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A road that is plowed and salted enough to safely drive a car is clear enough for me to drive a bike too.

As for cold, the kids can stay under a bubble canopy if it's really bad. I have this bike, though we've never bothered with a canopy, we just dress them warm (in New England): https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=workcycles%20kr8%20...:

It's precisely because I have kids that I prioritize a walkable place. Because kids can't drive!

So in car-dependent places, they have no autonomy until they're nearly adults. I think it's much more healthy for them to slowly and steadily expand their autonomy, rather than a sudden discontinuous break when they learn to drive.

The same argument applies in reverse to old people too. In places with good transit and walkability they can stay independent and active longer, with no sudden loss of freedom when they can no longer safely drive vehicles at high speed.

Walking and transit are both overwhelmingly safer than cars (most things are).

When kids are small you just push them in a stroller. Once they're too big for a stroller, they're big enough to walk everywhere that you can walk. It's really not that complicated. Suburban kids who never walk anywhere may whine about needing to walk two miles, but my kids have been doing that since before they could walk unassisted, it's perfectly normal to them.

I do also have a Dutch-style cargo bike which we use a lot around our neighborhood. It's wonderful.

I think as you gain more experience and perspective you will look back and realize that you simply weren't upper middle class yet. It's not about income (which is just a point-in-time metric that can change in an instant), it's about assets.

Programmers have a much better shot at establishing this kind of security than most people, because you should be making 2x to 3x median income for your area, which means you can live on 1x median income and invest the rest.

A lot of the people I've worked with as a programmer over the past 14 years have done effectively that, so by now they have a lot of assets. That is what upper middle class security looks like.

What nobody told this unfortunate person is that working for a tech company is not the same as being a tech worker.

I'm not defending the two-tier system inside many tech companies, just pointing out that it's real and it's maintained by market forces bigger than any one company.

If a big Seattle software company lays off a team of programmers, recruiters are swarming around them by the end of the same day.

It's 100% open source, there's a very nice Docker-based install. You can host it yourself on AWS or Digital Ocean for very little money.

Make a free Mailgun account and put your credentials into the Discourse installer and delivery is free up to 10,000 messages.

Yours is a pretty weird description of the current real estate market here in Somerville.

It's a pretty even mix of owners and renters (about 40%/60% last I checked). Because of all the factors in the article, huge amounts of money are flowing in and they're being spent on upgrading the housing stock. Far from "shitty and falling apart", you see gleaming post-restoration projects everywhere, at astronomical prices.

Maybe I'm biased toward the west end of the city because I live there and the gentrification is furthest along here. But "it's extremely expensive" and "no one likes it" are really not compatible statements. The market remains extremely hot, and it's being fed by people with money who want to buy and live here, not absentee landlords. There are still some of those, but it's a shrinking group because the overwhelming financial incentive is to gut-renovate and sell as condos.

As for increasing the density, I'm all for it, but it's worth pointing out Somerville is already the densest city in New England. Denser than Boston proper, despite all Boston's own high rises. You don't find a denser city until you get to NYC. People underestimate how effectively you can pack a city even at three-to-five stories tall, if you actually stick to that height _everywhere_. We were lucky to be built in the streetcar era, and then ignored through the incredibly-dumb architectural trends of the second half of the 20th century. If the rest of Greater Boston was merely as dense as Somerville there would be no housing shortage.

My favorite strategy for getting higher density here is killing all the parking lots, along with simply getting our transit system back to the scope and quality it had in 1930, with streetcar lines all over the place.

Thanks, I have been dreading the upcoming time when my pre-touchbar macbook pro is too old and I will check out these tips when it does.

One bit of feedback:

RAM usage: Useless. In modern OS it's always nearly 100%. That's natural.

A good ram usage indicator is still really useful, and along with cpu and network usage it's one of the first things I install on any machine.

The issue is that your indicator needs to show you not just "how much is used vs free", which is indeed useless. It needs to show you the breakdown of wired, active, and inactive memory. This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.

