jqm

I don't even know Ruby (well I did play with it briefly years ago for a week) and I didn't have any trouble parsing what @sentence was doing. There is undoubtedly much tightly packed cleverness in code but I don't think this is it.

I trust regulatory policy much more than badges of honor. I always laugh when I see "fair trade coffee". Is it really fair trade? Do most people care about it? Would the socially conscious hipster just as easily drink non-fair trade coffee if the budget got tight or they thought no one was looking?

You can't depend on people to do the right thing. That's why we have laws. International labor laws will hopefully one day become a thing. In the meantime we have trade agreements. We shouldn't allow import of slave produced goods to western societies. IMHOP.

I'm using peewee for the first time on a project starting yesterday.

Not using the ORM (I like writing SQL for some reason) but the connection pooling on Postgres is nice and I'm really enjoying working with it. Thanks for your work.

While all that is certainly true there were likely at least some advantages to ancient thinkers which we don't enjoy today.

If one was an elite a bunch of tasks that take up our modern time were taken care of via slavery. No thinking about bills and filling tax forms. No thinking about resumes. No job search. No washing the dishes. No worrying about parking the car and the apartment lease.

There were less distraction in general. No computers, very few (if any) books. The body of knowledge was very small. You could learn about pretty much everything that was known if were in the right situation. Today I can't even keep up with a small percentage of JavaScript frameworks much less everything else. At that point one could maybe really drill down and specialize and focus for long periods of time. Of course you did have disease and sore teeth and probably a short lifespan to contend with... but there were likely some advantages as far as flat out "thinking" goes.

That's an interesting perspective and I hadn't really considered it like that.

But I believe there is a reasonable point at which people should not be expected to go beyond because it becomes ultimately too harmful for them (ok... maybe that's not our business) and society which has to deal with the fallout (very much our business). Its why we have labor laws. Laws on how long truck drivers can drive without sleeping. People shouldn't have to degenerate into selling their souls and risking the well being of others for short term survival. Society shouldn't degenerate to competition at this kind of level. It really shouldn't.

I do strongly believe in the individual's right to chose. But as with all ideologies, purity generally produces very sucky real world outcomes and a modicum of sense and nuance has to be applied for the thing to work. The powerful shouldn't be able to lay traps for the less informed and then stand back and say "oh well... they chose...they have to accept the consequences while I reap the benefits". That's not how civilization should work.

No, not at all. I agree... this kind of problem exists even with criminalization and I agree on the pretty obvious (to me anyway) need to do away with criminalization.

But problems of this kind could become worse if taking meth were legal. That's my only point.

I'm of the opinion people should be able to do what they want. And certainly drugs being illegal causes more problems than it solves. That being said, here is a case to think about.

When I was in my early 20's (20 years ago) I got a job in Phoenix AZ working on a concrete crew. We were building poured in place buildings (something like big box store size). First we would pour the floor. Then the walls on top of the floor and pull them up into place with a crane. It was extremely demanding work and the company beat the crap out of everyone. Very often we would get to work at 3 AM so we could pour before the sun to prevent the mud drying so fast. Lunch time was around 10 minutes and there weren't breaks. If you didn't run at all times... going to get a shovel...run, go for a drink of water, run you got yelled at. If you still didn't run a second time you were fired just like that.

My first day there were 7 or 8 new people. At the end of the day they had fired all the new people except me and one other guy. This went on for a couple of weeks until they had the crew they wanted. I needed the job and it paid pretty well (at the time) so I ran and busted ass like you wouldn't believe. After a couple of months I got let go as well and was very OK with it. It was completely nuts and I'm sure illegal as hell but no one appeared to complain and I'm not sure the state at the time and place would have listened anyway.

The point being... almost everyone on the job site was doing meth. Except me and maybe a couple of other people. I've never been a fan of meth and find it completely disgusting even though I'm not "anti-drug" and I damn sure wasn't about to do it out there. It was expected. The pace was set by meth. When you finally burnt out, you were thrown away and left with mental/health problems. But the building was up and the company owner made money.

That is my fear about legal drugs. Expectations. End results. Even social expectations like booze is now in many places. I want to do what I want to do... not be expected to do anything.

It's a complex problem. I don't know the answer. Maybe part of the answer is to invent better/less harmful drugs that are less easy to abuse and legalize those.

"The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts."

That's generally the past and present as well. With some notable exceptions I think that's how the world has pretty much worked through most of human history.

That does sound cool and things like that have been tried in the past.

The traditional type of problems seem to be (human nature being what it is) that the guru in charge of the yoga studio proclaims he is the second coming of Jesus Christ and everyone needs to give him all their money and the persons in charge of day care start kiddie diddling. And it's a damn shame these type of things don't seem to work out so well.

Some of us still do. The whole world has not moved on to client side frameworks contrary to popular opinion on HN.

(I probably actually will move on at some point... when the dust settles and there are clearer options. And when I can go through some tutorials and have stuff all work. And when there isn't a huge huge library I don't need to to a few little things. In the meantime I proudly like jQuery and it works really well for the amount of JavaScript I need. Which amount incidentally is never on a server.).

Curiosity can also decrease likelihood of survival. See: saying about curiosity and cats. But as a species you might be correct.

Sometimes not working towards a goal for a day gets me closer than working badly towards goal. And sometimes, waiting until the moment is right is better than trying to seize the moment.

