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zimablueon Clojure Scripting on Node.js

But the slow-starting, big-bundle default one still works right? For someone developing an electron app maybe it would be a useful option.

zimablueon Clojure Scripting on Node.js

Just as an FYI for the interested, there is a self-hosted version of clojurescript now, it enables macros in the same runtime with some caveats but the main downside (AFAIK) is increased bundle size, which is less relevant for node.js.

zimablueon 10 years of whatever this has been

The most defensible / widespread use-case of getting money out of an oppressive regime strikes hollow to me as a lefty. Most people in an oppressive regime don't have the problem of moving large amounts of money around. And it only helps you with "temporarily store it somewhere with a wildly deviating value", how does that help when you need to get it BACK into your hands and actually spend it?

The real exploitation for 99% of the population isn't someone currency-manipulating your fortunes, it's being a de facto wage slave because we live in a system that decides at birth that you're a slave and 1% of people aren't. Crypto doesn't help you with that, ironically it makes it worse because it helps the kleptocracy move their money. That's who has a use for anonymous money, and they're normally robbing the locals. See: the Panama Papers, Russia

zimablueon 10 years of whatever this has been

I don't think Google has succeeded, for the same reasons you state ironically. "Making money/having power" isn't "success", it's "making money/having power". I don't find it at all ridiculous to say that Google and Facebook are failures, I (as the author) contest the synonymity of success and money. It's actually telling of how shit our society is that you (and most people) say "success" and mean "money", and find attempts to separate them laughable.

zimablueon Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for more than $10B

>outside of business use

Well that’s a clause doing a lot of work. I guess email could have been the permanent contact repository a la Facebook if it had been easier for people to own their own addresses

zimablueon UK to depart from GDPR

Britain handled corona one of the worst in the world, the vaccine thing does seem like a genuine good news story but it’s bolting the door after the old people are all dead. Go back, look at the excess death rates, the extra preparation time the Uk squandered and the rhetoric at the time. Our ruling class have the blood of hundreds of thousands of dead on their hands and it’s astonishing that the entire British public is mollified by getting vaccinated a couple of months early, when the damage is already done.

zimablueon One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

It’s about 40%, look it up there’s polling on it, and that’s apparently probably over representing the more trusting/sane ones. Partly joking on the last part dunno how the populated those polls.

zimablueon One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

Number of states that you get wrong isn’t a great measure though right? If I call if for trump at 51-49 and you call it for Biden at 75-25 and Biden wins by 51-49 I was more correct than you were, to count “states called” is the wrong way to evaluate analysis in the same way that fptp is unrepresentatove of the popular vote, ironically.

zimablueon When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

No we didn’t, that system wasn’t proportional representation by any definition, please do not make posts that are not true, other readers might be misled.

zimablueon Ur-Technical Debt

Summarizing the article (?) I wonder whether there’s a way to split this concept of technical debt into two axes.

If you do waterfall, your code is technically “simple”, because it has a nice architecture, but it’s “misaligned”- it won’t fit the problem well because it hasn’t been tested. This seems like the ur technical debt.

If you code to solve every problem as fast as possible and patch/rip it up to stay close to the domain- now your code is complex/ugly because design philosophy has been neglected, but it’s well aligned to the problem, call that modern tech debt.

So you have two axes, ugliness/beauty and misalignment/“fit”. Modern practice says to focus on iterating fit quickly then more occasionally solve beauty, in big steps. So aesthetic debt vs alignment debt.

zimablueon Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

I saw it in (I think, it wa sa while ago):

Posters in the airport Museums Tour Guides Random conversations

So some touristic and some just random like airport and people

zimablueon Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

It's also hard to bootstrap a cocaine habit if you're strapped for cash.

zimablueon Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

As a Brit who visited Greece it shocked me how much of a political issue it is there. I kind of came to the conclusion that any slippery slope or historical argument is less relevant than "If they want them so badly and we don't really care, just hand them over"

zimablueon Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

Another key difference is that we don't have the right to own guns. Whether you're for or against gun rights you can't argue that they don't seem to incentivise more militarized police. Militarized police means that you get tragic and divisive police killings but I guess it also causes more general distance from and distrust of police.

We also I don't think have the American civil war history and Jim Crow stuff, so it's not as much of a political football and the history of oppression diminishes MUCH earlier.

zimablueon The internet needs our love

They have no competitor, their product is a fully featured open source browser.

zimablueon The internet needs our love

Companies which are run for good intentions are often hard to work for, pay less etc. You can view it through the lense of employee as consumer - if people are likely to agree with the moral mission of the company, they're likely to be willing to work for less wages.

It's weirdly common and makes no sense to me this line of argument, I've seen independent newspapers attacked for paying less than (evil) big media companies. The devil pays well! That's the deal! Good guys can't/don't because they're trying to venture outside the huge raw capitalistic currents, and the employee-consumer effect. Ironically companies trying to do good which do pay well then get attacked for their profligacy with limited resources.