I use https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/

Sure, but I think many programmers underestimate the investment value of that time.

Diving into codebases is a skill that gets stronger with use, such that you can eventually do it radically faster. That makes a much larger set of problems economically practical to fix.

You're basically describing asm.js -- a subset of javascript that is known to be easy for engines to turn directly into native code and execute, that you can use as a compilation target.

The difference between asm.js and WASM is mostly just that WASM is more compact and easier to parse, while asm.js is a more gradually compatible upgrade story.

The problem with this kind of deep dive optimization is the cost of maintaining it in a long-lived project as the underlying javascript engines keep changing. What was optimal for one version of V8 can actually be detrimental in another version, or in another browser.

It's precisely the unpredictability of JIT-driven optimizations that makes WASM so appealing. You can do all your optimizing once at build time and get consistent performance every time it runs.

It's not that plain Javascript can't be as fast -- it's that plain Javascript has high variance, and maintaining engine-internals-aware optimization in a big team with a long-lived app is impractical.

If you are running your own webserver even a static simple site has required maintenance. You need to keep the server and OS patched. So adding a letsencrypt cron job is not any worse than configuring something like Debian's unattended-upgrades.

But I don't think most site owners should be doing even that much. They should just pay for static hosting, which is cheap and ensures somebody else will keep the server, os, and cert all safe.

There is a saving grace here, which is that almost nobody who would ship a new grid-based design today is shipping only one layout. They're shipping a family of layouts for different devices.

And once you have a family of layouts, it's not a big deal to add one more layout that covers non-grid-capable browsers.

The design choice that makes this all tenable is to accept that the site isn't supposed to look identical across every browser. You're accepting that you'll do progressive enhancement of layout. Old browsers still get all the content, they will just get it in a more boring format (like all stacked into a single column).

They save people from serious injury much more frequently than that. Extreme turbulence that can smash you against the ceiling happens not infrequently.

Getting off GMail is one of the best ways to take back your data in the face of dragnet surveillance.

This just isn't true. You can host your own mail server and GMail will probably still end up hosting a large fraction of the email you read and write, because the people you correspond with are still using GMail.

(In the same vein, you can refuse to have a Facebook account but Facebook probably has a dossier on you anyway. Enough people you know have dumped their contacts into Facebook that they already know your place in the social graph.)

They take HIPAA seriously (because there are fines), but that is definitely not the same thing as taking security seriously.

If the desirable employees, and the capitalists who want to actively oversee their investments weren't already in the more expensive areas

Most of those people were out in cheaper areas 40 years ago, when suburbia was still ascendant. So "they just happen to already be there" doesn't explain what we observe today.

or if there weren't costs to both associated with regular travel

That is just restating why walkable cities are nice to be in: travel has costs, being close to things means less travel.

if jobs moving to the new place wouldn't actually turn it into a more expensive, denser place

That clearly didn't actually happen when the jobs first migrated to the suburbs. The suburbs remained suburbs. The jobs were in low density office parks.

Outside of this strange vocal minority that shows up here, very few people would actually prefer to live in an urban area

If that was really true it would create a huge arbitrage opportunity for people to make billions of dollars by building their businesses out in cheaper areas.

The high paying/skilled jobs are there

Yes, but the question is why? If most people don't want to be in cities as you say, that would also include business owners, who could save a ton of money by moving their businesses into cheaper areas and paying lower rents and wages.

But that's not happening, on net. We're seeing the reverse. Businesses that fled to the suburbs 60 years ago are steadily moving back into cities.

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21706285-lots-promin... http://fortune.com/2011/07/14/companies-head-back-downtown/ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/economy/why-corp...

Many of these are sober, fortune 500 companies that wouldn't be moving if they didn't see a clear economic reason to do it. It's not some "strange vocal minority" position.

We are returning to the long-term average for civilization since the first cities began 6000 years ago: cities are the centers of economic activity and power. America went through a weird inversion for two generations where that wasn't true. We're now reverting to the mean.

People always focus on these extreme endpoints, but to get a vibrant walkable neighborhood you don't need anything remotely close to New York or Tokyo densities.

