> All-or-nothing thinking – which psychologists call ‘splitting’ – is a symptom of certain personality disorders.

And yet it permeates American culture right through its core.

With me or against me. Good or bad. Right or wrong. Amazing or horrible. Left or right. Freedom or communism. No compromise.

As a corollary, I wonder if it follows that the American culture counts as a personality disorder. (Let the downvotes come!)

And none of the people in this thread did provide even a hint of an answer either...

It's not a trivial question, so it's not that surprising that nobody answers it without prior knowledge of the thing?

There is now an answer to the question in https://github.com/esrlabs/josh/issues/23

The ability to do some changes like that is not the same as doing it always. Most commits are quite localized, and those should not be penalized by the ability to have a few cross-cutting ones.

>> Cryptography has rules, which are both simpler and more fundamental than we might think.

> <Proceeds to describe Cryptography in a way that confirms that it is exactly as complex as I set it out in my head>

This. Soooooo much this.

This article is surprisingly and disappointingly simple-minded to appear on a place called Hacker News. It's a list of things aimed at my mom, not at a "hacker", whatever meaning you assign to this term.

The most telling may well be section "5. Be wary of unknown sources" which recommends "You should never trust software from these sources". One of the key ways of making Android privacy focused is to install F-Droid and use the non-cloud alternatives it offers to all the standard Play Store crap.

Sorry, I would have expected more from something posted on Hacker News. I expect everybody here to roll their eyes when reading a heading such as "Use a PIN".

Install everything from Google Play, that's all good. Never install anything from F-Droid, that's all bad.

That's basically what this article is saying.

My advice to anybody in general would be: Do it. I did a Ph.D. and I had a blast. You need to be in an area of your field that you really like, and over the Ph.D. candidate years you will meet essentially everybody on the planet working on the same stuff, geek out with similarly-minded people in your lab or at conferences around the globe. A Ph.D. widens your view on our field substantially and you feel less like your role in the world is that of a code monkey. Don't do it in the U.S. though, where your position in society is to be a (financially) poor student and often times just being used by your advisor as cheap labor. Do it in a country that has better conditions, like you find all over the place in Europe for example. If you first go to industry, you'll never come back.

My advice to you specifically would be: Don't do it. You seem to dislike academia and your area in particular. A Ph.D. is not an instrument to get better opportunities in industry, except for a very few research-oriented positions. I'm now working in industry as a software engineer, and I'm also having a blast, but the position I have did not require a Ph.D. (I feel like I have a broader understanding of CS than my colleagues do though.)