| mostly because his father didn't want him to stay in pure
| mathematics. Loong was not only hardworking, conscientious and
| professional, but he was also very inventive. All the signs
| indicated that he would have been a world-class research
| mathematician. I'm sure his father never realized how
| exceptional Loong was. He thought Loong was very good. No,
| Loong was much better than that. When I tried to tell Lee Kuan
| Yew, "Look, your son is phenomenally good: you should encourage
| him to do mathematics," then he implied that that was
| impossible, since as a top-flight professional mathematician
| Loong would leave Singapore for Princeton, Harvard or
| Cambridge, and that would send the wrong signal to the people
| in Singapore. And I have to agree that this was a very good
| point indeed. Now I am even more impressed by Lee Hsien Loong
| than I was all those years ago, and I am very proud that I
| taught him; he seems to be doing very well. I have come round
| to thinking that it was indeed good for him to go into
| politics; he can certainly make an awful lot of difference.
|
| He then did the (now-discontinued) Diploma in Computer Science
| at Cambridge.
|
| [1]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180722130213/https://www2.ims....
| xvilka wrote:
| Quite sad he didn't pursue science career, it might have
| brought a few amazing discoveries to the world.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| Instead he rotted as an actor of change, represented his
| citizens, protected his country and solved sudokus.
|
| I dont know if he's good for Singapore but I mean, he did
| one of the most noble thing a human can do so I wouldnt
| blame him. I hope to do 1% of what this politician tried to
| do in my lifetime.
| vvillena wrote:
| Even if Singapore is the best of all the authoritarian
| governments out there, it is still kinda fucked up. Even
| with its nature put aside, Singapore still engages in all
| sorts of regressive, backwards policies, up to a point
| where it's difficult to claim that any high govt official
| from Singapore holds any sort of sense of nobility within
| them. If this person is the prime minister, he is
| actively choosing to ignore, detach himself from, or even
| to support and continue those policies.
| JulianHC wrote:
| Singapore is a successful example of how to intergrate
| multiple ethnicity groups. Many liberal and progressive
| countries have tried their way and didn't get a good
| result.
| vvillena wrote:
| Are both things linked? Even if they were, it's difficult
| to see how, say, caning as an accepted punishment, or gay
| rights suppression, can make an effect in ethnicity
| issues, unless we take this in the context of co-opting
| the cultural values of the less progressive culture
| present in the country. And in any case, stomping on some
| human rights for the greater benefit of the rest of
| society is kind of a gray area. The least we can do is
| recognize that grayness. Even if there existed a tangible
| payoff in acting and governing in that way, everyone
| should be aware of its price.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > he did one of the most noble thing a human can do
|
| Solve sudokus?
| ethanbond wrote:
| Maybe you missed the first half of the article title.
|
| _Singapore prime minister_ Lee Hsien Loong...
| theodric wrote:
| I read the parent comment as a joke
| mattcommenting wrote:
| Is he also pursuing covid-zero at all costs? death
| penalty for drug dealer? embracing canning? Kim jung um
| studied at a top school too
| samatman wrote:
| I vouched for this comment because it was worth
| addressing.
|
| You can go online and ask Singaporeans all day about
| their opinion of Lee Hsien Loong, depending on how old
| they are they've voted for or against him and the PAP
| several times.
|
| Singapore is a de facto one-party state, but it stays
| that way by (sometimes narrowly) keeping the ruling party
| in power by voting for it periodically.
|
| The comparison to Kim Jun "um" is inept and insulting.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean, he might yet? What someone does now is not their
| permanent lot in life.
| yomly wrote:
| Quite the opposite - I'm not sure how many eminent
| mathematicians have the background to have gone far in
| politics.
|
| The early pandemic outlined how many politicians lacked
| even the ability to reason about exponentials (let alone
| scientific thinking!) I am very glad that there is at least
| SOME representation of great thinkers amongst our leader-
| class
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| When I was young, I thought that anybody could learn
| programming. I was horribly, horribly wrong.
| Graffur wrote:
| I thought this when I was younger too. Now I hate seeing the
| meme "code is the easy part". There are, of course, other
| hard parts too but to trivialize coding is silly.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| For the most part, code is, indeed, easy. For you or for
| me. But some people just can't. I've stopped trying to
| understand, and just accept is as a fact.
| aksss wrote:
| For me, it was "money for nothing", best job in the world
| because it was also my hobby. Not everyone is that way.
