jordan0day

There's a small bit of irony here in that there was a rash of "Why I'm leaving X for Rails" posts between 2008 and 2012 or so.

Since there are infinite things about which we are wrong

That's... ahem... wrong.

How could there possibly be an infinite number of things "we" (humanity, I presume?) are wrong about, given that there have only been a finite number of human beings with (as far as I know) finite life spans?

One of my disappointments with the original Raspberry Pi was that I felt that its genesis story was from people whose early experience with programming came from Apple II's and QBASIC. It was pitched as a way to expose kids today to that same kind of low-overhead, get-in-and-start-making-things-happen experience some of us had 25 years ago.

Imagine my disappointment when the Pi's getting started experience was "Boot into a graphical window manager, open up the Python IDE, start writing Python..."

What about the term "American Indian"? I feel like that would be useful in headlines to set the context, so that then everyone knows which "Indian" is being referred to.

I'm not sure I understood your comment correctly, but I hardly think either group thinks a large black market would be good for their cause.

The difference I see is that the anti-saloon league obviously underestimated how large the black market would be for alcohol.

I would not be surprised (in fact, it seems to be a talking point) if the NRA is purposefully overestimating the size of a potential black market for firearms. But I'm totally speculating here.

You might not be wrong, but your concern seems reminiscent of the fears raised when seatbelts became mandatory: That someone would get into an accident where the car went into a lake or pond, and the seatbelt trapped the occupants inside the sinking car.

That is, it's a legitimate fear, but such a rare occurrence that the benefit of seatbelts far, far outweigh the risk of this sort of uncommon scenario.

I'm kind of uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, and definitely uncomfortable with this statement:

'"True freedom of speech" is an awful thing.'

That is, a good use of freedom of speech is to "speak truth to power". Yes, it's awful when freedom of speech is used to kick someone when they're down, but we need to preserve that freedom so that we can kick someone when they're (wrongly) up.

I'm pretty sure the point of the article was about women and Amazon, not "about a (painful and harsh) health insurance screw-up".

The health insurance "screw up" only occurred because she was on maternity leave. As a man, this isn't necessarily my area of expertise, but I'm pretty sure only women can go on maternity leave.

That's not to say this couldn't also happen to a new father on paternity leave... but paternity leave barely exists in the US to begin with.

Is there supposed to be a cause-and-effect here? Because I'm not seeing how that's related?

Obligatory link to Jim Gray's "Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?": http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf

TL;DR: Most software bugs that make it past testing are transient "heisenbugs". That is, they're the kind of bug that goes away when if you restart the program.

Related: This is actually a core tenet of the Erlang ecosystem -- spend any length of time around Erlangers and you're bound to hear the phrase "let it crash". Erlang actually has support for this built into the system: Supervisor processes exist to automatically "power cycle" your code if an unhandled error occurs.

What's extremely funny to me is that this article is at least half about how much we underestimate (or flat out don't know much about) the people of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

And the sole comment thread here is full of people saying "No way were people in North Dakota capable of eating sushi in 1905".

A couple weeks? I don't know much about the state of the railroads in 1905, but the Pony Express could get a letter halfway across the continent, on horseback, in 10 days. Fifty-five years beforehand.

It seems entirely reasonable to me that a person in North Dakota could get fish delivered from the coasts, on ice, in a couple of days. Now, did they? I honestly have no idea.

Heck, half of the point of the article seemed to be that we seriously underestimate the people (Americans, in this case), of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I've been noticing a trend recently whereby all the standard BCPL advocacy articles, tutorials and feature overviews are taken, have 's/BCPL/[some newer language]' run on top of them and reposted as if they're all novelties of [some newer language].

Seriously, though, I don't get this critique? It's not like binary pattern matching was novel in Erlang, either. Personally, I'm just happy to see an article on binary pattern matching (in any language!) on hn.

You're not wrong, but it just seems like bad design. Why do they still show shipping rates at all, if the separate price/shipping prices are meant to deal with the uncertainty of shipping fees?

I'm not sure if they're altering the page based on geo-ip or not, but what I'm seeing on their page is "$14/mo (plus low 5.99 shipping) and $150/yr (plus 69.99 shipping)."

Why not just say $20/mo or $220/yr (additional shipping fees may be required for non North American customers)? It seems like that would be less likely to cause the sort of complaint had by gergles.

We can't get it without shipping. Don't quote prices that are impossible to achieve.

This, exactly.

When I first glanced and thought "Oh, $150 a year? That's not too bad." Then I looked closer and saw the shipping cost was extra.

It's not that the extra shipping cost was necessarily prohibitive, it's just that there's some sort of psychological effect (sticker shock, I guess?) where you think you know what the price of something is, and are disappointed to learn that's not really the price at all.

