stoppingin

Does Fortran need to? Does Fortran still have any real advantage over Julia, MATLAB, etc.?

Please forgive my ignorance. I've never written any Fortran. I understand how and where it's used in modern computing though. I also understand why it's faster than C in some cases.

I really, really hate the way this author writes. It's so needlessly verbose, obtuse, and condescending.

I've written Node for a living. Mostly Typescript in recent years. I've encountered multiple codebases where previous developers have used all kinds of novel constructs to make Javascript codebases resemble a purely functional language. I've never seen an example of this where the developer has actually managed to make their codebase more concise, understandable, testable, extensible, or more robust. The usual outcome is a complete birds-nest of spaghetti code that only the original developer could ever understand. These codebases usually never outlive the tenure of the original developer: They're usually thrown out the second another dev even lays eyes on it.

Reading through this article, I don't really see anything that would make my real-world coding job easier. I don't see any constructs that would actually make my code less complicated. Not to mention the elephant in the room that adding thousands of lines of scaffolding code (that only the author understands) so that Javascript supports monads (that the developers asked to maintain the code won't understand) adds so much more surface area for bugs. If you want to write an application in Haskell, just do that instead. At least then the company knows to look for a Haskell developer to maintain the mess you've made.

Where did you get that from the article?

From their results section:

> "Interestingly, detergent residue from professional dishwashers demonstrated the remnant of a significant amount of cytotoxic and epithelial barrier–damaging rinse aid remaining on washed and ready-to-use dishware."

> ...permanently blocks Samsung Pay, Secure Folder, a few other Samsung security apps...

Yet another good reason to root your phone. You wouldn't catch me using any of this Samsung shovelware.

That's a very fun example. However I'm a native English speaker, and I can't imagine actually writing a sentence like that. It's technically grammatically correct, but no one speaks like this. You would say "She must have been watched", alternatively "She had been watched".

I think that the human mind is not evolved for, and does not cope well in societies at the scale we now live in. I think there's a certain tipping point where social cohesion begins to break down, and people's psychology begins to shift from participation in a society of their peers, to guarding themselves from a society of potentially dangerous strangers. I think this phenomena has been extrapolated to a large scale. I also think that the society consisting of people who are largely genetically different from yourself has an impact as well on social cohesion, and by extension, on how people behave in society.

I'm not sure what it's called, but I've seen a product which is a database of the time/location of US car license plate sightings. As I understand it, these are OCR'd from a combination of private, and public footage. I wonder if something similar exists for faces, and if some company is performing facial recognition on publicly uploaded footage. It sounds quite paranoid, however we know for a fact that such technology exists, and that there's a motivation for it.

I've been a long time i3wm user, and I couldn't be happier with my workflow. What network managers are people using together with i3? I've been using wicd for a while, however with Debian deprecating Python2 this won't be viable for long. I haven't found another lightweight GUI network manager which works well with i3. This might not be the perfect place to ask, however I don't use Reddit.

This sounds intuitively correct with regards to the economics of property development. I'm not a property developer though. I'm not really that concerned about their profits. I'm a young person renting an apartment in a city that is rapidly becoming unaffordable for the average Australian. The point of my post above was: If property developers are legally able to artificially constrain supply to maximise their profits, then how does all this YIMBYism actually benefit me? The main argument I hear for urban consolidation is that increasing supply lowers the cost. If this doesn't actually happen, then what's in it for us again?

Everything in your post is just your own personal opinion.

> The problem is that these individual preferences come with enormous costs, both economic and with respect to individual freedom...

What if I don't agree with increasing the population? If I don't want to increase the number of people in the city I'm living in, then why on earth would I want urban consolidation? Does anyone actually enjoy living in a tiny apartment, as opposed to being able to afford a house with a yard? The need for endless population increase is not just some foregone conclusion. Not everyone here is an SWE living in SF, with SF problems, and SF opinions.

> In short, yes, people do have rational, coherent reasons to oppose growth, but, no, those complaints are not in the end valid.

I don't agree with your opinion. Should I just classify all of it as 'invalid'?

> This is prudent pipeline management...

Doesn't this contradict your central thesis? If the supply of housing doesn't exceed the demand, the price isn't going to drop. How can urban consolidation actually benefit the renter class if property developers are able to artificially increase the value by restricting supply until mechanisms like immigration cause demand to catch up?

Why do so many people here take for granted that living in Asian-style megacities is inevitable, or even remotely desirable? I really don't want to live in such a place.

Thank you for taking the time to make a nice reply, and for not taking my criticism of your post personally. I really appreciate that.

