stass

So we end up waiting for several month for a surgery like other developed countries?

Or by removing the annual cap on the number of doctors that graduate and simultaneously relaxing the regulations and paperwork, that prevent doctor from operating independently instead forcing them to join large networks like PAMF. I talked to a couple of my doctors, both of them admitted they would like to have a private practice, but would get buried by the paperwork and accounting they will have to perform in addition to their actual job.

It's not really pedantry, I'm not picking on the words, but the concept. Many here, especially a lot of people coming from places with a strong government, decry the fact that US government does very little and seemingly can't make progress. This is by design: US institutions are setup in a way so only absolutely non controversial initiatiaves would pass, while the rest would be handled by citizens themselves or smaller governments on a regional level. Such governing structure was the fundamental innovation made at the time the US was established compared to the old tyrannical governments of the past, and I find it appalling that many people here, many of whom call themselves progressives, completely miss that fact.

Which nations? The only country which would be even comparable to US in terms of connectivity, healthcare and education quality, UK is still lagging behind US in all these matters. Good luck trying to get decent LTE or even 3G in London, or a proper timely healthcare for anything relatively complicated.

Are the other nations which are ahead in US in these areas which I am missing?

It never did, in US we are self-governed, that was the whole idea.

Wall Street Journal is still very good as well. I wonder if the fact that their articles are not available for free is one of the reasons?

Which most people would not use if this service was optional and adevertised beforehand priced at the amount they pay in taxes.

You can't properly price the service into your economic activity if it's forced onto you.

Do you think this law will prevent the government from accessing the data somehow? The way it's written it's primary goal seems to be extracting fees from successful business and not protecting user privacy. Ideally you would not want government intervention in these matters at all as you can bet it will end up with special provisions for government to have an access.

It is sad that EU is slowly moving back towards the over-regulated and bureaucratic regimes of the past. This will further push the EU economy down the drain and prevent people from innovating. I just hope it does not lead to jail sentences and labor camps for people accidentally leaking the data as some in this thread are arguing for. The history does not provide much hope here unfortunately.

I don't see how this law benefits anybody except filling up the EU budget by collecting fines. The companies are already careful with their data as any leak would affect their image extremely negatively.

If one needs a good example of why Brexit happened, here it is.

This is just a Marxist propaganda. How did wealthy become wealthy?

And how did you measure that?

They delivered an innovative business model. Not every company is a technology company.

They didn't access any Lyft systems. They ran Lyft software on their own devices and collected and analyzed the data Lyft provides. One can argue that they broke EULA, but it's not necessarily unethical, and I'm ready to bet the majority of this site users broke at least one software EULA in their lifetime.

There isn't the one and only standard for ethics. Perhaps a class would teach a certain version of ethics, but not a universally applicable one. As a somewhat relevant example, a lot of ethical norms in USSR (prosecution of successful individuals, outlawing free speech, destroying dissent, banning "unethical" literature and works of art) would be considered completely unethical in the Western society and vise versa, although the admiration of former became fashionable in tech circles lately.

What's unethical about this? They were doing market research. It's not much different from stalking your competitor on google and going after the users they advertise to.

Can't they use pidgin/gtalk? Gtalk works with bitlbee/irssi-otr.

Drivers != Linux drivers.

Also, TI and Freescale are both good with providing official driver source code of decent quality. Even Broadcom contributed a lot of drivers upstream.

Prolog and Natural-Language Analysis[1] is great from both theoretical and practical standpoints.

[1] http://www.mtome.com/Publications/PNLA/prolog-digital.pdf

I feel the original question was more in the line of "Why are US presidential election are not like elections in the many other democratic countries?" and is a huge trivialization of a complicated issue.

It's not obvious by any means, that's why I pointed to the reference work on that topic. There are reasons the electoral college was implemented, whether they are still valid of not is a different question entirely.

Furthermore, it's not even clear what the question is. Why it's not elected by the US populous? Because it's the President of the United States being elected, not the President of the people of the United States. Why is it not a direct vote? In part, to make the system resilient to the tyranny of majority which was feared by Founding Fathers.

There is extensive literature on that topic by the designers of the system itself and one cannot summarize it in a HN comment. So if the the Americans the parent was referring to are indeed puzzled by that question there are answers to be found.

And the answer can be easily found in e.g. Federalist papers and even Wikipedia.

> Thus neither Go or Rust was an option at the time. Don’t tell me it should have been written in OCaml, Haskell, Java, ADA, whatever. All of those memory safe languages were either unfit for such a low level software or far too confidential to be a good pick.

Which of these are unfit or confidential? This is an extremely weak argument. It's basically saying that none of the languages besides Rust and/or Go are unfit for system-level software.

It's not really a property of a functional or strongly typed language. Trees are trivial to define and iterate over in e.g. Prolog or Erlang as well. The essential thing here is the first class support for structured/abstract data types.

And don't forget Erlang as well.

It does not have to be attached though.

Some operating systems like FreeBSD and (I think) Debian have this functionality built in without the need for external service. So it depends on what you are using. RedHat had a similar functionality as well AFAIR.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither."

This seems like an appropriate quote here. If we want to protect our rights we should not settle for conveniences. The software world in 90s is a good example of what happens.

They were called "jails" long before "containers" became a thing on HN. Somehow "jails" didn't stick, so I'd assume it was even more confusing for newcomers.

Also Essentials of Programming Languages (also by Dan Friedman), which talks specifically about language design and compilation/transformations.

I highly recommend Modern Compiler Implenentation in ML by Andrew Appel (he is also an inventor of a number of important modern compilation techniques).

I also rather enjoyed Crafting a Compiler. I found the explanations and excercises to be much more practical and enjoyable than the dragon book, but the code authors present is mostly garbage and full of global variables, state mutations and design pattern heavy. Ignore the code and do the excercises yourself.

I always found the Dragon book to be too parsing-heavy which gets boring quickly. The books I listed spend far less time on parsing and much more on code generation and optimization which I find more enjoyable. YMMV.