vacri

negative a few grand. I supplement my mother's retirement income a bit, and give a regular-but-small amount to charity.

It's pretty easy to set up - just contact your bank and get an automatic monthly transfer going. I did it online, and haven't had to worry since!

Hawaii has no state borders, drawn now or in the past, so I'm not sure why that's relevant here, given we're talking about the article's byline. Alaska also has no state borders, though it does have national borders.

In any case, if you were born several generations ago and still don't consider your childhood to be in the distant past, remind me not to get on your bad side :)

Nah - in the OP's link, there was an overlap between michigan and wisconsin that was resolved by the supreme court in 1936.

> You base your State shapes on magnets and not cartographers?

You can see the transfer of a few square miles on a continent-scale map like the ones in the article?

The North/South Carolina border change represents about 700 sq miles changed over. The smallest state in the US is Rhode Island, with 1.2M sq miles - four orders of magnitude more. South and North Carolina are 30M and 50M sq miles respectively - five orders of magnitude more than this parcel of land.

Do you think that miniscule corrections every few decades are really enough to counter the author's claim that the state shapes were 'drawn in the distant past'? Seems excessively pedantic to me - especially since the shapes involved didn't change all that much.

Well, it's more that the shapes of the states were pretty much all set back in the 19th century. Trying to construe a miniscule alteration between states as "the state lines are still in flux" is pretty disingenuous. Doubly so, given that the edit made this past january was about making the state lines truer to the demarcation set out back in the 19th C.

These little corrections are tiny, and there's been no state border changes of any real significance for almost a century.

The transfer of a few acres of land does not a state shape make - sellers of state-shaped fridge magnets don't have to go get their stock remade as a result. The last significant transfer of land in the mainland US was michigan and wisconsin's quarrel almost a century ago.

Saying that state shapes are still in flux because 19 properties were shifted from state X to state Y earlier this year is a bit like saying you've got a new computer because you replaced your mouse.

The January edit in your own link is listed as "too small to map".

> The crimes of past European powers (think Belgian Congo for a single example)

That's underselling it. It's not a 'single example', it's 'the most extreme example'. When you're mistreating your African colonies so badly that even other colonial nations are asking you to back off with the horror, that's pretty bad.

The 'right to track' here is because Mozilla is getting blacklisted for sending to now-nonexistent addresses, and when they're blacklisted, it's hard to get off the blacklist.

As an example, one company I work for is on the blacklist RFC-Clueless, which blacklists you for not following the RFC and having the required default mailboxes (webmaster@, abuse@, etc). We use gmail, and it was a screw-up in their system - something I got them to fix about 2.5 years ago. Despite multiple requests to get off the RFC-Clueless list (their request link being obfuscated), they've done nothing about it. It's particularly galling that a blacklist that blocks you for 'being a bad netizen' is themselves an atrocious netizen.

So, if a client has an IT dept that subscribes to RFC-Clueless, there's simply no way we can send them email - it's very difficult for our sales staff to convince their contacts to start that conversation with their own IT, especially in the initial stages of the trial.

So I can understand that Mozilla might want to keep themselves off mailing blacklists, especially when they're sending mail to now-dead addresses that have previously asked for mail to be sent.

In a previous discussion of this kind (I'm not in this area myself), a scientist had said that the speed of the languages is less important than iterating the algorithms, and it was a lot easier for non-developer scientists to work with python than with C++.

> you don't actually understand it. Tell me, what is the meaning of 'survivorship bias'

If I don't understand the term, then what's the point of getting me to explain it? Explain it yourself if you think I have it wrong.

> Tell me, what is the meaning of 'survivorship bias' when we're talking about things which have lasted for significant periods of time, over many cycles?

O_o

My first comment was pointing out that the ancients believed in a lot of things that DIDN'T stand the test of time. If you're just limiting yourself to only those ideas which have survived and are making your conclusions from those, then you really are in no position to declare others ignorant of what survivorship bias means.

> I never claimed that an idea is better just because it was held earlier.

A strawman of your own, because I wasn't talking about individual ideas, but the concept that the ancients were more enlightened than today. I said in my original comment that some lessons come from them, but overall they weren't 'more enlightened'.

The point is that this is an issue of "slipped through the cracks", not "Facebook facilitating anti-semitism for a dollar". I'm no fan of Facebook and they've done sleazy stuff in the past, but this bit of reporting in the NYT is bad journalism.

I mean, seriously, if you ran a forum and someone opened an antisemitic thread in a minor board on it, which one of your others users pointed out and you then removed, do you really think it would be fair to call you antisemitic? After all, your forum allowed the antisemtic thread to exist in the first place and didn't auto-filter it out, and apparently there's no leniency even though you removed it as soon as you knew.

Well, you're succumbing to survivorship bias there, because there were plenty of poorly thought-out perspectives from yesteryear that haven't survived. Claiming that the ancients were more enlightened than us moderns because a few of their ideas survived is simply not rational.

And it's certainly stacking the deck to compare the apex thinker of antiquity to a non-apex thinker today.

> Ross Baird, president of the venture capital firm Village Capital, noted that when ProPublica[click-through link] tried last month to buy targeted ads for “Jew haters” on Facebook, the platform did not question whether this was a bad idea — it asked the buyers how they would like to pay.

Clicking through to read that article[1], it's clear that the categories were created by an algorithm rather than a human, and when reported, were removed without fuss. The way the main article phrases it is highly misleading.

