marklgr

I call these books candy for the brain. That audience just love to feel smart, wise or "aware" (depending on the specific subgenre), and these books give them just that -- pleasant feelings. Napoleon Hill is perhaps the poster child of brain candy, and once you realize a lot of today's books are the (supposedly) backed-by-science versions of the same recipe, the whole genre loses almost all interest.

What are the best, up-to-date books to learn Clojure for an experienced developer pretty familiar with FP?

I'm not sure I get the Dirty Writes example about not always being able to rollback: it first says going back to state A would lose w2[x], so it stays in state C. Then it says that aborting t2 can't go back to states B or C, concluding that the scenario thus can't be rollbacked. But what about going back to state A in case of a1+a2?

Obligatory "x slides to zero":

  while (x --\
              \
               \
                \
                 > 0)
       printf("%d ", x);

In the same vein, you can also check sc-im: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

What's the alternative, lock all books related to cryptography lest someone might do something in production? Educating is fine, and people reading relatively advanced technical books like this one should be considered as responsible, I think.

There are downvotes on HN, you just need to reach some karma (500 if I'm correct) before being able to do so.

Exactly. And by disrupting the bazaar, we're not talking small time tactics like some guy creating a handful of accounts, but mass scale abuse with army of bots and scientific methodology to maximize the impact and influence on unknowing readers.

Eg. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/04/nigel-oakes...

That's a far cry from the small stand in the bazzar of ideas.

Oh yes, it's hard. Reputation and ratings are abused by "brigades", groups of people who upvote all posts of other members and downvotes those of opponents. Eventually, it's a batlle of the most zealous and organized groups who are willing to put up the most time in this. These groups can be some volunteers on the Internet, but they can also be professionnal teams working on e-reputation/web-influence, and they know very well how to bypass the (mostly rudimentary) protections against astroturfing. It doesn't look like it, but it's a big business.

You conflate censoring ie. forcing people to shut up, and giving anyone a giant soapbox. One can regret doing the latter without suggesting doing the former.

Please, let's leave Hitler out of the discussion.

Rarely happens here, in my experience. Significantly downvoted content almost always has severe issues, either in form, tone, or quality. We sometimes might happen to agree with some controversial opinion that has been downvoted a good bit, but more often than not the tone was just not conducive to a good discussion. There's probably a few exceptions I guess, but overall the false positive rate is low enough for me.

'histappend' just makes the shell append its history list (from current session) to the history file, instead of overwriting it. This still occurs at exit time, not immediately.

Besides, since you load the HISTFILE at startup, you'll append your whole history (file+session) to the HISTFILE each time you exit a shell, so either it will grow very large quickly, or you set HISTFILESIZE to limit it but as a consequence you'll lose entries (and unfortunately not the oldest).

The option "only append the session entries typed in this session", while still using the whole history (file+session) for searching, is missing, as far as I know.

Those benefits have a cost--financially, emotionally, and time-wise. So the whole question is, is it worth it, past a certain point.

One of your point is that three things to memorize is more difficult than having just one, but sometimes it's just not the case: adding vivid images and funny/silly backstories actually makes remembering easier, as research suggested and borne out by personnal experience.

Now, it could be argued that these images/backstories could be made up for random ASCII chars too, but to me it's just easier to do so with words.

Regarding screenlocks, I tend to use relatively mediocre passwords (nothing stupid, though), since screenlocking is only useful against very casual attackers -- someone skilled and motivated will just get in if they have physical access to the box. But I agree that it's where muscle memory would work best.

I doubt most people type their passwords multiple times on a daily basis, so dismissing mnemonics with "just use muscle memory" doesn't look practical to me. And they're not incompatible, actually: you can eventually commit to muscle memory a diceware-like password, but in the meantime (or if it slips out of muscle memory) you got mnemonics ie. clues.

As far as I'm concerned, I've tested some diceware passwords for some months, and I would say they served me all right. I "name" my passwords by their initials (first letter of each word), so there's no risk of missing a word or swapping some.

Diff, cherry, commit. But avoid blaming.

> insurance is specifically about transferring risk from people who can't handle it to those who can.

It is probably true for eg. real estate insurances, but there are also quite a lot of extremely overpriced insurances for all kind of products (eg. cellphone) that people certainly can afford to lose, but they are fooled by loss aversion and hyperbolic discounting.

> There's a decent argument for drug patents (drugs cost a fortune to develop; makers only recoup losses if they can mark up the cost of drugs massively; competition gets in the way of that), but I'd argue this is a better argument against the whole industry and an argument for more public funding of drug research.

Most people wouldn't go and see a doctor who clearly states that they're just after money, because you know they have tuition to pay back and if they leave money on the table then competition is gonna take it and drive him/her out of business. Public health is obviously a public good, but somehow handing it over to companies with non-aligned interests (eg. pushing some of the dubious drugs to recoup on R&D) is ok.

> multiple cursors: is nothing compared to the confirm flag in `:%s/foo/bar/gc`

Why is that? I'm a long term vim user, and I prefer multiple cursors to 's///gc' for many operations. Unfortunately the multiple-cursors implementation (via plugins) is not flawless, but it's quite handy for standard usage.

Or you press `<C-v>` before the `j`.

Most terminals support bracketed paste, and vim can automatically toggle pastemode based on the special sequences.

Eg. https://github.com/ConradIrwin/vim-bracketed-paste

Sarkozy is prosecuted for several charges regarding the funding of his electoral campaigns (who cost far more than what the law allows), and it is now extremely likely that Gaddafi is illegally involved. Prior to that, Chirac had strong ties with Charles Pasqua, whom he appointed Interior Minister -- Pasqua was clearly linked to the Corsican mafia and he later funded the infamous SAC -- muscle from the mafia to counter the OAS. As for Mitterand, he made it possible for Berlusconi to invest in France via Mediaset and "La Cinq", among others.

So there's a long history of shady ties at the very top of the French institution, pretty often in the form of what was deemed as a "necessary evil", but corruption nonetheless. That's pretty much summarizes the spirit of the French Fifth Republic, anyway: "we go to do what we got to do, and the public wouldn't understand".

The muscle part is mostly historical, up to the '80s maybe. Now it's more about money eg. to fund campaigns. Cf. Berlusconi, Sarkozy.

Scandinavia is the poster child for ethics, and from what I know I would say rightly so, but it's not representative of Western Europe as a whole.

No, they make sure that what's left as unions is pretty much harmless.

I don't know about India, but in a large part of the rest of the world, money funds campaigns and buys influence, which is extremely correlated to winning elections.

Organized crime have had a _tremendous_ influence in Europe, and most countries of the world, up to the very top of governments. In wartime, or when the government is in a weak position domestically, they don't hesitate to resort to the muscle of mafias, and of course this has long term consequences: once they have helped the "state", they have a free hand to do a lot of things -- a lot.

> its allowance for political opposition without fear of retribution as a modus operandi.

Are we talking of the country of COINTELPRO, that killed civil rights activists, or obliterated unions and the US socialist party by force and shady tactics? it's like, you can say what you want, as long as it has zero consequences -- otherwise, prepare to meet some serious shit.

That's Internet culture for you: being lovable trumps pretty much anything else.

> what Erlang's releases do for the ERTS platform

That's the difference between an industrial-strength platform like Erlang, and a dev-centric deployment nightmare like Python. Java is normally on the enterprise side of the spectrum, but unfortunately it didn't get deployment right for quite a long time, even though it appears it's getting there lately.