Viewing profile — rpedroso

Suppose that we eliminate net neutrality. Further suppose that, in a few years, I start a video streaming service called "Notflix". Because ISPs are no longer required to be dumb p…

IANAL and I don't have an answer to this, but I would be deeply alarmed if this were the case. I can understand them making the case that anything on your personal is searchable (t…

Pai makes a lot of questionable arguments: The FCC’s regulations weren’t about protecting consumers’ privacy. They were about government picking winners and losers in the marketpla…

I primarily write python web-based APIs for a web application + 2 mobile apps. Just the other day, I was dealing with an endpoint that had to update hierarchical data (i.e. a colle…

I write python professionally and I use vim exclusively, but I have pylint + jedi plugins and could not imagine working without them. I'm also not convinced that depriving new prog…

They're programmers, the fast idiot is a computer.

There are a few problems with this explanation: 1. FDR did not propose a wage cap until 1942, 3 years after the Great Depression had ended. It was a temporary wartime fundraising e…

I have no suggestions for the latter two, but number of commits / user / repo is doable in vanilla git: git shortlog -n -s

> The Electrician was functioning as an Electrician, not as a government agent. I don't think your example vindicates Best Buy, but rather, simply repeats the central question of t…

I think the correct tradeoff is to judge the malfeasance of the product based on what security precautions were reasonable at the time the product was created. Granting that "reaso…

One unfortunate side-effect of traffic capacity expansion is that usage increases to compensate: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Matthew_T...

The underlying assumption is that a multitude of users would switch to devices produced by such a manufacturer. This, I think, overestimates how much most users currently care abou…

That's a good point, and thanks for the recommendation!

Public auditing of voting terminals strikes me as a place where open source of government-used software matters.

Well, notwithstanding all the ordinary people who got blood tests done by Theranos that were later invalidated.

For those who prefer CLI git: I've used gitk a fair bit, but lately I've been gravitating towards tig, which implements a tree view via ncurses.

Actually yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabinoids They typically cause more severe side-effects than traditional marijuana. There have been a few rounds of subway …

To clarify, PEP 8 nonetheless recommends that lines be limited to 79 characters, and even recommends capping docstrings and comments to 72 characters. The python standard library f…

Yes, it is a feature of the default browser stylesheet, but many websites override it. DuckDuckGo, for instance, keeps all of its links black and uses the :visited pseudo class to …

Little details like checkboxes next to places I've already been are super helpful and I miss those little touches in google. Google does do this, and in a less subtle way -- it app…

As the article mentions, the polygraph results are still occasionally used in court. Regardless of its utility as an interrogation tool, there are serious concerns about the scient…

Carbon neutrality does not mean that atmospheric CO2 is not released at any point, but rather, that any release of carbon is offset in some way. Offsets might include planting tree…

I honestly take issue with the way you phrase your argument. You refer to the poor with phrases like "these people", trivialize their ability to survive without a week's paycheck b…

Yeah I figured I would be off by a fair bit off when it came to the income tax math. I'm not sure whether there would additionally be some tax burden due to NY state income tax and…

The minimum wage in New York is $8.75. Someone working 40 hours/week for 52 weeks/year, which is a generous estimate due to how many minimum wage employers hire and schedule employ…