ScottBurson

Wow, that was fascinating -- thanks for the link.

It does seem like a poorly chosen example. In the case of an exponential process, the doubling time is a remarkably important number.

For fine art photography a fast lens is still desirable, but for almost anything else it matters less than it used to. The sensor itself is worth about 2 stops.

Yeah, that's still going on, dammit -- my new D780 has the 30 min. limit.

I've puzzled over some of Glenn's recent writing too. But I think I'm starting to get the picture. Although he's certainly left-leaning -- he likes Bernie Sanders -- what really motivates him is attacking the complacency of the center.

I don't find him boring, usually, though sometimes I fail to relate to something he's exercised about. But he definitely has a different bias than most journalists. I think this is very useful.

There are lots of good ideas floating around for a second CL standard. The problem is, either such a language has a CL compatibility environment, in which case it is probably implemented in CL using the features already in the language, meaning that it's really just another Quicklisp package; or it doesn't, in which case it has to fill some need that couldn't be filled the first way in order to attract a critical mass of interest. Julia is the closest thing I'm aware of to the latter.

It's hard to get people to switch from something they find good enough for their needs, if the new thing is incompatible. See: Perl 6.

Never use LOOP. I don't! (Except in the trivial keywordless form in which it means "loop forever".)

Dylan doesn't have parameterized types.

Wow, what functionality did it have that took all those pages to document? Can you offer any examples of things it could do that Unix couldn't?

I feel a tribal connection with all the other people in this thread who agree with you.

People with strong eyeglasses (more than 3 or 4 diopters positive or negative) may find wide-gamut monitors hard to use for text. The problem is that chromatic aberration is wavelength-dependent; the larger the difference in wavelength between two photons, the greater the angle between the paths they take when they pass through the lens. (Except at its optical center, the surfaces of the lens aren't parallel, so there's a prism effect, which increases toward the edge of the lens.)

These wide-gamut monitors have both a deeper red source (longer wavelength) and a deeper green (shorter). So the red and green peaks are quite a bit farther apart -- possibly as much as 80% -- than they are with a standard CCFL or WLED backlight. Combine that with high-index plastic lenses, which have higher dispersion (a measure of chromatic aberration) the higher their refractive index, and you can get a real problem.

Since my correction is about -6.75 diopters, and I have wide-gamut monitors, I had a pair of glasses made with CR-39, a relatively low-index plastic with low dispersion, almost as low as that of glass. CR-39 is generally not used for such strong lenses because they would need to be thick at the edges, but this problem can be minimized by making the lens round in shape and not too large.

I have read elsewhere about researchers at least trying to develop 15-minute tests. Not sure what the status of their work is, but some think it's possible -- and they're specifically targeting entry checks.

What you're missing is that a rapid test like this can be used as an entry check at restaurants and other public venues, allowing them to go back into business. Even if the vaccines turn out not to work for some reason, we can have our economy back, while limiting spread of the virus. It's not so much about getting people to fully self-quarantine, although that would be nice, as about eliminating super-spreader events.

> What they want is predictable, maintainable error free software that still works when the "artist" moves on.

Producing such software is the essence of the art! Managing the complexity of large software systems as they grow demands the ability to creatively invent elegant abstractions that factor that complexity into manageable chunks. Without that factoring, the complexity grows until no one understands the code -- with entirely predictable, and sadly familiar, effects on maintainability.

I met my wife online, in 1993. On Usenet. I kid you not: it was in alt.psychology.personality. She was trying to figure out whether she was a Four or a Five on the Enneagram, so I emailed her "Well, do you have a worse problem with depression or paranoia?" Not your usual pick-up line :-)

We are in a time of moral upheaval, when the old mores are no longer acceptable, but as a society, we haven't yet worked out new ones. The search is inevitably clumsy at times, and mistakes will get made.

That said -- outlawing mere expressions of disagreement would be a very serious mistake. Nor is it workable to require that we never make anyone uncomfortable. That would go too far towards shutting down the open expression of ideas.

