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baobrain

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It's dismaying in the comment section to see people who are seemingly unaware of the Dickey Amendment straight up defending it. The Dickey Amendment banned the CDC from funding any research that may be used to advocate or promote gun control. And it was lobbied for by (who would've guessed) the NRA.

Pretty much all medical associations have called for the amendment's repeal. It's had a stifling effect on research into gun violence since 1996 because most research in this area is funded by the federal government.

This is nothing but good news and a blow to groups who want to stifle public knowledge to protect their own interests.

$, like someone else has said, but I also would guess that many of the engineers do not have a clear idea of the overarching functionality of the application.

I'm sure internal communication about the product is extremely positive, with phrases like "improved law enforcement accuracy by XX%, decreased customer costs and time by YY," so some may truly believe they are doing something that everyone would agree is good.

I think it's inaccurate to claim that there are people who aren't enamored with unions simply because people don't like unions.

Take police unions for example. It is well documented that many unions are fervently against policies such as always-on body cams that theoretically should protect a (good) cop and the citizen. Fail that, they are against releasing body cam footage.[0] Police unions are also known to protect abusive officers. [1]

I'm not trying to claim that there isn't an anti-union attitude, but it is not simply associating them with communism.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/nyregion/new-york-police-... [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/how-pol...

Are you developing apps on it? That's a pretty niche use-case.

A niche but extremely important use case, isn't it? Without app developers the platform is dead.

Is wanting to connect to your Macbook to charge your phone an obtuse use case?

At the very least apple should have shipped with a USB-C to lightning cable, not USB-A.

Keeping the lightning port is what really jumped out at me. Now some iPads are going to have USB C and others are going to have lightning, all under the same umbrella product of the iPad.

What is even worse (!) is that the iPhones and iPads still ship with a USB A to lightning cable, meaning even users inside the Apple ecosystem need a USB C/thunderbolt dongle with usb A ports to connect their iPhones/iPads to their computers. I have no idea how this decision was approved without thinking about this.

No that's not what the other languages are doing.

Is this a claim that people do not indent in other languages and leave it to the dev environment? Yes, those languages don't rely on indentation but people do still manually indent or rely on their environment to indent it for them to make the code remotely readable. I for one cannot read Java without it also being indented correctly.

This frees the developer from the job of manually formatting their code like some sort of caveman.

I honestly don't understand this part. What tools are you using that don't do indentation for you? Emacs and vim extensions, vscode, Pycharm, atom...all of them have very intuitive indentation for when you type. The most you have to do is hit backspace after finishing a block.

Especially considering it's so easy to fix Python the language so that indentation becomes unambiguous: add an "end" statement for each deindent (aka closing brace).

As someone with a lot of Ruby experience, the "end" is absolutely not more clear than indentation. There's a reason environments highlight do-end pairs together: because it's hard to know which ones match which.

Then I found out that -white space is important-.

I hear this a lot and I think it's a misunderstood statement. Python does not care if you do not have a space in assignments or arithmetic or between commas or parentheses.

What Python does care about is the indentation of the source code. The indentation is what guides the structure - which is already what we are doing with most languages that don't care about indentation!

What I really mean to say is there are plenty of valid complaints with Python, but white space just is not one of them. If you are writing good code in a language with C-syntax you are doing just as much indentation.

I find some take-home assignments to be completely reasonable and preferable to whiteboard interviews.

For example, Klaviyo in Boston (no relation, I just interviewed with them at one point) has a take-home assignment listed here [0]. It is simple enough that I can finish it in the same time as phone technical interviews and applies to the company's product and job requirements.

Though I am certain there are companies that have unreasonable take-home assignments.

[0] https://www.klaviyo.com/weather-app

Someone posted this in the comments:

Utter nonsense. John DeFrancis debunked your interpretation of this drawing back in 1989. This is not a letter at all. It was a prop in a parlor game played by Yukaghari girls: one girl would sketch a drawing and the others would take turns trying to guess the story behind it.

Geoffrey Sampson helped to propagate this myth in his book on writing systems first published in 1985. Sampson published a retraction in 1994.

While I could not find any verification in a cursory search, maybe we should take this with a grian of salt

I still think it's insane that the bean counters and value engineers let them include a microphone that wasn't needed.

Having worked on hardware products, the features planned sometimes (even often!) change after the hardware has been prototyped and an initial production order has been placed. It is cheaper to simply not ship the feature than it is to change the board.

Many in this comment section do not really seem to have much experience with hardware. It is fairly common for products to ship with unused hardware and it much more believable than malicious intent, especially given how disorganized Google is internally.

I'm not familiar with the specifics of setting up an office, but from just a talent perspective, Boston has the benefit of having a large concentration of universities: Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern, UMass...

That's a lot of new unemployed talent that (potentially) is looking for a career start in Boston. It is also more affordable and public transit is decent.

From experience, this is simply not true. My version of wechat is registered with a US phone number, installed from the google play store on a google phone, not sponsored, and while I can't put money into wechat pay my friend can still transfer it

You can also still use all the social features everyone is used to in China.

Often times the websites are completely broken under reader mode: images are in the wrong locations, image captions are treated as article text, article text doesn't appear on websites that have awful scrolling behaviour.

I completely understand why people have problems with AMP. However, AMP is a drop-in replacement (for the user) and Firefox's reader mode is simply not equivalent, as much as I use it.

Other languages occupy still other places on the linguistic axis of “busyness,” from prolix to laconic, and it’s surprising what a language can do without. In Mandarin Chinese, a way of saying “The father said ‘Come here!’” is “Fùqīn shuō ‘Guò lái zhè lǐ!’”

The writer seems to have copy pasted the phrase into Google translate. The phrase ‘Guò lái zhè lǐ!’ is simply incorrect grammar in mandarin. I'm unsure of how accurate the rest of the piece is.