fyi1183

I believe you make a lot of good points, except for one: Walking as a white man through a black neighborhood, the police won't stop you. And even if they did, their attitude would be very different than if it was the other way around.

You may be thinking of compassion or sympathy rather than empathy.

I'm not going to dig up your earlier post, but discussing up- and down votes like you're doing here is an anti pattern on HN. I think that if you look objectively at your comment, you'll find that it doesn't contribute anything to the discussion, and has the potential to distract from it. Most likely that's why you've been down voted here.

Are you sure about that? I haven't actually lived through the Troubles in England, but my understanding is that while terrorist acts were obviously reported by the news, there was much less hysteria than for today's much rarer terrorist events.

The relationship between government activities and government use or threat of force is highly nonlinear.

The biggest chunk of government use or threat of violence is in property rights enforcement. Anything on top of that is mostly peanuts.

For example, if a local government raises property taxes by 5 percentage points in order to get the funds for better schools, there's likely no additional use of force at all. So it's absolutely possible to raise living standards without use of force for all practical purpose.

A reasonable libertarian who worries about use of force (but I'm aware that such people are so rare they may as well not exist) should be in favour of such a policy, because it increases the ratio of "quality of life per use of force".

I agree that that's not well supported, because it kind of goes against the grain of git thinking about project versions rather than file or directory versions.

What you should probably do in this case is use git merge nevertheless, but reset all changes outside of the directory of interest before committing the merge. This way, you get the history of the merge in the DAG, which will make git's merge resolution work.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a built-in way of doing this.

Because of how floating point works, it doesn't matter. The difference between modelling in meters or millimeters disappears in the exponents. What matters for precision is the mantissa, which is 23 bits in single precision floats. So you get ~16 million of your smallest unit before you're losing precision, counting the implied leading 1. You can double that to ~32 million by using the sign bit.

Edit: this translates to 320m if you want 0.01mm precision.

Here's what you wrote:

> Or that I used the generic term rather than the git-specific term?

In the context of the discussion, generic term refers to "check in", and git-specific term refers to "commit" (which is the only possible alternative term to be using in that context). The obvious reading is that you're calling "commit" a git-specific term.

So I wouldn't say I'm putting words into your mouth, unless you were unaware that "commit" is the correct alternative term, which is of course a possibility that I didn't consider.

I'm well aware of that, but the ggp was arguing that "check in" is a generic term and "commit" isn't. That's pretty obviously nonsense.

    git log -- filename

Unless the file hasn't been touched for many years in a Linux kernel size repository, that's faster than you can blink.

I do occasionally wish that git blame was faster. Building up a cache of side index information for that would be a nice addition.

I don't know if you're intentionally trolling, but I have been using version control for almost 20 years now and have never used the term check-in. All version control software that I've used in that time used the term commit.

What krupan and kazinator are saying is that you would use exactly the same command as today, i.e git add -p etc.

However, unlike today, those commands would automatically also do the equivalent of:

    if HEAD is marked as WIP
    then git commit --amend
    else git commit --special-wip-flag

As somebody who understands and uses the git index, I would wholly approve of this change.

Please don't use recovery Q&A.

As a user, I cannot trust that a website gets the recovery flow right. Some websites will allow you to bypass email and password if you know the answer to the question. Because of that, I cannot put in the real answer, as that would be a massive security risk.

So I usually put in some random garbage, which means it's essentially a second password. Well, if I lost my first password, chances are good that I lost the second password as well.

So please, don't do security questions. Just send a password reset link by email.

If you're worried about stuff like payment info stored in the account, just ask me to re-enter those details after I changed my password.

I call bullshit.

It's a nice story, and I don't doubt that some Venezuelans benefit from bitcoin somehow. But for BTC to be considered a "lifeline" for the population would require people to actually do day-to-day transactions with it. That's not happening.

They're clearly not.

At the same time, they may be propping up a tyrannical system. "Just following orders" is not a solid argument for your morality.

It's clearly a complicated mess. My personal hope is that we eventually learn the lesson that sufficiently influential social networks need to be subject to democratic oversight and a transparent judicial system. That will likely make them more expensive to run, but that's a price we have to pay for three sanity of our society.

So on [1], there is an interesting question of cause and effect. Are women voluntarily taking inherently lower paid jobs on average? Or is it involuntary / due to social pressure? Or are certain jobs lower paid because they're predominantly taken by women?

The latter is at least a possibility.

In certain Nordic countries (Sweden at least, I believe), all tax data is public. By extension, everybody's income is public as well. It doesn't seem to be an issue.

They are also no longer fossil fuels, just chemically equivalent or at least similar hydrocarbons.

I wonder if language will eventually change to reflect that.

So what about the volume of the observable universe in cubic Planck lengths?

The whole point of having no upset bound on numbers is that this kind of game can be continued arbitrarily.

