andrewl

Exactly. It was described in Chesterton’s Fence:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

The gen part of transgenic comes from genes, not gender.

Transgenic refers to an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means.[1][2]

Trumps’s team grabbed the term to anger credulous people and get their support. Trump might not know what it means, but his team does, and they don’t care. I expect depatru knows what it means as well, or is capable of finding it out. But he’d rather add to the manipulation.

I’m linking to both genome.gov and to Wikipedia in case the government site is taken down.

[1]https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Transgenic [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgene

I knew OCaml was being used by a number of big finance companies, or that it had been used. I really didn't know it was still active. Has anybody here used it? How was it?

We moved from Subversion to Git a long time ago, and we’re fine with it. But we’re only 16 users, so I personally can’t speak to how well it works for much larger teams, although I know of course that it’s used by giant teams for giant projects. One of the advantages is that so many people know it. So even if the features and user experience were worse, it could still be the best choice because almost everybody you’ll need to hire will have experience with it.

What I keep meaning to try is Fossil[1], built by the creators of SQLite. (And built on SQLite.) It’s not that we’re looking to replace Git. I’m just curious about the actual hands on experience. Has anybody here actually used it, as opposed to looked at it?

[1] https://fossil-scm.org/

mock-possum wrote: ...but it’s so hard for me to get past the thought, “why don’t they just stop being that way, and start making friends who they can open up to?”

Past a certain point it’s indicative of pathology, and not necessarily one they brought on themselves. Looking at the CDC data on suicide (while it’s still available) it says the suicide rate among males in 2022 was approximately four times higher than the rate among females. Males make up 50% of the population but nearly 80% of suicides:

https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

I was fortunate to grow up in a family and a section of society in which being connected was natural for men and women. I benefited from it, but I did not create it. So I get no credit for it. I don’t know how mock-possum grew up, but if you grew up as I did your current healthy state is certainly good for you, but you had a head start. Like my head start of growing up in a big stone house full of books, with lovely educated and academic parents who read to me. I didn’t create that situation. I just showed up. I inherited that emotional and intellectual wealth. I did not earn it.

And men who grew up being beaten, literally, for emoting, and frankly for not being brutal, did not create their own situations either. They do, unfairly, have to do the work to get themselves out of what they did not get themselves into. But it requires more than to “just stop being that way, and start making friends you can open up to.”

Obviously not everybody is suicidal, but at the extreme you’re saying to certain people “instead of wanting to kill yourself, why don’t you stop feeling that way? Don’t despair, don’t feel suicidal, just cheer up instead!”

Agreed. There is, or at least were, some parts of the body that were only recently discovered and not just known about and assumed to be inactive. It was only in 2015 that lymphatic vessels were discovered in the central nervous system:

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lymphat...

That article is about mice, but they were later found in humans, too.

I was mostly thinking that poorly paid agricultural workers or other people doing periodic manual labor may be getting paid in cash, and perhaps they are not paying taxes on the money, even if they are legally required to. The wait staff and bartenders I used to know did not pay tax on their cash tips.

So what I am talking about is not what the legal requirement is, but to what degree it is followed. But to the degree these people pay taxes while here they are not getting a completely free ride when they take advantage of our tax-supported services.

On a related note, I would be happy for illegal immigrants to get at least some medical support, such as vaccinations and treatment for communicable diseases, as that benefits everybody.

Although there is probably support for immigrants besides welfare, I believe that welfare itself is reserved for citizens.

And this is not a statement for or against immigration, but in response to what some people have said (not PKop, to whom I am replying): non-citizen immigrants do pay at least some taxes, in the form of sales tax. And, depending on how they are paid (cash or paycheck) they will also be paying taxes on their own pay. If they are getting cash it is easier to avoid taxes. It is harder if they're receiving a salary.

I’m always glad to see new work on tools, and amplifications to our capabilities of any sort.

I played with Smalltalk, and later Pharo, a bit, but it was years ago. As I recall the editor was always aware of the state of the system. And I think it was at a level beyond what any current IDE can do. While I do not remember if it allowed you to enter invalid code, it was definitely an interesting approach.

So I will be following Eyg for sure.

I believe it is for Thomas Kurtz, one of the two people who created the BASIC language.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42141761

Well, the mother who was arrested doesn't agree with the policy. I wouldn't be surprised if she is saying it's insane, and it should be stopped. She got a lawyer to help push back against the charges.

This was voted in, in theory, by the majority of the US population.

The laws vary state by state, and probably by region within states. So this seems to be a law in Fannin County, Georgia. It might not even apply to all of Georgia, much less the entire country. It certainly does not apply in the city I live in. It might apply in other parts of the state I live in.

And it would not have been put to the entire country for a vote.

I don't know if you can can say the entire USA has an "obsession" with preventing children from being autonomous based on this one incident. That's too much of a generalization. There are obviously people who do think that way. But there are also a lot who do not, including the mother, who said "I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident."

