c2the3rd

C-u M-! does the exact same thing in Emacs.

This is moronic reasoning. Just because stocks are "cheap" relative to bonds right now does not make stocks an "attractive" investment. As Buffet says, never confuse price with value.

For the people that haven't noticed, a global pandemic and lockdowns killed 40% of small businesses this year, forced many large businesses to take on new debts that will blunt future profits, and forced the government into unprecedented deficits. Stocks are "cheap" because risk went up.

Why not say "Every ~~Forth~~ program is its own DSL for accomplishing its work."? For moderately complicated programs in any language you choose, it can take a long time to grok how the literal code relates to solving the conceptual problem. No language can build in every abstraction, and no programmer has time to learn them all.

I think you are close to part of an answer, but it isn't because Forth and Lisp expect one to do more work than other languages. If anything, they expect one to do less. The problem is programmers feel lost because there is no way to differentiate the bedrock of the language from higher abstractions. C has operators and statements and keywords that tell you there is nothing "underneath" what you are looking at. With Forth, everything is words. With Lisp, everything is lists.

Written text IS a visual medium. It works because there is a finite alphabet of characters that can be combined into millions of words. Any other "visual" language needs a similar structure of primitives to be unambiguously interpreted.

You say visual programming seems to unlock a ton of value. What can you do with a visual language that is much easier than text? Difficult concepts might be easier to understand once there is visual representation, but that does not imply creating the visual representation is easier. And why should pictures be more approachable than text? People might understand pictures before they can read, but we still teach everyone to read.

How much of the increase in median job tenure is explained by an aging population?

Just because some Linux users do that does not mean it is a requirement. If it were, Linux could never have achieved server the server dominance it has. Fiddling is a side effect of Linux being too flexible, so you always have the nagging feeling you could be better with a different distro/window manager/shell/editor/file manager.

I installed Linux Mint on my parents' computer and it's been running rock solid for three years. And they appreciate not being tricked into updates they don't want.

What annoys me most about this kind of position that I haven't seen addressed enough is the assumption that politics is some kind of grocery basket of personal taste where positions on issues are all independent opinions.

Anyone who thinks about politics seriously and argues politics with people needs to base their opinions on something besides personal preference. This means trying to develop moral and logical principles and goals on which to base positions. When people do this, opinions on many topics will be highly correlated.

I liked this article because I enjoy reading about data structures that can be used in places where the "obvious" implementation is a list of lists. A lists of lists data structure is general enough for many applications and readily available in many languages, but when using it, I often get the sense that I am spinning wheels writing far more code than necessary to do the desired manipulations. It makes me happy to read about more novel solutions.

While their current focus does seem and probably should be on politics due to the wide reach of that topic, I think the idea of perspectives in general is a great idea for such an encyclopedia. The problem, in my view, that leads to the culture of deletionism at Wikipedia is the inability for one article to coherently explore all aspects and interpretations of a topic, so editors start deleting all but the parts they care about. Facts that are relevant to one perspective are not relevant to another. For example, Jesus-the-historical-figure is a different topic from Jesus-the-religous-figure.

I think the way Infogalactic solves the problem it is trying to solve is that people no longer have to argue if a particular fact is worth including in an article and have an edit war. It opens up a third option of recognizing that including or not depends on the circumstances of what the reader is looking for. I'm not sure what potential new problems you are thinking of.

As for corporate sponsors, they are bound by the same rules as the rest. I don't think explicitly recognizing corporate interest in the topic would be worse than trying to have an objective page which would probably be subverted anyway.

As for terminology, I don't see how "Infogalactic" as a name is more confusing to new users than "Wikipedia". Most people didn't know what "wiki" meant before Wikipedia. And I don't think new contributors would really have a problem figuring out "Galaxians" and "Starlords" with the obvious context.

I find this sort of answer unsatisfyingly incomplete.

All the examples of people who profit off fear: mass media, lawyers, politicians, and industrial pharmaceuticals have all existed for decades longer than the current age of fear. That makes them insufficient as a cause. There must be something else.

Not surprising since both Macbook Pro and Air lines have gone >15 months without a hardware upgrade.

The current mac owners have no real reason to buy newer versions.

I would like to thank all the people who had a comment on this article, but did not post it. Truly, you improve the community with your silence. I'm aware of my own hypocrisy on this point, but logical consistency would prevent this sentiment from ever being expressed.

As it is, perhaps 5% of these comments know anything about what they are talking about. One of the biggest intellectual failings of the sort that frequents this place is mistaking being smart with being informed.

