davidp

The day-by-day dev log[0] is worth a read on its own. It's impressive what a single developer can do with the right determination and discipline.

[0] https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX/blob/master/devlog.md

You're right that this is potentially anticompetitive, but

    “Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story. 

Personally I switched back to Firefox when Chrome tried to force login to my Google account, and I haven't missed a thing (other than some dev tools, e.g. websocket inspection). Firefox Quantum is really good, and their bookmark sync has replaced my previous usage of the now-defunct Xmarks.

Superb video, and in the public domain. Thanks so much for the link!

I certainly hope we don't.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the press, including the freedom to make mistakes and even outright lie. There is no godlike authority that can tell truth from fiction without fail, and having government censors telling people what they can say (especially w.r.t. political speech) would invert the relationship between the people and their government, making government the master instead of the servant.

Instead, we rely on an educated readership to identify bias and mistakes and call them out, as has been done here. People get the journalism they deserve. To the extent we're failing to teach our children critical thinking skills, we're putting our democracy at risk.

The NY Times and other resources currently considered "credible" have earned that credibility from the people not through government permission but by generally providing a useful service to its consumers, despite all the mistakes they make and biases they present.

The NY Times in particular has unfortunately been burning through that hard-earned credibility capital at an alarming rate, even long before the current last few years, with the result that there are large portions of the country that no longer trust it like they did, with good reason. More recently they have taken the bait proffered by Trump and his ilk and lowered themselves to his level, spinning most articles I've seen with more political or oppositional bias than in the past.

I can only hope this is a cyclical phenomenon, where the citizenry/readership becomes ignorant of the related history and its challenges, simply because we've lived through a period where the battles were won and we could take such things for granted. Just like our predecessors, this generation is going to painfully relearn that everything printed (or typed) should be taken with a grain of salt and cross-checked against multiple sources.

Seriously, switch to Firefox. It's good again, and prioritizes privacy.[0] After Chrome's forced-sign-in debacle [1] I switched away from Chrome on all my platforms (Windows, Linux, Android) and haven't missed a thing.

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161

Nothing built on X does mixed DPI well, because X itself (in most configurations) treats multiple monitors as simple viewports onto a single screen. A single screen with multiple DPIs doesn't make sense virtually any more than it does physically.

Wayland is supposed to help with this, since it has a more modern take on screen virtualization (a la Windows or Mac). Getting all the user software to work on Wayland (via XWayland) is a nontrivial ongoing task. I'm not sure what Gnome Shell's state of affairs is w.r.t. Wayland, but I do know the ecosystem missed the boat with Ubuntu 18.04, which elected not to make Wayland the default due to stability and usability issues. So it might be a while before a major stable distro makes the move.

  It's an improvement over writing csv files to disk.

This is not intended to contradict your point, but the first video is an obvious marketing fluff piece almost certainly funded by the Chinese government (China Daily is not an independent news source). It is designed to manipulate foreign opinion in favor of China and distract from their pollution problem. The video does not represent scientifically persuasive evidence in favor of your point.

"As we get closer, I can feel the temperature change. Here it's not just cool, it's actually a little cold."

Well no shit; those mountains you're strolling through peak at 7000 feet and higher [0].

[0] http://en-gb.topographic-map.com/places/Hebei-7042315/

  They are hired by the agent

Another complication to be aware of: Inspectors can face "blackballing" by banks or realtors if they scuttle too many deals by finding bad things. If you find an independent inspector, don't balk at paying a little more -- they may need it to make up for business lost from being honest.

These struggles sound much harder than what I've had to deal with; please accept my sympathy.

About the student debt: That's a lot of debt. I suspect you and many other millenials were lied to when you were told that getting that much student debt is normal and necessary, when it is in fact neither. For example it takes longer to graduate when the student alternates semesters of school and work, but it does get them through (especially if the school has a strong co-op program), without nearly as severe a crushing debt load. Second, the overall benefit of an education goes way beyond the differences between schools, i.e. for many careers an inexpensive school is just as good as an expensive one. (Counterpoint: if you want to be on the Supreme Court someday, you apparently have to go to Harvard Law School...)

I confess that I'm puzzled when I hear about such high debt numbers from new grads, and the main explanation I can think of for what's different now from when I came up is that people are systematically being told that any college debt is a good investment (and loans are freely granted on that basis), when it plainly is not (and they should not be).

Agreed.

An expat is someone "on assignment", who has and expects strong ties with their home country. People who fit this description tend to frequently seek help from their own consulates, for example. It's particularly relevant for Americans because we tax ourselves even when overseas.

An emigrant (as seen from the source country) or immigrant (as seen from the destination country) is someone who has (usually permanently) moved and now expects primary services and sovereignty from their new home country.

I highly doubt that the distinction is strictly an anglophone concept, although perhaps it's related that they sound similar and have similar roots.

