srssays

The desire for a Norway-style agreement was voiced frequently before and after the referendum by various Leave politicians (e.g. Hannan and Boris). Since Leave isn't a party, it didn't and doesn't have any policies.

5.3% of Germany is 4 million people. And a wealthy 4 million people at that. Organic food is not going to feed China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc.

The bizarre thing about that law is that having sex with a real 16-year old is completely legal. But draw a picture of a fictional 16-year old having sex and you'll go to jail.

If a library is supported and maintained by the language designers, then its lifetime will be at least as long as the lifetime of the programming language. Or if the library is replaced, then it will be done through some mechanism of deprecation, rather than sudden abandonment.

I don't see the standard library and third-party packages as being in opposition. Far from it. A rich standard library encourages a rich ecosystem of third-party packages.

Maintenance costs affect the authors of open source packages even more than they affect commercial users. They are working for free and in their spare time. A rich standard library makes a language attractive to people who want to write packages.

Of course. But these projects exist in addition to a rich standard library.

C++ takes the approach mentioned of having a rich standard library (Boost) that is a separate project from the core language. It (IMO) does not work very well. Many C++ programmers don't use Boost and generic C++ libraries are unable to use Boost as a dependency.

I wouldn't say it works, rather that people will put up with it. When I write JavaScript/node.js code, I have no idea whether the dependencies I'm using will be supported 6 months from now.

It's not so easy to just "choose the right package". Often all the packages for a given function are someone's hobby.

Consequently JavaScript code needs constant, expensive maintenance. Whereas Python code can rely more on the standard library and big frameworks and tends to keep working for years.

Programming language designers should see themselves as builders and curators of great standard libraries, the language itself is almost incidental to that goal.

The claim was that pharmacists aren't running their own businesses anymore. It's hard to spin that as a win for 'equality' if the profits have been redirected to the executives and shareholders of medium-sized chains and Walmart.

Laptops are much more expensive than CPUs. I'm not likely to buy a whole new laptop just because Intel introduced a new generation.

However, if my laptop is old and slow, and I'm already in the market for a new computer, I can easily be convinced to buy the computer with the "bigger numbers". Buying i7 instead of i5 only a small part of the full price, so why not?

It's clear in hindsight. Natural language is the serialisation of human thought. Humans don't think symbolically in terms of rigorous logical statements. We stretch and play with definitions, sometimes making up a new definition on the spot, and relying on context and our shared experiences for the other person to figure out the meaning.

Statistics isn't sufficient for fully understanding natural language (for that, a computer would have to go out and experience the world in the first person). But it is necessary.

To be pedantic, GPUs are no better than CPUs at multitasking. GPUs are best at performing one task on a moderately large set of floating-point data (SIMD).

The Tesla vehicles use cameras, ultrasonics and radar. So they are processing graphical data (a video stream) and signal data. That's exactly the kind of task that GPUs are good at.

However, this only gets you as far as perceiving the world. The vehicles also have to decide which action to take -- following the traffic laws of the jurisdiction they are in -- which is exactly the kind of branchy imperative task that CPUs are good at and GPUs are terrible at.

Many people desperately want to be artists. They may go to college and study Art. But the world only needs so many artists. So, if they don't have any other skill, these people inevitably find employment making a low wage in the service industry.

So why aren't people in hot countries all obese?

> Shouldn't it be people should hire people who are most qualified for the position?

If you take that literally (and we are on HN so I will), the most qualified person for any given position probably costs far too much money.

Rather, companies want to hire an arbitrary person from the set of competent people. Hiring someone's friend is arbitrary, but not uniformly random (i.e. diverse). Hence the problem.

You have that kind of backwards. People are complaining this time because everybody has tried the 2015 MacBook and everybody knows exactly how bad those butterfly keyboards are.

When the 2015 MacBook came out, nobody knew what a butterfly keyboard was. Nobody had ever tried, felt, or melded with that keyboard. But journalists who got to try it did start hating on it right after the event finished.

Also, the MacBook was an addition to the existing Air + Pro product lines so you could just happily ignore its existence if you didn't like it.

Still, the computer costs thousands of dollars, and most people's purchase decision will be informed by their 15-minute experience of using it in the Apple Store.

I tried it, the keyboard was uncomfortable, and I decided not to buy it.

It would be nice if Apple would make an international version of the 15" that has more than 100Wh!

