Aside from that: I wonder what would happen if all the people in the country who are using marijuana at least semi-regularly were to go to some very public place at the same time and light up a joint.
I think it's pretty obvious what happens when you light up a joint in public (in the US anyway). You may not get arrested every time, but keep it up and you will.
That obviousness surely elevates their response to DH4.
Yes, it is obvious. So obvious that assuming that that's what the grand-grandparent is proposing is either disingenuous or extremely uncharitable.
Instead of a posting a glib response, a reasonable thing to do would be to read the wikipedia article on civil disobedience and realize that a single person randomly disobeying a law in public is not how it works.
Well gee, sorry I didn't refute your argument in the form of a DH6 retort in the form of refuting the central point. What most people on the internet seem to miss is an incredibly profound insight.
We are on the internet. Most of these conversations will go nowhere beyond where the people reading them will take them, which is nowhere. I am not interested in writing essay after essay debating things with people who have no power to change them in the first place. This is a waste of time. The internet primarily exists as a form of entertainment. This may be against the spirit of HN but I would argue that HN is against the spirit of the internet. My proof of this is that the vast majority (99%+) of the internet is nothing like HN.
Anyway, to address your point - numerous people take drugs publically at events like music festivals. The result of this action is a lack of arrests and a lack of policy change.
This is why Knuth has stopped writing cheques, incidentally:
"Nowadays almost everybody knows that it's dangerous to reveal your credit card number, or to have that full number on a printed document that somebody might find in the trash. Soon people will learn that it is equally dangerous to reveal the numbers that are printed in plain sight on every check. Forget signatures; banks have no time to verify them. The once venerable system of checking accounts is irretrievably broken. Before long, companies will find it impossible to give out paychecks without exposing themselves to unacceptable risk.
One consequence of this debacle is, alas, that I can no longer write checks to reward the people who discover errors in my books. The system that I've been using has worked well for almost forty years; but recently I have had to close three checking accounts, and the criminal attacks on those accounts have caused significant grief to my bankers. (Certainly I do not believe that anybody who received one of my checks has been in any way a culprit. But all such recipients are entitled to bragging rights; therefore the numbers printed on those checks inevitably become known to random members of the public.) I cannot in good conscience continue to traumatize the people at my bank, who obviously have plenty of other things to worry about."
A friend of mine had $3m stolen by his business partner who simply wrote out $500k cheques and took them to the bank. The bank oked the cheques despite knowing that he had no signing authority.
Once it all came to light, the bank then sued my friend and drove him into bankruptcy.
This is supposedly happening all the time, yet no one has managed to catch it on tape for some reason. I can't think of a credible explanation for the lack of hard evidence (and lawsuits).
"Because these people are paid poorly, they have a sense of living on a precipice and will do anything to avoid falling off."
This is actually a positive externality (well, depending on how you look at it) of providing some sort of social security net. You get to live in a society where people are less incentivized to stab each other in the back. Of course, they are also less incentivized to work themselves out of being-close-to-the-cliff.
On the other hand, in societies where, if you don't have any money, you are starving on the street as well as ostracized, you can hardly ever trust anyone not to carve you up if there is anything to be gained by it.
I once heard of a doctor working for an NGO in a major Indian city (I think it was Calcutta), who talked about how it was virtually impossible for a white person to make a friend there, because everyone he met was just trying to use him to gain status/money in some fashion.
I agree completely. Why does the US have so much crime? Because there's no safety net. (The War on Drugs also contributes in a major way.) This ends up being foolish, because we pay more to keep people in prison (over $30,000 per year) than we would by providing them with education and training. We have the resources to get rid of poverty, but we're spending what we have in phenomenally stupid ways.
There was far less crime in America before the War on Poverty dramatically expanded the social safety net in the 1960s.
America has a significant anti-poverty safety net -- welfare payments, food stamps, Medicaid health care, public housing vouchers, earned income tax credit, child care subsidies.
