ezrast

14 ms·

91.
by ezrast 6y ago
There is no line, and there is no reason to choose between lobbying Amazon and lobbying politicians. People can do more than one thing! We're focusing on Amazon right now because we're in an HN thread about Amazon. I'm not
92.
by ezrast 6y ago
Bezos' current estimated net worth (143B, per Forbes) averaged over the entire 25-year history of Amazon still comes out to well over half a million an hour. Why quibble over a measly one or two orders of magnitude when the amount we&#
93.
by ezrast 7y ago
There's no reason we have to choose between those things. Network utility scales with connectivity. It doesn't make sense to optimize for profit when doing so triggers a race to the bottom for service all over the fringes of the n
94.
by ezrast 7y ago
Thank you. It blows my mind how rarely I see anyone talk about what an utter disaster of a product this frontend is.
95.
by ezrast 7y ago
HN has this conversation about web services all the time. "I'm tired of seeing ads" -> "Somebody has to pay server costs, would you prefer all content be paywalled?" -> "Someone should implement a micropa
96.
by ezrast 7y ago
Because a reliable communications network is a public good, and cutting off millions of poor Americans from critical services is a despicable way of remediating whatever vague injustices the USPS is perceived to be committing against taxpay
97.
by ezrast 7y ago
No, it's built into the format that implementations can extend it with their own types. Then library authors decided it would be neat if any object in their language could be serialized as yaml, and so extended it with types that hap
98.
by ezrast 7y ago
> What, if any, government interventions could be put in place to somehow add value to BTC mining? Well, the typical answer to "what can government do about this thing that is bad for society, but not bad enough to ban outright&quot
99.
by ezrast 7y ago
That's not the same at all. You left out an important step in the first model: Energy -> Factory + Labor -> Goods and Services -> Revenue Goods and services improve the life of people, and we have deliberately organized our so
100.
by ezrast 7y ago
I'm just shooting from the hip here, but I think it's: Joe manages his whitelist through his mail provider's web UI. Many providers already use the address book as a whitelist; the only difference is they default to filtratio
101.
by ezrast 7y ago
A popular vote "disenfranchises" any voting bloc that stands in opposition to a majority. Do you believe this strategy of ameliorating tyranny-of-the-majority scenarios by weighting votes generalizes to demographics other than pla
102.
by ezrast 7y ago
> The whole promise of LLVM is that your prog-lang just targets LLVM (so to speak) and doesn't have to worry about specific platforms. "Platform" in this case mostly means executable format. LLVM is too low-level to be abl
103.
by ezrast 7y ago
You're probably describing this or a related issue: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/6351 I don't think it was ever a major roadblock. The fix isn't pretty but it doesn't come
104.
by ezrast 7y ago
All that stuff is still optional. I don't think there are any cases where removing type annotations from a working Crystal program will change behavior.
105.
by ezrast 7y ago
World GDP is around 87 trillion dollars. $ ruby -e 'pp 87e12 + 0.01' 87000000000000.02 If you're certain that your software will never handle national-economy-scale or hyperinflationary use cases, then sure, you
106.
by ezrast 7y ago
Is the hypothetical contradictory article that you assume exists, but can't be bothered to find, also backed by an extensive report from a well-regarded environmental science group?
107.
by ezrast 7y ago
They're predictions. How do you want them to be framed? Anyway, if you prefer more certain terms, just click through to the Audobon study[0]: "The results are clear: Birds will be forced to relocate to find favorable homes";
108.
by ezrast 7y ago
You're right, this is wonderful news for people who love desertification.
109.
by ezrast 7y ago
It's not surprising. Blitzchung has a name and a face, and he earned a thing, and he had it taken away from him directly, deliberately, and unjustly. That makes him a strong symbol to rally around and more likely to incite a social mov
110.
by ezrast 7y ago
So it's a rounding error for DHS but an expensive soaking for the taxpayer? That doesn't bear out. No one is going to deprecate ICE because it's too expensive, but they might do it due to extensive political pressure from all
111.
by ezrast 7y ago
Remember that we're comparing languages, not programs. A language can be thought of as the space of all programs that can be interpreted by that language. In any language, any algorithm can be implemented arbitrarily slowly. So the onl
112.
by ezrast 7y ago
Agreed. Ruby is a very fundamentally OO language, but its Enumerable interface is more comprehensive than many FP languages' equivalents (in addition to the standard map/reduce/select, it has methods for iterating over permut
113.
by ezrast 7y ago
You're right, and my experience was clouding my judgment. It's a hostile decision to me only because I know and care about the difference between a domain and a subdomain. I thought I'd be able to find a counter-example whe
114.
by ezrast 7y ago
I don't doubt that Googlers believe this is a useful change, but that belief is borne out of their own vested interest in deprecating traditional web navigation. That's really the best light you can put it in, considering how utte
115.
by ezrast 7y ago
It's natural for some operations to be used only for their side effects, and for those a return value is just noise. What does a while loop evaluate to in your favorite language? Are there any circumstances where you'd want to ass
116.
by ezrast 7y ago
> The internet allows the "unwashed masses" to voice their opinions and viewpoints too. And of course those higher up will always have a distaste for those opinions. I think the real enabler isn't the internet, but the ubi
117.
by ezrast 7y ago
Then the cost in externalities would do the same. That's the whole point of pricing in externalities: if the paper packaging becomes cheaper after you do it, that's because the plastic packaging actually is worse for the would-be
118.
by ezrast 7y ago
The cost in dollars would go up significantly. The cost in dollars plus inflicted externalities would remain constant-ish, implementation failures notwithstanding.
119.
by ezrast 8y ago
I like the way the author characterizes the "feel-good" nature of bouncing between keys with traditional touch typing. I type mostly in Dvorak these days (with some modifications to make it less terrible for programming), but when
120.
by ezrast 8y ago
Maybe not, but I bet "someone else overrode == and you've been told not to mess with it" has.

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