Well said. Moreover, modern programming as a profession is a group effort now more often than not. One must also have the skills to work with others on these problem solving tasks, be able to give and receive criticism of work and methodology, and build things so that others can use and understand them make the effort all the more challenging.

When there's a consensus that they're no longer contributing to the public good, I'd submit for consideration. Perhaps corps with income > 2 B should be subject to public dissolution pending a ballot initiative?

Paul Manafort -- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0... if you're willing to read, please pay attention to the 'how do we use to get whole' bit, and then the activity of Manafort sharing internal polling with his Russian counterparts. If this isn't enough 'helping Russia elect Trump' for you I'm guessing you expect Putin to get a notary signature on his plans to influence our elections.

to some extent, yes. Lots of people believe batty and wrong things, and that's just fine. When someone 'acts' on these beliefs in a way that harms other, it's a different matter altogether.

Perhaps not all 4, but if it can win on 2/4, maybe even 1/4 it'll have a place in the market.

Many frameworks/libraries are open source, so I don't thing "black box" is a fair way to characterize them. Moreover, they have at least some level of battle-testing having lived in the wild and hopefully more than a few unit tests to prove out the functionality. I wonder what use cases you have in mind that would justify re-implementing functionality vs using a framework. Reading a csv? A date parser/converter? A sorting algorithm? A cryptographic implementation?

I agree with your comment generally, but abstractions are a huge part of what makes code maintainable/extensible. Avoiding abstractions to streamline code seems to me to be a niche requirement.

Well, yes, that's goal for now until we can achieve it, but not what you're suggesting. Having human level intelligence means being able to understand sarcasm, imperfect responses, recognizing fakes, perhaps even some variation on boredom so that it seeks out new places to learn. The failings of current AI don't appear to be that they're too good, as in 'the matrix" movie sense where the architect creates a too-perfect response. It's more that current iterations of AI are very impressive calculators vs a dynamic intelligence.

Right, that's why we have no innovative desktop apps /s. Google and Apple charge that much because they have the control to do so. I would imagine MS would LOVE to charge 30% to install photoshop on your desktop, if they could wrestle back control from the users.

It is a risk, but I think it's a risk worth taking. We will be able to scale up production of these vaccines like crazy next year, why not get as broad an investment in the vaccine as possible while resources are more scarce assuming that we will be able to scale up like we think? The upsides (2x as many doses offering apparently the majority of the benefits during one of our heaviest outbreaks) seems to outweigh the downsides (we might have to re-vaccinate some because the scaling up was slower than we'd hoped). Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb (also a Pfizer board member now) embraces this approach and I think he's right.

A couple things I disagree with there:

We've had Hispanic representation in the senate for ~200 years (https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/HAIC/Hispanic-Americans-in-Congress/), black for 150 (or 50 if you think that's pedantic), Women for ~100. Minorities have been (and generally are) under-represented but this isn't exactly a new thing to be discussing, particularly on Slashdot.

if we're looking at 'ethnicity' - which is technically what's at question here as Latino isn't a race - we've always had it hovering in the background (ask someone Jewish or Irish.) When ethnicity was brought up, I would argue it was a negative influence on the conversation.

The diversity of the 'Latino' vote in our last election drove home how silly it is to lump people into these huge categories. They're virtually meaningless. Which, if you're like me and think that we should be as color/gender blind as we can muster when making voting decisions and take into account the individual, is all to the good.

Sure, but nobody is going to use a messaging service that isn't near instant, or they'd just send emails. There's no way to run a service with the kind of response time you want on a mobile device without something like sms or push notifications (see stackoverflow comments like these: https://stackoverflow.com/ques... https://www.reddit.com/r/andro...)

If you think all that is needed is to connect two device ip/ports in order to send an encrypted SMS to another device asynchronously in a timely manner, you really don't understand what's going on. Here's a data point: if the average user sends 53 messages a day (https://www.textrequest.com/blog/how-many-texts-people-send-per-day/) and you have 500 million users, that will cost nearly 5 million in just in push notifications (https://aws.amazon.com/sns/pricing/).

OK, so you're hosting a service used daily by 500 people -- can you afford hardware/bandwidth/licensing/support/development for a few bucks a year? I doubt it. Where's your break-even point as you scale? Let's see your numbers and see if they pass muster, otherwise I think you're assuming things don't cost money.

I had no idea this person's race before you brought it up. There was a day we could have had a discussion on a person's qualifications without identity being the primary focus. I wish you'd put forth an argument as to why he is an effective politician -- I know nothing about him and could be persuaded. Knowing his race doesn't add much to the discussion.