Juul is the first mass-market e-cigarette product I'm aware of that isn't directly or indirectly owned by a company that was already in the traditional tobacco market.
12,994 karma · joined June 4, 2008
But that's generally not what's being argued. What's usually being argued is something more like "it is incontrovertibly and undeniably proven beyond all doubt that evolution has deeply and unalterably hard-wired female humans not to be as good as male humans at programming computers, and therefore it is an inescapable conclusion that we should stop caring whether men outnumber women among computer programmers, and we should immediately cease all efforts to teach/encourage more women to be computer programmers."
I'm not even exaggerating. This is why people want to make these kinds of "well, women and men are different, you know" arguments. The "well, women just aren't as good at this" or "well, women just aren't as interested in this" arguments have been tried in multiple fields, and have fallen over flat in the face of actual empirical evidence over and over and over. But people keep desperately trying to revive them and say "Ah, but this field is different! The females really are inferior and less interested in our field, and we have science truths to back it up!"
Also, here's a takedown from someone who just did basic math back during the initial burst of drama around Damore's "diversity memo". It's very hard, once you check the math, to accept that we have any basis for asserting that observed ratios of men and women in STEM have a biological basis:
https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3Awikisteff%20sin...
That's a link to a date-based search. Scroll until you see "if there were large biological gender differences in STEM, you'd see it", and then start reading up from there for the replies.
I have to link you to that, because the thread was in reply to, disagreeing with, and debunking a tweet that's now deleted, and that apparently breaks Twitter's threading. The deleted tweet being debunked, for what it's worth, is from a user whose Twitter bio says she is "founder and editor" of Quillette, the site hosting the claims of the author of the "uncomfortable truth" paper this HN thread is about.
Would you argue that Social Text would, in that situation, still have some sort of duty to publish the paper? Would you argue they'd have a responsibility to give it a prominent, permanent, place in their archives to avoid accusations of having "disappeared" it? Would you argue that they'd need to air that dirty laundry in public? If they did air it all publicly and honestly, would you treat that as a form of bullying of Sokal and his accomplice(s)? Remember: that would be the powerful journal leveling accusations of deliberate fraud against an academic who submitted the paper, and accusations of, at the very least, dishonesty and violation of review processes against one of their own.
Here's a brainteaser: spot all the flaws in that chain of "reasoning".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0
The speaker formerly worked at Google, and around 8:55 in the video relates the story of being on a hiring committee that was known for being tough on candidates. And a recruiter once forwarded a set of interview packets to them, and they voted "no hire" on all of them. The recruiter then revealed to the committee that they'd been given their own packets, slightly anonymized, from when they were interviewed, and had just voted against hiring themselves.
They need to know you're the sort of interviewer who likes to be the organ grinder while everyone else is the dancing monkey. Many common interview questions give this away quickly, which is useful.
But that's a big "if" -- too many drivers are like your friend, and work themselves up into a blood-boiling rage at the thought of someone "cutting" by engaging in proper zipper merging. Tell your friend the problem is he's thinking of the merge as a competition with a "winner" (person who ends up in front) and "loser" (person who ends up behind), instead of looking for the option that maximizes efficiency for everyone.
This argument basically says that if the computer only does it better in 99.99999999999999999% of cases, the correct solution is to have the computer handle 0% of cases. Which makes no sense.
(also, almost all "automatics are terrible at anticipating what needs to happen" arguments are based on decades-old experiences, as if automatic transmissions are fixed in time and incapable of improving)
So I don't find anything magical or special about having to manually manage the gears when a computer could do it more efficiently and relieve me of the need to worry about it. When I'm driving I want to be focused on the road and traffic around me, not micromanaging the way the engine is transmitting power.
Or maybe to go with a car analogy: what if we took away your accelerator pedal and replaced it with a crank attached to a fuel pump, so you had to constantly turn the crank to get fuel, and turn it faster or slower to manage the throttle and the amount of fuel going to the engine? You'd be much more deeply "connected" to your car that way, but would you rhapsodize about what a wonderful experience it was? Or would you see it for what it is: a task that can be done with more efficiency and less distraction by a different approach?
Each CPython VM stack frame has three tuples associated with it:
* co_consts is the constant/literal names local to the frame
* co_varnames is all other names local to the frame
* co_names is the all nonlocal names referenced in the frame
Under the hood, Python creates a structure called 'fastlocals' which is basically an array of (pointer to) PyObject, where the PyObject at each index of the array is the value corresponding to the name at the same index of co_varnames. LOAD_FAST and STORE_FAST are extremely simple opcodes; they do a tiny bit of error checking, refcount management (increment on load, decrement on store), and then just manipulate 'fastlocals'.
So, for example, 'LOAD_FAST i' consists in its entirety of:
1. Grab the PyObject at fastlocals[i]
2. If it's null, throw an UnboundLocalError
3. Otherwise, increment its refcount and push it to the top of the frame's evaluation stack.
The truth is that there's no shortage of competent people who'd like to be airline pilots. There's arguably not even a shortage of competent people who already possess the training and credentials. There is a shortage of people who are willing to put their expensive training to use at the near-starvation wages offered for entry-level positions with US airlines. So people either don't bother learning to fly, or if they do, they go sign with Asian or middle-eastern airlines, which have been expanding and are willing to pay good salaries for US-trained pilots.
Would you argue that pilots who demand more money than a US airline is willing to pay "don't understand how much they're worth"?
