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racer-von Why Is 'Affordable' Housing So Expensive to Build?

The obvious solution to this is to build taller

Why is this the obvious solution? Why not spread people out instead of trying to cram as many as you can into the same place?

racer-von Why things might have taken so long

Could you provide a reference as to how "human genomics can easily refute the idea of brain functional changes in the last 10K years"?

Furthermore, this is why Cochran is considered a racist; correctly so.

I'd caution that this isn't actually an argument, but merely invective: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

racer-von Why things might have taken so long

it took a really, really long time to transform wild plants and animals into useful domesticated varieties.

Really? The wild plants and animals were already useful. So from day one, the transitional forms to the domestic varieties were useful as well.

Without those, you really are better off remaining a hunter-gatherer.

There's not a sharp division between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist. Sedentism preceded agriculture. As people accidentally dropped seeds around their dwellings (or discarded them with the trash), they gradually became gardeners and then farmers.

racer-von Why things might have taken so long

A favorite from Jack Handy: "I think somebody should come up with a way to breed a very large shrimp. That way, you could ride him, then after you camped at night, you could eat him. How about it, science?"

While today saying "how about it, science?" has become our second nature, it wasn't the obvious way to think about the world 50K years ago.

racer-von Why things might have taken so long

People’s brains were actually biologically less functional fifty thousand years ago.

This is correct; there's been a huge amount of brain evolution in the past 50K years. See for example "The 10,000 Year Explosion" (Cochran).

racer-von Why things might have taken so long

"That man that hath a tongue, I say is no man,

If with his tongue he cannot win a woman."

racer-von Why things might have taken so long

Each step along the way must produce a net benefit or it gets discarded.

Maybe so, but the benefit could have just been individual fitness signalling (like a peacock's tail) without providing any advantage to the species as a whole until the big "payday".

racer-von German hate speech law tested as Twitter blocks satire account

But that doesn't explain its popularity; other ideas are simpler than fascism and don't spread. Fascist leaders gain an audience because they address concerns which their opponents (liberal globalists) won't bring up, for fear of alienating their own support base. Fascism may not be the right solution, but dismissing its supporters as too simple-minded to understand complex ideas doesn't help advance a better alternative.

racer-von German hate speech law tested as Twitter blocks satire account

Fascism is coming back in some parts of Europe and we won't get rid of it by simply asking politely to go away.

Maybe you could get rid of it by having better ideas?

racer-von Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

The most seasoned programmers have been using functional programming since the 60's.

racer-von Call to ban sale of mini mobile phones

There are already legal mechanisms such as a judge's order (not to mention technical methods) to address such cases. Banning every convict from using a phone is like swatting a fly with a Buick.

racer-von Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

My advice to graybeards: when somebody is excited about a new technology XYZ, don't say "oh, we did that 20 years ago and called it ABC". It annoys people, because generally XYZ has important differences that prevent ABC from being a drop-in replacement.

Instead you can say "that reminds me of a similar concept we used to implement using ABC", and quietly appreciate that you got a leg up in understanding because of your experience. If young people are smart and curious, they'll want to know more about ABC, and ask.

racer-von Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

I presume you wouldn't hire someone who expresses a strong distaste for your software stack, regardless of age (unless their job is specifically to replace it).

racer-von Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

There's a perception in computer programming that any experience outside of the specific language, library and toolkit being used on the project is irrelevant. Or worse, an impediment; "I don't want somebody with bad habits and instincts acquired from working on now-obsolete systems". Managers really believe a kid with 3 years JavaScript experience and 1 year of Vue is as good (or better) than a senior programmer with the same, plus 20 years of Unix, C++, protocol implementation, and similar "baggage".

racer-von How to not waste time on a side project when trying to get a job

In these cases, isn't it the dayjob that's the "side" project?

racer-von Kernel debugging for newbies

> he has conflated single-step in situ debugging (which does in fact suffer from limited utility in the context of an OS kernel) with debugging writ large.

Where does he do this? The quote is only about single-step debugging.

