ihumanable

The handmaid's tale is a book, a work of fiction about politics.

Many works of fiction provide political commentary.

There's no actual invisible hand of the free market either, just some pop-culture metaphor by some Scottish guy.

Did you know that someone can tell lots of lies all the time. Telling a lot of lies all the time would look identical to transparency. Hell even just talking a lot about things that are true but are not at all important or your priorities would look like transparency.

Just because someone won't shut up doesn't mean they are telling you their true intentions.

One of the best things I've learned is that you can go into your watch history and remove something and that seems to work pretty well to fixing the algorithm after clicking on something and realizing it's garbage.

I enjoy the occasional true crime documentary. It's been amazing to watch YouTube demonetization just drive censorship to an absurd degree.

No blood, no violence, no bad words. And the words YouTube deems bad are somehow much stricter than what I grew up with. Many words related to violence (abuse, assault, etc) words related to death (killed, executed, etc) words related to drugs (took me a while to figure out what a suspect was even saying when their speech was censored to "they drank and used s**d" I finally figured out it was speed aka meth)

It's amazing to see how sanitized things have become, almost to the point of absurdity. Does making it so that people can't say the word "abuse" somehow eliminate abuse from the world?

You might notice the very top of the file that skips it unless docs are being generated. Or the fact that every function is completely empty.

It’s a module that exists solely for generating documentation.

Yea, the physical key is, to me at least, one of the top human inventions.

Ubiquitous, cheap, convenient, and provides sufficient security. My little brass key never needs charging, never refuses to open the door because I didn't apply the latest over-the-air update, doesn't phone home to an advertising firm to track every time I open and close a door.

I can make as many copies as I like and give them to friends and family in case I lose mine. There are some scenarios where it might be nice to have a smart lock, but for me at least, they are so few and far between that I'll stick with this tiny bit of metal.

I agree with this, especially when you consider that it is us, the taxpayer that is largely subsidizing musk to build out this toll booth.

It is not crazy to believe that in the medium term that SpaceX will be one of the only viable ways for America to access space. In that position SpaceX will have a lot of leverage and ability to extract concessions from anyone wanting to go to space.

Why my tax dollars should go to help the worlds richest man build a toll booth between earth and space is beyond me.

Sideshows are the dumbest thing. I live in an area where people do sideshows. Midnight, a dozen or so cars and then a hundred or more random people will show up and make a racket squealing around. More than once they’ve crashed and caused injuries and property damage.

For what? Even if they succeed in not destroying their vehicles, other innocent people’s property, or maim someone it’s a loud pointless nothing. It’s not a competition, it’s just being loud and smells awful. I don’t even get how it’s a show, it’s literally just cars doing donuts… how many times do you have to see that before it’s boring, once? Who goes to these things

I wrote sorted_set_nif, the lack of activity isn’t a lack of care about the library but more just a reflection that the library is done.

With data structures that have some definite behavior unless someone finds a defect there isn’t going to be much activity.

For anyone mystified about what a NIF is that doesn't want to go read the docs.

The BEAM VM (which is the thing that runs erlang / elixir / gleam / etc) has 3 flavors of functions.

- BIFs - Built-in functions, these are written in C and ship with the VM

- NIFs - Natively implemented functions, these are written in any language that can speak the NIF ABI that BEAM exposes and allows you to provide a function that looks like a built-in function but that you build yourself.

- User - User functions are written in the language that's running on BEAM, so if you write a function in erlang or elixir, that's a user function.

NIFs allow you to drop down into a lower level language and extend the VM. Originally most NIFs were written in C, but now a lot more languages have built out nice facilities for writing NIFs. Rust has Rustler and Zig now has Zigler, although people have been writing zig nifs for a while without zigler and I'm sure people wrote rust nifs without rustler.

The fact that they are having to sell these shares to try to right the ship means the market decided. Otherwise they could just keep extracting as much profit as possible.

Oddly enough people that fly on planes want to be confident that the planes will work.

Exactly this. As someone that’s served as an oncall engineer for years now, the skills you need to operate a cluster are completely different from the things leetcode tests for.

There are thousands, and I’m not exaggerating, literally thousands of leetcode problems.

A lot of them require you to make, what to me at least, is some non-obvious clever observation about the problem. Sure the problem is talking about a guy robbing houses, but if you stand on your head and squint just right you’ll realize this is actually a graph cycle detection problem and you should use Floyd’s algorithm to solve it.

