speedplane

> Their obesity exacts great cost to the medical system that we all have to bear, it takes from their productivity that they could offer to others (society and their own family) and benefit from themselves in a multitude of ways.

This complaint runs into a more fundamental dispute: freedom versus collectivism. In a purely libertarian world, everyone would be absolutely free to do whatever they want. In a completely socialist world, one is only free to do what they want insofar as it has no negative effect on others, or if it does, they should compensate others for the harm they cause.

There are problems with both extremes. Absolute freedom can lead to anarchy which will effectively prevent people from coordinating and building anything collectively. But forcing individuals to adhere to a strict cost/benefit analysis for every action stymies creativity and personal freedoms.

When considering a ban on a particular individual behavior (e.g., eating too much), it's perfectly reasonable to talk about the larger social harms (e.g., increased medical costs). But it's also important to consider the freedoms that are being taken away by such a policy (e.g., the freedom to eat what you want).

Western society has never solely been focused on maximizing overall social well-being, it has also balanced ideals of individual freedom with it. China, in contrast, has focused almost entirely on collective well-being over individual freedom. Many people (myself included), would prefer to live in a less successful but free country rather than a more successful authoritarian one.

> Calling out non-professionalism and bashing a stranger's communication style are, perhaps ironically, nice examples of non-professional behavior.

I don't see how this is the case. One can critique a style of communication professionally just like any endeavor. I'm not "bashing" Linus, or even suggesting that he should be less honest. Just that there are far more effective ways to make the same point.

New showerhead with the eco-water-limiter removed.

> That is no different for serverless. You don't magically escape startup times - you need to carefully ensure that cold startup times are low enough, or that you maintain excess capacity to compensate.

Serverless deployments are just another ladder step up the abstraction level, continuing the tradition that hardware doesn't matter. Similar to code compiled into assembly or a garbage collector managing memory. In the common cases, these cases are harmless (otherwise they wouldn't be popular), but they generally hide what's actually happening. Doing a garbage collection on a 200MB app is generally pretty snappy. But doing one on a 32GB server app can take seconds or minutes.

Abstractions like these are fine, as long as the limits of the abstraction are well understood. Sadly, that is rarely the case.

> As long as Linus is blaming the work done and not the people behind it, that's fine.

Certainly, ad hominem attacks are worse than making substantive attacks, but is that really the standard we should judge it by? Instead of a sprawling thread of visceral, wouldn't it be better if he just explained the reasons why the approach is bad in a professional manner?

Writing like this just seems sloppy and non-professional. It's rambling and unclear. It could have been far more effective if written point-by-point with far less emotion.

>> data-raped

> Please don't dilute the meaning of words like this.

It's a bad term, but telling people how to speak provoke's backlash and resentment. It's more effective to explain the effect phrases like this have on people (as you did) and let them make their own decision then telling them to not say it.

> I have been learning how to code on windows, python can be downloaded easily from their website and is a lot easier than Java

Python is a great language, but the most serious issue with it right now is the split between Python 2 and 3. If you're just learning Python now, you're probably learning Python 3. But if you get a job working with Python, you will probably have to work with their Python 2 codebase, and eventually have to do the arduous task of converting 2 to 3.

This conversion is not difficult on an intellectual level, but it's incredibly time-consuming and boring, kind of like fixing Y2K bugs. Hopefully the Python community eventually comes out of this 2 to 3 disaster alive.

> I'm at a company that minted over a thousand millionaires, assuming they held onto their options.

Okay, so that requires the company to be sold for at least $1B, the employees collectively own 100% of the company, and the stock is evenly distributed. Given the investor's share and uneven distribution among employees, for there to be 1000 millionaires, the company would have to sell for at the very least $5B (probably much more). There are only a handful of companies that have sold at that level, certainly not common.

Who said anything about violence? No one should try to stop fraud with violence, except in extreme circumstances. The answer to fraud is to simply repay the person who was defrauded... someone who bought a fake lottery ticket should just get their money back, there is no need to resort to violence.

You seem be assume that "free exchange" simply means no one is physically stopping you from making a trade. That isn't what free exchange means. Free exchange means that two consenting parties trade known goods without undue influence. If someone puts a gun to your head to buy something, that isn't free exchange. If someone sells you a fake lottery ticket passing it off as real, that isn't free exchange. If someone sells you something they don't actually own, that isn't free exchange.

I was more interested in the cat claim.

> But if you to try to objectively answer a more abstract question, "Is it better for humans to live to 150 years of age rather than 75 years of age?", I don't think there is objectively a right answer.

This answer depends on the definition of what is "better".

Is it "better" to have two "medium" happy people or one "very" happy person? On a societal level, should we be measured by collective happiness (the sum), average happiness, the most happy person, or the least happy person? Or maybe "happiness" should not be the measure at all. Evolution dictates that the "best" is the one that survives the longest as a species, so maybe we should tune society simply for long term survival, regardless of happiness. Or maybe you believe in god, and "be fruitful and multiply" is the standard, so the more the better, regardless of other criteria. Maybe the answer is to maximize GDP. Or perhaps seeking knowledge is the pinnacle, so any society that builds the largest pool of knowledge is the best.

There are countless other ways of determining "better". Take a philosophy course and dig into it.

> As a manager I do not accept that team members skip PTO.

Sure, but as a manager, you should probably know that giving people engaging work, with meaningful impact, and significant personal growth opportunities is often a greater motivator than providing additional days off.

> If I want to bet that the man offering me a lottery ticket is accurately conveying the odds, and you don't want to let me make that decision because you just overheard him discussing the fraud he was about to commit against me, physically stopping us from making that exchange by use of force is a restriction of my freedom to make that bad decision.

