repolfx

70 ms·

511.
by repolfx 7y ago
But there's no significance. There's no evidence the precautionary principle works at all. As observed in a comment above, when you remove car deaths and murders (things unrelated to chemical regulation) US life expectancy is the
512.
by repolfx 7y ago
Then why is the EU banning random things without being able to definitively attribute any negative effects to them? That's easy. It's for two reasons: 1. Trade barriers. The WTO mechanisms are full of holes. The so-called "
513.
by repolfx 7y ago
Be careful. Rob Pike asserted Googlers can't handle an "advanced language" or whatever his exact words were, but he provided no evidence this was true, or that others at Google agreed with him, or that this was even the rea
514.
by repolfx 7y ago
Me? In a world where such licenses were not mandatory, i.e. the doctor in question wasn't actually breaking any laws? Sure. I'd probably want some alternative evidence of competence of course, like a long stream of happy, healthy,
515.
by repolfx 7y ago
Yeah, and a lot of that software sucks because the companies who pay for it to be developed want the cheapest possible thing that just about works and not some ultra-engineered unkillable concrete bunker of an app that costs them 50x more
516.
by repolfx 7y ago
It's an age old problem. Upstreams were complaining (legitimately) about how Linux distributions would (re)package their software and break it along the way 20 years ago. Broken packages in Docker being pulled from Debian is no surpris
517.
by repolfx 7y ago
Yes, basically every news outlet other than Breitbart refuses to publish the racism and sexism of the Googlers in question, instead allowing them to present themselves uncritically in whatever way they like. Why? Because apparently journali
518.
by repolfx 7y ago
Alleged misconduct. That's what Googlers seem to have lost sight of. Take Andy Rubin. One of Google's most valuable executives, he built up Android from nothing. He has a consensual relationship with a woman, but it starts to co
519.
by repolfx 7y ago
That's simply not true. I'm going to assume you are repeating things you've read in articles written by journalists, who I noticed lied repeatedly about the contents of Damore's memo. If you're curious about what it
520.
by repolfx 7y ago
I'm afraid it's completely true. As moderators you really need to decide on your positions with much more rigor and systematisation. I enjoy reading Hacker News but its biased moderation is by far the most regrettable part of the
521.
by repolfx 7y ago
I think we are maybe discussing slightly different things: you're talking about Koreans in Korea, whereas I had in mind Asians and more specifically Koreans in the western world where they and their children frequently excel relative t
522.
by repolfx 7y ago
Maybe affirmative action at work?
523.
by repolfx 7y ago
What sort of fair system would not reward very hard work and study with very high rewards? If Koreans culturally want a life more tipped towards academic achievement, who are we non-Koreans to tell them they're wrong or that their achi
524.
by repolfx 7y ago
None of those things have happened though, have they? Which democracies has Facebook toppled? Which genocides did they "enable"? And as for "elections were manipulated", I'll give you that one, but the only actual e
525.
by repolfx 7y ago
No it didn't, that's historical revisionism. Go read any historical text or even Chinese censorship propaganda today and you'll discover the authorities were/are obsessed with "rumours". Attempts to control wha
526.
by repolfx 7y ago
HN moderators discourage humour. Contrast with Slashdot that encouraged it via the moderation system. If everyone has to sound serious all the time, you get a lot of angry sounding posts.
527.
by repolfx 7y ago
Probably both - AMD chips have lower market share because they have lower performance, and they have lower performance (maybe) because they speculate less aggressively. Intel did these optimisations for a reason after all; the market reward
528.
by repolfx 7y ago
That's not how I remember it at all. Assange left Sweden because the allegations had been dismissed by prosecutors. He didn't run from Swedish justice, quite the opposite, he hung around longer than necessary until he was told the
529.
by repolfx 7y ago
He had already been questioned by police in Sweden prior to that. He even stuck around for a month and then asked the Swedish police if he was free to leave, he was told he was. The prosecutor dropped the charges because the alleged victims
530.
by repolfx 7y ago
Not only harder to quanitify. "Tech debt" is frequently used by devs as an excuse to make changes that they'd personally like to do, but which aren't necessarily improvements, e.g. rewriting from one language to another,
531.
by repolfx 7y ago
I think the problem there is that the uncertainty bounds can be massive. Almost every task will have the form: "This task should take a day. But if the feature of the framework I plan to use turns out to be buggy, it might take a month
532.
by repolfx 7y ago
Well, because stating needs and not implementations disempowers managers and means they're left with no feeling of grip. It makes it hard to imagine what you'll actually get and whether it'll be useful, which is scary. Plus,
533.
by repolfx 7y ago
The USA didn't go to war against the Nazis until they had gone well beyond even the most terrible actions, let alone speech. Almost all of Europe had already been conquered, the last holdout in the UK was getting pounded daily and th
534.
by repolfx 7y ago
The real question in my mind is when do browser makers start directly blocking websites they believe to be bad? After all both Chrome and Firefox are made by people with very strong political views. So far they've not abused SafeBrowsi
535.
by repolfx 7y ago
But you can argue Twitter does the same. I see hate speech against my race and gender all the time. For evidence, just look at what happens when people post "it's ok to be white". Notch did it recently: massive meltdown. Very
536.
by repolfx 7y ago
It's more complicated than that. When I moved there in the mid part of the first decade I needed a work permit despite coming from an EU member state. Then there has been a period of "unlimited immigration" from the EU but du
537.
by repolfx 7y ago
Radio Shack was pretty big in the UK. I remember them having stores when I was a kid. I think the general macro-economic and social conditions may explain why Acorn was rare, whereas the US birthed many such companies. But then again, the U
538.
by repolfx 7y ago
The UK had a small but modern computer industry in the 1980s, via Acorn and the resulting ARM chips that are world-beating today. It also had firms like RIM, Sinclair etc. Until ARM was sold to SoftBank it was the primary British high tec
539.
by repolfx 7y ago
Good question. I suspect it's like Germany and precision machinery/automotives. Japan lost comprehensively enough to destroy any notion that their government was good, and had a huge US involvement in the rebuild. IOW they were re
540.
by repolfx 7y ago
Why not? BBC has an operating budget of about 6 billion dollars a year. It has over 20,000 employees - it's enormous and that money isn't borrowed, it's simply given to them by legal fiat. The BBC is thus in a stronger fina

More ›