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WildUtahon Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

Microsoft has a license to the UNIX APIs from AT&T via Cal BSD.

WildUtahon Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

Either way "on-premises licenses" sounds weird so I'm likely to stick with "on-premise licenses" regardless. Sorry.

Downvoted for expressing contempt for the English language and common decency, but then failing to add in the obvious "irregardless."

WildUtahon Considerations on Cost Disease

Yes, my estimates are the present value of the liability the pension plan is incurring. It's what a pension plan would have to save to be fully funded.

Pension plans are currently not allowed under federal law to fully fund themselves because that would be so expensive it would disrupt federal taxation. Instead we are constantly building up future pension crises that will have to be paid in higher taxes and economic chaos later.

WildUtahon Americans Renouncing Citizenship at Record High

If you have half a million dollars in free cash you can afford to set aside for a few years (you'll even get most of it back), you can buy a green card.

WildUtahon Americans Renouncing Citizenship at Record High

H-1Bs do not have to pay US taxes for life no matter where in the world they go. It's just one more way that foreigners in the USA are privileged again and again over American citizens.

WildUtahon A Low-Cost Solution to Traffic

You can have that. A freestanding home in a quiet neighborhood with a garden and space to park one car per family with affordable housing and high quality transit in reasonably dense urban development (150+ density, 2x that of the city of San Francisco) is possible. And it scales to millions of people, even tens of millions. But you need Japanese street geometry. That means small blocks and really narrow streets. Really narrow like 4-5m wide streets making up 80% of all street kilometers in your city. That's 4-5m building line to building line with no sidewalks because the entire street has to be shared.

It works, but it's no good for daily driving. You can get out of town in a car with some patience, but you're going to take the train in town.

If you can accept that, you can have it all. But no American city has made that choice.

WildUtahon Considerations on Cost Disease

Plainly the elites of America are not willing to accept the population trends and immigration laws of the successful nations negotiating the cost disease. You can see that in how they celebrated the power grab in Washington.

Copying the immigration policy of Hungary, Japan, Korea, and Poland is easy if you want all the people of your nation to prosper. If your elite is more interested in keeping the people down so they can stay up, you get a different policy.

WildUtahon Considerations on Cost Disease

Are there any countries where the nominally expected result of things actually getting cheaper and easier over time are obtained?

Yes.

Japan, Mexico, Chile, Poland, Hungary, Korea, Thailand.

WildUtahon Considerations on Cost Disease

The cost of a defined benefit pension have skyrocketed. Replacing 90% of salary after 30 years for life with cost of living adjustments use to be worth about 20-35% of your salary. Now it's worth 120-200%.

WildUtahon Vim's 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8

Moving around with hjkl is a bad habit to be discouraged. It's not the vi way.

Well, j and k are fine if you're not moving far. A lot of slow scrolling up and down should be { and } or C-d and C-u or <count>[jk]. Even better: Use / and ?. It's bad to be repeatedly tapping j and k or waiting for the keys to repeat.

But h and l are the EMACS approach. You should be moving in a line with w, e, b, f, F, t, T, ^, $, I, A, 0, and the like. Vi provides lots of tools for efficient line editing and h and l are not good.

Beginners should try

    :noremap h <nop>
    :noremap l <nop>

to keep them from the temptation of the nefarious h and l keys.

Lately I use

    :no h ^
    :no l $

which is even better because ^ and $ require moving your hands off the home row even though they're much better than h and l for you.

WildUtahon 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

What were you doing in a car in Mexico City? First time I drove there, it had me shell shocked for months.

Next time, get out on foot and see the city. You can't see anything from a car. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r83MF9BRZA&feature=youtu.be

WildUtahon Vim's 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8

Promoting bad habits. Don't use the left-right arrow keys to move around!

WildUtahon 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

Yes, terrible urban design and bad infrastructure and bad policy is pervasive in the USA.

You can just look at neighboring Mexico with 1/6th the per capita income and correspondingly lower public budgets where transportation, urban maintenance, and quality of city life are routinely better. And not just relatively better: Mexican cities (outside the shady border region) are nicer than American cities to live in. If you could put a typical neighborhood from Puebla or Guadalajara or León or Mexico City into Dallas or Los Angeles or San Jose or Atlanta, it would be the best, nicest neighborhood in the city.

And that's not even bringing up the great cities of Europe at all. Because that would be completely unfair.

It's like the health care system: Even a great country does some things horribly wrong and suffers for it.

WildUtahon 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

If Brigham Young could foresee how cars would abuse the design, he would have laid out Salt Lake City like Paris or maybe like Kyoto.

Alas, President Young had long since exhausted his outrageously lavish budget of divine providence just getting to Utah.

WildUtahon 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

Outside SF proper, the SV urban design is as bad as in Utah.

WildUtahon 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

It's rare to be worth a lot more than $105k in SLC; wages are pretty low and deep specific expertise isn't often bought so much as grown in house. Especially with a startup.