Agreed. Pre-Wayland, Linux/X typically needs to treat all your screens as viewports onto a single virtual screen, which of course has to have a single DPI.

This is a more common use case than some folks might imagine. My laptop screen is HiDPI, but as soon as I plug into a projector or screen sharing device that acts as a second display, things get realllllly weird: Linux/X does not know how to dynamically change screen DPI without logout/login. I work around it by just running my laptop screen at "low" DPI. I don't miss it TBH; I suspect that many people who do notice it have better eyesight than me (possibly an age thing).

Wayland is supposed to help with this to some extent, but it's not yet ready for prime time.

As simple as possible, but no simpler.

We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users. Plain text is easier to produce, lowering the friction for people to contribute, and it’s also cheaper to store and transmit, lowering the cost of bandwidth.

This is jarringly bad analysis that says more about TechCrunch's view of "content" than it does about anything else.

The cost of the "plain text" produced by the likes of true journalistic organizations like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, WaPo, et al comes from the salaries of the journalists and the resources needed to support them (travel, domestic bureaus, foreign bureaus, fees, etc.).

We didn't need paywalls on the early web because... well, maybe we did need them and we failed to build them or invest in alternatives: Look at what's happening to journalism.[0]

The author may have a point about there being an opportunity to streamline something, but if it doesn't result in money being directed to people creating the content that really matters (and honestly, people voting with their pocketbooks is the only rational way to choose just which content that is, unless you want someone else deciding for you), then it changes nothing.

Personally I'm happy to send subscription money to these organizations, at least, and grateful for the privilege to do so.

[0]: lmgtfy https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2...

I like to trot out this old gem[1] when people wonder why there's so much hate for MySQL.

Nontransactional DDL alone is sufficient to classify it as a toy DB for me. Yes, I've been personally bitten by it.

[1] https://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else

You're mostly right, except that trees are now understood to not be a great way to sequester carbon: They eventually grow old and die, and the carbon in them is released as they rot. Over (non-geological) time trees are net carbon neutral.

he was a cool guy and I don't think he'd enforce the clause

The problem with that kind of trust is that sometimes the person who makes the decision isn't the cool guy. It can be the company's lawyers who decide to make your life hard after termination for whatever reason (reduces your negotiating leverage at least), or someone else entirely if the company is acquired (for example).

That's the apparent paradox in the galaxy rotation curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve

I have a friend who is a linguistics professor at a major public university, and she has complained to me about some of the projects she's been involved with where her fellow researchers really are not good at math.

Among other things, there's a lot of confusion about statistical significance, and how and when it's calculated. There are people out there, especially in the cognitive and social sciences, who think it's OK to run an experiment to gather some data, and then look for statistically significant trends in the data and draw whatever conclusions they can. They're p-hacking and they don't even know they're doing it; they think it's science. And the people judging their papers sometimes think the same thing. How do you fix a field like this?

This issue lies at the root of the reproducibility problem. The example someone gave about an undergrad cheering (that she didn't have to do any more math) points at one of the causes.

This light bulb is exactly why many people prefer statically-typed programming languages, especially above a certain codebase size/complexity and team size.

Make my tools do the grunt-work for me, thanks, so I can focus on the actual problem domain.

With the GPL at least, its major clauses are aimed at restricting software from being incorporated into closed systems. I don't know if eliminating that control was what the GP had in mind, but it would be one of the perhaps-unexpected effects.

See also: Licenses that prohibit use for military purposes or other things the authors consider undesirable.

Copyright is the foundation of all FLOSS licenses, from GPL to MIT. You might know that already, but that's a sharp double-edged sword you're swinging.

Title II != net neutrality. Title II is a highly bureaucratic strong-oversight-in-all-things tool aimed at a completely different problem space, namely providing a legislative solution to the case-law-derived 1980s consent decrees with AT&T & IBM. It covers things that have nothing to do with what ISPs want to deal with as part of their businesses, and places the expensive burden of proof and compliance on the ISP. So yes, it makes sense that small ISPs would not want to compete with the AT&Ts and Comcasts of the world with their armies of compliance officers. You'd never see another small ISP formed again.

Instead Congress needs to create a separate Section III (or whatever) to address net neutrality specifically, and empower the FCC to act within that purview. The FCC does not get to decide on its own that it wants more authority than was previously granted it by Congress.

Congress (and the various involved presidents) deserve to have all the cannons aimed at them. As it stands, people directing their ire at the FCC chairs (on either side) are letting Congress get away with being irresponsible.

This is the problem that a lot of people have with the FCC regulatory approach, specifically abusing Article 2 of the 1996 communications act.

Net neutrality is essential for the internet to continue to thrive and flourish as it has done since 1996. But using Article 2 for that purpose is like using a sledgehammer on a finishing nail.

