pjlegato

7 ms·

1.
by pjlegato 1y ago
Public transit is abysmal in SF. The fact that it exists by no means qualifies it as "good".
2.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Private utilities are very common. There are many listed on the stock exchange. Everything they do is heavily regulated. They cannot do things like cut off service for any reason whatsoever, or raise rates without justification.
3.
by pjlegato 2y ago
In a socialist country, you would have a government entity building various qualities of housing. The best houses in the best locations go to the nomenklatura, to the governor's cousin, to the nephew of the town party boss, and to blac
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by pjlegato 2y ago
There was a DOS port of nethack, so likely it could be made to run on elks.
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by pjlegato 2y ago
AI and machine learning aren't necessary at all. You 'just' have to empirically measure a few constants that describe and bound the various nonlinearities of different real pigments, and then plug them into a relatively stra
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by pjlegato 2y ago
Common misconception; Stoicism is not about curtailing or repressing emotions. Stoicism is about not allowing your emotions to govern you. Subtle but profound difference.
7.
by pjlegato 2y ago
You said "yes exactly" when I asked if personal sentiment was the means of determining when an unfair power differential exists and ought to be legislated against. Then you said "there is no point at which the process is &#x2
8.
by pjlegato 2y ago
The lines for what is legal are not at all drawn arbitrarily in a constitutional legal system such as the United States.
9.
by pjlegato 2y ago
So there are no objective standards possible or even relevant in the lawmaking process -- it's purely a question of might makes right, whoever can marshal the most people to their team through sophistry should win?
10.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Interesting. Do you then view the lawmaking process as nothing more than a chaotic and never-ending expression of the randomly changing emotions of the people? No ongoing rational standards, logic, or objective argumentation is required or
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by pjlegato 2y ago
Of course, and our laws have apparently determined that "gambling is OK." Why ought we revisit and overturn that process in this case? Is there any objective criterion beyond "it seems bad to me, I don't like the result
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by pjlegato 2y ago
This takes us back to the beginning: how shall we determine when the social process has failed, and what constitutes "improvement"? Society has already spoken on this matter. It seems that your criteria amount to nothing more than
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by pjlegato 2y ago
We have such social systems, and they have already evaluated this specific case and determined that we as a society want to allow gambling. Note that I am not agreeing or disagreeing with the merits of that outcome; I am just noting that th
14.
by pjlegato 2y ago
You mean the way we passed the current laws that allow such gambling, which you are now complaining about? By that standard, we're done, the matter has already been concluded in favor of "allow gambling."
15.
by pjlegato 2y ago
How shall we as a society decide who is to be denied agency in this way, because someone else determines they are to be infantilized, deemed incapable of exercising full responsibility for their own -- entirely voluntary -- actions? Can you
16.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Nubank _as a company_ does not support Datomic. It's a bank. _A few employees_ they acquihired support Datomic. If those few employees quit, get fired, get transferred to some other project, etc., then no more Datomic support.
17.
by pjlegato 2y ago
> teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a
18.
by pjlegato 2y ago
On the contrary, most religions assert that their particular views are the _only_ valid ones -- and many require their adherents to actively proselytize, to try to convert others to their dogma. These views are replete with many untestable
19.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Catholic and Orthodox Christians still retain and practice vast repertoires of rituals. They are not thriving amidst our skeptical public.
20.
by pjlegato 2y ago
You are speaking of what is called "mainline Protestantism." Catholicism is, by far, the largest Christian denomination in the US. Moreover, large areas in the south, midwest, and California favor the "evangelical" and &
21.
by pjlegato 2y ago
If there were any other groups with an organization capable of pulling off coverups, we'd never know about it, because they would have covered it up.
22.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Not at all. Family units are extremely widespread in cultures around the world, including those that have had little or no contact with Judeo-Christian beliefs. Nearly all cultures have them.
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by pjlegato 2y ago
Of course, many people did read books and newspapers on the subway 20 years ago. A significant fraction also did speak to one another sometimes, and engaged in spontaneous conversations, too. That fraction has dropped to close to ~0% today.
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by pjlegato 2y ago
If they're not in the EU, probably "forever," especially if they are in one of the many countries that are politically indifferent or hostile to the EU. Information flows freely worldwide. Regulations do not.
25.
by pjlegato 2y ago
Comments here have never been temporary. Hacker News itself has for many years provided a free near-realtime API and a variety of large datasets to the world for the specific purpose of making it easy for anyone to analyze our comments here
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by pjlegato 2y ago
Doctors and lawyers take that credential test once, immediately following their graduation from years of fulltime schooling that has been specifically designed to prepare them for that test. Software engineers are expected to retake our tec
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by pjlegato 2y ago
On the contrary, capitalism is based on providing value to others. It rewards those who do something that others actually WANT... as opposed to what some roomful of bureaucrats decide ought to be done.
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by pjlegato 2y ago
There are many thousands of DOS programs still in active use today -- and not just by hobbyists or for educational purposes, in active commercial use, if you require economically productive criteria to consider something practical: Many ind
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by pjlegato 2y ago
Allowing government bureaucrats to oversee the app store review process seems like quite possibly the only single thing that could make it even slower, more frustrating, and more arbitrary than it is now.
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by pjlegato 2y ago
If your product going down for an hour will lead to the loss of millions of dollars, then you should absolutely be investing a lot of money in expensive distributed and redundant solutions. That's appropriate in that case. The point he

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