| Easy as breathing for some, completely incomprehensible
| alternate dimension of reality for others.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Code is easy, the math is hard.
| knorker wrote:
| For many mathematicians code is hard, math is easy.
| lordnacho wrote:
| How do you distinguish between "can be taught" and "cares to
| be taught"?
|
| Plenty of people still live in a world where coding is low
| prestige.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| People who have very low paying jobs and very unhappy about
| it, they know programmers earn well ("high prestige", in
| your words), and they try. But for some reason, they just
| fail and they can't to anything about it. I've seen it many
| times, when diligent dedicated people _just can 't_.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Maybe they are not diligent or dedicated enough? Have you
| really met anyone who wanted to actually put effort into
| something, had no barriers (lack of money / family
| support / etc) and didn't manage to do it?
|
| For me the answer is I've only seen it where there is an
| absurdly narrow selection process: professional sports
| (all of them), admission to certain universities (Ivy
| League/Oxbridge), certain specific jobs (SEAL team,
| investment banks, etc).
|
| For everything where there's no gatekeeper, I'd only
| count out very few people from the start.
| jbellis wrote:
| I also thought anyone could learn to code at at least a
| basic level, until I worked for a year as a computer
| science instructor, including for the big intro class for
| freshmen. Some people's brains just aren't wired for it.
| (And this was a self-selected group in a positive sense;
| I would expect a random set of the population to do
| worse.)
| [deleted]
| lordnacho wrote:
| Aren't students the ultimate "I'll do it if it's easy"
| group of people? They have to balance their learning with
| their new found freedom to socialize.
| xhevahir wrote:
| You asked for anecdotal evidence against this belief of
| yours and you got it. What do you want now?
| lordnacho wrote:
| It's not anecdotal that it's hard to be a professional
| sportsperson, or get into an Ivy League college. You want
| links?
| xhevahir wrote:
| I don't think we're communicating. You asked: _Have you
| really met anyone who wanted to actually put effort into
| something, had no barriers (lack of money / family
| support / etc) and didn't manage to do it?_
|
| And got in reply: _I also thought anyone could learn to
| code at at least a basic level, until I worked for a year
| as a computer science instructor..._
|
| You then produced a no-true-Scotsman argument to the
| effect that students don't qualify as a counterexample.
| lordnacho wrote:
| All I'm asking for is for some kind of confirmation that
| he thought the kids were actually trying hard, which we
| all know (without documentation, yes) isn't universally
| true of students.
|
| It's also often true that instructors don't know what's
| going on in all the students' personal lives. People who
| are pressed in other ways don't always make it known, so
| you could easily see how you might mistake someone who
| didn't learn it with someone who couldn't learn it.
| lanstin wrote:
| I have and i have spent a lot of time trying to help
| people understand it with no luck. I wouldn't count them
| out from the start but eventually it seems they will be
| happier not trying to write programs
| openknot wrote:
| A major hurdle I found as a beginner in programming was
| the lack of immediate reward. I was studying Automate the
| Boring Stuff as my first text, and it took around six
| months of slow but steady studying to understand and
| retain the first of two parts of the book.
|
| The material was about the fundamentals of programming
| (loops, lists, dictionaries). I found it hard to stay
| focused because the applications and usefulness of the
| concepts weren't immediately obvious (any problem I could
| solve at that point could easily be solved better with a
| 'no-code' solution). Some of the concepts also took a few
| days to understand, while I was struggling with
| maintaining motivation.
|
| I've since used other learning materials, and now I
| better understand why new programming courses nowadays
| (like Harvard's CS50) like to start their courses with
| the Scratch language. It communicates earlier the
| usefulness of the fundamentals (e.g. using if and while
| statements to animate a cartoon character).
|
| This lack of immediate useful application (until months
| of study later) might not be the only reason, but it may
| well be a major one. It can cause people to give up even
| if they are diligent and dedicated in other fields (where
| the rewards arrive earlier).
| aksss wrote:
| > I found it hard to stay focused because the
| applications and usefulness of the concepts weren't
| immediately obvious
|
| Yep, I had that experience with electronics, but I
| applied the lesson you're pointing to - you need to have
| practical projects that are relevant to you (that you
| care about), and then learn by working through problems
| and concepts as they present themselves on the road to
| solutions. I guess that makes me a hands-on learner,
| though I appreciate the conceptual once I have enough
| practical exposure to provide context.
