weberc2

You’re right: they don’t. They tell us the progressives are exaggerating.

> The UK kept trade with the US when slavery there was rampant.

And we’re I a citizen of the UK in this tortured analogy (with my contemporary morals and all that), I wouldn’t want my money supporting that.

> Any country will have hiccups throughout its development.

Right, but we don’t have to support those “hiccups”. Anyway, China had 60 million hiccups in the last century. They’re all out of hiccup passes.

> It's convenient but counterproductive to categorize every argument against yours as "whatabouttism".

Not every argument, only the ones that start with suggest I can’t criticize China until <other countries that I presumably support> are completely without blame. Such as yours.

> There’s a limit to how much leverage any one side has on a sovereign countries policies (and how much they actually enforce them when they agree).

I’m not advocating for anyone controlling sovereign Chinese policies. They can continue their awful anti-humanitarian policies, fraud, IP theft, etc. I just don’t want my country aiding and abetting it. At very least I want my fellow citizens to be able to make informed purchasing decisions.

And I’m all for lifting people out of poverty, but I’d rather do it in a country with some minimum base line respect for human rights and integrity, and where my purchasing dollars don’t end up propping up some dictatorial system that bullies other countries.

I would rather see more rigorous trade policy. Frankly fewer low-quality or fraudulent Chinese imports will probably be a net positive and even if it is more expensive, I would rather our trade dollars support countries with less corrupt governments and better ethics with respect to intellectual property, fraud, environmental protection, etc.

I’m sure this will garner plenty of whataboutism regarding how the west is imperfect (never minding that I didn’t say “the west”)...

That’s a laudable goal, and to that end I imagine it would do a world of good to stop the constant exaggeration of how disenfranchised those groups are (NOTE that I’m not saying these groups are fully enfranchised, only that the disenfranchisement is exaggerated). At some point, advertising tech as a bunch of rapey, Nazi frat bros is probably more offputting than whatever discrimination actually exists. Let’s ditch the boogeyman and see what happens.

Damore's thesis was that Google shouldn't expect gender parity because (among other factors) the preferences of women are distributed differently than the preferences of men. So Damore was talking about both groups, but he was fired specifically for suggesting that Google's hiring practices were unfair--the argument being that criticizing Google's hiring practices implies that the women hired under those practices didn't really deserve to be there. This is especially interesting because lots of people make the inverse claim (Google's hiring practices are biased in favor of men) and no one is trying to fire them for implying that male Googlers don't belong (note that recently Google has discouraged activism, but this is because it stirs up unwanted controversy and impedes business, not because it offends a demographic; never mind that being told to behave is not the same as being terminated).

I'm sure I'll be downvoted for merely asking, but I'm genuinely curious: what is the evidence for discrimination? Is it simply the null hypothesis (gap, ergo discrimination) or are there studies or something that actually highlight discrimination, and if the latter, how much of the gap is explained by discrimination?

Last I asked this question, I was referred to the orchestra blind audition study (Goldin et al), but I'm pretty sure that was data from 1950s-80s, from a different industry, and didn't actually demonstrate a significant effect when accounting for large error margins.

Downvote me if you like, but at least explain the reasoning for those of us following along at home. In the worst case it's an opportunity to evangelize your point of view.

I wonder if they're trying to eliminate the VM substrate layer that clouds today currently run on by replacing it with hardware and an OS that is more amenable to running containers natively with good isolation/security properties?

WRT to Frazelle, are you referring to her contributions on the Docker team as "creating software used by millions"? If so, that seems disingenuous, or perhaps she was more of a core contributor than I realized? If not, what software are you referring to?

While minimizing the use of violence is an indisputably good thing, there’s a big gap between the UK machete case and the US sniper case. There are certainly lessons the US police could learn from the machete incident, but I don’t see how they apply to this sniper incident.

The sniper was a trained soldier that was an imminent threat to the police officers—he had already killed several and given his training, motive, and the premeditation of the crime, it was entirely likely that he would have killed additional officers who attempted to arrest him (by way of booby traps or similar).

Wow. I definitely read it as “ACLU would use robots to police” and I thought it was just a clumsier way of saying “ACLU to police the use of robots”. I didn’t actually realize police was a noun until your comment.

I’ve found the opposite. For the last year, I have to resort to Google more and more often. DDG was on par with Google when I started using it a couple years ago, but it has managed to get worse and worse over time. Note that I’m specifically claiming DDG’s performance has degraded; not just that it has remained the same while Google’s has improved.

It is remarkable what can be accomplished when another much larger state is heavily subsidizing your entire economy. Good on the Belarusians for the progress they’ve achieved, but let’s not pretend it’s attributable to communism.

No idea if this idea is any good or not, but I wouldn’t recommend marketing this solution using the words “nuclear” and “torpedo”.

I know very little about any of this, but our ability to forecast weather has certainly improved in the intervening century; might that be helpful for avoiding storms?

IIRC (from some documentary on the subject) canids are somewhat unique in their “genetic plasticity” (I don’t recall the precise term).

Wow, thanks very much. I spent a good chunk of Saturday morning googling around for something like that last one. I’ll look into all of these.

