geofft

20 ms·

121.
by geofft 5y ago
The difficult thing about measuring causes of death is that we take it as axiomatic (and, to be clear, I think we're right to do so) that the goal is not for humans to live forever, that everyone should die of something . Heart diseas
122.
by geofft 5y ago
Also, quite literally, people (both management and other engineers) often don't fully think through the consequences of systems that have neither enough automatic failover nor enough staffing by non-distracted humans, and build syste
123.
by geofft 5y ago
Then you need to do a better job of moderating the bad comments in the first place. We're all trying to make HN a good and enjoyable place the best way we can, and you warn "both sides" like that helps anything.
124.
by geofft 5y ago
There's a risk of a baseball bat being used to limit, coerce, and change people's behavior, and there are documented cases of them being used in that way, but nobody would say that the Louisville Slugger is crypto-authoritarianism
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by geofft 5y ago
I never thought I'd be saying this, but Joe Rogan is right here. The claim that it's impossible to get covid twice contradicts obvious empirical evidence - and more importantly, reasoning from first principles gives you no parti
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by geofft 5y ago
I just mean keeping your job, but to the post above, I mean realizing that because there is no inherent virtue in a for-profit job, there is also no "corruption" simply because there's too much bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is
127.
by geofft 5y ago
I think you missed the part where I said this was not moral or virtuous. Don't go looking for virtue. You won't find it. If the managers you advise are working towards evil (say, they're having you find zero-days to deploy
128.
by geofft 5y ago
Here is a blunt question: Why do you care about being able to migrate your apps before the end of Q1 2022? Is your management expecting you to do it faster? Then you need to put your management in touch with the managers you're talki
129.
by geofft 5y ago
Literally the point of a job at a for-profit company is to make money, yes, primarily for yourself and secondarily for the business. This is by no means moral or virtuous. But it is true , and because it is true, the people who admit the t
130.
by geofft 5y ago
But why would one single country tamper with their own reports - that is, what would motivate Japan, more than other countries , to tamper with their reports? Like I see the argument for why all countries would want to make themselves look
131.
by geofft 5y ago
> The vaccine is one barrier keeping the virus at bay. Oka says that it's a social norm in Japan to keep another kind of barrier over people's mouths and noses. > "Even though I keep having no COVID patients, I haven
132.
by geofft 5y ago
Somehow I get the feeling that what was intended was "A shadowy global cabal is trying to steal freedom from America and is suppressing reports in Japan," but I do agree Occam's Razor applies and yields the result "Peopl
133.
by geofft 5y ago
Touché, but I think it's pretty clear that even under the most generous but still fact-based interpretation of the effects of "lockdowns," covid kills a lot more people.
134.
by geofft 5y ago
That math doesn't work out, because the infection fatality ratio measures fatality - non-existence - not impaired existence. Long covid is a thing, and affects a staggeringly large percentage of people who get covid and do not die, s
135.
by geofft 5y ago
I think this is an interesting question and I'm not sure why it was downvoted. One argument here is that the whole mental model of Rust is that yes, most things can be solved with off-the-shelf synchronization methods. What the Rust
136.
by geofft 5y ago
Most of this internal bookkeeping is at compile time, right? Your average object that contains a bunch of mutable fields will, even in Rust, be expressed using a mutex. For instance, here's a very simple race-free program that transfer
137.
by geofft 5y ago
Fortunately there are a lot of other more-senior leaders in larger companies and longer-lasting non-profits who believe people can learn from their mistakes and there is no magical class of people who never make mistakes. Obviously mistakes
138.
by geofft 5y ago
The fact that Ross didn't mean to do this is all the more reason why someone - maybe an IRB, maybe not (your argument makes sense) - should be assisting 20-something researchers with having a well-informed perspective. In the absence o
139.
by geofft 5y ago
I didn't claim it bans "any discussion." I claimed it bans "honest and uncensored discussion."
140.
by geofft 5y ago
My claim (upthread) was "honest and uncensored discussion." You can talk in censored ways about it, yes. If you think it's okay to censor particular views because they're obviously wrong or misguided... you're total
141.
by geofft 5y ago
There are a large number of bills in US state legislatures aimed at suppressing honest and uncensored discussion of the Tulsa race massacre. In America, we should discuss and debate and try to incrementally learn from our experiences. And
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by geofft 5y ago
The halting problem is easy to solve most of the time. For instance, you can easily tell whether the following two programs halt: while True: pass while False: pass What's impossible is solving the halting
143.
by geofft 5y ago
I haven't seen anyone do a good job of it, but it seems to me that if you wanted to try, the way to do it would be to make the marketing versions and compatibility versions so different that they can't be confused (like Windows 95
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by geofft 5y ago
Semantic versioning solves one specific problem that's worth solving - whether you can (expect to) automatically upgrade. That is a problem people have with languages just as much as libraries, and it is a problem that affects both big
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by geofft 5y ago
Thanks, I missed this at the bottom of the gist, but it was helpfully quoted in a comment: > As one might have guessed, this is not an essay. It's a transcript of the following talk by R. Martin with some substitutions made (SmallT
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by geofft 5y ago
I think you're misunderstanding my point - I'm saying that eugenics was bad at the time, even before the Nazis implemented it at horrifying scale, but the scientific consensus of the time was that eugenics was a perfectly reasonab
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by geofft 5y ago
I don't know what their views are on those matters - I don't think there's a lot of documentary evidence. (I also picked those two people because I'm American and I grew up Methodist and I happened to have read about bot
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by geofft 5y ago
This is certainly not true! Many, many people from more than a century ago opposed racism and bigotry. It's just that many powerful people in recent years supported it and want you to believe that racism and bigotry was (and still is
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by geofft 5y ago
> Then why did this guy have one to begin with? Because the college wanted to celebrate itself and demonstrate how it has notable alumni. So any alum of any defensible level of notability would have worked here. Nobody looked at the
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by geofft 5y ago
I think what I'm saying is that what is called "politically incorrect" is a small slice of the things that will cause society to turn hostile. Moreover, in fact, many things that are "politically incorrect" simply w

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