degrews

> In the end the dead bodies count and it doesn't matter whether a cautious or inexperienced driver killed them

It matters to the safe drivers. Bad drivers are mostly a danger to themselves. At only "1.5x as safe as average", it's a good deal for the bad drivers, but there are probably a lot of "2x as safe as average" drivers that are getting a bad deal. They are in more danger than before.

Edited for clarity.

I agree, but I think that in order for that to work, we would have to accept much lower salaries for junior/apprentice engineers (until they've proven they can add value). And maybe also a higher tolerance for firing engineers who are not working out early.

As it is, I'm not surprised companies are reluctant to bet on the potential of untrained engineers, _and_ the chance that they'll stick around long enough to make the investment worthwhile.

I'm sure there are a lot of inexperienced, uncredentialed engineers out there who would take a low-paying job with a significant chance of getting fired in 3 months. I was one of them. The alternative is to not get hired at all.

The speed of cars mostly comes down to how much power they have. The main reason for having more power is not to increase top speed, which is limited by law, but to increase acceleration, which is not.

Sure, but the comment above is talking about "how valuable that space in major city centres is".

The opportunity cost of 1 sqm of street parking space is not 1 sqm of "living unit", but 1 sqm of land.

If 1 sqm of apartment is worth $7.5K/month, and average building height is 4 stories, that suggests 1 sqm of land is worth approximately 4 * 7.5 = $30K/month (minus value of the building).

I still don't get it. How are we supposed to recognize his face?

> He says that "Pinboard has more than 350K commits and is 20GB in size when cloned fully." I'm not clear though, exactly what "cloned fully" means in context of the unoptimized/optimized situation.

It probably means including all commits.

It looks like they were successfully only pulling the last 50 commits, but they were doing that for each of 2500 branches. Now they are pulling only the most recent 50 commits for one branch.

Using an incognito session on Chrome worked for me.

Having 100 items on the checklist doesn't mean you need to act on all of them. You can go through your normal packing, then take a few minutes to scan through the checklist for anything you may have forgotten. Most items may be irrelevant to that trip. Just skip them.

Okay, I can appreciate that observation. But I don't think that the advice to individuals to stop worrying about luxury daily coffee spending follows from that.

> The article isn't advocating that you buy a coffee every single day. It's saying a. focus on larger issues and b. it's okay to do a little self care and a little self indulgence.

I agree. But I don't think the people making the argument for spending less money on coffee are arguing against those two things.

They are not talking about never going to a Starbucks. As you point out, there are circumstances where buying a latte can provide a lot of value. But those situations don't account for most of the money being spent on $5+ lattes. In most cases, it's people in poor financial health, who are not saving enough, and who spend a significant amount on minor luxuries which don't actually contribute meaningfully to their lives. They do it just out of habit. It feels like a sacrifice to stop, but only because it requires giving up a habit. All habits are hard to give up.

I think most of this argument is based on a false dichotomy "Saving on coffee is bad advice because there are other things wrong with our finances that have a much bigger impact". The author is also not making a clear distinction between "things that are wrong with our financial/economic system" and "things one has direct and immediate control over", like the money they spend on coffee every day.

Also, no one is claiming that coffee specifically is the key to financial health. But it's the most popular example of frivolous habit-spending that doesn't actually make people happier, a category which makes a up an increasingly large part of Americans' spending.

I agree that testing for knowledge of specific tools is probably not what you want, but I find that among people who do have significant experience with git, ability to use it effectively seems to correlate pretty strongly with overall programming ability and productivity.

I mainly have experience with git, but I assume this generalizes to other version control systems. I also think that version control is a pretty fundamental skill for software engineers (comparable to unit testing), so I think substituting that for "use a version control system to do x" would fit in with with other skills.

I don't agree with the original article at all, but I find this comment quite ironic. Almost no European except for the very rich is thinking about owning a 6000 square foot house, it's just not a priority. But it doesn't surprise me that an American would. And I think that difference is illustrative of the American vs European narrative the author is alluding to.

The aspiration of owning a 6000 square foot house probably costs the American a lot of things the European _would_ value: not having to be so career-focused to make enough money, not having to take on as much debt, living in a higher-density urban area which makes other things mentioned in the article possible (taking the train, going to cafes, casually stopping for groceries, all the while being surrounded by other people)...

See Paris Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

I also recommend jk or kj over jj. Much faster and less strenuous.

And it has the added benefit that, if you type it when already in normal mode, it's effectively a no-op (as opposed to jj, which will move the cursor two lines down).