Article 2 was aimed at the true AT&T telecom behemoths of the world. But it is not the job of any federal agency to dictate what its own job is to Congress, i.e. in this case the FCC deciding it wants different public policy from what its charter statutes support. Congress sets public policy and determines how much leeway it will delegate to the agencies and the President. Federal agencies (of any stripe) arrogating power unto themselves is undemocratic, even if well-intentioned.

So the problem is that Congress has failed to act to block the new abusive behaviors of the ISPs, and we need Congress to write new laws. Personally I think that if sufficient leeway were granted to encourage local competition, all of this and a bunch of other abuses (exhibit A: Comcast customer support) would vanish in a puff of smoke.

Side note, I happily donate every month to the EFF, but I believe they are misguided in their support for lawsuits like those announced today.

I know this isn't a comforting thought, but: Missiles from the most likely source (North Korea) are not thought to have very good accuracy. They may be as likely to hit Kauai or the big island (or the ocean nearby) as Honolulu.

I hope this event wasn't too stressful for you and your family.

Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics[1] is a superb book on the subject. It's lengthy but very readable, especially for its real-world examples. Particularly excellent are the explanations for the unintended consequences from price controls.

The first edition came out many years ago. Since then, the world has provided a few case studies on the matter. For example we've been been watching the slow-motion train wreck that is Venezuela's economy, as first Chavez and then Maduro gripped prices tighter and tighter. The horrible consequences Sowell describes have shown up inexorably, predictably, just like clockwork. It's grim to watch; but my point is that his book and other writings give a real intuition about economic fundamentals that you can see every day.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Basic_Economics_(Thomas_Sowell...

Has the top 1% really become _that_ much more productive over the last few decades relative to the middle class?

No, and that's actually the crucial point: High wage earners in the US have remained that much more productive than their competitors around the globe. They don't compete/compare at all with middle- and low-wage earners in the US. The "pie" we're slicing up isn't the US GDP (which would be the zero-sum game you-win-I-lose math assumed in the article), it's global GDP.

It seems to me that you're defending the uppermost social class in the US, and are attempting to place blame on the middle class of the US for not being able to compete on the global stage against the lower classes of third world nations. They aren't necessarily more productive, they're just willing to work for less. A lot less.

I'm identifying the correct problem to solve. The goal is to return to income growth distribution closer to that seen in 1980, since there's a host of benefits to a pluralistic democracy when everyone is doing well. In particular it makes social transitions much easier, such as social justice and access to healthcare, because there's less sense of loss for the incumbents, and the costs of the changes can be borne more easily.

But if you misidentify the problem as mere existence of difference in income, or worse, that growth in the high-income bracket comes exclusively or even mostly from exploitation ("unfairness"), then you'll never solve the real problem, which is:

They aren't necessarily more productive, they're just willing to work for less. A lot less.

Exactly. The same work, at the same quality, is now actually worth less in real dollar terms than it used to be.

In the 50s and 60s US middle-income workers were much more productive than their peers in other countries, and could charge more for their labor. Now others in the world have caught up (dramatically improving their own quality of life, it should be noted), and if we want to keep getting paid more than them, we have to increase our productivity again. Alternatively we could put trade barriers in place to tilt the playing field in our favor, but the cost for that is borne by consumers of all income classes (via higher prices).

What do those charts look like for the rest of the world? I don't have the stats handy but I'm fairly confident that the middle class in China, Indonesia, and Malaysia has dramatically expanded over that time period, so it's arguable that the world is a (net) better place. If the author wants to make a nationalistic argument that US workers should have done better than their counterparts elsewhere, I guess that's OK, but I suspect that's not his intent. Either way, ignoring the fact of increased globalization over that time period undercuts the argument.

Rather, his supposition is that middle-income workers in the US have missed out on gains that have instead gone to upper-income workers in the US. That's false, for the same reason that workers in a single company don't "miss out" on the money given to its executives. As defined by skill sets, the labor pools for upper-income workers and lower-income workers don't intersect, globally or otherwise.

This matters because it affects the solutions we choose. Income inequality is a symptom of the deeper problem of reduced American competitiveness 1) relative to our peers, 2) in the middle- and lower-income labor markets. Because so many more middle- and lower-income skill workers have come online, who are delighted to accept lower wages than US workers because it's an order-of-magnitude improvement over what they had before, these US workers would lose ground merely by remaining as productive as they were 34 years ago.

So in order to maintain the globally-superior wages we have become accustomed to, we must maintain and even increase our productivity edge. How do we do that?

That is the challenge, not income inequality itself. "Fixing" the problem by calling the situation "unfair" (and taxing upper-income US workers out of vengeance for their presumed unfairness and exploitation) isn't a fix at all. It's like prescribing painkillers when someone has a broken leg; the problem isn't the pain, it's the broken leg.

Thanks for the tip, you made me go google some things! [0]

Do you need a full-on JIT, or just a runtime? [1]

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-g...

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-g...

Yep. Civil disobedience, unsurprisingly, includes breaking the law.