alecdbrooks

I'm sure the FDA could be more efficient, but isn't a large part of the difficulty intrinsic to bringing a safe and effective device to the market? The flip side of people dying from not having an Epipen is people dying because their generic Epipen didn't work.

In another post, the author states outright that she likes many styles [0], so the idea she promotes "sterile, totalitarian looking architecture" is off the mark. The original post itself includes a diversity of good examples, so I'm not sure where that came from.

I guess I find it hard to take your claims seriously until you explain why you've concluded the author wants to enact her tastes into law rather than just discuss them.

>People find "careless" designs interesting.

I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. It just that in some (many?) cases, careless designs are less likely to be widely appealing or stand up to scrutiny.

[0]: http://mcmansionhell.tumblr.com/post/148836824926/man-i-love...

>I find it inappropriate and offensive that this author decides to be the sole authority on aesthetics of PRIVATE properties, appealing to some sort of an unassailable, celestial authority that mainstream architecture is and promoting boring, utilitarian designs. Just how far down the slippery slope of the rabbit hole do you want to go? Why not box people in grey Soviet apartment buildings?

This is a straw man. The author isn't against interesting designs, just careless ones. And interpreting this article as a advocating authoritarianism is reading a lot into it.

I could be wrong, but I don't think projektir means they "feel like shit" even when they exercise. I think they mean they occasionally feel like shit after exercising, which obscures the benefit.

If so, I'm in projektir's camp. I often feel better after exercising, but sometimes I feel worse. Also, I don't necessarily see a clear day-to-day improvement.

There are definite health benefits to exercise for most people [0], but I don't think subjectively feeling better is necessarily as widespread as some exercise proponents think.

[0]: Video summary of the evidence for exercise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFBBjynBpSw

I don't think the barrier is nearly that high. I could see people downloading co-op apps if they hear that they have more drivers or better drivers. Getting to that part is difficult, sure, but not out-of-hand impossible.

Totally agree. Hacker News readers like to promote their favorite, but I think most of us are ultimately pragmatists. For example, Vim is a personal favorite, but I've been using Microsoft Office's built-in VBA editor for most of my recent programming because it fits the problem I'm trying to solve best.

To be fair, there is some precedent. Printf, QuickCheck, and other libraries and features keep the exact same name as they're copied from language to language.

It fits with Chris Arnade's other reporting on addiction, but it does seem a bit too focused on McDonald's and a bit too uniformly positive (aside from noting that readers might "sneer").

The Guardian does do native advertising [0], and I find their labeling policy unclear. This case study [1] by their native advertising division, Guardian Labs, highlights videos that are very clearly labeled [2] but also an article [3] that doesn't seem to be. Their policy on commercial content [4] seems to suggest that everything is clearly labeled, but at least in this case they either didn't follow it or ignored the distinctions in the case study.

[0]: http://www.adweek.com/news/press/guardians-unusual-take-nati...

[1]: http://guardianlabs.theguardian.com/projects/silent-circle-t...

[2]: http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/ng-interactive/2015...

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/18/guardian-...

[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/info/2016/jan/25/content-funding

I like the theme—I'm guessing it's supposed to be reminiscent of early Mac OS and HyperCard? That seems to fit HyperDev's goal of getting up and running quickly so you can enjoy building something.

Another approach would be to use cron/anacron/launchd. Although these are technically serve a different purpose (running commands automatically), I find a lot of my background commands also should run regularly.

I don't think knowing when you're being asked to work too much is a thing that comes automatically with whatever job skills you're hired for. Even if you work in management or HR, where having a sense of "too much work" is part of your job, you might not be objective enough to apply that expertise to yourself.

And even if you know you're working too long, you might not feel empowered to do something about it. This could be because you literally don't have the power—your employer requires everyone to work unreasonable hours—or because you lack the confidence or skills to use it.

Not to dismiss your experience as a resident of a country that's received significant aid, but there's substantial evidence that cash transfers work, which GiveDirectly has compiled[0], including the following benefits:

—Adults more likely to work, even five years later.

—Children are healthier and get more education.

—Adults do not spend the extra money on things like alcohol or tobacco.

—Adults make significantly more when surveyed years after receiving the cash grant.

GiveWell, which has spent a lot of effort evaluating GiveDirectly, does have some lingering concerns [1] that programs like GiveDirectly's might worsen inflation or hurt people who don't receive a grant and live nearby. Research on these questions isn't conclusive, but suggests some minor, short-term effects. I suspect broadening programs to more recipients will mitigate the latter problem.

[0]: https://givedirectly.org/research-on-cash-transfers

[1]: http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas...

Update: Fixed formatting and added to final paragraph.

I would enjoy it if they used +ε and -ε for that, although +0 and -0 is probably clearer.

>Try incorporating some java code in a ruby project, however. No possible way that is going to fly.

I don't think this example is convincing. There are too many languages to expect arbitrary pairings to combine well. (Not to mention the fact that googling "java ruby" returns JRuby, which apparently lets you do just what you describe.)

I do agree with your last point: Even when we look at similar languages, like Python and Ruby, we don't declare one a winner, generally.

It's planned, apparently. [0] When it was discussed on the mailing list, it sounds like people were in favor of adding a keyword to disable it, making the syntax something like WITH UNBOXED (subquery) or WITH VIEW (subquery).

[0]: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Todo#Optimizer_.2F_Executor. Search for CTE.

