Mercury has been awesome, I've been using them for my business account for years and recently started using them for personal as well. I didn't know they used Haskell until well after I started using them, but it definitely tracks. The quality of their exposed software surface is at least a couple stddev above median.
There are two countervailing effects when you choose a more theoretically advanced programming language. On the one hand, your hiring pool shrinks. On the other hand, the quality of the remaining hiring pool goes way up, which acts as an excellent recruiting filter (for both employer and employee). Jane Street made a similar play with OCaml.
The problem is that the intersection between your business's interests and the interests of the small pool of available developers is usually very small.
Building banking apps? Well, even if it's Haskell, the Haskellers were dreaming of GPU compiler jobs, not banking front ends. So you're probably down to literally 5 qualified people on earth who want your job.
But then 3 of those 5 don't want to relocate or have other operational desires that require you to re-think how you run your team, and 2 of those 5 believe so strongly in supply-demand that their salary should be 3x the industry average.
Many companies, including Jane Street, come to the same conclusion: If you really want developers of a niche language, you have to be very good at finding smart people who don't know the language and training them.
And categorically: the issue isn’t what “I’d” do, my habits often match my habits, it’s what other project members will be doing (including future degenerate versions of myself assumed to be some combination of busy, tired, stressed and drunk).
The Confucian philosophy that people act like water coming down a mountain, seeking the path of least resistance comes to play.
Haskell, OCaml, F#, and their ilk can yield beautiful natural domain languages where using the types wrong is cost prohibitive. In languages without those guarantees every developer needs discipline to avoid shortcuts, and review needs increase, and time-pressure discussions rehashed.
You demonstrate well the problem: yes anything that is computable can be than in any computation system. That's not what discussions about tooling are about.
If a tool can help enforce some ways of doing things, or if it doesn't constrain people much, that has consequences for the type of work that gets done with them and the systems you encounter running out there that you might be invited or find the need to work with.
"I can do it" is exactly the wrong answer. "How can I guarantee that others will do it" is the point being made.
Some people, teams and orgs can benefit from it. "I don't need it" is missing the point. "Not everybody needs it" is missing the same point from a different direction.
The final frontier of display tech (as far as being able to elicit any physiologically possible eye response) is a pair of tunable lasers. You really can't go much farther than that for emissive displays! We're almost saturated (no pun intended) on useful resolution, so I expect color to be the next area of focus.
In the same way Trump claimed to be the President of Peace, supposedly "left" or "progressive" politicians will push these measures forward while also pocketing money from businesses/organizations who benefit from various social/fiscal causes being ignored.
These are the legislative equivalent of the Dem leadership doing the kneel with the Kente cloth around their necks.
These politicians would never push to end qualified immunity, audit overtime usage, investigate police unions, etc. That requires actual change your donors might not like.
Same thing here, no work needs to be done determining why black/native women go missing at higher rates. That's hard, that's a deeper societal problem. It might just implicate a Sheriff or two or illuminate rape kits going unprocessed.
36% of missing person cases in the US are black women and children, even though only 13% of the population is black, but those cases get much less media attention and are treated less urgently than missing white people.
Creating a separate alert for those cases is meant to bring more attention to them.
There is a similar issue with Native Americans, who go missing at an even more disproportional rate than black women and children, and receive much less attention and resources than white cases.
The odd language is a result of sloppy back and forth fighting over the specific legislative language around scope that largely was a result the fact that the driving concern from the main group that sought the adoption of the alert (the California Tribal Families Coalition) was the incidence of both rape victimization and becoming missing affecting indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit.
"A Feather Alert is a resource available to law enforcement agencies investigating the suspicious or unexplainable disappearance of an indigenous woman or indigenous person."
I think it's a matter of perspective maybe more than 'knowing what they are talking about'.
Like - seeing property as 'investment and ownership' vs 'places where people live' is sometimes pretty big gap. Especially when we've been grounded in 'mortgages and wealth creation' for regular middle class people.
