hyperpape

There are good reasons to discard the best runs. If you think of your system as having predictable behavior that's slowed down by background processing happening on the machine, it might make sense to use the best run. But if there are any intrinsic sources of non-determinism in the program (and it's far more likely than you might think), taking the best time is likely to be unrepresentative.

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2019/minimum_times_tend_to_mis... is a good piece on the subject.

You're right in principle, but are they usually 20%?

I agree we can say "this is a minefield of scams" without doing a comparison.

There still is a question about when it got bad--I think Dan mentions 2016 as a point of comparison, and there were plenty of scams back then, so you might wonder whether the days when a query wouldn't return many scams.

If you go back far enough, then there wasn't the same kind of SEO, and Internet scams were much smaller/less organized, but that's a long time ago.

From the study:

> Moreover, although we tested tears from women donors, we speculate that all tears would have a similar effect. This becomes particularly ecologically relevant with infant tears, as infants lack verbal tools to curb aggression against them and are therefore more likely to rely on chemosignals.

> I appreciate that most of the ECS hype has been around specific use cases, though.

I recently watched the first 30 minutes of Mike Acton's 2014 talk, and while that portion of the talk wasn't about ECS specifically, it very much presented an absolutist perspective.

It's funny, because GitLab feels pretty bad. It's slow, there are weird places where things require a full page reload, and it's extremely aggressive about hiding files that have significant changes (yes, small changes are better, but I still need to review big ones some of the time).

If you want to argue "this costs the US money, but it's worth the cost, because it has a benefit to our preparedness", that's one thing.

But from the article:

> This makes it “a misnomer” to call the $68 billion he calculates we have spent to arm Ukraine “aid.”

I really think the article, and people commenting in this thread, are blurring the lines between idea "this might be good for US military preparedness" (arguably true) with "this is a free lunch because it's paying american workers" (just false).

To summarize my position as unambiguously as possible: there may be second-order benefits, but aid to Ukraine is an economic cost to the US, not a free lunch. If you want to argue for non-economic benefits, I'm not saying anything in this thread that contradicts you.

Quoting the parent:

> Again -- I totally support what we're doing, for the record. But money doesn't come free. We shouldn't pretend like this is all almost for free or something. It's not.

You really are wrong. There is a reason the broken window fallacy is one of the most famed concepts in economics.

> There is no downside here form the US perspective. Every dollar spent is returned in ways that no other expenditure could replicate.

Suppose we gave "American aid." Instead of giving military items to Ukraine, we pick the names of 10 millions of Americans out a hat, and buy them things. Only restriction is it has to be made in America.

This has all the same effects on the US economy as military aid to Ukraine. It pays the salaries of some people in the US. It uses some raw materials that we have to buy. It costs us in taxes. It diverts some labor to whatever we're buying for the American consumers, and away from all other industries (this can be inflationary).

But the difference is, at the end of the day, those 10 millions Americans have something they didn't have before. America is slightly richer than if we'd given stuff to Ukraine.

So the aid to Ukraine is more beneficial to the US than if we were giving Ukraine money to buy Chinese goods, but still less directly beneficial to the US than if we spent the money on ourselves.

P.S. Like the grandparent post, I'm not bothered by this. I think it's appropriate to aid Ukraine, but it has a real cost to the US. I'm just bothered by the fact that you're so loudly getting the economics wrong.

You can say it's broken until you're blue in the face, and honestly, you're not wrong, but it's irrelevant.

If major libraries and user code are constantly incorrect, but work because of an implementation detail, then removing that implementation detail becomes extraordinarily difficult, verging on impossible.

It would be like retrofitting your language to distinguish valid unicode text from arbitrary byte strings, when you'd previously treated them as equivalent.

In particular, the icons are really bad. I get that modern flat icons can be a little abstract, but they’re at least visually distinct at a glance. Here you have three icons in a row that feature tiny text (11pt? 10pt) text above equally tiny icons.

It’s weird, because in the abstract I agree with a lot of the criticisms and principles in the post, but this example is so bad.

> In my personal experience, most codebases can easily shrink a hundredfold and speed up a thousandfold.

A thousandfold speedup means going from 1 second to 1 ms. A hundred fold reduction in size means going from a million lines to 10,000 lines.

I'm sure you can find examples where that's possible, but as a general claim, it's utterly implausible.

From the article:

    never break it

    Never remove a name

    Never reuse a name

Your point is a very reasonable statement, but you are really disrespecting the author by putting a reasonable statement in their mouth. They had every chance to say the reasonable thing, and they clearly made a choice to say the unreasonable thing. Respect that decision (and tell them that they're wrong).

