I have never understood why, post 9/11, planes were not modified to remove the cabin to cockpit door, and make the cockpit door a separate entrance. This would more or less completely remove the possibility of a second 9/11 attack, and would render airplanes no more attractive a target than any other group of several hundred people.

That might be inconvenient, because aircraft staff sometimes needs to talk to pilots or make them sign some documents.

Also, the pilots would need their own bathroom.

The cockpit door was reinforced and can’t be easily broken down now. That has achieved effectively the same thing.

Pilots need access to a toilette, but also there are rare cases where pilots need to look out of side windows. There's also flights with crew changes. And the very rare case of crew incapacitation. A case where a pilot needed to gain access to the cockpit but couldn't, Germanwings Flight 9525.

Likely cheaper to make a tougher door than build a new entrance and moving arm for people thing.

Incorrect. See Marsh v Alabama

Incorrect. In that case, the company was the government for the town, thus they were held accountable to the first amendment.

Have you read the decision? That is an odd way to frame it...a corporation cannot ‘be the government’, and there is nothing in that decision that says they were. The more applicable passage would be:

“The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.”

I don't understand the fixation with Wikileaks' motive. That seems independent of whether their information is true or false.

Shoot the messenger in the hope the message doesn't get out. Look at this story. Flagged. Apparently one yesterday too. Lots of people want the "all Russian people and companies are working together to ensure everything I disagree with happens" line to stick, but US intelligence agencies impersonating Russian firms undermines that angle. So it's gotta go.

Well, enough accounts with enough karma obviously don't want anything favorable about WikiLeaks on HN. But then, HN has no pretensions about impartiality. And I must admit that, overall, the system works quite well.

There seems to be a common bait-and-switch tactic performed by proponents of UBI, in which they mention UBI as a replacement for social programs when talking about affordability, but back away from that assertion when questioned about how to handle (for example) recipients that spend all of their UBI on drugs instead of food.

I see that as a societal symptom instead of a personal failure. I would rather a person spend their time playing videogames* instead of being stuck working dead-end jobs until the day they die.

*Drugs are a different issue, that should be treated as a health problem and dealt with accordingly.

We handle them exactly as we do now... by doing nothing. Today's social programs don't give people more money just because they spent all that they were given yesterday.

It's universal INCOME, not universal "take care of all your problems for you".

Isn't better psychological assistance the better solution to that problem?

Unless you are serving food directly you cannot prevent turning assistance into drugs because you can always just sell whatever you are given.

Counterpoint: As Taleb points out, car accident deaths are 'thin-tailed'; that is, the rate of car fatalities is essentially fixed (and predictable by looking at past data), while terrorism is 'fat-tailed', and the number of deaths that would be caused by a dirty-bomb in Manhattan does not appear in historical data, and so it can't be 'priced' in the same way.

In the example of the dirty bomb, I'm not sure that the number of casualties/cancer incidences is especially high, based on some brief search. Sept 11 seems like it was a more damaging attack, for example, and that seems roughly as difficult to replicate as a dirty bomb. Especially given the trade-off between payload and shielding your substances enough to prevent detection by the myriad of radiation detection systems I'm sure DHS has installed in major cities.

But you are certainly correct that statistically these events are more difficult to interpret, and raw averages are not a fair comparison.

I have made this exact argument (quoting Taleb) but HN users are not receptive to anything other than a do-nothing approach.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14262011

This was reply to the grand-parent comment, mistakenly posted to parent comment.

Unfalsifiable arguments are not especially strong.

There's also a certain kind of person who seems to really want 10x people _not_ to exist.

I'm not a 10x person, but I have worked with some. I don't think they are unique to programming..there are 10x folks in every field.

Sometimes you don't need a 10x person, and if you don't, it can seem like they don't matter. In those cases, a few 1x people will do just as well. But I do believe that sometimes you _do_ need a 10x person, and if you do, you can't do the same things without them. In those cases, I'd absolutely take a 'toxic' 10x person over the nice-but-1x alternative.