I feel like you have a very arbitrary definition of NIMBY. I'm writing this post right now from the 14th floor of a highrise building in Sydney's inner city, in the apartment I rent from a landlord who lives in mainland China. There are still rows of historic terrace houses in the nearby suburbs that have been heritage listed. I'm sure property developers would love to turn these into more highrise apartments. Even though I'm renting, I don't want these to be replaced with endless new apartments. I could list a dozen reasons too. For one, I don't think this would help create a city that people would actually enjoy living in.

I've been told by people who would know that one of Sydney's big problems is that property developers are able to artificially inflate property value by staggering the release of newly developed property onto the market. So more development isn't necessarily going to solve any of this country's problems with property value. It hasn't so far.

> How does someone oppose population growth?

In the case of the western world, what population growth? The amount of couples in the first-world having children has slowed to a trickle in the last few decades. This seems to have spooked governments in the western world into enacting policies to encourage immigration, ostensibly to prevent a decline in economic growth coinciding with a shrinking population. The only place where the birth rate is actually increasing is Africa.

My personal theory (which people are free to disagree with) is that the decline in birth rate in the first-world is a reaction to overpopulation. Although I acknowledge that extrapolation from this example is risky, we know that some animals lose their desire to breed when population density increases, and in captivity. Is it so strange that humans could be similar?

This idea is pure fantasy. This condition of classifying people as NIMBYs if they disagree with you on this topic is incredibly toxic. There are a plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth.

> My hypothesis has been that renters stopped voting.

Who are these renters who stopped voting? I can only speak for Australia, however the average age of renters has been rising for decades. Most of Gen Y have come to terms with the fact they will likely never own property in a major city. These people keep voting, but their vote isn't accomplishing anything.

> Density hurts landowners by decreasing property values and landowners vote.

How does density actually hurt landowners? If you own a house in a heavily consolidated urban area your property value will hardly have decreased. Look at the value of houses in Ultimo, Chippendale, Pyrmont, for instance. Also consider that maybe people just don't want to live in a highrise legoland, or think that endless urban consolidation is a good thing for our cities.

Why would the Australian government intervene in the housing market when they can just ride the wave of infinite foreign investment instead? If the goal was actually to ensure that Australian families could afford a reasonable quality of life they would have done something about the housing market 40 years ago.

Sydney's metropolitan area is already oversized. People are already regularly commuting for well over an hour to the city center on congested public transport, or driving on congested roadways. I don't think Melbourne is much different Where would we put 25,000 new homes today?

Is this on account of cost, or simplifying verification? I was under the impression that minimising the overall risk of a design was a major consideration. I'd love to know more about how these design decisions were made.

Apologies for a silly question, what exactly are we looking at here? I've seen the inside of an F-91W, and I always imagined that under the black epoxy blob was some kind of off-the-shelf microprocessor (most likely 4-bit) with a mask ROM containing the watch's logic. Is the entire watch run from this IC, with no processor? If so that's really interesting.

The same Stanford that labeled the word 'American' to be harmful?

https://nypost.com/2022/12/20/stanford-releases-guide-agains...

They do seem to hate fun indeed!

I've been working in environments that use mainframe systems for a long time. I've read COBOL code to get an idea of what's happening downstream, but never actually written a line of COBOL myself. I've always wanted to know: In a modern context, does COBOL have any advantages for applications like transaction processing?

I understand that it's not ideal from a language point of view, but does it have any properties that make it a great fit for the job? Does COBOL on a mainframe have particular properties that make it good for concurrency, validation, etc?

I definitely consider Hacker News to be designed in the style of the old internet.

What if AI could be leveraged to find interesting content? I doubt I'd even notice the bulk of comments being replaced by an AI. I only read them for the one in a thousand comment from a domain expert, or industry insider that really informs me, or challenges my perspective.

I look back very fondly on this era. In retrospect, it seems like the internet was a much more optimistic, much less cynical place.

On a similar note, does anyone else find that new forum software UIs aren't nearly as nice and easy to navigate as the forum software of the early 2000s?

I'm an Australian with family in eastern-Europe. I get my dental work done there at a fraction of the cost of doing it here in Sydney. The quality is at least on par with Australia.

I was unable to travel for a few years on account of work, and then COVID, and was seeing the local dentist recommended by my health insurer. They advised me that I needed my wisdom teeth removed. I was skeptical: My wisdom teeth came through in my teens with zero pain. I'm an adult with no tooth pain. When I asked why, the dentist was very vague, and told me it was for the best on account of the long-term likelihood of decay. I wasn't convinced. When I recently saw my extended family's local dentist, they showed me that my local Australian dentist had just left decay to flourish in my wisdom teeth, and not even let me know there were cavities there that were fixable. A quick filling would have saved me lots of hassle. Instead it seems they wanted to encourage me to take a much more costly course of action. In case anyone is wondering, this was an expensive clinic in Sydney's CBD. I'll never return!