grumblenum

Getting a request for a provocative picture of eating a corndog was definitely the most funny to me. The Chris Hanson moment was usually when the victim suggested a real date or offered to send a pic of his willy. I'm not THAT committed to humor.

>Emotional damage

Just for clarity, I'm talking about adult males whose job description is essentially "jump out of planes and kill people." We're not made of quite such fragile stuff as, apparently, you are. It sounds like your life must be very difficult.

The level of well-I-never and pearl-clutching in these comments really speaks volumes about the HN commentariat.

That depends. Do senior CDC or NIH staff stand to collect patent royalties on its administration? The former (and probably informally mandatory). If not, then the latter. Given Stéphane Bancel's and others' recent trading, then I wouldn't bank on this one being a winner.

Fun prank if you have some young male friends:

1. Create profile with hot babe pictures

2. Set search proximity to lowest setting

3. Swipe furiously until you find your friend

4. Wait for a match

5. Screencap the ensuing conversation

I did this to a couple guys in my platoon. The results were definitely worth the effort.

I think the number of people killed in the world each year by personally owned novelty military vehicles is approximately zero. Hundreds of people are killed in the United States every year by unarmed assailants. When will we wake up and pass common-sense karate-chop control?!

Ah, so we just eliminate low-cost transportation, agriculture, textiles and consumer goods and consequently starve billions of people. A modest proposal for such an ill-specified problem with unfalsifiable causes. I like it.

I've never dealt with a city in my region that didn't have variance procedures for building and land development permits. In my own experience, these committees are nearly a rubber stamp unless an adjacent property owner expects to be inconvenienced. You're observing what's called realized preferences.

Coffee-table planners seem content to frame everything as a political problem, as if developers are an extended civil service or some kind of unthinking machines. There is also an unsurprising lack of investigation into places in the world where zoning free-for-alls actually do exist. Most are not like Martha's Vinyard. Many people don't actually want to live in a favela, and they vote and spend their dollars accordingly.

The east coast built walkable neighborhoods because they were built before cars existed. Several of these states have a net negative domestic migration, which does not suggest that people want to live there.

Obama invaded Syria "in the name of Christ and oil profits"? That justification was a myth, even when the Trotskyites-cum-Conservatives asserted it as truth 15 years ago.

Creating a belt of failed states in Central Asia has been a long-standing policy, if Wesley Clark is to be believed. I can only speculate what the real goals are, but "because Jesus" or "because Bush is dumb" was always fodder for the low-info crowd who watched the Daily Show.

I think the refugees are motivated much more by the financial incentives those governments provide. They usually pass through multiple safe countries to get to places like Germany. A modernized Plantation of Ulster has been the policy of every Western government since the 60s.

War and, I guess, the weather, are convenient narratives for these highly unpopular policies.

>It isnt about money, I am juwt ashamed to have an American passport and know my tax dollars are being spent on war and murder in the name of christ and oil profits.

You know Bush isn't president anymore, right? That hasn't been a a popular (and I would say erroneous, even when it was popular) talking point for more than a decade.

I do find it interesting that expatriation trends seem to pivot in years with presidential elections, according to that chart.

The allure of becoming a billionaire with almost no productive effort spent is the heart and soul of the pop-tech. Crypto that you have becomes more valuable only if more people decide they want it after you have your position. If you're "hodling" then you have an incentive to be a promoter.

Do you think the folks with real decision making power (I'm thinking people invited to Davos, rather than people in mostly ceremonial political roles) in the United States actually want a future without global Chinese hegemony? As far as I can tell, our elites are overtly hostile to the American populace and actively undermine us.

I am reminded of 1940s US-Soviet relations where FDR & friends saw Stalin as the lovable rascal leading us all toward a lovely future of enlightened, global despotism under the new faith of dialectical materialism (nowadays otherwise named). Given the chummy trade relations we maintained with our 'enemies' throughout the 'Cold War', I suspect Soviet capitulation was kind of, like, an accident. I don't think our money-masters or politburo want Americans as we know them to survive.

The HN server or moderators promote literally anything with “Rust” in the title to the front page. Yes, Neo, you’re in the Matrix.

Comments like this are why I read HN before the left coast wakes up.

As for the article, it reads like teenage-angst Marxism.

