Maybe this is breaking news to you that supreme Court justices receive gifts but a quick Google search will reveal news articles going back 10 plus years that talk about this. This is well known that supreme Court justices have received gifts many of them extremely lavish by normal person standards.
There is constantly investigations into the justices. Literally every opinion that they publish is scrutinized. If a traditionally liberal Justice all of a sudden ruled in an extremely conservative manner that would like people's hair on fire. So the investigations are constant and the fact that the justices rule extremely consistently is strong evidence that whatever gifts they're given do not influence them to rule opposite of their constitutional understanding.
What you do see in other areas such as Congress is that money buys votes. That is a well demonstrated fact. It is so common and so well demonstrated people ignore it at this point. You cannot find any evidence that the supreme Court justices are ruling inconsistent with their past stated constitutional understandings and inconsistent with their past rulings. That's why in all of these hit pieces there is never anything brought up about corruption and buying of justices. If there was even a shred of evidence that Clarence Thomas vote on the supreme Court could be bought it would be front and center on every page. Instead we get nonsense hit pieces of one of the most corrupt political bodies Congress pointing fingers at one of the most consistent government bodies.
Because you can disagree with how the justices rule on issues but the supreme Court justices are exceedingly consistent in how they rule. That is direct evidence that either votes have been bought for many decades and prior to when they were nominated to the supreme Court or that these gifts don't influence. I don't think there's a tin foil hat big enough to think that people are able to predict potential supreme Court justices decades before they even made a name for themselves and started buying them off on mass hoping they'll make the supreme Court.
> You cannot find any evidence that the supreme Court justices are ruling inconsistent with their past stated constitutional understandings and inconsistent with their past rulings.
Yes, we can, and so could you if you were actually curious about the matter. You're actually demonstrating the exact same kind of "motivated reasoning" that afflicts the court.
Kavanaugh and Alito have both changed their position on stare decisis, going from "settled law" to "egregiously wrong" when it suited them in Dobbs. Kavanaugh changed his attitude on the rights of religious minorities.
There are many many more examples, for anyone not inclined to cherry-pick and turn a blind eye. Stop demanding ever more proof from other people, just because you haven't even bothered to study the reality yourself. Prove your own points or stop making these sweeping claims that are, frankly, tantamount to lies.
BTW, before you add strawman to the list of your crimes against curious discussion, nobody is saying that justices can't change their minds. They can and should, as circumstances or understanding change. Even long-standing precedents have been set aside this way, and correctly so. However, the recent changes in attitude seem suspiciously sudden and arbitrary, and go to the heart of each justice's claimed judicial philosophy (often the one that got them through confirmation). As Kagan said in her dissent on Dobbs, nothing has changed about the case or issue itself; all that has changed is the composition of the court, and that's a poor basis for such a momentous decision.
Again, we can't read minds. Maybe there have been several once-in-a-lifetime changes of heart all at once. OTOH, even if we consider such an incredibly unlikely coincidence, the court's recent decisions are far more consistent with a particular partisan agenda than with any recognizable judicial philosophy - even a flawed one. That's what sets them apart from any other court at least during my lifetime.
Not the same thing. You're comparing the relationship between a fake version of an artwork and the artwork itself to that between two digital objects both of which are derivative of a third thing. The third thing is the analog to the artwork, making the metaphor unusable
Your like ironic actual point is well taken but I just wanted to note that even without the irony this is actually a very cool thought provoking question and I couldn't answer it at first.
One hint is that some jurisdictions, including France, have a law that says that merely breaking the spirit of the law is also illegal. Other countries, especially dictatorships, are less textbook about legal interpretation. In other words, if you wanna play with loopholes, do it in the US and similar countries.
> And he also hasn't beaten the market in over a decade.
You say that like it's an accurate condemnation of Buffett's investment skill.
A 30% - or higher - average annual return like the old days means Berkshire would have to go from a $636 billion market cap to a $8.7 trillion market cap in one decade. Yeah right.
