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Dominic Cummings is the Chief-of-staff of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He managed the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, the primary campaign during the UK referendum on European Union membership (campaigning successfully to leave the EU).

His success in Vote Leave is down to a targeted digital campaign on Facebook using the services of Cambridge Analytica / AggregateIQ. These are the root actions that sparked Facebooks turmoil around election advertisements that may again affect the 2020 US Presidential campaign.

Cummings is an anarchist and has said he wants to tear down the UK Civil Service, getting rid of mandarins and long-term civil servants, and replace it with something else. This blog post is part of that change.

It's government by data science, perhaps technocratic. With a governing majority of 80 seats, by December 2019 election, he thinks he -- the government -- has space to do controversial or unpopular things, and tearing down the civil service is something he believes is necessary.


Slight clarification: he's an anarchist in the sense of wanting to subvert the existing established order and ignoring rules and conventions along the way, not in the sense of rejecting hierarchies and advocating self-governed societies. Unless I'm completely mistaken.


The first no-castling match has already taken place earlier this month as part of the London Chess Classic

https://www.londonchessclassic.com/press/lcc19_pr5.htm

The current castling rule was an innovation of the Italians when the game was brought in from India. It, along with pawns moving two squares on their first move, ushered in the Italian School of Chess, known for its slashing attacks, sparkling sacrifices and all out aggression.

However, the Indian form of the game did have something like castling, the king could move from its start square to g2, where a fianchetto'ed bishop would normally sit.


>known for its slashing attacks, sparkling sacrifices and all out aggression

Interestingly this goes against the entire point of the article, that castling results in defensive play which results in draws.


Step one of fixing bad laws, or abused loopholes in existing laws is demonstrating the extent to which it's being abused. That way we can equate the lost tax revenue into something more identifiable. Stories like this give us the evidence we need that something in our tax laws isn't working.

These figures published are part of the public record of the company.


That is untrue. When IE6 first arrived it was on par with Mac IE 5.2 in terms of web standards support. It was a great browser for its time.

The problem with IE6 is Microsoft declaring victory in the Browser war with Netscape, and IE6 development stopped. For years until Firefox and Chrome threatened Microsoft's browser dominance.


The Web, the iPlayer app.


Bobby Fischer played a lot of Blitz, notably:

* 1958 trip to Moscow chess club he took on all comers, including Petrosian in blitz: https://nezhmet.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/the-fabulous-50s-fi...

* 1962 Stockholm, Geller pulls a trick on Fischer suggesting he play his "unknown" compatriot when Fischer challenged him to blitz. The unknown was Leonid Stein, a legendary blitz player, but largely unknown outside of the USSR: http://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2012/03/16/bobbys-blitz-che...

* 1970 Herceg Novi Blitz tournament, held very soon after The World vs USSR match. Winner was a certain Bobby Fischer: https://www.365chess.com/tournaments/Herceg_Novi_blitz_1970


> It's currently +3-18=14. That's 3 wins for Caruana's position, 18 wins for Carlsen's, and 14 draws. That's about as decisive a position as you can get in high-level chess.

Except that +3 would mean three chess engines, supposedly stronger than Carlsen, have managed to lose Carlsen's position. That's eye-opening, and perhaps justifies Carlsen offering a draw than risking being in that +3 column.

Caruana was supposedly without counter-play. +3 is far too high a score to support that claim.


There's one important nuance here. Those machines are playing against super human defense. In human chess there are countless positions that computers can easily defend whereas even the best players in the world would lose nearly every time. Finding only moves in very complex positions is not really that hard for most modern programs. Doing this over and over for humans, let alone with limited time and with mental fatigue a very real issue, is just not possible to consistently do.

This position hadn't reached that critical of a juncture yet, but that's largely because Magnus just started winging it long before the final position. His position was much stronger earlier on. But even in the final position he was very much the attacker and Fabiano's clock was starting to run low. In practical chess, Fabiano definitely faced an uphill battle to try to draw that position.


If US corporations hike their prices up to cover the tax, that would increase the competitiveness of local companies who have already been paying their fair share of tax. Perhaps that's the encouragement governments need to stimulate the local economy further.


Sounds like tariffs. If you want that - fine it makes sense. Just don't bully others to apply tax rate of your choosing on terms you want on business outside your country.


Just about everything the EU does these days is blatant protectionism. This short sighted focus on punishing successful foreign competitors vs growing strong local companies just weakens Europe in the long run and exacerbates the very problem they are trying to solve.


European union doesn’t let members decide on tarifs on their own borders.


