civility

As an example, buyer's agents will not show, or disparage, homes where the agent's get less than their approx 3%. For instance, Trelora in Denver offers a discount to the seller, but they'll offer full rate to the buyer's agent because they know they'll get more traffic that way. You can kind of read that between the lines in their FAQ:

https://corporate.trelora.com/faq

Even if the buyer finds one of these homes on their own, all the buyer's agent needs to say is something scary like, "I've seen deals like this fall apart, and I wouldn't risk tying up your money if you're not dealing with a responsible realtor".

Then they'll say something like, "besides, the seller pays the closing costs!" ... which is a huge lie if you consider that the buyer is the only person bringing any money to closing.

Redfin looks like they're trying to be a "discount agent". Here is a quote from their front page:

> We're full-service, local agents who get to know you over coffee and on home tours, and we use online tools to make you smarter and faster.

This isn't what I had in mind at all, and I'm not surprised they have trouble getting traction with that approach. If they save you 1.5% on your half, but the other agent still gets their 3%, you'd only save 25% of the thousands you spent in middle man costs. Meanwhile, all the 3% agents out there are applying pressure to see it fail.

In the ideal case where they get both sides, Redfin is only saving you 50%. There is no reason home sale paperwork should cost thousands of dollars to process. Someone like Amazon could eliminate agents altogether.

Here is another analogy - imagine TurboTax charged you a percentage of your yearly income instead of a hundred dollars for the "Deluxe" version. That would be insane.

There's already lots of healthy competition in moving companies. Imagine if the movers wanted a percentage of your home price instead of few hundred for the day's work.

The problem with realtors is that they've got a lock on the bureaucratic side, and the existing realty sites (Zillow, Trulia, etc...) are aligned with them. There are upstarts in some cities, but the existing realtors in those places collude to keep the process inefficient. It'll take a behemoth to crack it open, but there'll be a lot of reward for someone big enough to pull it off.

I wonder if Amazon would ever dive into the home real estate market. With modern day search, realtors provide very little value above doing the paper work, and that seems very automatable. There's just no reason to pay 6% of every house sale to middle men, but that's the way it currently works. A large company like Amazon or Google could make a ton of money at a much lower rate. I think this makes a lot more sense than going into the restaurant delivery business.

That bothered me for a while until I figured it out. After a while, I learned that underspent projects are your opportunity to learn new things, mentor junior people, and provide cushion to people waiting for their next projects.

The only thing I ever got reprimanded for was not spending my money - there are much harder problems to solve than that.

Newer versions of Chrome OS are able to run Linux in a container. You can install Firefox with the "firefox-esr" package in that Linux. Unfortunately, audio doesn't work yet (at least not on my PixelBook), so it's not really a complete solution, but for (quiet) browsing it does work with uBlock Origin. Apparently Linux audio under Chrome OS is coming soon.

If you think I said anything like that, then you're not as good at natural language as you think. Why would I defend an argument I didn't make?

I guess something requiring discipline and effort makes you defensive. You can't really think all programmers are equal. How do you think the good ones got better?

You can say how you wish comments were done, but in practice a section of code with a lot of comments tends to indicate unresolved complexity. The worst is when you can tell the original author used comments to indicate how they wished the code worked, but it doesn't. Sometimes the comments are from the next maintainer trying to figure out what the hell is going on because there is a bug in there somewhere.

The other problem with comments is multiple maintenance. It's very common for a change to be made to the code but not the comment. Now you've got lies misleading the next poor developer who dives in there.

Documentation comments can be useful, but I cringe when I see lots of comments per block or statement.

> Humans aren't good at reading code.

That's something you can get better at, but it requires discipline and effort. Programmers who have no intention of getting better at it think the comments will save them.

About 1 in 4000 people has problems with blue and yellow. If you try to accommodate everyone, you just can't use color for information. I think using blue and yellow is a reasonable compromise.

> except it was a little harder to get a hold of people

I certainly don't miss using the yellow pages to find a store or service, or looking on a paper map to find where the street is.

