samcal

Is that what they were getting at? It seems to me like you made up that 80% number just now, to prove your point.

We can definitely agree that as a company grows, it needs more employees. I think the point at issue is that there is such thing as having too many employees. There are multiple opposing forces in tension here, and the tricky part is striking the right balance. I think that GP was trying to say that they hired too many people, and introduced complexity.

I think the title should be changed to "99% of the people who have died to date from Coronavirus had other illnesses". It is irresponsible to frame this as a complete sample of deaths from this virus. In other words, it would make sense that the most vulnerable would die first.

I'm not sure that your first sentence is true. The symptomatic effect that a not-mild virus strain has can help it spread, for obvious reasons. It seems like there's an optimization problem there, with a sweet spot where the virus doesn't kill its host, but makes them cough and sneeze to spread to other hosts.

The reason that it's usually used in this context is that a nation state has a monopoly on violence within its borders. It's a natural extension in "cyberpunk" circles to apply this to digital violence.

Right, the relevant part is that there are 5 people whose annual salary totals $70 million. That is tremendously too high, and allows those 5 people to have undue influence on the society that allowed them to get such power. I'm sorry that I implied that the only benefit of this point was the redistribution part.

I don't expect to change your mind, but I had a very different reading of this article than you did and here are my thoughts on the 4 points that you raised:

1. I don't think it's a big secret that stamping out unions is a key part of modern management. If McKinsey and other consulting firms were management consultants, they should be even more aware of that strategy and would have been in a key position to effect that change over a large number of companies.

2. CEO salaries are certainly relevant to the working middle class, since they are commonly seen as tremendously too high and the extra money could contribute to the middle class' wage.

3. I think the point of that sentence is more like "the amount of effort it takes to become successful is significantly greater than it was when the system worked better."

4. He's not trying to be the technocratic management, he's literally arguing against its existence.

Comparing being in a wheelchair to losing at soccer seems reductive to me. Being in a wheelchair is completely life-changing and having public spaces being accessible is a very good thing for the quality of life of people being in this terrible situation.

The ADA has dramatically improved accessibility for those with mobility impairments:

" When asked whether access to public facilities had improved, 75 percent or more of respondents in 1994, 1998, and 2000 reported that they had perceived improvement. Not surprisingly, the percentage of people with disabilities going out to restaurants regularly has increased from 34 percent in 1986 to 57 percent in 2004."[0]

[0]: https://ncd.gov/rawmedia_repository/f493e262_8a9e_49c8_ad84_... pg 45

Drinking no milk at all is best! Reducing dairy intake reduces Parkinson's disease rate[0], reduces hip fracture rate[1], reduces twinning offspring rate in women[2], and may even reduce Prostate Cancer[3]. You really don't miss it after a while, and the most annoying thing is modifying your restaurant orders to remove all the cheese :/

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24894826

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20949604

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16779988

[3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15203374

They can fly because of their strange gut microbiomes o_O

There are plenty of ways for you to contribute to your society (even labor), you just can't get paid for them: volunteer, clean up, contribute to open-source codebases, etc. I think there's a reasonable argument that the best thing you can do for your society is learn and grow, and we need to support children that wish to do so.

Right, the problem might arise from when you have some people making $9/hr and others making on the order of $1k-100k/hr. Those two groups both occupy and influence the markets, and if you don't keep that gap small enough you risk people not being able to afford the cost of living. I agree that if you paid everyone $10-15/hr, no one would be producing any goods that no one could afford.

Well, the search engines decided that robots.txt was the better approach for them. Which makes sense, since they want control over as much data as possible, that's their profit motive. The jury is still out on whether that's a long-term win-win social contract between search engine companies and the world.

10 years is nothing on the scale of language development, and SV is nothing on the scale of the English-speaking world :) Fear not, I bet there aren't enough words to go around for this to be a big deal long-term.

The answer is yes to all 3! There are cameras and smart boards at the highest level, but chess players are still required to write down their moves. Archaic for sure, but tradition is strong with these old games.

You can do both! But if you supplement vitamin D you wouldn't need to worry about making it out for your walk every day. IANA nutritionist, but I also believe GP's prescribed dose would be unfeasible to get reliably from the sun, especially at northern latitudes.

Right, but those animals aren't as naturally helpless as a domesticated cow.

I believe GP meant that picking Dijkstra's is an uninventive answer to the question of a favorite algorithm, since it's very well-known.

While I agree that the problem is not a very big deal, I think that you might be surprised how difficult understanding compiler errors can be for newcomers.

Another popular remap is a Karabiner option that enters Esc when Ctrl is tapped, and Ctrl when when used with another key. Rebind the Caps Lock key to Ctrl in System Preferences and you're in business.

That's not usually the reason to ship early. Common wisdom is to ship early because it's very possible that you do not have a good understanding of the problem you are trying to solve, or how your users will use your solution. The only way to find a better understanding is to release your product and see how it does. It is usually efficient to find this information out before you spend time polishing the wrong parts of the solution.

Yes, but only recently. The most notable example in a top company is Facebook's spam detection service, powered by their library called Haxl[0]. The language allows some very skilled programmers to build this library that makes it very easy to write spam rules. Lower-level engineers can then write very simple and elegant code that looks sequential but is automatically parallelized by the library.

The service is a big deal, because every action or request that anyone makes on Facebook touches this service.

[0]: https://code.facebook.com/posts/302060973291128/open-sourcin...

Ah, that's where I was confused. I would call both of those solutions mocks.

James Mickens at Monitorama: https://vimeo.com/95066828

Aside from the comedic aspect (which makes the talk incredible), Mickens is a genuinely brilliant thinker and has a marvelous way with words.

Can you elaborate on this? What is the correct way to test external services that may have side effects in Python?

Swift has the same syntax for its nullable types. It's also conceptually similar to Haskell's monadic bind over the Maybe type, where your example would look like

    foo >>= bar >>= baz

The nice thing about this approach is that (>>=) is not specific to the Maybe type, and can be extended to other data structures, include one that passes along error messages in the "null" type through the sad path if it encounters them. This would be in the (Either a) monad.

"Sttwohenge"

It would seem that the point was the unpleasant experience. It's not as if they didn't have the choice to leave.

> There are plenty who don't need to because they work with their hands and plenty more because they have active hobbies.

And I bet those aren't the people about whom the parent was talking. It's not as if the benefits of exercise are unknown or controversial. Everyone knows that they are better off being active. Therefore, people who do not spend time being active are at the very least making a choice, if they legitimately have a more effective way of benefitting themselves, at most making excuses, if they do not have such a way.

Great puzzle! Just finished after a solid hour's work. Had to refresh the old re syntax as well.