> So as he rejected in situ debugging, he also implicitly rejected postmortem debugging and dynamic instrumentation

Do you have any evidence of this? It seems to me that dump traces and kernel probes have been an important part of Linux for many years.

racer-von Can People Choose to Change Their Personality Traits? (2015) [pdf]

I know, but the possibility of getting rich is a nice booby prize for the unlikeable and unattractive.

racer-von Can People Choose to Change Their Personality Traits? (2015) [pdf]

What you're describing is actually the way the world is. People who find it easy to be pleasant get further in life, while those with antisocial tendencies experience rejection - even when they're make more of an effort to be pleasant than those for whom it comes naturally. On the other hand, the unpleasant person may discover a billion dollar idea thinking alone in his basement. So it goes.

racer-von What I Look for In Tech Startups

Maybe it's just easier to predict which people are going to be successful than which technologies.

racer-von Which lines of longitude and latitude pass through the most countries?

I'm trying to identify exactly what the borders of "the Delphi" are. UNESCO identifies it as "between two towering rocks of Mt. Parnassus". Liakouras is said to be the highest peak of Parnassus - would the Delphi be between there and the second highest peak?

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/393

racer-von Firefox is on a slippery slope

I think we're in agreement that Linux is in a better state than the browser. To nit-pick at your argument, Linux development is driven by people who are interested in working on it; many of those are lucky enough to have employers who encourage them to use a company email address to submit changes, and part of their working hours. Nothing indicates they wouldn't still be contributing without the @intel.com attached to their name.

Furthermore in the study you are referencing, the "8% volunteers" is larger than any company's contribution besides Intel and RedHat - even more if you add in the individual "consultants".

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/the-top-10-developers-a...

racer-von Boardgame.io: State management and more for turn-based games

This looks pretty interesting. Could Nakama be used to build a federated, decentralized application (let's say, game world) where each user self-hosts on his own Docker instance?

racer-von Boardgame.io: State management and more for turn-based games

I'd love to see the client-side state extended so that this could be a framework for decentralized turn-based games, without using a centralized server.

One concrete cause of centralization in today's Internet is a difference in programming costs between a closed centralized solution and an open decentralized one. Let's say we're writing a tic-tac-toe app. In the centralized design, the game board is one data structure. Your score and mine are two variables. You'll be done in a couple of hours.

As an open decentralized solution, you're building a federated system. You need a standard protocol for communicating tic-tac-toe moves. Maybe you should work through the IETF to write an RFC for OTTTP: the Open Tic-Tac-Toe Protocol. You might be done in 2018. When solving a problem the wrong way takes two hours, and solving it the right way takes two years, it's going to get solved the wrong way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1qroWiZF90

Note that I don't endorse the particular solution in this video - MirageOS is perhaps a more viable alternative.

racer-von Firefox is on a slippery slope

> If GNU/Linux were to die

But there is no such entity as GNU/Linux. It's hundreds and hundreds of independently working engineers who would all have to be hit by buses at the same time.

racer-von Firefox is on a slippery slope

> most Linux distributions are just cosmetic variations of the largest upstream distros.

Plenty are not. I am impressed by how usable community-based (non-corporate) distros are (e.g. Gentoo, Arch). This is truly indigenous technology.

> they all rely on Torvalds and everyone else for the kernel (heavily funded by donations, companies, etc)

This is an interesting thought. I believe the Linux kernel would continue to be viable on a purely volunteer basis, without corporate subsidies; I can't prove it though.

racer-von Firefox is on a slippery slope

> the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla.

Yes. If anyone wants to do a git bisect to find when the Mozilla Corporation lost its integrity, we can say it was definitely "bad" by the time they forced out Eich in April 2014.

racer-von F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

Ask around for community-friendly ISP's in your area (including Monkeybrains and Sonic in San Francisco).

EDIT: OK I suggested sharing a T1 but apparently that hasn't been a good deal since the 90's.

racer-von Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

No, GPLv3 and v2 have always been incompatible. v2 forbids placing additional restrictions on distribution, whereas v3 adds more requirements (e.g. patent grants). So if you receive code under v2, you can't distribute it under v3, nor can you distribute v3 under v2, nor can you combine them.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1778

racer-von Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

Eh, what? Safari and Chrome are not GPL - they're Apple / Google freeware built on BSD and LGPL. OSX is proprietary based on BSD. Android is notable for refusing to include GPL components other than Linux. Not sure what you're trying to say here.

racer-von Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2

The GPL ship has sailed. It used to be every free license could be converted to GPL, so it became the "universal recipient" license. Then Stallman forked it and created two incompatible GPL's, effectively killing his own dream of a copyleft ecosystem. So the only sane thing now is "universal donor" licenses like MIT - or straight public domain. I'm stealing all of this from Rob Landley.

https://ia601008.us.archive.org/7/items/OhioLinuxfest2013/24...