My street in Somerville, MA has a WalkScore (91) that's higher than the average score for New York city (89), yet every building in my neighborhood is detached and three stories tall. I have a back yard with grass. Not a big one, but it feels nothing like lower Manhattan. And I can walk or bike to literally everything I need in a given week.

People equate "crowded" and "ugly" with "walkable" when it's just not accurate. Being more green and more attractive is literally one of the components of being walkable, because people need to actually want to walk.

This may work for chronic conditions

According to the CDC, 75% of healthcare spending in the US is spent on chronic conditions or issues comorbid with chronic conditions.

So system changes that only help with chronic conditions could still be very worthwhile.

This is a strong contrast with my experience in trying to patch the vulnerability on an Asus desktop motherboard.

The process was so byzantine that I very much doubt more than a small fraction of home users would get through it, or even bother starting.

The correct steps were (1) flash a newer bios, (2) install the Intel ME driver for windows, (3) run the actual vulnerability patching tool. Discovering those steps required a bunch of trial and error and navigating Asus's really terrible website full of badly named downloads.

I keep seeing this misconception repeated.

Both default and named exports can be rebound to new symbols locally. But that has no effect on how statically analyzable the code is.

“It can’t be auto refactored” just isn’t true. If it’s true for your particular tool, file a bug.

People are using a cargo cult understanding of how code analysis works. It’s not just grepping for a string.

The authors are mistaken about the impact of employer-paid open source. It is orders of magnitude bigger than anything else, and it has a decades-long history of success in projects like Linux.

Companies aren’t doing it out of charity and don’t see it as such. They see (correctly) that it’s easier to get what they want by paying some people to work on an open source project than to start from scratch and pay for 100% of the cost.

I’m all in favor of more models, but until you’re channeling many tens of millions of dollars per year, your impact is much smaller than employer sponsored open source.

Your bus solution ignores what makes transportation networks slow. It's the intersections, not the roads between them.

A dedicated bus lane wouldn't help anything if those buses are getting on and off every exit through regular traffic.

Six lanes of traffic Cue whining about how pollution and an over-priced mass-transit utopia and high rise apartments will solve all our problems.

You do realize that six-lane highways are every bit as expensive as mass transit lines, right? And that a pair of railroad tracks down the median of that six lane highway can move a volume of people about 3x bigger than all the lanes put together?

Honestly even if you just love driving, you should be in favor of anything that will get other drivers out of their cars, because otherwise the end-state is horrific traffic for you to sit in.

There is no known way to scale up a city while keeping cars the dominant mode of transit. You can only add so many lanes before you run out of space, and long before that point you start hitting un-enlargeable bottlenecks in parts of the system that propagate outward.

Color me deeply skeptical of the suggestion to try to lock people out of community participation unless they pay.

The real secret to not burning out is to scale up the set of maintainers in proportion to the users. You do that by lowering the barriers to involvement, not raising them.

Most maintainers err on the side of controlling too much. Which makes them into bottlenecks.

One or two good PRs is enough for me to give you commit bit on my repos. This has never yet resulted in abuse, and has brought in a many helpful co-maintainers.

Bad commits can be easily reverted. Whereas giving people a bit of trust often inspires them to help more.

When you build them on earth, you aren't using "a factory", you're using a supply chain with thousands of factories and millions of people. A factory that can go from regolith all the way to spacecraft is still very speculative.

As for 2 billion tons of rocket fuel, it's not trivial but it's something less than 5% of one year's current CO2 emissions, and we're talking about spreading it out over a couple decades.

The thing is, those people stay rich and powerful precisely because of the sanctity of property titles.

And the city's own incentive is to be as harsh as possible toward unpaid property taxes. The quotes in the story from Jose Cisneros are consistent with this.

So even though the residents are wealthy, they are up against powerful institutional forces.

And while it's absolutely true that the legal system favors the wealthy, there are diminishing returns to being still wealthier. Beyond some point you can afford to have a competent lawyer on retainer and it's much harder to simply bury you in trivial stuff. It's not obvious that these real estate investors will be easy to push around.