| JulianHC wrote:
| I concur. I tried to learn language like C, python... but
| could never make any progress. However, ironically I made
| serveral scripts for botting in MMORPG that I played. I
| could spend days perfecting and running them. It was the
| shorterm reward for botting in games that kept me going.
| Meanwhile learning to code is like walking to a
| destination that you don't know when you are going to
| reach. It feel like a chore and mentally challenging.
| [deleted]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm glad this realization exists. When I was in school, I
| quickly realized that most of my peers - the ones that came
| with me from an associate's degree course in IT, more
| sysadmin stuff - just couldn't keep up with software
| development, they didn't have the knack for it.
| gypsyharlot wrote:
| Uh, okay. People like John Carmack (programmer) have proven you
| wrong.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| Why can't you teach microbiology to a programmer?
| ComradePhil wrote:
| What I have heard from them is that it requires "wet lab
| experience" to really _learn_ it. Not sure how true it is.
|
| If you were to ask me, programmers can't learn it because
| what they are learning is based on complete misunderstanding
| of organic chemistry (which has not been updated with the
| modern understanding of physics)... so it is bound to drive
| anyone who tries to make sense of it crazy. The only way to
| _learn_ it is to accept all the _rules_ and ALL the
| _exceptions to the rules_ as the foundation and go from
| there, which not a lot of people are willing to do.
| openknot wrote:
| > what they are learning is based on complete
| misunderstanding of organic chemistry (which has not been
| updated with the modern understanding of physics)... so it
| is bound to drive anyone who tries to make sense of it
| crazy
|
| This sounds like an extraordinary claim, especially since
| organic chemists work along physical chemists and chemical
| physicists who presumably have a strong modern
| understanding of physics. It would be better for an expert
| to chime in, but I don't see the incentive where organic
| chemists would be content to let their field stay out-of-
| date.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| If you think those who study microbiology study it with
| quantum chemistry of organic compounds as a foundation,
| you would be very wrong. I'm not saying they don't exist,
| I'm just saying it is way more uncommon than you'd think.
| Ask around your network and find out for yourself.
| openknot wrote:
| It looks like I may have parsed your comment in an
| unintended way. I read it as, roughly: 'To learn
| microbiology, a programmer must learn organic chemistry
| as a prerequisite [true for the university I attended].
| However, the concepts to study organic chemistry are
| based on an outdated view of physics, which is why they
| have so many rules and exceptions.'
|
| I believe that any good organic chemist must have
| strength in physical chemistry (both to excel in the
| field, plus it's typically a degree requirement), and
| physical chemists are well-informed of quantum mechanics
| (also typically a degree requirement, with at least an
| introduction to QM in most introductory chemistry courses
| in the unit about atomic bonding).
|
| However, it's more plausible to believe the claim (re-
| interpreted) that many microbiologists don't have a
| strong foundation in organic chemistry or modern physics.
| Still, I'm skeptical that those who make it to a tenured
| professorship can still have these weaknesses, as I'm
| under the impression that the field is cross-disciplinary
| with collaborations with biochemists, who can then bring
| in their stronger background in chemistry (and thus
| organic chemistry, physical chemistry, and physics).
| Leading microbiologists (e.g. those tenured at MIT and
| other top institutions) who influence the field should
| also have familiarity with these subjects.
| o_m wrote:
| Working full time as a programmer makes you brain damaged
| makapuf wrote:
| Working full-time with brain damaged _clients_ make you
| brain damaged.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Can confirm.
| oblio wrote:
| We can't be sure about your confirmation, though.
| openknot wrote:
| You absolutely can (an example includes programmers who
| decide to work in computational biology and learn more
| biology from textbooks to better understand the job).
|
| However, there is a substantial barrier for a programmer to
| switch careers and become a microbiologist: access to lab
| equipment. Part of the job of a microbiologist is to work
| with (usually expensive) scientific equipment to carry out
| and design procedures for experiments, and it's hard to study
| independently without owning a lab space or the equipment.
| I've also found less educational material for self-study
| online.
|
| Contrast this with self-study in programming. The required
| equipment is also just a low-end computer, and you don't need
| a laboratory environment to develop your skillset.
| Educational resources (e.g. Automate the Boring Stuff With
| Python) are also not only widely accessible, but often free.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| How much of that is because programming is easier, and how much
| because for programming there are plenty of free resources
| (books, tutorials, documentation, etc.) while other disciplines
| are much more hermetic?
