rabidrat

Financial solutions like this have proven to perform poorly with 'black swan' events. Pressure from stakeholders and people who decry 'waste' (i.e. "slack in the system") when there hasn't been one of these rare events in recent memory leads to cutting 'unnecessary' costs. After all, people have reason to be wary if a power plant builder in Ecuador argues that they should spend millions of dollars preparing for subzero temperatures. At best they're viewed as a paranoid prepper, at worst a fearmongering profiteer.

Then when one of these rare events happens, and now thousands of people are owed tons of money, either insurance pays out, or the government bails out the power company, or the power company goes bankrupt (or is forced to make cuts in other areas). In none of these outcomes has the SLA achieved its goal of ensuring that consumers have more-reliable access to power. Some of them may be richer for their suffering, but some of them are also dead.

> I can't even understand why anyone would propose such a thing

A bill that won't go anywhere but gets a lot of attention is a great time-waster. Think of it as part of a DoS attack on meaningful legislation.

I agree, I would not have either. But my present financial philosophy for such things is to always sell half (and only half).

> Even basic 1px horizontal line takes 10px of height or whatever. Places where 1 or 2 px padding could do will use full cell instead.

This is not true; there is an underline attribute which can add a ~1px horizontal line without taking up any additional space.

> oldest images they could find

Sounds like survivorship bias (as with most "they don't make 'em like they used to" plaints).

How might you recognize a project like this?

Except for these "greenhouse gases" which reflect an annually increasing amount of radiation back to the planet?

This is like saying that books made out of text are a workaround for the movable type printing press, and with high-DPI laser printing in an ideal world the concept of text books would not exist.

> unwanted third party making demands on my information input

It seems like we want the same thing. If we don't have any kind of moderation, then that filtering is pushed out to each and every leaf node, instead of being handled centrally, and this is a huge demand on my attention for information input. Do you remember how bad email spam had gotten before we developed effective server-side spam filtering? Email had become basically unusable.

I banned people from public IRC channels on EFNet all the time. Google deplatforms SEO spam sites all the time. The internet is unusable without some kind of filter on participation.

Or CNET reporter James Kim in 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kim#Death

I guess it would have had an even greater impact if you didn't go to the bathroom.

License keys, software phones home to verify the license key, refuses to run if license key not verified. You could hack the software to remove this protection, and for popular software packages people have done this (Windows, Photoshop, etc).

I tried programming in XSLT and it was not fun. I'm sure if it took off we'd have the equivalent of Clojure that compiled down to it, but by itself it is not a hacker's language, if you know what I mean.

Hey, VisiData author here! If you do want to make a FIX loader (or any plugin), you can come chat with us on Freenode #visidata and we'd love to help. A straightforward row-based file format should be quite straightforward to make a loader for!

That's a moat, not network effects. A network effect would be if your friends at other companies get value from joining Slack while you're on it. But there's not (except maybe sharing integrations/bots).

Escaping is an unnecessary kludge in 99% of cases. If you need nested tables, then you need a special-purpose format that allows for it--and it will very likely look more like a binary filesystem than a parseable text file. If you don't need nested tables, then escaping is unnecessary if the format uses delimiters which aren't present in the data. A lot of data includes newlines, some data includes tab characters, but only binary data would ever include the ASCII specified delimiters.

Don't get caught in the CS trap of thinking you need a completely "general purpose" parser, when a slightly-less-than-completely-general parser will be significantly easier to write, simpler to understand and debug, and faster to execute. And as mentioned above, if you do find yourself needing more than this parser, then you should be looking at non-parsing based approaches anyway.

Escaping drastically complicates parsing (though not as much as quoting, thank god). But you seldom need to nest tables within tables. Much more frequently, table values want to contain embedded newlines.

I'd like just a .jsonl or .csv of the list.

How is it so obviously not heroin? I, a fully-formed and functioning adult, feel the pull in my brain. I was addicted to cigarettes in my 20s and I've had unhealthy relationships with numerous other drugs and video games that I've (mostly) managed to pull myself away from, after years. The feeling of "checking your notifications" and "scrolling through twitter" on your phone are remarkably similar to the compulsion for drugs. This is my personal subjective experience and I believe objective research confirms it as well.

Maybe he could use 'sanction' instead of either.

The streaming is public and free, only the chat is sold out. So you can still watch (now or later).

It's very hard to get, even for solid performers. Possible but not available to most employees.

dish-washing is a cost-center, not a profit-center, so really the solution is to cut costs by washing dishes as little as possible :)

I applied to this company a few years ago. The first question the hiring manager asked me on the phone? "What editor do you use?" This same hiring manager was out sick for my interview (I did not learn this until I arrived at the office), and never responded when I pinged him a week later. The whole process left me with a sour taste and I would caution other people not to have their time wasted similarly.

Learning involves being wrong, and being wrong is stressful. The older you are, the more stressful it is. In humans, there is a strong ego component, but I imagine that there is also a physiological resistance that comes from a lifetime of learned skills, models, behaviors, and traumas. Having gotten cuts, scrapes, bruises, and maybe breaks while learning to ride a bicycle, which still continues to work just fine for getting you where you need to go, it's a hard sell to suffer or risk another set of cuts/scrapes/breaks to learn to ride a bikeprime, even if it's a qualitatively better tool--it's not essential. And we also learn over the decades that our bodies and minds at 64 are not as flexible and resilient as they were at 4 or 34.

If there were just one new bikeprime every few years, it would be easier to settle in for the pain and benefit. But the pace of technological change is much much faster, and along with intense marketing, it seems like there are dozens of new bikeprimes every year. Many of these turn out to be mostly hype, so it's hard to know where to invest energy. And every time a supposed bikeprime turns out to be more pain than it's worth, there's a real lesson that's learned about the value of bikeprimes in general. And so we become older, more skeptical, more rigid.

I also think there is some aspect of survivorship bias in the value of "learning new skills". For every person who invested the time in learning a skill that turned out to be valuable for them overall, there are other people who spent years investing in a skill that turned out to be a dead-end.

The median wealth in the US is $70k. The ratio is more like 1/100,000 for your average billionare, and 1/10,000,000 for zuckerberg, gates, and bezos. In this scheme 1/99 would be downright communistic.

Sometimes I just want to move the plug from this socket to that socket. Sometimes just to make room for another wallwart.

I love desktops, but I have to admit that it's pretty great having a built-in UPS. To get the equivalent for my desktop is an extra $200+ and a big honking box that apparently will only last for 30 minutes when the power goes out.

Smaller requires more innovation than larger.