It's a very fine line though and can become a good excuse not to get things done or let circumstance drive us around. But I for one do not believe in working on a goal every day. Just most days.

There is an inordinate amount of noise being made about the issue.

Often people make less noise when really trying to get what they want. Sometimes noise is for other reasons. Not saying it's a conspiracy but jeeze.... enough already! We know, we know... Apple can be trusted 100% and are our bestest friends and even those mean governments can't come between us! We get it. And a few of us even might believe it.

What a ridiculous incendiary article. Certainly has no place here. Flagged.

Yep. Pretty much anyone not Ottoman.

I live in a small town and used to work with a guy who was Microsoft Windows phone support at one point before they transferred the role to India. He wasn't a programmer. He wasn't an admin. He was phone help support as in "I can't get teh google to come up when I push the power button... pleaz help!".

He has gotten the best job offers in the area including an interview for head of IT for the entire school district. He doesn't even have a college degree. He is good guy and I enjoyed working with him, but at the risk of sounding dismissive I didn't observe him to be very motivated nor a top level problem solver nor see that he possessed much high level knowledge.

Point being... with people who don't know better the word "Microsoft" on a resume is a golden ticket and a guarantee that one is top caliber talent and highly knowledgeable. So there is that in your favor....

? It's an easily checked fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Saud

Excerpt: "After World War I, he received further support from the British, including a glut of surplus munitions. He launched his campaign against the Al Rashidi in 1920; by 1922 they had been all but destroyed."

It was the British who backed the Saud family initially. Towards the end of the Ottoman empire. They gave the Sauds advisers and military support.

I listen to soma.fm groove salad while programming. (https://somafm.com/groovesalad/)

I've discovered some great artists on there. Jens Buchert for instance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GomA...

for a 120 pound adult....

But I weigh over 200 pounds. So 9+ potatoes a day from me to get all the essential amino acids. That's a pretty high starch to protein ratio and would be nearly my whole intake in calories to get a bare minimum of amino acids. Essentials aside, is that enough protein? Also at that point I would have fulfilled my daily requirement of calories but be still be short vitamins A, K, E, calcium, selenium, fatty acids and who knows what else.

That aside, potatoes are one plant. I don't dispute you can eat certain plants or combinations of plants to get all essential amino acids. To restate "the idea you can get sufficient protein by eating just any old plant is... wrong". It is. You'd be in serious nutrition trouble if you tried to live on just broccoli or lettuce. You have to carefully balance your diet as a healthy vegetarian and it is far easier just to add some animal protein.

For the record I still eat a "mostly" vegetarian diet. But not completely. And I feel a lot better and have more energy than when I did ate a full vegetarian diet.

All food may have protein, but all food does not have essential amino acids (which cannot be made by your body) in the quantities required to maintain health. This is why non-meat eaters must be sure to add certain foods (or certain combination of foods) to their diet if they want to stay healthy. Not bagging on vegetarianism, but the idea you can get sufficient protein by just eating any old plant is.... wrong. And animal protein is a far easier and certain way to get essential amino acids. This from a guy who was a vegetarian for a number of years.

No worries. I actually think it might be better for the locals if (a more enlightened and less hard-line) Israel governed a bit more of the Mideast but this is a political impossibility right now and certainly better left unsaid. I should have left that bit off... it didn't have anywhere to go but towards irritating somebody. I'll take blame on that.

Well, there would be generally less tensions with many other countries acting in an expansionist manner than with Israel doing so.

Given the history short (modern) history of Israel and the religious animosity of the neighbors etc. it would be certain to inflame more hostility internationally than Rawanda taking a piece of Burndi for instance. But I'm sure you are already aware of all this. I went back and read your previous posts. It seems you may be looking for an anti-Semite under every rock. Well... next rock. I'm just pointing out practical reality. I don't have an axe to grind with Israel existing.

Circumstances may change and at that time it may be in Israel's best interest to appear expansionist. But for now and for the foreseeable future, it will probably help keep the peace if they aren't.

Either interact with an external database... (an existing company db for instance...this is just a front end) or else use a sqlite file on the local machine for smaller stuff.

I like Jinja2 templating and haven't fully jumped on the client side generation train. But I'm partially on that train and do do some client side generation. Particularly for elements that need to appear and disappear with the data lurking in the background. What I found is that I can pass json directly to the script portions of a Jinja template and avoid a second request (although certainly subsequent requests are often necessary). It might not be the "right way" but it works for a lot of things and is pretty simple.

Falcon (http://falconframework.org/ mentioned at the bottom of the article) does look interesting.

I've also had good experiences with bottle (http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/index.html) for building internal apps for companies. The limited amount of users means I don't have to worry much about scaling and bottle with Paste server works pretty nicely. Jinja2 templates can also be used with bottle which is a plus. It's also pretty easy to compile this setup into an executable so it can run off someone's Windows machine and no need for a separate server. This setup makes a really convenient internal-use app which is easy to send to end users for deployment.

He also predicted Mexico and Poland would become world powers soon. Although there are some interesting insights, I take his predictions with a whole shaker of salt.

Sound bites taken out of context are pretty easy to do with Trump.

But this is hardly the place for political flame wars.

I really wish people would quit with the "Trump scary" thing. Lots of people agree with a lot of what he says. He isn't manifestly wrong on everything. Because you have a different opinion doesn't make it a fact and it is becoming paraded around like one.