Because there are thousands of these problems the amount of time it would take someone to become familiar with them is prohibitive. So you are at the mercy of the interviewer, have they picked a super clever one, are they going to be ok with removing duplicates from the answer by tossing stuff in a set or do they want you to pull some dynamic programming out of thin air.

It’s the part where you have to divine the trick under pressure that measures nothing of value. I’ve been a professional software engineer for 2 decades. I’ve had times when I’ve been trying to solve some very tricky problem and done research and thought thoughts and come up with pretty clever solutions, or at least I think they are clever. Not once have I had to do this under pressure in a 45 minute time box with someone looking over my shoulder.

That’s my objection to leetcode. Sure it’s great if a candidate can recognize that your riddle about topological map rain capture is actually just a restatement of Kolger’s postulate at first glance (a problem and postulate I’ve just made up because I’m not going to wade back into leetcode right now) but that’s an insane thing to optimize for.

The vast majority of the problems programmers solve are actually just mapping business domains into code. The most common problems that need solving is taking squishy, incomplete, and contradictory requirements from multiple stakeholders and figuring out what needs to get done. People in the real world are rarely rolling their own data structures, because the red black tree you slap together is going to be infinitely worse than the battle tested highly optimized one you can pull out of the standard library or off your package manager.

In my long career I’ve had a handful of occasions to actually build a data structure or solve a problem with some very clever algorithm. And in those cases you don’t really want people shooting from the hip anyways, you would want them to do research and see what prior art exists so they can discover something like Floyd’s algorithm for finding cycles in a unidirectional graph (ok this one is real).

It is not clear to me what exactly leetcode tests. My best guess would be your ability to take a disguised questions and convert it into a handful of problem shapes and solve those. But if you grade leetcode like the website does during an interview, expect to lose a lot of perfectly fine candidates along the way.

I saw a video from people in the car. The screen allowed them to pick between 2 different destinations. It’s not like they could just punch in any old address.

Seems like the food producer would have a clear incentive to mark their products with sell by dates.

If I’m making a food product for sale at retail and I can mark it “sell by” some date, consumers get confused and think it’s no good after that date, the store that buys my food product will not want to keep it on the shelf because consumers won’t buy it.

The retailer has to discard the perfectly fine item and reorder from… me the food product producer and then I make more money.

I imagine the food retailers are happy about this and the food manufacturers are probably unhappy.

I read this many years ago. I do think for being written in 2003 it's interesting to read again now and see in the last 20 years what parts seem more or less plausible.

I think the nice thing about science fiction is that even bad science fiction can contain within interesting ideas. Sorta like pizza, even bad pizza is pretty good.

> zstandard streaming significantly outperforms zlib both in time to compress and compression ratio.

Time to compress is a measure of how long the CPU spends compressing. So this is in the blogpost

This is the correct answer. News loves the term because it's eye catching and clearly not informative, that's why every article has to explain it.

The cops came by to arrest the criminal but luckily the criminal quickly thought of a brilliant scheme.

“I didn’t commit the crime and, in fact, I hold myself to a higher standard than the law requires.”

Crestfallen the police walk away. “It’s air tight, bullet proof really. He said he didn’t do it so case closed.”

People are downvoting you, but February 7th Chris Matthews is on MSNBC after Biden and Sanders debate he says that Sanders will lead to executions in Central Park.

https://www.newsweek.com/msnbc-host-chris-matthews-ties-bern...

I also wanted to say that I appreciate your original reply and your civility. Sadly a rare thing these days.

Thanks for the thoughts they are also interesting.

Sorry I saw your comment after I wrote this reply to someone else, I’d be interested to hear your take on this hypothetical situation too if you don’t mind. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40911779

I agree with you though about the idea that the market works well when those that receive the most value spend the most money. While we have very high rates of wealth inequality, which also seems to be something of an emergent property of this system, once you have even medium amounts of inequality the system becomes interesting. I think expanding on your thoughts it comes down to the relative value of money being different for different people. If I have $100 then $10 is a LOT of money, it’s 10% of all my money. If I have $1000 then $10 is probably not a lot of money to me, not trivial but it’s only 1%.

Now this is an order of magnitude but if you asked someone if a system where the wealthy had 10x as much money as the poor they’d probably say that the inequality wasn’t so bad. But even in that case the guy with $1000 would probably be willing to spend $11 on some good that the other guy wants maybe infinitely more, just because that guy can’t really afford it.

