Confusion

I wonder whether you can't write this story about almost any SF author. If you write a dozen books and stories each with a plethora of new ideas, you are sure to get some things right. Pick out all the things they got right, add a few mistakes for 'balance' and tadaaa, another visionary SF author.

Has anyone done statistical analysis on the accuracy of 'predictions' by SF authors? Are some really more visionary than others?

  The reality is we as developers choose not to give languages 
  enough context to accurately infer the lifetime of objects.

The reality is we as developers choose not to give languages enough context to just do what I mean.

  instead of finding a way of expressing when we're done with instances

So, when are you done with an instance? How to enumerate all possible situations and devise a comprehensible encoding for them? Without requiring developers to keep a lookup table of lifetime declarations or other non-local reasoning in mind? Concurrency. Laziness. Runtime code replacement.

You're handwaving over fundamental research problems here. You don't know this is even possible in a way that doesn't completely hose the comprehensibility of a language.

No, if you're a serious professional cyclist.

There is huge difference between driving in front and driving in second place. Between having one good teammate with you and not having one. Between having a good day and a just-so day.

How can you ensure others do as much of the 'upfront' work as you? How can you try to prevent others from benefiting from your teammates? How can you prevent one just-so day from ruining a multi-day tour?

That all requires communication, negotiation, deals. Sometimes the deal is just the default: every few km we switch positions. Your behaviour is your acknowledgement of the deal. Sometimes the deal is more intricate.

Example: you broke away with two competitors who are in the same team. If you work together you are 90% likely to take all three places on the podium. You can offer them places 1 and 3. If they try to shake you off they will probably succeed, but both you and them are less likely to make the podium at all. What do you do? Take an 90% chance on a second place or try for a maybe 30% chance to become first?

What if second place nets you 50K?

What I would be very interested in seeing in an introduction to a new language is an explanation of why the authors think other languages that intend to support a similar combination of features have failed to achieve that or have failed to get traction.

These kinds of introductions always read like "we're going to combine these and these and these awesome features from all your favorite languages" and well, what's not to like? Wouldn't everyone want this? So I can't help but wonder: why didn't anyone previously succeed at creating such a language? What are you going to do differently?

How many people died similar deaths in the outdoors before mobile phones?

How many where neither a phone nor camera is, or was, involved?

Without numbers to compare the reported numbers against, this tells us nothing.

The Black-Scholes equation is literally the basic heat diffusion equation [1].

[1] https://quant.stackexchange.com/questions/84/transformation-...

No, there’s some confusion here. There are two distinct benefits you are entitled to when you become a father.

One is that you get exactly 1 week of paid leave.

The other is the right to take 26 weeks of unpaid ‘parental leave’ during the first 9 years, which is often used to e.g. start working 4 days a week (the leave is used at a rate of 1 day per week then; you could also use it for taking half a year off at once).

Yes, you only get paid 80% of your former salary.

When would I want to use this? What problem that people currently have does this solve? The website tells me what Radicle is and what you can do with it, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t explain why/when I would want to do that.

  I think the average joe is generally more reasonable and 
  able to develop critical thinking skills than most people 
  think

You think wrong. You would like this to be the case and you let the desire cloud your judgment. It's simply not the case. The research is squarely against you.

  They just don't ever get the opportunity to learn it properly.

That's irrelevant. The point is that they never learned and cannot be expected to learn anym ore. We have to care for these people, instead of expecting them to take care of it themselves, telling them they are capable of it. Because they aren't and they don't.

  This sentiment is one of the reasons anti-intellectualism is thriving at this very moment.

This is not a sentiment: these are facts.

At least 10% of people are functionally illiterate. How are you going to teach them critical thinking skills? How are you going to get them to see the truth about e.g. vaccination? Answer: you don't. This is where we need a government, to take care of those that do not, for whatever reason, take care of themselves.