> The problem is that reducing thickness is a selling point/feature for a lot of people on Apple

It's the Peter Principle for laptops. Laptops are made thinner and thinner, which is always an improvement, until the point when they no longer function properly.

Fundamentally, people expect a certain amount of travel in their keyboard for comfort, and long enough battery life. Apple made a big mistake thinking these were mere "nice things to have".

> You cannot get married until the age of adulthood. I suspect states would compromise on this one and allow permissible parental consent as young people will still continue to have children.

Course you can. The US doesn't have a monopoly on marriage.

Scotland has historically had more lax requirements for marriage than England (and still to this day the age of unconditional age of marriage is 16 in Scotland but 18 in England). So English couples who couldn't get their parents' permission just went to Gretna Green past the Scottish border to get married.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretna_Green#Marriage

You should be more worried about using npm. How do you know that when you install 100 of different dependencies, there isn't one that is turning on your mic and listening to your conversations?

The Echo is an unlikely device to be compromised and recording everything you say, because it's pretty locked down and definitely not a general purpose computer.

I'm not saying that all retail jobs will go... yet. But the number of employees per store will go down, and since there is a large absolute number of retail workers, it will still be bad.

Secondly, once people get used to shopping at stores where they don't have to line up to pay, the new experience will become expected by consumers.

So there is a double effect whereby stores who adopt the new tech will save money on payroll, and stores that don't will lose some business.

You are still looking at millions and millions of jobs at risk. And stocking shelves is a problem that will be solved eventually anyway.

Amazon Go will be worse. There are a lot more retail workers than drivers. The technology is closer to fruition: Amazon has a working autonomous store, but we are still a long way from fully autonomous vehicles.

The hardware requirements for any store that wants to adopt Amazon's tech are minimal: some cameras, an entry gate and possibly some pressure pads under the shelves.

Even if Amazon doesn't license out their tech -- and they would be foolish not to -- you can be sure that Google and Microsoft are working on their own versions. The market is staggeringly big.

In the beginning, USB1 was no competition for Firewire. 12Mbps vs 400Mbps.

USB2 was more competitive, but Firewire stuck around due to its lower latency for audio applications.

With a state pension, a government can exclude people from reaping what they have put in, retroactively. I don't expect to be able to claim a UK state pension -- they can just keep putting up the minimum age from 65, to 66 to 70 to 75 to 80... until the scheme is removed entirely.

Whereas with private pensions the values go up and down but are unlikely to hit 0 and stay there -- unless it's really mismanaged!

State pension systems tie your financial security directly to government finances, and also to election results decades in the future. They are essentially a form of gambling.

No rational person relies upon them, and rational people are precisely the kinds of people to have savings!

"workers owning the means of production" is neither necessary nor sufficient for socialism.

The only people who advance this peculiar definition are members of the American left, presumably as a way to define themselves out of being "socialist"!

French Wikipedia has a better definition: the elimination of inequality and social classes.

> The word "socialism" covers a very diverse set of currents of thought and political movements, whose common purpose is to seek social and economic justice. The original goal of socialism is to achieve the social equality, or at least a reduction of inequalities and, particularly for Marxists, to establish a society without social classes.

I guess you could say "socialism" is a label and not a description.

The problem is that it's bad style to write (in Python 2.x):

    for i in range(n):
        # your code here

because it potentially allocates a lot of memory for no reason whatsoever. It's the equivalent of this C code:

    int* r = calloc(sizeof(int), n);
    for (int j = 0; j < n; j++) r[j] = j;
    for (int j = 0; j < n; j++) {
        int i = r[j];
        // your code here
    }
    free(r);

If you don't want to deal with the distinction then what you can do is just treat range() as deprecated and always use either xrange() or list(xrange()) depending on the situation. But you had probably ought to know about the issue.

xrange vs range is basic competence for any Python 2 programmer. They are two of the most commonly used functions and have very distinct uses. I think that was the point of the original post, however, that the question is so basic it is actually insulting - like interviewing a doctor and asking the difference between red and white blood cells.

Spaced repetition software is designed to maximise absolute throughput. That is, maximise the quantity items-remembered/year.

The way it does this is to open a firehose at your memory. If the information is simple and well presented, then ideally about 90-95% of it will stick.

If you want to retain 1000s of items (like a foreign language) and can accept some amount of loss, then spaced repetition is effective.

But it's not designed to increase the relative chance that any individual item will be remembered. If you want to learn a small number of items with 100% recall, then spaced repetition is a bad way of doing that.

https://www.supermemo.com/help/fi.htm