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One of the best software engineers who worked for me was the guy who deleted the most code. He absolutely produced negative net lines of code, and it was a running joke that we were paying him to write code, but he was doing the opposite.

I'm always amazed at people who think that programming languages and typing and editing are the hard part of what software engineers do. I spend much more time trying to understand the problem that I'm trying to solve, and to make decisions about how to do that in a way that I won't regret.

I think the objection to statistics about immigration (or minority populations) and crime is that they are inherently misleading because they generally compare crime rate to the population as a whole (as you did, jumping to the per capita), rather than to equivalent socio-economic groups. Consider two headlines: "immigrants commit most of the violent crime in this country" vs "most violent crime in this country is committed by poor people, and most immigrants are poor". How you phrase the headline makes a big difference in how people might think about policy.

I think they could be measuring the wrong thing. While it may be true that the air temperature doesn't change the biology of the virus, air temperature definitely changes human behavior (what activities we do and where we do them).

Ruby played a big role in helping me rediscover my love of programming, and it also acted as a bit of a gateway drug to think much more about language design and to explore a lot of other languages. I don't use Ruby much anymore, but it will always have a big place in my heart.

This made me laugh, because I actually am planning on making a transition to woodworking. My house is paid off, and I can live on a fairly small income that I can probably generate mostly from passive income. If I can actually supplement that with building furniture, bonus. If not, then I still get to build furniture.

"This one weird trick copy editors don't want you to know..."

I think journalism has to go this way because of what it competes with.

While coq is an automated theorem prover, I've had a tremendous amount of fun working my way through Software Foundations[1]. The vast majority of the proofs are assembled "by hand", but with coq verifying steps. For someone like me who has a "late in life" fascination with mathematics, doing proofs using coq has been fantastic.

[1] https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/

I really enjoyed reading the first chapter, and I was looking forward to purchasing the book, but like others, I'm really turned off by your purchase process. Entering email and getting to a payment page where the easy ways to pay disappear below 20 EUR is really, really annoying. If you were to fix the purchase process and publish some sort of chapter outline of your book, I'd almost certainly purchase a copy.

We have Briggo[1] here in Austin. The one I used is in a private large office building, and it's actually really convenient, since I'll generally order by app from the parking lot and be able to pick it up when I walk in. I think the coffee is a lot better than the normal "Coffee from the multigallon thermos in the cafeteria". I've heard that the biggest part of their R&D investment wasn't actually in the arm, but rather in figuring out how to get the machine to do as much of its own maintenance as possible. They could use more investment in their mobile app, which they've redesigned a couple times but which is still horrible.

[1] https://briggo.com/

Being in prison for part of your life doesn't rule out passing your genes off to your kids. Your post made me do a bit of googling, and it looks like about half of the men in prison have kids before they go in. Some will certainly have kids after they are out.

That seems like a very strong statement. The air pollution from rubber and brake dust is minimal relative to the emissions from combustion engines. You seem to be arguing "there's no way to continue cars because we won't get them to 100% clean and silent". It's not that having quieter cities and no pollution are bad things, but having those as your goals eliminates many good options that address other laudable goals (like substantial reductions in pollution and noise from EV's).

Those books were both brilliant. I don't recall his tech books being "bad", at least in terms of being somehow worse the the other Windows programming books that several large publishing houses cranked in volume.

First - I'm really glad that you are alive to post this, and it sounds like that wasn't a given based on your story.

I wanted to comment on one of your last sentences - that "natural recovery" doesn't warrant attention. I think there's a certain bias here given your own experience. If you go twelve step meetings, you'll find people who's lives were on the brink of ruin and who have pulled themselves back by living the steps. But I think even NA/AA would acknowledge that the percentage of people who walk into an meeting once who get sober and continue to attend meetings is small (if I had to proffer a guess, it'd be less than 10%, but I don't have a good basis for that). So the question is really "what happens to the other 90%"? Some will certainly die from their addictions, destroying themselves and the lives of their loved ones in the process. Others are going to "grow out" of their addictions. It may be that the percentage who grow out of their addictions is actually higher than the AA percentage (and that seems to be what the article implies). That actually _does_ merit attention (and I think we'll find that in most cases the growth mirrors some of the steps that you'd see in AA, just without AA).

Of course, those that _don't_ grow out of their addictions would be far better served working a program, and we don't have a good way to distinguish which group any addict is in, so that puts us back to where we are, which is in not knowing the best way to treat addiction. :(

(Personal note: I was clearly an addict and alcoholic in my late teens and twenties, and this period of time involved multiple trips to rehab, as well as AA/NA meetings. None of that "worked" for me, but what worked was the development of some additional maturity (late 20's) that was able to see a life that I wanted which was incompatible with my behavior. As an adult in my 40's, nobody would define me as an alcoholic or an addict. I'll occasionally drink, but drinking to excess really just doesn't fit into my life anymore.)

I think you're broadly labeling "us addicts" here, which is sort of the point of the article. I outgrew my addiction (but I'm not suggesting that anyone who needs help just "wait it out!" - see below).

The article is essentially asserting that of the people who clinically qualify as addicts earlier in their lives, about half of those people don't by the time they are in their 30's, and that the pursuit of treatment doesn't necessarily correlate to that outcome.

