learc83

48 ms·

511.
by learc83 6y ago
>but the US passport is not one of the most prized passports in the world Henley Passport Index ranks the US at #7, by a reasonable definition of "one of the most prized", I'd say #7 counts. #1 Japan only has access to 6 m
512.
by learc83 6y ago
>Funding defined benefit pensions is very expensive, USPS wants to save money by not funding it in order to pay benefits. I’m not sure their argument other than “we don’t have that much money.” This is their argument. 1. They are forced
513.
by learc83 6y ago
>Basically people don't move house willy-nilly, but when they move house they can take considerations like roads and railroads etc into account. Locations aren't fungible and the kinds of long term population movements your tak
514.
by learc83 6y ago
So the government creates a natural monopoly for the shortest route from A to B, and then hands it off to a private entity to run it. What's the mechanism in place to prevent the private road owner from charging far more than the maint
515.
by learc83 6y ago
>It's funded by insurance premiums paid by companies that offer pensions, not by taxes, It's not much different than the post office itself in that regard. It's losing money every year. At some point congress will step in
516.
by learc83 6y ago
That's one of the purposes of the PBGC--to prevent people from losing their pensions when companies have problems. Look at the history of the PBGC and bankruptcy. Companies routinely use bankruptcy to benefit creditors at the expense o
517.
by learc83 6y ago
You need to look a little more carefully into the history of railroads in Great Britain. An act of parliament was required to build most of them. And they approved the routes over the objections of local landowners. In fact many local lando
518.
by learc83 6y ago
Yes, we spend billions a year subsidizing food production and distribution.
519.
by learc83 6y ago
None of that addresses how you build the road in the first place without government assistance (or expand existing roads). Private companies can’t compel property owners to sell land.
520.
by learc83 6y ago
There are billions of dollars in Government subsidies sprinkled all throughout the food production and distribution system. There are food stamps and government grants to private charities charities. And there people who donate millions of
521.
by learc83 6y ago
> A private enterprise, on the other hand, would only hurt creditors if it can’t pay a pension. There’s a Federal fund setup specifically to help pay pensions for companies that go bankrupt.
522.
by learc83 6y ago
You’re right! Only about 20% of healthcare spending goes to physicians and half of that does to practice expenses like malpractice insurance. So even forcing physicians to work for free wouldn’t do very much to lower healthcare prices.
523.
by learc83 6y ago
>Btw, some places are very good for outsourcing (Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus) I've had just as many problems working with outsourcing firms in Russia and Ukraine as I have with Indian firms. And I've had the same problems
524.
by learc83 6y ago
>Unfortunately at any moderate scale The problem here is the definition of moderate scale and huge amount of usage. We handle tens of millions of events per year using our primary RDMS as a queue with absolutely no problems at all. The v
525.
by learc83 6y ago
Assume you hold the view that a design document provides all the information necessary to construct a piece of software without any further design work. Construct a software development methodology around that assumption. Now remove that as
526.
by learc83 6y ago
That’s exactly why I implemented my own queue system. If it’s something that will only take a few hours to build, and I’ll need to maintain it long term, I’ll always favor rolling it myself. There are very few “feature gems” that I’ve used
527.
by learc83 6y ago
That completely depends on the amount of items you plan on adding to the queue. I’ve used the primary DB as a queue often over the last 10 years for things like sending notifications. Sure there’s a point where this doesn’t make sense, but
528.
by learc83 6y ago
At some level sure there will be differences, but for the end users, unless something went wrong, they won't be able to tell much of a difference. Blueprints for a house are much, much closer to being reproducible than design docs for
529.
by learc83 6y ago
Reproducibility is just a side effect of lack of specificity, which is the major difference and the entire point of my critique. Design docs don't tell you enough to actually build the thing you want to build.
530.
by learc83 6y ago
What happens when there is a flaw in the design? There's another higher level of design on top of that, with a platonic ideal of the design unknown to humans at the top? Turtles all the way down. Each stakeholder has a different "
531.
by learc83 6y ago
Yes models can be helpful even if they aren’t perfect. But not only is this one too far off to be useful, it does more harm than good. The expectations that happen when people (specifically managers) start thinking of design docs as bluepri
532.
by learc83 6y ago
>If code is the bricks and mortar, then these docs are the blueprints. That analogy falls apart quickly. Design docs aren’t specific enough to be analogous to blueprints. You can give a set of blueprints to 3 different construction firms
533.
by learc83 6y ago
They do, but they also have universal coverage mandates, and pricing regulations. If you want to mentions specific countries we can compare them to the US.
534.
by learc83 6y ago
That is very close to how I interview people. The worst thing about white board coding is the adversarial relationship between you and the interviewer. It’s so much less stressful when you can team up with the interviewer to work on a probl
535.
by learc83 6y ago
>I'm curious as to what makes a good size of N. That depends on the size of the population being sampled from, the margin of error, and the confidence level. For a huge effect like the one shown in the study, where one side performe
536.
by learc83 6y ago
> but isn't N=48 a little small? Not when the effect is large. 48 people is fine when there is a 2x difference.
537.
by learc83 6y ago
When it happens to me, I try to roll my tongue. Once I do that it snaps me out of it.
538.
by learc83 6y ago
> there is an element of faith That's exactly my point. >if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that become
539.
by learc83 6y ago
>Faith means continuing to believe something that is massively contrary to the evidence, to preserve some type of fidelity or loyalty to a previous belief commitment. You've just defined faith in a way that wins your argument, but t
540.
by learc83 6y ago
>Expert consensus is more likely to be correct" is falsifiable That's one of those things that sounds like it should be falsifiable, but in practice it's not. The statement is far too broad to conduct reasonable experiment

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