alexandercrohde

I get that. I'd be quite content to concede renaming master/slave in the linux kernel if that was the end of it. I think what I want to fight against most is the amount of distraction/c…

Just to flesh this out a little, suppose my work has 5 Christians, and they all feel "abort" is an insensitive term? 1. Whose opinions count on the issue? Just Christians? All women? 2. Do w…

>> The trauma of being asked not to make rape jokes can't be compared to the trauma of being raped. ??? >>> Just do the right thing, is it worth the arguing? So I think your argume…

>> You don't get to feel ... I don't think you get to tell other people what they get to feel. I encourage working on your empathy here. Who gets to decide "what's polite&quo…

I don't feel you're arguing in good faith. We should define "offensive language." How will we measure it fairly? Will we poll the english-speaking and set a thresh-hold? Because I …

My own take trying to express this dichotomy of second-hand versus firsthand knowledge https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/682 …

Yeah, I'm curious if he burdens himself with our inane internet opinions (reads it)? Or if people manage to send him emails about it?

So thinking about that... One the one hand, suppose I log into reddit and see police officers clubbing some people drinking beers (this specific instance was in a foreign country). Yes, on the one han…

When I read this type of thing, I try my best to look for some basis to decide if it's fortune-cookie-nonsense or great advice. It's obvious to me that a person can care too much about bei…

>> But what if they fired them solely due to public outcry... It's interesting to me that this is always put on the outcrier and not the company itself.

Yes there is. What you do is have don't put any IO calls inside your pure functions, but rather pass in their results as parameters. Keep the impure code and the pure code separated.

One thing I've learned, is that unit testing seems much much more painful than it has to be when you are using too many classes. When you are writing code as pure functions (i.e. stateless), it&#…

https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/178

I hate this framing too. I don't understand all the hand-wringing over people losing money in the stock market. If you want to be mad about people losing money, be mad about the ones where it…

I would turn down applicants who don't have this mindset. The last thing I need is a dev who never mastered postgres because they were too busy learning mongo.

- Don't delete accounts entirely when they are reported, just lock them. If it's not disputed delete them 1 year later. - Add a "reputability score" for every channel which is log(…

I don't know why you're downvoted, this is a pretty important topic. Well, I do know why you're being downvoted -- you're challenging an a very dear orthodoxy.

Ridiculous. Completely hypothetical argument devoid of any real-world considerations. Reducto ad absurdem -- A single crack-house can bring down the value of every house in the neighborhood by 100k or…

I've heard this hypothesis that groups tend to go down in quality for this reason -- 1. Group has an average quality. 2. People who have a much higher quality tend to avoid the group (e.g. that d…

As soon as those metrics are exposed though, people will start hacking them by purchasing older accounts, etc.

What are you talking about, that's absolutely a premise. To quote a huge heading "Should violent video games narratively justify their obsession with violence?" My response is that ther…

I absolutely reject a premise of this article, which I suppose is that violence in videogames is somehow bad or meaningful. They are best understood as toys or works of art, and their moral implicatio…

Yeah, but this is to some extent just an interesting side-note. At least I know several people who are liberals but don't agree with lacking "political correctness" being sufficient cau…

According to that article, those vaccines are on track for next year, which I believe is a year too late. >> Whether or not you quarantined, the economy would collapse because you would have a m…

Damaging the economy to the tune of 2 trillion in bailouts, the cost of the war in Iraq, just to have the exact same number of deaths delayed by 4 months is inexcusable. And you should be ashamed of y…

>And also realise that what you're saying is that you advocate for a modeled 2 million deaths. So far as I know, there's no evidence that now that quarantine is over the same number of pe…

As far as I'm concerned, if quarantine is the "answer" then the cure is worse than the disease. In fact, I'd take this as evidence that quarantine might have been a mistake.

>> There is no such thing as universal advice. All advice is useful in some context, but no advice is useful in all contexts. The interesting thing is some advice is pretty good for almost all-c…

>> In your example, try and try again does NOT mean try and try the SAME thing again. Who says? For surfing, "If at first you don't succeed, try try again" may seem to apply. And …