That isn't to say that there are people who absolutely need to treat addiction as a disease, and that viewing the next drink as an existential threat isn't an important part to their recovery.

When I was a teenager and in my 20's, my drinking and drug use was out of control, and I did enter treatment including 12 step programs. Those weren't particularly effective at keeping me sober in part because of the mantra that "hey, you have a disease, and you don't have control". That's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy to a younger brain.

What ultimately happened to me was that the life I wanted wasn't compatible with drug and alcohol abuse, and I moved on in my mid-20's.

I do occasionally drink now (in my 40's), but there's no fathomable way that I could see myself going back to what I did when I was young, and no clinician would diagnose me as an addict or alcoholic today.

So yes, the article is dangerous if you are part of the subset to which it doesn't apply. The question is whether we should be treating all addicts in the same way. One answer might be "use the disease model on all addicts because it may apply". Another might be to try to treat this as a leaning disorder.

Right now, we don't know the answer, so I agree with much of your practical advice: if you need help, it's out there, in the form of free communities of 12 step programs, as well as medical treatment programs.

Obviously when humans designed the universe, we didn't use the metric system. We used English units, which is why the speed of light is 1 foot per nanosecond!

(Actually that's a _really_ close approximation and very helpful in reasoning about special relativity).

I love that. I definitely have more recipes than cooking skills. Better head to the kitchen!

I'm a little surprised by the combination of a study on low dose (1 g) of fish oil coupled with the recommendation to get fish oil from diet. When I eat a tin of sardines, I'm certainly getting more than a gram of fish oil. Am I missing something?

The best piece of this post is hidden in a sentence in the middle, and I wanted to call it out:

If cost is an issue, go to a community college BEFORE going to a 4-year engineering school. Community colleges are a fraction of the price of a university.

Any EE degree is going to require a significant investment in calculus, some diff eq, linear algebra, chemistry, physics, and likely some humanities.

With some clever coursework you can do ~2 years of full time EE coursework at a community college.

PayPal _was_ legitimately owed money. I don't think that's at question - when you die with a debt, that doesn't "erase" the debt. The issue here isn't "dying with debt", it's PayPal's phrasing of this - "Hey, being dead is a violation of your agreement". A less insensitive letter that indicated that there was a $3200 balance against the estate wouldn't have raised any eyebrows (unless UK credit laws are very unusual).

I'm 48, and I'm starting to crank up font sizes on my monitors. I can jam lots of tiny font on my monitor if I wear reading glasses, but I then end up much closer to the screen than I'd like.

A college tuition in what sense?

College degrees have different values - an engineering degree has a very different value than a history degree. Since the tuition at four year schools for both degrees is (largely) the same but the financial value after graduation is different, I would argue that one of those degrees is a luxury degree while the other is not.

If you're arguing "the middle class should be able to afford college tuition without debt", that's a slightly different argument, but I'm not sure it has any merit (given the above that students make _choices_ about what degree to seek and that some degrees are luxury degrees).

A better headline might read "I wrote a review on Yelp in which I accused a doctor of committing insurance fraud on other patients that I had no actual knowledge of, and it made my life a nightmare".

Courts have established that you can write negative reviews and that they fall well within rights to freedom of speech. She isn't being sued for giving the guy a one-star review and saying "This place sucks". There's one sentence she wrote that has cost her $20k:

"I suspect that this doctor gives unnecessary procedure to a lot of people and then charges the insurance sky high prices and no one knows the difference."

Independently of the background checks that European companies might not do, any European government almost certainly knows that he's a felon and would bar entry. That would preclude showing up for an in person interview or ever showing up for a company event.

I think that's a broad over simplification. You're a "user" of your compiler or interpreter. Is it the act of typing that makes it programming? We've had a definition and model for computation since Turing that is largely universal, so as long as the language and rules that you are following is Turing complete, I think it could be argued that using that language is by definition programming.

I'd also argue that a game like cargo-bot (which is effectively a game-ified assembly language) is very much programming, even though you do nothing but drag some boxes around.

I think this is an incredibly valuable skill, but it's one that is sometimes looked down upon because many people have negative emotions around "being sold to". Good sales is really about learning to ask the right questions at the right time, which is something that engineers should in general learn to be good at anyway.

What other things do we, as an industry, have a responsibility to pay attention to? Environment? Health and sanitation in developing countries? The civil war in Syria? HIV? There are a variety of areas where tech could play an important role in changing the lives of (b|m)illions of people. How do you draw the line? What makes torture (which I would argue is completely unethical but directly affects few people) more important than hunger (which isn't an ethical issue but which clearly affects millions)?

I really enjoy their podcast despite the fact that I don't really do much .NET these days. They have excellent guests, a good range of topics, and makes for a very nice commute listen.

To the point of the article, having 5000 professional archers likely does NOT translate to 25,000 arrows in the air at once, but rather some number lower than 5,000.

You're one of the first people I've seen on the internet actually admit this. Over the last month, as the price has dropped, many people have pointed out "sure, it's dropped - back to November price levels". Which is fine if you invested a year ago, not so much if you invested in December. When I sold six weeks ago, there was someone on the other side buying, and they are clearly not happy now.