| mr_toad wrote:
| > I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the
| thing I always tell myself is that you can teach programming to
| a microbiologist, but not microbiology to a programmer.
|
| You can't teach height.
| sethammons wrote:
| Are you agreeing and saying that learning some skills, like
| your height, comes from innate genetic wiring
|
| - or -
|
| Are are you saying that height is something you can't teach
| and of course anyone can learn microbiology?
| verinus wrote:
| Interesting. Programming yes, Software Development no- imho
| there is a huge difference between writing compiling code and
| writing maintainable code and/or designing stable and resiliant
| systems.
| aksss wrote:
| Alternative view:
|
| A) any microbiologist may eventually need to learn very basic
| coding to do their job/tasks effectively;
|
| B) a programmer likely won't be interested in learning even
| basic microbiology unless hired by microbiologists.
| k_sze wrote:
| I don't think B) is necessarily true.
|
| I'm a software engineer/programmer by profession and
| schooling, but I have a life-long fascination with little
| critters, especially insects, and especially Apocrita and
| Lepidoptera among insects. I'm an avid participant on
| iNaturalist and have almost as much reputation on Biology
| StackExchange as on StackOverflow. I also enjoyed
| proofreading oncology papers for my brother in law when he
| was doing his PhD because that stuff is fascinating when you
| have somebody who can explain it to you.
|
| I'm not spending more effort in biology or entomology mainly
| for three reasons:
|
| 1. lack of time, especially since getting married and having
| kids;
|
| 2. lack of mental energy partly due to kids, partly because
| I'm tired enough fighting inane requirements or some stupid
| half-assed TypeScript "framework" du jour every day at work;
|
| 3. I'm not confident I can make as much money in entomology
| as in I.T.
|
| Lack of interest has never been one of the reasons for me.
| aksss wrote:
| Well sure, there's always a few whose random area of
| interest might land on microbiology. Most career developers
| I know are autodidactic obsessives who have no trouble
| finding fascinating rabbit holes to crawl down. Then life
| advances, gates close, time gets constrained and you have
| to pick your passions in life because you can't do them
| all.
|
| I tried to use the word "likely" to avoid these points
| being perceived as absolute laws. I think it's simply less
| likely that any random programmer will have motivation to
| learn microbiology than it is for a microbiologist to learn
| some programming techniques.
|
| The microbiologist may be compelled by functional
| requirements for their job to learn some coding while the
| programmer, unless working on business problems in that
| domain, would never be professionally compelled to learn
| microbiology to reinforce their profession aims.
| bajook wrote:
| The specific background of Mr Lee is that he was the Senior
| Wrangler at Cambridge University (essentially, the top
| mathematics student in the UK), and was a very promising
| mathematician who instead chose the family business of running
| Singapore.
| narrator wrote:
| It's not a bad business. Senior ministers in Singapore are
| paid multi-million dollar salaries. According to Transparency
| International, Singapore is one of the least corrupt
| countries. I'd guess that's because there's no need for side
| hustles because the job pays so well.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| For all of its many other issues, one thing clear is that
| Singapore is one of the few countries where being a public
| servant is a reputable and highly regarded career. It was
| described to me that Singapore inherited both from both the
| British public service and the imperial Chinese civil
| service systems - which have diminished or fallen apart in
| both of those countries and others which inherited them.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _For all of its many other issues, one thing clear is
| that Singapore is one of the few countries where being a
| public servant is a reputable and highly regarded
| career._
|
| Singaporean here. It's mostly "reputable and highly
| regarded" if one gets a top-tier government scholarship
| [1], since that leads to civil service postings with more
| exposure and chances to take credit.
|
| Everyone else is just a "farmer" [2][3]. :)
|
| [1] https://www.quora.com/Are-scholarship-holders-more-
| likely-to...
|
| [2]
| https://www.mycarforum.com/forums/topic/2675951-lousy-
| schola...
|
| [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/7p5unh/de
| gree_ho...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| What other countries inherited the Chinese civil service
| system?
|
| Does Taiwan count? I would hardly say it has diminished
| or fallen apart. Of course, that is only my humble
| opinion.
| baybal2 wrote:
| UK civil service was actually modelled after Chinese one
| after missionaries brought news of how powerful, and well
| oiled Chinese bureaucratic machine was in comparison to
| contemporary British one.