Berkshire no longer competes with the market. It is the market. The larger you get, the harder it is to keep high returns going; Berkshire got really, really large. In terms of value it's also overwhelmingly an operating holding company, not an investment portfolio. The investment side of the business is not what drives Berkshire's stock higher, and hasn't been the primary driver for decades, operating results are.
First we have to ask, "why does programming get harder as the project goes on?"
Let's say you are designing a system - any kind of system - with the philosophy that everything should be connected to everything else. Your first part goes in quick with no connections. Your second part goes in quick and has one connection. Your third part has to be connected in two places for it to work right, but that's not a problem. Your hundredth part has to be connected in a ninety nine places for it to work right, and now you're spending more time wiring than you are on making parts.
Then we ask, "what can we do when that happens?"
You have to put effort into the design of the system, reassigning duties and studying the nature of the problem it's solving, so that you lay down the connections along the true contours of the map, and not between every single component. Afterwards the next component you add has to be connected only to the three other things it's actually related to and you're back in business. This results in a period of time with no new features or even bugfixes, but afterwards you move faster.
Then we ask, "why do people call it debt?"
Because you pay interest on it when you have it, you run it up when you're short, and you better have a plan to pay it down or else you will go out of business.
Two ways, I think they're easy to understand but I have no experience in teaching:
Technical debt is like not cleaning your house to save a bit of time everyday. When you actually have to clean it, it's going to take longer than the time you saved. And until it's not clean, everything you do will be a bit worse because the house isn't clean.
"Remember when you were a student and didn't do the dishes, and then when you finally did them everything was dry and sticky and stinky, and it took you a lot of time to wash everything and you felt terrible? That's dishes debt. Technical debt is the same. When you make a change, you produce dirt in the codebase, and if you don't or can't take the time to clean every time, dirt accumulates."
You know how you're working on a project, and everything mostly works but some stuff isn't quite up to spec, and you swear you'll fix it later because you have a lot of stuff to do? This is that, compounded over a few decades.
You're patching over problems with short term solutions instead of investing the time and effort to fix it "the right way".
Like when you need to fix all the support columns in your building, but instead of spending millions to take them down one at a time and replace the corroding rebar inside, you just patch over the exterior cracks. They will look fine from the outside and get the job done on a day to day basis, but they hide structural problems and one day that debt will come due. Most of the time it's in the form of a giant project to finally fix everything, but sometimes it's catastrophic failure.
It’s a pretty broad term, but I’d define it as properties of a software system that make it hard to modify/maintain safely and easily. And it’s fixable, but takes an investment of time/effort/money to fix. The debt metaphor is that it can make sense to have a bit of this, but too much becomes crippling.
Often the most maintainable solution is simple and elegant, but it takes a lot of refactoring to implement, so a hacky, complex solution is implemented instead, because it’s faster/easier to implement. Such solutions tend to either contain bugs, or lead to bugs when built upon, and a lot of security vulnerabilities are basically bugs in hairy parts of systems that are hard to understand.
> Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt, but can be also related to other technical endeavors) is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.
This is it. It's not just "stuff that's not perfect". The term technical debt refers to things the business accepts as debt to be repaid later for more as the price of getting a feature out of the door sooner.
It's a quick fix that will take more time to fix later than it would to do it properly now but typically gets done to meet a deadline because time is of the essence currently for some reason.
There is significant cognitive load in understanding the code and what it does and why it does it that way etc. Keeping all the important bits in one mind is challenging and a lot of the little fixes can lose sight of the big picture in a way that comes at a cost and, over time, this can really add up.
Over time, different people may work on the code and have different reasons why they made different choices and at some point it may all stop playing well together. Then there comes a point where someone needs to try to reconcile all the different bits and understand what needs to happen and why and rebuilding the entire catalog of goals, features, etc. in one mind at one time so someone actually understands it all and gets it right is a substantial future cost that only grows as you keep delaying that step.
(From one lay person to another -- I do write code, mostly html, and run some web projects, mostly blogs and Reddits, and spend too much time on HN. So technical debt isn't alien to my experience though I'm not really a programmer.)
