squidbidness

Worth pointing out though that we do already know the answer: 42

To my understanding, "common-law" technically refers to the body of precedent that the United States grandfathered in from English jurisprudence and prior colonial practice into the new United States government, as opposed to "precedence", which is the general principle by which prior rulings at the right scope are respected like statutes are. But that's just a semantic quibble.

But on the question of the weight that precedence carries: I'd be curious how you feel about federally enforce integration of schools as a result of Brown v. Board of Education, or abortion as a right thanks to Roe v. Wade, as two examples of seminal increases of rights resulting from the heavy role of precedence.

Personally I'm a bit of a hybrid in my own opinion. I'm partial to the sentiment that the legislature is the supreme branch of the Government, being the representatives of the people. So in principle, I'm opposed to drastically new doctrines arriving by way of court ruling, especially when they seem a little too "creative" and go outside the scope of interpreting existing law and statute into the territory of what "ought to be law". I prefer that such significant changes be a matter of federal statute, or when they're a matter of novel constitutional interpretation, that they originate in actual constitutional amendment. (Though even then in the case of federal statute, there are very real questions about how and when the federal Congress may override the states, and jurisprudence/precedence has been an important part of working out those questions).

But on the other hand, I am strong a believer that once a court with sufficient scope and jurisdiction has ruled, and a further appeals process is either at a dead end or would be too injurious for various reasons, then upholding the rule of law is of preeminent importance to the stability of society against the breakout of violence or factionalism. So, for example, in the case of Roe v. Wade, I feel the ruling was far too creative and far too tenuous in its actual references to the Constitution. Nevertheless, it is now the law of the land, and if I want the other protections the government provides and protects for me, I feel it would be hypocritical to flout that law just in the cases that I prefer. I actually feel that the outcome of Roe v. Wade was morally egregious; but I won't rebel against it or seek redress outside the established legal order unless I feel ready to morally take responsibility for the potential consequences of anarchy or of violence outside the civil order. Of course, not every question of civil disobedience is realistically divisive or pervasive enough that civil war is likely if I or others rebel. But civil war and anarchy can be the product of a thousand cuts, as it war, and if I had to oversimplify and take it to an extreme, I would say that I do not feel morally justified in flouting a nationally established law unless I feel sure that even the risk of widespread death and war might be warranted. Even with ongoing inequities and injustices (sometimes severe and chronic) in American Society, I still personally feel we generally (generally!) enjoy such a magnitude of protection, liberty, and privilege in this country, and I'm not sure that risking that is truly moral on the balance.

I love the irony in this.

I love how github fosters discovery and remote collaboration, though one of its liabilities is when great git command-line features are effectively lost unless github re-implements or exposes them, because some conventions incentivize only doing what github itself can do.

I see from retina_sam's comment that there's a fellow Mormon commenting here ;-)

A plausible financial incentive for them would be rent-seeking: they might be afraid they lose money on the balance if you only have to buy the game once. Doing it this way they have a shot at getting money from you again for the same game when new consoles come out.

IIRC Stroustrup mentions a desire for features such as these for versions of C++ after C++17.

To clarify a question raised in this write-up:

"auto [a , b , c] = getvalues();

"The braces are needed, getvalues returns a tuple. std::pair is not mentioned in the proposal, so its unclear if this works with pair, which is returned by the STL in some insert methods."

Destructured bindings will work with arrays; plain aggregate structs; and any class that offers a specialization of std::get<>(), so both std::tuple and std::pair are supported as a consequence. (C++11 added std::get<>() for std::pair).

Pedantic correction: "less they become ..." should be "_lest_ they become..."

But that's just the prior, isn't it? What's the full Bayesian picture?

The slippery slope fear is a bigger than which particular phone models will be made technically insecure by what the FBI is asking here and now in this case. The larger fear is the precedent that will be set by allowing such a ruling to stand--the strict legal precedent for cases much like this one, but also the momentum it will give to large agencies in the cultural fronts of the war against encryption.

My mind is exploding with the possibilities this presents even for existing film and animation production pipelines.

Just one example: A layout artist being able to directly sketch into being the spaces and sets they envision, then being able to storyboard and block character animations by sketching with traditional animation techniques, but directly in the camera space.

Similar kinds of programs could be a revelation for modeling, rigging, and animating characters... it had never occurred to me till seeing this how awesome VR interfaces could be for that kind of artistic work.