Why would a developer work in such a place? I imagine you would be forced to be all professional yet always play second fiddle to the traders, no matter great your skills were.

This is generally the case at most places where software development is done, even when the software is the product.

For example, as any developer working at an "enterprise software" shop -- despite being the "producers", you're still beholden to (and less important than) the sales folks.

Not saying that's right or wrong, just that that is how it is.

I feel like people need multiple-pass compilers for their logical arguments.

On the face of it, your analogy kind of makes sense. Both trucks and women (<strike>Allegedly. I don't know if your claim is actually based on fact?</strike> edit: link in parent seems to back up this claim) use a disproportionate amount of a shared resource, so they should be made to pay more for that use.

The second pass of your compiler should catch the little hitch here, though: Truck drivers and transportation companies can choose to exit the market (or not enter the market in the first place), if the costs of doing business are too burdensome. I don't really think that kind of option exists in the same way for women?

Unless you're suggesting that women should similarly "exit the market" (Hurry up and die? Become men?). At least, I certainly hope that's not your proposed solution.

[insert whynotboth.gif]

Seriously, though, it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to market a "lesser of x% or $50" type of product?

Another issue, it is proportionally harder to execute a larger portfolio than a smaller one.

Is this really true, on the individual scale? Especially for something like Wealthfront where all the investors as basically "lumped in" together anyway?

I don't know much about the market, and know even less about actual investing strategy-ish stuff, but what does the loss look like five years later?

I guess what I mean is, for an "index fund", crashes don't seem to be... permanent?

Perhaps that's small comfort for someone who's set to retire the month after one of these 30% crashes, but I guess that's what the whole "invest more conservatively as you get older" thing is supposed to help with?

touché

It's amazing how many programs that most people would consider "core unix utilities" totally eschew the (alleged) unix philosophy of "do one thing well."

I think Elixir and Go solve different problems -- but for the problem space the author mentions here, web services, Elixir is clearly superior.

I get what you're saying, but I'm actually happy the FBI is getting involved when it's a matter of "hacking" (regardless of the appropriateness of that term) involving a multi-million (billion?) dollar companies.

Or to put it another way, I'd much rather the FBI spent it's time prosecuting crimes committed by large companies than screwing over kids like Aaron Schwartz for their minor indiscretions.

Another way to phrase "corporate wrong-doing" is "crime."

So that's probably why the FBI would care.

I liked the video, but to a layperson like myself, the title seems to not necessarily match up to the content of the video itself.

That is, it seems like more of a "How did we get here from the big bang?" explanation, and not so much of a "How did we get a big bang?", which is what I had expected from the title.

So, presumably this was all "okay" (or legal at all), because "the client" owned 51% of the company.

Would it have all suddenly been illegal if "the client" only owned 49%? I'm very curious about how this all works.

No, I don't believe it's necessarily illegal to pay someone "hush money" (though it probably depends! laws are awfully vague). I do believe it's illegal to demand to be paid "hush money", though, normally referred to as "blackmail".

Presumably the reason the accused used structuring, even if a "hush money" payment itself was legal, was that they would have had to explain why they were making such a large withdrawal -- which doesn't really help for keeping things "hushed".

This is very interesting, in large part for the reason the author of the article mentions -- it's not the sort of thing most of us think about very often. And when we do, we usually leave off having no more insight than when we started.

Anyway, I've seen some other comments here wondering about how "consciousness as an evolutionary adaptation" could have spread so rapidly, or going so far as to suggest that they've met people who were (to paraphrase) "less evolved".

I wonder if rather than it having been an evolutionary process, consciousness may have been meme-like in its' spread. That is, perhaps humans had the brains required to handle consciousness for many generations before it really sprang up, and when it did, it occurred because of the spreading of the idea of consciousness, and not some particular set of genes.

Either way it doesn't mean it isn't foolishy dangerous to get close to wild alligators.

You're absolutely right. But what is "close?" An alligator swimming right alongside the boat? Sure, that's definitely too close. But what about an alligator on the riverbank, 100 yards away? Is that still too close? How about half a mile downstream? Again, I've never lived near gators, so I don't have an intuition on what is and is not a dangerous situation.

Additionally, I feel like you're forgetting that oft-repeated (and generally true!) maxim: "They're more afraid of you than you are of them."

Maybe the father in the story was being outrageously irresponsible. My gut tells me (and the story seems to intimate) that he knew what he was doing. That is, he probably intuited that the situation was low-risk.

To use a different dangerous animal, people have been killed by grizzly bears, yet tens of hundreds of thousands of folks annually camp out in the backcountry. Are they being irresponsible, just because their is a risk involved?

Obviously there are limits, but pushing your kids to do things they are uncomfortable with or afraid of is part of being a good parent.