edmccard

Take Herb Sutter for example, who argues that "memory safety" as defined in this article is an extreme goal and we should instead focus on a more achievable 95% safety

I wonder how you figure out when your codebase has reached 95% safety? Or is it OK to stop looking for memory unsafety when you hit, say, 92% safe?

A coin deposit is no more a mark of a bad neighborhood than having cart corrals in the parking lot -- like them, it is a way of reducing (or trying to eliminate) the amount of time employees have to spend collecting carts and returning them.

so putting the OST in CD format was a nice easter egg.

It wasn't an easter egg; it was how the games accessed and played the in-game music (and digitized speech when that was a new, exciting thing). There would be one huge data track and then dozens of small audio tracks. If the game did take multiple CDs, then either (a) you installed all the discs but all the audio was on the CD that had to be in the drive for the game to play or (b) each CD had the audio needed for the levels that were on that disc (I think that scenario was more common on PS1 games, but I could be mis-remembering)

I like money staying local, seeing kids sports teams sponsored by Bob's Ford

In theory that sponsorship money could stay local, if the people who saved money by buying cars direct from Ford gave it personally to the local sports teams instead of giving it to Bob first.

It's like finding out my neighbor doesn't lock his front door at night and announcing it on twitter.

No, it's like finding out your neighbor sold a bunch of faulty locks to a bunch of other people. There's a difference between information that would benefit only one person (the neighbor in your analogy) and information that would benefit many people (the neighbor's customers in my analogy)

When they are cast to the shadows they can grow,

It's a nice poetic conceit to think of good ideas as thriving in the light like flowers while bad ideas flourish in the darkness like mushrooms, but they both thrive on the same thing -- attention. To make another comparison with things that grow in the shadows: the crawlspace under my front porch is full of bugs and critters, but they didn't get there because I cast them out of my house, and I don't keep my house bug-free by periodically inviting them in for debates.

Is it also one of the safest in history in other nations that have not increased their incarceration rates?

Yes[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop

We had an XT/286 and I don't recall any expansion card involved...

And other people had an XT that they installed an expansion card into -- like the Pfaster-286[1]

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=xsMx9D2s6y0C&pg=PA43&lpg=P...

Wouldn't that hurt men even more?

More than the internal injuries that could be caused by water forcibly entering the vagina? Probably not.

FTA: It is available first today in the July release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code, and we will later release it as a standalone component that you can use with any tool that works with the Language Server Protocol.

Yep. And the shark is still a shark, and the horseshoe crab is still a horseshoe crab...

Every time they write a loan they are forced to provide the customer with a 200-page "book" of all the compliance and regulation surrounding that loan.

This must vary by state; I recently took out a small loan from my local bank in Pennsylvania and the information I went home with came out to about 15 pages.

When you're dealing with huge amounts of yellow tape and you have millions of customers

I thought the conventional wisdom was that onerous regulation actually favored huge businesses with "millions of customers" -- for example, the effort of having to "print that, audit it, have lawyers look it over, maintain it" is a fixed cost so the cost per customer is smaller for larger banks.

That some genetic features may be dropped or changed if not required anymore without the pressure of a higher death rate / lower reproduction ... darwinism doesn't seem to explain everything

If the results of a newly-introduced selection pressure can be explained by darwinism / natural selection, then surely so can the results of a removal of selection pressure.

For example, if there are genes that result in lowered fear or agression, and that leads to fewer offspring for wild mice, they will have a lower frequency in a wild mouse population than in a population where they don't lead to fewer offspring. I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem like this particular article requires any additional mechanisms beyond natural selection.

...One of talents greatest contributions is knowing how to let your winners run and cut your losses...

...talent would understand what events are more likely to succeed...

If we already know that these things are the result of talent and not luck, and if it's a foregone conclusion that the model gives an "oversized role" to luck, then I guess these kinds of investigation are doomed from the start.

where metaphors have been mistaken for new words.

Dictionaries have included metaphorical definitions for ... at least 60 years? I have a 1958 Webster's that defines "feather in one's cap" and "hard row to hoe" and probably quite a few more.

Given the rate of startup failure, and the sheer number of other companies whose "product wasn't there", what reason do we have to believe that hiring a diverse workforce is more relevant than all the other possible reasons for not creating the best possible product?

The formula for constant growth over time, for example, a 2% increase every year, would be starting salary * 1.02 ^ t where t is the number of years. So there is an exponent present, and constant growth is an exponential process.

