edmccard

>do you really think those jobs will return given the cheapness now of solar and natural gas?

In the county and state where I live (Somerset County, PA) the majority of coal production is metallurgical, so we are more sensitive to the demand for steel than to the price of natural gas.

That demand is on an uptick, so there are 4 new mines planned for PA (2 in my county)[1]. But there was a similar spike in demand back in 2008, which didn't end up making much of an impact on employment. For example, PBS coals, whose headquarters I drive past every day, had ~600 employees in 2008 when they were bought by Severstal (a Russian steel company), who planned on adding ~150 more jobs.[2] In 2014 they were acquired by Corsa Coals (from Canada), who laid off about 130 miners in 2015.[3]

TLDR: no I don't think those jobs will return.

[1] http://www.coalage.com/news/latest/5510-4-new-met-mines-plan...

[2] http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1531216/russian_steelm...

[3] http://triblive.com/business/headlines/7530395-74/mines-coal...

>I think it's fair to argue that it's a tenant of faith for liberals that all conservatives hate gays, hate minorities, hate women, etc.

Well, to paraphrase your next sentence: "that these people exist in the Democratic party is impossible to deny, to tar and feather the entire Democratic party as this way is how we get to the binary world view."

In particular, I am a liberal in a rural Pennsylvania county that voted 75% for Trump, and I know that my conservative neighbors do not hate gays, minorities, and women. (Most people I've talked to were responsive to his position on coal mining; I'm not sure what will happen in four years if those jobs don't come back.)

>This is why I say people are expressing a binary worldview. From what I can see, many are not expressing that there could be a third possibility. Or fourth. Or a myriad of options.

You mentioned Twitter; if Trump being a Nazi is one bad option, and there are x-1 other good options, I think it's only natural that the kind of people who like to tweet are going to tweet about what they think is the most dangerous one.

>I don't understand how people who can understand and believe in things like quantum and multiple realities think that the only outcomes our world are strictly binary: Nazism or Progressive Liberalism.

That's a bit of a strawman, I think; no-one I've heard of, who thinks Trump is a fascist, arrived at that conclusion by saying "well he's not a progressive liberal so all that's left is nazi". It's been more like (whether correct or not) "his policies and views are similar to the historical policies and views associated with fascism, so he could be a fascist."

>> and CurvePreferences to avoid unoptimized curves

The key word being unoptimized. In the article, the code snippet has a comment "Only use curves which have assembly implementations" and he mentions that "a client using CurveP384 would cause up to a second of CPU to be consumed on our machines." (presumably because it does not have an assembly implementation)

> Programmers should not need to know this stuff.

It can sometimes be a sign of a leaky abstraction, but programmers might need to know the performance characteristics of the code they write.

>> Salted cucumbers, sugar, and yogurt might work, but if you count the salt, that’s four ingredients, not three. You might not like the thought of potatoes, mayonnaise and cabbage, but someone has invented a corned beef salad that has all three.

>So, which is it? "More than 3 ingredients doesn't count" or "it counts as long as it contains all 3"?

Not sure what the confusion is, but neither of the two examples counts as "three foods where any two of those foods taste good together, but all three combined taste disgusting". The first example fails (if you count the salt) because it has four foods, not three. The second example fails because someone has made a (presumably non-disgusting) recipe with all three combined.

>It only works when your function returns error of the same type as expression inside 'try!' or '?' macros. So in a lot of cases it doesn't work or forces programmer to return underlying type of error

Or you can implement a conversion from the underlying error to your custom error type[1], and 'try'/'?' will just work.

[1]https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/error-handling.html#composing...

>the Kappernick debacle

Earlier this year, ESPN had 10 million fewer subscribers than they had in 2013; they lost 1.5 million of them between February and May of this year[1]. That was months before Colin Kaepernick's first anthem protest in late August.

[1]http://www.outkickthecoverage.com/espn-loses-1-5-million-sub...

>The 6502's two-phase clock throws a wrench in direct clock speed comparisons, no?

Not really? The two phases are more or less just inverted versions of each other[1], but 1 clock cycle, for the purposes of counting cycles-per-instruction, is the same time (I think) whether you're measuring phase-1-high to phase-1-high or phase-2-low to phase-2-low.

[1]http://lateblt.livejournal.com/88105.html

>* It takes way more effort to compose a careful, persuasive comment about political issues on HN

and...

>* The rest of the tech community does not appreciate thoughtful political commentary on HN

Maybe the two are related? If someone wants to have a meaningful discussion about, say, structural injustice in tech, I bet there are places they can do that _without_ having to start with an argument from first principles about whether or not racism and misogynism have any value.