| samatman wrote:
| Taiwan is an interesting case!
|
| It's known that the ruling power in Taiwan is descended
| from the Nationalist government, it's perhaps less well-
| known that Sun Yat-Sen was a serious political thinker
| who designed that government, effectively singlehandedly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Principles_of_the_Peo
| ple
|
| There's a visible mix of Western (by way of America and
| Britain) and Chinese thought in how the Yuans are
| structured.
|
| Taiwan also inherited a large and functional civil
| service from the Japanese occupation, this is less
| immediately obvious in the structure of Taiwanese
| government, but you can find small traces everywhere if
| you know what to look for.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > According to Transparency International, Singapore is one
| of the least corrupt countries.
|
| This is not a pervasive opinion. The prime minister has
| directly sued personally anyone who attempts to investigate
| the state wealth fund and there is a lot of questioning
| about the motives and conflicts of interest among
| Singapore's ministers and their families.
|
| The lack of free press, and that it is illegal to
| investigate these government activities, is worth noting as
| well.
| laumars wrote:
| That doesn't stop many western CEOs from being corrupt.
|
| From what I've experienced, the lack of corruption in
| Singapore is partly cultural and partly due to their heavy
| penalties for crime.
| logicchains wrote:
| > According to Transparency International, Singapore is one
| of the least corrupt countries.
|
| Note this ranking is based on "perception of corruption".
| Given that Singapore is a one-party state with extremely
| little press independence
| (https://theindependent.sg/singapore-in-
| bottom-20-countries-i...), citizens would be less likely to
| hear of any major corruption that occurred as the media
| wouldn't report it.
|
| As an example, PM Lee's wife was CEO of Temasek, the
| national investment company, for many years. Consider, of
| all the five million plus people in Singapore, what is the
| probability that the prime minister's wife just happens to
| be the most qualified of anybody in the country to manage
| the country's money?
| lelag wrote:
| He probably married within his social circle of the
| Singapore intellectual elite whose members certainly have
| a much higher chance to reach such a position than the
| average joe in the country. I don't know anything about
| this gentleman but I don't think it's enough of an
| argument to accuse him of corruption.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _He probably married within his social circle of the
| Singapore intellectual elite whose members certainly have
| a much higher chance to reach such a position than the
| average joe in the country._
|
| Probably irrelevant, but I wanted to add that Ho Ching is
| his second wife. The first Mrs Lee died three weeks after
| giving birth to his first son [1].
|
| [1] https://wiki.sg/index.php?title=Death_of_Wong_Ming_Ya
| ng_(198...
| refurb wrote:
| Yup.
|
| I spent some time there and I honestly believe that
| corruption is probably on par or better than other
| developed countries. They take it very seriously.
|
| However, as you mentioned, if there was corruption, you'd
| probably never know. With the libel laws and control of
| the media, I doubt many would be willing to speak out.
|
| Singapore's system has worked so far, but all it takes is
| some corruption within for the whole system to rot to its
| core. It's not setup to self-correct. It seems like a
| well oiled machine on the surface but that's just because
| you're not allowed to see all the warts.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Consider, of all the five million plus people in
| Singapore, what is the probability that the prime
| minister 's wife just happens to be the most qualified of
| anybody in the country to manage the country's money?_
|
| She somehow also finds the time to make _hundreds_ of
| Facebook posts a day: https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/
| comments/g33rvv/how_is_ho...
| rogual wrote:
| I'm gobsmacked that Senior Wrangler is an actual thing. I
| thought Terry Pratchett made it up!
| dcminter wrote:
| Part of his great talent was that of weaving together
| factual minutiae with fictional minutiae such that the
| boundaries are impossible to spot without prior knowledge!
|
| Even if you know you have to keep your eye open for it.
| E.g. my personal favourite is that I 100% did not spot
| until it was pointed out to me that the printing dwarfs in
| The Truth are all named after fonts...
| Symbiote wrote:
| The Annotated Pratchett File lists many similar references
| Pratchett included in his novels. In this case, it's marked
| as p35 of _Reaper Man_ :
|
| https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/reaper-man.html
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| He also did a diploma in CS, which is now regarded as a
| masters degree (when he did it, there was no taught masters
| in CS offered by Cambridge).
| Laforet wrote:
| His youngest son is a programmer and prominent member of
| the Scala community.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/haoyi-
| li-3b3291182?originalSubdo...
