nlew

The plan is the outcome of the investigation. The point is to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.

For sure. Let's judge the entire community based on one incident from one person.

Who is responsible for paying the fine if the self-driving car breaks the law?

High school math is often taught as simple facts, without proper explanation of the significance or how it's derived. It's entirely possible to learn how radians correspond to degrees and what you can do with them without understanding where they come from or what they mean.

I learned all the rules of logarithms in 10th grade, but didn't actually know what a logarithm was until chemistry in college. They just.. didn't really tell us. And how often are integrals explained as "the area under a curve", which is a definition that makes absolutely no sense?

It's hard to take your claim seriously that people readily respect technical expertise, when I see "Twitter is just caching" repeated on this very site all the time.

He's not generating bigotry. He is saying that people who are uneducated in politics on a fundamental level are trying to make the rules that govern us all. Not that they are valueless, or are in any way worse; just that they have no idea what they're talking about.

You wouldn't ask a 6 year old how the government ought to be run. Why should you value the opinion of a 30 year old who hasn't actually learned any more about the topic in the intervening 24 years?

When you refuse to acknowledge the value of expertise in a field, you are effectively discrediting the entire field. You really think you know just as much as someone who has studied it for their entire adult life? The only way that can possibly be is if there's nothing to be learned about it.

You may think you understand a topic, but you really have a narrow view of it. You understand your own point of view, but not necessarily others. Or the breadth and depth of consequences to a decision. How can you expect equally valid results through a narrower lens?

It's not really. The point is that the market is segmented and you need to target the segment for which your product is the right fit. People who already have a fully-featured tool which solves their problem and they are comfortable with are never a good market.

It's not that they don't "know better", it's that their needs are different. Just like it's hard to sell an amateur tool to a professional, it's hard to sell a professional tool to an amateur.

Of course, that's not the only division. Small business vs. enterprise is another. For instance, Amazon S3 enabled an entire new class of content-based web startup. Not because it was "like having fileservers but worse", but because it served the needs of users who needed to host files, but didn't need and couldn't afford to have their own hardware. A group which was otherwise underserved in the market at the time.

I expect you've only noticed one case of sexism. That only one case was overt enough that, despite being a man, it affected you. Many women in the field have countless stories of discrimination. The article I think you're referring to was a parent complaining about a teacher not reacting to harassment and bullying her daughter was receiving simply for being female in a computer science class. To the extent that her daughter no longer wanted to study computer science. That's a far cry from arguing in favor of "positive discrimination".

But here's the thing: it doesn't really matter what you have or haven't experienced. What matters are the experiences of the people being discriminated against. As I said, these stories are everywhere; if someone says they were made to feel a certain way (such as: unwelcome) it's not your prerogative to question whether that was a valid way to feel.

If you're only doing one or two things, the value is a bit more vague. But consider even the simplest interaction: the config file for a service should look like X, and if it has to be changed, the service needs to be restarted afterward. Oh and there are 10 config files, but you only want to restart the service once if any of them changes, after they've all been changed. That's not hard, but it's already starting to look non-trivial.

And what if you want to have the same logic for several services? I guess you abstract it out to a function. But then it turns out one of those services doesn't have a restart command, and you have to do stop+start. And another service won't start if you use restart while it's not running, so you have to check if it's stopped and use start, otherwise use restart.

It's much more than just whether the code is declarative or imperative, or whether it's idempotent or not. An imperative tool can change your system from known initial state A to desired state B. A declarative system can change it from whatever initial state it's in to desired state B, even if you never considered it might be in that state.

It's not about whether or not to use Watsi now, but a concern on behalf of Watsi. I'm not going to refrain from donating today because Watsi might go away tomorrow, but I'm certainly concerned about if and how it will still be here tomorrow.