I guess you missed the part above where I mentioned C++ templates as a cautionary tale about accidentally creating an awkward metalanguage. Besides, Go and Rust are both clearly responses to C++, so it makes sense they would try to provide (reinvent) similar capabilities while avoiding the flaws.

I think Bayes theorem might be worthwhile here. Besides, going with the majority or authority as a principal is almost the definition of dogma. That's not likelihood in any rigorous sense.

> No - I think having a pro-economic growth bias would be helpful, [...]

I like how that sets the bar higher for extraordinary claims and extraordinary proof. Although honestly, I'll always be skeptical about extrapolation and predicting the future more than a few cycles out.

> If there is any such bias among climate scientists [...]

I agree. It seems fair to ask who goes into and gets accepted as a PhD in that field. It's pretty easy to imagine there could be a selection bias, and "science advances one funeral at a time".

> I suspect the majority would do the opposite and deny/understate the problem.

I don't know. I've seen so much fear-mongering in my life. We're all going to die from zika, n1h1, ebola, killer bees, aids, mrsa, terrorists, and so on. In each case, there's something to be afraid of, and you might actually know someone who died in one those ways, but the media and the lay people blow it way out of proportion. The people I've know who died have been from drugs, suicide, heart failure, stroke, and car accidents.

> The sensible thing to do in the absence of information is precisely to imagine the worst outcomes and act with them in mind.

I can't accept that as sensible. It's easy to contrive unacceptable courses of action by applying that rule: "The police don't know who the murderers are, so they lock up everyone to avoid the worst outcome." "The doctor isn't sure how bad the infection is, so we amputate all the limbs just in case."

Because there isn't any reason for me to jump to a conclusion. For other reasons, I already have a carbon footprint and voting record almost anyone in that consensus would approve of. Is it really important that I "believe" all the things people are afraid of? I'm pretty content to leave some topics unresolved until I get more information.

> and have a pro-economic growth bias

Sarcasm? Forgive me, but it's honestly tough to tell.

Amusingly, I think anyone who can make a model of the climate which can predict 100 years into the future really should make a model of the stock market a modest 1 year into the future instead. Having done so, they could make enough money to buy whatever technological or political change they think would solve the climate problem.

Heh, you got me there.

> Then you obviously don't know basic physics.

Ugh, if you're going to just attack me, why not jump to the big guns and call me a shill for the oil company or some other cliche.

> The average temperature is much easier to predict

If you do enough averaging over a long enough period, this can be true. I mean, we can all tell the average position of a double pendulum. I'm guessing you think 1, 10, or 100 years is enough time to average temperature. Try looking at the last 400,000 years and tell me how well you can predict those swings.

> I rather believe that what's behind your statement is that you just don't care what is going to happen in 50 or 100 years.

You can believe anything you want, but I doubt you used the scientific method to get there.

Yeah, in the absence of information or understanding, a lot of people like to imagine the worst. I guess that's a good defensive instinct.

That's a very reasonable position, and I won't argue with you there. Many times you need to make a decision with imperfect or incomplete information.

However you go one step further and attack anyone who dares question that view, and you do it with the a sense of righteousness as though you did understand the topic and applied the scientific method to get there. That's just bullying, but you get away with it because you're part of a mob. I mean it's one thing for an expert to claim certainty and argue their point of view, but you aren't actually certain - you just picked the safer bet.

To be clear, I think the world would be a lot better place with less burning coal. I care a lot about the poisoning and pollution in the oceans. I think smog is disgusting. I probably have one of the smallest "carbon footprints" of any adult you know. However, I know a fair amount about programming, math, and simulations, and I don't trust anyone who says they can predict a chaotic system 50-100 years into the future.

And concensus doesn't compel me much at all. Once upon a time in America, you could probably get a concensus (even among scientists!) that God was real.

I'd believe the simulations are reproducible. However, re-running the atmosphere of the earth is certainly not an experiment anyone has reproduced. There's at least some room for questioning whether the simulations have sufficient fidelity to predict a chaotic system 50-100 years into the future.