1. Knows the wider requirements but isn't involved in the implementation. They can't fully specify what's needed without doing the actual implementation; the map is not the territory.
2. Is told the broad requirements but probably can't grasp the things they aren't told in the imperfect spec. So under time pressure, in good faith, they do the simplest workaround possible.
3. Is given the next set of requirements. Instead of re-engineering the original design, under time pressure and in good faith, they add a workaround for the workaround.
Each new workaround is "tech debt".
When you add the next feature you now have to deal with multiple levels of complexity not in the original spec.
Understanding the actual implementation now takes more time than expected. The chances are that no one fully does, which leads to further mistakes and workarounds. So more tech debt.
Either you pay the debt down and re-engineer or you pay the compounding interest forever.
...and so on. Each new level of complexity gets harder and harder to understand and debug because no one really knows how the real design, held in the actual works.
When you cook, you make food, that's the primary result. You also produce waste, dirty dishes and general disorder. This secondary result is tech debt.
You can cook a bunch of times ignoring these secondary results but over time cooking will be slower and of worse quality due to the mess and at some point it will be impossible (too dirty, no usable pots and pans, etc).
its like not combing or washing your hair to save time but it ends up turning into dreadlocks and then it still kinda serves as hair but is much harder to work with and untangle into other hairstyles.
"tech debt" is when you decide that you will cut a corner to build something.
If you did it when building a plane, and it killed people, you would go to prison, but in the technology industry, this is acceptable as "the cost of being first"
I presume you were not trying to be ironic with this request (given how you chose the easy option of inconveniencing others rather than Google/Wikipedia)
Or, maybe they thought someone on HN would be able to explain it better than the Wikipedia article. It did not seem like an unreasonable request to me at all.
In my opinion, no, not really. Hard work could be necessary but not sufficient, or contingently necessary. Or the success criterion could be defined in a way that obscures the link to hard work. This is from a review of Taleb's The Black Swan:
As Cicero pointed out, we all suffer from 'survivorship bias': that is, we confine our evidence to that adduced from those few who succeed or survive, and ignore the silent evidence of all those who didn't make it. The graveyard is silent, the awards ceremony is noisy.
Well said! I came here to say this. Founders of successful businesses usually are not exceptional geniuses. They often happen to be in the right place at the right time, or they steal ideas from other people when the business is too young to be worth litigating over. See, e.g., Microsoft, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Or they get government assistance at a critical time. E.g., Elon Musk. There are so many species of selection bias at work here; I totally agree with your comment about reading "Ten morning habits of billionaires."
Also, the idea that one should be "constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're doing," _while_ trying to try hard and trying to do well, is insane. You can't be the CEO and the ditch-digger at the same time. You have to be able to inhabit both perspectives as _separate_.
That said, it was an interesting read, albeit a self-consciously unhelpful one. It was helpful and humbling to read that you just think some things are easy for you because they were taught at a low level in school. I can adapt that same logic to suggest that this author isn't imparting serious, deep knowledge about the true nature of hard work and success.
Standing and merits are both terms of art. Merits essentially means whether one side wins or not. Standing OTOH is a preliminary matter like jurisdiction. If the court lacks jurisdiction over the defendant or the subject matter of the dispute, they kick the case on jurisdiction without reaching the merits. If the plaintiff doesn't have standing, they kick the case on standing without reaching the merits.
Your confusion is 100% reasonable because there is _conceptual_ overlap between standing and "who wins." For example, one aspect of standing is "injury-in-fact." That means "you suffered a harm recognized by the legal system." If the court says no standing because no injury-in-fact, to a layperson that's similar to saying "stop crying, go home." Which sounds a lot like saying "you lose the case."
No they haven't. That's why it's breaking news when they get discovered.
> In my entire life I have never seen any evidence that for supreme Court justices things influenced their ruling.
How would you possibly know what this looks like when, as you concede, there never have been meaningful investigations into the justices?
> The history of the justices predicts their current rulings and does it amazingly well.
No better than the history of their acceptance of lavish gifts from ideologically motivated rich people.