room271

Ha I agree with the broad point, but as someone who (used to until Covid) commute from South London to Kings Cross everyday, this doesn't seem true timewise until you live quite far South in London. And I live a 15 minute walk from a tube station.

Having said that, I agree with the sentiment!

The model is unsound. Private vehicles on roads in cities cause a ton of pollution (and I don't mean CO2) that is very undesirable. Public/mass transport with good mechanisms for short journeys to and from hubs is a better model. The rise of ebikes and scooters is an encouraging alternative here too.

Yes of course there are times when people need a car, but they are not the majority of the time for the majority of people. And their severe externalities need to be priced in to discourage use.

I would agree up to perhaps £100k (or perhaps £150k in an expensive place like SF) but beyond that I think there are very diminishing returns to wealth and other things, like vision/purpose and relationships dominate decision-making. (Well obviously not for everyone, but for a lot of people.)

We still support it (www.theguardian.com).

I think you should wait if you can. See what the new ARM macs are like. If they're good buy one, else get an Intel one then. It's only a few months.

An alternative that a lot of people do is rent a car just for holiday, as it ends up cheaper. Or just get the train and rent on arrival.

I'm very sympathetic to your criticisms of the UK/US, but I think you are taking for granted the great many freedoms you enjoy (I assume you are from one of these countries but apologies if not) and are being naive (or just perhaps it's driven by cynicism) over the very real differences here.

I'm not sure it's just a China-US thing. I think Europe will increasingly find itself taking a role. India too.

To clarify, while US-China superficially seem like the 'sides'. Really, what I think is happening is that the values of many (especially Western) countries around human rights, democracy, freedom of religion and expression, are coming into conflict with a new kind of Chinese authoritarianism that really doesn't care for these things and is quite willing to subjugate large groups of people in doing so (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, claims to Taiwan, etc.).

Our governments balance these concerns all the time: economic cost vs security risk. It's very normal.

This kind of thing is going to play out a lot over the next few years. It's a tough question: how to marry globalisation with the political realities. When China was very poor, it didn't really matter, or perhaps the assumption was that China would liberalise more quickly than it has. But China, while increasingly mature economically, has not developed proper civil society, human rights, freedom of expression, democracy, and so on. Let us hope they do so as quickly as possible, not least for the sake of the Chinese people themselves. And let us work to improve our example and unity too in countries where we do have these things, however imperfectly.

There is a difference between China is 'uniquely evil' and 'China has an especially bad record on human rights and fair enforcement of the law.' Remember, in China there is pretty much no freedom of thought, including religion. And they are oppressing 3 large groups of people - Tibet, Xinjiang, and now Hong Kong. Of course it is not a binary good/bad thing, but some kind of false moral equivalence between China and Western countries is just as ridiculous and harmful.

Soon you should be able to use one of the newer 5g offerings that work over the air. It might be worth checking this is not already an option for you in fact.

We're using 3s new 5g service and it's £25/month (2 year contract) for what they claim is 400mb/s download speed, although in practice it fluctuates a lot but is always > 100mb/s.

I appreciate the point, but surely both are possible!?

The intention is good, but if the NHS needs more money (which it almost certainly does), for wages or otherwise, increased taxation seems like the better choice.

I suspect loneliness/isolation is the biggest issue for most.

At the moment it's great because I'm at home with three housemates/friends. But I think I'd get lonely pretty quickly if it was just me. Co-working spaces might solve this a bit (never worked in one so don't know how much people socialise).

You shouldn't just copy paywalled content onto Hacker News. It's reasonable to question whether paywalled sources should be posted, but you are stealing content and harming the interests of one of the US's major journalism companies in doing so.

It's really not difficult to think of many ways that would have been an improvement over what they did.

I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. As you say, Buffet himself is asking to be taxed more. It's not really relevant to say that he's giving it to charity here. (Although I think it's great that he is.)

Small changes. If possible, pick a bit of logic and extract it into a (unit) testable function. Release it, see if anyone shouts. Repeat.

Even then, it is often hard to justify this work/find the time. It depends on how long you think you'll be working with the codebase really.

Edit: the above assumes you have something like CD/fast release cycle. If not, then it's not really viable unfortunately.

Thanks. One does wonder why they have tens of thousands of content moderators, none of whom are actual employees.

I think you've missed the broader point. The whole thing is a reminder that many 'progressive' companies like Facebook like to boast about how well they treat their employees - high wages etc - but in reality they outsource most/all of the lower-paid jobs. There's nothing wrong with this(!) but it does mean they lose some moral highground as a lot of people working physically in their offices probably don't have very good terms/job security after all. (Unless, of course, they also require good conditions for their outsourced workers too.)

It does look like they support some kind of left-hand mode in the settings, but it's practically impossible to find this on their website or what it actually means in practice. Very disappointing given about 10% of people are left-handed (including me).

I am not knowledgeable enough to endorse/criticise the plan. But watching the various statements yesterday by the government/scientists it's clear that they do plan for lockdown, just not yet. But it's fully expected in the coming weeks.

Most useful programs have state. As the program scales you need to break it up into parts (or 'modules') with clear interfaces. Usually these parts own state.

The problem with OOP is that it assumes you need lots of these parts. Whereas really, you might have a few or possibly a handful. Use, class-like constructs to represent these, and use normal functions within these, with ideally some kind of polymorphism that also doesn't require classes.

For small programs, don't even bother with this. Just use pure functions for key logic, and unit test those, and delay testing anything with state for as long as possible. When you do need to, leverage interfaces and stubs/fakes (not mocks) to test them.

That's what I do now anyway.

Yes, though you also have to consider default values as a possible source of error.

Yes, except: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality.

Okay, Verizon's consent process is a disaster. After following several options to try and opt out I gave up and left. Which unfortunately means I can't read this article.

But the airlines know that Boeing will never go under because the US government would (justifiably) never let that happen for strategic reasons.

People may not understand how big an achievement this is. Yes you need a lot of good fortune, but there are 7m players of FPL. For most, getting into the top 100k is seen as a good result for the end of the season.

Magus is clearly a massive football fan though - he talks about it a lot on his livestreams etc.

Thanks. Couldn't reply earlier but this is definitely what I meant.