marcacohen's comments

Not sure why you say "if that was so easy, why bother counting the votes at all?". My estimate isn't really easy in that it's based on 86% of votes counted statewide, thanks to the hard work done by election officials, poll workers, and volunteers in Nevada.

Agreed but I've seen arguments both ways. If I had to bet, I think the Biden shift will be stronger than my prediction but I chose to adopt a more conservative assumption.

Thanks for pointing that out. I agree and noted that caveat in the article.

Re: 5 vs. 4, again, it's aspirational. How do you know what's possible by 2040?

Re: highways, thank you for pointing that out. I've fixed the article by s/interstate highway system/public works program/ with link to the details. Btw, FDR spent over $4B on highways, roads, and streets, a considerable sum in those days.

Re: You can't aspire using the impossible." Naysayers like you are why we may hever have this.

1. The article is meant to be aspirational, not literal. We're talking about 2040 and what we could accomplish, if we put our minds to it.

2. I did the same calculations you did but went with a more provocative headline for reason cited in 1. above.

3. Re: only benefiting NY & SF, if you read my article you would know that I'm advocating a network of trains to replace the antiquated, wasteful, and enviironmentally unfriendly extant network of highway systems.

4. FDR and roads, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration.

In response to your final comment about bad math, etc, I would say that your feedback is replete with the kind of overrly-literal interpretation, detail knitpicking, and generally holier than thou attitude that has given HN a bad reputation. Nonetheless, thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Here's an easy way to see how this works. Run this script:

echo dollar-star: for i in $; do echo $i; done echo dollar-at: for i in $@; do echo $i; done echo quoted-dollar-star: for i in "$"; do echo $i; done echo quoted-dollar-at: for i in "$@"; do echo $i; done

./x.sh a "b c" d dollar-star: a b c d dollar-at: a b c d quoted-dollar-star: a b c d quoted-dollar-at: a b c d

> Do you think they are putting their focus on marketing over content?

I never said, nor meant to imply, judgements about any other projects. I was simply sharing the choices we've made based on our priorities and resources.

Personally I'm comfortable with those choices because they've resulted in literally hundreds (>650 at my last count) of nice looking and fun to use coding tutorials. I'm also quite proud of the authoring flow we built: these codelabs are generated directly from Google Docs (you don't have to write a line of code to produce them) and we've open sourced the tools for others to use (https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools).

The lack of a human touch on this site is simply a function of our priorities. This site was developed by volunteers, in the proverbial Google 20% style, and we've put very little effort into marketing. Admittedly, it could stand a bit more warmth, but, for better or worse, we've always put our focus on the content -- giving developers a fast track to building something fun.

and article with nice overview here: https://medium.com/google-developers/introducing-material-de...