- jonathanstrange parentPlenty of work isn't manual labor. That distinction is not at all what I've talked about, you've missed the point entirely.
- This might rub some people on HN the wrong way but what these people call "work" isn't really work in the sense of what most people consider work. They jet here and there, intervene wherever they want, and everybody listens to them all the time. They can cancel and postpone meetings as they wish, and so on and so forth. It's work in the same sense as buying another house is work -- you have to get together with lawyers and plenty of people but in the end these people all work for you and you can also change your mind and not buy it.
That's also the reason why these multi-billionaires never retire. They've retired from real work a long time ago.
- I think it's 500 points, or at least it used to be.
- By "controlled" I had something else in mind than what you seem to insinuate, namely that the yearly immigration rate must roughly match the desired long-term population stability. For a reasonable immigration system, you need to welcome the immigrants you want to get, provide a long-term perspective, and offer some incentives for them to come. Unlike the US, European countries have often failed at that basic job, or at least their immigration politics have been erratic and without constancy. Phrases like "a stance hard enough" are a symptom of the problem.
- They're clearly not being replaced, as a look at the numbers indicates, but what is true for most European countries is that if the low birth rates stay far below 2.1 their populations will continue to decline and their economies will shrink, if they don't manage to offset that trend with controlled yearly immigration.
To clarify: Although it follows mathematically with constantly low birth rate, dying out is, of course, not a likely consequence. It seems likely that at some point when the economies shrink poverty would hit so seriously that the birth rates would start increasing again, as they seem to be negatively correlated with standards of living. However, we're talking about levels of shrinkage that feel like a collapse of the economy and social security/pension systems.
- WTF? I don't even program in C - but I do know Rust (and Ada). Being a little bit less condescending would go a long way if you want to be taken seriously. So much for the tone.
To address the content: Yes, you have to deal with that error result just like you have to deal with a nil pointer. No difference. That's the point.
By the way, the toxic behavior of the Rust community is one of the reasons why I barely use the language.
- People also sometimes forget in this debate that the NSA is allowed and has a mandate to spy on non-US citizens and companies as they deem fit. Anything is allowed, including mass surveillance and hacking into systems. There are only restrictions when US citizens and companies are involved. European agencies probably have similar permissions but I don't think they have comparable capabilities and they also have and will continue to have smaller budgets.
- It is impossible not to have invalid objects in a real-world system with i/o and dynamic memory allocation. Perhaps there is some semantic confusion between us, however. What you consider an invalid object doesn't exist in my parlance. I'm not even sure I understand what you mean by it. What I mean by an invalid object is an object or structure of a certain type that is in an unexpected state, a state does not allow further regular computation with it. It's some sort of error state.
For example: Dynamic memory allocation can fail. Input might fail. Input validation might fail. Hence, any object with dynamically allocated memory and any object processing input might become invalid in that sense.
You have to deal with such cases in any programming language and the source of error is the same in any of them. Nil is not an "additional source of error" or anything like that. Inadequate typing of nil (instead of having option types) might create an additional source of error but that depends on the language and it doesn't need to.
On a side note, those type system fixes may be neat for people who like typed logics but they are mostly pointless because the invalid state occurs at runtime.
- I don't believe it is possible (or even makes sense) to completely avoid illegal/invalid objects and structures, and a cheap way to mark these are nil pointers. From that perspective, it doesn't matter to me whether a language allows nil pointers or doesn't have them. What matters are the details, though. It is generally desirable to keep invalid objects properly typed and languages with nil sometimes have quirks with "nil typing" (I'm not sure if that's the right term).
- That information is outdated by now. The assessment was based on Trump's claim that the US will work together directly with her instead of Machado, whom he considers unfit to be president right now. It was an attempt of giving a rational explanation of Trump's and Rubio's press conference. I assumed that in order for their statements to make sense there would have to be some backdoor deal with her. However, she has given a speech now condemning the attack and refuting the US narrative (although, leaving some door open for diplomacy).
I can't edit the original comment any longer so I hope people read this one. In any case, the situation is still very fluid.
- Apparently, the Venezuelan vice president has sold out her country or is acting out of duress because she has allegedly offered full cooperation with the US. That could be a viable way to a US-led military/CIA dictatorship there, if the Venezuelan military and police around her allows it to happen. She seems to be in the line of succession. That seems to be the current "plan."
