Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
I'm mid-20s and everyone I know has like 6 food delivery apps on their phone.

I'm somewhat of minimalist with trying to keep a low number of apps on my phone but whenever I see my friends phones they have hundreds of apps

Comment · 6 years ago
But if they offer an equal or superior product at lower price, they would have a fundamental advantage: people/businesses would be more incentivized to switch to them when money gets tight, when previously it may not have been a priority.
Comment · 6 years ago
Each of these systems is degrees of the other as well, and that seems proper for the exact reasons you mentioned - not including desired externalities in pricing/market dynamics.

There are a few things that I believe only work in a moral way when they are taken out of the hands of capitalist pursuit-of-profit dynamic:

* Healthcare: What does the demand curve look like when your alternative is death or a painful, limited life?

* Pollution/Environmental damage control: Without regulation the chemical company owner has zero incentive not to dump their leftovers in the creek.

* Access to quality education: Equality of opportunity

* Access to housing: Simply a question of morality. In the US at least, we have so much goddamn money and so much goddamn land and the ability to build giant buildings on that land. No one should be homeless.

Comment · 6 years ago
Oh it still is.

Capitalism is not exactly equal to "free market". There's still a hell of a lot of market under socialism.

I'm just pointing out that you have to regulate SOMETHING. Regulating nothing = people amassing wealth and buying political influence = those current power holders regulating everyone else so the current power holders just continue to win. Then you don't have your "free market" anymore. It's inherently unstable.

In my opinion, the wealthy should have no more political power than the poor. But of course the wealthy have an outsized ability to influence politics. So they can work to repeal or nullify the very laws meant to reduce their influence - it's a fight that will never end and requires working and poor people to constantly be aware, organizing, and participating in politics to have any chance at all.

Or maybe one day, in my dream world, the rich and powerful will realize hey it's not so bad to have a workforce that is educated and healthy and has enough money in their pocket to buy the things we produce without taking out loans! And then we all leave in peace and harmony...

Comment · 6 years ago
It's not purely "free market" to restrict housing supply, but the freedom to influence politics to your own advantage (like NIMBY's restricting housing supply) is absolutely an effect of the free market system.
Comment · 6 years ago
Interesting, I guess they don't get spit out to the console by default.

Overall Python has really good stack traces, but the hyper-dynamic nature of so many common libraries does make it tough to grok sometimes.

I usually end up reaching for the PyCharm debugger which is fantastic anyway.

Comment · 6 years ago
This just gave me the thought... if exception stack traces came with the argument values of each method call, they would be 1000x more helpful. You wouldn't even have to attach a debugger and step through in many cases.
Comment · 6 years ago
This is how it should be done, I'm such a fan of this page: https://www.psycopg.org/docs/errors.html

Edit: by "this" I meant to agree with parent: Getting a useful, well defined exception is how it should be done. Psycopg2 does this very well.

Comment · 6 years ago
I think when people talk about this, they mean to push back against the fact that people will often to be biased to hire someone they think they could be casual friends with, share interests with, etc.

I like my coworkers and I find them perfectly find to work and make small talk with, but I don't share interests with many of them and wouldn't really care to hang with them outside of work. That shouldn't be a criterion for hiring.

I have found it highly annoying to work in engineering orgs where everyone seems to have the same interests. Everyone talking about Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, etc. constantly because it's assumed everyone else around also enjoys that conversation.

Comment · 6 years ago
I’ve found asyncio to be a very simple model to understand, using the aio libs: aiohttp, aiopg, aiobotocore, etc.

Basically just slap “async” or “await” in front of everything and understand that anytime there is a network connection being accessed, that method will release control of the main thread.

You just have to pay attention to where something might block the thread for any significant amount of time - heavy calculation or lengthy file IO

You can spawn a multitiude of async tasks on startup and have super basic “scheduling” by using asyncio.sleep with some jitter.

The only time I have seen the performance limits of a naive asyncio app reached was in an auth app that sat in front of every API request for the whole company, and even then it was an obscure DB connection pool management issue deep in psycopg2.

Comment · 6 years ago
Oh I agree it's a radical change from what we have now (Although the resulting system is one many countries have already succeeded with). I was merely pointing out how if the program - and the tax to support it - is not truly universal, you have created incentives for businesses to weasel out of it.

The exemptions are billed as being "pro-small-business" but that's a BS talking point. Universal medicare for all would take away all that healthcare-plan-administration overhead that small businesses already have to deal with and pay for. Plus the extraneous benefits of having employees and customers who aren't pressured to avoid basic health care and preventative care and then go bankrupt when they need a larger procedure.

But I think only a radical change can have any real effect. You have to get the denying-care-for-profit insurance bloodsuckers out of the system completely; any concessions to them should be viewed with extreme suspicion.

Comment · 6 years ago
The important issue with Warren's "plan" is that it's essentially a $8,000 per year per employee head tax, so it's a regressive tax. An afterthought in the expense of hiring a very highly-paid employee, but a not-insignificant expense of hiring a lower-paid employee.

Not to mention that her plan exempts contractors and business under 50 employees, so it incentivizes businesses to to lean on contract labor or reorganize themselves into smaller sub-companies - a small paperwork expense in the scheme of things.

The business tax should be universal to stamp out avoidance and scaled to all payroll spend so it's at least not regressive, even if it's not a progressive tax.

Comment · 6 years ago
Agreed, the one thing I have promised myself is to never have a commute over 35 minutes. I even found a 35 minute commute to an internship in the suburbs disheartening when it was mostly spent sitting in traffic.

It's insane to waste that much of your daily life shuttling to your job (if you have an option, which I hope to remain lucky enough to have).

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
I'm struggling to find a source, but I was taught in school that some large majority of the total beer consumption is by a core group of beer drinkers that average > 3/4 gallon (around eight cans of beer) per day

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