I haven't personally studied the literature, but this study is in line with what GiveWell has concluded, although they are more certain about cash transfers not being spent on alcohol and tobacco [0] than on it not displacing work [1]. This paper and GiveWell's research are based on some of the same studies, so this study's not exactly surprising or new information, but replication's always nice.

[0]: http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas...

[1]: http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas...

The other common places are in names like Brontë, Zoë, and so on and in the word naïve. See the the English subsection of the Wikipedia linked to above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29#Engl....

This is good advice, but I disagree with his example. The entire paragraph reads[0]:

>The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe was a tradition that lasted for perhaps 20,000 years and it will always be rightly described as primitive. But it is upon those anonymous artists' shoulders — giants' shoulders — that later masters like Picasso were able to stand. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: 'After Altamira, all is decadence.'

Sure, for maximum clarity, Neil Oliver could have written more like he talks. But this paragraph is clear enough and written in an appealing style. It might not be Paul Graham's favorite style, but that doesn't make it bad writing.

I also think the sentence he picked is particularly unconversational, which is misleading for two reasons. One, it makes Oliver's style sound more opaque and formal than it actually is. Two, even in a more conversational style than Oliver's, you're occasionally going to include something that's a step more formal.

I think Graham knows this, albeit unconsciously. Would he really say "Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas" in a conversation? Probably not, but it reasonably passed his read aloud test because it's a good distillation of his point.

[0]: https://books.google.com/books?id=1Uk0AgAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...

There's Airtable, and although the form feature is rudimentary, it is point and click: https://airtable.com.

Taken together, Coca-Cola's beverages might come close:

>Today, products of The Coca-Cola Company are consumed at the rate of more than 1.8 billion drinks per day. [0]

However, it's hard to say how that translates to unique people, since it's not uncommon for people to drink more than one soda a day. Not to mention the fact that the product lineup is very diverse: you could have orange juice for breakfast (Minute Maid), water for lunch (Dasani), a sports drink after your workout (Powerade), and soda with dinner (Coke) and be individually responsible for four drinks.

Probably unnecessary disclaimer: I own a small amount of Coca-Cola stock.

[0] http://www.coca-colacompany.com/contact-us/faqs

No. What is it about how the Met Office studies climate change and requests new computers that is interesting? They both seem self-explanatory, so it didn't seem like listening to a 28-minute program would be worthwhile.

>Of particular interest is the Met Office's constant demand for bigger more expensive computers, and its recent moves into the more politically contentious territory of climate change policy.

It doesn't seem that interesting to me. One of the reasons supercomputers are built in the first place is for studying weather and climate [0]. And "politically contentious" or not, climatology is a reasonable thing for a meteorological office to study. For example, the National Weather Service in the United States does both.

Also, the Met Office has been involved in climate research [1] for a long time, so it's hardly "recent."

[0]: For example: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0829_050829_...

[1]: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/resources/hadleyc...

From the tables of fatalities per 100 million miles that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration compiles [0], the accident rate for trucks went up from 1.03 to 1.29. Passenger vehicle crashes are actually lower, going from 1.03 to 1. These are still on the low end historically: both rates were around 1.36 15 years ago.

[0] http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/large-tr.... I'm using tables 4 and 5.

Thanks to you and aaron-lebo for pointing that out. I'm not sure how I missed that, as I distinctly remembering noticing the language selection in the corner.

I probably should have written something like "no longer want to participate in." "Use" is too passive, probably. That being said, "quit" feels distinctly stronger than how the German version.

gnusocial.de has a better pitch, at least for the Hacker News crowd. My translation:

>We are a community of microbloggers, distributed over a worldwide federation of independent GNU Social servers, also known as StatusNet. We're the right choice for users like you, to whom ethics and solidarity matter and who no longer want to use centralized commercial services.

A nice touch is that if you mouse over the word for federation ("Verbund"), it explains that you can communicate with gnusocial.de users through any GNU Social instance or even other implementations of the same protocol.

It looks like it's open-source, distributed Twitter. The references to a public timeline on gnusocial.de and other sites [0] make me think you can make some tweets private and others public, rather than the all-or-nothing approach Twitter takes.

[0]: https://gnu.io/social/try/

>now, more then ever, the transparency and accountability of governments has increased in response to many of those exact same services (Twitter/YouTube/Facebook/Google).

I'm skeptical. Sure, advocates for transparency have used these platforms, but that seems unrelated to these companies' mass collection of data.

Not to mention that one of the biggest whistleblowers recently (Edward Snowden) revealed that these companies were complicit in NSA's not-at-all transparent surveillence.

American tipping isn't a particularly good system, but it's unkind to not tip if it means cheating the wait staff out of their wages.

Similarly, ads have issues, but blocking them is not fair to the creator, who reasonably expected ad impressions in exchange for creating the content and paying for visitors' traffic.

>... At no point, as a consumer of this content, did I get presented with so much as a simple "In return for consuming this content, you agree that you will look at the ads being shown here".

Isn't it common knowledge that many sites rely on ads for their revenue? Sit-down restaurants in the U.S. don't tell you as you walk in that you're expected to tip, but it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid minimum wage because customers are expected to tip. Yet, it's generally considered rude to not tip even though it's even easier than installing an ad blocker and restaurants won't refuse you service, whereas some websites try to block ad blockers.

Edit: Added last sentence.

Thoughtless or not, these comments are exclusionary. Accidental sexism is still sexism.

Saying she should have responded to the people directly doesn't fly either. We don't know what she did in the moment, and we don't need to. This post describes a pattern of sexism, not the specifics of each case.

It's attributed to Getty Images, so it's actually a stock photo.