If you've had either the pfizer or moderna vaccinations, then yes, it is actually safe to go back to the office. It's at least as safe as it was prior to covid, probably more so in the short term thanks to the flu being a noshow this year.

No, there really isn't any debate, at least not for the pfizer and moderna vaccines, in the scientific community. They're effective. It's a lot more complicated than the 90% and 60% "scare quotes" numbers you hear reported in the press.

Except that what you're describing here isn't actually what happens with vaccinated people. There's a lot more than just 90% and 60% to reason about, and it's not nearly as straightforward as you might expect: there's probabilities for getting infected, for having a severe infection, for being hospitalized, for death, and for various kinds of transmission. Being vaccinated affects them *all*, and all of them by different amounts. Those "90% effective" vaccines you hear about actually have nearly 100% reduction in deaths, but that doesn't sell as many eyeballs.

The press is not your friend. The media is not your friend. They don't have the same incentives you do, they don't have the same goals, and they don't have your best interests in mind.

That's awesome, and a really great idea of something to do with your kids.

I tasted some heavy water ~30 years ago, and I remember very specifically that 1) it definitely tasted different, and 2) it seemed sweet. It seems strange that it would take so long for a paper to be written about the topic.

Not only is it not as bad as the summary makes it sound, it's actually really cool and really positive.

I *like* what they're trying to do here. Tweaks like what the article describes make it much easier for me to eat healthy and avoid things I know I shouldn't eat. They're trying to encourage healthier employees; I want to be healthy. Win-win.

I too tend to be quiet and avoid these topics completely. Even peripherally expressing an opinion on topics like this can threaten your job or livelihood. It doesn't have to make any sense.

As a multi-decade game developer, I can't even count the number of times somebody has "mansplained" various aspects of game design to me. Thing is, I'm male, and everyone knows it. The world is indeed full of armchair quarterbacks, and men aren't exempt from it.

God, if only my typical armchair quarterback message was as polite as Derior's. What wonderful world that would be.

I've seen it work at large scale in exactly one place.

In order for dev/ops to work well, a lot of things have to be done correctly. Most of it is culture and design of the organizations and communications channels; social engineering in terms of how the groups are set up and their incentives. Failure to do this is generally why dev/ops fails or doesn't perform.

You don't fix this kind of problem (perverse market incentives) by adding another layer to 'correct' for the results. You fix this kind of problem by addressing the underlying incentives in some fashion.

The underlying incentive here is that there's a benefit to keeping salary information private. (Whether that benefit is merely perceived or real is irrelevant.) One obvious solution to this is to have the SEC require that all salaries and compensation data at publicly listed companies be made public, similar to how all government salary data is public. Public companies already have to run open books anyway. This just extends that a bit.

The big problem with C++ is that you literally can't master it quickly. You can learn the basics quickly; you can become decently good at it in a couple of years if you have prior programming experience. But I know a lot of professional programmers, and I can point to precisely zero of them (myself included) that have 'mastered' the language. We each know pieces of the language, and some of us cover rather wide areas, but all of us have to occasionally research how exactly various constructs work.

People are stupid, and news sites like to print the most horrible, twisted and eye grabbing thing they possibly can. In that kind of environment, it only takes a single crash due to a software glitch to get the project outlawed statewide. I'd keep the information private too, and probably pay off the guilty party anyway just to keep them quiet.

When I was growing up, my sisters would spend fully 1-3 hours a day doing makeup, hair, clothing, and other prep work to look presentable in public. Society expected this of them, or rather they felt society expected it. I spent 15-30 minutes a day on the same task.

When I was growing up, my sisters spent virtually no time at the computer, or building things, or learning about engineering. Society expected this of them, and my parents largely supported it. I spent 1-3 hours a day on these tasks.

The gender gap isn't due to lack of raw talent, or lack of ability. It's not due to the jobs not being "interesting" or "world changing". The gender gap is because women don't spend the same amount of time doing engineering that men do in their formative years, when it matters the most. We aren't going to fix the problem by trying to bring women into the picture after the damage has been done - the best we can do at that point is mitigate the issue. To really fix it, society is going to have to value engineering more highly than spending two hours on makeup and appearance.

Good luck with that.

I've looked at D before. It looks promising, and I've considered using it. The reason I don't is a bad reason, but it's the most common bad reason: legacy code.

I have two hundred and sixty four thousand lines of code in my personal project/library archive (my own code, not counting custom versions of external packages like openssl and portaudio), all in C/C++, all with a unified build system, that's been ported and debugged on serveral platforms. Every new project I start uses those core libraries and header files. When I think about switching to a new language, my biggest concerns are how new code will integrate with my existing, how the new language will make use of my existing libraries, and how to remain productive in a dual language environment. The long term gain might eventually make it worthwhile - but it might also just cost me time should the new language die out or not support a platform I need it to.

I simply can't justify the gamble.

Bennett, please just shut the fuck up about your improvements to burning man. For your traffic flow 'improvement', you notably didn't provide simulations, suggested a broken alternative, and didn't even bother to fully understand the situation before jumping in with both feet. For this one, you've done something similar.

In particular, the problem when the ice line is backed up is -not- because the ice wasn't prefetched. It's because half the time they can't get it out of the trucks any faster, and half the time they can't get the customers out of the way faster. Adding prefetch to a throughput bound system does not improve performance. If you had the experience of going through the lines more than a few times, you'd have maybe picked up on that before offering your advice.

I'm not going to say that traffic isn't a problem, or that ice queues aren't stupidly long at times. But these are hard problems, and they have been thought about extensively by smarter people than you, smarter people who have more information and experience than you. You insult all of them by discounting that so blatantly.

The FDA has -safety concerns- testing a drug that might be effective against a -contagious disease with a 90% fatality rate-?

Somebody's priorities are in the wrong order.

Don't be a dumbass. CCl4 isn't used in HVAC, CFC's are, and no, they aren't liquid at room temperatures.

Oh yeah, (a) is definitely true, but that's no reason to blackhole it immediately, especially if it does something good at the parsing layer. There have been plenty of instances of 'deprecated' features being used for several years with compiler switches to allow it.