zipfle

I find it amazing and heartening to see this kind of humanistic, self-reflective discourse on hn, where I generally expect to find macho posturing.

I think the policies you cite as bad ideas do in fact enjoy broad support in the areas that enact them. "Hearts and minds" campaigns led by outsiders are notoriously difficult and prone to failure. Can you suggest a way to start the conversation about these policies in a way that you think is likely to succeed?

She didn't leave it out.

"I think Prof Taleb did get annoyed when I said that I had read his ‘pop risk’ book, not the others. But I was actually trying to make clear that I had some knowledge of his work, though not a lot."

We could try to regulate away the good fortune of the people who bought the house, or we could try to convince the tech industry that they actually don't all need to be colocated, alleviating competition for resources in that area. What I've observed about human nature suggests that neither would be very popular.

I know I'm in the minority about this, but I still prefer callbacks. In one common case, you're only doing one or two async things in a given area of the code, and in that case the async primitive you choose doesn't really matter. In another common case, you're doing a lot of async things that depend on each other's outcomes. In that case, I find that it's easier to build a reusable pattern for handling the specific type of async interaction you have using callback-based functions, whereas with promises and async/await, you tend to try to write straight line code that can't be reused and hides the asynchrony in a way that makes it difficult to debug.

This is the problem my startup is going to solve! It's going to be a service connecting muggers and burglars who steal your physical stuff with criminals who want your passwords! I'm going to call it Robbr!

I think that the author is defining memory leaks as permanently out of scope but not deallocated memory. In that sense I don't know of anything in vanilla Python, or Java, that would qualify as a memory leak. In the more intuitive sense of a memory leak being any failure to make objects available to garbage collection, (such as by retaining references to them in an unexpected place) leading to unchecked increases in a program's memory footprint, memory leaks are possible in either language.

I really wish I could get 16gb RAM without paying for a touchscreen. It was possible to get an Ubuntu XPS configured that way as recently as two weeks ago. Should have pulled the trigger then.