Only historically. The calculus is rapidly changing. If the US can't even respect sovereign territory of friendly countries, it doesn't inspire trust that they would repay debt.

This has been repeated elsewhere in this story. What's your thinking here? I assume you mean the non-US members of NATO, but you seem to have forgotten two G7 members if you're equating NATO - US with the EU.

The remaining members include two nuclear-armed states, five or so aircraft carriers, submarines, several large air forces, navies, etc. What would make them unable to project force into the Pacific?

You clearly don't have any idea what you're talking about.

The UK's two aircraft carriers were commissioned in 2017 and 2019 and carry 60 and 48 aircraft respectively.

But what about the other side of the coin - that exports will now become more difficult, because of retaliatory tariffs? How does that help your domestic economy?

Trumps solution seems to be to try to bully other countries into accepting tariffs and not imposing tariffs on American goods. But how is this supposed to work? Quite apart from the appalling moral and fairness aspects of this strategy, trashing the economies of other countries is a bad idea, because you want other countries to be wealthy so they can buy stuff from you.

Free trade has built the modern Western world, and has already made the US the world's leading economic superpower. I can't even see what Trump is trying to achieve.

Examples include clubs for walking / running / cycling / scuba clubs etc. It doesn't have to be physical activity, but since you need exercise anyway, then you might as well get those endorphins whilst socialising.

Hardly relevant. If you control guns better, you get fewer illegal weapons as well. Most of the murders in Europe are committed by illegal weapons as well.

> Banning legal weapons wouldn't reduce crime

Of course it would - see the reduction in gun violence in countries where this has been implemented.

> Besides, USA is not a good example. According to Wikipedia [1], high murder rate statistics in the USA are skewed due to the overrepresentation of one specific part of the population

Oh. You're one of those.

It's a peculiarly American thing to try first to look to race to try to understand something, when there are more salient correlations.

Presumably since Black Americans are overrepresented as victims of gun violence, you'd like to see a significantly higher proportion carrying guns?

Since you bring up Europe, I can give you a counterexample of Switzerland, which is armed to the teeth and still has a significantly lower homicide rate than the USA. The same applies to Canada. Even some countries with prevalent illegal guns are not even close to the USA. Heck, there's a war in Ukraine, guns are everywhere, and still, there's a very low homicide rate.

> Oh. You're one of those.

One of which? Say it or shut up. Or are you one of these? ;)

> It's a peculiarly American thing to try first to look to race to try to understand something, when there are more salient correlations.

I'm not even an American. But given the above counterexamples, it's clear that the availability of legal guns is not the only, and probably not the biggest deciding factor for high homicide rates.

Want to understand the cause? Open a Wikipedia page, look at the stats, and identify the fact that most of the homicides in the USA can be tracked down to some specific population. That's not racist, since facts can't be racist. You won't reduce the homicide rate by ignoring the facts.

> Presumably since Black Americans are overrepresented as victims of gun violence, you'd like to see a significantly higher proportion carrying guns?

Can you explain that logic? First, if you look at the stats again, most of the Black Americans are killed by the members of their race, probably due to higher exposure to threats.

So yes, Black Americans need legal guns to protect themselves even more than White Americans, since they are more endangered.

He changed his mind on Johnson, but he seems to be of the view that nothing works and that there is nothing for it but to burn everything down and start again according to the Dominic Cummings vision.

Not exactly. I think you need to listen to the interviews.

Dominic Cummins has solid rationale for why he believes what he believes. I would need to listen to them again to remember what he said, but what you are describing was too simplistic.

Also his opinions on Brexit have nothing to do with some of the things he said about how COVID was handled.

> He changed his mind on Johnson, but he seems to be of the view that nothing works and that there is nothing for it but to burn everything down and start again according to the Dominic Cummings vision.

I don't remember him saying that exactly.

I've viewed and read an interminable number of interviews with Cummings.

He decided that a) Brexit was a good idea (we can see how that turned out), b) he decided to help get a Johnson government elected, and c) joined his administration as de facto chief of staff and chief advisor. If that's not a tacit approval of Johnson and his government, then what is? Of course, he backtracked later when it was a disaster.

The statements you have made don't really line up with the interviews I've listened to.

The context around the events and what his involvement was and was not, is important.

You are leaving out key information that he mentioned in many interview appearances.

> He decided that a) Brexit was a good idea (we can see how that turned out)

Without re-litigating everything. It may have been different if the politicians and those that worked for them hadn't frustrated the process. I was genuinely disgusted by the attitudes that many of the politicians had after the Leave won. That was my interpretation of what happened. Your obviously differs.

It also says nothing about the validity of his other statements, which is what I was referring to.

> b) he decided to help get a Johnson government elected

Yes, but the way you are talking about it is omitting events both before and after the 2019 General Election.

Theresa May had been ousted by the Conservative Leadership. Earlier she ran an awful election campaign, squandered a huge lead in the polls and had to form a coalition Government with the DUP to maintain a majority.

