try_again

Congratulations, you're a sensible human being who has figured out that listening to your body and intuition works much better than all these "optimal" solutions everyone is chasing after. I've suspected for a long time that much of ergonomics is just snake oil and hardly based on any evidence at all. If sitting upright or in some specific allegedly ergonomic position is making me feel tense and wears me out, how is that helpful? I prefer to go with what millions of years of evolution have coded in me. Fortunately I don't have a desk job anymore so it's not of much concern to me.

The death toll of nuclear energy is only a minute fraction of the casualties brought about by coal and oil. The most pessimistic estimations of deaths caused by all nuclear power accidents that ever occurred and waste that has been produced utterly pale in comparison to the insane human cost of the fossil fuels. And thanks to their greenhouse gas emissions the worst of it is likely yet to come. And the sun generates its energy output as a result of nuclear fusion, not the nuclear fission of a chain reaction. We'd very much like to bring the sun to earth because controlled sustained fusion could potentially solve the majority of our energy troubles. Unfortunately thus far we've brought it in the form of thermonuclear weapons.

My dad had a workshop where he made woodwind instruments. For some applications he required lead. I recall entertaining myself as a kid by melting some small pieces of lead with a welding torch and looking at the pretty liquid metal. It was in the outside air, but I can't help but wonder what I may have done to my brain that day. Thank god he didn't have mercury.

When you state "in this country", please specify what country that is. Despite the use of English as the lingua franca here we're amongst a geographically diverse group. I'm going to assume you mean the US. If that's a correct guess, as a European the US work standards frighten me. Health insurance so tightly coupled to work that if you get into an accident shortly after being laid off and don't have (expensive) private insurance you could be bankrupted by it. Two weeks vacation per year seems to be common and I've repeatedly heard that employees are being pressured to not actually use their full paid time off. Maybe I've just been too coddled by the working conditions here in Belgium but I simply can't imagine working in the US without going completely mad or sinking into a depression. I know that I pay incredibly high taxes, but a higher income at the cost of living in such a cutthroat environment simply doesn't seem worth it to me. And to be honest I consider my standard of living to be very high and comfortable, both in spite of and thanks to taxes.

That's really just a failure of input sanitation or not properly escaping special characters or putting the comment in CDATA when constructing the XHTML. Basically that blog allowed an injection attack. Not XHTML's fault, the same software would have allowed any comment to do god knows what in HTML.

Not really. Tests with two lines generally have one "control" line and one "test" line. If the control line fails to appear, then the result is invalid and you should try a new kit, regardless of what the other line said. If the control line appears, then the result is valid and the test line shows a negative (no line) or positive (line) result. So "pregnant" should only appear if both lines show up. It's a very simply boolean AND condition, but that's something that would be challenging to have done purely by chemical reaction. Probably a lot more complex than having a simple check by a circuit. Using a microprocessor, you can have "pregnant", "not pregnant" or "invalid" show up to give an unambiguous single result. Trying to achieve the same through chemical means only is likely also more prone to failure. Even if the outcome is clear, there are still false positives and negatives. Of course you should expect users to read the manual and be capable of interpreting a very simple system with only 4 combinations and 3 outcomes, but apparently that's beyond many people. Which is exactly why some test producers go to this length.

Look up "Time Cube" and prepare to indulge in a bit of insane internet history.

Consent is too often treated as this magical concept that makes everything right when it's present in some form. Many people seem to think of consent as a "yes" when often it's more a lack of "no". Someone not protesting or going along with something doesn't absolve the other party of responsibility. Heck, even explicit consent doesn't do that. Would you accept someone repeatedly offering another person in their company drugs when that person hasn't outright refused them but not really shown interest either?

When someone goes along with something but ends up feeling uncomfortable or even resentful about it, they can talk about it with the other party. And that party should acknowledge it. They may have meant no harm or even be surprised or feel hurt, but a decent person would consider the other's feelings and admit they may have had poor judgement. This Jon Pretty guy allegedly has a pattern of maneuvering women into vulnerable positions, inappropriately bragging about his "conquests" and from what multiple sources confirm shows a bunch of telltale signs of an emotional abuser and manipulator. It wasn't one instance of them being drunk, it was an extensive period of pushing boundaries, coercion and probably gaslighting.

You'll always hear questions along these lines. "Why did she stay around him if she was uncomfortable/mistreated/abused?" "Why did she wait so long to talk about it if it bothered her so much?" "Why didn't she collect proof?" "Why didn't she just say no?" These questions interpret the situation as far too simple. Abusers are great at creating doubt. They do something wrong, they make their victims feel as equal accomplices. Good and fun times are alternated with bad ones. They don't outright break the law or force someone but will push boundaries and wear someone down repeatedly to get their way despite the discomfort of the other.

