james-mcelwain

The legislation to block this was defeated by a single vote -- notably, Bernie Sanders was absent and could have voted to defeat this.

No, you should almost certainly be using openjdk, which oracle jdk is based off, unless you have a compelling reason an alternative implementation is better.

The nice thing about Kotlin is that you can just bind to the existing Java GraphQL libs. Clojure is similar in this respect. Sure it means you have to also be familiar with Java and the Java ecosystem, but it's actually great to interact with Java-the-ecosystem when you don't have to write any java. ^^

That's a really good point. Accessibility is super important and a shame that many devs (including myself) forget about it.

Because Node.js isn't appropriate for a lot of back-end applications, or for legacy back-end applications that already exist.

That dream is already here if you use Clojure, and it's great! Web assembly makes me very bullish on this kind of setup. Maybe we won't even be targeting the DOM in the future?

I think the advice is sound, but Kotlin and Graphql are pretty mainstream. This sounds like a local market problem.

> Well, yeah, it's reasonable to expect investors to appropriately researching something before buying, and be cognizant of the risk that it could crash.

Is it? Isn't this the entire reason risk management departments exist?

Really? I found it slow enough to basically not be able to use any of my regular build systems (Maven, NPM, Cargo, etc.).

The subsidies only make it a less-worse bad idea. Particularly when you take into account things like predatory car leases many drivers take out.

Like, I think there are interesting broader questions here about regulation and the social safety net -- but I think we need to be clear that Uber is basically a payday loan on your car's title. People are bad at understanding depreciating assets.

Maybe if there were a stronger social safety net there would only be a labor market for drivers for whom Uber is actually a good fit? It's certainly possible.

When it comes to Uber, it's more difficult for me to consider because I'm less sure of the social utility provided by the application, particularly when we take the massive unsustainable subsidies out of the picture.

I think the entire question is distorted right now by the fact that they've been in massive growth mode for years so we don't actually know what the equilibrium of the gig economy looks like in many markets.

> I have no idea what you're driving at. No one chooses to be born, no one chooses the cell structure that requires consumption. There are thousands of choices we don't make to live in society.

"Your argument is that someone unemployed and starving found a job where they could feed themselves - but its not a good enough job?" is not an explanation for why the argument is emotional.

> How do you think they're NOT choosing to do it?

Because I don't have a idealistic view of free will that assumes all choices are ultimately unconstrained? I view the distinction between an armed robbery and being forced into a job to prevent starvation only a matter of abstraction not kind.

> hard facts of social reality that "coerce" them to work, but then regulating Uber in particular seems unwarranted, because why is Uber singled out

I'd agree that this is a more effective path than attempting to regulate Uber, but also do not think it's mutually exclusive with the view that Uber has exploitative labor practices, even if they are not directly coercing drivers to work for them.

> I think that the desire of government and the society to micromanage other people's lives is too great to resist, and the "coercion" is just an excuse to get moral justification for meddling in the deals other people make.

This only seems like a relevant argument if the sole purpose of UBI is to create some kind of deregulated libertarian society. I don't view deregulation and UBI as being intrinsically linked -- indeed I would prefer to see UBI and more regulation.

I never claimed that Uber or Lyft coerced them to work, so I'm not sure where we disagree.

You're going to have to do more work to justify dismissing an argument out of hand than simply calling it emotional.

> 100% of people do willfully?

You've personally interviewed every gig worker? Do you really think every single one of them would agree that there are no coercive forces at play here?

> emotional, irrational non-argument

Please avoid calling arguments emotional / irrational just because you disagree. The parent argument is that people are forced into bad situations by contingencies that aren't facts of nature but human policy choices. There's nothing emotional or irrational about that.

Some of us just have big hands. :3

I've often been tempted to show my less-technical manager our commit log, but have always avoided it because I can't see any way it wouldn't turn into some stupid game about commits and lines of code changed.

Isn't this the same rhetorical move that communists/socialists get accused of all the time? How can you claim that the most ideologically capitalist country on the planet isn't actually capitalist?

> If you'd like to share an explanation of how the spread of ideas leading to the revolutions of Europe could have happened without an innovation that had the same effect as the printing press ded, I'd be genuinely intrigued to to read it.

History is more complicated than a single invention! It's needlessly reductive.

I could also say: "how could have the revolutions of Europe happened without mercantile capitalism challenging the economic structures of feudalism?" But that's just imposing a post-hoc narrative on history that happens to fit my existing views.

> So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world.

My sole reason for participating in this thread is to firmly reject idealism and the teleological view of history. Ideas aren't magic. Technology isn't either.

(P.S. it's kind of hilarious that you're invoking HN rules regarding my speech in the same breath as you are defending the merits of free speech.)

I think that framing ("necessary but not sufficient") is a much more productive way that I wish free speech advocates would use more.

My opposition to censorship derives from the fact that it tends to require an unjustified hierarchy (i.e. the violence of the state).

However, I have a real problem with imparting some kind of magical quality to ideas. I'm particularly annoyed by the way in which free speech advocates act like social norms are a form of censorship. More specifically, that free speech requires platforming -- i.e., rejecting a freedom of association.

While I do think that the power companies like Google exert of society is well wroth investigating, in general I find that these are much weaker examples of the use of force to censor ideas.

This either trivially true, in the sense that the Western canon builds on itself, or patently absurd, in the sense that you attempt to frame the 1918 revolution as being a mere effect of the invention of the printing press 500 years earlier. Neither strikes me as being particularly rigorous historiography.

I mean, a teleological view of history and ethics is just so absurd that it disturbs me that professed "rational" scientifically minded people believe it. There's no basis for believing just because things "tend" to get better that is in itself a causative argument about some intrinsic nature of humanity.

I mean, even the example used ("the noble class") is preposterous on face because:

1. The Russian Revolution? Germany 1849? Even the American Revolution? None of these are about ideas, or "shining the light on ignorance" -- they're about putting the nobility up against the wall. If there's some kind of teleology at play here, it's not that we thought about it in the marketplace of ideas long enough and decided to do away with the concept.

2. Nobility still exists! At best, this just means we live in a secular society, where we no longer believe the Word of God justifies massive inequality.

> That's precisely what you want if you care about not harming society at large, especially in the longer run.

Please, explain: how do queer ideas harm society, in the longer run?

Past results do not guarantee future performance.

I mean, like many things, this just comes down to axioms that ground your meta-ethics. I don't find moral Platonism very convincing.

There's no natural inclination of humans towards justice or injustice, beyond the limits of our own psychology. To me, the idea that there is some internal teleology towards justice is absurd. These are material struggles and material gains that must be defended materially.

We should reject this kind of naive idealism.

I'm not sure the criticism is just "hypothetical." My roommate just received an antibody test and was told by the provider that the error bars are so wide on positive results that it's basically only useful to confirm that you haven't had it. Maybe they're just hedging, and sure that's anecdotal, but I think we need more evidence before drawing a strong conclusion. I hope you're right.

I'm not suggesting that we should stop reviewing dependencies. I'm pushing back against the idea that internally structuring a large repo or project via independent modules necessarily explodes the burden to review.

It may be the case that this preference for well modularized code leads to lots of disparate small packages in the ecosystem, but within the scope of a single project, I see no reason why modularization poses any intrinsic risk.

Why is number of packages and not package size the relevant metric here? Especially when all the packages live in the same repository, there's practically no more overhead to review each package qua package, versus just a bunch of directories in a package monolith.

This "144 times longer" number seems pulled completely out of thin air.

A minority of the global population is still a huge number. You're much more optimistic than me about Western democracy's ability to cope with 100s of millions of climate refugees without things falling apart.