Cummins said he was contacted by Johnson because Johnson had a minority government and couldn't call a re-election. His first job was to get Johnson out of that Quagmire, then prepare for re-election. He decided to help Johnson under certain guarantees / conditions. Which tells me that he didn't actually trust Johnson.

He claims to have been gradually forced out by Carrie Johnson and his team shortly after the election.

If you are being hampered by the Prime Minster's wife on the agenda that you are supposed to implement. It is likely to fail.

I've actually experienced something similar in my career where I was being blocked (for political reasons) by another team. It makes getting anything done impossible.

So there is no reason to believe he is lying, back tracking or retconning events.

This is because his statements about Carrie Johnson's involvement line up with other accounts from other people that I've heard during the time period shortly after his departure.

> c) joined his administration as de facto chief of staff and chief advisor. If that's not a tacit approval of Johnson and his government, then what is? Of course, he backtracked later when it was a disaster.

It not about it being an approval or disapproval of his government. Often you must work with people that you would rather not to, to achieve things.

His feelings about the Johnson government doesn't change his the validity of his statements about how Whitehall operate while he was present.

His comments about ossified organisations lines up with my past experience of working in both ossified Public and Private orgs.

His account of the events around COVID match up with the timeline of events, and I re-watched old interviews of him and he hasn't backtracked at all or changed his story around what happened. He has mentioned things he couldn't mention at the time e.g. his residence was broken into and he was advised not to mention this at the time.

I have no reason to not believe him, since his statements match up with both what I have experienced and a known timeline of events.

I think your dislike of Cummins and his involvement with Vote Leave. As a result is clouding your judgement on the validity of his statements about how Boris Johnson behaved and how Whitehall operates.

Generally there is a lot of stuff in his interviews that I've seen that quite honestly changed my opinion of him (which was somewhat negative). I believe he is telling the truth.

Genuinely, how? Give me the best case scenario.

I've already stated my impression of what happened in Parliament leading during that time period, it was obvious that people were being obstructionist and that alone doomed any hope of a positive outcome.

Which is exactly why any answer I give you would be unsatisfactory.

I did a long detailed response in this thread where I spent a lot of time detailing why I believed somebody's assessment of about about Dominic Cummings was incorrect (I actually listened to what he had to say). So I've already have put weight behind my opinions.

Your reply on this topic is essentially leading to a re-litigation of Brexit which happened a decade ago now, which isn't anything to do with Dominic Cumming's observations on how Whitehall worked while he was present during COVID.

Brexit isn't something I wanted to get into, but both you and the other person I was replying to seemed to be focused on Brexit when it isn't the topic of discussion. I made that abundantly clear in my long reply to them.

TBH. You can do a web search or ask an AI the various exit strategies that were present at the time. Many scenarios were proposed before and after the vote. This was discussed to death at the time. Loads has been written about it. Why do I have to summarise something that is easily found via a search engine for you?

Actually it wouldn't. There are many arguments from fringe figures to more mainstream with various rationales. Much has been written about it.

> If you’re not interested in someone’s question then you should probably just ignore it rather than write paragraphs about why you’re not interested in it, but you do you!

I answered your question. The way I answered while a bit sardonic is supposed to make you think a bit. Obviously you don't appreciate it, but it isn't in bad faith.

Not everything has to be some sort of logical back and forth debate to get the point across.

I don't want to start another Brexit debate or even take position on it. However I'd like to point out that the key with Brexit is the plan on what to do afterwards and that is what has been completely lacking.

Whatever one's opinion of Cummings, he did put forward a plan and that plan was never attempted (probably too bold, shall we say, for politicians to touch it). I am not commenting on whether that would have worked or not, but at least he put forward a plan and strategy. On the other hand, Bojo's "plan" for Brexit seemed to have been limited to becoming PM...

Anyone can propose a brave or bold course of action. It’s very rare these people have any idea how to actually execute their plans.

Regarding Cummins, Why exactly? Dominic Cummins is articulate, seems to be quite intelligent and seems to be very fact/data orientated. I've also heard him describe how he would action particular policy.

Therefore I find it hard to believe he had didn't have any idea on how to execute his plans.

Increasingly I see people offering simplistic solutions that don’t even pass basic smell tests.

And then when you point out the obvious flaws the response is that you just have to be brave or take a risk.

But I do agree - we seem to be in a world full of intractable problems and doing something may be better than nothing.

I think that the UK won't solve its issues until it gets a PM with a bold plan and great leadership, whatever side they may come from.

> This particular article is an opinion piece from last April by "the world's oldest surviving anarchist publication" (apparently). I'm not sure why it deserves front page HN status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_(British_newspaper)

British Anarchism isn't the American Right?

Concern for free speech traditionally cuts across the left-right divide, as it should. Sadly, there's been a greater erosion of it on the left than the right in recent years, despite the absolute centrality of free speech rights to key progressive causes: abolitionism, civil rights, gay rights, etc. At the same time that the left got softer on free speech, the right had a series of 'are we being shadow-banned?' scandals, which increased the importance of free speech to the right.