That's why it's so hard for a victim to come forward. It's exactly because everyone says "well you didn't set hard boundaries, did you?" It's because maybe no crime was committed according to the letter of the law so they don't feel like they really have a case to make. It's because the victim initially feels like they share as much responsibility or it's their own fault and they should have known better. Abusers are great at walking that line where they get what they want while still maintaining plausible deniability, making it impossible to fully dismiss the argument that the other person is responsible too. It lets them justify their actions to themselves and others, believing it was as much the agency of the other party as their own. Meanwhile they're constantly using a position of power and a victim's weaknesses to manufacture precisely the situation they want.

They call them predators for a reason. It's cause they seek out prey. They know what to look for in a potential target. Don't blame a victim for being possibly naive, inexperienced or easy to sway when those were exactly the preconditions to be taken advantage of. It doesn't justify someone doing just that.

There are of course the ways to share your digital collection. Your games list on Steam, books on Goodreads, music on services like Spotify and last.fm. On the one hand it's less immediately visible but on the other people can see it without visiting your home. As for what has replaced it in the home, no idea.

I'm glad to hear this perspective and know it's not just me. I live in Europe and parking in a garage here always raises my heart rate. I don't think I'd make it without parking sensors. Some people I know just slam their car in there in one quick swoop. I don't know how they do it. Even driving past parked cars makes me feel like not hitting side mirrors is just an act of faith.

Does someone know if this is purely a property of languages and their evolution or if there is a biological or neurological foundation for this? I understand that you could make names for colours as fine-grained as you want with visible light being a continuous spectrum, and at the most base level there is only a concept of "colour" without further distinctions. But to me it feels like the major divisions as we know them in English are intuitive beyond language. Surely when you look at grass and the sky you feel you need different terms to describe them?

Printers use cyan, magenta and yellow because printing is a subtractive process. It's the complement of the additive RGB that monitors use. For example, cyan acts as a filter for red, so a combination of magenta and yellow filters out everything but red and thus appears red. Ultimately, the difference is in whether something emits light (a monitor) or has to reflect light (a white piece of paper).

You're right in that what we're taught is often incomplete or misguided. Teachers are fallible. But as a child you assume their authority implies them being correct. I reckon seeing through that illusion is an important part of growing up. And to me, part of us growing up as humanity must involve not having to rely on the authority of governing bodies.

It won't protect against a newer version of an established library introducing malicious behaviour.

Having the means in place for total surveillance and thinking it will be kept in check with "strict control" is a total delusion. Who determines what constitutes proper grounds for using the captured data? The government, I suppose? And if you want to automatically recognize certain individuals it must by design mean everyone gets scanned.

A well-known quote is that whoever doesn't understand Lisp is doomed to reinvent it: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2352

It's exactly like the premise for Black Mirror episode "Nosedive"!

There are certainly situations where that can work well, but there are also many instances where running two solutions in parallel is anything but trivial and adds another layer of complexity. Possibly to the point or multiplying the costs of the rewrite. I've been part of projects where that exact scenario occurred.

I also recalled hearing exactly this. In fact, in my recollection Burger King had a vegetarian burger option for some time before dropping it due to complaints of it being prepared on the same grill as the meat patties. Meanwhile McDonald's also offers vegetarian options which apparently aren't prepared separately to avoid cross-contamination. Only their options seem to vary quite a bit by region, so maybe they've just cleverly avoided the scrutiny that comes with a global marketing offensive like this.

I'd wish that not every other article I read these days feels the need to focus on detecting misogyny or racism. It is absolutely important to identify the ways in which outdated world views led to injustices and move towards a brighter future but there's a fatigue setting in with it taking center stage in every discussion. Particularly troubling is the tendency towards wanting to separate the art from the artist whenever the artist held problematic views. It's a result of a cognitive dissonance setting in when you can see value or beauty in someone's work but don't agree with some aspects of that person. But the person behind the work is an integral part of it and vice-versa. If you hold someone's output in high regard but find objectionable fragments in it or in their life story you can't just go dissecting it into those pieces you wish to keep and discard the rest. I guess what irks me is the classification of Lawrence's essays as "indefensible". A view can be troublesome, even reprehensible, but to deny it representation by calling it indefensible is setting up a dangerous precedent where anyone can be silenced or their opinions simply cherry-picked to find what fits our desires. And that's no different than the biases that are railed against.

Complete rewrites seldom tend to work out well. Using a current version's behaviour as a "requirements doc" rather than the code or an actual up-to-date document probably misses out on a good deal of functionality that is rarely used but critical in some conditions. The thing about legacy software is that the software has encoded in it years or even decades of changes to functional and technical requirements, workarounds for edge cases that weren't foreseen, bug fixes, optimizations. Each of those can appear like a mess to the observer but it is foolish to think a new system will not run into similar issues. The idea of starting over to "do it right" is a fallacy because perfection does not exist. This is why the software industry is increasingly focused on processes that reap the benefits of quick turnaround and making change easier to deal with.

Believe me when I say the day you switch the old system off will never come in the vast majority of scenarios like this. The result is either wasted development time or, probably worse, you now have two systems to maintain and keep running.

Slightly ironic that a system which has scalability as one of its goals went down due to traffic. Although I guess few things are prepared for an onslaught of catching attention on sites like HN or Reddit.