cderwin

For what its worth, I think most people who agree with your first to sentences would have no problem with cutting the things you list in the third.

You might want a redistribution program, just like I don't want healthcare to be a right, but none of that changes that no politician will speak about their support for some healthcare policy in those terms. It would be electoral suicide if they're from a competitive district.

I don't think it's true that "details can't be shared(because they don't exist)". It is a political imperative for Republicans to repeal the ACA now, and worry about replacing it after the positive PR. Without doing that, Democrats have no reason to come to the table to work on bipartisan reform (not that Republicans necessarily want this), and any replacement will be spun as a minor modification to Obamacare, which causes big political problems for the GOP both among its base and among swing voters. Details of a replacement aren't being shared right now because it would be tactically damaging to Republicans and Democrats don't want to attempt reform.

Presumably the repeal wouldn't take effect for some time, allowing an alternative to be put in place before hitting that point.

But that doesn't mean the ACA saved their lives, it means ACA allowed them to continue with their startups rather than find coverage working for any of a plethora of big businesses. That is obviously still a good thing, but to claim that those founders literally would have died without the ACA seems misleading at best.

It certainly could, and in fact Massachusetts implemented a similar program in the mid 2000s

Obviously there's a non-zero chance it will blow up, but isn't that risk worth it if reform would:

* Preserve some form of protection for people with pre-existing conditions (this covers the "save my life" part)

* Lower costs of health insurance for both individuals and the public (perhaps dramatically)

* Actually address the underlying healthcare issues directly, i.e. implement policies that will reduce the cost of healthcare itself, not just the cost of insurance

In particular, the risk of losing some important things (like coverage of preexisting conditions) seems extraordinarily low.

Not according to the dictionary (maybe some, but it's clearly not a consensus): http://www.dictionary.com/browse/contrarian

Perhaps, but isn't it just as reasonable that they didn't want to change it? Presumably changing the date would actually censor the vote, with it being nearly impossible to get word of the date change to the entire electorate.

He can be entirely and uniformly contrarian throughout his entire life without being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. We have no idea beyond wild guesses why he is contrarian.

This sounds like evidence that his knowledge is wide, not narrow

If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better?

I remember back when I was in high school, I always sort of assumed that the authors of the poems we were tested on wouldn't be able to answer the ridiculous questions on our assessments. But even if they did, I've never been able to figure out what skills these questions were testing. If poems are open to interpretation, isn't it reasonable to think that two equally skilled readers would arrive at different conclusions? Which is to say: Is the answer really objective?

In any case, the state of standardized testing is miserable, and unfortunately from all accounts I have heard it is worse abroad. I don't think this should be much of a surprise to anyone.

Sure. It's not a fair comparison. But dynamically linking rust's std isn't an option. If you are optimizing for executable size, c wins because dynamically linking libc is possible. This is even true controlling for glibc, since most rust code also dynamically links glibc too (including hello world). In fact, rust's hello world has quite a few more shared dependencies than the equivalent c anyway: it uses libdl, librt, libpthread, and libgcc_s as well.

On my system (2015 MBP running Ubuntu 16.04) Rust's hello world compiles to a nearly 3.5 MB executable. Compiling the equivalent C program with clang results in an executable under 9 KB. Rust may not have a GC, but its executables are certainly fat.

Note: Rust executables can be trimmed down by stripping them (not done by default, even for release builds) and using libc malloc instead of jemalloc. But even then, C wins by a lot.

Relevant blog post: https://lifthrasiir.github.io/rustlog/why-is-a-rust-executab...

> If there's anything we've learned on HN, IoT software is complete shit when it comes to security.

Yes, but I think most people here will till you it's not because of a lack of engineering talent. Rather security takes time and a lot of money (in particular security engineers) and IoT companies would rather do without for the most part. And even if you do pay the price it doesn't always work out. It's not an engineering or talent problem, it's a management and P/L problem.

That's interesting, thanks

I think this is a rather elementary (and Randian) view of capitalism. I don't know of any serious proponents of capitalism who claim that pure greed and self-interest is desirable. It is also a mistake to equate the existence of private property, or even the existence of limited free trade in primitive society with the effect of a society that is fundamentally capitalist in nature. And mercantilism (aka "crony capitalism") isn't capitalism either. Capitalism isn't the same thing as "some trade exists, that is somewhat free, for some people, sometimes".