This article is far too shallow in its diagnosis.

Yes, the media manufactures outrage for attention. This is not the problem. The media has done the same for as long as it has existed. The problem is that real people are willing to believe and act upon this "outrage", sometimes in an extreme manner, to avoid being on the "wrong side".

The action I care about isn't the media writing a libellous "story" about how "outraged" people are at some action of mine, though they are scum for it. What I care about is when people use it as justification to call my boss/family/friends and go after me personally.

It's not the media that doxxes, makes death threats, and gets people fired. Who does that is a population that increasingly cannot tell the difference between words and violence, a population that sees bad thoughts as assault and disagreement as evil. Even the smallest infraction is justification for ruining lives.

Brendan Eich was ousted from his position at Mozilla for his donation years ago. A pizzeria owner was threatened with death for merely saying he wouldn't serve gays. The mob retaliations are completely disproportionate to the "crime".

That's why people are afraid of the new outrage. They know one violation of the ever changing set of rules can now cause a mob to go nuclear on everything they hold dear.

I hear more people complain about Westboro Babtist Church than I hear Westboro Babtist Church complain about anything.

That doesn't mean Westboro Babtist Church is not a problem. It just means the majority is sane.

While they aren't banning DD-WRT, they are creating restrictions for manufacturers. The easiest way for a manufacturer to meet the new rules is simply to not allow flashing third-party software.

Even if they don't intend to ban DD-WRT, their rules may indirectly eliminate consumer ability to use it.

I think there might me a simple explanation for this.

Nonreligious children tend to be richer and come from richer countries. Having more wealth means they do not attach as much value to material goods, so they are more "altruistic". Likewise, wealth shields them from the consequences of negative actions, so they are less "punitive".

I think that people are now using overt racism and sexism as protest against Social Justice. Since a Social Justice Warrior will define anyone who doesn't agree with them as a racist or sexist anyway, people make it as obvious as possible because there is no escape. The only thing left is to piss them off.

[dead] I'm Terry Davis and I created TempleOS

How many people know who Terry Davis is?

That comment was about how HN could learn from 4chan's layout. For example, I think comment trees are way harder to read than a linear stream.

One thing to remember about Krugman is that his specialty in college was trade theory. That is what he studied as a graduate and what his thesis was about. He made landmark advances in that field, and I respect him for it. However, this also means he is not an authority on monetary or fiscal policy and his views on these things do not have the weight some think they do. He is widely published in mainstream news only because he is an talented writer.

If he came illegally from Mexico, there would be plenty of people fighting for him to stay.

Drawing on this story and [others](http://politicaloutcast.com/2013/02/usa-trying-to-deport-chr...), it seems immigrants are only protected if they are willing to break U.S. law. It is a very dangerous incentive to deport those not breaking the law and welcome those who do. People might get the wrong idea.

This is true of any "-ism", especially ideologies.

Every person will give a slightly different answer as to what it is.

Let me start by saying I do think there are definitely "Null Professors" who do not properly teach, and thus allow competent students to fail.

However, I must agree with the notion that some people inherently can't program. To take the most extreme case, do you think the dumbest human on earth could learn to program? I don't. All concepts require some level of intelligence to grasp. Many animals have some intelligence, but cannot learn how to count. Humans know how to count because humans originated the concept, and therefore the first human to do it must have had some intrinsic ability others lacked. Teaching can spread the insight, but it cannot create insight from nothing.

I will go one further to say some people who can't program make it into universities. Admissions aren't perfect. People can get in because of their parents, because the school wants them as an athlete, because of Affirmative Action, or a simple misjudgement by university staff.

I think people lose sight of this because intelligence and knowledge are so hard to measure. Footraces are much easier because you can only measure speed against a clock, and I know most humans will never have the ability to run a 4 minute mile. No women has done it yet.

This is not to say this makes some people "better" than others, but everyone has their own skills. It is folly to think everyone can do anything anyone else can do, even in principle.

Structure influences functionality. This is the case in both engineering and biology.

For example, dolphins have tails and flippers while I have arms and legs. No one disputes the dolphin is a better swimmer and I am the superior runner.

Why should this be any different with brains? Brains with different structure are suited to different things.

Has anyone managed to implement an and gate out of this? {xor, or, true} is a universal logic set, so it it theoretically possible. A not gate is easy, but the positioning of the inputs and outputs makes and gates tricky.

For those who are rusty on boolean algebra or just curious:

not A = A xor true

A and B = ((A xor true) or (B xor true)) xor 1