But once you surpass roughly 4,000 people per square mile, things inevitably turn blue. Any political heat map shows this. There's a heavy correlation. Surely, urban vs rural is related to red vs blue, no?
Absolutely, which is why breaking up the country geographically wouldn't work. And breaking up the country based on population density seems like a logistical nightmare.
One of my web sites is run by a "bundle exec rails s" in a tmux window on an EC2 instance. New deploy? Run "git pull" (and maybe "rake db:migrate") in tmux pane and restart the "rails s" command. Easy peasy.
I'd make it more complicated and resilient but why?
I still haven't seen a great reason to go NoSQL over, say, Postgres. I'll think about a good application but then realize that it'll be a PITA to do something slightly different than what I first imagined.
Usually the bigger reasons are easier scaling. By taking a different approach to data, it's often easier to scale across data centers etc. The second being the shape of your data. If most requests are simple key/value queries, a much simpler model can work better, more so if you can keep all your data for a given query together (document dbs in particular), this can have performance benefits over a typically normalized database.
Another is when you need read and more specifically write performance that a single system cannot keep up with. When you hit these boundaries, it gets interesting. Sometimes it's just easier to design for such a system up front.
If it's an internal application SQL first is probably fine, if it's SaaS you may want to look at alternatives.
I'd love to use Postgres, but Firebase is really nice in that it provides first class libraries that abstract away the requests and querying, to the point where querying Firestore just feels like calling an async function on your front end. Plus, you don't even have to think about deploying. There's something really great (and risky) about having an always deployed, always ready backend. Also basic user auth is really easy.
If you're doing a long term project, then Postgres makes sense since the deployment/setup costs are one time. But for short projects Firebase is very nice.
All other things being equal, I wouldn't go NoSQL over Postgres.
What makes Firestore interesting to me (not used it in production) is that you can avoid the need for a backend completely. Your normal architecture is Client <-REST-> Backend <-> DB. You can avoid all the deployment and development in the backend by doing the work in the client.
For #1, the master password gets entered in when you need to decrypt the password file, right?
Doesn't that mean that anyone who can read the input stream from your keyboard can decrypt all your passwords?
I mean, I use a password manager because it's the least-shitty way I can think of to not reuse passwords, but to me it's a matter of when and not if some bad guy manages to insert malware into the password manager code and get all the passwords.
I question whether this is really more useful. You'd have to show that advertisers noticed that data was fake, and that they cared, and that they cared enough to pull FB advertising.
To do that, you'd have to get a whole lot of people putting up false data, and to do that, you'd have to make it very easy to do. Which would probably make it detectable (you think your fake data tool will stay off their radar?).
It looks like it doesn't have to read data from a static gist file. It can read from any JSON source, and you can just have the formatting data in the gist.
How so? Stating your thoughts with conviction ends any hope of a reasonable discussion? Maybe if you're afraid of confrontation. For me it's an invitation to debate.
You find labelling people is in invitation to a debate? So if you find yourself in a position where you desperately need a job but upper management says "I think people of race X are <racial slur>" you would take that as an invitiation to a debate? Saying a person is unethical is labelling them. That's what I object to, not debate or confrontation.
San Francisco values gets repeated by Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity, Rush, ... at every opportunity. Sorry to link to Breitbart, but here's Roy Moore ranting on about San Francisco.
Why are you associating those douchebags with the south? Newt I get, but aren't the rest of them in NYC?
The real divide in this country is rural vs. urban. Cities in the south are plenty progressive, and rural areas in the rest of the country are plenty conservative.
I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.
Roy Moore and Newt Gingrich are about as South as South gets and they definitely campaigned against San Francisco values. Newt Gingrich essentially defined the modern Republican Party's approach to campaigning and governing.
First, Roy Moore lost. It wasn't a resounding loss, but he did lose.
Second, acting like an entire region as a monoculture is stupid and unproductive. We're all very, very different, and while there are some trends that are more prevalent in a region, that doesn't mean that the people who believe those things are backwards. Perhaps it means that you just haven't tried to see things from their perspective.
