Silfen

"Compile time" is artificial, but the difference between static and dynamic is natural (in some sense, I realize these words are quite slippery). It emerges from the underlying mathematics. There's a real difference between correctness properties that I can prove without running my program and correctness properties that will introduce failures at runtime.

While this might be accurate of downtown, you've lost the forest for the trees. Seattle absolutely has protected views for many of the single family houses. If they expire, it's on 30-40 year time horizons. Most of the city's land is single family housing (often with large minimum lot size).

If you want to know what Seattle is actually infamous for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_process

I have some "old Seattle" credentials. I grew up in Capitol Hill. I absolutely believe that Amazon is unfairly scapegoated, but at the same time do understand the gripes that many have about the city's changes. The most bitter are just the vocal minority, but there are many more natives who are uncomfortable to some degree. Given that I'm also a tech-yuppie-gentrifier, I think a lot of the toxicity is unfortunate and misdirected.

While it's definitely a terrible idea to fossilize a city, some parts of town are entirely unrecognizable, even from what they looked like three years ago. I don't long for the SLU of old or the abandoned lots of the Denny triangle, but there was an entire "sense of place" that was wiped out almost overnight. The wrong people are blamed for it, but I can completely understand where the grievances originate.

I'd place the blame most squarely on the NIMBY establishment and our single family zoning. There were bound to be growing pains from all this growth, but they didn't have to be so extreme. If we could upzone Magnolia and Wallingford, it would give the CD/south seattle renters quite a bit of relief.

I also think that the HQ2 stuff has much more to do with hitting the limits of our transit and housing infrastructure than the leftward swing of city politics, but that's probably best left to another post.

For us mortals, it is far more likely that you simply lose your balance, strength, or concentration. A typical multi-pitch climb is hard work and the odds of missing a move are pretty high.

Granted, I'm a mediocre climber (can lead 10c/d), but falling every once and a while is pretty common for most of us.

> Typescript annotations are little more than documentation

This is true at the boundaries of your codebase, but if your application is complex enough, tsc is a life saver. Typescript saves me from bugs literally every day. Not to mention the benefits around tooling and refactoring.

Agreed that there are some big footguns with respect to soundness, though.

It's bad when modern society depends on the integrity of the biosphere.

I don't think the issue is purely semantic. The government provides a financial incentive to buy houses. I can decide whether I want to be $x richer and have a mortgage to pay. I can similarly decide if I want to be $y richer and have a health insurance plan.

I don't mean this as a rhetorical question, so I apologize if it comes across as snide, but from the point of view of economics, what is the difference? I'm trying to understand why one kind of tax incentive is objectionable and not the other.

It's not a mandate, it's a tax incentive. I'm not forced to buy a house, but if I choose not to have a mortgage, then I forgo the federal tax benefits. If you accept that the mortgage deduction is within the scope of the government's powers, then I am not really sure I see the difference. Am I missing something?

As an aside, I agree that Medicare expansion would have been a better policy. Good luck getting that through congress, though.

This is a strange non-sequitur. The concern is about the warming effect of the atmospheric CO2, not about whether it's safe to breathe. The particular concern of this article is about the potential for positive feedback in warming.

We have already seen many, many species go extinct. The exact figures are not well understood, but there's a lot more at stake than just the polar bear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

This is pretty much what boosting is. Although we can ask the same question of the boosting algorithm, I guess.

I'm not so sure we do disagree :)

At the risk of splitting hairs... there are costs associated with finding developers who have this education and/or fostering a company culture where security best practices are important.

If software companies were seriously punished for compromising PII, then I imagine we'd see a change.

I don't think endemic poor software quality is about "lack of perfectionists." It's mostly about perfectly rational cost/benefit analysis. A lot of software is valuable for reasons other than code quality (e.g. network effects). In this case it makes complete sense that businesses would rather be first to market than produce something of the highest technical quality.

There are other issues at play, of course. In cases where quality and business profitability are strongly aligned - think avionics - then there is plenty of high quality software.

The random number generator generator (or monkeys at typewriters) analogy is deeply flawed. The entire point of natural selection is that it is non-random.

Think instead of a stochastic optimization process that provides feedback at each iteration, and introduces psuedo-random noise that is seeded from the previous iteration.

