weberc2

I don’t know why this is downvoted; this is exactly correct. These were the stereotypes I was referring to, employed without irony.

Perhaps, but your rationale (“it’s not meaningful if jobs pay half of what they used to”) supports my interpretation (“not the whole story”), not your thesis (“WRONG story”). Correct me if I missed something; haven’t had my coffee yet.

Are you arguing that things are better or worse than they used to be? And in either case how does it relate to my comment. Genuinely can’t tell.

I didn’t take your position to be one of ideology (although your position certainly isn’t based on science); I’m pointing out that you responded to the parent’s concerns about meeting everyone’s needs (I.e., “running an economy”) with some stuff about human motivation and the caveat that human motivation will only do the job if basic needs are already met.

You’re right that this one metric doesn’t tell the whole story, but no metric does and they aren’t meant to. Of course you need to look at other metrics besides employment to understand how well your society is doing.

> so long as the worker's basic needs are met.

So just the one teeny tiny detail of meeting everyone’s basic needs then?

> Instead of economic or physical barriers, we have hordes toxic personalities that try to gatekeep people. It's not all sunshine and roses.

I’m skeptical that these are uniquely tech problems; I suspect they occur in relatively even proportion in other industries, but other industries have bigger problems that tech largely doesn’t have, and so they aren’t preoccupied with “toxic personalities”. In particular, the “tech is terrible” proponents need to explain why tech selects for toxic people more than other industries, and so far all such explanations depend on (toxic) stereotypes of whites, Asians, men, and people interested in technology (“nerds”).

We have prosperous people today and while many of them are engaged in some form of philanthropy, we still have lots of poverty and other social ills. So “compassion” alone seems like a weak guarantee.

The OP mentioned companies play a kingmaker role by owning the platforms on which elections are won and lost. The implication is that they can directly and disproportionately influence the government, such that the government is their tool and not the people’s tool, as in a bonafide democracy.

The question isn’t whether the government or corporations have more power, it’s whether corporations or the people control the government and in which proportions.

Oh, that’s great news. Thanks for setting me straight. There are so few unambiguous wins when it comes to environmentalism.

> The federal effort, called the National Program for the Safe Use of Treated Sewage Water for Afforestation is going a long way towards achieving the country’s commendable ambitions voiced in the 1992 UN Rio conference on climate change—because so many trees can soak up hundreds of tons of CO2.

My understanding is that commercial forests like these don't generally capture the carbon, depending on how the harvested wood is used.

> Every excretion flushed in the city of Chicago ends up as fertilizer on midwest farms. Mostly soybeans, IIRC.

Is this meaningfully true? My understanding is that the wastewater is treated and emptied into the Chicago river where it flows toward Missouri. Insofar as that water is rich in organic compounds, it "fertilizes" the fields that draw from that river and its distributaries; however, this model is different than the picture you paint, which sounds more like dumping more-or-less raw sewage directly on fields. If the latter is indeed the case, it's news to me, especially since I understand human sewage fertilizer to be prohibited as a health risk.

You should check out the Literal type in Python. It provides for some of the stupider things in libraries, like return types that vary based on the value of an input parameter, as in Python’s open() method, which might return a text stream or a bytestream based on the value of the second parameter.

I'd definitely subscribe if you blogged about your efforts.

Genuine question: why should we put solar panels on our roofs versus investing in a solar coop or buying solar power directly? I would think the latter options would be more cost-effective/efficient (it's more efficient to service one solar farm than the equivalent number of panels on roofs scattered across a community, etc).

> - My "daily driver" is still a large Dodge Ram - though I rarely ever drive it and certainly not daily, but occasionally I need it. It's an '09 so I've had it for quite a while. I want to replace it with something less ridiculous, but our lease on the Honda HRV is up so that'll take priority. Something electric if possible though our house is old and there's nowhere to install a charger.

I've heard that replacing your gas guzzler with an electric car can actually generate more carbon by virtue of the carbon emissions associated with the manufacture of electric vehicles, and consequently you're better off driving your gas guzzler til it dies before going electric. I'd be very curious to hear from people who know more about this. Intuiting about emissions is really hard, unfortunately (which is why I'm curious about carbon offsets as a solution).