Oh but it is, independent of the language. Fewer LOC means more code on the screen, which means you can more easily grasp the functionality of some piece of code, which makes it easier to maintain.

This can work sometimes and may even sound wise, until you realize that a lot of people's character and behaviour is determined by their environment.

So I prefer the direct approach that is known to work by directly helping people do the right thing, over the indirect approach that may or may not work, depending on circumstances.

See, this is an interesting thing about labor law: it can actually protect both parties.

If Marriott was forbidden by law from firing the employee in this situation, then they could much more easily deflect the pressure from China. Make some token gesture and then say, hey, we'd like to do more, but those pesky laws prevent us from doing that.

This is a case where everybody wins when there's stronger employee protection.

The black box criticism is fair but to be expected. Early 3D APIs were black boxes, but that had the advantage of allowing IHVs to experiment with different implementations behind the scenes.

Now that things have largely settled down, moving to explicit APIs like Vulkan makes sense.

With hardware acceleration for ray tracing we're only just at the beginning of the development, so having fairly black box APIs makes sense again. Expect that to change eventually once the industry has settled on answers to many of the currently open questions, but it might take a while.

This doesn't help at all with deep refactoring. The "git way" of producing small, self-contained changes covers all possible changes, not just feature additions.

The fact that commits are organized in a DAG is absolutely not an implementation detail. It's one of the core concepts of distributed version control.

It's also kind of silly to call git's terminology "non-standard". Git was the first truly widely used DVCS, so if anything, git's terminology is the standard terminology by definition.

But git doesn't actually require you to know these internals.

You don't need to know the format of git pack files or the network protocol in order to use git.

You do need to understand the concepts of commits and branches.

I've been wondering the same thing. A few points come to mind:

It's easy trot out the "but the bureaucracy!" argument.

Helicopter money is in-your-face money creation which brings out the gold bugs and inflation hyperventilators. QE as practiced is in comparison too mysterious for people to latch on to effectively.

Helicopter money was never really championed by anybody in the first place, so nobody really had to argue against it.

It's really unfortunate that a perfectly reasonable policy never got a fair chance. I do think it has a lot to do with ideological bias especially among central bankers, and with the fact that a lot of people on the left, who should naturally be in favour of such a policy, are too averse to studying economics and finance thoroughly enough to participate effectively in such discussions.

QE: Not really. The problem with QE is that it's a purely monetary operation, so the only way it could lead to real economic growth is if it somehow lead to more lending. But arguably debt leads to instability, and besides it's like pushing on a string: it doesn't work when people don't want to borrow. It'd be better for the government to outright buy stuff or give people money.

Depressing economic output: Absent inflation, economic output is proportional to overall spending, so a policy like this can't depress economic output almost by definition.

However, I'd say there is a risk of directing that output towards useless things, plus there's the risk of favouritism that leads to hidden inflation via inefficiency (see also: military industrial complex). So it matters where the money is spent.

Personally, I'd like to try something like a "citizen's dividend": just hand out money to all citizens equally each month (or permanent residents, you can argue the details), no questions asked and no strings attached, but vary the amount based on current inflation. That is, increase the dividend when inflation is low, scale it back when inflation rises above some target.

So kind of like a UBI, but with a macroeconomic motivation rather than trying to replace the welfare system. It also appeals to me because it's a sort of direct democratic approach to macroeconomic management: people can literally vote with their wallet about how the money is spent.

Where to read more: modern monetary theory is a good keyword to start with. I found Randall Wray's book very interesting. Warren Mosler's "7 deadly innocent frauds" is less academic, but it's available online and interesting since it comes from a practitioner instead of a theoretician. Though I admit it's been many years since I read either.

To put a finer point on it, most people still believe that (monetarily sovereign) governments are constrained by their income and by the willingness of lenders to accommodate government debt. But that view is incorrect: the real constraint to government spending is only the economy's real capacity for production. Another way to think of it is that the real constraint to government spending is inflation (because excessive government spending beyond the economy's supply capacity would lead to increased demand-pull inflation).

Whatever the reason, the empirical observation in these days of low inflation seems to be that most governments aren't even close to the true limit of spending.

I think you may be missing the more interesting point. Corporations can be seen as non-human intelligences that emerge from the structure of the corporation together with the incentives of is environment.

In that view, the humans inside the corporation are like individuals neurons of a larger brain. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and its incentives and actions are often not aligned with those of its parts, i.e., the humans.

The brain/neuron analogy is not a perfect description, because in order to function towards is potentially anti-human goals, the corporation must essentially bribe a small number of humans who are critical to its function. But this only goes so far: CEOs and other executives are well compensated, but they are easily replaced if they pose a serious threat to the goals of the corporation.

I think the argument is very compelling that today's AI Doomsday prophets are seriously missing the point, and we're actually already largely being ruled by hostile or at least indifferent non-human intelligences. It's the old sci-fi trope that if an intelligence is too alien, you might not even recognize it as one.