Viewing profile — pjlegato

Public transit is abysmal in SF. The fact that it exists by no means qualifies it as "good".

Private utilities are very common. There are many listed on the stock exchange. Everything they do is heavily regulated. They cannot do things like cut off service for any reason w…

In a socialist country, you would have a government entity building various qualities of housing. The best houses in the best locations go to the nomenklatura, to the governor's co…

There was a DOS port of nethack, so likely it could be made to run on elks.

AI and machine learning aren't necessary at all. You 'just' have to empirically measure a few constants that describe and bound the various nonlinearities of different real pigment…

Common misconception; Stoicism is not about curtailing or repressing emotions. Stoicism is about not allowing your emotions to govern you. Subtle but profound difference.

You said "yes exactly" when I asked if personal sentiment was the means of determining when an unfair power differential exists and ought to be legislated against. Then you said "t…

The lines for what is legal are not at all drawn arbitrarily in a constitutional legal system such as the United States.

So there are no objective standards possible or even relevant in the lawmaking process -- it's purely a question of might makes right, whoever can marshal the most people to their …

Interesting. Do you then view the lawmaking process as nothing more than a chaotic and never-ending expression of the randomly changing emotions of the people? No ongoing rational …

Of course, and our laws have apparently determined that "gambling is OK." Why ought we revisit and overturn that process in this case? Is there any objective criterion beyond "it s…

This takes us back to the beginning: how shall we determine when the social process has failed, and what constitutes "improvement"? Society has already spoken on this matter. It se…

We have such social systems, and they have already evaluated this specific case and determined that we as a society want to allow gambling. Note that I am not agreeing or disagreei…

You mean the way we passed the current laws that allow such gambling, which you are now complaining about? By that standard, we're done, the matter has already been concluded in fa…

How shall we as a society decide who is to be denied agency in this way, because someone else determines they are to be infantilized, deemed incapable of exercising full responsibi…

Nubank _as a company_ does not support Datomic. It's a bank. _A few employees_ they acquihired support Datomic. If those few employees quit, get fired, get transferred to some othe…

> teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a managemen…

On the contrary, most religions assert that their particular views are the _only_ valid ones -- and many require their adherents to actively proselytize, to try to convert others t…

Catholic and Orthodox Christians still retain and practice vast repertoires of rituals. They are not thriving amidst our skeptical public.

You are speaking of what is called "mainline Protestantism." Catholicism is, by far, the largest Christian denomination in the US. Moreover, large areas in the south, midwest, and …

If there were any other groups with an organization capable of pulling off coverups, we'd never know about it, because they would have covered it up.

Not at all. Family units are extremely widespread in cultures around the world, including those that have had little or no contact with Judeo-Christian beliefs. Nearly all cultures…

Of course, many people did read books and newspapers on the subway 20 years ago. A significant fraction also did speak to one another sometimes, and engaged in spontaneous conversa…

If they're not in the EU, probably "forever," especially if they are in one of the many countries that are politically indifferent or hostile to the EU. Information flows freely wo…

Comments here have never been temporary. Hacker News itself has for many years provided a free near-realtime API and a variety of large datasets to the world for the specific purpo…