This isn't the first time you've been told this. It's not going to be the last time you'll be told this. And I know telling you this isn't going to change anything, but I have to try anyway. We know now beyond any doubt (and a legion of Cassandras were telling us long ago) just how easily social-media sites (and yes, HN is one) can turn into instruments and enablers of radicalization despite openly enforcing "civility".

You know what the solution is. You know, on some level, that civility isn't an end in itself; you know that the actual ends to which people use civility as a means matter. You know some of those ends are very, very bad. And you know how to recognize the people doing it. You also hold in your hand the power to do something about it.

Abandon the civility-at-any-cost policy. Stop being an enabler for the stuff I've been responding to in this thread. Take it from an "experienced user" who's had to learn this the hard way when moderating elsewhere. Or, in keeping with the season, treat this as a visitation by a spirit who warns you of the chain you're winding about yourself, link by link, and change it while you still can.

What will be interesting is to see the effect on Leela (https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lczero), which is public and open-source, takes part in public tournaments, and is built -- as much as possible, based on what's been disclosed in the papers -- to use the same approach as AlphaZero.

I think a world without Nazis in it would be a better world than the one we have, and I think the fact that several countries already have laws in place to restrict the speech of Nazis, and they haven't led to your dystopian outcome, is a strong empirical counterargument to what you suggest.

A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."

You accidentally mixed up your scripts -- you're in favor of the people who argue for rounding up their enemies into death camps, remember? You think those people are great, and need special support and protection. So if I were to argue for rounding you up and throwing you in a death camp, you would suddenly be on my side and offering every resource you have to help me further my glorious cause. Right?

I think you need to think this through a bit more.

And let's be honest: we're not talking about people who are "being punished because of the horrible behavior done by other people years ago". We're talking about people who are being shunned in the present day precisely because they want to revive all those horrible things and start doing them again. They don't just want a platform where they can lob slurs at Jewish people all day long; they want to re-build the concentration camps and finish what Hitler started. They don't just want a platform where they can use the n-word at will; they want a return to at the very least Jim Crow and the lynching era, if not all the way back to full-on chattel slavery of dark-skinned people.

I'm OK with them being told "go build your own forum to talk about how much you want to do that". To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?

strptime() produces a datetime object, which consists of year, month, day, hour, minute, second, microsecond, time zone, fold. If you do something like "2008-12" with format "%Y-%m", strptime() will fill in the remaining arguments with day=1 and all time components set to zero, so what you get is datetime(year=2018, month=12, day=1, hour=0, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0).

That works because it's unambiguous -- there aren't multiple possible numbering schemes for the day of the month in the strptime() formatting options.

But there are multiple possible numbering schemes for the day of the week, which means a year + week with no day-of-week format code is ambiguous. Worse, the two options don't even share a start: one of them begins numbering at 0 (Sunday) and the other at 1 (Monday).

So I'd guess the insistence on a day-of-week format code is to force you to indicate which day-numbering scheme you want, in order to avoid the possible ambiguity.

(and you might think it's reasonable to assume if someone uses ISO year + ISO week number, they'd also want ISO day-of-week number, but we're talking about dates and times here, and "reasonable" left the building a long time ago)

There are people trying to reverse that trend, of course, but the volume at which they're currently screaming that they've been silenced is, I think, a pretty good indicator of the trouble they're having trying to pull it off.

Also, if you think you can decompose without allocating memory... well, try a code point like U+FDFA.

For reference, its decomposition is:

U+0635 U+0644 U+0649 U+0020 U+0627 U+0644 U+0644 U+0647 U+0020 U+0639 U+0644 U+064A U+0647 U+0020 U+0648 U+0633 U+0644 U+0645

(and that doesn't begin to touch any of the potential issues with variant forms, homoglyph attacks, etc.)

I like to stand up on it and yell out my views. Sometimes I let my friends use it that way, too.

Some guy comes along and would like to use my soapbox to yell out his views. But I don't like him and I don't agree with his views.

Would you like the government to come force me at gunpoint to let him use my soapbox?

What you're arguing, basically, is that once my soapbox gets popular enough that lots of people want to use it, you do want the government to force me, at gunpoint, to let them use it even when I find their views repugnant.

Or, basically, what this person said, and they said it better and in fewer words:

https://twitter.com/lessdismalsci/status/1076488300188307456

When it was Margaret Sanger being prosecuted for distributing information about contraception, well, there's a perfectly reasonable justification for that law! Women can't just go around having sex without consequences! When it was theaters refusing to book touring companies of South Pacific, well, it's Communist to say that interracial marriage is OK! And we're at war with Communism! When it was movie studio associations and comic book publisher associations enforcing "codes" to avoid having formal censorship imposed on them by law, well, topics like sex and drugs are objectionable, and people shouldn't be encouraged to question authority figures!

The people complaining today about being "silenced" tend to hold the same types of views as their predecessors who used to do the silencing. And their predecessors didn't stop at just boycotting or otherwise exercising their right of free association (and disassociation). Even if it's not, in the end, held to be fair play, turnabout is a nice source of schadenfreude.

Examples:

'%G/%m' is illegal; it contains %G without %V, and does not contain a weekday format code. Attempting to call strptime() with this format raises ValueError.

'%V/%u' is illegal; it contains a weekday format, but has %V without %G. Raises ValueError.

