Otherwise I feel that there's a loaded gun pointed at my head and any random statement is likely to set it off.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14407542

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

It's not an ideological talking point that people who die earlier due to health problems don't cost extra in pension funds. It's just a fact: if someone dies at 55, he won't cost a pension system which starts paying out at 65 a penny. fpgaminer posted much the same thing.

Nor, I think, was my aside about taxes being enforced with violence an ideological talking point: it's a fact that any law is ultimately enforced with violence. I honestly don't see how mentioning a social cost in the context of cost-benefit analyses could be considered a violation of any of the HN guidelines.

I'm not trying to derail or be argumentative; I'm honestly trying to understand how a fair moderator could threaten me with a ban for my comment.

It's a little less kick-ass if you live in North Dakota, and wonder why a few coastal congressmen are able to pass laws which interfere with your lifestyle.

More seriously, our problem is a metastasised federal government. Very little should actually be a federal issue (read the enumerated powers of the United States in the Constitution!), and yet almost everything now is. As a result, every issue becomes winner-take-all: the entire country must comply with me, or the entire country must comply with you. There's no room to allow Massachusetts to go wrong and right in its ways, and to allow North Dakota to go wrong and right in its ways.

I've had much the same experience that the Mr. Marshall describes with many aspects of Common Lisp: repeatedly, I'll discover that something which annoyed me (CLOS, packages, pathnames — whatever) is actually remarkably well-thought-out and pragmatically useful. It really is an amazing language.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14390141

Points: 5

# Comments: 3

Either the host country's end-of-life medical care is not great by American standards (in which case what you write is true, but many Americans wouldn't care to move), or it is, and a retiree would consume considerable public resources. Unfortunately, there's no way to have it both ways.

And it's pretty wonderful on the desktop too!

In the future, we'll see less revelations about this sort of thing, not because it has become rarer but because Google have chosen a course of action which obscures it.

(it also breaks things like personal or corporate CAs, but that's a different problem)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14311403

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Yes, waterfall was a mistake, but design-nothing is mistaken too. Thinking before doing helps avoid waste & rework.

It turns out that the semantics of RPC — attractive as they undeniably are — are pretty poor for building real-world distributed systems, while those of REST as a pretty good (or at least better) fit.

Isn't the solution to that to not use systems with poor usability? Linux exists; it's capable of doing everything many (maybe most?) people need — why not just use the superior system?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14308411

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

For me it's TV. While I own a TV, I essentially never use it. A tablet has more viewing area than a phone, which makes it much more pleasant to consume TV shows on.

I think you hit the nail on the head re. how well relatively recent tablets work. At first I thought a tablet would be like a phone — replaced annually — but I find that I've had the same tablet for four years. It does its job, it's a nice size (and Google haven't come out with another 7" tablet since!); why replace it?

Even if they were, we Americans have a fundamental right to strong encryption, protected under the Second, Ninth & Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. I'd go further still, and argue that everyone in the world (who's not a prisoner or otherwise unfree) has a right to strong encryption.