- Not a shred of evidence was ever provided that the crewmen of these boats were "terrorists." That alone makes these murders very different from other illegal extrajudicial killings, where this evidence is usually provided or readily available.
That's not to say that I would in any way support extrajudicial killings, in many cases the high civilian/bystander casualties have been completely unsupportable. I just wanted to point out the stark difference between "normal" extrajudicial killings and these murders.
- That "unlawful combatant" designation was invented by the US as an excuse and has always stood on shaky legal grounds even in the US. Other Western countries don't support this legal construction. That being said, the double-tapping was ordinary murder, not a war crime. Every bombing of those ships could have been avoided by boarding them and presenting those drugs as evidence, as the Coast Guard normally does. But that would only have worked if there had been any evidence to start with...
- > And military power influences diplomacy.
Negatively. That has always been the problem of the US, it's the reason why they cannot act like the most of the rest of the world. The military has way too much influence on decision making.
- I had my page served with Go and it was instant, 100% speed score. Then I moved the static content to a CDN and it's slower now, only 96% speed. However, the question is really how fast the page is when it comes under heavy load.
- Here is one thing I don't understand about these kind of approaches. Doesn't a computational simulation imply that time is discrete? If so, doesn't this have consequences for our currently best physical theories? I understand that the discreteness of time would be far below what can be measured right now but AFAIK it would still makes a difference for physical theories whether time is discrete or not. Or am I mistaken about that? There are similar concerns about space.
By the way, on a related note, I once stumbled across a paper that argued that if real numbers where physically realizable in some finite space, then that would violate the laws of thermodynamics. It sounded convincing but I also lacked the physical knowledge to evaluate that thesis.
- Out of curiosity, would you explain what you mean by that? Google was founded in 1998 and writing a mail client isn't terribly complicated. Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company? Is Gmail older than Google?
- I can't imagine any reasonable use case for having AI tightly integrated into a browser (or an operating system, for what it's worth). Why not make a browser plugin or a web page or an app? I don't get it.
- That's neat, I was about to ask which languages support that since the vast majority don't. I didn't know that you can do that in Typescript.
- IMHO, these strong type systems are just not worth it for most tasks.
As an example, I currently mostly write GUI applications for mobile and desktop as a solo dev. 90% of my time is spent on figuring out API calls and arranging layouts. Most of the data I deal with are strings with their own validation and formatting rules that are complicated and at the same time usually need to be permissive. Even at the backend all the data is in the end converted to strings and integers when it is put into a database. Over-the-wire serialization also discards with most typing (although I prefer protocol buffers to alleviate this problem a bit).
Strong typing can be used in between those steps but the added complexity from data conversions introduces additional sources of error, so in the end the advantages are mostly nullified.
- The Dutch military fired on drones. However, they are all over Europe and generally not shot down for various reasons. First, shooting at them can be very dangerous. Debris and whatever is used to shoot at them (usually bullets) can hit civilians. Second, the laws tend to not allow military and police to shoot at drones that don't pose an immediate threat to life. A new police law has been passed in Germany to fix this issue, but it was only passed very recently. I suspect other countries have similar legal issues that first need to be fixed.
- Of course, I agree. The UK has nothing to do with the EU, though.
- The UK is not an EU country.
- Personally, I only find LLMs annoying and unpleasant to converse with. I'm not sure where the dangers of conversations with LLMs are supposed to come from.
- What do you consider the probability that there will ever be free elections in the US again? Please answer with a value between 0 and 1.
- What I'm trying to tell you is hat this has de facto worked for me during the past 20+ years. I get ca. 100 spam mails a day and they all get neatly sorted in the spam folder. There is no server-side filtering at all, my email provider allows users to switch that off entirely (and better should because it's very faulty).
As I've said, I'm not interested in theoretical arguments. All of my domains wildcard forward to the same email address, too. Filtering client-side has never been a problem.
- No, I'm using Bogofilter and it works perfectly. I'm not talking hypothetically. AFAIK, it does some Bayesian statistical analysis.
- There is currently no alternative to geo-blocking the UK if you don't want to get threatening legal letters from Ofcom that order you to break the laws of your country.
- Spam can be filtered effectively client-side with a good spam filter. This has worked well for me for decades without the need for any server-side spam filtering.