No, this sentiment is very wrong. 10% of the population is functionally illiterate. Another 10% can't do basic arithmetic. Another 10% has more important things to worry about than vetting all their sources. Another 10% just can't be bothered. There are many more reasons why expecting everyone to just be able to develop the ability to critically gather and evaluate information is clearly a fantasy that can only be entertained when you don't realize how incredibly challenged people are, probably because they don't interact with any.

And [1] explains why this is the case. In short: patents.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...

I think the abstract pattern here is: own it.

You are assuming moral reasons where simple business reasons suffice.

That’s why I said I hoped you were trolling, because the alternative is that you have a strong opinion about something which you have thought insufficiently about.

I hope you are trolling.

If you are asked to swipe some IP of your employer, with a subtle reminder you still have family in your home country and they know where to find them, what would you do?

Mozilla is subject to US law. Mozilla has no obligation to enable certain addons only for visitors from certain countries.

The US of course. Look at the list of sites the plugin works for: none of them cares if you ignore their paywall. The likelihood that you would subscribe is negligible. It’s American readers they are after. And for them the jurisprudence is clear. No deliberate subversion of access controls allowed.

Folks, you can downvote me, but that doesn’t make what I’m saying false. Look at the law cited in TFA.

No, it’s not. The jurisprudence is pretty clear.

You are not allowed to circumvent paywalls, just like you are not allowed to circumvent locks, no matter how easy they are to circumvent. As far as I have always understood, you may publish a locksmithing guide, even an “entering your home when locked out” guide, but not a “how to commit burglary” guide.

Thanks, reread and adjusted it a bit. Better like this?

Rename the plugin and change the description. The message from Mozilla states that the problem is the intent of the plugin. The technological measures it actually takes are not illegal per sé, but are illegal when used to circumvent paywalls (of course IANAL).

If you present this as a plug-in that allows you to view websites as the Google bot views them, for educational and debugging purposes, there is no problem. You can give the fact that it won’t see the paywall as an example. It’s actually useful for that purpose: you are not lying. It’s just that most people will install the plugin for its ‘side effects’. Their use of it will still be illegal, but the intent will not be illegal. Cf. Firearms, crypto, drugs, ...

(I say this as someone that pays for various journalistic sources and I encourage everyone to pay for at least their three favorite sources)

Meanwhile geeks are marvelling at the speed improvements of their latest SoC's over the previous generation and over their competitors.

I was going to ask the same. According to the regular definition of 'strong typing', Ruby is strongly typed. You cannot take a bunch of bytes in memory and pretend they are a different type. If something is an Integer, you can only treat it as an Integer. Sure, it may sometimes seem that way (duck typing, automatic type conversion), but it never is that way (no casting or type coercion)

  before the world can build artificial intelligence, it must
  explain human intelligence so it can create machines that
  genuinely work like the brain

Why must intelligent machines work like the human brain? It’s just an accidental result of evolution and doesn’t define what ‘intelligence’ is?

You are assuming this was 'reasoned talk'.

Only if you think hiring decisions should depend only on certain measurable professional qualifications. Which they of course never are. If someone has a specialization that you already have in your portfolio, while a competitor has a different specialization that would be an addition, then the competitor can be preferred. If someone is a loner while the competitor is a teamplayer, then the competitor can be preferred. Etc. Maybe he just behaved like an a* during the hiring procedure, taking for granted he would be hired. You don't know and any conclusion based purely on the numbers is unwarranted and premature.

> The proper scientific answer is a peer-review,

Not necessarily. This can be viewed as a case of vaccines-cause-autism. The proper scientific answer there is to prevent endless repetition of the same boring, already sufficiently disproven, 'good points'.

His observations/facts/data can be explained in a number of different ways, if you take into account that there are sociological factors to consider. Even in physics just taking the data 'as is' is not acceptable: you need to check whether the data is reasonable. In these case there are huge questions to be answered: why do women publish fewer papers? Why do they get cited less? If the answer is 'because of sexism', then the argument presented by this physicist is a circular argument.

Only if those houses make them money or their money yields more than the debts cost.