I've been looking into Carbon offsets. The chief criticism against them seems to be "they're just paying for your sins; they don't actually reduce the carbon", but as far as I can tell, that's not a valid criticism since the offsets directly fund projects that reduce carbon. As far as I've been able to discern, the most legitimate criticism is around governance and quality assurance--how to make sure the funded programs are actually achieving the results you're paying for, and specifically how to make sure those results wouldn't have been achieved without those programs. I would really like to hear from people who are more knowledgeable than me.

Beyond that, I'm also considering buying solar power.

For me in Uptown, the Wrigleyville traffic doesn't seem too bad as long as I don't need to be _in_ Wrigleyville itself. The worst part is the Red Line--seems like game times seem to coincide with rush hour such that everyone needs to be going North at the same time. Soldier field traffic was pretty miserable when I lived in South Loop (all that traffic going to/from 90 via Roosevelt).

What are the Tweets in question. artnet.com keeps paraphrasing and quoting other tweets, but I can't find the actual Tweets that threaten to bomb art/cultural sites. Can someone please link me to them?

EDIT: Why am I downvoted? This question isn't rhetorical. Did I miss something obvious in TFA?

I think it would be particularly interesting to compare idiomatic Rust and C code. For example, given C's lack of generics, I would expect Rust to have a number of wins, including better inlining opportunities for polymorphic functions a la qsort.

What is the ceiling for how good (i.e., "close to generating idiomatic Rust") it could get? Given the differing semantics, it seems like it should be nearly impossible to generate anything close to idiomatic Rust, but I know very little about mechanically translating between programming languages and I would be delighted to be incorrect.

I don't make claims that SV is one way or another, nor do I dismiss anything, but the skeptical response to your proposal is that hers is just another data point, and our media systems only select for data points that support certain narratives. Perhaps this sounds conspiratorial, but it's not that far fetched if you consider how much the newsmedia and literary industries skew progressive and the fact that the narratives in question are progressive narratives--it's not a conspiracy but rather the predictable fruit of two utterly homogeneous industries.

I see this all the time with build systems for various languages and projects (as well as for other classes of tools, frameworks, etc). Most of the time you don’t need the more complex tool. Ride out the simpler tool for as long as you can, and only when your product is mature (the time finding market fit is tremendously valuable—don’t waste it on integrating/building the perfect, most future-proof build system) and successful and you have a backlog of features that really do depend on the more complicated solution do you migrate. Ruthlessly trim that backlog for fade dependencies (most of the time the simpler tool really meets the actual requirements, but proponents of the more complex tool will stock the backlog with items that only appear at first blush to depend on the more complex tool). Consider the one-time cost of moving to the more complex tool and the ongoing increased cost of maintaining the more complex tool (and multiply both by 10) and compare those costs to the value of the items in your backlog, making sure to account for opportunity costs (I.e., what else could my team be working on instead of spending time porting and maintaining the more complex tool?).

A sign of engineering maturity is knowing the right time frame to plan for relative to your project’s lifecycle. Don’t worry about how your solution will scale when your product is hugely successful and you have Google-scale concerns; focus on getting to next week or next year or whatever timeframe is appropriate for your product’s current level of maturity.

Oh no, did my previous comments read as an exhaustive list of issues with C?

I'm not missing anything, I'm responding to a specific claim--that libraries allow C to compensate for missing language features. This is patently false irrespective of the merits of the features in question.

That said, I think your entire criteria for determining whether a language or feature is good boils down to its intuitiveness to experienced C programmers, which seems like a particularly poor, subjective criteria and it probably doesn't actually even hold for C considering all of the security issues and undefined behaviors that are introduced by and continue to surprise experienced C programmers.

For my money, closures, pattern matching, and templates (not any implementation in particular) are easy enough to reason about and much better than the corresponding bugs they address, but to each his own.

Man that's really rough. I've been playing BF1 on XBox and there aren't any significant cheating issues that I've seen.

Could you refer me to a good/standards-compliant library for typesafe generic lists, hashmaps, pattern matching, closures, etc?

I don’t think you implied otherwise, but people say some crazy things on this site, so I wanted to be perfectly clear.

Any resources (blogs, podcasts) suitable for laypeople?

While true, the distractedness (on the part of the pedestrian or the driver) doesn't absolve the driver of their responsibility to yield in this scenario. A driver who hits a pedestrian in this scenario will be subject to criminal and civil penalties, and rightly so.