akjj

I think others have addressed the differences between Python's class system and CLOS, both of which are very flexible, as I understand.

However, as far as optimization, the point is that Python's class system is implicated in almost every line of code. Most operators are actually invocations of corresponding "dunder" methods on their operands, which can be potentially changed, and whose invocation is actually surprisingly complicated and difficult to optimize.

Common Lisp, of course, does not have operators in the same sense, just functions. However, the analogous functions, like +, *, aref, etc. are not generic functions in the sense of CLOS. They only take built-in data types as arguments and cannot be overloaded. This lack of extensibility makes it easier for the compiler to know what actual code is being invoked and to optimize their use. Arguably, this makes Common Lisp seem like a less flexible language, and in some ways its design does pay more attention to optimization than its reputation would have you believe. On the other hand, the lisp syntax means that there's no such thing as a finite set of operators that you'd want to overload. If you want a different type of multiplication, you can just use a different function.

The root of the disagreement seems to be that you read the article as condemnation and I read it as a news story. In any case, I stand by my reading that this a piece of news and any heavy moralizing is a gloss you've imposed.

> so it appears ironic when an exposed agent of state propaganda alleges that a state is engaging in propaganda. It's a, "well yes, and you would know" sort of humour.

I'd say it's more of a "rain on your wedding day" sort of irony.

If the article were planted by the CIA, that would be ironic. If the article were planted by the FSB, that would be even more ironic. But "NY Times reports on foreign propaganda" is not ironic.

Why is this ironic? I'm struggling to find a reasonable interpretation for this claim other than "The NY Times has been wrong about issues of spying and propaganda before, therefore it's not worth my time to consider the claims in this article, and I dismiss it completely." Which is a reasonable thing to believe. A little harsh in my opinion, but reasonable can disagree. However, it's definitely not ironic.

Even if you believe that the NY Times is nothing more than an appendage of the US security establishment, then it's completely straightforward that the establishment would be trying to counteract the propaganda. It's certainly not ironic for the CIA to try to identify and stop foreign spies even as it itself uses spies, or that the military builds armor even as it also uses guns, is it?

If you believe that the NY Times has an institutional position that propaganda is always and forever a legitimate tool of the government, then there's no contradiction if they also call out propaganda for the purpose of neutralizing it.

If you believe that the NY Times is more or less a legitimate news organization that maybe has made mistakes in the past, then I think the article is newsworthy and relevant.

I keep seeing discussion of Russian involvement in other countries' politics dismissed as ironic, which seems to just be a rhetorical trick to make it sound like there's a more sophisticated argument than just "I don't believe that source".

Compile macros wouldn't be sufficient for Rust's println! because the type signature (even the number of arguments) depends on the format string. The format string has to be constant and has to be interpreted at compile time so that the variables being printed can be type-checked.

I once looked into their financial statements and came to the conclusion that per article published, they had about $2500 in costs and $5000 in revenue, so 50% profit margins. If you look at the price of comparable PLoS journals (i.e. not PLoS ONE), the publication costs are also about $2500, so I think this is in the right ballpark.

This is mostly true, but you're confusing because there are two different levels: corporations are registered and regulated at the state level, of which LLC is one category. The IRS then categorizes registered corporations as either S-corps or C-corps for the purpose of federal taxes. There's not a one-to-one mapping between the two levels, especially since there's 50 different states, but usually LLCs implies S corp.

You could disable your network connection before starting Firefox and then change the preference.

No, because Google, Microsoft, and Apple could have coordinated on implementing EME even without an official W3C stamp of approval. Or they could have implemented 3 separate APIs for DRM. Netflix and others would be mildly inconvenienced, but that's something they could deal with. As long as content producers insist on DRM, which they do for video, the sub par user experience is going to be with the platforms that don't support Netflix.

Remember also that a well-known limitation of economic measurements of GDP, productivity, etc. is that it doesn't account for personal work when no money changes hands. For example, a man who works full time and spends 100% of his salary on a nanny gets counted in GDP. But if he quits his job and takes care of the kid and the nanny takes his old job, then GDP and productivity have been reduced. Nothing has been changed about the amount of work done, but you've replaced two people working for money with only one working for money, so the accounting systems show it as less.

If part of the effect of minimum income is for people to spend more time with their kids, then this would show up as less work, in part, because less of the work being done would be for money.