If you're looking at $105k in SLC, you should be asking for $225k+ in SF by my experience.

We did the calculation between $125k in SF and $45k in SLC a decade ago and SLC came out well ahead for a family of four.

WildUtahon Vim's 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8

That's why i use kj.

(Also: quaternions)

WildUtahon Vim's 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8

    :ino kj <Esc>
    :ino <Esc> <Nop>

Try it for a week; you'll love it.

WildUtahon Vim's 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8

This is so nice and so much easier than it seems. And there's no need for a private repo; unless you're ashamed of your dotfiles, you could keep them in a public repo.

WildUtahon London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup

^rich^white

WildUtahon Regex: badly needs fuzzing

All regexes run in O(N) where N is the length of the string matched.

But some regex engines accept non-regular expressions. [0] The usual notation for it is an escaped number: \1 or \2 or so on. They're used to refer back to capturing groups earlier in the expression, usually marked by parentheses.

Regular expressions don't have backreferences but various enhanced expressions add them. If you use those extensions, you are in danger of exponential execution time unless you are careful and know what you're doing. In particular you should know not to use regular expressions as your principal tool to build a parser.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

WildUtahon Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

Sometimes you feel a regret. "I know!" you say, "I'll fix things with regretular expressions." Now you have two regrets.

WildUtahon Dakota Access Pipeline to win US Army permit for completion

So now we're getting DAPL and DACA but not DAPA.

Well, Trump could withdraw support for DACA as he promised, but he's now signed off on thousands of new DACAs, so he's in no hurry to change the program.

WildUtahon State of Clojure 2016 – Results and Analysis

I'd note that Neovim is doing better with Parinfer support. Paredit seems okay with Vim, but you need guns/vim-sexp and tpope/vim-sexp-mappings-for-regular-people also to make the key bindings good. See my vim.info/.vimrc. [0]

[0] https://github.com/WildUtah/secret-personal-dotfiles/blob/ma...

WildUtahon State of Clojure 2016 – Results and Analysis

vim-fireplace is much improved. I had been using a heavily hacked version matched to my own preferences for years but recently upgraded.

What you really want is just to run

    lein repl

in your repository and then fire up another terminal and edit code with Vim. Then you should send whole top-level forms to the repl with :Eval from Vim and it should just work. You can then test them in the repl. (I alias C-c C-c to :Eval (:no <C-c><C-c> :Eval<cr>) because I'm used to the old vim-slime)

And it should all work automatically. With the new versions of vim-fireplace it does just work automatically.

I'll write a 'process-data function in Vim, send it with :Eval, and then test it in the repl with (process-data {:some "data", :more "other data"}) and it all just works. There's a little reading up on namespaces necessary once your projects get complicated, but it works on a bare repl right out of the box, too.

WildUtahon Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions [pdf]

A few people lose their jobs as authorities try to placate the SJWs and the chilling effect over the whole society is palpable. Ask Brendan Eich or the leaders of that University in Missouri or the guy who made an innocent dongle joke at a conference.

People remember that kind of thing and millions edit themselves in a general low-level miasma of fear they might get targeted.

WildUtahon State of Clojure 2016 – Results and Analysis

I couldn't get Parinfer to work with Vim. There's a port but it's buggy.

But the Neovim port is great. Installation requires a little patience, but it works well.

In any case, one should read the Clojure style guide on GitHub [0] and get used to writing code in normal editing modes first. Then move on to Parinfer or Paredit once you feel the shape of the code and sense why it's like that.

[0]https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style-guide

WildUtahon In Defense of C++

In C, C++, Rust, Swift, &c I can determine how and when references go into or out of scope and get freed.

The defining characteristic of a garbage collected system is an active outside process with priority and control over my code that chooses when to inject bugs (to wit: arbitrary pauses) into my program outside my control.

WildUtahon In Defense of C++

What matters most will be the quality of implementation. Is the compiler smart enough to know that an object passed 3 routines deep doesn't really escape the stack scope? If it can do that, it can elide all the cost of either approach.

This is the plan with Swift and what makes it zippy.

bone of contention with sweeping collectors is constantly walking

The real problem is that you cannot determine when the program will pause. It makes interactive and soft realtime impossible with gc. (Hard realtime should not run a generic allocator at all.) You can't write anything but servers and unpleasantly unresponsive apps.

Android developers have to carefully jump through hoops to avoid allocating any RAM at all if they don't want to bug their users. For years when the chips were slow, ref counting was a major competitive advantage for iPhone. A hundred-billion dollar win.

And then there's system software. You can't afford a live, unpredictable runtime messing with you in systems code so anything that touches low level code can't use gc. There's a disincentive to really invest in a language that simply can't ever do a full stack, even if you're unlikely to need to write a device driver anytime soon. That's why no major browsers, performant ACID databases, or fast app servers depend on RAM gc.

WildUtahon In Defense of C++

I hope that the 100-man years of top engineers version has some benefits over the 3-line newbie approach.