gridaphobe

You rightly point out that income disparity metrics can be manipulated, but changing the calculation (eg by ignoring Bezos) does nothing to change the actual disparity, it just makes it harder to detect... So what exactly is your point?

> sensible reforms to tenancy laws that protect the vulnerable while not making it impossible to build new housing.

The author also addresses this point, or rather exposes it as a non-issue.

> One common belief, even in many liberal circles, is that the cause of these outrageous rents and prices is the very government intervention that was intended to ameliorate them: rent regulation. This notion might have some validity if, say, rent regulations in New York stifled construction. But they don’t. New buildings in the city are not subject to rent control and never have been.

Or it could be the causation is correct, but for a rather unsavory reason, the wealth came from economic rents due to IP protections. The argument that IP defenders need to make is that these innovations could not have happened without strong IP protections, and I’ve never seen a compelling argument for this.

Can you point to where the author recommended that Google and co. be forced to hire black women (or any identity group for that matter)?

What she did say is that it's not surprising that Google search produces biased results, given that minorities are underrepresented and topics like ethics are barely discussed in engineering schools.

It sounds to me like she is attempting to raise awareness of a systemic issue in the tech industry, which requires no qualifications other than knowledge of the issue.

Why should it be YouTube’s responsibility to enforce copyright? Shouldn’t the beneficiaries of copyright be the ones to pay for its enforcement? If that were the case we might see many fewer claims, simply because it’s not worth the time/effort.

This doesn’t directly address false positives, or the problem of fair use (which seems to be a real issue on YouTube), but it could be a start.

I see your point, but it seems to rest on the rest on the way we determine when capital gains are realized. Capital gains accumulate regularly just like other sources of income; in my mind the tax obligation is incurred at the time of the gain, just like the tax obligation on other income.

For practical reasons the state does not demand the tax until the accumulated gains have been realized by selling the asset. This makes sense for illiquid assets like stock in your private startup, but I don't think it should change the calculation of when the tax was incurred and how much. For liquid assets like shares in public companies, I think it would actually be perfectly reasonable to demand the tax on unrealized gains.

Why are you singling out capital gains? Your argument works equally well for labor-based income, but capital gains are already taxed much less than labor.

You seem to be implying that morality is subjective, which I think is a dangerous belief. People may believe their actions are ethical, but that doesn’t necessarily make them correct.

It’s standard to use the capital city to refer to the actions of a state. Tel Aviv is the internationally accepted capital of Israel, not Jerusalem.

One of my favorite quotes about Haskell is "We cannot afford QA teams, so we use a sadistic compiler".

That seems like more of an argument in favor of having all source code available (i.e. not using closed-source libraries) than an argument against OOP. The question of what code executes when you call `person.walk()` is no different than the question of what code executes when you call `(person :walk)`: it depends entirely on the value of `person`! This is the core of dynamic dispatch in OOP and higher-order functions in FP, they enable behavioral abstraction. You can impose restrictions on the behavior through types or contracts, but at the end of the day you can't know the precise behavior except in a specific call. And this is precisely where a live programming environment comes in handy.

Chicago's problem is that their guns laws only affect the city itself. If a criminal wants a gun he need only drive out of Chicago, buy the gun, and drive back home. In fact, a recent article (don't have the link on hand, sorry) pointed out that a large percentage of guns used in crimes in Chicago were bought from a single store just outside the city limits.

The point is that cities don't have monitored borders, and so they have a hard time regulating the influx of guns. A country-wide ban would actually stand a chance of working.

Edit: here's the article I mentioned: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/us/strict-chicago-gun-laws...

Where are you studying? My undergrad (City College of New York) was mostly C++/Java with the exception of the PL course, which used Scheme. We also had an elective that taught x86 assembly.

I had to discover and learn Haskell on my own :)

C is a language I'd like to see make a reappearance in CS curricula. It's great that most programmers today don't have to deal with memory management and pointers, but I think a CS degree should leave the student with a basic grasp of the full stack of programming paradigms.

I think a nice approach would be to start off with a high-level, functional language like Haskell or Scheme, and then move down the ladder of abstraction in subsequent courses, culminating in a hardcore C (or maybe even assembly) course.

Learn You A Haskell is a really great book for newcomers to functional programming, I can't recommend it enough.

Cider is, IIRC, regularly used to port games to OSX, but the results are pretty poor in my experience.

The winelib/cider method of porting raises an interesting question, should I as a mac/linux user have to pay the same price as a windows user for an objectively inferior product? (In the case of steam I think this is fine, because I get access to all three versions of the game)

I don't think the concern is that the next generation of doctors will be incompetent, but perhaps they won't be as quick as their elders. There are times where you can't wait 30 seconds for Watson to suggest a course of action.

A policeman's job is to enforce the law, not kill criminals. In this case that means arresting the bank robber so he can be brought to trial. If the bank robber comes out of the bank "guns blazing" then the police are certainly justified to shoot him as a matter of self-defense.

If, however, the bank robber steps out unarmed and is shot and killed, the family should have the right to bring a wrongful death suit (or something, IANAL) against the police officers in question.

Interesting point about motorcycles. I wonder though, would motorcycles actually benefit from seatbelts? In an accident a car will provide a substantial amount of protection to the driver, so it's in the driver's interest to be fastened in place. Perhaps it's actually better for the motorcyclist to be separated from the bike as opposed to bring dragged along..

If the FBI supplied this guy with a fake bomb, what crime did the guy commit?

He obviously didn't commit an act of terrorism. I don't even think you can claim he /attempted/ to commit such an act since the FBI gave him a fake. So we're left with what, the desire to commit an act of terror?

The type of map is `(a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]`, which means that map takes a function from any type `a` to any type `b` and a list of `a`s, and returns a list of `b`s. Generics, aka parametric polymorphism, are required for this because the definition of map makes no assumptions on what types `a` and `b` will be instantiated to.

Why is it so hard for people to conceive of the possibility that there may be multiple issues contributing to tragedies like Friday's? Mental illness is certainly an issue that does not get enough attention in the US. Gun control is also an issue that does not get enough (real) attention. These /two/ issues, and likely others, are together responsible for the shooting.

We need to address both.

Thanks for the link, sounds really cool!

Heh, I misread the title as "Realtime statistics of Haskell programmers" and was expecting a study of how haskell programmers work.

I'd actually be really interested to see a study comparing the brain activity of a haskell programmer vs a smalltalk programmer. FP and OOP are such different models, I bet there would be some interesting differences in which parts of the brain light up.

How do you handle window-switching on OSX? I haven't found anything that satisfactorily reproduces the simple mod-j/k keys of xmonad.

How much material is covered by any single MS certificate? A semester's worth? If an entire 4-year curriculum were covered by the certification exam, it would be near impossible IMO to cram.

Of course, having your entire college record decided by a single exam is quite a scary prospect..

Is it possible to launch using just a single dyno and heavy caching/optimization?

I'd be very interested to see/try it. The lack of a decent WM in OSX is one of the main things that keeps ArchLinux on my MBA.

Isn't Google one of the few corporations that hasn't started using patents offensively? Assuming that's the case, I think it would be reasonable to stockpile patents defensively, even if they abhor patents.

It's just a terrible situation, the only way for google (or any other software company) to protects themselves from certain death is to build up a defensive barrier of patents. And I think this is a great argument for abolishing software patents entirely.