I agree, at least in part, that the progress of the modern era was indeed due to both modern science and the principles of the enlightenment. However, I do believe that the success of both modern ethics and science can ultimately be attributed the advent of emergent phenomenon (of which capitalism is the economic sort), which is the eventual conclusion of free society.

In the case of science, this is the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" that is often talked about today, but really coincided with the enlightenment. Scientific ideas compete in the literature for dominance, and that grow the most acceptance over time eventually dominate. Both Newton's calculus and gravitational theories proved to be subject to quite a bit of criticism (from Gottfried Leibniz and Robert Hooke, respectively), and of course Newton's gravitational theory has become dominant, though I have heard that the calculus we learn today is closer to that of Leibniz than that of Newton. Likewise, Darwin's theory of natural selection was subject to intense a persistent criticism for nearly 100 years -- Darwin's Theory of Natural selection was published in 1856 and the Scopes trial was not decided until 1925, and the Supreme Court only struck down laws outlawing teaching of evolution in 1968. Today, of course, countless scientific theories are competing for dominance in the scientific literature across the world -- a process that has been fundamental to the monumental scientific gains we have made since the time of Newton.

Likewise, secular theories of morality have been almost entirely emergent in nature. Adam Smith first proposed that morality was the consequence of compassion, learned by each of us as we grow up and figure out that making others happy makes us happy, and seeing misery makes us unhappy (he called this "mutual sympathy of sentiments"). He claimed that as we grow, each of us comes up with our own moral code based on what we discover to cause mutual sympathy of sentiments, and that society's moral sense is derived from each of our individual moral codes. In fact, Adam Smith first used the term "the Invisible Hand" in his "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" to describe how societal morality is derived from individual moral codes. An example of this in our lifetime is the growing acceptance of lgbtq people in the west, or in the generations before us, the about face in the moral attitude towards race. Today, that arguments is carried on by the likes of Steven Pinker, who claims that our sense of morality is continually moving towards acceptance and away from violence, which he attributes to commerce (which forces people to interact with each other), and centralized government, by forcing people to act as people of a court rather than as warriors -- though I might prefer the term civilized government.

That said, none of these ideas are even slightly novel. Lucretius first expounded on them in his "De Rerum Natura", and obviously the giants of classical liberalism explained them in much greater depth. Charles Darwin was brought up in the tradition of the Scottish enlightenment thinkers, and very much surrounded himself with the ideological successors to classical liberalism and, in particular, David Hume. In the economic sphere, Hayek devoted his entire life to the idea of emergent phenomenon. And lastly, most of the examples here are taken from "The Evolution of Everything" by Matt Ridley.

The honest truth is that almost everyone will have the same exact experience in neovim as in vim, and that the differences right now (this could always change) are mostly for developers hoping to use vim in a creative way. For example, nvim has a decoupled back end, so ides could emulate vim without having to do emulation at all -- they would literally just communicate with the neovim backend. Another example, which I think is great, is that to support python extensions, nvim does not need to be recompiled. A third one, which is perhaps the least valuable but is also the most user-facing, is that you can now open terminals within neovim. Of course, you can do this with vim and tmux, but sometimes it's nice that I can set up a binding for <leader>-t to open a terminal, or <leader>-p to open an ipython shell instead of using tmux's more cumbersome default bindings. That said, there are of course ways to set up fantastic tmux bindings, I just haven't.

I love neovim, but the idea that "most people use nvim" or "vim is dying" is just wrong. Though I really do think nvim's development philosophy will lead to better results than Moolenaar's.

FWIW, I recently jumped ship and installed Ubuntu over MacOs on my Macbook Pro (not dual booting), and it was as easy as can be reasonably expected. The worst side effect so far is that a strange red light is emitted from the headphone jack. It's been more-or-less flawless. Oh yeah, I also had to google for about ten minutes to find an askubuntu question about running web videos that depended on silverlight. I must admit I don't entirely understand what I installed (from apt), but it worked and in total maybe a half hour was lost.

I would have a much worse experience transitioning to windows, or even in all likelihood transitioning back to MacOs.

Of course, having linux interoperate with MacOs is a completely different situation. That said, for a while I dual-booted with grub, and it worked fine. In booting from usb, dual-booting, and running only linux on mac hardware, I never experienced track pad or keyboard failure, though I do think apple's keyboard layout is inferior for non-MacOs systems. I expected to have some major problems using Ubuntu exclusively, but I have had few hard-to-fix problems. It was hardly a nightmare.

