krapht

At least from the conversations I've heard about this topic, the issue isn't acknowledging that slavery and Jim Crow has caused problems for generations of blacks. The problem comes when measures to address it are discussed, like reparations or quotas. People see it as monumentally unfair because, while being black is a handicap, it's only one of many that are too endless to enumerate. For example, there is no affirmative action for poor whites who grow up in broken homes. There is no affirmative action for simply having parents who are a standard deviation below the population in IQ. Insofar as student spots at high-tier institutions go, here poor whites see favorable action to benefit blacks when they themselves never played a part in their oppression. Black, well-spoken immigrants from Nigeria who never experience discrimination in their home countries get benefits merely by dint of their skin color, and not actual suffering.

Even if you limited it to some way to only US blacks who could prove lineage to an actual enslaved individual, suffering is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. So... why action on this topic is politically impossible. I think color-blind welfare policies based on economic resources would be much more feasible, but... good luck raising taxes to increase the size of the welfare state.

The pain of deploying Python applications is a leading complaint about the language, so maybe you could pick a better example :).

For what it's worth, while on any single contract you might get bad behavior from a contractor, their reputation will matter when they go for a recompete or bid on a new contract vehicle.

Not all contracts are automatically won by the lowest-cost bidder. Yes, it allows corruption on the part of the person doing the hiring, but it's better than the alternative.

You must be somebody who's never had to remove an underperforming colleague on a public project.

What happens is that they get promoted to another team, or put on a project that has absolutely no future, and everyone knows it.

Why is it difficult to remove people? Because in the old days, newly elected executives would clear out the civil service and hire or contract with people that supported their election campaign.

Those games you play are a lot easier to deal with oversight-wise. I disagree with your conclusion. You're assuming in-house doesn't have the same perverse incentives. Also, pricing information can be impossible to discover. You often hear on HN how nobody can realistically estimate large software programs. Under that regime, what good is a firm fixed price contract? What'll happen is that the company, once it goes over-budget, will stop work and/or go bankrupt depending on the legal contract it signed. Then the client has no choice but to add more money into the pot - which suddenly sounds like a cost+ contract.

Huh? It's already happening. It's not labeled AA, but admissions officers do it anyway because women don't want to attend universities where they are a significant majority.

Would it be weird if I named my son Guy Fawkes?

Are you telling me the government is fluoridating my precious bodily fluids?

It would be way cheaper to design the radar detector to have better RF isolation than to go towards an SDR solution.

A modern radar gun operates in the Ka-band, Google says between 33.4 and 36 GHz. Assuming 12 bit samples, your proposed solution needs to process a minimum 3.9 gigabits per second, or ~500 megabytes per second. To do this work in software would require a workstation.

Not to mention I'm not even sure if you can operate most ADCs above the 1st Nyquist zone like would be needed here.

Don't need to imagine, I lived in that world where most utilities I used were shareware with a nag screen on startup...

I don't think it was just "muh War on Drugs"

Stimulants, especially crack cocaine, caused loads of crime in the 80s. I mean, it even does today - addicts crush and snort Adderall all the time for the high.

It's the 5% of the population with addictive personalities that ruins it for everyone else.

Is it wrong? I don't think anyone is up in arms over coffee and cigarettes, and my personal experience is that Adderall is just caffeine without so many side-effects.

Incidentally, coffee and cigarettes is how I managed before getting a prescription.

Bilinguals are already better than the low end translation market.

The rest of the lab/company uses python and collaborating with Julia code is difficult.

What. That really depends on your task. In my field, real data is extremely expensive and if we could generate believable synthetic data, we'd save a ton of money.

Thanks for the links! Interesting reading.

The difference is intent, and this is a core consideration of our justice system.

Define actual harm. You don't seem to hold the time of people who play games very highly.

FTA

> The billion-dollar question here is really whether or not developing another new fighter could result in an overall reduction in cost without creating a reduction in capability.

Since this is HN your bullcrap-meter should be going off here just as if somebody told you throwing away the the Linux kernel and rewriting it in Rust would improve performance, while reducing the number of CVEs - oh and this whole business would only take a year or two while maintaining ABI compatibility with existing packages.

> The A-10 is truly remarkable as are the drones. Meanwhile the F35 is an overpriced hangar queen that should never have been built (the F22 is a solid stealth plane).

No.

Only on Hackernews would somebody be surprised that high-performance system software would be written in C++...

This is a pretty obnoxious way to tell me you don't work on real-time systems without explicitly saying you don't work on real-time systems.

Comparing just to SF is a bit misguided. By the same reasoning, what is your reaction if I told you the average software developer makes $120 in Zurich?

Why are so many formerly desktop applications sold individually per major version now sold as subscription services delivered online through the browser?

The answer is the same.

This is one of those sayings that I don't think is helpful. What it should be is: limit variable scope to the smallest thing it can be.

Nobody is being fooled about global state when you have a singleton database connection, event bus router, or network stack. I don't think your program is better when you pass in i/o functionality to every single class context in the constructor.

Similarly a mega-class that encapsulates everything your program does is also a code smell. There's no point to a private variable when everything can access it.

In my experience, it is more they "share" spam documents with you.

Right. Snow tires, 4WD, and engine block heaters should be standard equipment on cars because obviously things should be designed to handle every environment they might reasonably encounter.

/s

Why are you confusing something that could be used to implement the back-end of a REST API (Kafka) with the idea of a REST API?

Your question makes as much sense as: why is <new database X> any different from SQL?

Is Starlink such a big deal that it would materially affect phased array costs? Cell base stations are already ubiquitous. From my own experience with phased array systems, the big cost is usually in the massive FPGAs that are needed to process all the incoming data in parallel.

I assume you have two eyes, right? What happens when you close one eye and only have monocular vision?

Not much, but it's a lot harder to judge distances correctly. You still can, if you use outside knowledge and perspective, but it's less accurate.

Same for stereo hearing. With two ears it's easier to locate where a sound is coming from. With one ear you can tell if something at constant volume is moving away or moving towards you based on loudness. With two ears you can tell if something at constant volume is stationary or circling around you.

Unfortunately I don't think there are words to describe it. You "just know", because it's an unconscious brain thing.

You could sort of simulate it by rotating your head 180 degrees and noticing how the sound changes. People with two working ears can do this without moving their head.

The effect for music is mostly: it's easier to separate instruments even if they are the same volume, if they are in different spatial locations so the brain can filter against it. Stuff can sound less "cluttered, muddy", but it doesn't help as much as you think in recordings because you as a listener can't move the microphone. I think it would be a bigger deal in small live shows, or music performed in virtual reality where a 3D engine can calculate the audio delay appropriately for each ear, and that difference is relevant because you the listener are close to the musician and possibly moving relative to them.