ellen364

I'll confess I was sceptical about this but, at minimum, the database seems to exist.

There's a company called Carfax that I'd never heard of. Their EU site seems to provide basic reports about the VIN, whether the car has been written off, etc. Those basic "Is this car sale a scam?" checks are common in the UK.

But the site also makes a big deal about "Get the American report!" So I googled "Carfax oil change" and found people talking about the oil change history in the reports [0]

In the UK it was traditionally common to keep a car log book where you recorded all maintenance and might get the garage to put their stamp on it, to prove to a future buyer that you'd looked after the car. But having a garage enter that info into some random company's database, and maybe not telling me, would be disappointing.

[0] https://www.toyotanation.com/threads/oil-change-history-when...

Are you suggesting that a process once done using pen and paper can't possibly be complicated?

I have no insight into the DVLA, but the idea that no paper process could ever be complicated is really funny. The UK enjoyed/loathed centuries of bureaucracy before computers were invented. At one point getting a divorce required an Act of Parliament specifically naming the unhappy couple! Being restricted to pen and paper hardly inhibited the human ability to create complex systems.

I suspect the idea that “people aren't even honest about what constitutes murder and what doesn't” creates a high barrier to the discussion you’d like to have.

From your post, I think you’re starting from the pov that governments have the right to decide what is murder vs an acceptable killing. Some of the people I’ve met who are most interested in these ideas are staunch pacifists with a strong religious motivation (e.g. Quaker or Methodist) and reject the idea that governments can declare any killing to be acceptable. I don’t believe they’re dishonest, for all that it’s a very different starting point.

“50 hours of video” seems especially true for cloud certificates. Figured maybe I should finally pick up an AWS cloud cert or two and realised that video courses tend to be 40-50 hours per certificate. If you’ve already worked with AWS, or any cloud provider really, a lot of that content looks tedious.

In the end I bought a “course” that’s 6 practice exams with high quality questions and explanations of each answer. For AWS it’s been a nice approach, so far anyway, because the docs are truly vast and I probably wouldn’t have thought to read the docs for Snowmobile, which I don’t use day to day.

I'm not convinced the first principals are so clear. Economics research in the last 30 years has often examined market distortion due to incomplete information (especially information asymmetry) in the marketplace. Given the tendency to hide salary data, labour markets have very incomplete information. It's like having a stockmarket where the stock prices are secret.

Glad someone mentioned the gift economy. So much discussion around FOSS reminds me of ideas from gift economy. E.g. the extent to which a culture assumes a gift is part of gift exchange, with some expectation of reciprocity. Or the concept of “giving while keeping”.

I think both ideas exist in copyleft licenses, but were lost in the more permissive MIT-style licenses. Sometimes I wonder if maintainers feel burned because they use more permissive licenses, which might be standard in their ecosystem, but unconsciously have a different gift culture.

I didn’t 100% follow this story. Sounds like you knew the manager’s password and used it to log into a website. Where did the email protocols come into it?

A build your own algorithm laboratory sounds fun.

I think “motivating the problem” (a phrase I hear a lot in American lectures) is often the weakest part of an algorithm and data structure course. The teaching approaches seem quite abstract, or make passing mention to practical problems.

Personally I find algorithms a bit boring in the abstract. I’ve always wondered why DSA projects are so rarely things like “Here’s a simple database that doesn’t support indexes. We’re going to query it and it will be painful. Then you’ll extend the database with a b-tree index.”

The stats in the link say that the annual “traffic-related death rate” is 12.9 deaths per 100,000 people in the USA and 2.2 per 100,000 people in Sweden. It’s the death rate that’s (more than) 5x higher in the USA, not the death count. That’s around 45,000 deaths compared to around 225 deaths.

In English courts, there’s some debate about a defendant’s ignorance of the law.

In this Chancery case from 2021, the judge mulls over what it means that a defendant is “unaware”. He considers the distinction between someone who knows about the relevant law and misunderstands it vs someone who doesn’t know at all. And the judge briefly wonders whether someone working in regulated activity (like finance) and completely unaware poses the most risk to the public.