Part of the issue is that there's more work for programmers than ever, and most of that work is of the 1x variety.....if you're just banging out CSS for some small-business website, it doesn't matter whether you have Jeff Dean do it, or a new grad from Omaha Community college. If, however, you need to write a new globally consistent database abstraction at scale, then the new grad probably won't cut it. If you actually need that thing, then it wouldn't matter if the new grad was the nicest person on earth, and Jeff Dean the most 'toxic' (though actually I understand that he's a very nice person).

As a thought experiment, for people who agree with the idea that a company 'owns' all of the thought-output of an employee: Why should that mean only the valuable IP, and not _all_ of the thought-output, including the unpleasant parts. If an employee commits a pre-meditated murder, should the company be liable, as a partial 'thought-owner'?

Or if the employee made something that made a net-loss. We only hear the company knocking on the employee's door when the employee is earning a profit.

I actually might sign a contract like that. Most (all?) of my projects tend to lose money. This would make me more successful, not less. :)

IP's the more specific case here. The company both owns and is responsible for anything an employee does during the course of their employment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_of_employment

So if you work for a bank and commit serious wire fraud on your own time, can you be sued for breach of contract, conflict of interest, etc? You'd have a lot of experience in doing so from your normal employment.

I would believe that in certain situations in certain jurisdictions that would be possible.

why go for something like murder and not the widespread ip violation crimes such as using ideas from patents but hiding that you ever saw that patent (why do you think every company has rule against discussing patents on email?)

It's quite funny, but..

" The followers advice is dropping the curly brackets for these one-line ifs to make them all happy. "

I have never understood why anyone would do this. It's a bug waiting to happen (as goto fail showed), for truly marginal benefit

    if (foo)
      bar();

    if (foo) { 
      bar();
    }

I agree, but to be fair, goto fail was not really caused by the lack of curly braces around an if statement body. It was caused by inadequate code review and lack of testing coverage. The latter especially is inexcusable in security-critical code.

"The building's collapse was not caused by poor choices in materials, but by inadequate inspection procedures."

Any number of things could have prevented the bug. So lets do all of them.

That logic clearly fails, though. You will never do everything to prevent a failure. (As an example, there are almost always stronger materials. Cost is a requirement,)

Though, your point here is interesting. Using curlies probably could have stopped that bug. Using static analysis that saw dead code definitely would have stopped it.

In this case, mechanisms (automatic checking for dead code) are vastly superior to good intentions (always using curlies).

You're right.

I didn't mean literally everything. I mean everything that has more benefits than costs. I consider consistent curly brace style to fit in that category.

Consistent is nice. There are place where it is consistent to not use them, though.

And to be clear, I find that just as weird as you probably do. :)

Out of millions of CVEs, one is plausibly related to this coding style. I don't think that's a strong argument for using the more verbose style. If we saw this all the time it might be a different matter.

I think it is a strong argument for compilers' -Wall to detect misindented statements directly following unbracketed conditional expressions, though.

Does this make it a moo-t point?

Also a strong argument for Python's syntax :)

Except in Python both the incorrect and correct code are syntactically valid and the error cannot be detected by auto-formatter.

Yikes. Do you realize how useful it is to have a single consistent formatting for source code? It eliminates an entire class of arguments. Or do you enjoy arguing about tabs and spaces, and when to make newlines?

Try rotating your screen 90 degrees.

Do you know how weird that makes me look when I'm coding on my laptop at the airport?

No doubt it's quite weird, but I am of the opinion that hardware should serve the code and coder, not the other way around. Maybe use a portrait orientation tablet with a bt keyboard for travel. I think there could be a small market for laptops with a portrait mode, too.

"And again if it be true, that a wise man like a good refiner can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea or without book, there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdome, while we seek to restrain from a fool, that which being restrain'd will be no hindrance to his folly"

I feel compelled to point out that your question has 2 assumptions: - that the RNC is equally corrupt as the DNC - that Assange has (or could obtain) evidence of that corruption.

If either of these assumptions is incorrect, then your question is meaningless.

Based on your two points, I'm kind of leaning toward the question having some meaning.