If Minnesota or California can protect the rights of their citizens, then good for them, but it does not protect LGBT individuals in Texas or the Midwest.
Yes, but Hacker News is not exactly a random slice of American voters. I would expect to find some, but not many, Trump supporters who are going to find and use a site like this.
In order for it to be a legitimate alternative, as opposed to only being of interest to ideologues and academics, shouldn't it actually be competitive with existing technologies in areas like fees, user experience, or speed? If it was better at some and worse at others, it would provide a legitimate alternative with a different set of trade-offs, but for it to lose in every category doesn't really make it seem like it can be an alternative to the centralized banking system in a real and useful way.
A well designed fiat currency system would not rely on the moral code of humans, but rather on having created an incentive structure such that the actors in power are pushed towards doing the correct thing. We have not fully accomplished this, but it is a state that we can strive towards. It is important to note that fiat currency is not based on the idea that we can reliably find and promote saints to run it (at least in theory).
Regarding the trustworthiness of social institutions, there are mechanisms for creating more trustworthy systems on top of less trustworthy parts. A simple example is TCP. It is a leaky abstraction at times, yes, but it is more trustworthy in the face of adversity than UDP is.
This is not to say that our current batch of social institutions are even as trustworthy as TCP, just that it is possible to build institutions that are, and that we have a lot more experience as a civilization with debugging social institutions than we do debugging software. Thus, I do not think it is paradoxical to lean on social institutions to reign in raw human nature.
The documentation for Effect Managers is basically "If you don't already know how to make one, you shouldn't be making one." I get that it's an "expert feature", but I want to learn and try anyways! I've been learning the basics by looking at the WebSocket library, and reading the compiler errors when I broke it in different ways. The compilers errors were surprisingly helpful, but some documentation would be nice.
A related anecdote: One of the major reasons I decided to give elm a try was when Richard Feldman was giving a talk about writing Dream Writer in elm, and he got to a point where the performance was noticeably slowing down. He started trying to make it better by 'sprinkling a few `lazy`s through the view code', and then stopped because that had magically made everything super fast again.
I have a hobby project that uses Elm on the front end with Elixir and Phoenix on the back end, and that has been working really well. Elm's event machine like architecture goes well with Phoenix's native support for channels, although the elm library for Phoenix Channels is definitely not production ready.
It has been a very bizarre experience having dynamic typing on the back end and static on the front end, though. Everything feels slightly topsy turvy.
As someone who has started to explore (and enjoy) elm, I have to say that speed is not one of the major selling points for me. Rather, seeing that it has at least competitive speed is just dodging a potential deal breaker. It could smother me in kittens and do my taxes, but if a framework only renders three frames per second, I definitely won't use it. Elm being in the same ballpark (slightly better? slightly worse? doesn't matter) means that I can see if the other features of the language entice me to try it out. They did, I did, and I really like it (even though apps that use random a lot end up being structured in a way that is strange to my brain).
It would be hard to detect the best time to deliver the message. Naive approaches could get it almost exactly wrong, as one of the times when I really don't want to be interrupted is when I'm just sitting and reading something, and not really interacting much. I'm sure there are better ways of determining if the user isn't focusing on anything, and maybe some of them would work well as a trigger for delivering messages. That would be pretty nifty.
It seems like the "Watch" feature would actually take care of this. If both people are watching the same chat, they would both get real time notifications, and could chat in real time. The app limits how many threads you can be watching, though, trying to force you to actively opt-in to things that you want to pay attention to because they are directly relevant to what you are doing right now.
I actually am struggling to see the real relevance of the military examples there at the end. It seems to be there to show that stubbornness and/or courage results in winning (to rather grossly simplify). But it should be obvious that neither stubbornness or courage are enough for military victory, and it's not too hard to find examples where the opposite was what brought victory. In fact, we don't even need to leave the Punic wars. Hannibal's winning move at Cannae was in fact to have the center of his battle formation not be stubborn, and fall back, drawing the Romans into an encircling trap. Fabian's strategy was seen as cowardly, but as squozzer notes, Hannibal didn't destroy Rome, while Rome did eventually destroy Carthage.
The core insight here, while interesting, ended up being much more generic than I was expecting it to be after the initial examples. It seems to boil down to "There exist mechanisms by which a small group can either grow to dominate a larger group, or have their behavioral norms spread to outside of their group, or otherwise punch above their weight. These mechanisms involve a rule or circumstance that is asymmetric."
It is an interesting principle, and useful to keep in mind, but I do not think it really supports all of the points he makes with it, or justify some of the language used. For example, I do not think that all drinks being Kosher, or a high prevalence of halal butcher shops, merit being described as "dictatorships". In the examples that would merit such strong language, such as the possibility of an anti-democratic religion dominating a democratic society and culture, I do not think that the Power of Asymmetry Principle leads where he tries to go. Specifically, he says that we need to be "more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities". However, if we examine the situation while keeping the power of asymmetry in mind, all we need to do is look for the asymmetry that would give this group its power, and take that away. In this case, the ability to use violence to enforce religious rules, specifically the death penalty for apostasy. Without the threat of violence, fundamentalist Islam would look much more like fundamentalist Christianity, trying (with various levels of success) to enforce its norms through political and interpersonal channels, but far from an unstoppable juggernaut.
You might be able to approximate the triangle in line by using slash and backslash. 2/3\ = 8. 2/\8 = 3. /3\8 = 2. Not nearly as pretty, but if you're familiar with the triangle in a hand written context, it might get the point across.
Being too successful is of course a good problem for github to have, but for the individual maintainers, it's still a source of frustration that can lead to maintainer burnout. If too many people get frustrated and leave, then it can quickly turn from a problem of too many people to having too few.
I agree that that's probably how it started, but it seems that once the cultural expectation has been set, it's hard for a single project maintainer to set a different custom just for their own project. People are going to use the conventions and communication methods that they learn elsewhere, even if you say not to in the contributing guidelines document. You might be able to get individuals to stop doing it in your project by asking them directly, but then each person has done it at least once, and you've had to ask each person to change their normal habits.
Besides, as they note in the letter, there is a valid and valuable purpose to these communications, it would just be better if they were in a different place than clogging up the comment thread.