Rent control and the underlying civilization power dynamics are kind of a subtle thing, I think most folks are going to just answer in terms of 'what is good for them'.
Rent control drives up rents, not down. Since rent control was enacted in SF, rents have increased by 15x in 45 years. That's 24% a year annualized over 45 years. Its similar for other places that enacted it.
Rarely in human history has a specific policy failed more spectacularly. Yet you still hear supposedly educated people advocate for it every year.
> Rent control drives up rents, not down. Since rent control was enacted in SF, rents have increased by 15x in 45 years.
A couple of things:
You're aware of the Californian property tax control? If you aren't, go read up on the 197X Proposition 13, as well as the ways even vaguely-savvy landowners can get around the "tax is reassessed when the property changes hands" rule. IMO, it's only fair that tenants get the same sort of price-increase-protection that landlords get. If the landlords get rid of Prop 13 and anything even remotely like it for the next fifty years, I'll be first in line to clamor for the removal of what passes for rent control in the few cities that have it.
Unless you -as a developer- especially request otherwise, SF's rent control only applies to buildings that were in existence back in 197X, when the ordinance was enacted. New units are not covered by rent control. It does not apply to any commercial buildings... just residential rentals. It also only controls the rate of rent increase until the unit is vacated. Once it's vacated, the landlord is free to charge whatever rent they wish.
Your story gets confounded by the fact that -for a variety of reasons- it's nearly impossible to build any new residential buildings in SF. When demand is met with a nearly zero increase in the supply, the cost of the thing being demanded tends to go up.
Rents are generally quite high in California, not just in SF. From [0]
2000 1990 1980 1970 1960 1950 1940
United States $602 $447 $243 $108 $71 $42 $27
California $747 $620 $283 $126 $79 $42 $27
Washington $663 $445 $254 $113 $71 $43 $22
Only a few cities in California have rent control [1], so that doesn't explain the fact that rents are high state-wide.
Though, it is more interesting to look at the numbers when adjusted to 2000's dollar. [2] I wonder if your "15x" figure is inflation-adjusted...
2000 1990 1980 1970 1960 1950 1940
United States $602 $571 $481 $415 $350 $257 $284
California $747 $792 $560 $484 $389 $256 $286
Washington $663 $569 $503 $434 $350 $263 $226
Let's be real, if a bigtech ignored judicial orders, whether you would describe it as "fighting autocracy" or "corporate fascism" is 100% dependent on who is currently in office
Google is a multi trillion dollar company, not a scrappy libertarian upstart ready to gamble everything in court
Parent comment has a strong implication that the bets will impact their decisions, and invariably for the worse.
If "Politician XYZ takes the day off and sits on the couch" were paying 100-1 odds, it wouldn't be such a big drama (although, again, the existence of the bet would still impact their behaviour)
Correct. I've always had a hard time getting my point phrased in a way that gets people to understand my point, but I'm baffled that people don't see an issue with creating something that says "Hey if you blow up these random people in Iran today you can make $50 million dollars and no one can punish you" and thinking its not a big fucking deal.
This also isn't a theoretical issue that may happen - it dissapoints me that very few people know this but - on October 10th when BTC fell from $122k to $104k because of a trump announcement, someone created a short position 30 minutes before Trump announced 100% tariffs on Chinese imports and profited $200M USD.
I replied to 1 comment below yours - but I want to ask, how do you think this incentivizes people to make info about decisions public? That would lower the return on their bets.
> Like mandatory seat belts, some people argue that there would be no need for CHERI if everyone "just used type-safe languages"[...] I'm not having any of it.
It wish the author would have offered a more detailed refutation than "I'm not having it". I'm pretty sure the claim is right! I'm fairly convinced that we'd be a lot better off moving to ring0-only linear-memory architectures and rely on abstraction-theoretic security ("langsec") rather than fattening up the hardware with random whack-a-mole mitigations. We're gradually moving in that direction anyway without much of a concerted effort.
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