The click-through article also says that while "Jew Haters" was a group that could be selected, it was too small to buy a targetted Facebook ad for by itself. They added a few more 'jew-hating' categories, and a few 'Hitler' categories, and the target demographic was still too small. So they ended up adding the category for a small extremist political party in Germany. At this point, the target demographic was big enough to allow them to buy a $30 ad.

Painting this as "Facebook is facilitating the rise of antisemitism just for a buck" is extraordinarily disingenuous.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertis...

When did prima noctis ever occur? Not "as a right of kings in general" which even the myths don't suggest, but even once, as a specific right of one king?

> I mean, how many Greek cities had nuclear landfill fires smoldering underneath them? Fewer than modern America.

How many modern American cities have smouldering nuclear landfill fires under them?

> When you truly accept that we today are not smarter nor necessarily more 'enlightened' than the people that came before us

We're not necessarily smarter (native intellect) but we are a shitload more enlightened (educated, experienced). In Plato's time, only the absolute social elite could converse in this manner, whereas now we have much broader and deeper knowledge available (and discussed) on pretty much every aspect of life that is common between our times.

Don't fall into the trap of deifying past thinkers; they were humans too. Yes, we can learn lessons from them, but our populace as a whole is more enlightened than the populace as a whole in Plato's time. One simple example is egalitarianism; while not perfect now, Greek democracies were only democratic for elite men. Sucks to be you if you're a slave or a woman because... um... that's just the way it is? If you're going to be making theory, you should work from solid foundations - the ancient Greeks had some really wrong ideas about the role of the physical heart and brain of a human, and no-one today would talk about the left ventricle being the source of human heat, for example.

Your conversation flow relies heavily on the other party doing a solid, succinct, clear 'no'. If only human interaction were that simple...

That's a very romantic view of medieval times (link is broken, by the way). Half the year off for vacation? I hope you enjoy vacationing at home, because if you're a serf, you're going nowhere. If you're a noblewoman, you're as likely to be married off for politics as not. Women in general were markedly less free - barred from education, property, public life, so on and so forth.

To further your analogy, would you prefer to be a diabetic paraplegic in the modern era, or the medieval? Because you're not going to be able to medicate yourself with the insulin you need, and there's not much work for paraplegics to do if they're not born into money.

> Our 60 years of wage slavery in windowless offices might seem unconscionable to a medieval peasant drinking mead all day by a stream with his friends, even if he ends up dying at 50.

We have the opportunity to change our lives if we don't want the wage slavery; entrepreneurialism is the whole reason why this site exists. For a medieval peasant, they can't move into the nobility, their inventions are not protected, they frequently aren't allowed to move around, travel is dangerous, communication with anyone outside the area they grew up in is more difficult due to language differences, hobbies are limited largely to what you can build yourself, since trade for items is difficult and expensive... the list of restrictions goes on and on.

In any case, the peasants of yesteryear are analogous to the working class of today, and they don't work in offices, windowless or otherwise.

Because the yes command will repeat whatever string you give it. If you need to parse the incoming load in a certain way, /dev/{zero,urandom} won't be suitable.

The yes command will repeat whatever string you give it, so it's useful for load/traffic testing. Speed helps this particular use-case.

This is a pop-science view of biological and psychological drivers. The reality is more complex than "everything is a thin veneer over 'let's fuck'"

"Let's fuck" is vital for continuation of a species, but it not the only reason why species might show a behaviour.

It seems weird that the good judges will reward you for poor behaviour and the poor judges won't.

An above-ground pool or water tank is a bad place to go. In-ground can be a little better. If you're trapped and there's no way out, go for it, but don't depend on a water store to save you.

The difference between "the rent for this space" and "the rent for this space plus a new grease trap" is going to be nowhere near recouping money on the trap. Like a car, expensive upgrades generally mean very little to future worth.

It also works in reverse though - when you leave a premises, you don't have to strip out your custom fit-out and put the space back into how it looked before you left. The landlord can't say "I never liked your choice of lighting, so put it back the way it was", for example.

> but what he REALLY didn't know was about the operations of a building and the cost of the corner he wanted to end up on. That fucked him from the jump.

However, his family investor 'with nearly a decade in the biz' should have known this stuff from the outset. The same goes for the lopsided income vs outgo. Was that investor just not worth it? Was their advice ignored?

> They paid for an improvement to the rental property, how come the landlord didn't split that with them. It just seems unfair.

In business, the landlord is renting a space, and the company renting fits it out. You could spend more than several years' rent on a fit-out, why should the landlord goes halvsies in that case?

Perhaps look at an OS packaging system. Debian has a particularly robust one, and it simply couldn't be brute-forced like this (as it's key-based).

Even just simply forcing 2FA would be a significant improvement.

It would have to prove itself in smaller shops first. If you're running a multi-thousand-user shop, you'd be insane to be a first-adopter for something as critical as "can my employees even start working each day?". It's not a matter of "what they're used to", it's a matter of risk management. And with things this big, it's not IT's call to make, it's a business decision; it needs to come from the top, because the penalties of failure go well outside the IT department.

Politicians will always find a way to promise changes to big ticket items. They're the ones that hold the purse strings. You can't plan for whomever is going to be in office next year ("a week is a long time in politics").

Case in point: it was only 17 months from Trump announcing his candidacy to winning the election - plus his party put up over 20 nominees.