It’s a fascinating way of looking at things I hadn’t quite ever thought about in terms of relative value of money itself. I don’t have any real point I’m making here, just thanks for contributing I found your reply interesting and it made me think.

I wonder though does it have to be limited. Like imagine I could make enough apples to fully satisfy the market demand for apples and I’m also willing to sell to anyone.

I want to sell those apples for $1 each. There’s plenty of apples to satisfy the demand. But let’s say that the market would bear a higher price, people would love to buy apples for $1 but due to a love of apples would be willing to pay up to $5.

In that scenario, the arbitrage opportunity still exists. Apple scalpers knowing that people would be willing to pay up to $5 would want to buy up lots of cheap apples and make the $4 profit that I’m leaving on the table for themselves.

And there’s just nothing we can do about it. I think we’d say that when the equilibrium price of $5 is met that the market is efficient but it’s a market where the producer of the good can fully satisfy the demand of the market for $X and yet the consumers have to pay $5X and this arbitragers get $4X.

It’s just interesting is all.

Well just to be clear, I didn’t say central planning would solve this problem. A careful reading of my post would show a distinct lack of the term “central planning”

You can be interested in market failures without proposing an alternative. Complex systems are fascinating and their boundaries and failure conditions are fascinating. That’s all I’m talking about.

It's interesting how the real problem here is that our economic system has no way to sell a product at what the seller will bear, only what the buyer will bear.

I think this is a fascinating feature, a lot of artists would be more than happy to make $X for a show so that their fans can come see them. The problem ends up that a free market has no mechanism for that, the artist can sell the tickets such that they end up with $X but then you get things like scalpers who don't want to see the show but do want money and act like artificial demand. They know that regardless of what the seller wants there are buyers that will pay $X+N and want to capture that $N.

The scalper provides no value to the market, but they get $N, which seems like a market failure to me. The fans lose $N, the artist still only gets $X and they also get reputation damage because fans are upset that things cost $X+N.

And that's just the end of it. The artist literally can not perform for their fans at a venue for $X even if that's what they want, there's just no mechanism in the free market to make that function correctly. I find market failures like this fascinating because it really shows the limits of how "free" markets operate. The only person that isn't free to do what they'd like is the producer of the good being sold, they literally can't sell it for less than the market will bear.

And I suppose this plays out for every part of the market, if I can produce apples and make a profit for $1 a bushel and that's plenty of money for me, I don't want any more, tough shit. Arbitrage will make sure that people pay more for those apples. If people are willing to pay $5 a bushel then someone will snap up my cheap apples, mark them up and make a bunch of money for doing nothing. Even if I were willing to do all the distribution myself, if the person conducting arbitrage adds no value to the system (the common argument being that they deserve the money for finding cheap apples and connecting people that demand apples with a supply of apples), it just can't happen. The incentive to make that free money means everyone loses, I don't get to give people cheap apples, people don't get to enjoy cheap apples, everyone is worse off except for the person doing arbitrage.

I don't have an answer, but the idea that the person providing you with a free service owes you anything at all just reminded me of this Simpson's quote I think about sometimes.

---

Comic Book Guy : Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured that I was on internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.

Bart Simpson : Hey, I know it wasn't great, but what right do you have to complain?

Comic Book Guy : As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.

Bart Simpson : What? They've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? I mean, if anything, you owe them.

Comic Book Guy : Worst episode ever.

Depends on the store. Some stores food courts are outside where they check for membership and some inside.

> Costco officially restricted food court access to members in 2020

How much that's enforced is store by store, Costco makes a lot of profit off of memberships so there's an incentive to having non-members have a positive opinion of the store so that they one day become paid members.

Yea, and the entire boycott is virtue signaling (or vice signaling). Giant corporation dared to acknowledge the existence of some people I don't like, GO WOKE GO BROKE ARGGGGGG!!!!

I'm sure some people were legitimately upset, I don't think they have a particularly valid reason to be upset, but people get upset for silly reasons all the time. And then 95% of the people were just like "I'm supposed to be mad because people in my tribe are mad" which is literally virtue signaling. I'm in the group too, see how mad I am!

If you've found a way to participate in society without being constantly surveilled by private companies who frequently leak your most personal information, I'm all ears.