Recent submissions

Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
The idea here is to make a clear split between owning and licensing. If the company decides they are selling the items themselves then the items should be repairable by the new owner. If the company decides they are merely selling the rights to use the items then it is reasonable for the user to be unable to repair it, provided the owner (the company) is willing to keep it in working condition.

That should absolutely include wear and tear as well as accidental damage. Intentional damage is an issue, but there shouldn't be much motivation for it under such a system.

Comment · 9 years ago
I don't think there needs to be parity between the prosecution and defense in this matter. Those technicalities on the defense side serve to help protect the rights of the accused, while on the prosecution side they just obscure the truth of the matter.
Comment · 9 years ago
That's not really a meaningful argument. You're talking about a large multi-cellular organism that has tissues, organs, and all that and comparing it to something that doesn't even have cells.
Comment · 9 years ago
> The difference here is that neo-nazis make a decision to be bigots. They could stop. Most LGBT people consider their status to be a matter of birth.

I don't understand why this argument gets thrown about so often. Obviously not so much about neo-nazis in particular, but whenever a comparison is made to LGBT people. And before anybody jumps to conclusions, I am not about to argue that sexual orientation is a choice.

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence of all kinds, from all sorts of sources, there are people that seem to honestly believe the earth is flat. There is no way to make a reasoned decision to believe that. It must be something they are not in control of. It could be something they were born with, something in their experiences, or both, but it's clearly something they are not rationally deciding.

I'm not certain it can be said that the neo-nazis are definitely making a choice. It seems to be a pretty vehement emotional response, which would indicate it's not.

I don't mean to say we should tolerate neo-nazis in the sense that we just let them do their thing. But I do think we might be better off treating them as people that have some predisposition to being neo-nazis than as people that just decided to be one.

Comment · 9 years ago
I don't understand the extreme focus on brevity, though it does seem to be mentioned regularly. In practice I don't notice a difference between "begin" and "{". It's not something I have to think about, and my typing speed exceeds the speed at which I'm able to determine what to type next.

I understand avoiding excessive amounts of large boiler plate where standard patterns are constantly repeated for no particular reason, but that's not a comparable situation to individual keywords.

Comment · 9 years ago
Did you figure out why customers would leave? I've been thinking about doing something in the "most people use a spreadsheet" space and hearing that people went back to it after a year of using a dedicated product is a little worrying.
Comment · 9 years ago
Do you feel bad for using any of the multitude of tax-payer funded services available?

Taxes are already pretty divorced from use of the services they pay for. People with more money than you have had more of it "forcefully" taken from them to pay for the roads, emergency services, and so on that you use.

Comment · 9 years ago
I don't think there's much predictive power there. The people who are answering thousands clearly just haven't though about it before and are on the spot. Humans are just terrible with big numbers, and thousands sounds like a lot already.

You may as well ask any other sort of technical trivia question and figure the people that happen to carry around more random facts about tech are more likely to understand the bigger things that do matter. It isn't necessarily wrong it's a pretty obtuse way to make a judgment. Why not just ask them about the memory hierarchy or network delays or whatever directly?

Comment · 9 years ago
I agree that it is "useless trivia."

The reason is that things today are "fast enough." These days most slowdowns aren't the result of the CPU not executing instructions fast enough. Other factors dominate, such as memory access patterns, network delays, and interfacing with other complex software such as databases.

Unless you are doing compute-heavy code, the speed of the CPU isn't much of a factor in estimating how fast the program will run.

Comment · 9 years ago
It takes significantly less than a second to turn a screw once. A couple orders of magnitude less actually, to give it some relation to the computer question.

Which really just demonstrates the point, I think. At some point things are "fast enough" that it just doesn't matter. We've reached that point with computers. Unless you are working in a niche field that needs serious compute, the sources of performance problems are almost never going to arise from issues like trying to execute too many add instructions in a given period. The delays will come from things that are significantly harder to see - network, database, or program architecture + runtime.

Comment · 9 years ago
I agree with you in general, but not when only talking about the mathematical understanding.

If you want to add fractions by individually adding the numerators and denominators and the only reason you don't is one of these checks, you have some kind of fundamental lack of understanding about fractions. It's great that you are wise enough to verify, but that's irrelevant to your mathematical understanding.

Comment · 9 years ago
I've always done those quick checks myself because otherwise I'm prone to making errors. They give me a quick answer of "no, you can't do this" but I never found they actually improved my understanding of anything. It just told me I can't do the thing I wanted to do and it was time to move to the next idea. It's a valid proof, but not one that really ever helped me get a grasp on what's happening.

Mostly it just means I'm in trouble and need to be really careful and do more checks because I'm working with things I don't understand fully.

For example, I've never needed to do that sort of check with adding fractions. I have enough understanding of what those numbers represent and how they work together that I've just never thought I might want to add numerators and denominators separately.

Comment · 9 years ago
That's not really relevant. You only need to check if the equations hold if you don't understand the math involved. You've already lost at that point.

Checking is the smart thing to do then, but ideally what is important is the understanding rather than just the diligence to make sure a guess isn't trivially shown incorrect.

Comment · 9 years ago
What do you think his right hand might be doing? I'm not familiar with the Tesla interior setup so I don't know what is possible, but I'm having a hard time imagining what he could be possibly be doing off-camera that wouldn't be reflected in any of the visible displays.

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