In the past few years, Canada's population passed that of California. Canada's population is growing very fast, while California's has grown modestly for a decade, and slightly shrank over the past few years.

I’m actually not clear that the ACA isn’t tougher than that. The ACA introduced a 85% medical loss ratio. I thought that required them to spend 85% of premiums on payouts. That limits profits to an obvious maximum of 15%, but there are other expenses (advertising and so on) that also cut into that 15%. In practice, maximum profit will be lower than 15%.

That said, I haven’t gone into this in tremendous depth, so I’m kinda hoping someone can confirm or deny my understanding.

> yes it is

Can you double check and/or give references? Because I specifically doubted my memory here, and everything I found online before posting matches what I thought—-standard relational algebra is not Turing-complete (hence relational queries are guaranteed to terminate).

Relational algebra is not Turing complete. SQL gets Turing completeness by means of various additions/alterations (sometimes pretty weird ones about that). So the foundations are pretty different, and I think this is obvious if you tried to start writing typical programs in SQL/Prolog.

Now, some people argue you might want a less expressive logic programming language, especially datalog, so this isn’t a knock-down argument, but it’s a pretty big difference.

I'm tempted to be sarcastic about it, but it's surprising to me that no has mentioned sales quotas being connected to bad behavior. The most important kind is deceptive behavior to customers, and not just the "ordinary, good for the company kind". I mean making promises the company can't keep, or selling future features that require a deathmarch, with the attendant loss of quality/sustainability, even if the C-level doesn't see it.

This isn't to argue that we should just believe developer estimates unconditionally. That's a bigger rabbit hole that I'm too tired to go down right now.

While interesting, their study has a weird relation to the headline claim. It’s not unrelated, but it’s not a demonstration of the claim (I don’t see that they measured the time teams spent discussing each statement), nor does it really a seem like a consequence of the claim.

So while I appreciate some of the reminders about decision-making it’s an oddly structured article.

Here is the JDK 7 String#hashCode(), which operates on characters: https://github.com/openjdk-mirror/jdk7u-jdk/blob/f4d80957e89....

That's changed in the newer versions, because String has a `byte[]` not a `char[]`, but it was just fine. A hash algorithm can take in bytes, characters, ints, it doesn't matter.

In Java, you don't get access to the bytes that make up a string, to preserve the string's immutability. So for many operations where you might operate on bytes in a lower level language, you end up using characters (unless you're the standard library, and you can finagle access to the bytes), or alternately doing a byte copy of the entire string.

I admit, checksums using characters are a bit weird sounding, but they should also be perfectly well-defined.

You’re correct about algorithms that do “human” things with text, but you need to think of more examples.

That’s how you write hashing algorithms, checksums, and certain trivial parsers.[0]

But most importantly, right or wrong, this code is out there, running today, god knows where, and you do not slow it down from O(n) to O(n^2).

Iirc, you're entitled to bring in a single laptop, above that, import taxes may apply. The issue is that "personal laptop" is not really something the customs has evidence of. They just see someone with multiple laptops, which could represent intent to sell.

> Why not do it by state then?

While state level differences are real, the entire US shares federal taxation and federal labor law, and has freedom of movement, constitutionally limited barriers to internal trade. It’s a very natural unit of analysis.

If you’re inclined to take this paper seriously, or if you feel like reading a very badly produced article, I recommend reading the full paper. It’s just a few pages, and a light read.

Also, you’ll get to ponder how in the “List of abnormal clinical symptoms of the child with an autism spectrum disorder prior to antifungal therapy”, the first entry is “Silly”.

No standardized assessments of autism (e.g. the ADOS) are mentioned. While there are other genuine autism symptoms mentioned, it’s unclear if any other professional assessed the child, or if both the diagnosis and subsequent statement of cure were done by this guy with his pet theories.

I believe that national borders can change, and new states can form.

I don’t see how that prohibits me from looking at this particular “state” and thinking “its chances are bad and there’s no reason to hope it succeeds.”

I don't generally disagree, but using json for structured logs is a growing thing as well.

I can't confidently say, but the article suggests it's post-Elon.

No, because it wasn't always true for Twitter. Twitter made a choice to change how it rewarded pictures vs. links, and it happened surprisingly late.

IMO, it’s option (1) if the effect is small enough. Option (2) if there are serious knock on effects for society.

"It's faster/less of a pain to ask the bot than to use StackOverflow" is a significant portion of what I use ChatGPT for. Sometimes, it's just a better search engine.

I recognize that there are questions about how that works in the longer-term, but for now, it's useful.