digler999

paradoxically, there would be less total suffering (including inmate suffering) if prisons were more humane. That reduces your statement to "Should the victims be the only ones suffering?" after a violent crime. The part you miss is that there's no PSA video warning the perpetrators about the misery of solitary they face before they choose to commit the acts. They are either mentally ill or high when most of those crimes were committed. The only way you'd have a valid argument is if the criminal had a huge ctrl-z button, and once solitary "broke" them , and caused them to hit CTRL-Z, undo the victims' suffering, and everyone goes home. Then solitary would be an amazing, 99.99% effective punishment.

This is not even touching on the fact that a lot of these solitary inmates never commmitted heinous offenses. They just misbehaved in prison or were mentally ill and ran afoul of prison regs.

I can't speak for the UK, but in the US, if you go to anything other than a luxury boutique, they will jump all over you for a $7k sale. That customer may change their mind or take the sale elsewhere if you put them off for 90m.

its beautiful, not only is it absurd and hilarious, but it says so much. Not as a direct diss to java, but how badly a simple task can get over-designed to the point of being indecipherable. What would be great is if they added some kind of CRM or e-commerce to it, and donated the proceeds to charity. So like, could "Pay as a service" or sign up for "fizzBuzz as a service" and pay to run fizz buzz up to certain limits.

> They are the ones who have to have 35 levels of abstraction.

Have you seen FizzBuzz: Enterprise Edition ?

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

> did the single celled organisms survive such hits

or perhaps life itself was delivered by these hits ?

> In short, it's fuckin insane.

Just take a moment to consider the feedback loops: huge cloud cover blocks sunlight, so the ground temperature is cooler, so ground air pressure is lower, which probably acts like a sponge to pull in any nearby clouds, which would then increase chances of precipitation. I would imagine the time of day matters too, because cloud cover at night can trap in radiant heat... fucking insane.

I wonder if they put an open bounty on the problem, say for specific geographical regions: find a better prediction scheme for city X, win $Y

Try a 4K TV. I bought a card with 4K HDMI2.0 (for 60 fps) out, plugged it into my 46" TV and never looked back. The only drawback is needing to use the remote to turn it on/off. The monitor shuts off with DPMS but when the machine is off it still searches for signal. Doesn't bother me at all

To make some tech company rich ? Is that what "making a difference" means to you ? To help fund the CEO's golden parachute ?

> a human designed the bot that pulled the trigger.

And a human designed the insecure code on IE. That programmer isn't "absolved of the ramifications" of exposing their user base to god-knows-what kind of malware/ransomware.

> an artist looking for new opportunities to make a difference.

The only "difference" I want to make is in my checking account. I want the deposits from my employer to "differ" by greater margins as time advances.

I neither agree or disagree with you, but what concerns me is that your same logic can be applied to the "top tier university" farce:

"They're equally competent except that they didn't go to a school like MIT or Carnegie Mellon known for the highest quality CS departments. They obviously would've been accepted if they were top-tier grad material, so they are qualitatively not the same as being equally competent to someone who graduated from one of those programs".

I do agree with you inasmuch as they need to be able to speak intelligently about CS. Whether or not they can recite some textbook taxonomy of algorithms, they need to know how to describe and critique an algorithm or describe how a program works.

It's asymmetrical though. A reviewer can yea-or-nay my 1-hour assignment in a minute or two. If I'm desperate for work, sure I'll do it. But my position is in high enough demand that I can choose another position that doesn't require me to do homework. If they made some attempt to get to know me, talk to me, and then give me homework, I might bite. But I'm not going to do hours worth of work just for the chance to get a job.

> a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment

then you'll only select for people who have nothing better to do with their time than to donate it to your fun programming escapade. Experienced devs will say it's not worth their time and wont apply.

I wonder what would happen if there were a world-wide campaign to plant fast-growing weeds such as hemp? If literally everyone who had access to sunlight and water did it, you might be able to collect enough carbon to make a dent. then you'd have to put them somewhere. I imagine the dried plants could be baled and stored underground. They would still release some CO2 from oxidation but perhaps theres a way to stop that ?

I worked for a (casino) gaming company that thought electron would be appropriate for a production slot machine. I expressed serious doubts that JS was the right language for a graphics appliance, but I didnt want to take control of the situation. A few months later, there was memory fragmentation and leaks that nobody could figure out. That company went belly up shortly thereafter.

> I am very skeptical about recycling

I am too. I really despise that they push the burden onto the customer, instead of hiring people or robots to pick bottles or other shit out of the trash stream and recycle it. As a homeowner, I'm paying them for trash service. If there's a cleaner way (recycling - which isn't necessarily any greener, as you pointed out) , the waste management industry should be forced to do it for the greater good, just like coal plants are forced to run their exhaust through scrubbers to remove pollutants. They shouldn't profit, or burn millions more gallons of diesel driving huge recycling trucks around, by forcing (or guilting) us to do unpaid labor.

I get what you're saying, that the docs dont really follow an overarching theme. Thankfully, stackoverflow fills in the rest.

> I can't understand what the authors/developers were trying to achieve when writing it.