Here's another one: i-told-you-it-was-private Ruby gem by Xavier Noria

https://github.com/fxn/i-told-you-it-was-private

The Effective Altruism community has produced a lot of discussion about donating early vs saving and giving later.

This post does a good job of listing some of the trade-offs and includes several links to more discussion: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/4e/giving_now_vs_later_a_su...

I agree it's frustrating that most sites leave it up to each individual user to decide what each star rating means.

On the other hand, I don't think it's really a problem as long as users are consistent. It doesn't matter how "harsh" they are as long as everyone has similar odds of getting a harsh reviewer.

I do tend to leave slightly below-average ratings because I like leaving room for truly exceptional products/experiences to get a higher rating.

> The best way to do this is to try to identify the good part or motivation in a student's statement, regardless of anything wrong that might be in there too

Your example sounds very reasonable to me, but do you think that this is ever taken too far?

Coming to the US as a student from Europe (not the UK), I noticed that some instructors (mostly TAs) took this effort to give a "positive" response to any answer in class to quite an extreme. I can think of many instances where a student's answer showed a very serious lack of understanding, and the instructor would say something like "okay, that would be one way to think about it, but how about... " without every correcting the student.

Two negative consequences I saw were 1) a lot of missed opportunities for correcting students' misunderstandings 2) students seemed overly sensitive to any kind criticism (I had a German friend who was a TA and had quite a bit of trouble with this)

Again, none of this is incompatible with your advice, I just wanted to take the opportunity to see if anyone has noticed this as a common problem.

Of course I'm not saying anything like that. Just pointing out that the people who seem to be publicly talking about this the most also reject the use of "reasonable" as a synonym of "rational" [0] (LessWrong might be "fringe" to the general public, but is quite mainstream to people who are actually concerned about the topic of rationality).

It could be that some current academics use the word that way. I would be surprised though, I don't know why they would prefer the ambiguous "reasonable" to the established and well-defined term "rational" (I don't think this is the same as asking physicists to stop using "energy"). It's even in the Wikipedia entry for "Reason" [1]:

> The meaning of the word "reason" in senses such as "human reason" also overlaps to a large extent with "rationality" and the adjective of "reason" in philosophical contexts is normally "rational", rather than "reasoned" or "reasonable".

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g28WWuaMLXNzAnR9v/rational-v...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason

I take your point but even the current "rationalist" community (LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowski, etc.) don't seem to use the word "reasonable" in that sense.

The author was using the "pay 50k to win 1M at 1:400 odds" example to illustrate how the calculating the expected value (in a mathematical sense [1]) does not always result in the "most reasonable" decision. If I understood correctly, his point was that _even if_ the expected value (reward*probability - cost) is positive, it still might not make sense for the average person, because of the non-linear relationship between the money they have and the utility they will derive from it (i.e. the first dollar is more valuable to them than the millionth dollar).

The example doesn't support that point very well because the expected value of making that bet is negative, so the bet would not make sense even in the naive case, where all dollars have equal utility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

> “an influencer with 100,000 followers on Instagram can charge around £2,000 per picture (approximately $2,700), while celebrity influencers with between four million and 20 million followers can charge £5,000-£13,000 ($6,700-$17,500).”

So 2.5x the price for 40x the reach? These numbers just don't seem to make sense.

It's very similar in Spain (and I imagine many other European countries). Your grade (a single number representing a combination of high school grades and standard university admission exam results) determines which major you can study at which university. In fact the cut-off score between majors varies much more than between universities.

I'm very excited to see the results of this study [1], testing the effects of a one-time dose of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) on a sample size of 400+ suffering from treatment-resistant depression.

The podcast episode referenced in the article is also well-worth listening to. They talk about the current state of the research, the regulatory process, getting funding, etc.

[1] https://boingboing.net/2018/05/23/depression-the-psychedelic...

I'm from Spain and all city streets and plazas have at least some lighting at night (enough that one can comfortably walk through the city at any hour of the night) and even the least lit areas are popular for people to hang out in. I do not think it would be feasible, desirable or safe to reduce lighting to the point where it would be uncomfortable to be hanging out at night.

I might even predict the opposite effect: drinking on the street, although popular, is illegal in Spanish cities. Darker plazas would make it easier to hide drinking from the police, and could attract even more people.

So how _do_ you handle nil without those things? You've said you try to just avoid it, but many functions return nil and there's no easy way around it (e.g. trying to get the max value of an empty list)

Cabify, an Uber competitor from Spain operating mostly in South/Central America and recently valued at 1.5B has been moving from a primarily Ruby stack to Elixir over the past year.

I'm getting a 404 Not Found. Anyone else?