'%G/%V' is illegal; it contains both %G and %V, but does not contain a weekday format code. Raises ValueError.

'%G/%V/%u' is legal; it contains both %G and %V, and contains a weekday format code.

'%G/%V/%w' is legal; it contains %G and %V and a weekday format code. It's a bad idea, though, because %w numbers days 0-6 starting Sunday, while ISO (%u) numbers them 1-7 starting Monday.

If you need to work with ISO week date formats for some reason, you should stick to one of these two format strings:

'%G-W%V-%u'

or

%GW%V%u

The date of this comment (December 26, 2018) comes out as either '2018-W52-3' or '2018W523' using those format strings.

For example, "é" can be written as either U+00E9 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE, or as the sequence U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E followed by U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT. These two options have canonical equivalence; what this means is that Unicode treats them as two ways of specifying exactly the same thing.

Now, consider "½". That's U+00BD VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF. Generally you can replace that with the sequence U+0031 DIGIT ONE, U+002F SOLIDUS, U+0032 DIGIT TWO ("1/2"). This is not quite the same thing; most places where someone writes "½" can safely be replaced by "1/2", but not necessarily all, and it definitely doesn't work in reverse. This is compatibility equivalence, and under compatibility equivalence "½" maps to "1/2".

So to get to your actual question: U+017F LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S has compatibility equivalence with U+0073 LATIN SMALL LETTER S. But U+03C2 GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA does not have any type of equivalence with U+03C3 GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA.

If you follow the general recommendations for things like comparing Unicode identifiers, you'll apply normalization to form NFKC (which decomposes by canonical equivalence, then recomposes by compatibility equivalence); this will turn a "ſ" into a "s". It will never turn a "ς" into a "σ".

And FWIW, Python's (strftime-based) datetime library won't let you mix ISO and non-ISO format codes. Trying to use %G with %m, for example, raises an exception, as does trying to use %Y with %V (%V is the ISO week number format code).

And card issuers know about churning. The highest-value cards also have limits to how often you can churn. Chase's "5/24" rule (if you've opened 5 or more new credit cards in the past 24 months, anywhere, Chase will automatically decline you on any application for one of their cards) is one of the more well-known anti-churning tactics, but not the only one. You have to immerse yourself in the churning/manufactured spending world to really get much more than one or two free tickets from card signup bonuses.

On the other hand, if you already travel enough to reach at least mid-tier status with one airline, it's often worth it to do so; that's when you start getting into large RDM bonus territory. Combine with the airline's branded card and you can easily generate enough mileage to take a nice vacation every year.

What the parent was talking about is usually called "same-day change" (abbreviated "SDC"), and is in fact only available free of charge to passengers who have a minimum status level within the frequent-flyer program.

Another related perk is the "guaranteed seat" -- the ability to purchase a ticket within 24 hours of the flight, and receive a guarantee that you will have a seat and will not be "bumped" due to overbooking (they'll bump someone else off the flight instead, if it comes to that). Which tends to kick in at the higher status tiers; back in my days of flying too much, I only used that perk once, and the last-minute ticket was expensive, but it was worth it to know I would get where I was going.

In very broad terms: tourism is a larger part of the travel market than business travel. When the economy is bad, fewer people travel for pleasure, and those who do don't fly as much. So loyalty programs ramp up the rewards for the people who are still flying, in order to hang onto them. Then when the economy recovers and tourism picks up again, there's less need to desperately keep customers by any means available, so loyalty programs start getting slashed.

On top of that, at all times the big US airlines tend to hand out redeemable-only miles like candy (elite-qualifying miles are the ones that are hard to accumulate¹), which makes them a heavily inflationary currency and requires jacking up the redemption rates every so often to soften the blow of all those outstanding miles.

--

¹ Airlines in the US issue two types of miles. Redeemable miles, usually abbreviated "RDM" in the frequent-flyer forums, do what the name implies: you can redeem them instead of using cash to purchase a ticket. They offer no other perks. The other type is the "elite-qualifying mile" ("EQM"), which can be redeemed for a ticket but also contributes toward qualifying for some level of "elite" frequent-flyer status with the airline. Elite status is what gets you free upgrades and free checked bags and all the other perks.

Elite-qualifying miles, with very few exceptions, can only be earned by actually purchasing a ticket, getting on the plane and flying (sometimes this process is also referred to as "BIS" -- "Butt-In-Seat" -- miles). All the "50,000 miles for signing up!" type offers you see with credit cards are denominated in redeemable miles, for example. If you know your way around the loyalty programs, you can generate hundreds of thousands of redeemable miles per year without too much effort. Achieving 100k elite-qualifying miles in a year, however, is a significant feat and typically qualifies you to the highest public status tier (the big three US airlines each have at least one unpublished tier above that, offered by invitation only to customers perceived as extremely high-value).

Without committing to any position on the book itself (it's certainly an interesting Rorschach test), it is at least clearly stated that there are more than enough dangerous jobs available for non-combatant service to still involve risk of death. In the book this is presented as a mathematical balancing: power over the lives of others is granted only after demonstrating willingness to risk your life for others. You can find plenty of fault with that principle, but the book is at least pretty consistent on requiring it.

You've just committed the fallacy of begging the question -- you assumed the truth of mathematical realism in this line, and arguably in a couple others.

If mathematical realism is false, various parts of your argument start to crumble.