kscaldef

I opened a 2007 with a synthetic cork a couple nights ago. It was great. I can't say if they hold up well for decades, but I've encountered no problems with them in the <10 year time scale.

"Having a space to work that you can ignore people is key to getting work done. Constantly being interrupted by people you live with or other people will kill your productivity."

"We wrote the first scoring algorithm at Goalee based on the red-green light. Within a couple of weeks we made our first algorithmic change, and made several quick fix releases to update the scoring methods in the following weeks. By the end of the month, a whole section of our testing suite was almost completely worthless. In a world where cash is king, I wouldn’t mind having those dollars back."

What I don't understand about comments like this is that a whole section of your code, both runtime / deliverable code and test code had become worthless. But, you only seem to view the discarded test code as wasted effort. Either the tests have value or they don't. And, if you write tests, and then discard the code they test, you'll likely also discard the tests. But, that doesn't change whether or not the tests had value, nor whether the new tests that you'll write for the new code have value.

You're arguing against a strawman. The article states that no one is suggesting that students not learn Standard American English. The point it is making is that it is more useful in teaching SAE to recognize that some students arrive at school speaking a different dialect rather than with an incorrect understanding of SAE, and that acknowledging that explicitly is more productive than telling them never to speak their home language.

While parents do, of course, have a huge impact on their children, I think it's overly simplistic to lay the ultimate responsibility at their feet. As raganwald points out (in the other direction), when there are feedback loops at play, the system can re-enforce other traits than you might hope for. Parents with no education in nutrition or no real supermarkets in their neighborhood can't be expected to feed their children well. A father in prison will have highly limited influence on his children. A teenage girl with limited access to contraceptives or abortion (or sex education) may end up a mother well before she's financially, emotionally, or intellectually prepared to perform that job well. Low-income, blue-collar communities may have perverse incentives to tie their children to their existing social and economic status, and resent and resist "modern society" in it's various guises.

Which is to say, I don't think you can approach this from a purely reductionist viewpoint. Yes, a given institution is limited to a degree by its inputs, but it's also the case that each component has the potential to make improvements, even if marginal.

Since we're talking about belief rather than what we can prove, I think it's extremely plausible for the causation in question to go the other way. Given the choice, would you rather date / marry someone who was happy and healthy or someone who was depressed and drinks too much?

Are you attempting to make an argument of the form: A is correlated with B, and A causes C, therefore A causes B?

I'm sorry, but that seems to be about earnings, not about happiness or drinking habits. Am I missing something? (It also says that women experience a penalty, whereas the original article asserts positive correlations for both men and women.)

> as someone who got married at 21, I can honestly say it's the decision I'm most happy about in my life so far.

One might hope that statement was true no matter what age you got married at.

Because unhappy people aren't fun to be around, so people don't choose to marry them? Or because depressed people are negative about their relationships, just like anything else, so don't see them as worth pursuing? It's really not hard to conjecture mechanisms for a correlation.

"Unmarried twenty-somethings are more likely to be depressed, drink excessively, and report lower levels of satisfaction than their married counterparts"

Let's all say it together: Correlation is not causation.

I don't think the law can be submitted as scientific evidence. (One generally hopes the law is informed by scientific evidence, but even that isn't a given.)

Fundamentally, my point was that there's no scientific basis I can imagine for the idea of free-will, in humans or anywhere else. There's simply no physical law that enables it. (It is, of course, an immensely useful fiction, but that's not my point, which was rather that the entire question of "how to behave rationally" seems to rest on an irrational basis.)

> 1. You as a human have the ability to control your reaction to anything.

Do you actually have any support for that statement, other than as an article of faith? I am honestly not aware of any scientific evidence for it.

It is somewhat difficult to divine the precise intent of the author of the article, or of the submitter of the article to HN; but I think it's important to acknowledge that some people are going to use this article to criticize and dismiss anyone who "gets offended" as someone who hasn't reached a certain ideal of detachment. Your very statement that you think it's okay to "act offended", as opposed to "getting offended", gets to my point of the subjective nature of the issue.

This article very early makes the statement that "while getting offended by something sometimes feels good and can help you assert moral superiority, in most cases it doesn't help you figure out what the world looks like." Implicit in this statement is that "figur[ing] out what the world looks like" -- and then accepting that status quo -- is, or ought to be, the goal of all people.

However, assuming one has an understanding of the status quo, and a desire to change it, "getting offended" can be a useful, and rational, response. (I include the quotes because there is an amount of subjectivity in what various people label as "getting offended".) In particular, such responses can serve to educate other people about behaviors which perpetuate the aspects of the status quo which the expresser desires to change.

So, while this article presents itself as a highly rational and neutral argument, embedded within it is actually a deeply conservative point of view.

