555 karma · joined July 25, 2011
We're currently considering alternatives. See <https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/3298>.
Personally, I first learned to use the simpler design; when I saw the kind with the gears and handle, it seemed over-engineered to me. I find them equally easy to use, but I've seen the handles break on the more complicated kind (they were plastic, not metal) and I've also seen the gears go out of alignment. Yet the simpler design is rarely seen except in swiss army knives and military rations. This seems to support the idea that some added complexity can be worthwhile for most users as long as the product is otherwise well-designed and well-built.
I wrote up the following response and then realized that I was answering a different question than the one you asked. The following is an investigation of whether the tendency for child-raising to be "womens' work" is caused by genetic or cultural factors. This isn't directly related to the question of whether the personality traits are caused by genetic or cultural factors. I'm posting it anyway because I spent an hour writing it up and don't want to throw it away.
I did some quick research and found that even in "matriarchical" societies, women are usually more involved in infant care than men. I started with this article: <http://metro.co.uk/2013/03/05/where-women-rule-the-world-mat... and went down the list:
* Regarding the Mosuo, this Wikipedia article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo> writes that "Children of such relationships are raised by their mothers and the mothers' families." However, men are involved in raising their nieces and nephews.
* While men are heavily involved in child-raising in Aka societies, this source: <http://books.google.com/books?id=21z2hbOuTcEC> writes that "The Aka are exceptional in comparison to other societies in that fathers are actively involved with infants and are second only to mothers in the amount of direct care to their infants." (pg. 5)
* Despite the existence of sworn virgins, Albania is patriarchical, according to this article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_sworn_virgins>
* I wasn't able to find sources regarding childcare in Iceland or Meghalaya.
In addition, the fact that there are so few matriarchical societies in the world is notable in and of itself.
My hunch is that the reason why women are more involved in childcare than men is due to cultural factors which are caused by genetic factors. One could certainly imagine a culture in which as soon as a woman gives birth, she hands the infant off to the father, and then has no further involvement in its care. So there is no immediate reason why women must be the caregivers. But that hypothetical society would require that babies be bottle-fed, which is a recent invention; historically, children had to be breast-fed, and genetic factors are certainly responsible for the fact that women are much better than men at producing milk. So the women would have had to be involved in caring for their children at least at the beginning. This could lead to a cultural norm for women to remain involved in childcare even after it is no longer necessary to breast-feed.
Of course, that's not to say that childcare should be "womens' work". Even if women do turn out to have a genetic propensity towards childcare, that doesn't mean that we as a society have to let that dictate our gender roles.
We have plenty of social structures that discourage women from programming.
Programming first arose as a profession in the mid-20th century, at a time when the vast majority of scientists, mathematicians and engineers were male. Naturally, the first programmers mostly came from those fields, so they were mostly male. Over time this became self-reinforcing, both because the programming community has historically been hostile towards women (and still is today, but to a lesser extent) and because the perception of programming as "mens' work" means that teachers and advisers encourage women to choose other paths.
You may not agree with the above argument, but it's the main argument against your position, and I'm sure that you must have heard of it at some point. It seems strange to me that your post completely ignored it.
The fraction of HN users that see a post on average depends on how long a typical post stays on the front page and on how often a typical HN user checks HN. I don't know what those parameters are, but I think it's plausible that a typical HN user sees fewer than half of all front-page posts, in which case it wouldn't be surprising for there to be some re-posts.
If something changed about those statistics--for example, perhaps more posts per hour leads to a typical story staying on the front page for a shorter time--then that could account for an increase in the number of re-posts.
Also, I'm not sure that there is actually a trend towards more re-posts on HN. It seems like the kind of thing that would be easy to mis-estimate.
Of course, this doesn't apply to prosthetics that don't actually improve performance or are completely irrelevant to the sport in question. It doesn't matter if a soccer player has a prosthetic arm as long as it weighs as much as his other one.
Prosthetics are fundamentally different from other sports equipment in that any athlete can use a given piece of equipment, but most athletes can't use prosthetics at all.
* Ideally, you want separate types for absolute temperatures and temperature-deltas. Absolutes cannot be added, multiplied, or divided; subtracting absolutes produces a delta; adding or subtracting an absolute from a delta produces an absolute; deltas can be added and subtracted, and multiplied by unitless values.
* Multiplying a MeterNum by a MeterNum would ideally produce a SquareMeterNum.
* If you don't have to worry about precision, MeterNum and FootNum should both be replaced by LengthNum.
* You can convert a LengthNum into, say, meters by dividing by whatever value represents "1 meter" to produce a unitless int.
* Often operators don't make sense at all. (a << b) only makes sense if b is a unitless integer, for example.
I implemented most of this (but not absolute temperatures) as a Python library. The source is at <http://timmaxwell.org/svn/src/pychem/units.py>; and <http://timmaxwell.org/svn/src/pychem/std_units.py>. (Warning: these will download rather than opening in the browser.) I also found this: <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/units/>.
Other than that, I agree with the other posters here. It's an impressively lightweight and elegant language. It's especially good for embedding: its C integration is next to none, it's easy to sandbox if you want to run untrusted code, and the interpreter doesn't use any global variables.
The OP complains that it's easy to write imperative and functional programs that contain bugs; I don't think that declarative programs are fundamentally better.
I find it interesting to model gang violence as a market. If drugs are made legal, the demand for thugs will go down. If the supply of thuggery is elastic, then former gang members will leave gangs and find other work. If it's inelastic, they'll find other revenue streams.
The benefit to society of granting a patent is that it gives companies an incentive to do R&D. The cost to society of granting a patent is that other companies have to pay money to use the same idea. In a healthy patent system, the average benefit of a patent is equal to the average cost of a patent.
If the average benefit is higher than the average cost, the Patent Office should be more lenient in granting patents, or should lengthen the term of the patent. The former solution would increase the number of patents, but the new ones would have lower average benefit. The latter solution would reduce the average cost of a patent. Likewise, if the average benefit is lower than the average cost, the Patent Office should be stricter in granting patents or should shorten the term of the patent.
The average benefit from a software patent is quite low; most software patents are for an obvious solution to an uncommon problem, not for a clever solution to a common problem. The average cost for a software patent is (currently) pretty low too, because patent holders usually don't assert their rights; but if patent holders asserted their rights whenever they could, the average cost would be very high. The solution is for the US Patent Office to be much stricter about assigning software patents.
In a healthy patent system, patent trolls aren't a bad thing. Patent trolls raise the price of patents by buying and using them; that increases the incentives to do R&D. Since in a healthy patent system, the cost to society of the patent troll asserting its patent rights is equal to the benefits from the R&D that gets done, that isn't a problem.