dmitrig01

The goal is economic growth, which matters more than anything else.

To some people, but not everyone. It doesn't make sense to give unqualified "bests" without these kinds of caveats.

I don't personally share this view. I don't think growth or wealth are inherently good.

To what end? "Best" implies towards a certain goal. Is the goal economic growth? Or is it a fair society? Those are very different.

For example, if the goal is a fair society, then we should have a wealth tax, to disincentivize wealth equality. (And an income tax isn't so bad either in).

Having only a consumption tax makes sense if the goal is (only) to reduce consumption.

In California, it is regulated: https://california.public.law/codes/food_and_agricultural_co...

Writing blog posts has become cheap, making them sound human has become hard.

Thank you!!

This is wonderful. Could you add European-style (i.e. non-Greek) yogurt as an option? That's what I most often have on hand.

Please, if you want to persuade me, do it yourself. If you don’t believe in it enough to go through the effort to write the article, and instead ask an LLM to do it, it’s not going to convince me.

I hate that in our modern world, we are obsessed with being "productive". Why is this important? Why do we punish ourselves for being "unproductive"? Maybe we should try and spend as much of our time in things that are unproductive or unquantifiable as possible. Is having a relaxing afternoon the beach "productive"?

We've lost our ability to just "be". We must always "do". A sad state of affairs.

I don't know whether to call it a corner case or not, but I was pretty easily able to find this one (based on my own experience – the peak temperature in the East Bay has always felt very late in the year): https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/541~3268/Comparison-of-th...

The plot is almost exactly the start of one of my favorite Onion Talks, What is The Biggest Rock? https://youtube.com/watch?v=aO0TUI9r-So

This is interesting. Could you provide any information about this commercial product? As far as I understand, the most sophisticated treatment happening is low oxygen storage. But neither of these things explain why apples straight off the tree are also bland.

Apple grower here. I still don't understand Honeycrisps. I'm on the younger side, so I haven't seen that many years of Honeycrisp, but I feel I have never had a good one. My experience of Honeycrisp is that it is super crunchy, almost too much so, but completely devoid of flavor. To me, it's like eating crunchy water.

As others have pointed out, this article doesn't actually explain why (or even if) Honeycrisp has gotten worse. One thing I will add to this discussion, though I don't know if it is true in the case of Honeycrisp, is that it is definitely not a matter of breeding (nor selective breeding, breeding for storage, etc): in order to produce more apple trees, Honeycrisps (or any other variety) aren't bred, they are asexually propagated through grafting. That means all Honeycrisp trees are more-or-less genetically identical.

That said, just like any organism, as trees grow and produce new cells at the tips of branches, there is always a chance for a mutation. Sometimes these branch mutations (called "sports") have visible genetic differences: stronger coloration, earlier ripening, or perhaps earlier storage (though this is harder to notice). This is how Red Delicious went from a wonderful apple to tasteless, mealy cardboard: sports were selected over time that prioritized storage and color over texture and flavor.

As an apple grower, I have had the opportunity to taste Honeycrisps straight off the tree, and to me, they taste just as flavorless as the ones I get from the store. I grow almost all heirloom varieties, and I can tell you there is one that for me is head-and-shoulders above the rest: Wickson Crab. If you are in California, I recommend marking your calendar for September to search this variety out at the farmers markets (or better, plant a tree yourself!). There are many other wonderful varieties that stand out from grocery store apples. In a pinch, I'll get a Pink Lady from the store, as I find it's the most flavorful of the commonly available apples, but I find they sit heavy in my stomach in a way that homegrown or farmer's market apples don't. I believe this is to do with the fact that apples available at the grocery store are picked early, before the starches have converted into sugars, so the higher starch content may be harder to digest.

Hint: any apple with an "apple green" undercoat is underripe; to pick a ripe apple, wait for that bright green to mellow out or change colors. For redder apples, it can be harder to see, but most apples have some green visible under the red (Pink Lady is again a great example of this). And yes, Granny Smith apples are so sour precisely because they are picked and sold underripe; a ripe Granny Smith is yellow and sweet.

Hive and Impala are databases.

Presto and SparkSQL are SQL interfaces to many different datasources, including Hive and Impala, but also any SQL database such as Postgres/Redis/etc, and many other types of databases, such as Cassandra and Redis; the SQL tools can query all these different types of databases with a unified SQL interface, and even do joins across them.

The difference between Presto and SparkSQL is that Presto is run on a multi-tenant cluster with automatic resource allocation. SparkSQL jobs tend to have to be allocated with a specific resource allocation ahead of time. This makes Presto is (in my experience) a little more user-friendly. On the other hand, SparkSQL has better support for writing data to different datasources, whereas Presto pretty much only supports collecting results from a client or writing data into Hive.

I believe there are HLB-infected trees in California as well: https://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-citrus-greening-20190329-... reports that there are over 1,000 affected trees as of mid-2019.

I do agree that CA seems to be doing what it can to be combating the disease.

Some folks also report to having success using cover crops to restore soil, to mitigate the effects of HLB: http://citrusindustry.net/2019/11/18/cover-crops-bring-hlb-r...

Could you elaborate on what "Money at the End of the Rainbow" business model is? Thanks!

Because Facebook is battling Google for engineers. So you've got a big fight between two companies over which company is the coolest place to work, and both of them are companies that your grandparents love. How are you going to win this fight? One way is to have the hippest Web framework.

And who ends up winning? Web developers everywhere. I don't see why this is a bad thing.

Very interesting concept, and I agree completely. One thing I've noticed in myself – and I'm curious if others have noticed this as well – is that the "million-dollar idea", as he puts it, never really turns out to be quite as good as I had imagined. Especially once it's been stored away for some time, under the pretense that I don't have the ability to explore it, it seems to be dramatically worse than what I had it made out to be.

Autocorrect kills

Taking this further, as a developer, I find I have even less patience for slow loading times than a 'regular end-user'.

I don't know exactly, but I assume this is because I know what goes on behind the scenes, and 99% of the time, the website is doing way more work than it really needs to in order to deliver the experience that I'm asking for.

This is great. All complaints about Mongo's durability aside, it wins out over many other databases because of its ease-of-use -- its small DSL certainly beats out having to learn a whole new language (SQL, etc.). Now, combine that with real durability, real transactions, etc. If this isn't the database for the 80%... I don't know what is.

(My one open question, and something this page doesn't touch on, is how easy is it to get ToroDB up and running? Mongo makes that part easy as well!)

Interesting allegory. Pretty much the exact same thing could be said about pure/impure functions in a language like Haskell -- where I thought this was going (until I realized it was about JS)

Better stack traces is huge. One of the biggest pain points in Clojure development today.

In that case, Anne is unmarried

Heh, this is exactly why I could not understand what was being said.

Ah – I see what you mean now! If they are blind writes, not some kind of CAS operation (reading from and modifying the same key), then there is no conflict.

I thought you meant that clients A and B do their writes, and only if someone at a later time were to observe the value at that key, a conflict would be caused (Heisenberg-style).

Thanks for clarifying!

I'm not an expert in this, but:

because there are no reads, any serialization order is possible and therefore there is no chance of conflict

I don't understand how this is the case. If clients A and B try to write to the same key, it can be serialized as {A,B} or {B,A}, but in either case, there is some kind of conflict... no?

Very interesting. One thing I notice about this architecture is that in the example given, the fourish features (loading suggestions, displaying suggestions, reloading all, reloading one) are pretty tightly complected together (especially further on, for example in the combineLatest area). Is this necessarily the case? Is there some better way of accomplishing this?

Sorry - it's on the list. I'll bump it up in priority :-)

Was about to write exactly this :-)