Calling someone and telling them you've found them to have violated a rule, and that there would therefore be certain consequences, is not an easy task, nor one that most people should be expected to do well. There's no shame in not being good at it.

NumFOCUS should think about this. Someone in Jeremy's position could decide to sue them. They should think carefully about how these decisions are to be communicated to the putative violator and who should do it.

It's not "every group of people" -- it's organizations that invite the participation of the public, or at least of others they don't know well, as long as they adhere to the mores of the community.

More importantly, I take the parent's point to be, not that such an organization "owes" anything to anyone, but simply that anyone formalizing a Code of Conduct and a committee to enforce it would do well to understand why the protections of due process exist. If their intention is truly to create a safe space for interaction, setting up a process that can be easily abused is not going to help with that.

Then it seems to me that you're not the sort of person who should be on such a phone call, unless you can get this habit under control.

Burson's Observation on Programming Languages:

When someone who knows a lot about programming languages has a task tn do, they probably already know a language well suited to it. They also know how many person-years of work are required to turn a new language from a toy into something others would want to use. So, it's unlikely that such a person, needing to write a program, would create a language to write it in. There would have to be some use case that no extant language handles well.

On the other hand, when someone who doesn't know all that needs to write a program, they're much more likely to say, I know! I'll create a new language!

Therefore, most new languages are created by people who don't know what they're doing.

> As soon as Stripe doesn't employ them - they're gonna be competing for remote-only workers wages (or whatever is local too I guess) unless they move back.

And on top of that, they may have to accept a non-compete clause in their employment contract.

All in all, they have a pretty strong incentive to remain a Stripe employee as long as possible. Stripe probably likes this.

Here's a great piece on caste in America: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson...

Writing an entire operating system in an inherently insecure language?

Ha! Best laugh I've had in a month!

I don't know whether you'll see this belated reply, but anyway: I have had some sympathy with your position, as you can see in my sibling comment, BUT as I read more about IRV, I am actually coming to disagree. Look at this page, especially the chart near the bottom: https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i... What this says is that in simulation, given mostly tactical voters, IRV doesn't do any better than PV (FPTP). This surprised me, but I'm starting to see why, as the rest of that page explains.

Here's another: https://www.rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html The most telling argument here, I think, is that a century of IRV hasn't freed Australia from two-party domination.

Another page with simuations: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

What voting reforms have been attempted in your province?

Yes. This is why I think we should be doing much more geoengineering research than we are now.

I realize that geoengineering poses its own dangers. I just don't think we're going to have any choice.

So the losing candidates get empowered to speak for their voters? An interesting suggestion, but I think the voters would prefer to allocate their votes themselves — this is what IRV is.

Hmm, this is interesting: As part of concerns about whether the NPVIC would shift power from the federal government to state governments, at least two legal scholars have suggested that the NPVIC would require explicit congressional approval because it would remove the possibility of contingent elections for President being conducted by the U.S. House of Representatives under the 12th Amendment.

First off, I would tend to consider the potential need for a contingent election as a bug, not a feature. But that aside, the claim seems wrong. It is certainly possible in principle for a popular-vote election involving the whole country to result in a tie; it's just extremely unlikely. But perhaps the wording of the NPVIC doesn't stipulate that in the event of a tie, the participating states' electors will be allocated so as to generate an Electoral College tie as well, if possible — and what happens if it isn't possible?

Yes, I tend to agree with this. Even so, I think Approval Voting deserves more buzz than it's been getting.

As I like to say: "I approve of preferential voting, but I prefer Approval Voting" :-)

That's the best argument for Approval Voting. It's very simple: you just vote for or against each candidate independently. The votes are tallied, and whichever candidate has the most votes wins. It's much simpler than IRV with its multiple rounds. It's even simpler than Plurality Voting (aka "FPTP") because it doesn't require you to pick a single favorite.

Anyway, I'm writing for the HN audience here, not for general consumption :-)