dominicr's comments

I used to code ColdFusion, it was great! Really easy to understand and easy to build custom web sites. I saw it more as a framework than a launguage and it tried to push what a framework could do, making it's own browser widgets. Being Macromedia/Adobe they weren't very good and there were other limitations but you could also make use of it being Java under the hood. It was very popular with the US government and there are still a few (but decreasing) number of developers maintaining these old CF sites.

One of the many reasons we moved our young children from the UK to Scandinavia was to improve their childhood by reducing hazards & risks whilst also being in an environment that was more acceptable of those risks. (The paper distinguishes risks vs hazards as something the child can perceive & control vs something they can't, like a car or unsafe equipment).

My children had whittling knives from age 5, built their own fires when we went on walks, could explore into the small woodlands on their own soon after and walked home from school at age 7. None of this would have been socially acceptable in a UK city but was pretty much standard in Oslo. Our children still feel safe and also feel confident doing things themselves. Our level of stress about our children seems to be lower than my friends elsewhere, who have a risk avoidance mindset, living in a society that highlights any potential risk as to be totally avoided and bad parenting if a child is exposed to any risk.

Occasionally you hear stories from the US about parents being arrested for letting their children walk down the street alone or play in the local park by themselves and that seems crazy to most of the rest of the world.

Rate-limiting is a real problem for it, and one reason it might not be feasible as a product as some APIs still rate-limit based on IP, so for those there would have to be some randomisation of IPs used.

I'm hesitant to share it as I know it's quite buggy and a bit too simple at the moment. I've not tested it with enough variety of APIs and use cases. Plus the whole UI needs deleting and starting all over again, but built properly! With all those caveats, it's https://apiarchive.com/

I had a need for an API middleman, recording and replaying API messages between an application and provider APIs, without setting up a local proxy. So I decided to built something myself instead of another product. As with many side projects, I'm using it to learn new skills and brush up old ones.

With working from home and schools closed, I don't have much extra time, but the restructured day does mean I have pockets of time where I'd usually be out and about but can now be used at home.

In the UK the kitchen was a larger, family space until after WW1, when they started building more apartments in London. The art deco 1920s/30s vision of the kitchen was that is was secondary to the other functions of the house and that family & social areas should be distinct from the messy kitchen. Over the next few decades that spread to houses, whose owners wanted to appear cultured and have a dining room, forcing the kitchen into a smaller space.

The 1960s especially saw a lot of terraced houses put a small kitchen out back so they could knock through the 2 rooms downstairs and remove the old ceilings and fireplaces. In the 2000s those properties that didn't modernise in the 60s now fetch the higher prices.

The worrying possibility is the other way round: an impressionable mind that can be shaped into action by some of the more extreme ideologies of the world.

This not a theoretical argument. Trump regularly makes stuff up on the fly when there are multiple records proving the opposite. The White House has to make up 'alternate facts' on a pretty much daily basis to keep up.

The results are always the same: his die-hard supports believe him, and reality is altered; his opponents point it out and wonder how anyone can think he's not maniacal; and the Republican party sighs and repeats the mantra "you dance with the one that brought you".

I don’t think I can downvote replies to my own comment on HN. But I’ll take the internet crown anyway, thank you!

Edit: just tried it, I can downvote your original comment but not your replies to mine.

There’s nothing to be gained here so I’ll apply the principle of conservation of energy and move on. When two arseholes blow hard all you get is a smelly room.

You come across as somebody who's trying to fallaciously prove how smart they are, so can dismiss any argument you think isn't worthy of your esteemed intellect. It's not a good look. Your username adds to the suspicion that you're just a troll.

If you really want to, compare the past 150 years with the previous 2000: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1401-2

It's partially related to the work needed to obtain them. There's very little edible meat in each one and the processes to obtain that seem to be largely manual.

It might be worth considering in this discussion that there are different levels of what we refer to as an environment and levels of cause & effect.

Variations in local climate, populations booms & busts, freak weather events: these are all things that happen regardless of any global level climate change. A population fall or damage to a localised ecosystem can recover naturally. Nature is resilient and it is sometimes accurate to say that nature to return to what's typically normal for a localised ecosystem (reverting to mean).

The concern with climate change is that these events are more common and "normal" is harder/longer to return to due to a long term change in environmental variables. More storms means less time to recover; higher temperatures mean some species won't thrive where they used to. In this article there does not appear to be a strong claim that this bloom is directly casued by climate change, but the long term climate change might be making it harder for the ecosystem here to recover.

Just as a cold winter doesn't mean global warming is a myth, a localised ecological event doesn't mean that effect is permanant or signifier of how things will be elsewhere. A local view point (from the poster above) is useful in understanding this situation. For a global view, you need experts to take long term views at much lager scales than this article covers.

Yes, but it is much, much, much faster now than any previous time. Plus we have the knowledge of its effects upon us directly and the ecosystem that we rely on to survive, combined with the technological knowledge & wealth in order to reduce the effects and mitigate the impact.