EDIT: TAG seems to focus on eliminating fraudulent Internet advertising; it's a much narrower scope than I had in mind.

Thanks for pointing me to fair trade; I'll have a look. There are a lot of things I'm interested in, but mostly they fall into one of a few groups. For any given product, I want to know:

1. If (or to what degree) the product was made via exploitative labor conditions

2. How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through disposal)

3. Does the product benefit from subsidies? (e.g., is a foreign product cheaper only because shipping is heavily subsidized relative to a local alternative)

4. Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised. If the product is fraudulent, can I trust that the company (including investors and leadership) will be held to account or will they simply rebrand and continue their scheme? This concern spans the gamut from Walmart selling name-brand merchandise from low-quality OEMs to companies paying for fraudulent Amazon reviews.

There are probably other concerns as well. In my experience, these concerns seem to be highly bimodal. On average, products which are not Chinese (i.e., not sold/manufactured/etc by Chinese companies) score very highly while Chinese products score very poorly. So while it would be great to have some certification provided for each of those concerns, I would settle for some certification with respect to whether the product is Chinese or not (of course, if that certification took off, there would be all sorts of issues with enforcing it--Chinese companies could operate shell companies and so on).

I agree that any organization can, but I don't know of any. I'm vaguely aware of orgs that certify organic/non-GMO/etc and presumably someone certifies kosher food and conflict free diamonds and the like, but I'm not sure of any that certify labor conditions or that a given company operates with some baseline of ethics and is subject to accountability.

I believe you are correct about Go. The rationale I recall was that generated parsers were slower and afforded less control over error reporting. Notably wrt performance, fast compilation was a major goal for Go from the beginning.

I wonder if there are any organizations that can certify products and brands. From inhumane conditions to poor quality to scammy marketing and outright fraud (especially on Amazon), I want to avoid Chinese products as much as possible. It’s difficult to avoid completely, but there’s certainly a lot of low hanging fruit.

> It's not at all a SF problem, it's a metropolitan city problem. NYC, Boston, Denver, Austin, Boise, both Portlands, etc all have the same housing crisis.

I was responding to the claim that it's a state- or national-level problem. Perhaps you would argue that this meets some criteria for being a 'national-level' problem, but it's not obvious to me.

Genuine (outsider) question: how is housing not a uniquely-SF problem? The rest of the country and even other parts of California seem to have affordable housing, at least relatively speaking.

EDIT: RE downvotes, shame on me for not being familiar with SF politics, I guess. It is, after all, the center of the universe. (◔_◔)

Programming languages lend themselves to different applications and the kinds of projects one contributes to in one's hobby time are different than those one contributes to in one's professional time. As such, I wouldn't expect hobbyist Rust users to work on the same distribution of projects as professional Python developers. In any case, I just want to know what people are inspired to work on with Rust; it's an open ended question, and it's okay that this question has no single easy answer. (Also, "what are people building with Python?" is a very interesting question to me; it's pretty much why https://github.com/trending?l=python and similar exist--and note, the kinds of projects that trend for Python are very different from those that trend for Rust).

I've been using Go for 7 years and I don't think this is a mischaracterization at all. I definitely don't think it's something "only really novice Go developers do"--I see it all the time, including in popular open source libraries and even the standard library. I don't think it's contentious that Go's error handling needs some improvement (by which I mean "more standard, structured error handling" and not "syntax support for eliminating error handling boilerplate"--the latter is more contentious as far as I'm aware).

Please forgive the tangent, but I'm curious about how people are using Rust if it's not in their primary day job? My impression is that there aren't yet many Rust jobs, but many practitioners. What are people building with it? For Rust enthusiasts, how do you use it? Are you contributing to an open source project or do you have your own pet projects? In either case, what are the projects? I'm asking because I might have some time to play around with it over break.

That made me chuckle, but apparently it’s a bit more nuanced. According to Wikipedia:

> It was named by the Roman Senate in honour of Roman general Julius Caesar, it being the month of his birth. Prior to that, it was called Quintilis, being the fifth month of the 10-month calendar.

This stuff is fascinating. Reminds me of how the Romance language weekdays are named after the Roman pantheon and the Germanic (including English) weekdays are named after the approximate germanic counterparts for those same Roman gods.

This is my experience after 7 years of Go as well. Error handling is actually fine. People make too big a deal about the error check (and Rust people make too big a deal about the compiler not forcing you to handle every error). The substantial opportunities to improve error handling involve establishing a standard, typesafe interface for getting at the relevant, structured information in an error so callers can handle things properly; however this probably depends on generics and sum types and will probably look a lot like Rust’s result types (which seems great to me). In practice these are not where your bugs are. On the other hand, sum types would actually go a long way in reducing bugs (including the nil pointer problems you mention).

No, it just means that Qt is valid C++, not that the two have equivalent semantics (which is necessary for Qt to be exactly C++ and not a bastardized version thereof, which is what we are debating). If I we’re wrong and you were right, the moc would be purely optional; it would serve no purpose, and Qt programs compiled with moc would behave exactly as those compiled without.

Oh, TIL I guess. Thanks for the correction.