I can't speak for them, but event-driven designs are a great alternative to procedural polling / event loop designs. I am not sure, but I think there's a relationship to the functional programming style where you say "when there's data, do this to it". So I think what they're trying to accomplish is to enable FP paradigms in python. You could write a coroutine that says "yield until there's data, when there is, transform it".

I used it with zeromq [1] to route messages between a few C++ programs that all work together. So my python program is a "supervisor" task that sends heartbeat messages to my binary programs over zeromq. Asyncio is handy for timing the heartbeats (because you can say "in 2 seconds, do this") and reading the message queue. I also hooked it up to inotify, so I can do "echo SOME_COMMAND > command.txt" and as soon as command.txt is written to, my supervisor gets a notification, reads the file, and processes the command. I almost lost my sanity to get it working, but once I got it, I really like it. One tip though, dont try to mix async and sync programming. Go big or stay home.

[1] http://zeromq.org/

> I cannot get asyncio to fit in my brain

I found it extremely (to the point of a frustration-induced mental breakdown) hard. I still can't fit it all in my brain, but I got enough so that my code works. The best explanation I can give is by analogy: think of the kernel of an OS, and how it spreads CPU time across all the processes. Sometimes processes know they dont need to work, say they're waiting for a disk read, or a network message, so they surrender and say "ok kernel, I'm done for now, let someone use CPU". Thats like what the "yield" command does in asyncio, although yield requires a context. So you say "yield until this function does something interesting" (I think it's called 'await' now), then a mini-"kernel" (the io service) stops executing that function and polls all the other functions to see if any of their yields have changed state. It just keeps polling till it finds some work it can do. I dont yet fully grok the futures yet, but I think they're just a way of packaging up the "work item" produced when a yield actually gives you something.

* Disclaimer: I barely understand this, so if I'm spreading bad information I apologize in advance.

I have nothing against asyncio in python, I think its presence helps put python in the "big leagues" of languages, and not just a toy for noobs with arduinos. It's an additional language feature, like C++ templates. You dont have to use it, so the noobs can keep doing their thing. But it prevents more experienced devs from outgrowing the language and having to learn a new one, or port working code to a new language.

the "lets stop using it" comment, yes. Stratoscope's comment was just explaining why it hurts some big egoes. s/he didn't take any position on it.

I doubt fentanyl would work in a public place. Wouldn't he just pass out from respiratory failure until paramedics (who are probably onsite at the airport) ventilated him ?

they also won't pay the claim unless you can prove the item was worth what you say it is. They dont tell you this when you buy the insurance, of course. But once you try to make a claim, they demand proof. They want a catalog showing the item, an appraisal, etc. And just like any insurance, the first thing they will do when you try to make a claim is get out of paying it.

> a system that has the proper insurance in place

insurance is a scam, especially with USPS. You can't just say "this package is worth $10k to me". They will let you buy $10k worth of insurance, but if you go make the claim, only then do they say "ok, you said it was worth $10k, now prove it". If you can't show a catalog, or a preponderance of evidence that the item was worth what you said, they simply won't pay.

wont an easy fix be to just hash it again with sha256? Sure that will take time to bake it into software, but wont they just be able to put a text label next to the description and say "sha256: abc...123" ?

> and then will hike prices.

there's a reason why you get a flyer telling you how much a cab ride from JFK->Midtown costs and that cabs are only allowed to pick up passengers at the designated stop (creating 30m+ lines). But go ahead and believe theyre just "working class folks" and not scam artists.

Just a guess, but in the ~80s/90s, coloring books were popular for children. At restaurants, they would have single-page coloring pages for kids with a handful of crayons. The caption used to say "Color me well" or something. There was a 90's R&B band that was a play on this phrase called "Color me badd".

"devaluing working class people's taxi registration"

read: a company that figured out their way around regulatory capture.

* what a healthy level of immigration is

specifically, what reasons is it being used for? It's been discussed here many times that the H1B program for tech workers is being used to depress wages and remove the immigrants' rights to competition. So while a politician may seem so shiny and "progressive" for increasing immigration, you never know if their back pockets are being padded by the tech corporations who save billions of dollars by not paying the "free market" rate for the skilled work.

I've thought this too. They say prison "breaks you down" and the contact with other ruffians "hardens you", well, maybe if they structured prison the opposite, and give them a ladder to climb up. So that through years of operant conditioning, an inmate can go from a tiny cell and many hours of lockdown, and gradually earn those privileges by not misbehaving, getting a GED, mentoring new prisoners, etc etc. Earn privileges all the way up to better food, having a pet, limited internet access, music, free college education, family visitation , etc. You could probably get true rehabilitation by "breaking them up" instead of down.

Probably the same thing that goes though someone's mind when they drive drunk, or dont wear a seatbelt, ride a motorcycle without a helmet, or partake in any other risky behavior: I saw someone do it before and they were fine, nothing bad will happen to me, I can do it safely. Taking one dose of herion won't instantly kill you, thats why it's so insidious. You can take it many times and there will be no consequences. But it takes ahold of you before you know it, and at that point its too late to simply stop. check out /r/opiates if you want to take a peek into an opiate addict's life

> I personally know people

survivorship bias. You dont know all the people who succumbed to it because they're dead.