>apart from the circulation of egregiously awful comments in the few moments they exist here before people like me flag them off the site

Yes, the most egregiously awful comments get flagged. But that's not a very high bar to clear, compared to what I've seen on other sites.

>a few years ago mine started requiring a full set of fingerprints for driver's license renewal.

Is it Texas? I think they gave up on that last year:

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/02/06/texas-dps-sto...

>How many kids are hospitalized/die from swallowing batteries?

For button batteries:

poison.org[1] lists 54 fatalities since 1977; the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has a page [2] that mentions "Fifteen children have died — 11 of them within the last six years" but it isn't clear when exactly that page was published.

[1]http://www.poison.org/battery/fatalcases

[2] http://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/kohls-injury-prevention...

>the judge was a member of SDLRLA, an extremely political Latino advocacy organization.

The SDLRLA (La Raza Lawyers Association) is a Latino bar association. The NCLR (National Council of La Raza) is the political Latino advocacy organization. The two organizations are not the same.

>How does it compare with the great buffalo herds that roamed the plains 200 years ago?

There are about 92 million cows and calves in the U.S. today.[1] Estimates for the number of bison at their peak range from 30 million to 60 million.

[1]https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2016/01_29_2016.php

>When they rise up against you at the ballot box...

Fewer votes than Hillary. Fewer votes than Romney's failed 2012 run. Hardly an "uprising".

>It's not the anti-racism, it's the incessant lecturing. Get it?

Since when is "linking to another site" some kind of "incessant lecturing"? If you don't want to read stories on theundefeated.com, don't click the links.

FTA:

"The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber."

Was that not there 15 minutes ago?

>it touches on a great deal of topics ... it's likely still a great resource for keywords, no?

What? No. When a source is that biased, then the "list of topics covered" (and the keywords associated with them) do not somehow magically escape that bias; it is not a "great resource" for anything except the viewpoints of r/MensRights

>In places where great work is being done, the attitude always seems to be critical and sarcastic

It can be tricky, though, to be critical and sarcastic without using a jeering tone.[1]

[1]https://twitter.com/paulg/status/789066303566929920

or funet, or wuarchive

>Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses.

And swinging a bat is one of the skills baseball players need to use for their job. The comment you replied to was talking about skills that are not going to be used every day. So I don't think your analogy is very useful.

>No ill will intended.

Is that a new short version of Hanlon's Razor?

My guess is that "packages" is shorthand for "binary packages", as opposed to being able to redeploy from source.

>Let's concoct a toy. You own 100% of a company. A suitor offers to buy it for $100bn. Not negotiable is that they will use 1,000 child laborers post-acquisition.

>[by] refusing the $100bn ... one turned down the opportunity to go to Mars or rid the world of the guinea worm and possibly other bugs or cure this or that

The buyer that had the $100bn to spend also had those opportunities but was willing to exchange them for buying your company. So claiming the decision not to sell is somehow reducing e.g. the number of trips to Mars seems disingenuous.

>Because the article is pretty much saying that the boss cannot offer any criticism at all

FTA:

"What if the work is all wrong? Obviously, if there’s more than “2 cents” worth of stuff that needs to change, then this rule does not apply."

>An independent/small family bakery, or photographer, etc. who may not even have a retail storefront who won't service gay weddings, I would consider "not a real problem"

So a "No gays allowed" sign on a walk-in retail storefront would be bad, but a "Gays need not call" ad in the yellow pages[1] would be "not a real problem"?

[1] Or however these non-storefront businesses connect with customers.

>Are the rest of us on variable incomes which we can scale up and down at will?

Are you on an income which is, by law, tied to changes in the Consumer Price Index? That's how Social Security works. From the 2016 benefit letters:

"The law does not permit an increase in benefits when there is no increase in the cost of living. So your benefit will stay the same in 2016. There was no increase in the cost of living during the past year based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the Department of Labor."

So maybe "pegged", as in "pegged to an index", would have been a better idiom, but we're probably stuck with "fixed".

>Java choosing IEEE754 floating point. Which isn't natively supported on x86.

IEEE754 was based on the design of the 8087, and it's been native on x86 since the 80387.

The problem with Java choosing IEEE754 was, according to the paper you linked, not that it wasn't supported on all hardware, but that Java didn't follow the spec completely,

"Later we shall see why Java’s expanded market would be served better by actual conformity to the letter and spirit of IEEE Standard 754"

>I sort of assumed this would be discordian up front, just from the title.

Wouldn't that have been "fnord" instead of "fjord"?

That case involved a maternity test, not a paternity test.

It's even mentioned in the article: "A similar case in 2006 saw a 26-year-old chimeric woman, Lydia Fairchild, almost lose her children after maternity tests required for welfare payments suggested she wasn’t actually their mother."