To extend our metaphor to ridiculous lengths, consider instead of a room full of monkeys typing away randomly, you have a machine that punishes monkeys that type in the "wrong direction," and rewards monkeys type something that is approximately closer to War and Peace. After each reward/punishment round, the monkeys would start their editing on strings that were rewarded in the previous round. This process would be expected to converge much more quickly.

Maybe not exactly relevant to the article, but we have observed plenty of "new features." For example, bacteria that have evolved specific enzymes to digest compounds that didn't exist before the 1930s. See http://aem.asm.org/content/61/5/2020.long

The commonly cited downsides include (a) rent seeking among protected industries and (b) prices of domestically produced goods are higher. How true these are in practice is probably somewhat controversial and difficult to measure.

Depends (like most of these generalizations) on your college and teachers. I had two professors who hammered the point that the priorities are: clarity, correctness, and performance. In that order. Perhaps a bit dogmatic, but a useful idea.

We would often spend class time writing cleaner, simpler code after arriving at a correct answer.

C# incidentally solved many other shortcomings with Java. The languages are getting closer to parity, but for many years C# was pretty far ahead (if you only consider language features and not tooling/ecosystem). Between reified generics, better native interop, and many functional features, C# felt and feels more concise than idiomatic Java. And I've written plenty of both.

Disclaimer: MSFT employee expressing personal views

The DSM exists for billing purposes. It's not exactly a scientific taxonomy of psychiatric disorders.

The issue is the outsize power that suburban districts have relative to population. Intra-Seattle light rail would clearly be best for the city, but Snohomish gets as much of a say as the city proper.

The U District stop is actually a great example of this. Farther west (e.g. near The Ave), there is much more transit access and substantially more walkable areas. But the priority seems to be getting suburbanites to Huskies games.

Disclaimer: That's not to say I dislike the extension. It's the first time Link has been useful for anything other than getting to the airport.

GP isn't talking about taking legal action against offensive speech. If you're offensive, it is entirely reasonable for people to take social action against you - like branding you an asshole - but you should never be arrested or punished by the state.

There is likely an efficient (in the economic sense of the word) level of CO2 emissions, but I doubt that anyone knows what it is. It's very difficult to price. However, I do agree with you that it's probably not zero.

The good news is that we have a proven carbon capture technology. Grow new forests.

Really? Most big businesses in America devote incredible resources to following the law. Of course there are prominent examples to the contrary, but those are the exceptions, not the norm.

I don't know where you're from, but cannabis is certainly very available in many parts of the U.S. And much easier for minors to obtain in areas where it's illegal!

(even more anecdata and speculation) I live in Washington, and it is absolutely not a problem here. The main difference, to my mind, is that alcohol induces higher risk behavior, while cannabis produces risk aversion. Prohibition has been an abject failure. That said, I don't think it's very good for your brain. Worth avoiding or at least moderating your intake.

I'm not sure how to unpack this. If there isn't energy scarcity, why does petroleum cost money? Scarcity isn't just a question of production, but also one of consumption. With some goods (e.g. food), we could reach a point where the entire population of the world cannot consume more. With others (energy is a salient example), there seems to be no upper limit on consumption. There will always be a finite amount, and people want to use it differently. This is exactly the problem markets are purported to solve.

Someone with a little more knowledge of financial markets, help me out here. Is it really news if a tech company's stock drops 8-10% on a day when NASDAQ is down over 3%?

This is why I find the gradual typing paradigm so interesting! You begin by writing your program in an untyped language, allowing for easier iteration and more exploratory programming. As you codebase grows, you transition modules over to static typing.

A particularly interesting approach, I think, is Sam Tobin-Hochstadt's typed racket. https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/

Training near your 1-rep max is as much about training your nervous system as it is your musculoskeletal system.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgi_tendon_reflex and http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-golgi-tendon-reflex.htm

I think this is fairly revisionist. This narrative undersells the influence that Buddhist thought had on enlightenment philosophers[0].

IANAHistorian, and am likely well out of my depth here, but I'd venture a guess that the influence worked in both directions, due to overlap in philosophical positions. For example, from the Dalai Lama:

Both Buddhism and science prefer to account for the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations of the natural laws of cause and effect. From the methodological perspective, both traditions emphasize the role of empiricism. For example, in the Buddhist investigative tradition, between the three recognized sources of knowledge - experience, reason and testimony - it is the evidence of the experience that takes precedence, with reason coming second and testimony last.[1]

[0]http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/how-davi... [1]http://www.dalailama.com/messages/buddhism/science-at-the-cr...