The judge left the issue unsettled, but it raises the possibility that ignorance might count against a defendant. The Chancery Division handles business disputes, though, and I imagine the criminal courts have their own rules.

Paragraphs 22-25 are most relevant: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2021/995.html

I sometimes wonder if people have become more resistant to critique or if uninvited critique has become more common. But early twentieth century books like How to Win Friends and Influence People emphasise that people respond well to positive reinforcement, which makes me suspect that people have long given unsolicited criticism and long been annoyed by it.

Linear extrapolation seems to be a common theme in the comments. People take a product they know and then essentially say “Twitter only has X times as many users, surely they only need X times as many engineers. The other employees were excess!”

I haven’t worked on Twitter-scale products. But I do wonder if it’s safe to draw a straight line between services that have middling and large scales. Things don’t necessarily work the same at the extremes.

I think it partly depends on what you buy. I haven’t seen it much. E.g. sometimes there are few eggs, which I guess is due to the bird flu situation. And sometimes I can’t find generic ibuprofen. Minor stuff. But some people I know have things they used to buy weekly and now sometimes can’t find for weeks at a time.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20221002174503/https://www.econo...

“So long as it’s legal” is an interesting caveat to universal service. Utility companies, e.g. electricity suppliers, don’t check whether you’re using the utility for illegal purposes. It seems like a true “utility” internet company would only take down content on receiving a court order.

It’s possible that a “choose to be utility or publisher” world would have an extremely polarised internet. On one hand, “utility” services with a lot of illegal content and the police playing whack-a-mole. On the other hand, “publisher” services with liability and therefore intensely risk averse, allowing only the most anaemic content.

A strategy that I’ve seen turn around someone’s relationship woes is asking yourself “Would I hire this person?” Not thinking about skills, particularly, but more about their attitude and approach to things. I was sceptical of the idea but, looking back, it changed the rules of thumb the person was using to assess potential partners. In their case, it worked really well.

The talks from PyCon UK 2022 are now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/PyconUKSoc/playlists

My understanding is the founding fathers believed in a combination of “natural” and “positive” rights. In that context, “positive” rights were things the government had to provide, like a jury trial. “Natural” rights were things you could do without a government, like speaking and writing, but that could still be limited by law. As an example, the 1798 Sedition Act restricted criticism of the government. That was just 7 years after the ratification of the First Amendment.

Somehow forgot the two books that had the biggest influence on me. (And forgot for so long that I can’t edit the post.)

- The Population History of England, 1541-1871, by Wrigley and Schofield.

- English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837, by Wrigley et al.

These books describe and analyse what was, for the time, an extraordinary amount of painstakingly pieced together historical data. Reading them changed my understanding of how history could be studied.

Each book is 700-800 pages, so a big commitment for anyone outside the field. But if anyone’s curious, Prof. Wrigley’s obituary has an excellent summary: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/28/sir-tony-wrigl...

Thanks for the recommendations!

I bought Silman’s book on endgames a while ago and you’ve given me a nudge to start reading it.

Two theories of change:

(1) An increasing number of Americans see free speech as a positive rather than negative right. In other words, “Facebook must host whatever I want to say”, not just “The government can’t arrest me for insulting the president.” That’s a controversial expansion of the right to free speech, creating a lot of debate and disagreement.

(2) The internet means Americans are more exposed to non-Americans. At least some of those people come from countries where free speech is seen as a right that should be balanced against other rights, like privacy. That makes it seem like fewer people support free speech than in the past.

Few of these books are “great works” in their field, but all changed my understanding of their topic.

- How to Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren. I was in academia when I read this and it had a huge impact on how I read and thought about academic papers.

- Intuitive Biostatistics by Motulsky. First stats book that I enjoyed. Emphasises the practice of statistics, particularly the assumptions and mistakes people tend to make.

- World War II Map by Map, published by DK. Had never previously been interested in WW2 history, but something about this took my interest. While reading it, I finally appreciated the scale and complexity of WW2.

- Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. Working through this one meant I actually started getting better at chess!

- Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by Wengrow. The book that helped me become interested in data structures and algorithms, rather than being something I “should” learn about.

Fantastic to see Bob Allen mentioned here! The research group where I worked tended to be on the opposite side of debates to Prof. Allen, but he’s a skilled and influential historian of the British Industrial Revolution.

The last 10-20 years of research into the Industrial Revolution hasn’t had much impact on popular understanding. Hopefully books like the Very Short Introduction will change that.

I can see that the cloud hosting would be a sticking point if you aren’t familiar with it.

Luckily, for Protohackers you can use a really basic setup. I used Hetzner’s standard Ubuntu image, opened the nano text editor on the server, copy-pasted my Python code, then ran the program using the OS’s version of Python. Didn’t even run it in the background; just started the program and closed it when Protohackers reported the tests were done.

There’s a lot of debate in this thread about the rights and wrongs of monarchy, the extent to which the Queen chose to serve, and so on. There isn’t much context about Britain as it was when she became Queen. Since I used to be a historian, I figured I’d throw some in.

Princess Elizabeth wasn’t originally expected to become Queen. Her father was only the second son of King George V and was not expected to become King either. But, in a move that was deeply shocking at the time, the older son, King Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 so that he could marry a divorcee.

The abdication crisis was complicated and further complicated by the Commonwealth. The members of the Commonwealth, all of whom had Edward VIII as their king, had to agree to the abdication. The government of the Irish Free State, as it was then known, used the opportunity to dramatically reduce the role of the King.

Elizabeth’s father became George VI and she became the heir presumptive. At this point (1936) it still wasn’t clear that she would become Queen. She was just 10 years old and if her parents had a son, he would leapfrog his older sisters and become the heir.

Edward VIII had become Duke of Windsor after the abdication and he remained something of a thorn in the sides of the royal family and British government. There were fights about money and titles and whether the Duke would be allowed to return to the UK. There were bad feelings all round. In 1937 the Duke visited Nazi Germany, which infuriated the British government. During World War II he was considered to be pro-Nazi and was for a while under surveillance by the Americans.

Things had in some ways calmed down by 1952, when George VI died. But the UK was still intensely feeling the effects of World War II. There were several financial crises, the country’s debt was enormous and rationing didn’t end until 1954.

The British Empire had also continued to fall apart. Today many people consider that a good thing, with countries gaining independence and people gaining self-determination. But from a monarch’s perspective, losing an empire is a pretty terrible failure.

I’ve missed out all sorts of things because this was already so long. But that, roughly speaking, was the situation when Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II in 1952.

You might be right. I interpreted the parent comment as saying the government should do more and started thinking about the government’s role in free speech.

That’s interesting. Would the Tenth Amendment prevent the federal government regulating free speech in the opposite direction, e.g. a law saying “companies can’t do anything to limit free speech”?

Dan Grossman (in Programming Languages Part A on Coursera) suggests there are 5 broad areas of knowledge about a programming language:

- syntax

- semantics

- idioms

- tools

- packages

The koan glosses over the time it takes to become familiar with the bigger language ecosystems (tools and packages), which is awkward when a business gets value from packages like web frameworks.

Having said that, recruitment can seem 100% about tools and packages.

I’m not sure how consciously hirers think about the different areas of knowledge. E.g. might a deep knowledge of Python semantics offset inexperience with Flask? Does ignorance of idioms necessarily indicate poor semantic understanding?

In hindsight, I’ve had hiring discussions that touched on these questions but without a clear framework for considering the trade offs. Guessing it’s the same for many people hiring at smaller companies.

> A private company should not be making decisions on essentially freedom of speech.

This comes up a lot and makes me think I’ve misunderstood US free speech dynamics. I thought the USA traditionally limited the government’s ability to regulate free speech, leaving it to private / social regulation. In other words, it was up to individuals, communities, companies and so on to decide what was acceptable.

But perhaps that’s a misunderstanding. Can anyone recommend books or papers to better understand the history of free speech in the USA? I guess The Federalist Papers are often a good place to start?

Demographers sometimes describe age as “the number of completed years”, which always struck me as a wonderfully simple explanation.