🇺🇦 Власти Киева в рамках дерусификации переименовали переулок Орловского в Шевченковском районе города в переулок Джорджа Оруэлла

@BFMnews

Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?

Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulation...

This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system.

When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists, we often don't do it because the action creates legal liability for any and all negative externalities of the action, even if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing.

We resist permitting prescribed burns because when they cause unintended damage and harm, there's a person to institution to blame, so no one wants to take on that liability. So instead, we let brush grow out of control and eventually a mega fire hits that creates orders of magnitude more destruction and health hazard than the sum of all prescribed burns ever would have.

Another example is medical treatment. If you develop cancer and die because you get no treatment, there's no person to blame and no one to sue. It's just an "act of god" so people accept the outcome and move on. But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention.

The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse.

I don't know how we solve this problem. To me, the root of the problem seems to be a weakness of the constitution of our society and/or leaders.

Collectively, we need to figure out how to balance diffuse statistical risk against acute, dramatic risk, or else we all risk being the frog slowly boiled alive.

anonporridge, 12 hours ago

Re: IRS tests free e-filing system that could compete ...

"A fence around the chicken coop is wholly redundant and is nothing more than a solution in search of a problem," said Sly the Fox. "It will unnecessarily cost the farmer thousands of dollars and especially harm the most vulnerable chickens."

foobarian, 14 hours ago

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

Where are the docker/redis/next.js/linux kernel/qt/roller-coaster tycoon creators?

Something I learned relatively late in my career was that really impressive work is the result of iterations in tiny steps. When you see something that makes you go "WOW! I could never do that!" you're seeing the final result of a long journey, and you probably could have taken each small step with a bit of effort.

There's no need for a special title for people who make amazing things. They're not that different to the rest of us. The main thing they have going for them is an environment that lets them shine - time to research and explore, less pressure to do things that aren't moving them towards the end result we see, and fewer externalities that make them lose focus.

I'm not suggesting just anyone could make Linux or Roller Coaster Tycoon, but I am definitely of the opinion that given then right circumstances most people could produce something that other people believe is at that sort of level of complexity.

May we all find those jobs one day.

onion2k, 1 day ago

Диалог с коллегой из Еревана напомнил мне старые анекдоты про Армянское радио:

- У меня тут отрубили воду и проводной интернет, сижу у окна, чтобы мобильный хоть как-то фурычил.
- Интернет по водопроводу, что ли, шел?
- Похоже. Армяне слышали, что сигнал распространяется по волнам, но не слышали, что по электромагнитным.

Re: FreeBSD spends 7% of its boot time running a bubbl...

Dawson's law strikes again!

> O(n^2) is the sweet spot of badly scaling algorithms: fast enough to make it into production, but slow enough to make things fall down once it gets there.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/arranging-invisible-icons-in-quadratic-time/

daniel-thompson, 2 hours ago

Re: Linux tool to show progress for cp, mv, dd

Wow, didn't expect to see @xfennec pop up on hacker news while drinking my coffee this morning! I don't know if he'll see this, to be honest didn't know he was still doing things - but this person basically got me into programming and game development-I really can't believe it.

xfennec (and some friends?) I think built a game engine called Raydium, and one of their games called Mania Drive-a Track Mania clone-got distributed with OpenSuse installation CDs back in the day. When I was just like 12 years old, my dad installed that on the family computer and it was all we had, Mania Drive was one of the coolest games on there. Me and my siblings played that for literally days and months on end, making crazy levels we couldn't beat without knowing every turn. It was a huge part of our childhood.

Their game engine was in C with PHP scripting, I remember posting some levels to their forums and asking, in retrospect super dumb, questions and they were so polite and friendly. I remember us joking at the time that the French seemed like these god-like game developers, it had such a profound impact on us, I even wrote about it last year and linked a video of Mania Drive first[0]. I went on to learn Python and then lower-level languages as a result. I'm not sure I'd be coding today without them, to be honest.

Sorry it's off-topic, just really blown away to see a username like that pop up in my feed. Really goes to show that kindness + some cool open source software can have profound effect on people.

[0] https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/increasing-my-contribution-to-zig-to-200-a-month/

slimsag, 4 hours ago