| ValentineC wrote:
| And his middle one is ex-Google, and is now in the
| Singapore equivalent of US Digital Service/Government
| Digital Service:
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/hongyi-li-16183230
| samuel wrote:
| > I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the
| thing I always tell myself is that you can teach programming to
| a microbiologist, but not microbiology to a programmer.
|
| I don't know if microbiology is special in some sense, but I
| have witnessed several times during my career cases of
| programmers turned into domain experts(in Logistics for
| example).
|
| Obviously you don't became an MD that way, if that was your
| point.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Yes, Wall Street (high finance) also has many people (traders
| & quants & risk controllers) who do not have financial
| engineering degrees, yet deeply understand the field as
| practitioners. Some common "alternative" degrees: economics,
| mathematics, physics, chemistry, microbiology, computer
| science/engineering. The previous generation was even less
| specialised -- many had liberal arts degrees!
| pdonis wrote:
| Where are the 6 test cases? I only see one on the leetcode
| page, but I might be missing something.
| vmception wrote:
| my university made other hard sciences a prerequisite to a
| computer science degree so I feel like I learned that topic
| well enough
|
| I see utility in focusing on interdisciplinary skills
| knorker wrote:
| Everyone says that about their field, though.
|
| In the telco industry I've heard several people say "I think
| it's easier for someone used to circuit switched to learn
| packet switched than the other way around". Every single time I
| heard that was from someone who knew circuit switched, and did
| not have one single clue about how packet switching worked, but
| thought they did.
|
| If it's your field it's very easy to see people come in and
| think they've learned it when they haven't.
|
| I've seen it in mathematicians, too. They very often think they
| can program when they can't.
|
| Or in other words: You can teach a programmer to be a
| microbiologist to the point where _I_ will believe they 're a
| microbiologist. But _I_ am not one.
|
| And same with programming, except you'll only convince the
| microbiologist that you succeeded.
| cm2187 wrote:
| On the other hand you can teach finance to a programmer but I
| had a really hard time teaching finance people to code.
| s-lambert wrote:
| I think it's because programming is not that much of a stretch
| to the brain if you've done any mathematics and are literate.
| The brain is used to combining structures through words to
| create sentences and programming runs along that same path
| (just more strictly).
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| Wrt any politician coding, I am reminded of the old proverb "The
| marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances
| at all."
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| He was the top math student in his year at Cambridge, also Lee
| Kuan Yew's son.
| gtsop wrote:
| Why is 1ms impressive? How much time does a simple solver take?
| pdonis wrote:
| The solution time can vary quite a bit depending on the
| difficulty of the puzzle. 1 ms for a single puzzle for a
| program written in C could actually be fairly slow for an easy
| puzzle, but would be quite fast for a hard puzzle. (It would
| also depend, of course, on how fast a CPU and how much memory
| was being used to run the program.)
| lol1lol wrote:
| India's Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao writing computer programs
| in 1990s
|
| https://princeezraj.medium.com/the-indian-prime-minister-who...
| [deleted]
| sairahul82 wrote:
| Narasimha Rao is brilliant in other aspects as well. He spoke
| 17 languages. Apart from 8 indian languages, he can speak
| fluently English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German and Persian.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._V._Narasimha_Rao
| missedthecue wrote:
| It's crazy to me how you can keep those all straight. I
| quickly lost a lot of ability in a second language after not
| speaking it for a relatively short period of time.
| betaby wrote:
| Are there any videos of him speaking German or French? Two
| ex-presidents of two different small European countries had
| ~5 languages listed in wikipedia, yet in reality they were
| speaking native + some euro-english only. Now I'm very
| skeptical about multilingual politicians.
| lol1lol wrote:
| PM Narasimha Rao would speak in the local language of the
| states he visited during his tenure in politics. After his
| premiership, wrote a fiction novel indirectly sharing his
| experience in politics. His skill in language translation
| helped in climbing the political ladder because so few
| national politicians could speak more than their regional
| language.
|
| It's quite amazing that he learned COBOL and BASIC and
| wrote UNIX programs during his career in politics. He's
| credited with liberalizing industrial policies that helped
| Software/IT services industry dramatically grow in the
| following decade after his tenure.
|
| His secretary BN Yugandhar is the father of Microsoft CEO
| Satya Nadella.
|
| https://twitter.com/spignal/status/749534530856517632
| gfd wrote:
| That might explain why Singapore is surprisingly strong in CS.