I think for circularity you'd need a pair of definitions -- "programming: making a program" and "program: the result of programming". In this case, we already know what a program (or a "programmed solution") is -- that is, we can tell that something is a program without necessarily knowing how it was made. So the definition at least provides some new information on top of that -- the name for the activity of creating programs.[1] Also, by including the concept of "design", it lets you know when the author says "programming", he doesn't just mean the acts of writing source code, or typing it in.

[1] You could have probably guessed that the name was going to be "programming", but it might not have been.

It might even explain why so many cultures had rites to male adulthood involving extreme pain.

Unless you believe that the rites were created to address the problem of "one day, there will be analgesics with antiandrogen effects, so we'll have a few centuries of practice at enduring extreme pain", then I don't see how there could be any connection.

If you classify say 50% of people as AI's and 50% of AI's as people then those AI's passed the Turing test.

And if your version of the test is "heads it's an AI, tails it's human" then any AI's that are classified as human will have "passed the Turing test."

If you're locating a chirper by sound, you're not seriously impaired by the lights being out.

Even if you're locating it by sound, you probably don't want to stumble around in the dark while you're trying to find it. So you turn on the lights, and you can't find it because it stopped chirping. Then after you turn off the lights, it starts back up, so you turn the lights back on, etc.

This article bugs me because they don't clearly identify the author. There is a Doug Pearson...

In the article, the author's name at the top is actually a link to a short bio[1] which seems like it has enough information to identify him.

[1]https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/DougPearson/1021383/

You don't agree with the thinking therefore the author is wrong and her experience and opinion isn't worth considering.

No, I just don't agree that the author's experience generalizes to other women.

Just be interested in what she is working on based on the merits or her work.

And what of people like the event manager in the article who are interested in other aspects of her career? Shouldn't we practice "acceptance, inclusiveness, and diversity" toward them also?

She describes a culture where her experience is normal.

She describes having grown up in a culture where that experience is normal, but that is not necessarily the same culture that she is working in now.

It's substantive and grounded in personal experience.

Yes, but it's the personal experience of someone who has never "had to defend their choice of or fight an uphill battle while selecting engineering as a career choice". Which makes it seem like more of an "argument by outlier" than the expression of some deep universal insight-- yes, maybe Mallika doesn't appreciate someone listening to her talk as "being supportive", but maybe women who have had to fight an uphill battle would appreciate the show of solidarity and the chance afterwards to swap war stories.

(I do agree that it was unfair to flag the article.)

basically, it re-enforces the idea that men and women are actually so different that you have to be a certain gender just to do something you want to do (gender essentialism)

Do you think there's a difference between thinking you have to be a woman because you want (for example) to be a nurse, and thinking you have to be a woman because you want to be a woman?

they might suspect that a darker skinned person driving with a white person at the back is more likely to be an Uber driver

I think in Finland official taxis say "TAKSI" and have a yellow sign on the roof, so maybe they might suspect any unofficial-looking car with a driver in the front and the sole passenger in the back as being an Uber.

still I find it strictly better to have a part of the population with access to life extension than nobody with access to it.

But that's already the case. There are people right now who will live longer than others because they have access to better healthcare.[1] Why should it be strictly better (addressing only your point b) for the situation to change from "people with an average lifespan plus people who live 10 years longer" to "people with the same average lifespan plus people who live 20 years longer"?

Or in other words, is longevity some sort of unalloyed good? Is arithemtic the only tool needed to judge the merits of life extension? Another comment asked us to consider what would happen if Einstein were still alive; maybe there are some other people whose continued existence would not have been a net benefit to humanity?

[1]Yes, as mentioned elsewhere in these comments, people on welfare have access to some healthcare, but after going from a premium employer-paid insurance plan to what's available under my state's Medicaid expansion, I can guarantee that the former has a higher standard of care.

People on welfare have access to better healthcare than the richest person on Earth did 50 years ago. They have access to pocket computers and communication systems far more powerful than the military could have afforded 50 years ago.

Which doesn't really matter unless you have a time machine that can send them back 50 years. At least, none of the poor people I've known (including myself) have ever said "I can't afford to give my children better opportunities, let alone leave them something in my will, but hey! at least they'll have nifty pocket computers!"

But isn't insane that things like life extension and genetic engineering are becoming a victim to this? I wouldn't have even thought these issues were controversial or political.

You don't think there are any political ramifications to the possibility of dividing the world into new categories of "haves" (life-extended and genetically-modified) and "have nots"?