I predict that unless an obvious loophole appears very soon, it will be cheaper for the homeowners to just buy the investors off.

The observations in that post are helpful to illustrate the problem. But I can't agree with the author's conclusions.

There's another way to read every single one of his examples: as evidence of a design failure. For example:

A message box opens up, but the kid clicks OK so quickly that I don't have time to read the message.

Users are so bombarded by unhelpful dialog boxes that many are trained to dismiss them as fast as possible. It becomes subconscious, some users literally can't see the dialogs anymore.

I hand back the laptop and tell him that it's infected. He asks what he needs to do, and I suggest he reinstalls Windows.

This is obviously not the users fault. It's the responsibility of the system designers to make it hard to subvert. iOS is now ten years old with no major malware outbreaks -- it can obviously be done (through means that the author doesn't approve of, like application signing).

I take the offending laptop from out of her hands, toggle the wireless switch that resides on the side, and hand it back to her.

Poor design decision. Normal users in 2017 basically never want no-network, dedicating the cost of a physical switch to it is doubly bad.

My point is that the author needs to stop lamenting that the hoi polloi have breached the gates and start taking seriously the question of how to design general purpose computing that actually serves most human beings. "Use Linux" is not, by itself, a remotely helpful suggestion. His "Mobile" suggestion is indistinguishable from satire.

Those wars are bad, but badness needs to be measured relative to something.

For example, the Afghanistan war from 2001 to the present has killed somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 people. This makes it very small by the standards of 20th century wars.

In the 1990s alone, there were at least eight wars an order of magnitude bigger than that (Congo, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Yugoslavia, Algeria, Burundi, Rawanda).

And yes, we can add up Syria and Iraq too, and that is a much bigger number, but I can likewise keep adding up 1990s wars. It turns out that was a more violent decade in terms of actual battle deaths.

though I could argue the actual starting point is Pakistan or maybe even Indonesia

You could argue that, but you would be hampered by the fact that casualty numbers in those countries are minuscule by the standards of actual wars.

not to mention terror in Europe.

Terror is Europe is up a bit but still far from the highs it was hitting in the 1970s.

http://www.datagraver.com/case/people-killed-by-terrorism-pe...

The panicky "things are worse than ever and deteriorating" position is just not supported by hard evidence. It's stoked by an eager media ecosystem that profits from fear, and an aging generation that wants to externalize it's own perceptions of decline.

Many of the people saying "the west is declining" are in fact just baby boomers who are declining who can't accept that they are not equal to "the west".

I'm not objecting to the existence of geographic boundaries. I'm objecting to the idea that those geographic boundaries say anything meaningful about the people born on either side of said boundaries.

Is real estate comprised of nothing more than imaginary lines? No, it isn't.

I agree. But I think that a real estate sale is a voluntary contract between two consenting adults, and it's none of your business if I want to sell some of mine to someone who happened to be born slightly too may miles away to end up on the "right" side of some border.

Nativists like to pretend to be defenders of human liberty, when they're just nanny staters with different preferences.

Even tree roots are constantly fighting and competing for finite resources and territory on time-lapse.

Yes, but why does it matter if the other organism you're competing with was born in El Paso vs half a mile away in Juarez? The nativist position is that one is vigorous, dynamic market competition and the other is a foreign invasion. When really they are exactly the same.

Sure, all living things compete (in addition to cooperating -- all ecosystems and markets feature a network of both). But that does not explain the fetish for treating certain people as OK to compete and others as not.

What do you think an invasive species is? Are those imaginary?

Obviously we are only discussing human immigrants here, so unless you're making an underhanded comment about the inhumanity of foreigners, where are you going with this analogy?

Realize that's not just snark -- the whole argument rests on the idea that there's a bright line between two sets of people. That line is completely imaginary. I guarantee you couldn't find it in an experiment, if I got to pick 50 American citizens and 50 non-citizens and you had to tell who was who just by talking to them.