jordan0day

There's a small bit of irony here in that there was a rash of "Why I'm leaving X for Rails" posts between 2008 and 2012 or so.

> Since there are infinite things about which we are wrong

That's... ahem... wrong.

How could there possibly be an infinite number of things "we" (humanity, I presume?) are wrong about, given that there have only been a finite number of human beings with (as far as I know) finite life spans?

One of my disappointments with the original Raspberry Pi was that I felt that its genesis story was from people whose early experience with programming came from Apple II's and QBASIC. It was pitched as a way to expose kids today to that same kind of low-overhead, get-in-and-start-making-things-happen experience some of us had 25 years ago.

Imagine my disappointment when the Pi's getting started experience was "Boot into a graphical window manager, open up the Python IDE, start writing Python..."

What about the term "American Indian"? I feel like that would be useful in headlines to set the context, so that then everyone knows which "Indian" is being referred to.

I'm not sure I understood your comment correctly, but I hardly think either group thinks a large black market would be good for their cause.

The difference I see is that the anti-saloon league obviously underestimated how large the black market would be for alcohol.

I would not be surprised (in fact, it seems to be a talking point) if the NRA is purposefully overestimating the size of a potential black market for firearms. But I'm totally speculating here.

You might not be wrong, but your concern seems reminiscent of the fears raised when seatbelts became mandatory: That someone would get into an accident where the car went into a lake or pond, and the seatbelt trapped the occupants inside the sinking car.

That is, it's a legitimate fear, but such a rare occurrence that the benefit of seatbelts far, far outweigh the risk of this sort of uncommon scenario.

I'm kind of uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, and definitely uncomfortable with this statement:

> '"True freedom of speech" is an awful thing.'

That is, a good use of freedom of speech is to "speak truth to power". Yes, it's awful when freedom of speech is used to kick someone when they're down, but we need to preserve that freedom so that we can kick someone when they're (wrongly) up.

I'm pretty sure the point of the article was about women and Amazon, not "about a (painful and harsh) health insurance screw-up".

The health insurance "screw up" only occurred because she was on maternity leave. As a man, this isn't necessarily my area of expertise, but I'm pretty sure only women can go on maternity leave.

That's not to say this couldn't also happen to a new father on paternity leave... but paternity leave barely exists in the US to begin with.

Is there supposed to be a cause-and-effect here? Because I'm not seeing how that's related?

What's extremely funny to me is that this article is at least half about how much we underestimate (or flat out don't know much about) the people of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

And the sole comment thread here is full of people saying "No way were people in North Dakota capable of eating sushi in 1905".

A couple weeks? I don't know much about the state of the railroads in 1905, but the Pony Express could get a letter halfway across the continent, on horseback, in 10 days. Fifty-five years beforehand.

It seems entirely reasonable to me that a person in North Dakota could get fish delivered from the coasts, on ice, in a couple of days. Now, did they? I honestly have no idea.

Heck, half of the point of the article seemed to be that we seriously underestimate the people (Americans, in this case), of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I've been noticing a trend recently whereby all the standard BCPL advocacy articles, tutorials and feature overviews are taken, have 's/BCPL/[some newer language]' run on top of them and reposted as if they're all novelties of [some newer language].

Seriously, though, I don't get this critique? It's not like binary pattern matching was novel in Erlang, either. Personally, I'm just happy to see an article on binary pattern matching (in any language!) on hn.

You're not wrong, but it just seems like bad design. Why do they still show shipping rates at all, if the separate price/shipping prices are meant to deal with the uncertainty of shipping fees?

I'm not sure if they're altering the page based on geo-ip or not, but what I'm seeing on their page is "$14/mo (plus low 5.99 shipping) and $150/yr (plus 69.99 shipping)."

Why not just say $20/mo or $220/yr (additional shipping fees may be required for non North American customers)? It seems like that would be less likely to cause the sort of complaint had by gergles.

> We can't get it without shipping. Don't quote prices that are impossible to achieve.

This, exactly.

When I first glanced and thought "Oh, $150 a year? That's not too bad." Then I looked closer and saw the shipping cost was extra.

It's not that the extra shipping cost was necessarily prohibitive, it's just that there's some sort of psychological effect (sticker shock, I guess?) where you think you know what the price of something is, and are disappointed to learn that's not really the price at all.