> Climate change are now a multi-billion dollar industry ... They have zero interest in changing opinion or even questioning if this is all correct.

I don't understand this argument as the fossil fuel industry is worth many trillions of dollars, so the argument is much stronger in favour of them being the ones not wanting to change. The climate protection industry is small in comparison. Industries like green electricity generation, resource use reduction and recycling also have benefits beyond climate alone, so are becoming the right choice even without that consideration.

There is also a big "industry" working now and historically on the link between tobacco and smoking. Do you think that they were just doing so to make money and there is no actual link? Who you believe is an epistemological issue: none of us can research everything ourselves so we choose who to believe based on our influence and internal desires.

Anyone remember the global cooling scare? Or the nuclear war scare? Or the acid rain scare? The threat of nuclear war and acid rain were very real, they just got solved (almost). It's like the Y2K bug: people love to say it was a lot of nonsense and a non-event, but it was so exactly because a lot of work was done to avoid it. Nuclear war is no longer a threat due to diplomacy; acid rain is severely reduced due to international treaties & technological solutions. These problems are perfect examples of a real problems being solved by concerted international action.

A lot of people are going to read only the headline and shout "MIT says global warming isn't true" into their science denial bubbles!

From my reading of this, the study does not say that sea-level rise won't happen, it's just saying one theoretical mechanism for RAPID sea-level rise might not be correct, so it'll be slower than some models predict.

The study relates to ice cliffs on land and the theory that if the ice shelves in the sea break apart, then the ice cliffs on land will break apart rapidly, contributing to rapid sea-level rise. Ice already in the sea doesn't raise sea-levels but ice currently on land would. The study uses modelling to demonstrate that runaway event is unlikely, so the sea-level rise from that even should be removed from estimates.

There's another paper about this from February_:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0901-4

Some quotes from the papers:

- "We’re saying that scenario, based on cliff failure, is probably not going to play out. That’s something of a silver lining. That said, we have to be careful about breathing a sigh of relief. There are plenty of other ways to get rapid sea-level rise."

- Ice cliff collapse... "is not required to reproduce sea-level changes due to Antarctic ice loss ... without it we find that the projections agree with previous studies (all 95th percentiles are less than 43 centimetres)."

A couple more things:

- Both papers still agree that sea-level rise will happen, but maybe not so fast and not so much. (Whether your house is under one foot of water or two doesn't make much difference to if you can live there.)

- If your discussion point against climate change is based on the models being wrong/inaccurate/too varied, then you have to discount this evidence, as it too is based on modelling.

- MIT's press department need to write better headlines.

That text is all over the place. They go from not hiring someone because they play basketball, to having wrestling as a meditation tool. I'm not going to make assumptions about their wrestling motivations but he openly admits they were gate-keeping based on an internal concept of male "alpha male nerd" culture. This doesn't fit the view of a healthy workplace for those who think diversity brings resiliance & strength to a company.

The MP who said this, Nicky Morgan, has a less than stellar reputation. Sounds like the comment was purely a case of throwing out a buzzword as a terrible answer to a good question.

The minute any implementation of this hit the real world it'd fail. Teenagers are very good at working around technology, whilst anyone other than the average caucasian is likely to get an incorrect age assessment.

I agree that this isn't common and the use of a memified word was not useful. I think the mental image of "brogrammers" is often literally coding jocks, which is inaccurate. It is often badly used to equate to a homogenous and closed culture within a team, often young and male. However same can indeed happen with other group of people. The example of alpha-maleness I can think of is Paypal: https://twitter.com/SaddestRobots/status/1184885797419401216

A better way of describing the problem from the original article is that infleixible & homogenous teams make it harder for people who don't fit a personality type to contribute to the work & work culture.

I'm no expert and I've mostly been in Europe with marginal time in the US, so I don't know the frequency of occurrence.

I think what's slightly more common is homogenous teams within companies that form an overwhelming culture, rather than entire company cultures. Teams do form their own ways of working and their own cultures, and this is fine: it's human and it can be positive. Healthy teams adapt to new members and vice versa.

But I have occasionally seen teams develop an impenetrable culture and reject anyone that wasn't a perfect fit for their existing culture. They also tend to reject any company-wide initiatives for change & improvement, not even engaging with the process or contributing to the discussion. Typically the way to solve such a team is to rebuild it by removing at least half of the members, after which everyone usually goes back to working normally.

I think the point is that companies shouldn't be frat houses full of brogrammers.

If you want to hang out with your friends and wrestle to decide coding patterns, then that's all well and good. But the second that it becomes a company that employs people it should be more mature, equal and accepting. Work is indeed not always only about output and skills, it's also about respecting each other and collaborating with different people and their opinions & experience to produce the best outcome.

Anecdotally, I have worked at a company whose unofficial hiring mantra was "hire people you'd go drinking with". It did not go well! Luckily some adults got hired and the company started functioning better.