Viewing profile — jsjohns2

It always strikes me how much commonality exists across different software engineering disciplines—not to mention across fields outside of engineering (e.g., how double-entry bookk…

To those bashing the author as uninformed -- this is George V. Neville-Neil. Member of FreeBSD Core Team who wrote the book on FreeBSD. He might know a thing or two about POSIX! [1…

> In arbitration, this doesn't work. It's a vastly more even playing field for consumers, who tend to have less money than the companies they're suing and less downside in the case…

Lest anyone come away from this thinking that arbitration is good for the consumer, this story only has a happy ending because the business chose to settle. I also took a corporati…

I suspect that there is a strong non-linear effect, i.e., introducing novel drugs into a state with very cheap housing does not move the needle that much on homelessness (WV) but i…

Jake, I get the argument. Fifty years of bad housing policy have yielded high housing prices today, high housing prices leads to homelessness, and homelessness leads to drug abuse.…

Comparing the number of available beds with the number of unsheltered homeless people does not disprove parent's argument that there is a bed for everyone who wants a bed. A better…

Comparing LA and WV is like comparing apples and oranges. At least those are both fruits. Those locales differ on much more than just housing costs.

If you are naïve enough to think that we will simply build our way out of the homelessness crisis, I encourage you to book a flight to Los Angeles and strike up a conversation with…

You may have a circadian rhythm disorder, e.g., delayed sleep-wake phase disorder (DSWPD) [1]. It is rare in the general population ( I struggled with sleep for years. I had diffic…

In the USA, public access to federal court records is largely behind a paywall known as PACER. In 2009, Aaron Swartz downloaded somewhere between 1% and 25% of those records (~750G…

Aaron Swartz purportedly downloaded ~20% of PACER. 760GB or so. Are the documents available online? --- Carl Malamud: “And data started to come in, and come in, and come in. Soon t…

> I’m not sure what you are getting at? There is one general characterization of a homeless person who has severe mental illness or is in the throes of addiction. There is another …

If this isn’t a problem in need of an immediate solution, then what is? Those people need help today , not if/when LA figures out how to fix fifty years of housing stock mismanagem…

Well, where is this invisible majority hiding? No RVs at all in Santa Monica, limited parking in general, close to zero tents, a limited number of parks, and no forests. The city p…

But how does this solve the immediate problem of psychotic people roaming my neighborhood?

> Edit to add: before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, th…

This is a flawed comparison. GraphQL is probably a superior query language. The more salient question is how the complexity of back-end API endpoint implementation differs. The ans…

Also an excellent read on the subject: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

> For a while, Bitcoin was used for transactions that people wanted to keep secret from government authorities, like drug deals. It soon became apparent, however, that if authoriti…

Soylent is great, but you should check out Joylent if you get a chance. Similar nutritional profile to Soylent, but cheaper, better tasting, and cooler branding. I've been getting …

Yes! Many people seem to miss this for whatever reason. There is no risk-free choice if you are unlucky enough to have poor eyesight. Personal anecdote: I have a retinal scar from …

Sure, some actions are more harmful than others. Killing a person is worse than imprisoning them indefinitely. But the degree to which it is worse (and whether it is enough to ban …