Underneath all this (especially on a still semi-elite tech site) I think a (societal) system with big problems pushing people into complicity creates a compulsion to attack anyone seemingly slightly nobler in their mission, in an to quash pervasive cognitive dissonance.

zimablueon Giant Pacific Octopus

Read the sequel (if you haven't ;) )

zimablueon Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

One could make an equally (actually more) compelling argument that anyone supporting (state-subsidised/recognised) marriage is being very discriminatory towards asexuals, polygamists, people who for any reason are unable to form a monogamous partnership.

George Bernard Shore: Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.

zimablueon Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8

zimablueon Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

This is an excellent comment, it should be noted given the thread.

zimablueon Giant Pacific Octopus

The Children of Ruin series is somewhere between an homage and a rip-off of the "Zones of Thought" series, they're similar quality though in my opinion, I'd read the originals first just 'cause.

zimablueon Emacs-Helm development is now stalled

Helm allows one to specify their interface in the form of a class (helm-source) between (arbitrary searching code) and (helm-core = a standardized way to represent/navigate that in a buffer) which one can plug in his candidates for searching (anything).

So if one eg. used shell or remote tools, it would still plug into helm, one would write a "helm-source" which communicated to helm how the source was updated and provide actions to communicate back and update/filter the source.

zimablueon Banks create money, but it's less impressive than it sounds

I think there's a mixup between what most people who have no idea what they're talking about (almost everyone including self) mean when they say fractional reserve banking and the technical meaning.

People mean: Bank has less "hard cash/assets" than deposit liabilities Technical meaning: The bank is legally/practically constrained to a fixed minimum reserve fraction of liabilities to harder assets

So banks DO have a "fractional reserve" even when not practising technical "fractional reserve banking"... I think

zimablueon Banks create money, but it's less impressive than it sounds

https://xkcd.com/1570/

I think you haved to be careful about attributing your success or ability in one field to a generalized philosophy that you have.

Just looking around empirically, "successful" and "unsuccessful" people seem to vary wildly in ideology. Stallman, Thiel and Bill Gates have pretty wildly varying ideologies and are all successful, I'm sure you could find 3 unsuccessful people with similar ideologies.

I'm moderately OK because society currently values ability to solve quite formally defined logic puzzles and I was in a sociological place to get a couple of pieces of paper that statistically indicated some combination of privilege and ability to do the former when I was 18-21.

That might not even last, never mind demonstrating philosophical superiority. If I make a few million or achieve inner peace in the next decades it still won't prove too much, since there's so many other people of all philosophies going in all directions.

zimablueon Banks create money, but it's less impressive than it sounds

"legal barriers aside" is insane, legal barriers aside I'm off to rob a bank. There's only really two or three things that could possibly make banks different: the law, de facto capital requirements to enter the market and hidden knowledge, and you can normally buy hidden knowledge so the thing distinguishing banks from anyone else is either the law or money, and it's mostly the law.

zimablueon Banks create money, but it's less impressive than it sounds

Can you please explain this in further detail or provide a link?

zimablueon Banks create money, but it's less impressive than it sounds

I think it's splitting a very meaningless hair in a way that's totally misleading to say that "anyone can create money", when you mean "anyone can theoretically create money, they'll just land in jail fairly quickly"

It's like saying that nation-states don't have a monopoly of force, because I can shoot my neighbour, or that I support abortion but I think you should be jailed afterwards.

Only banks can create money without getting locked up in jail.

That's the important point, and this article adds or takes nothing, other than a very weird dodge with the justification that somehow legality isn't a primary consideration.

It's as interesting as saying you don't have to pay your taxes, (small print: because you can choose to go to jail instead).

zimablueon Banks create money, but it's less impressive than it sounds

The key question or claim is not whether banks create money but whether the way in which they are able to do it is unique.

"creating money" is ambiguous to be nearly meaningless, "creating money in a way that noone else is able to" is a lot less ambiguous

zimablueon Banks create money, but it's less impressive than it sounds

There's another paper by Richard W that I happened to read yesterday which seems to contradict this article and is not refuted or addressed in it, basically that a combination of accouting practices and "client money rules" distinguish bank loans from "random IOUs", basically anyone can issue an IOU but anyone other than a bank has to draw down their accounting assets when they disburse it, and undisbursed IOUs are not spendable.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...

zimablueon Blog Anonymously

I think that elected representatives are a special category in this, whilst technically you employ them they’re operating democracy not capitalism, so it’s different in many ways- it’s more reasonable to judge their character, the power imbalance is in their favor, positive discrimination for elected representatives seems more reasonable etc etc.

The lines will always be a little blurred, but international bankers isn’t a synonym for Jews, it might be a dog whistle but it would only be a problem for me if they know the colleague is Jewish and do this day in day out after being asked to stop.

I think so much of this discussion is wasted, and we’d be more productive just to pick a few examples and argue on them about whether we shift the line.

Eg. For me Damore shouldn’t have been fired and that’s when I realized that the woke thing wasn’t a right wing straw man, it really was running big Corp America