shadowfox

> Yep, we’re all rich racist WASPs.

Hmm. That was a strange, but interesting jump indeed.

> A direct link is tenuous

That could be.

> I guess the 'bias and inequality in AI' is less striking a cord for the HN crowd than 'fair business practices'

That is interesting. I wonder if it indicates something about the demographics of HN.

PG"s essays are not exactly known for the latter.

Whether he was justified or not, I think the point OP was making was that it is still a political decision.

> Instead the messaging should focus solely on the fact that they protect others from the infection carried (likely without knowledge) by the wearer, and that people without symptoms can be contagious.

Given the prevailing attitude towards personal freedom and personal responsibility in the US, I wonder what sort of an effect would such explicit messaging would have on the level of mask wearing.

> GTD is not about getting things done; it’s about being engaged appropriately in your life

It seems awkward to have to explain that "Getting things done" is not about getting things done :P

I mean it can also be used as a universal, semi-permenant activity tracking id with almost no work, which may not be desirable depending on your feelings wrt privacy.

Maybe an ability to generate virtual IDs based on a permanent id (like with virtual credit cards) might help though this is sometimes tricky to use correctly in a privacy-preserving way.

> Can you guess what the most common methodology people chose was?

> Did you guess an XML document?

If that is your most common experience with asking that question, maybe it is time you consider whether you are communicating what you want properly to your candidates.

Not the OP, but it is interesting that the US criminal law is so state dependent. Out of curiosity: do you have reason to believe that the sentencing disparity is better when considering states?

> Ah but universal cynicism and nihilism is also a form of control. When the very idea of objective truth has been destroyed, this makes the job of authoritarians easier, not harder.

Universal cynicism and nihilism may function that way. But that was not the attitude of the person in the description. So I am not sure how that is relevant?

> he set back computing by 50 years

No opinion on Chomsky's politics. But that quote definitely needs some substantiation.

Personally, I don't see how anyone, has managed to set back computing by 50 years.

> It makes no sense that 50+ states and territories have 50+ systems for the DMV, business registration, taxes, etc. when the basic functionality is most likely the same across all of them.

While this is likely true, this being the US, you are also very likely going to end up in an ideological (for the lack of a better word) rabbit hole about freedom and state's right to do their own thing.

> Wikipedia isn't a reliable source anymore. They seems to have become a Islamist and left propaganda machine

I do think that needs some stronger sourcing. It is one thing to argue that certain wiki articles have some bias or the other, but a categorical claim that it is an Islamist and left propaganda machine seems rather bizarre at first cut.

At the moment these claims seem to be supported by some random tweets?

> If I will be having to deal with those quirks anyway, then the guide is helpful

That assumes that the guide is frank and truthful. Unfortunately this is, in my experience, rarely the case. There is strong incentive to use this as a PR exercise (or "aspirational" to put it mildly) given that it is being published and visible to many people, especially above you.

So you are going to have to try to match reality against that document anyway.

> Being POC doesn't make you any more or less right

That is obviously true. However when someone is describing thier personal experience, that context is quite useful, which was clearly what was going on in the original comment.

It is not a FAANG, by definition :)

> if within the first week you can learn enough to form some opinions, you now have some ideas to test against and disprove

Interestingly there is some evidence that this might lead to anchoring bias related issues. I am not sure what we can do to improve the situation, however.

> used to

A very large number of people still do, even here.

I second micro. It has become my default console editor on both Windows and Linux for quick editing tasks.

I doubt that would satisfy the ego of most regular Americans, to say nothing about the leadership. Exceptionalism is very deeply ingrained here.

> IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused

While it is possible that they were correct, both companies, but especially Yahoo was already suffering from deep organizational and employee issues at the point these announcements were made. So I am somewhat skeptical about the cause and effect here. I would be more sold if this were coming out of a less disfunctional organization.

> there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care)

There is also TV, Netflix and a variety of different ways to distract oneself at home. Though I do agree that working- from-home-during-a-pandemic may be different from just working-from-home permanently.

The new PowerToys [1] are interesting too, though somewhat different in scope from the old ones.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

> Fair enough, so not capitalism, not communism.

> What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements?

Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.

Different political systems/policies combined with capitalism can produce very different societies and structures. For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.

That would have been useful. In the meanwhile there is gsudo [1].

[1] https://github.com/gerardog/gsudo

This is a great advice. Do you know of any publicly accessible design documents that you would consider good (to serve as An example)?

> Even if I could live forever, I'd never reach von Neumann's intelligence

Forever is a long time ...

An alternative is Scoop [1], which personally I find more convenient.

[1] https://scoop.sh/

> Society would be better off if we avoid appeal to authority and instead focus on evidence-based decision-making

While this sounds awesome in isolation (and is perhaps even a goal to aim for), I am in two minds about the reality of it.

In our society as it currently exists, most people are not in a position to collect, correctly understand and evaluate evidence for things outside their expertise. And some, like me, have very limited spheres of expertise to begin with. So people rely a lot on a "chain of trust" for informing their opinions and decisions. This is of course gameable and is indeed often gamed.

But I am not sure this is avoidable. It does not seem possible today to teach oneself to a point where as an individual you can form a fully independent opinion, solely based on the study of evidence, in any reasonable time for very many different things.

Maybe I am just pessimistic!

You may well be talking about different kinds of math here.

Most of what functional programmers / theorists tend to care about are from sub-fields like logic, abstract algebra and the like.

The "real mathematicians" that you mention are most likely working in other fields like linear algebra, statistics etc. While it is certainly possible that logicians and algebraists work with sloppy python (in as much as they write any code at all), but I don't feel that it had be a great fit.

To add to what others have said: Kotlin is a language that does path sensitive (re-)typing of variables. This is often very convenient in the presence of OO-style polymorphism or in cases where the language supports ad-hoc unions.

Personally it doesn't feel complicated to use/understand (at least the kind of thing that these languages do)