The lack of empathy and the unwillingness to consider that other people have different backgrounds and codes of ethics and a dogmatic insistence that "this way is the right way" is what's killing our cohesion as a country. And, as a whole, I've seen more of the "live and let live" philosophy in Atlanta than in a whole lot of supposedly liberal places.
But it remains that really starting with Gingrich that conservatives have mounted a long media campaign against liberals which has been personified as Pelosi and codewritten as San Francisco values.
The reverse is not the case. This was one sided but it was also Gingrich and Republicans only path to power. It worked as an election strategy but not as a governing philosophy. So if you are complaining about the cohesion of the country, you really should start there.
But I feel like you're blaming the victims. It was actually people like Rupert Murdoch who set up the whole "our culture is being destroyed by PC run amok" thing, and they did it to gin up ratings for Fox News and to gain power.
We're all vulnerable to cultural brainwashing. I think that's part of what the article is complaining about. It's hard to be an iconoclast, especially when you're treated as an immoral person if you dare to think for yourself.
Again, the way to save the country is to call out all demonization of "the other". Of course I call it out when I see it, to the point where my liberal friends think I'm conservative and my conservative friends think I'm liberal.
Fox News dates to 1996. Newt Gingrich (Atlanta suburbs) was already Speaker by then and had been recruiting and training candidates on his methods for close to a decade. He started as a pro-environment wonk Republican back bencher but saw this perfection of Nixon's Southern Strategy as his only path to power.
It's been 35 years since I lived in the Boston area, so this may have changed some -- I certainly hope it has! -- but the ethnic animosities there shocked me, as someone who moved there from the DC area and had the idea that Northern cities would be more tolerant. I moved into an apartment in East Cambridge in 1982, in what was, unbeknownst to me before I got there, a Polish neighborhood, only to learn that a few weeks earlier, a Black residence on the same street had been firebombed.
Please don't personalize or (so to speak) group-ize this here. I know the feelings are strong, but this temptation needs to be resisted because it leads to battle, which is incompatible with thoughtful exchange. You did it again downthread ("you" vs. "we") and it strikes me as no coincidence that this subthread is by far the worst of the ones I've scrolled through so far. Which I'm sure is not your intent and is definitely not all your responsibility—it's just that things predictably happen this way, given such initial conditions.
So here's a nice idea I had that I don't have time to implement:
A specialized debate forum. Basically, two people decide to debate on an issue. They are the featured debaters. They write positions and submit them, and then they try to knock down the other person's positions.
Watchers can comment on specific points they make, annotating them and giving points for them. I imagine a system kind of like RapGenius.
Eventually, in the best case, the best arguments float to the top, and the more common arguments will have a home on the net where people can point to them instead of rehashing them over and over again. Leading to more intelligent discourse and a perfect society.
People should be aware that this does not mean you shouldn't meditate. At least give it a shot. The risk/reward ratio is so heavily skewed toward reward (what are the risks, really?) that you'd be foolish not to try it.
Exactly.
And to paraphrase some other comment read in this thread:
"It's 1000s years that people practice religion, so it must imply that it is good for them".
Mindfulness or meditation is just the usual wave of religion or spiritualism or whatever you want to call it mimetized as something more exotic and powerful.
The peculiar thing is that for the most part the self-professed atheist are the most fervent proponents of this.
So maybe it is true that spirituality is an innate need of the human race...
Eh.. no? Mindfulness is something for which the results of trying it are testable. Pascal's Wager is a gamble about what happens beyond the verifiable. They are fundamentally different.
EDIT: Ok, fine, I'll bite: exactly the same how exactly?
Anti-depressants can cause suicide too: some people are too depressed to even commit suicide, and the anti-depressants give them enough mental energy to commit to that.
That doesn't mean anti-depressants are pseudo-science or a bad idea, it just means their usage must be determined on a case-by-case basis
I'm in Atlanta, and most of us here wouldn't be happy at all living in a "deep south" country.