Arguing this topic doesn't do me any good. It's like trying to tell a devout christian you think there's room for doubt and uncertainty about whether the apocalypse is coming. Most people just lock their heels and reinforce their current beliefs. This message will probably fade away into a light shade of grey, making me wonder why I even bothered.

However, every time I see someone trot out the word "concensus", as though that's relevant to good science, I grind my teeth.

Following the consensus is a fine choice if you're trying not to get lynched by the mob, but it really has very little to do with science. The scientific method does not say, "get everyone you think is smart to vote on it, if they all agree, it must be true". I really wish lay people would quit turning science into a religion and scientists into priests.

IMO, Rust has a very nice macro system, and this is a good thing (although I'm not familiar with any changes they've made in the last year or two). It's a bad thing that sometimes one needs to resort to the macro system because other features in Rust don't play well together, but that's a long topic with no solution in sight.

> About using them as generics, how do you enforce constraints?

I'm really thinking about the case for numerical algorithms where the exact same code works for different types (say float32 and float64 in Go). It sucks to copy and paste hundreds of lines of code and it sucks to have a separate code generator write your file for you (essentially an external macro processor). Imagine something like the C preprocessor for Go, but without the well known flaws of the C preprocessor:

    #define IMPLEMENT_FOOBAR(NAME, TYPE) \
        void NAME(TYPE* ptr, long len) { \
           hundred lines of implementation here \
        }

    IMPLEMENT_FOOBAR(foobar32, float32)
    IMPLEMENT_FOOBAR(foobar64, float64)

That parametric polymorphic enough for a lot of use cases, and this could work with data structures too.

As for constraints, you can pass function names as arguments too. For instance:

    IMPLEMENT_SORT(sort_baz, baz, bazcompare)

Other proposed features in go, such as the "check" statement for error handling, are probably implementable as a nice macro if you had a good macro language. This means the core language wouldn't have to grow, and features like "check" could be imported from a library. Including features like this in a library means the core language isn't bound by backwards compatibility when a better idea comes along. Old code used the old library, new code uses the new one, and the language stays clean and compatible with both.

I have a Pixelbook too, and agree it is a really great tablet and laptop. I love that it runs Debian Linux in a container, along with Android apps too. The security model keeps random Android apps from messing with my shell, and X11 apps from Linux run nicely (installed by apt get, or ones I've developed for myself). I can also charge it from the 12V cigarette plug in my car.

Whenever it becomes time to upgrade or replace it, I'll be disappointed if it's been discontinued.

I wonder if they'd ever consider adding hygienic macros instead of templates/generics. To me, that solves the problem of needing to write the same code for float32+float64 and so on. And it doesn't require so much careful thought about the type system, accidentally creating an awkward metalanguage like happened in C++.

> A language doesn't have to be black and white text

I agree. I'd like to be able to insert pictures to explain data structures and algorithms, or equations for the mathy bits. I'd like to be able to choose different font sizes for different parts of the code to indicate their relative importance. Instead of files in directories, I'd like to be able organize functions clustered 2D parts of a page. I'm not sure what you mean by VR (3D?), but I'd be curious to see it.

> C and Bash don't have to directly overlap if technology creates simple syntax that expands beyond how keyboards type.

I distinctly don't want a polyglot catch all set of languages. I mean you can almost do that in the .Net world where a project can use many languages. I don't have any idea what would be better than a keyboard or touch screen for entering the syntax.

Rich Hickey has some nice talks about why separating the data from the methods is really beneficial.

Which part are you reacting to? I can't speak for "many" users, but all three parts you quoted apply to my usage of Python.

I always liked the way Objective-C added the message passing syntax in a way which fit in well with C. The [squareBrackets means: "we're in SmallTalk land"] looks nice to me. The @ (at sign) sigils I don't appreciate as much.

> I think it could be improved by having the Smalltalk-side be the default

It does kind of seem like you'd want the higher level language on the outside and only dive into the lower language when you need it, but I could go either way for that.