Why do you say that? The NRA is one of the single most powerful special interest groups in the USA. The tech industry doesn't even come close to the NRA's lobbying results.
He wrote "results", so I think he targeted the fact that weapons are still essentially freely available in the USA (at least it looks that way from over here in Europe). This can be seen as really effective lobbying given how many times it has been argued that weapons shouldn't be so easily available anymore without any changes to existing laws.
> weapons are still essentially freely available in the USA (at least it looks that way from over here in Europe)
They're really not. Automatic weapons made after 1986 are banned; automatic weapons made before that date are extremely expensive and require permission of local law enforcement and revocation of one's Fourth Amendment rights. Firearms may no longer be sold by mail, as they were for most of our nation's history. Firearms may not be sold by private parties across state lines. All commercial sales require a background check. In many states it's illegal to sell a firearm privately; in some states you can't even legally give a weapon to a family member as a gift. Many states and some localities impose unreasonable restrictions on magazine size and cosmetic features. Some states impose registration requirements, which means that law enforcement has the ability to confiscate all legal weapons at will.
> This can be seen as really effective lobbying given how many times it has been argued that weapons shouldn't be so easily available anymore without any changes to existing laws.
I think the conditions above indicate how ineffective the pro-gun lobby has been, given that almost none of it is constitutional.
(although it's worth noting that for most of its history the NRA was a pro-gun-control organisation)
the judiciary is bound by precedent, and there are 5-4 conservative Supreme Court rulings from the 80s to the early 2000s that cemented the status quo into place.
With Trump/Pence as POTUS the judiciary will be hamstrung for years barring a truly massive public groundswell behind reversing some of those decisions - if that happened, you might see a single judge flip. Whether that's enough depends on who dies before 2021.
Technique as old as dirt. My thesis advisor used it in the 60s and 70s.
His favored approach had one artificial limitation, perhaps a remnant of the age: he limited the size of source files in bytes to some power of 2. This let him represent each token (incl. white space/new lines/comments) as a pair of fixed-size integers indexing into the file bytes. The tokenized file is an array of those pairs and the concrete syntax tree is a tree where leaf nodes are indices into the array of tokens.
Suitable for syntax-directed code generation, control-flow graph generation, static analysis, linting, pretty-printing. Super memory compact and even has an upper bound on memory footprint. The caveat is that the source language does need to support composing a "module" out of multiple files because of the limit on source file size.
I'm sure it's as old as dirt, but I don't think there is a good name for it. "Concrete Syntax Tree" is not a good name for the reasons pointed out in the article.
Do you have reference for this? I saw this problem mentioned in the write-up on the ZINC Abstract Machine by Xavier Leroy (author of OCaml). But I don't know of other papers that talk about this.
Also I believe that most open source tools do NOT have this functionality. Look at lib2to3. It's bolted on -- not exactly a clean design. Most open source front ends are not designed for tooling like Clang is.
My source is in-person conversations with a real-life human being, and working on one of his codebases that employed the technique. If you want to look up his work, his name is Bill McKeeman. I personally have never felt compelled to find secondary sources when I had primary sources.
Edit: I'm personally not surprised that open-source codebases don't employ this technique. Lots of great PL work was done for private companies until the 90s and while lots of work was published in papers and books, precious few open-source PL communities historically drew from academia. I'm sure you know the counter-examples.
Perhaps you shouldn't be asserting yourself as an authority on what did or did not happen if you are too young to have experienced it in the first place.
I'm very young, only 27, and know that I missed a full decade of early internet culture and can't speak to it. Even given that, I had a 14.4 and fondly remember downloading a music video for hours. (No porn on the modems personally, I think I was barely adolescent when we upgraded to cable)
a) The government has already illustrated through Flint and other incidents that they are very capable of completely screwing water up as well. And when things go wrong, unlike in the private sector nobody seems to ever get punished in any way.
b) I misspoke in one way, the government does kind of innovate in providing water. Take their decision to mass dose basically the entire country with fluoride. At best, fluoride's main benefits are for young kids about 4-10 years old in preventing child cavities. The point isn't to argue the health benefits of the substance, but to point out that they're medicating everybody without tailoring the dose to what's necessary for the individual. What's crazier than compulsory mass medication of an industrial byproduct that doesn't take into account individual dosage?
c) You presumably ingest food, created by non-government sources everyday. They look to cut costs all of the time. How often do they really screw up? And when they do, they immediately have to work to fix the issue and they're punished severely on top of that.
I assume it is because financing is profitable and locks drivers into a work commitment. This doesn't necessarily imply that it makes long term financial sense for the driver.
Just to throw it out there, I much prefer sitting at my desk, but I make it a point to spend some time wandering around the office/outside the building for at least a few minutes every hour.
I'm also not a developer though, so I don't need to be in focus mode for long periods of time.
If hacker news doesn't stem the growth of trolling (which has pushed out plenty of my friends) then it probably will eventually "shut down" new signups for a while.