Is there even a clear line where intelligence agencies end and Google begins? Google was an In-Q-Tel baby, after all.

A Malthusian crisis has been “imminent” since the 19th century. I think that you should try writing down what facts you think support the a priori assumption that our sinful ways are leading us to a future, sudden disaster. I don’t think you will find much evidence that isn’t traceable to popular opinion. Sorry, fam, it’s just Puritanism for the modern age.

Having observed the quality of the commentary here, particularly my own, I would not want to be friends with someone who posts here. Game-ified bloviating is no virtue.

I don't think there is an absence of software with the purpose of convincing the public to consume the right pharmaceutical products. I would say every owner of major internet property has adopted some kind of feature or process to promote them. Indeed, it has become quite the fashion statement to signal one's zeal for pop-science and one's contempt for the "deniers." I'm sure there's a market for 'Wear. The. Mask.' bumper stickers.

I would agree that stupid is winning, but I probably agree more with Kant on what Enlightenment means.

Exactly!

Buoyant forces apply to things in the ground. HDPE pipes without adequate backfill or anchoring will float out of the ground, like zombies, in flood conditions where the pipe itself contains air. Your local street department has probably seen it. Also, for expedient flood protection, those tubular dams are typically filled with water.

My reaction is that "if necessary" isn't really an "if". It is necessary, or your levee may float off precisely at the time you need it to work.

>$888M

Google, is that you?

I was really curious about bearing capacity of this material, and I found this spec sheet: https://my.civil.utah.edu/~bartlett/Geofoam/EPS%20Geofoam%20... The compressive strength is actually pretty good if you use the high-end stuff. I would be skeptical of the cost-benefit versus other common fills.

I almost spit out my coffee when I saw the section on levees and the anchors "(if necessary)" annotation. I would be very reluctant to market an extremely low-density product as a barrier for flood protection applications. It really makes me wonder about the rest of the statements in the brochure.

HN meta question: When I see all these double-returns at the end of each sentence, should I assume it's because someone is using Slack (or another chat program where mashing return after every statement makes sense) and a bot/script to make the post? That strikes me as a very unnatural way to punctuate in a textarea form.

Exclusionary rights to make, use or redistribute a thing. I’m under the impression that patent rights allow one to sue to prevent others from making, using or redistributing a thing without a contract or license from the patent holder. I would call that protection. Maybe it’s different where you live.

The manufacturer is making food production at scale possible. John Deere does not “fuck with” you when you buy its products. Expropriating their trade secrets because someone decided this was a special case seems capricious. Why not nullify Pfizer’s patents? Do we not have a “right to repair” our bodies with their drugs? Why not seize Google’s monorepo and publish it in the Library of Congress? Do we not have a “right to repair” our information systems? I guess picking the winners and losers of this policy is to be left up to the lobbyists?

I think it’s relevant to plug OSE https://www.opensourceecology.org/

There are free designs for a large number of useful machines, but the trade off is that you have none of a manufacturers’ warranties for safety or useful life. Personally, I think it’s a lot more palatable to subsidize open designs that can be easily modified by a user instead of legally compelling a manufacturer to give the world their intellectual property. I think a few $M in grant programs to uni engineering programs with a few paid senior industry consultants could really make a difference (I think the motive force behind OSE is basically one guy).

Given a 15 year retrospective, would you say that Rails lived up to the hype? If you think so, then there is nothing “disparaging” in that comment at all. If you don’t think so, then doesn’t that mean a reader should not regard such promotion with confidence? No need to be defensive.

I mean that you are one of several. Hence the running joke is the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" and not "that one rust guy."

An evangelist/growth focused role is exactly what a promoter is. If you spend large numbers of typical work-hours, which I'm assuming you're paid for, on social media to promote something, like Rust, or you go to conferences and events to speak publicly in promotion of something like Rust, then a "paid promoter" seems like a pretty accurate description.

Is that disparaging? Is that not what you are doing right now?

Well, I certainly wasn't speaking about you specifically. However, did you not say that language promotion is what you do and that you quit Mozilla for not paying you enough for it here: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/thank-u-next ?

SML has signatures. In the absence of HKT, I think it's not a fair comparison. Most popular languages have interfaces even if not by that name. Haskell, Scala and C++ are special in that you can describe an interface for interfaces. I'm sure I'm not giving due credit to others.