In a) and c), corruption is inescapable. It is an unavoidable consequence of centralized power, not something that can be fixed with endless (corruptible) oversight committees or particularly prescient design. It is cot an implementation bug, it is a bug in the spec. Meanwhile in b), corruption is a feature that looks like a bug. Self-interest is harnessed instead of ignored. And while b) certainly has its problems (one of which, infrastructure, is noted above), corruption is not one of them. However, despite its problems, the lack of central authority in b) has caused the single greatest reduction in both poverty and mortality in the history of mankind.

Replying to myself because parent was flagged: why was it flagged? It didn't say anything outright offensive or disturbing, and even though its tone was bordering on rude, it certainly raised a valid point (just look at the civil discussion below it). It is particularly troubling that a comment against suppressing speech on forums like this would be censored. I understand that HN is not Times Square but it is a public forum, and I do think a reasonable assumption of freedom of expression is warranted.

Sorry about that! I didn't mean to single you out, I've just seen people substitute "but [blank] isn't the gov't" for an actual justifiable reason to ban speech that I wanted to say something.

First off, it's not practical to ban all speech supporting censorship, because then all speech supporting that specific policy (including your own comment) would also have to be banned.

I'm not aware of other countries suppressing speech that is intended to censor others, though I am aware that countries like France criminally censor anti-semitic remarks such as holocaust denial. Is this what you mean? I've never heard of the rationale behind that censorship being that that speech is intended to silence others.

In any case, I do think there should be a near-absolute right to speech for three reasons. The first is a slippery slope argument -- any time you criminalize behavior that is open to human interpretation, the power of that interpretation can and will be abused. The risk of censorship is too great to put in the hands of regulators or politicians, even with n degrees of "oversight".

Speech also cannot cause direct harm, and censoring does cause harm in that it takes away someone's right. For that reason, it seems reasonable to censor speech that actually cause harm to happen, though idle threats or general instructions do not qualify.

Lastly, banning speech does not allow the ideas it represents to be addressed in a serious manner, meaning that proponents of that speech will always (likely somewhat correctly) be able to claim said speech was banned in order to enable attacks son that sort of speech. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that eventually whatever speech that would be banned would just be defeated in the marketplace of ideas, and banning speech just prevents it from being struck down as irresponsible on even ground. I think this can be evidenced by their being no more serious a problem with holocaust denial in the United States than elsewhere in the west where it is banned.

As you can probably tell, my opinions fall very close to the Supreme Court's interpretatin of the first amendment, so I guess I am a bit biased in my opinion.

But does Uber really have a competitive advantage here? In the multiple cities I have lived in in the past couple years (Boston, Austin, Dallas) I have never noticed Uber's range being greater than any particular taxi. I do prefer uber do to brand trust, but I had no issue switching to RideAustin after uber left the city.

The two are fundamentally different platforms. Twitter is an open space provided as a free service to the public at large, while a lecture is a fundamentally closed platform (only the lecturer speaks) only open to those enrolled in a specific class.

That said, even in the example you give it is not always considered appropriate to remove people causing disruption. Consider, for example, a conservative speaker giving a guest lecture being protested against -- often loud enough the the lecturer needs to shout to be heard by his audience, even though protesters are outside.

Here is a relevant video of Ben Shapiro giving a lecture at Penn State: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLpa6fsTxCA

I think a notable exception to this is comments on the wall street journal. They are typically well-informed professionals having reasonable opinions who take the time to write in-depth comments -- not unlike this site, I suppose. And of course commenting is gated on having a paid subscription to the magazine, and I believe there is an additional paid membership that gets ones comments promoted.

I don't know if things are still like this though -- I haven't had a subscription for several years.

Before someone comments noting that the 1st amendment only restricts government and is not binding on twitter: please note that free speech is a valuable community principle for the same reasons it is a valuable legal principle. The "marketplace of ideas" is very real and very valuable and ought not be censored. Moreover, it is very hard to consider social networks in this day and age to be acting as anything other than an online proxy for public space, and it is no less wrong to censor speech on twitter than it is for campuses to censor speech.

Most people use Uber almost entirely in a single city. This is obviously not true for those who travel a lot, but for most people they only need a single app (whether or not it be Uber) for their home city.

The real advantage Uber has is brand trust when taxis go back to their shady and anti-competitive business practices and the regulatory environment relaxes. The important question is if brand trust will be worth anything.

For what it's worth, Rust has both Null (for unsafe null pointers) and None (wrapping a type that may or may not exist at any given point). None is used far, far more frequently in my experience than null in rust though.