seacious's comments

Knowing what the AST looks like without having to sit an think about it is huge. Maybe you're smarter than me and can instantly intuit it, but I think most people can't. I think that this is one of the reasons that macros are so widely adopted in LISPs but not in other languages that support them. Having an immediately evident AST makes it much easier to reason about, and hence to manipulate either through code or manually.

Edit: Improve clarity.

Not having to memorize an operator precedence table makes me more than willing to give up syntactic sugar. This is one of the things that I dislike most about haskell. I wish liskell or one of the other projects trying to bring S-expressions to haskell had taken off.

There are people working on improving stack traces[1][2], but there is no standard solution yet.

[1] https://github.com/AvisoNovate/pretty

[2] https://github.com/mmcgrana/clj-stacktrace

I'd be careful about assuming that it is necessary just because it seems plausible. Workers rebelling against capitalists and seizing the means of production once also seemed like a logical, necessary progression from the economic system of the time.

edit: The material dialectic, if it exists in any meaningful way, is far stranger than we once supposed.

To be fair, social scientists are not the first to find this prospect troubling.

I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

--Blaise Pascal

People who had their account banned in the last few days before payment may be more likely to feel victimized, and therefore more likely to answer a poll to express their grievance.

I think this is where crypto currencies really shine. They remove the gatekeeper for financial services. All their other benefits (and risks) are less significant.

Outsourcing allows you to isolate the status page from your human infrastructure. If your team makes a bad decision that leads to an outage then they can make the same bad decision about your status page if they are in charge of that as well. This provides a form of human fault tolerance.

There's a lot to dislike about java, but the platform independence story of the JVM really is the best of anything out there that I've experienced. That doesn't necessarily mean Java anymore, Clojure, Scala, etc. all benefit from the work done to make the JVM truly platform independent. But when I compare it to my experiences with Node.js, ruby, or haskell, (dependencies not working because library maintainers forgetting (or don't care) that not every one uses their preferred development operating system), I am really grateful for all the boring, finicky work that contributors have put into making a truly cross platform development target.

Musk mentioned GPS satellites as one of the kinds of payloads he wanted to bid for. It looks like they fall well within the capacity of the Falcon 9. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_Block_IIF

Chromes ability to save settings silently fails with disturbing regularity (in my experience). A lot of people seem to have seen the issue (e.g. [1], and google will reveal many more) but consistent steps to reproduce seem hard to come by. It's one of the main annoyances that made me switch back to firefox.

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/npSTSO...

I think this is very true. However, I think it shares a lot of the problems that reasoning about "rights" often does. The term "right" seems to be ill-defined as it is used in public discourse so it is often useful to talk about rights in terms of the obligations and constraints they imply.

In the example of the right to free speech (as understood by US law) constrains the government from making determinations about the use of many of its unique powers (police power, power to tax, authority over public fora) on the basis of the content of what someone says (within certain limits). There are other powers about whose use they can make determinations on the basis of someones speech (like the hiring of speakers for government sponsored events).

In the US there are also (some? state?) laws constraining private employers from engaging in certain behavior in reprisal for the content of speech made by employees in some circumstances (e.g. Employee usually can't be fired for participating in a gay pride event (as long as they aren't wearing their company uniform or otherwise indicating that they are speaking for their employer, etc. etc.)). This too probably falls within the scope of what's meant by the right free speech.

I'm no expert in law, but I believe their are specific exceptions made to this constraint on employer power for decisions about officers of a corporation.

I gather that this comic is aimed, at least in part, at those who are objection to the treatment of Brendan Eich. And I think it is fair to say that his right to free speech as understood by the US government has not been violated.

But governments are not the only entities who can constrain themselves from various kinds of actions on the basis of someones speech. As an individual I can (and probably should) constrain myself from punching people on the basis of what they say. I can also constrain myself from from engaging in incivility on the basis of the contents of other peoples speech, and maybe I should. But here it starts to become less clear. Exactly what kinds of behavior should be constrained if I personally want to be supportive of other peoples right to free speech is a little unclear both for me personally and for us as a society.

I think that what people are principally objecting to with regard to the treament of Brendan Eich is Mozilla's and the Internet Community's failure to constrain themselves in various ways. These people (and I count myself among them) feel that if I try to get someone fired on the basis their political speech (regardless of how offensive I find it) from a job which is not related (I know some will object here in the case of Brendan Eich) to the content of that speech, then they are acting in a manner that is not supportive of the right to Fee Speech.

I hope this will be helpful in establishing a bit of mutual understanding.