madgar

Why do you say that? The NRA is one of the single most powerful special interest groups in the USA. The tech industry doesn't even come close to the NRA's lobbying results.

the judiciary is bound by precedent, and there are 5-4 conservative Supreme Court rulings from the 80s to the early 2000s that cemented the status quo into place.

With Trump/Pence as POTUS the judiciary will be hamstrung for years barring a truly massive public groundswell behind reversing some of those decisions - if that happened, you might see a single judge flip. Whether that's enough depends on who dies before 2021.

My source is in-person conversations with a real-life human being, and working on one of his codebases that employed the technique. If you want to look up his work, his name is Bill McKeeman. I personally have never felt compelled to find secondary sources when I had primary sources.

Edit: I'm personally not surprised that open-source codebases don't employ this technique. Lots of great PL work was done for private companies until the 90s and while lots of work was published in papers and books, precious few open-source PL communities historically drew from academia. I'm sure you know the counter-examples.

Technique as old as dirt. My thesis advisor used it in the 60s and 70s.

His favored approach had one artificial limitation, perhaps a remnant of the age: he limited the size of source files in bytes to some power of 2. This let him represent each token (incl. white space/new lines/comments) as a pair of fixed-size integers indexing into the file bytes. The tokenized file is an array of those pairs and the concrete syntax tree is a tree where leaf nodes are indices into the array of tokens.

Suitable for syntax-directed code generation, control-flow graph generation, static analysis, linting, pretty-printing. Super memory compact and even has an upper bound on memory footprint. The caveat is that the source language does need to support composing a "module" out of multiple files because of the limit on source file size.

Perhaps you shouldn't be asserting yourself as an authority on what did or did not happen if you are too young to have experienced it in the first place.

I'm very young, only 27, and know that I missed a full decade of early internet culture and can't speak to it. Even given that, I had a 14.4 and fondly remember downloading a music video for hours. (No porn on the modems personally, I think I was barely adolescent when we upgraded to cable)

Oh god I hope nobody ever ends up innovating with my drinking water. The last thing I need is companies racing to cut costs on fucking water.

Research won't be done because over 20 years ago, Republicans made it illegal for federal taxpayer money to be used to study gun control.

Very little cleanly private money exists to study the issue. Universities are tainted with public funds, NGOs are tainted as well, and so on.

So what studies we do get are NRA-funded.

> You're not supposed to buy infrastructure for these types of gigs.

Then why does Uber offer financing?

I didn't ignore your reasoning, I acknowledged it and said it was not insightful.

Unused CPU instructions are difficult (but not impossible!) to deprecate for completely different reasons than the critical functionality of line discipline that is used all day every day and for which nobody has proposed a viable alternative.

> Imagine standing still for eight hours a day.

Imagine sitting perfectly still for eight hours a day.

I just imagined both, and I preferred the standing still nonsense to the sitting still nonsense.

If hacker news doesn't stem the growth of trolling (which has pushed out plenty of my friends) then it probably will eventually "shut down" new signups for a while.

You are conflating genius with productivity. In so doing you are missing the point of both your parent and grandparent poster.

Ruth Porat is the change you're looking for

Seems like a huge difference between "instructions we don't use at all" and "ring 0 input processing we use constantly and can't stop using"

The only similarity seems to be "modern computers with legacy logic" which isn't terribly insightful.

The problem for Mercurial (with respect to group dynamics) was that it didn't have the built-in user base of Linux contributors right off the bat.

I'd love to dig into Pijul but sadly it's AGPL. Just looking at the code effectively taints me as a developer who works tangentially to VCS - it could be argued that my work is derivative and thus needs to be AGPLed. The viral nature of the license then creates an existential legal risk to my employer.

If so, then I see two possibilities here:

1) The IP in question was only reimplementable with Carmack involved, and the lawsuit was basically inevitable. Hiring Carmack in this scenario is reasonably perceived as an end-run around buying/licensing the IP itself.

2) The IP could be reproduced clean room without Carmack involved. Lawsuit is easily headed off.

They didn't seem to do clean room here. Seems like Carmack was wrote code for both companies which is the exact opposite of clean room.

(Please correct me if I misunderstood the facts of the case)

> In the limit it means "you read this code, understood how it worked, and wrote new code that could do the same function." You can stretch that to cover anything you have ever seen. Which is sad.

I thought the industry adopted "clean room" techniques decades ago to avoid this kind of appearance of impropriety.

It's more expensive, sure, but isn't eliminating legal risk something that typically gets paid for?

Not all user-generated content on Twitter is public. I couldn't possibly know what kinds of transactional records have been requested or the distribution therein, but DMs seem like plausible targets.

In the office I see a pretty big overlap with the group expounding/demanding absolute meritocracy and the group of people without any personality (or with explicitly anti-social personalities).

They're toxic IMO and the best strategy seems to be making sure they're not on your critical path. Tech companies are often allergic to admitting that personality can be disqualifying on its own, so actually laying these toxic folks off can be borderline impossible before their behavior explicitly endangers a co-worker physically (e.g. Doxxing on 4chan).

Yes, these folks get outreach from sympathetic peers constantly, but it never seems to take.

It's not about discarding what every scientist says. It's discarding the scientists that say things incompatible with his political opinions.

If a scientist pursues a line of work that might end up contradicting the GOP party line, they're immediately disqualified as a scientist. To him, that proves the scientist is motivated purely by political or financial gain.

You seem to be confusing work without net pay with slavery.

Sharecropping was abhorrent but was distinct from slavery.

Slaves may be killed legally by their owner.

You underestimate how deep this goes with the actual public.

My father has been in the GOP base his whole life. The refrain when I challenged his views on science was: "those scientists are all liberals. Why should I believe anything they have to say?"

He encouraged me to study sciences anyway because it offered a better life than his. Now, of course, he explicitly regrets providing me that education, because he sees me as "brainwashed."

Your first comment in this thread - in which you mention representatives in passing - suggests that you assume all "democracy" to come in the form of democratic republics. This might be true in a discussion of practical implementations of a scalable democratic governing system.

The thread you responded to, however, was about a theoretical directly democratic system of managing land use rights, without any grounding in a realized system with elements of republicanism. The disconnect between the discussion at hand and the assumptions you brought to it (IMHO) caused the confusion between yourself and Arizhel.

A more constructive comment from yourself might have instead politely pointed out that the scenario I described is a classic "tyranny of the majority" issue, a well understood failure mode of direct democracy that is indeed typically resolved practically through the features of republicanism you listed.

Interestingly, I'd never use pinning if it didn't shrink the tab down. I never have any trouble with keeping my tabs ordered, so the main value pinning gives me is the shrinking.

You forgot about protecting minorities. What do you do when the majority of the people in a jurisdiction like (eg.) Mississippi consistently vote down land use by black people? Just accept that the people have spoken and that black people are unwelcome in that jurisdiction?

This is not a theoretical exercise. This happens everyday in America in co-op boards, HOAs, etc and it doesn't require anybody saying out loud why an individual is being rejected. The current US president got caught doing this in the 1960s. If you want to redesign land use rights wholesale I would hope you wouldn't make this kind of discrimination more common... maybe that's just me.

The most common problem is with asymmetric network connections with limited upload bandwidth. If you don't limit your upload rate, BitTorrent will consume your upload bandwidth so thoroughly that even TCP ACKs for other applications aren't sent in a timely fashion.

Do you mean immigration from other countries, or other US states?

See reductionism: https://xkcd.com/1734/