This situation is ridiculous, of course. But the USA is huge, and you can probably find pretty much any or every attitude and approach to life here.

Roberta Lincoln! Great episode.

Also discussed on Slashdot at:

https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/10/28/2027229/a-million-...

“Look, what I’ve seen since coming back to the State Department three and a half years ago is that everything happening in the technological world and in cyberspace is increasingly central to our foreign policy.”

Their audio version of the article is free at:

https://www.economist.com/media-assets/audio/062%20Business%...

I took a course with Randy Kaplan. I thought he was an excellent lecturer, and a very kind person. We had some interesting talks after class.

I thought it was a good interview. And I will certainly be interested to try Workbook, although I am not clear on what it would do for us that a wiki would not. But I could easily be missing something. Workbook will be free, so it won’t be hard to find out.

I would put the date of the interview on the page.

I’m glad to see he plans to discuss Fossil in a followup post.

This seems very clever. I’ve enjoyed abusing SQL, too. And note that abuse is the developer’s term for how what he’s doing in sqlite-schema-diagram.sql. I’m not trying to be insulting. I actually do like it.

I’m looking at this on my phone, and not in a position to try it at the moment. But it seems very clever. I’ve enjoyed abusing SQL, too. If nothing else, it’s an engaging exercise. (Note that abuse is the author’s term for how he’s using SQL. I’m not trying to be insulting.) (Or abusive.)

Tests are valuable, but of course they’re never perfect. Certain kinds of programs require them more than others. And no development approach, method, or tool is the best in all cases.

The program with the most tests that I’m aware of is SQLite. I have a feeling Hipp and his team know their code extremely well and that they do a lot of thinking before they change anything. Then they run their massive test suite, which they built because they’re good enough to know that they’re not good enough to think everything through without making errors.

Tests have saved me from a few blunders over the years.

I had a very good user experience ordering from Dreamsofa.com. They answered questions quickly, sent swatches, then sent more swatches when I needed more information, and their shipping tracking and notifications were helpful and accurate. The two guys from the shipping company they worked with were very nice. And I’m very happy with the sofa.

bruce343434 isn’t saying he’s worried the silverfish will sneak into his bed and bite him in his sleep. He’s saying it would be horrifying to live with insects as stealthy and difficult to eradicate as silverfish, but which were also bloodsuckers, like bedbugs. In short, he’s saying bedbugs are horrifying.

In a different conversation (https://sigmodrecord.org/publications/sigmodRecord/1906/pdfs...) Hipp said he’d like to create a combination of Fossil and Git:

Q: If you magically had enough extra time to do one additional thing at work that you’re not doing now, what would it be?

A: Oh, I’ve got a long list. But my #1 thing right now I think would be a new version control system which the working name is Fit, it’s a combination of Fossil with Git. Uses the Fossil user interface but it uses the low-level file format of Git. So that then you can work with Fossil’s interface but push and pull to legacy Git users. And I think that would be huge.

It may happen for email and SQLite. Or at least a mail server that uses SQLite. In this July 2021 conversation Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, said he’s going to write his own email server:

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

I’m going to write my own mail server. I was making notes on that even as we were setting up this call. That’s a big problem, and that’s at least as difficult if not more difficult than writing a database engine, but I don’t want to be beholden to Gmail. I don’t want them controlling my destiny. I don’t want them controlling the record of all of my conversations. I want to control that myself, and so I’m going to go through a lot of pain and a lot of work and a lot of effort to come up with some solution that I can control myself. I can go out and lease a virtual machine out there in the cloud and run it myself and not depend on a third party to control my email.

I expect the foundation will be SQLite, just as it is for his source code control system Fossil.

Now cork is experiencing a revival as more industries look for sustainable alternatives to plastic and other materials derived from fossil fuels. ... The cork oak’s thick bark adapted to defend the tree from fire, making it a powerful insulating material that’s been used to shield fuel tanks on NASA spacecraft and electric car batteries. ... Several studies found that cork is carbon negative, meaning it can store more carbon than what is required to produce it.

When I saw the headline I assumed it referred to the gut microbiome. But the subhead says New analysis reveals how skin microbiome could be associated with wrinkles and skin health.

Interesting. I know we have a microbiome on the surface, but I never thought about it and what it does outside of acute skin conditions.

More about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Mills

There are different ways of setting up a bed with a duvet. In the United States a bed would most commonly have a fitted sheet on the mattress, then a flat sheet on top of the fitted sheet, tucked under the mattress at the foot of the bed. You sleep on top of the fitted sheet and under the flat sheet. The duvet goes on top of the flat sheet, so it basically doesn’t touch anybody in the bed.

The other way is to eliminate the flat sheet, and have the duvet inside a regularly-changed cover, because, without the flat sheet, the duvet is in direct contact with the people in the bed.

A more detailed discussion can be found at: https://www.realsimple.com/home-organizing/bedding-debate-to...