nitrogen

as long as they're the right ones?

Which ones are the right ones? Yours? Mine?

ActiveRecord is Ruby's nigh unassailable superpower for webdev. A few jobs back my last act in that role was moving all DB access from a separate Scala microservice into a Rails minilith, saving many, many lines of code and network round trips.

This comes up a lot. But it's wrong, or at least incomplete. People who want to live in their house don't want the value of that house to go up, because then their taxes go up.

Several years ago someone stole my former startup's first hardware prototype, along with a bunch of other stuff. In 300 years, should my descendents have a right to claim restitution from the descendents of whoever stole my things?

Do children inherit the sins of their parents?

Maybe an English degree would be a good complimentary one?

Muphry's Law strikes again: compl-e-mentary vs. compl-i-mentary.

It's only flawed for beginners. With 10 years or more of experience, it's possible to design successfully based on that experience.

the idea of Jesus had to come from somewhere

What present-day meme will reach a similar level of distribution and hazy origins? Will we see future generations speculating about the true nature of Harry Potter, or the Jedi, or Chuck Norris's superpowers, or the one true Nyancat?

Words follow that I hope might help you or someone else; but might not. I know sometimes the last thing one wants is "yet more advice." These are just things that work for me.

I'm vegetarian and I eat a pretty healthy diet.

Consider adding grass-fed/pasture-raised beef (or even just an occasional not-bottom-tier hamburger) to your diet on occasion. In my twenties I found that eating some high quality protein (better with friends, but even alone) added a small but growing crack in the walls that barricaded my soul.

Also consider drastically different life philosophies/cultures in case the one you're in isn't for you (e.g. the ideas that meditation is a cure-all or that vegetarianism is virtuous are pretty culture-specific). For me that meant leaving conservative religion, but for others it might mean leaving progressive "religion."

Something else that helped me was going into social situations with a slight "idgaf so I'll just be my positive self no matter who might try to shut me down" attitude.

And finally, find any weak link in the vicious feedback cycle and chip away at it. Don't feel bad, but if you do, don't feel bad about feeling bad, but if you do, don't feel ...etc. Put the brakes on the meta-guilt and just be okay with feeling whatever for now, and you can feel something else later.

I'm curious what was wrong with the in-floor heating. Modern in-floor heating is really nice, though you have to account for thermal lag.

"Pretty successful" is a poor proxy for "satisfies condition X." Kindle is known to be bad for anything where the spatial layout matters.

They should, in a kids' math textbook.

Many of us have lost a sense of community and place we once had. I don't know what about our culture has done this, but it's bad.

The marketing, political, religious, and cultural industries that divide and conquer us into ever finer slices of demographic identities to sell us things have convinced everyone that they can only be themselves by emphasizing their irreconcilable differences with others. In doing so they have robbed us of any sense of common identity.

It's no longer acceptable to be thought of as part of broad category A where everyone has different interests and affinities. Instead now, we have to be exclusively XYZ and W, and nobody else could possibly understand the XYZW perspective.

Such subversively worded math problems should be avoided, no matter who the named parties are.

"Jimmy, Jack, and John go to the store..." would be just as effective of a setup for a story problem without sneaking in moral displays.

I can see Who Let The Dogs Out and The Macarena making periodic comebacks, getting future reboots/covers/remixes, etc.

A lot of posters here aren't interested in discussing the actual data. They're personally offended, and responding off of that.

The perfect summary of much of modern political discourse.

The number of tents, needles, etc. found on sidewalks and in parks/open areas.

Consider this scenario:

1. The US drops all agricultural subsidies and tariffs.

2. The US begins importing most of its food from elsewhere.

3. "Elsewhere" goes to war with a US ally and stops selling food to the US.

4. The US then wishes it hadn't given up its abilty to grow food.

I’ve always felt a little awkward when using the word but couldn’t articulate why.

It's worth considering the possibility that the "why" is due to insidious bullying, a miasmatic reframing of language in the false name of unity.

If everyone feels a bit awkward about saying anything, then those who generated the awkwardness gain tremendous power.

Modern Family became unwatchable when they doubled down on the incredibly long awkward pause reaction shot sequences.

From 2014. The MERGE discussion is from 2022.

I spent my first few years of life living in a city near a downtown. My friends were a mix of colors, nth-generation residents, immigrants, and refugees. Race had nothing to do with why my parents left. It had everything to do with the serial rapist attacking our neighbor and still on the loose, the markets down the street getting repeated drive-by shootings, etc.

Do the new CDs have the same watermarks?

But fundamentally there is little common ground

This is the lie we are all told to preserve the walls between "us" and "them," to divide and conquer our society. We are told to focus on the superficial differences between groups.

We are told to flip our shared humanity on its head and treat the superficial as fundamental, and the fundamental as irrelevant, to the point where we react viscerally to even the suggestion that someone who doesn't share tribal value X can still be a good person. But there is a lot of common ground between all human groups, if only we would focus on what we share instead of what we don't.

What defines good is our shared picture of empathy, consent, maximizing joy, minimizing suffering, reciprocity, etc. Basic golden rule stuff that's built into most of us and within reach of all of us.

we have far similar values with each other than with atheists.

I would describe the values of the altruistic modern atheism of people I know, which has a lot in common with Christianity and Judaism at the big picture level, as "be good, do good." One needn't believe in God or gods to believe in good.

Even among people who seem financially stable, I've been surprised how many of my peers spend money as soon as they see it and have never had more than $X000 at the same time ever. The lesson of delayed gratification is actually a pretty big factor in being able to save up money as an adult.

If one was really being mindful

There's a sort of No True Scotsman fallacy combined with confirmation bias that comes into play with other spiritual practices with which I am experienced. For example, "If your prayers aren't getting answered, you aren't fasting enough and praying hard enough, or you are praying for the wrong thing."

This is an easy trap to fall into with anything that generally works for some people but not others, and it's important to remember that there are other dimensions beside "really" or "enough", plus general randomness, that affect whether a practice/belief/etc is good for a person and successful.

It's kind of like learning a subject from the final exam.

If you can pick up on the patterns of an unfamiliar language and/or codebase and make your code look like it fits in, you're probably good at both reading and writing code, and working with a team.

I can't speak for the parent commenter, but by "patterns" I am referring to multiple layers:

Detail -- Indentation, spacing, line length, naming convention, placement of braces and parentheses.

Flow -- pacing, grouping of blocks of code, levels of nesting, when and where to break up functions into spaced blocks or helper methods.

Architecture -- class boundaries, interfaces, cross-file organization.

There are higher layers but I haven't named them yet in mind and they aren't as well tested by this kind of interview.

You have to be affiliated with an institution to submit to arxiv.

Environmentalism doesn't have to equal asceticism.

Even the absence of speech has also been described in those same terms. This category of rhetorical double bind is counterproductive to progress.