Let me offer up another version of Dr. Coward's story: An employee is hired and does his job brilliantly in some aspects and along some metrics, but his employer has complaints in other areas, which are hard to read since we haven't heard their side. These issues are brought up with the employee in writing multiple times over the course of a year: September 2013, April 2014, and November 2014. Apparently, the employee does not address the issues and instead insists that he's doing a brilliant job and that the employer's criticism is really about him being too awesome. Employer decides that they don't want a rogue employee and fires him in October 2014, effective June 2016. Why such almost 2 years of lead time? Maybe it's contractual, but I'm sure that if they really wanted to, they could fire him at the end of the academic year. I read this as the employer trying to get the employee to take them seriously and still giving him another chance to change. Now, in 2015, the employee obviously still doesn't care what the department thinks.

Not everyone who claims to be a misunderstood and persecuted genius actually is one. There are people who are brilliant in some areas, but unwilling to accommodate being part of a larger group and difficult to work with. In programming terms, imagine an extraordinary programmer who's unwilling to use the organization's standard programming language or version control. I'm not sure that the Berkeley math department is really any different in preferring a pretty good in all areas to someone brilliant in some, but flawed in others, and, most importantly, unwilling to change.

At first, I wondered why he was blowing up the whole issue and whether it would actually help. If part of the issue is in the level of preparation for science classes, then the administration is going to be just as unfavorable as the department. Then I noticed that he's started some kind of teaching-related company. So, the department told him to change or be fired and he decided he'd rather do the latter, but as long as he's going out, he might as well try to get some publicity for his company.

> the primary value is separating out metals (especially aluminum) and paper

Especially cardboard. Cardboard is significantly more valuable than other types of paper.

> Is it worth rinsing plastic to recycle it? I've wondered about this. Sounds like it probably isn't unless it takes only a small amount of rinsing.

The article argues that it isn't if you rinse in hot water, which was heated by electricity (not gas), which came from a coal power plant. That seems like a comparison which is set up to make recycling look bad. I've never had any problems just rinsing plastic with cold water or leftover dish water, in which case it sounds like it's still worth it.

> Now women won't be taken seriously even with a degree from some fancy place.

Why do you say this? The experiment was about hiring faculty not about student standards.

The argument against this is that a URL starting with https means something, at least to some users and your proposal would undermine that. When I want to go to my bank, I type chase into the address bar and choose one of the suggestions that starts with https and then go about my business. Maybe I should be paying attention to whether or not there's a green lock in the upper left and maybe I'd notice if it were missing, but I don't intentionally look for for the lock. In your proposed change, the absence of a lock icon would be the only way I'd notice if my connection were being MITM'ed. So, in that way it would be making the web less secure for users who are entering an https URL and expect it to be secure.

That's what's attractive to me about Firefox's opportunistic encryption proposal. It really makes no change in the UX compared to an unencrypted connection, not in the URL and not in the time to connect.

I agree with you that incumbent commercial publishers are sucking up a lot of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Where I disagree is on the specific numbers. It's not about the publishing platform or physical printing but the administration of journal's operations. The editorial board and the referees work for "free" (which actually means paid for by someone else, usually universities), but the management and administration does not.

I point to PLoS as essentially the model you're asking for. It's a non-profit publisher started by open-access advocates working as researchers. There are no investors making a profit and they're mission is to spread open-access as a model, and they end up charging $2200+ per article for most of their journals. If that's the number they came up with, then I'm led to believe that that's what it costs to publish a journal, at least in the biosciences. As I said, there are small journals that operate for free, but if you look at large-scale open-access operations, started by idealists, I don't think you're going to find any that sustainably gets by with article charges less than around $1500.

For comparison, when I looked at Elsevier's finances, it seemed that they're charging roughly $5000 per article and half of that goes to their operations and half is profit. So their costs are roughly the same as PLoS, but they charge twice as much in order to make a substantial profit.

As for why I felt the need to correct you, I think it's because I think in general people ignore the real monetary costs associated with open-access publishing. I believe that author-pays open-access is the way of the future, but getting there will mean that researchers will have to find ways to pay these fees when they haven't had to pay before. In principle, this just involves redirecting money from subscriptions to pay author charges and there'd even be money left over, but actually performing that switch across thousands of institutions is not simple. Too often I run into the attitude that for-profit publishing is charging money for a trivial job, and so people wonder why it hasn't been replaced. However, the truth is that they're performing an important and real task with real costs, while also over-charging for it, and that's not going to be replaced overnight.