pytester

If you define "sensible" as "might impact existing MS monopolies" then no, NONE of it is particularly sensible.

Microsoft doesn't love Linux if it interferes with its monopolies. It never did and it never will. That's the whole point.

It didn't turn over any new leaf like it claimed. It just adapted its existing strategy as a means to stave off impending irrelevance in the server market.

Not turning over a new leaf WAS the "sensible" thing to do.

I'm not denying that the market exists. I'm denying that the product google launched in these cases was comparable to the competition. Google code, for instance, was SO inferior to github that comparing the two is actually kind of funny.

You don't.

>Reason, Cato

Reason and Cato are corporate funded think tanks pushing a corporatist agenda. If you look at CATO's front page piece right now, for instance, it's not an investigation it's an opinion piece on how hard it is to complain in the WTO inspired by their backers:

https://www.cato.org/publications/free-trade-bulletin/trade-...

>I disagree. That's effectively how modern journalism works where the news is "objective" by letting each side say its piece.

Even that level of objectivity is rarely met these days. One advantage of this is that it's easy to mandate and enforce.

Honestly, this would probably kill off most false advertising, though. Who would run an advert saying that a candidate had died when on the same advert you could see a response on the same advert from the candidate that he's alive and well?

Even subtle lies would be easily countered by giving right of reply.

>The fundamental problem is that manufacturing lies takes less effort than explaining the truth.

This isn't a new problem and never was. The Spanish didn't destroy the USS Maine. There were no WMDs in Iraq.

Exactly

The problem with free review sites is that once you've built up trust as an honest, objective reviewer, the most effective way to profit on that trust is to violate it.

>Thousands or millions of people used Hangouts, Google Reader, Google Code, or Picasa - they'd have been considered big YC successes.

Other than google reader I doubt any of these would have gotten traction at all without big g behind them.

That only works for products people actually like. I can think of maybe one product where this was a good model.

>People don't use Linux Desktop because it is bad.

There is a reason why it is not offered as an option to be preinstalled on laptops except in a few instances.

That reason is not "because it is bad".

The windows license is a tax on laptops. End of story. I have a dell xps 13 and even I paid it (dell's developer edition laptop is often hard to acquire for some reason).

>Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently.

I rather thought the point of the article was that Microsoft didn't actually love linux but pretended that it did to stave off irrelevance in markets where linux is kicking their ass (i.e. server).

As he said, if they really loved linux and this isn't just another "embrace, extend, extinguish" ploy sugarcoated in PR niceties they'd be porting office and directx and outlook to linux.

Which they're not.

Comments are there to clarify whatever is not easily understood in the code. If that's intent, sure, it's intent that should be commented.

It's not always the intent that needs clarification.

I'm not sure what you mean. Comments are for explaining code that IS there.

Depends on the area of the code you look at, but they can be fairly sparse, yes:

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/PC/python_uwp....

I'd say that redis is probably a better example of gold standard clean C code, though, and they follow the rule of "don't comment unless it's decidedly non-obvious" pretty assiduously:

https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/ae_epoll....

It's good to comment the what too if it's hard to discern what it's doing from the code.

There have been a number of cases where, for instance, I had to call a bizarrely named API and do something unexpected in order to get an unintuitive outcome and in that case a "what" comment isn't such a bad idea.

>I think we should probably just get it over with and accept that composition of functions operating on immutable data structures is just the right way to go.

It can provide an incremental improvement but it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

Comments are often a code smell indicating that the code was written in a hard to understand way. On a top notch code base - the kind that almost nobody works on - they probably should be sparse and mostly unnecessary.

Moreover, when a lot of people are asked to comment they write stuff like "this function does x to y" when the function is named "x_to_y". No shit sherlock comments I call them.

I'd always prefer to have good comments, but I've worked on a lot of code bases where no comments wouldn't really have been any worse.

To be honest there are a lot of processes that don't work for google either but with their treasure chest of money and profits from an easily defended monopoly flowing in, it's really hard to argue that.

I can still remember all of the people who defended the brainteaser questions microsoft and google used to toss at interviewees. If I was right that they were bullshit why wasn't I worth a billion dollars?