Twenty years ago the position was roughly reversed with the Iraq war, the PATRIOT Act, 'free speech zones', etc. Arguably, that same reversal might be happening now with Gaza, ICE etc.

In my ideal world, we all love free speech, but in the real world, it seems to zig zag across the spectrum to the people not currently in power. I suppose an understandable reflection of its value in standing up to power.

There are absolutely issues with the police focusing more on "crime online" such as people posting or saying offensive things, I do think that saying something outright offensive to the benefit of nobody is a net bad for society but instead of punishing say British people for "wrong think" I think the police force should be really investigating where this kind of stuff comes from, Foreign influence bot farms ect and enact legal removal of protection to ensure that people when they say such online in a public manner are actually people

Those with opposing views also tend to find themselves rate limited - dropped two comments on this story and now being told I'm posting too fast (even after going away for 60 mins)

It is scary how Trump has really taken over America. This war on European ideals is directly from Trump and Vance in the Whitehouse. Americans seem to be loving it.

I think a better assessment of how well you've evolved as a programmer is how simple you can make the code. It takes real intelligence and flair to simplify the problem as much as possible, and then write the code to be boringly simple and easy to follow by a junior developer or AI agent.

If you're wielding increasingly clever programming techniques, then you're evolving in the wrong direction.

But even in complex applications, there's still truth to the idea that your code will get simpler over time. Mostly because you might come up with better abstractions so that at least the complex bit is more isolated from the rest of the logic. That way, each chunk of code is individually easier to understand, as is the relationship between them, even if the overall complexity is actually higher.

Let me tell you about a key method in the root pricing class for the derivs/credit desk of a major international bank that was all very clever ... and wrong ... as was its sole comment ... and not entirely coincidentally that desk has gone and its host brand also...

At my job we're disqualifying candidates who don't use enough unnecessary classes. I didn't use them, but they proceeded with my interview because I happened to use some other tricks that showed good knowledge of C++. I think the candidate who just wrote the code to solve the task was the best solution, but I'm not in charge of hiring.

Without revealing the actual interview task, let's pretend it was to write a program that lowpass filters a .wav file. The answer we're apparently looking for is to read the input into a vector, FFT it, zero out the second half, unFFT it, and write the output file. And you must have a class called FFT, one called File, FrequencyDomainFile, and InverseFFT. Because that's simple logical organization of code, right? Meanwhile, the actual simple way to do it is to open the input and output files, copy the header, and proceed through the file one sample at a time doing a convolution on a ring buffer. This latter way involves less code, less computation, less memory, and is all-around better. If you think the ring buffer is too risky, you can still do a convolution over the whole file loaded into memory, and still come out ahead of the FFT solution.

But if you do it this way, we think you didn't use enough abstraction so we reject you. Which is insane. Some time after I got this job, I found out I would have also been rejected if not for a few thoughtful comments, which were apparently some of the very few signals that "this guy knows what he's doing and has chosen not to write classes" rather than "this guy doesn't know how classes work."

I think you've unwittingly bought into your hiring team's fallacy that classes are somehow essential to "abstraction". They are not. Wikipedia:

> Abstraction is the process of generalizing rules and concepts from specific examples, literal (real or concrete) signifiers, first principles, or other methods. The result of the process, an abstraction, is a concept that acts as a common noun for all subordinate concepts and connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category.[1]

The fundamental abstraction in computer programs is the function. A class is principally a means of combination that sometimes incidentally creates a useful (but relatively complex) abstraction, by modeling some domain object. But the most natural expression of a "generalized rule" is of course the thing that takes some inputs and directly computes an output from them.

Of course, we also abstract when we assign semantics to some part of the program state, for example by using an enumeration rather than an integer. But in that case we are doing it in reverse; we have already noticed that the cases can be generalized as integers, and then explicitly... enumerate what it is that we're generalizing.

(The reason that "FFT" etc. classes are so grating is that the process of that computation hardly makes sense to model; the input and output do, but both of these are just semantic interpretations of a sequence of values. You could staple a runtime "time-domain" or "frequency-domain" type to those sequences; but the pipeline is so simple that there is never a real opportunity for confusion, nor reason for runtime introspection. I almost wonder if the hiring team comes from a Java background, where classes are required to hold the code?)

If I were writing the convolution, it would still probably involve quite a few functions, because I like to make my functions as short as feasible, hewing closely to SRP. Perhaps the ring buffer would be a class — because that would allow a good way to separate the logic of accessing the underlying array slots that make the ring buffer work, from the logic of actually using the ring buffer to do the convolution.

(I'm not sure offhand what you'd need to convolve with to get the same result as "zeroing out the second half" of the FFT. I guess a sinc pulse? But the simple convolutions I'd think of doing to implement "low-pass filter" would certainly have a different frequency characteristic.)

We have given extra points to a candidate for having an FFT class even though it should obviously be a function. And the comments clearly indicated that candidate simply thought everything should be a class and was skeptical of things not being classes.