Upper management at the time was interesting. A lot of people who didn't necessarily understand the internet or technology in general, but knew they didn't, and were willing to hire and trust people who did. That was the magic sauce that led to Django, and a lot of the other innovative stuff. The owner of the paper, for example, had his secretary print out his emails and bring them into his office; then he'd write his replies on a manual typewriter, and hand them back to be typed into a computer. But he'd also managed to ride the wave of first the cable TV/internet boom (by setting up a cable division) and then the web boom (by hiring a team of people to build a first-class news site and giving them more or less free reign to do it right).
And that was how you got the heyday of the Journal-World. All sorts of interesting experiments in using the web to enhance journalism, close collaboration between the newsroom and the tech team, and a ton of cool things accomplished and a bunch of industry awards, etc. I actually had a byline at one point, on a feature that's now gone because Django got retired (a data-journalism project tracking the impact of flu during the H1N1 scare).
And other news organizations were happy to pay for the software to do their own version of that. We had both hosted and on-prem versions of it, and recommendations for hiring developers and training them to work on it, and as far as I could tell they seemed pretty happy to have something that had been designed at and by a newspaper (as opposed to other news CMS products, which often have their first encounter with a journalist at the time of production deployment).
But all good things come to an end. There were some management shakeups, and a lot of the tech team (myself included) left for greener pastures. A little while after that, I heard the CMS division was being shut down and everyone in it laid off; then I heard another company had made an offer to acquire it. As far as I know, Ellington (the Django-based news CMS) is still available today as a supported commercial product. But the Journal-World no longer uses it or, to my knowledge, maintains an in-house technology team like it used to.
Here's INPLACE_ADD:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/874809ea389e6434787e7...
And here's BINARY_ADD:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/874809ea389e6434787e7...
They're almost identical :)
Spying and intelligence are still, in the present day, seen as a matter of national defense. NSA is explicitly under the Department of Defense, for example. CIA is civilian, but is still framed as serving a defense/national security purpose (thus Constitutionally justifiable) and scoped to be foreign-facing (domestic intelligence is primarily the FBI's province, "necessary and proper" for enforcing federal law).
Would you like to revive George Washington and tell his ghost that his spy rings were unconstitutional?
People really do not realize how much maintenance commercial aviation involves.
In order to be allowed to fly in the US, and other countries, you better believe United does maintenance.
This is one of my favorite reddit comments ever, and goes over aircraft maintenance from a car analogy, explaining what you'd have to do to a car in order to meet the mandatory maintenance standards imposed on airlines as a matter of law:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/3v1hzj/how_do_old...
Truth is, things that are actually objectively wrong (like flaky first-gen version of this keyboard) get fixed, and the rest is... subjective. I'm on a MBP with touch bar and I don't have a problem with it. I've never particularly liked any laptop keyboard, and at my desk I always plug in a mechanical keyboard, but I just don't get the pure frothing-at-the-mouth hatred for this thing. It's a laptop keyboard. It's not the best one I've ever used, but it's also nowhere near the worst.
My feeling is that this is the latest iteration of people wanting some particular design choice they disagree with to finally be the thing that opens everyone's eyes and proves that their hatred of Apple was perfectly objective and rational all along. But it never actually seems to, y'know, happen. And every year or two they all move on to writing endless articles about some new thing that will finally be the one that destroys Apple once and for all.
That one is a bit more interesting, since in the modern day there are populist-economic wings of both major parties, though with very different approaches to implementing their ideas, surrounding a more laissez-faire "center".
Especially given that AutoModerator exists and can be set up to automatically remove posts or comments based on particular key words or even regex, and odes it so fast that not even the various "view removed reddit" services can show you what was there.
Reddit also doesn't have a built-in button to ban a user while you're looking at the offending post or comment; you have to go to a separate "ban users" page, and copy/paste the username to ban.
The official mobile app, so far as I can tell, doesn't have ban functionality at all. You can only approve/remove/mark spam and lock threads.
Moderator communities have worked around this, somewhat, with browser extensions that provide mass-remove and inline ban functionality, but they're only a partial solution. The mass-remove in the mod toolbox extension, for example, isn't always able to get everything, because reddit itself only partially loads busy comment threads, and the extension can only remove comments that are actually on the page. So you have to remember to force-load the whole thread and sometimes click through the "we don't care that you wanted all the comments, click to another page to see the rest" links.
The mod toolbox extension (/r/toolbox) also adds some pretty essential things like macros for common messages that need to be sent to users, shared notes all the moderators of a subreddit can see, etc.
If you show up to play a round of golf, and your opponent has a nice set of professionally-made clubs while you're using some sticks you carved by hand, you're probably going to lose, badly. But that doesn't make golf "pay to win" -- at the competitive level of golf, everybody has made the investment in that baseline of good equipment, and you're back to practice and skill as the differentiator.
Magic is similar. If you show up to a constructed tournament with whatever you could cobble together from a few booster packs, yeah, you're going to get crushed by people with competitive decks. But at the competitive level, everybody has made the baseline investment to have access to the full card pool, at which point you're back to skill (of designing/choosing/playing decks) as the differentiator.
Anyway. Top-tier Standard decks are in the couple-hundreds-of-dollars range, and even if you just go out and get the cards for one of those decks and nothing else, there's enough value in the cards that you can trade/sell and get back not 100% of what you paid in, but enough to make switching to a different deck not all that bad.