If someone wants to sell your friend a lottery ticket, and you know with certainty that the seller has no intention of paying out a winner, this is not free exchange. It's just a lie and simple fraud. Furthermore, as a friend, you should probably at least try to intervene. The same is true of government (or any authority).

Making a fraudulent trade is not "free exchange", legally, morally, or linguistically.

> "Off-time" is not an adversary to great work life, productivity and innovation. Some would even claim the opposite was true.

I don't disagree, we're not talking about absolutes here. But it's reasonable to consider that, all other things being equal, someone who loves their job may be less inclined to take as many vacation days compared to someone who hates their job.

Advocating for longer vacations, leisure time, and simply being disconnected so folks can develop their interests outside of work are important. However, most people spend most of their non-sleeping life at work. Accordingly, making work itself more fulfilling can often have a far greater impact than simply requiring less of it.

> Null is also the absence of a value altogether.

In digital logic, there is no such thing as an "absence of a value". Everything must be represented as bits one way or another. Computers can certainly represent higher level concepts like an "absence of value", but at the lowest levels, they must be represented by some bit-stream. Types are generally the way that higher level concepts can be translated from low-level bitstreams.

> You can also avoid using separate process for each client (NodeJS).

Yes, NodeJS solves one problem by having low process overhead, but it also fails to take advantage of parallelism in modern processors. Ideally, I'd like to see a system with both.

> If you assume that capitalism is intended to work not in the way sought by the people who drove the move to capitalism but instead according to idealized economic theories much younger than capitalism, sure.

I actually agree with you. Much of the foundation of capitalism was based on flawed assumptions ("perfect information" being a major one). Huge amounts of abuse were allowed to be perpetuated as a result, and it's fair to call into question the legitimacy of the entire enterprise.

That said, there are good ideas in capitalism, and we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

> I claimed that regulation is antithetical to free exchange -- if you restrict me from trading something then I am not free to trade it

Not quite. If you buy something without knowing what you're getting, that's not free trade. An airline selling a ticket on an unsafe plane but calling it safe is fraud, and fraud is not free trade.

A "perfect" regulation would only limit fraudulent trade, but allow all other types of trade.

However, because we don't live in a perfect world, regulation will inevitably limit some legitimate trade as well as fraudulent trade. A "good" regulation is one that limits enough fraudulent trade to more than compensate for the legitimate trade that it inhibits.

> This 95% Green solution is going to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than a 100% Green solution.

Right now our energy is roughly 5-10% green. Arguing whether green energy should eventually be 95% or 100% is purely pedantic at this point. There is approximately 95% of common ground between green energy purists and pragmatists. Lets get in line.

> I dunno the New Left's participation in anti-nuclear politics will hopefully be remembered as a horrible and irresponsible mistake.

I suspect that the minority of leftists that criticize nuclear energy will be remembered far less than those on the right that say global warming is a hoax.

Each language can define NULL differently. However, because eventually it gets compiled to machine code, it does indeed need to be represented by some value. Most languages represent that value as 0, but not always.

It's better to think about NULL as a value plus a type. The value "False" may be 0 with a boolean type, just as NULL may be 0 with a pointer type.

> Americans intentionally don't utilize a large number of paid vacation days each year. Work guilt may play a role

That is a plausible but pessimistic view of the situation. The more optimistic reading is that american workers derive personal pleasure and fulfillment from the work itself. If you are happier working in a fulfilling job than sitting idly on a beach, then it would make sense you wouldn't use all of your vacation days.

Work guilt probably does play a role, as does corporate policies that subtly punish vacation, but I would also bet that some percentage of workers actually enjoy what they do.

> your "capitalism" definitions can be pointed to as potential causes of the 737 fiasco

For capitalism to work as intended, there has to be "perfect information", i.e., no lying and everyone knows what they're paying for. This is obviously a practical impossibility: companies and people lie, and most consumers buy things without fully researching or knowing what it is that they're getting.

One purpose of regulation is to improve the situation. If the FAA certifies a plane as safe, then consumers can rely on that certification and don't need to do their own safety research. They still don't have "perfect information", but it's a lot better than without it.

Good regulation is not "antithetical" to capitalism, it is often necessary for it.

I think you're missing the larger point. It's mostly the large companies and those in power that create these rules. I'm not siding with either side here, but simply saying that "the rules are the rules" is not enough if the rules themselves are wrong.

If we want to make it harder for unions to organize, then she was rightly fired. But ff she was fired for union organizing and we want to protect that activity, then she was wrongfully fired.

> The economic case against nuclear is largely a byproduct of falling prices from fracking.

Fracking changed the economics of all energy production, not just nuclear. The economic case against nuclear is that it can potentially wipe out everyone in a 50 mile radius. The cost of a nuclear power plant is therefore proportional to the surrounding real estate value.

> while other languages are 10x or more faster than python in some benchmarks it's very rare that computation time dominates server latency

Most applications spend most of their time waiting for the database or network. I suspect the fastest programming languages are those that have the lowest thread/process overhead. If most apps spend their time waiting, then a language with 10X lower process overhead can handle 10X more processes.

> arrays that are not Empty but contain zero elements

What is an array that is not empty but contains zero elements?

> was creating python 3 a good decision for python community? ... I know that evaluating this kind of thing is hard

I don't think there is any question here: Python 3 is a complete disaster. Years and years of engineering effort wasted on changing string libraries. Sadly, the Python leadership refuses to acknowledge the failing, perhaps because such an acknowledgement would challenge their omnipotence ... it would, and it should.

> I have a Toto toilet that uses something like .7 gallons a flush and I am fairly sure is easily capable of flushing a cat

I think you owe it to this forum to provide a citation.

> All employees are free to leave...

That's a pretty poor excuse for misbehavior. Similar to "if you don't like this country, you should leave".