Atomic CSS was used on Yahoo sites, since the Marissa Meyer level. Apparently on a few of their properties. Hard to assess whether it was a failure or not. Considering their websites were a negative asset, I doubt the use of Atomic CSS was a major component of that, there were definitely bigger problems.


It puzzles me why these Atomic CSS based systems use various mnemonic systems instead of plain English which is much more understandable. I'm not a fan of human-powered text compression.


It's based on how often you use a helper. For instance, changing letter spacing is verbose (https://tailwindcss.com/docs/letter-spacing) as it's not something you use that often. Tweaking spacing is very common and "padding-horizontal-2" uses an awful amount of characters.


In what context is this "an awful amount of characters" an issue? GZip compression is fairly standard these days, and languages based on plain english (or similar languages) has a better level of compression than random text because of repetitive nature of sequences of characters.

I can't believe that mnemonic based languages are easier and more readable than something closer to a natural language. And with the assumption that code is written for humans first, computers second, what is the point of inventing a language that's less readable than the one it's trying to replace? CSS compresses particularly well, as every Atomic CSS based framework tends to point out on it's landing page!


It's an awful amount of characters once you multiply it. For instance, the first example (https://tailwindcss.com/docs/what-is-tailwind/) would be twice as big:

    <img class="block h-16 sm:h-24 rounded-full mx-auto mb-4 sm:mb-0 sm:mr-4 sm:ml-0"

    <img class="block height-16 small:height-24 rounded-full margin-horizontal-auto margin-bottom-4 small:margin-bottom-0 small:margin-right-4 small:margin-left-0"
After spending more than, say, two hours with Tailwind you'll probably read the first line much faster than second one (since there's less to read and you don't need to scroll). Humans are very good at pattern recognition, and you'll quickly read "mb" as a symbol in itself and not as "m[argin] b[ottom]".

> I can't believe that mnemonic based languages are easier and more readable than something closer to a natural language.

Well, it's worked out pretty well in mathematics. This is not about file size at all. It's about defining an "alphabet" of common concepts.


Ah, I see your issue: you do know you can have whitespace inside attributes? You don't have to clump all the class names on one line. Scanning vertically is quicker than through the horizontal line-noise of both your examples.

    <img class="
        block
        height-16
        small:height-24
        rounded-full
        margin-horizontal-auto
        margin-bottom-4
        small:margin-bottom-0
        small:margin-right-4
        small:margin-left-0
    ">
This also has the benefit too, that if you use version control line-based diffs to see what's changed, it will highlight the specific css class name that changed. Handy if you need to ensure that whenever you change the bottom margin, you can see at a glance whether the small prefixed one has been updated too.

On the other hand if you regularly need that many classes to style an element, perhaps it's a good place to refactor commonly occurring class names into a set, and label that set with a meaningful identifier.

As for mathematical notation, it's about as understandable to me as my understanding of Hanzi.


It's a decision to optimize write-ability, not readability. Not sure why this is so puzzling.


It's puzzling because the same people then shit on Perl for being "write-only".


I agree with your sentiment. I think this is because half the programmers like mnemonics and the other half prefers English, so no matter what you do people criticize your choice. People call Java verbose and perl write-only.


At that point, why not just write actual CSS?


Because you'll have 29 different margins, 67 different left paddings, etc all over the place. Tailwind allows you to create a consistent design system. CSS was supposed to be "write one class, use it everywhere instead of inlining". Usually it ends up with nobody reusing that class and everyone creating their on in the same codebase. There's an article I don't have a link handy, which explained how ridiculously many classes were used by GitHub/Lab, Airbnb, etc. Now even GitHub have their own utility based CSS system and others are following along, including Bootstrap with their CSS utility classes.


> Because you'll have 29 different margins, 67 different left paddings, etc all over the place.

That's not really the case since SCSS became a thing. If SCSS doesn't help you, Tailwind won't, you can ignore their classes just as you could ignore preset constants.

Honestly, to me it seems like people are just starting "fresh" with a benefit of some experience, and ascribing the benefits of experience to the tool.


I've used SASS for years, and yet switching to tailwind felt reaaally nice. have you tried it for yourself, or are you just assuming that you understand the practical differences?


Tailwind isn't a particularly new invention. I've worked with similar tools developed in-house years ago, and have no desire to do it again, no.


you have that with tailwind too, lol. probably even worse the bigger your app is.


Can you elaborate? I can't agree with you. Tailwind is meant to provide a consistent design system, of which CSS size should never get out of hand (which is the case then using regular CSS). Whenever I use Tailwind, I end up adding maybe 20-30 lines of CSS and I never have to open a CSS (or other sass/less/whatever) ever again. Have you tried Tailwind or you're just assuming what you're saying?


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