twentythree

I got an FTP account, mounted it locally with curlftpfs, and use SVN on the mounted filesystem. Quite trivial, really.

Guaranteed 98.9% positive feedback (https://xkcd.com/325)

Running a site for others to download movies doesn't bother me.

being a snake to go defraud a company to steal the hard work of others so your own illicit company can turn a profit off said labor by others irks me.

I'm sorry, I really don't understand this. What part of the second statement doesn't apply to the first?

Diane Greene left Google over two years ago.

cost savings compared to life imprisonment

Minor nitpick: it's actually more expensive to execute someone than to imprison them for life, mostly because of the increased legal costs.

That's interesting, do you have a source for that? A quick Google search turns up aircraft, machinery, and agricultural products (and doesn't mention garbage), but I'd be curious to learn more.

2.3. Don’t name your variables for their types

What's the best way to handle a situation where you use two different types for the same data? e.g.

  var usersMap map[string]*User
  var usersList []*User

No bus lanes that I'm aware of, or at least few enough that a multiple-time visitor didn't see them, so buses are stuck in general traffic.

No bus lanes, but buses aren't just stuck in general traffic. Portland has a system that gives them priority at stoplights: https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2016/03/what_are_the_bl...

The third variant of the problem (where one prisoner is allowed to make one change, which can guarantee that every prisoner survives) is the one I heard first; I like that problem because it seems even more counter-intuitive, but also makes it easier to understand why it works.

I love the concept of "a system where people have value independent of their productivity."

I worry that the increasing focus on a meritocracy (especially in tech) ignores the fact that it devalues anyone who for whatever reason -- lack of education, lack of natural ability, or just lack of motivation -- doesn't contribute enough to be considered important. It's probably an improvement on the system we had before, where you were valued for being part of the right community or the right family, but I hope this isn't the end goal, and that we can eventually get to a state where we consider everyone inherently valuable.

In flag football, you generally don't have linemen in the traditional sense; there's no blocking allowed, and the quarterback is protected by a count instead of his blockers.

The American Flag Football League is one of the organizations trying to take over this space (they recently played a game in Levi's Stadium with Michael Vick and Terrell Owens, among others). Here are the full rules if you're interested! https://www.americanflag.football/official-rules/.

Richard Sherman, one of the top NFL players and also a Stanford grad, is very outspoken about this, and agrees with you: https://www.si.com/2013/10/23/richard-sherman-seahawks-concu.... His argument is that at this point, everyone playing the game knows the risks, and is taking that into account when making their decision to play.

To your second point, there's a recent push to ban tackling at levels below high school football (and play flag football instead). The current theory is that it's not the big hits that cause brain damage, but all the smaller "sub-concussive" hits that happen on every play. Eliminating those until high school would hopefully limit the long-term damage of football, especially for kids who only play through high school or college. I don't think banning tackling at either of those levels is feasible, though; college football is a huge business itself, and a change as dramatic as eliminating tackling there would completely change the sport.

Completely agree with this; not only are you more likely to share a common origin or destination, but it also becomes an opportunity to meet someone new within your network.

There's a trailing quote: try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15899383

According to [0], it seems that "whoever" would be correct here.

Rule 1. The presence of whoever or whomever indicates a dependent clause. Use whoever or whomever to agree with the verb in that dependent clause, regardless of the rest of the sentence.

Examples:

Give it to whoever/whomever asks for it first.

He asks for it first. Therefore, whoever is correct.

[0] http://www.grammarbook.com/grammar/whoever.asp

The Week (http://theweek.com/) does a fantastic job of this. They summarize the main issues of the week from the viewpoint of a variety of politically-diverse sources, and there's a lot of non-US news in there as well. I believe they've covered all the examples you mentioned in recent weeks. Well worth a try if you haven't heard of it yet.

they're particularly well-tailored to picking up candidates who are hard to find by resume alone

Interesting -- can you explain more what you mean here? Referral programs are often criticized for reinforcing biases, since people refer other people with similar backgrounds to them (and, likely, similar resumes). I've held a negative view of referral programs for that reason; do you have data or anecdata about referral programs finding candidates who would otherwise have been missed?

I'm sorry I can't find a link to the study right now (I'll add a link if I find it), but one of the most fascinating lectures in my college linguistics class was about swear words, and this exact question. The lecturer claimed that hearing or seeing a swear word has a physiological effect on most people, not unlike being slapped in the face. However, when you replace the text with asterisks or beep it out, the effect is diminished, even if the audience knows exactly what's being replaced.

In that context, it makes sense to avoid using swear words in more professional settings if you want to avoid giving the audience the associated emotional reaction; it's distracting at best and offensive at worst, and it's easier just to find another way to communicate which word was meant.

That's not a fair comparison; Kaepernick would have been cut had he not opted out.

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2017/05/31/john-lynch-4...

"We gave him the option, ‘You can opt out, we can release you, whatever.’ And he chose to opt out, but that was just a formality."

Demand response [0] is an interesting solution to the electrical grid problem; utilities will pay customers (usually large commercial customers) to use less energy during periods of peak demand (which allows the utility to build fewer plants, so everybody wins).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response

it isn't as if driving has been anything close to free

Driving isn't free, but the costs you mention are all part of the cost to the person choosing to drive. That person has presumably incorporated these into their decision of whether or not to drive.

A congestion tax (or dynamic toll) is an attempt to internalize the external costs that a driver imposes on others; when I get in the car and drive, I slow everyone else on the road down, but without a toll (or an expectation of altruism toward random strangers), that won't affect my decision making at all. The goal of a toll is to make the cost of choosing to drive equal to the sum of the costs it imposes on everyone, not just the driver.

Most of the comments here talk about how terrible advertising is. Obviously, malware disguised as ads is a bad thing, and I understand the arguments for preserving our attention spans as well, but is there a space for good ads, which benefit both the user and the advertiser? I have bought many products which add value to my life that I probably wouldn't have found without advertisements. It seems like ads are still the best way to connect people to products. How do we preserve that, while stopping the bad actors from abusing the system?

It might be unhelpful to the users who know how to take advantage of the current system, but hopefully the net impact will be greater price transparency, which helps consumers in the long run; people will pay more for things which cost the airline more, but not for arbitrary reasons like booking too early.

In general, flight pricing seems rather opaque; I'm always confused by flights from city A to city B that are more expensive than flights from city A to city C with a layover in city B. I'm all for more transparency of the air travel market.

I hadn't heard that before, but I like that way of thinking about it. It reminds me a bit of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Good grades might be a good measure of a student's performance, but when we focus on optimizing the grades themselves, they become less useful as a metric.

When I was in high school, there were some students who wouldn't take a class if it wasn't weighted, because it would bring down their overall GPA; even if it was an interest of theirs, they were worried that the effect on their class rank would hurt their college admissions chances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_merchandise_authorizati...

I believe this is the one you're looking for: https://xkcd.com/915/

If you want to spend the time to dig into it, Caltrans has a more detailed dataset of historical traffic [1]. I used to research traffic in the Bay Area, and it was fascinating to see the way in which it responded to different events.

[1] http://pems.dot.ca.gov/