If you move in the direction of the pattern, its direction should carry you at least somewhat in the direction that a good design would, where 'orthogonal' would not carry you in that direction at all. So, not orthogonal, even if not strictly parallel. My metaphor and non-metaphor are unimpeachable :p

It feels to me like the argument of this article can be boiled down to: "The Majestic Monolith is a Good Thing, since when you know you're dealing with a monolithic system, you know you'll be hosed if you don't take extra special care." But I don't see anything here arguing that such care is inherent to the pattern--only that such care is needed when applying the pattern. I see that as a caveat, not as a built-in feature.

I agree that with a small team it's much more feasible to keep the monolith well-polished. But that polishing is more a product of professionalism and discipline than something that will come along naturally with applying the pattern--which is orthogonal to whether or not the code is monolithic. Good patterns are supposed to be non-orthogonal to good discipline--that is, they should bring along design benefits as an artifact of the pattern themselves.

Thanks for the clarifications. As soon as web text-based protocols were mentioned, I said "oh duh" to myself. There's nothing about the availability of a type system that forces a plain-data wrapper library to use it.

I'll admit my total naivete up front: isn't Swift already a typed language? Is there something about being a web framework that necessitates some other kind of type safety?

The usual expression is "fool proof", rather than "fullproof".

I do worry about programmers forgetting to check hidden layers even more than we may currently tend to ignore comments, so I worry about this adding parallel maintenance burdens even worse than the common problem of comments getting out of date with the code. Maybe there could be some way to have compile-time diagnostics or static tools to enforce updating of the documentation layers with the code. Though that could add obstacles to adoption, as the tools and meta-concepts would have to evolve along with the layering concept itself.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Just FYI, The expression is "rite of passage."

Oui, ja, si, gea, yes.

Yep, Indie games are a gold mine for great/unconventional art and design, as well as original gameplay mechanics. Some ones I've enjoyed: Limbo, Thomas Was Alone, Cave Story, Braid, FEZ.

Guilt. Making a change towards better treatment of people from different places brings up the poor past treatment, which people don't like to take responsibility for.

There are fringe, exceptional cases where this is a legitimate fear, but in the general broad-brush case, it's largely a self-fulfilling fear, brought about by the way people are treated when they come to a society that believes this. If they are given no opportunities when they arrive, and are segregated off into culturally de-facto ghettos, resentment brews over generations. In the cases where more open immigration is abused, such as the 9/11 terrorists who came to the United States, it's throwing out the baby with the bathwater to question immigration as a whole, rather than focusing hard on how to mitigate the exceptional cases of abuse.

I usually prefer the general, English meaning of a word to apply unless there's a particularly compelling case for abusing the word, or the context conveys that specialized technical nomenclature should be expected rather than the generic meaning. The OP is a news article with a general audience, so I see no problem with applying the generic English meaning of the word "startup", which simply denotes something that's starting. The original English word does not necessarily connote speed.

I see nothing in the words "repeatable" or "scalable" that has to mean "rapid". To me a repeatable and scalable business model means one that can grow, and that isn't a one-time opportunity.

I'm re-playing Super Metroid from the Super Nintendo glory days. Part of the entire charm of the game is repeated exploring of previous areas of the game with new tools, always looking for new secrets and areas. I do not wish Nintendo had applied the advice "never make me repeat a level" when designing the game.

This game (along with sprawling later-generation Castlevania titles) helped spawn an entire popular genre of games, "Metroidvania" that have been very successful.

In this case it's a symptom of poor cohesion and separation of concerns. If you find you're having to give very long names for things, it's worth looking for a way to decompose it into separate things that each do one simple thing. Then more than likely writing the code that composes the separate objects with the right operations will be the perfect substitute for the long name, and it will also be easier to maintain, since you won't have to update both the variable name and the logic that uses it; rewriting the actual expression or logic where it is used will take care of both tasks in one. This is what I usually take from the principle of letting the code itself be your documentation, where reasonable.

Here is where "first write good code" applies, at the design level. This function is begging to be two separate, composable functions that each only do one thing.

reverse(addToEach(input_list, 1))

> In a free democracy there should be no surveillance of innocents

I agree with the sentiment, although I might rephrase it as "There should be no surveillance without a warrant," since in some cases you can't know who is innocent or not without doing surveillance. A warrant is a good implementation of due process for people you want to investigate, but who are still (in theory) presumed innocent.