I think it's quite hard to pick out which groups will end up being the scapegoat du jour, although there are some hints. I think the hammer is much more likely to come down on Muslims than Jews in the west, for instance.

Whichever group it is, some wealthy people will probably get caught up in it and flee the country.

Precisely. The democratic party would be weimaresque almost to a fault under Clinton or Biden, just as it was under Obama.

If AOC, Sanders and Warren took the reins of the party, they'd not only lose all support from billionaires, they'd go into vicious attack mode, funding whomever they thought could defeat them - both inside and outside the party.

I also wouldn't want to presuppose who the "other" might end up being. The far right might very well embrace Jews, Hispanics and Blacks while they turn on immigrants and muslims. But, there will be an "other" and their "otherness" will become a bigger and bigger deal over time.

>Looking at this now though I think, okay, there's more of us than them.

Their solution to this is 1) divide and conquer and 2) scapegoating.

Which is why a racist boomer robot took your job and gave it to a Chinese millenial mexican illegal immigrant on drugs.

If past history is anything to go by they will support "moderate and conservative" status quo politicians until the point where the people have given up on them and started seeking more radical change - from ever more extreme versions of the right and the left.

At that point the ultrawealthy will seek to form an alliance with the growing popularity of the far right and seek to annihilate the left. This is simple self preservation. The far left will, after all, seek to destroy billionaires whereas the far right will seek out easier targets who look/sound different (muslims, immigrants, jews, gays, people of color, etc.).

The point where things start to become terrifying will be the point where billionaires give up on status quo politicians and start to throw their weight behind the far right. That's when the far right switch from being a bunch of racist, loser skinhead misfits into a well funded, slick and violent ultranationalist nightmare.

As far as I can tell, the current weimaresque neoliberal age is sputtering to a close and we're seeing the beginnings of this pattern re-emerging.

>Of course you should be respectful in a code review

It seems self evident but there are a lot of people who don't believe this and take a kind of perverse pride in "tearing others' code to shreds" so it's worth enshrining in policy if nothing else.

If you look at the actual richest people in the world though, they largely make their wealth off the hard work of others (walmart family), through some kind of gamble (finance), some kind of parasitism (unearned income like interest) or by monopolizing that "magically existing wealth the OP doesn't believe in" (e.g. saudi arabian oil).

For every JK Rowling or Steve Jobs there's maybe 100 who either fully or mostly extracted their wealth while going to great efforts to pretend that they're really just another JK Rowling or Steve Jobs.

>But you can't "fix" greed. Even punishing greed doesn't make people less greedy. That's a bit like thinking that the war on drugs will make people want drugs less

Or that punishing robbing banks makes people do it less?

>Regulations lead to lobbying. And lobbying leads to corruption.

Capitalism is a prerequisite for lobbying. Regulations are not.

>For instance the financial crisis. One big reason for this was regulations forcing banks to make awful loans in Bush’s “ownership economy”.

This is bank propaganda. It's been debunked countless times:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/05/06/the-lie-...

>This led to a situation where free market products (mortgage backed securities and derivatives) were corrupted with so many bad loans.

The bad loans were made by people who knew exactly what they were doing. It was a form of control fraud (sometimes called "bankruptcy for profit").

Wasn't too surprised to see that Bloomberg neglected to mention a pretty self evident reason why tech workers might want that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

I'm pretty sure that if the anti-trust litigation in 2001 hadn't battered microsoft then tech wages would not be as high today. Competition among employers is good for wages, and the fewer and bigger the employers, the less the competition.

Unrelated groups of people acting in self interest without being upfront about it isn't a conspiracy. It's human nature.

There's also pipsi.

>Lending someone money doesn't cost you money, it earns you interest.

In the case of government bonds, barely.

>That may be true, but the interest payments are still flowing in a specific direction.

Sub-inflation interest payments mean that wealth flows in the opposite direction.

>That is increasingly not happening because people are living longer

Life expectancy has dropped for the 3rd year in a row.

>Which would be true if it was mostly being used to pay for national assets like infrastructure, but it's mostly being used to expand social security and medicare.

I think you misspelled pointless wars, but yes, it would be better if it was spent on infrastructure instead...