| For example in the last olympiad (IOI) they managed to get 3 gold
| and 1 silver medals despite their relatively small population
| size: https://stats.ioinformatics.org/results/2021
| ValentineC wrote:
| Singapore has a fairly good education system for rote learning,
| but pre-FAANG, computer science was seen as a dumping ground
| [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SGExams/comments/azb9rq/uni_why_is_...
| swyx wrote:
| causal link is very tenuous here. i dont think he's ever been
| involved in the education system and this code is pretty much
| the only code related thing we've seen out of him since he got
| his CS degree in 1974
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| To be fair, Singapore is surprisingly strong in everything.
| Google "little red dot" and you'll get a window into their
| mindset.
| yread wrote:
| I don't understand all of the code but this bit
| > int valbit = Possibles & (-Possibles); // Lowest 1 bit in
| Possibles
|
| is pretty neat
| jlebar wrote:
| If you like that you may also like
| https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html
|
| (Also "Hackers Delight" if you really can't get enough of it.)
| toxik wrote:
| I think there's an Intel intrinsic for this, but nonetheless
| neat.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's the kind of thing that I would expect a compiler to know
| about and use; when writing code in a high level language you
| shouldn't have to think too much about what happens on the
| hardware level.
| xxs wrote:
| It's done in Java, Integer.lowestOneBit(int), citing HD
| 2-1. Java defines ints to be 2-complimentary. I can't
| recall if it's compiled tzcnt[0], though
|
| [0]: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/tzcnt
| hyperbovine wrote:
| It's a standard trick, e.g.
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12247186/find-the-
| lowest....
| pjc50 wrote:
| That's so last year! Where's his Wordle solver?
| schoen wrote:
| (2018)
| tgv wrote:
| He doesn't place braces around single statement conditional/loop
| bodies. Would not vote for him. While pretty unexpected from a
| politician, he did graduate in Maths & CS at Trinity College.
| Senior Wrangler, no less.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Senior Wrangler is genuinely impressive.
|
| I have it on good authority that Boris Johnson was viva'd at
| the end of his classics degree - implying he was on the
| first/2:1 boundary - and graduated with a 2:1.
| WithinReason wrote:
| I would not vote for him because the last for loop has
| unnecessary braces
| cm2187 wrote:
| And is he using space or tabs?
| WithinReason wrote:
| It seems to be spaces so I wouldn't try to actively
| sabotage his campaign
| [deleted]
| baybal2 wrote:
| He is a very boring PM, and lacking ambition of his father.
| Singapore under him is in "maintenance only mode."
| dskloet wrote:
| Is that a bad thing?
| baybal2 wrote:
| I would say it's a good thing when the size of ambitions
| matches the size of ones mouth.
|
| He certainly inherited the size of the mouth of his father,
| and tried to imitate his tirades heavily 12 years ago when
| I lived there, but so far nothing really came out of it.
|
| Sing in last 12 years: losing vestiges of its industry, and
| getting more, and more reliant on mainland money.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| What would be an alternative path for Singapore look
| like?
| baybal2 wrote:
| Not sure what it will look like, it's what leaders are
| for.
|
| I would say 1 thing: Singapore is probably the only
| country in the world which actively tries to reduce
| population of millionaires, and rich 6 digit salary
| making expats on the populist notion that this tiny
| population which pays for itself n-fold in taxes is
| "stealing Singaporean jobs."
| halgir wrote:
| Is that necessarily a bad thing? Admitting I don't know much
| about Singapore.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >He is a very boring PM
|
| We could do with boring in the UK right now.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| If it's good enough for K&R it's good enough for me. And yes, I
| do sleep with my copy of "The C Programming Language" (Second
| Edition) under my pillow. ;)
| StreamBright wrote:
| > While pretty unexpected from a politician
|
| I would say in the past this was unexpected. We cannot build a
| better future with bureaucrats and lawyers as it was proven
| several times. I am hoping that going forward means we have
| more practical politicians who actually have understanding of
| different domains outside of law and politics.
| shafyy wrote:
| Also, Angela Merkel, while not a computer scientist, was a
| physicist and quantum chemist.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Margaret Thatcher was also a chemist.
| schwanky wrote:
| Barack Obama wrote one line of Javascript code once. It made the
| world news.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I guess he was born into politics so kudos to him for learning
| and mastering another field.
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