I was replying specifically to this paragraph:

> I don't care about the 30 dollars turbotax charges me, I'll send 30 dollars straight to the CEO or promise to burn it. What bothers me is that I've been forced to do manual data entry - a pet peeve of mine as a programmer - because the government has been lobbied specifically to be less efficient.

in which the author reveals that he or she uses Turbotax, but finds the manual entry of data into the program onerous. I found this interesting as a criticism, since my own experience is that I virtually never have to manually enter anything into Turbotax. There was no endorsement of Turbotax or other judgement about the primary question under discussion in the article.

And paying out all the other investors, presumably.

I haven't manually entered more than a trivial amount data into TurboTax in years. Most banks and brokerages seem to be on the direct-download bandwagon these days.

I'm not sure, but you may be misunderstanding the article. As far as I can tell, they _are_ following semver, and the discussion is about why they would go to extreme measures to maintain the same major version for 13 years an avoid a binary incompatibility. In other words, it's not that they don't recognize the value of semver, but that they are also considering the cost to users of the varying types of version bumps.

If you don't mind, are you a man or a woman? White or colored?

Not to mention that $25k is considered a completely reasonable amount to spend on a car.

There's no doubt that the wedding industry is a racket (oh, did you want your dinner guests to have forks? That'll be $3 each. Water glasses too? ...) but also there's something to be said for not cheaping out on what's ostensibly one of the most important days of your life. FWIW, we managed to pay less than many people, while getting much better food and drinks than the average wedding and a more memorable, personalized experience by foregoing traditional wedding venues and caterers and instead simply buying out one of our favorite restaurants for the evening.

> Two racks of baby back ribs. Bam, 5k calories, and that's not even all of the food I could eat in one day

I'm not sure how you figure that's 5000 calories. While there's undoubtedly some variation, it would appear that's more in the range of 2-3000 calories.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/nutrition-facts-calories/baby-ba...

> That's a lot of different things to prepare 3-4 times a morning... but my guess is you meant all those things to be 3 or 4 breakfasts, rather than an example of a normal breakfast.

No, I really mean that I ate 3-4 times every morning. I was working from home at the time, though, so it made it much easier to prepare multiple breakfasts while stuff was compiling :-)

Interesting. Honestly, the sheer volume of food you're talking about would be challenging for me to ingest. A _quart_ of chicken lo mein? A _pint_ of peanuts? I'd consider a handful (2-4 tablespoons) of peanuts to be a normal snack.

This is an interesting lesson in the effect of food choices, I suppose. Because, my experience is that as long as I avoid soda and beer, it's really easy to consume <1500kcal a day, also without feeling hungry.

I'm curious what your diet looks like such that you have to take care not to consume 4000 kcal a day.

When I was cycling 100 miles a week, I found I needed about 3500 kcal / day to sustain myself, and it wasn't easy. On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal). Dinners were typically a massive serving of lasagna or similar pasta. Lots of snacks throughout the day. The only days where I would say that I easily got enough calories were when I gave in to the temptation of a fast-food hamburger and milkshake. However, as long as I was cooking at home, it was quite a bit of work to keep up with the calories I needed.

Setting aside the question of whether the subject is actually feeding his body everything he needs (a question that he appears to readily acknowledge as "good skepticism"), I have to wonder about the consistency of statements like these:

    we'll have to give up many traditional foodstuffs like fresh fruits
    and veggies, which are incompatible with food processing and scale.

    Soylent can largely be produced from the products of local agriculture

If local agriculture suffices to produce Soylent, why not just eat food? What concerns me is that it's somewhat unclear what's actually involved in producing the constituent ingredients, whether there are limitations on how much of them you can easily produce, and what the byproducts of the production process are.

The D can be a selling point. Some things D enables:

Working offline is completely transparent. If your employees are on an airplane, or if the wifi at the conference they are at is overloaded, or if the central repository goes down for some reason, people can continue to work normally.

Code review based on asking for permission, not forgiveness. While the UI is a bit horrid, gerrit has been a huge win for us when it comes to code reviewing changes before they are out "in the public". When code review happens after something gets committed to the main repo, it's far to easy for issues to get forgotten about and never addressed. (Of course, Github pull requests have a better UI than Gerrit, but you might have reasons not to want to entrust your code to Github. And, also of course, this isn't strictly something that can only be done in a distributed VCS, but it seems to be a lot more natural in that context.)

> We can manage the dangers of sugar toxicity pretty easily by exercising.

The assertion being made is that that's not true:

"The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity"

(emphasis added)

The second sentence explains and justifies the first. The third refines and clarifies. If you hold that it suffices to merely authoritatively assert a claim, then they are unnecessary, but the point of the third sentence is that, in fact, it doesn't.

Downvoted for generalizing from one blog post to a slam against 300 million individuals. Ironically, you appear to be doing exactly the same thing that you're criticizing.