humbledrone

The problem I have had more with "free" on Craigslist is that I get a lot of super-flakey people who reply immediately and then don't show up to take the item after a bunch of coordination effort. I've stopped listing items for free on Craigslist, and I either (1) list it for a more-than-fair but nonzero price, or (2) put it out on the street with a sign that says "free' (only for items that will obviously disappear quickly). Adding the price on Craigslist seems to weed out the worst flakiness-offenders.

No counterpoint is needed, since I was not arguing that all good brands advertise, merely that some do. :)

Yes, these are examples of good products that are among the world's largest advertisers.

I don't know anything about you, but I still know that you have seen some kind of Coke advertisement in the last year, whether it's a billboard, product placement, the logo on a fountain fountain machine, etc. My point was that "good products don't need very much advertising" is obviously false, since some of the world's best products advertise.

Coke? Nike? Disney movies? Apple products?

> theories are fact based

Yes, but theories are not /themselves/ facts. A theory is just one way to explain the facts, and though a given theory may explain the given facts well, a new theory may come along which explains the facts even better, or new facts may come along that the existing theory cannot explain. In either case, it's obvious that the theory is not itself a fact, because we may eventually have to discard it as inadequate.

I think that often the arrogance that people perceive in scientists (or at least in scientific reporting) is from the fact that the best known theory is described as a fact when it's not. It's just a model. Like any model of reality, all theories are wrong, but some are useful.

So I don't find it helpful to keep beating the dead horse about how the technical scientific term "theory" differs from the colloquial version. I think a more helpful approach is to try to educate people on how to skeptically evaluate the usefulness of any kind of claim/model/hypothesis/theory for themselves. Even if people understand the technical term "theory," it still doesn't matter unless they can evaluate a theory's usefulness.

I was under the impression that this is common knowledge. Most pregnant women I've known did, indeed, forego alcohol during their pregnancy.

How do you feel about the fact that this kind of thinking basically rules out the possibility of Puerto Rico from ever becoming a state? Or California splitting into two states?

Are you implying that each Californian should count for less than one vote?

At least for popular brands of jeans, the "inch" measurements have succumbed to the exact same nonsense: https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a8386/pants-size-...

It's just really unusual for the area. I've lived here for about 8 years, and during that time I've heard exactly two claps of thunder (until last night). Thunderstorms are just not a thing here.

I made a web-based clone as a Java applet circa 2003-2004 for a $300 contract on rentacoder.com for which I was never paid. :)

I built just the basic skeleton of a game engine, and stupidly handed over the code to the client before they paid me. They went on to find another contractor to dupe and turned it into a game called "Fat Super Heroes" which was online for a while on some sleazy website where you could gamble real money on the outcome of the game.

The original (horrible, terrible, hacky) engine I wrote is here:

https://github.com/emezeske/museum-of-ancient-artifacts/tree...

I don't think it ever got much real popularity; I was not a fan of the theme and the second contractor added a bunch of bloat that made it load slowly, etc. But it was quite a fun learning experience.

> the code works fine and doesn't actually need abstraction

Well, maybe it works fine. We didn't see the other 97 lines to verify that they actually include all the integers from 3-99 without skipping or duplicating any. (NB with a loop this verification would be trivial.)

> But at the same time it shows that rocket tech is not as difficult as people make it out to be.

It really doesn't. The scale model probably weighs a few pounds where as the real Falcon Heavy weighs 3 million pounds [1]. Think about what a different scale that is!

Also note that the scale model's (really cool) test flight failed -- with the real Falcon Heavy that lesson would cost something like $150M.

I think this is kind of similar to: it's really easy to query/serve a SQL database even if it's a few tens of terabytes in size. But make it a few tens of exabytes, and things are dramatically more difficult due to the scale. The architecture that works at the terabyte size (single machine) falls over completely.

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

Paper airplanes fly, and they have flat wings!

It turns out that flat wings work just fine, but the airfoil shape we see on airplanes is more efficient:

http://warp.povusers.org/grrr/airfoilmyth.html

You don't seem to understand how natural selection works. The people whose lives have been extended from 70 to 80 years are well past their reproductive years, so their genes have already been passed on (or not) and their early death due to COVID-19 can't change that. So when the pandemic kills people in that age group it is not affecting natural selection.

We could differentiate between providing basic life support (housing + food + medicine) and paying for your hobbies. I am doubtful that the stick is the only option (destitution) and not the carrot ( having an iPhone Pro Max Super Wazoo 300, eating at restaurants).

In your example, books I'll concede you could do on the cheap, but woodworking not so much. As a hobbyist woodworker myself, I know how much all the basic tools cost, and then the wood on top of that (+ a large margin for how frequently I botch a good plank).

And it's not like we need to provide a 3,000 sqft penthouse to those who are not contributing to society; something that keeps people safe from the elements but is otherwise pretty bland would be okay. I think it could be sufficiently bland that folks would be motivated to work to upgrade.

> the cynicism comes from Bezos being committed to fighting climate change as long as it doesn't take his money, and actually, it should probably make him money in the process.

If this is the way it works out, isn't that actually pretty great? I mean, I personally find Amazon to be quite useful, so it if could continue being an economically viable business while also fighting climate change, I'd be very happy.

That's simply tax fraud.

I frequently see the "they're just doing this for the tax breaks" sentiment for these kinds of donations (especially when the donor is a corporation or hyper-wealthy individual) but I don't understand the reasoning.

From what I understand of tax deductions, a donation of $X basically means that the donor can skip paying taxes on $X of income. This results in a savings of tax% * $X, which is always < $X. Since tax% is always < 100%, it seems that the donation is always negative-sum for the donor.

The tax deduction also seems like a boon for the beneficiary, since they receive $X instead of (1 - tax%) * $X.

Can you help me understand the cynicism? How does the donor benefit here (aside from PR etc)? It seems like they do not come out ahead financially, and the tax breaks benefit the recipient of the donation.

I'd rather get hit in the head by a ten pound blob of clay than a five pound iron ball. (Preferably neither, though.)

> Inhaling smoke isn't good for you.

Sure. Neither is being overweight, which is just as measurable as nicotine use. (Probably more measurable, since you can't easily lie about being overweight.)

Smoking is not binary either; there's a world of difference between a couple cigarettes a week while at the bar vs. a pack a day every day.

Thanks. I must be only used to proto2.

> It’s impossible to differentiate a field that was missing in a protobuffer from one that was assigned to the default value. Presumably this decision is in place in order to allow for an optimization of not needing to send default scalar values over the wire.

Isn't this just flat incorrect? You can tell the difference between set-to-default and not-set with buffer.has_some_field().

Protocol buffers already do that; serialized fields that are not recognized by an older message definition are parsed and can be accessed via the "unknown fields" API, exactly as "r" above. Intermediaries can pass these through trivially, or inspect them to see what they didn't understand.

The problem with making fields required is that older serialized protocol buffers parsed by newer message definitions may be missing newly added required fields, which will break things.

Gasoline tax and vehicle registration fees pave the road.

All of the gold that has ever been mined by humanity over the last few thousand years would fit in a cube about 21 meters per edge. So I think that actually it would make a big difference to grab something this size made out of gold.

https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...

How hard did they push you? If they shoved you with only a micronewton if force and you fell, it's probably the fault of your overreaction.

How good of a programmer do you need to be in a language that only has two valid characters? Just press tab and space and go. Typing speed is the only factor that I can think of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...