1) Getting rid of the war on drugs would be a good thing. As it would save money and not cause as much crime (drug war causes crime).
2) You can spend money on education and training to reduce poverty.
Please keep your arguments separate rather than using one issue as a support for another. That 30K per prisoner could be spent on any number of things, or simply not collected from the public at all.
Personally, I agree with 1. That would be fantastic, and I think that there is a political ball rolling slowly towards that.
The second, well, we do spend a lot on education and training. I am not so sure that it does much more than make education more expensive.
I find that I am slowly losing confidence in Google. What I often do is input searches in the form: "general term", "specific term", then click on a link and immediately do a find for the specific term I searched for. In the last few months, the specific term I searched for often does not exist on the linked site at all, which I find quite annoying.
I tried bing a couple of times, but the results are even worse.
Maybe Google verbatim mode will fix the problem? I've set up a quick search recently, but have yet to start using it.
Would love to see some example queries to debug if you have them handy. (You can check your search history https://www.google.com/history/ to jog your memory if you have it turned on.)
I don't know - if I had to guess what the query 'python list popleft' meant, it would be 'how to pop the leftmost element from a list', even though the answer does not contain the word 'popleft'.
In this case it does, but very often doesn't. It seems to me that this happens mostly with rapidly changing websites, as if the cache showed a somewhat later state than when it was indexed.
These days, I've been searching for things about Flask with Heroku. So I tend to search for something like "python flask heroku sqlite", and often times, I get results that are not specific to Flask. (NB: I don't know if this example works but you get the idea)
I hear a lot of people say that google search results are worse than they used to be - personally I have a hard time telling. What's interesting, though, is that nobody is doing search better, which suggests that it a very tough problem to solve, and even with all the resources Google has, they aren't doing it as good as it could be.
So my question is - what is google doing wrong?
Has their search algorithm become worse?
Has the web become more complex?
Have people just become lazy and feel like they should never have to dig beyond the first 10 results to find what they're looking for?
I think there are some good nano questions that show A) that you have worked with some piece of technology (or at least read up on it well) and B) that you have some deeper conceptual understanding of it.
For example, you could ask how to switch two variable's values in C++ with the aim of finding out whether they know about the swap function (and you can then go on to ask about template specialization for extra credit).
This would be a better question than the ones in the OP because it's not just trivia and it's not something that your IDE will do for you.
Many people will claim to know a programming language on their CV because they spent a week trying it out 3 years ago, figuring that they can just pick it up quickly if they get the job (this might be somewhat true for the 5th or 6th language, but probably not for the 2nd). And these are the same people who will then program in that language for years without ever producing any quality code because they don't realize that there is room for improvement after you know all the keywords.
I remember someone telling me that in Sweden when you move into a place, you can just plug your network cable in, your browser will direct you to a page where you can select whatever provider you like, enter your payment details and you are online.
Yes, that exists in a few places, there are ISPs like http://opennet.se/ that do those deals. But then the owner of the building, typically the housing co-op, foots the hardware bill, and each household chooses an actual ISP and is billed according to the chosen service.
It's a nice model, but costs more in total than other arrangements. My house is going to get hooked upto fibre this year, and I was checking up on this for my housing co-op, and the cheapest and best by far is to tie ourselves to a provider for five years and get a group deal. That way everyone in the house gets 100/100mbit for less than $20/month, and everyone can upgrade from that basic package to gigabit if they want, but that's currently costing ~$150 a month.
However, all of this is possible due to the Stockholm municipal fibre company, Stokab. They've been around for at least a decade now, digging up streets, laying fibre, hooking up buildings, and since they're making good profit, they're re-investing that into providing fibre for everyone in Stockholm.
I'm using the date range search option a lot when I am getting outdated search results. Even constructed a quick search for it, so I can type something like: "gdr 30 things" which will then search for stuff from the past 30 days.
Aside from that: I wonder what would happen if all the people in the country who are using marijuana at least semi-regularly were to go to some very public place at the same time and light up a joint.