gervu

Yeah, like the cops have never gotten caught claiming someone accidentally fell on 43 bullets before. Or like there haven't been numerous cases of misattributing COVID deaths because they were inconvenient for the genocidal robber nihilists we have passing for a major political party. And that's just malfeasance, there's plenty of just plain error involved.

Having a deaths count -- which itself definitely has error bars, otherwise what the heck are missing persons estimates -- doesn't mean you have a correct attribution of those deaths. Never trust data in the absence of auditing how it got there.

Users trying to kill kernel_task sounds like an uncaught design problem. Replace the kill options in context drop-downs with "Why can't I kill kernel_task?" and have it pop open a short explanation, do the same as a feedback message if anyone tries to kill in the terminal.

If the system doesn't do that already, either nobody considered that users would try that particular nonsensical thing, or nobody cared enough to let users find out immediately instead of wasting their time thinking the computer was at fault.

"Are highly effective" is a massive understatement; they finance their campaigns and provide their unofficial retirement plans. The reward structure is what it is, and the behaviors that optimize for that reward structure are unlikely to change without somehow demolishing it and replacing it with one where the rules and their many workarounds aren't written by the beneficiaries.

"A politician is talking" should also at a minimum be treated with the same skepticism as when you encounter any other form of advertising. Even assuming the person speaking is completely ethical and aligned with your specific interests, it's literally their job to convince people of things. Assuming their job is "making laws" or "governing" is a lies-to-children version, they have to get a group of people to agree on some specific set of laws or policy for any of that to happen.

The flag button is the report button.

Flagging puts stuff in the moderation queue to be reviewed for abuse / spam. Please don't abuse it for other purposes.

Downvotes exist, but are hidden until you've posted more than some threshold I forget the exact value of.

The idea is to help prevent the downvote button from being even more of a "I don't like what you're saying but can't muster a convincing response to it" button than it already is, while making it convincingly difficult to manipulate via spam accounts.

It's much better at the second than the first, people being what they are, but it does seem to help with both at least enough to justify the feature's continued existence.

Elixir and Erlang both yield BEAM bytecode, which is what actually runs. There's zero difference other than a choice in interface design, which is why they're also completely interoperable.

Phoenix is basically a feature wrapper around Cowboy which is written in Erlang and dates to 2011 when it reimplemented Webmachine which ran on Mochiweb which I am too lazy to dig up the actual start year for beyond "had quite an install base when Rails was in alpha."

Again, potentially useful argument, but you're pointing it in a direction that doesn't make any sense if you actually understand how those work.

That's certainly an argument to be made, but I think you've overlooked the part where Erlang predates Rails by about two decades.

Wow, one character from a region that makes up 60% of the world's population? How radical. Next you'll be telling me that I should be worried because they included a black character and a female character.

If anything, the fact that anyone considers this at all notable should be a sign of just how racially biased casting is in most Western media. The world isn't nearly as white as it looks on your TV.

> ML has advanced so much in those 5 years that all my prior experience is totally irrelevant to them

Most people involved in hiring are either not involved with the work being hired for, and thus have no idea about that side of things. Or else they're total amateurs at hiring itself who have, by virtue of having some measure of authority over it, deluded themselves into thinking they are awesome at it.

Arrogance and bias will lose you an awful lot of qualified applicants.

It's not even that hard to work around that problem, if you're willing to shut up and listen. You can easily factor an objection as a concern instead of shutting them down entirely, which lets the applicant either show you that it isn't a major problem after all, or respond in a way that confirms that maybe it is.

The fact that some things are getting better doesn't change that others are simultaneously bad, or that things could maybe be more better if resource allocation wasn't so drastically unbalanced.

I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial, which is...well, it's a thing.

I have a highly complex understanding of wealth but I'm also very tired and typing into a web forum with a touchscreen. Some simplification is entailed.

Particular definitions of wealth depend on what's contextually useful, and are thus quite varied. But I've yet to see one that deals with having an increasingly poor Gini coefficient in a way that makes that a desirable outcome, or which absolves people of intentionally pulling on it for their own benefit without regard for how that impacts millions of others.

People doing obviously shitty things to society are doing shitty things to society, and you'd expect a good definition or model to show as much. If you fit an elephant to the data and squint in a way that makes it sound like it's actually good, when that contradicts observable reality to first order, it's probably a bad model.

Based on your quote, I think you may've meant to respond to the other reply.

But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter.

It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like socioeconomic access to housing that comes with or allows it, as well as the cost of power to operate it sufficiently, plus having it be affordable enough that you already have it before it's a heat-stroke-and-die problem for you to not have it.

Sixty year olds with bad hips and fixed income don't generally go out and buy an air conditioner because it's hotter that year. Not everyone is a healthy twenty year old male with flexible disposable income, and sometimes people die because of the assumption that those form a useful ideal model of the overall population.

We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not so equally distributed.

It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.