returningfory2

My favorite fact about raindrop paths/watersheds is that they determine most of the political boundary between Argentina and Chile. If the rain at a point ultimately flows to the Pacific Ocean, that point is in Chile; if it flows to the Atlantic Ocean, it is in Argentina. This is article 1 of the original boundary treaty [0] from the 19th century.

The treaty was made before the Andes were fully explored, and so it doesn't handle some interesting edges cases like the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. The field has the property that when rain falls there, it freezes and goes nowhere!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Treaty_of_1881_betwee... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Patagonian_Ice_Field

I emailed hn@ to try to find out, I’ve no idea why.

I don't see why the code is not "learning safe". The code presents the simplest safe way to handle an OOM condition. Seems basically perfect for a _beginners guide_ to manual memory management.

The code in the article is not wrong. It is not unsafe. The author explicitly handles the OOM case correctly. It is true that there are more optimal ways to do it if you do have an OOM handling strategy.

And no, you're not supposed to teach your students the best way to do things at the start. That's not how teaching works. You start with the simpler (but still correct) way, and then work towards the best way. This is why introductions to Rust are full of clone calls. The best Rust code minimizes the number of clones. But when you're introducing people to something, you don't necessarily do the optimal thing first because that disrupts the learning process.

It's a beginners article about memory management. I think it's weird that so many comments here are judging the code snippets as if they're commits to production systems. When writing articles like these there are pedagogical decisions to be made, such as simplifying the examples to make them easier to understand.

This is an article introducing people to memory management, targeted at beginners. The code snippets are there to illustrate the ideas. The author made the correct pedagogical decision to prioritize readability over optimal handling of an OOM edge case that would be confusing to introduce to beginner readers at this early stage.

Talking about "making future changes" seems to be missing the point of what the author is doing. They're not committing code to the Linux kernel. They're writing a beginner's article about memory management.

I feel like this comment is misleading because it gives the impression that the code in the article is wrong or unsafe, whereas I think it's actually fine? In the article, in the case when `tmp == NULL` (in your notation) the author aborts the program. This means there's no memory leak or unsafety. I agree that one can do better of course.

It depends on the specific coworker I send it to. I have coworkers who will review within an hour without any additional prodding, and coworkers who will take up to a week unless I prod.

In general for small PRs I consider a consistent latency of over 24 hours to be long and mention it negatively in peer review.

The problem is that, remarkably, there’s always a reason not to build. A different site in Chile will probably have some obscure species of beetle, or rocks that someone has interpreted as an Indigenous site, or some minor highway that can’t handle the traffic, etc etc etc, so that we can’t build there either.

This is true, but it’s also how basically every country runs their visa programs. They initially admit foreigners in a temporary status and after a few years grant a permanent status. This is how Mexico residency works in general, and even how marriage-based residency works in Colombia. I don’t really see it as much of a problem.

This is a good point. How about a per state auction instead? Where each state gets an allocation based on its population.

Some internet searching suggests fares account for between 25 and 33 percent of the MTA’s revenue. There’s no way the infrastructure for collecting fares costs that much.

This is one of the main criticisms of free fares: in reality the revenue stream from fares is never actually fully replaced, so it just results in the transit agency becoming underfunded. This makes transit worse for existing users who are already paying. The new users you get because of free fares are mostly casual users like tourists who have alternate options, so serving them isn’t that useful and not worth the negative impact on existing users.

Every year thousands of people in statuses like F-1, O-1 and TN get employment based green cards. The idea that you have to be in H-1B or L-1 status to get an employment GC is simply 100% false.

Yep, fully agree.

> - You ll have to dispute a dead family member against a faceless company that conveniently deleted crucial logs.

On the contrary, of all my negative experiences biking in NYC over 10 years, the _only_ time I was able to hold a driver accountable was when they were riding a Revel scooter in which case the "faceless company" took them off their platform. This comment seems to significantly overestimate how easy it to hold human drivers accountable.

The Waymo failure mode of false positives (signals but doesn't turn) seems much better than the human failure mode of false negatives (doesn't signal but turns)!

Yeah. Do people really think that Silicon Valley would be such a huge economy (and a huge job creator for US citizens) if the US had never allowed immigrants to work there?

This piece of misinformation seems to be trotted out every time H-1B is discussed. H-1B is not for "extraordinary ability", the O-1 is. The H-1B is just designed for regular workers in a "specialty occupation". This is how Congress designed it in the Immigration and Nationality Act.

What do you mean by "cash grab"? Are you suggesting this is a scam?

You save money.

Take some time off and live off your savings.

If you want to start making money you go back to the workforce (e.g. fall back to your skills).

I was arguing against the specific claim that a "free and fair" election is one that is consistent with the laws of the country the election is being run in.

In fact, I think your response proves my point. What you're saying is that the specifics of the laws matter - i.e, whether or not a election is "free or fair" depend on _what_ the rules of the game are, not only on the fact that they are the rules.

Yes, I do.

By your argument if a country (e.g. China?) outlaws competing political parties then the rubber-stamp single-party elections are “free and fair” because they are in accordance with law. In general the whole point of a “free and fair” election is that the government can’t just change the law and rules to get the result it wants. There is an independent notion of “free and fair” election that is rightly independent of country specific law.

I feel this is kind of stretching the phrase "free and fair". The election e.g. in Venezuela earlier this year was not "free and fair" because the votes simply weren't counted and made-up tallies were published. This is not what's happening here. Here, there is no doubt that people wanted to vote a certain way and the votes were accurately counted to reflect that.

Sure, but right now we're talking about a situation in which quite a lot of money has been pumped into someone's campaign! This situation is proof that people are willing to interfere in the election. The problem is that once you introduce the idea that the election can be "annulled" a bunch of people are going to be motivated to hack the election to get it "annulled" in some way.

Right, so what about if I don't like a candidate and I intentionally pump 1 million euro into her campaign so she gets disqualified? This is what the parent is asking about.

I appreciate the details, but ultimately I still don't buy it. The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves. Yes, they were likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign. But they still have agency, they liked what they were being presented with, and made the final call themselves on who to vote for.

Could you give an example of what the motive could be then, and how the not-professional-but-sort-of-professional fits into this?

I had thought it was either (a) professional hit or (b) disgruntled family member.

I think it's a little bit misleading to casually drop a "yearly budget" like this, as if this is something we're currently following. In the US the average car emits 4.6t of CO2 per year [1]. If you really think we need to be following this yearly budget the implications on our society (including basically a ban on most car trips being currently taken) are extremely drastic.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t....

I'm guessing they meant Portland Maine, but yeah confusing given the article being discussed. :)

We can have it both ways. In ~50 years in the US, 99% of cars will be electric and 99% of electricity generation will be carbon negative. We can keep our comforts of modern life, like cars, while not damaging the planet.

I accept there is not a story for air travel, yet.