Osage orange produces wood that is the 2nd hardest in America, behind the live oak. It's exceptionally resistant to decay and insect attack. I've seen osage fence posts that are at least 70 years old and are none the worse for wear. If we could breed a variety that grew straight, it'd be a great source of dense decay resistant timber. Interestingly, the common mulberry is one of its closest relatives, and its wood has similar properties (but usually smaller and not quite as hard / dense). It's too bad there isn't more research being done around osage orange and its potential commercial value. Perhaps genetic modification will help.
If you're looking for some insights into why it's like that, you should make some time to read American Nations [0]. It connects a lot of dots. Probably the best book I read/listened to last year.
Not saying it isn't a complex problem, but you're not exactly helping to enrich the area and stem the likely brain drain. And, I am not judging you or others like you. It's completely rational to avoid suffering and seek out an environment where you can thrive.
Diffusing positive cultural influencers instead of hoarding them in cities or places like SV would probably help. But, I really doubt that's a practical solution. It may just be that we need to build out from the bright spots rather than spread ourselves too thin with a sweeping social experiment. We may be stuck with deserts of backwardness for a while.
"State choice" and urban migration strikes me as similar (albeit with a slower generational period) to school choice. Some areas will attract more "good" students and teachers while others will slouch and drag behind in a fractal failure. How far are we obligated to go? Similar questions came up in the wake of Katrina. Personally, I think replacing vicious cycles with virtuous ones will almost always be a good investment.
> Why use regex? It's much simpler to write a URL validator by hand...
I actually have a use-case. I am firming up a feature right now that detects when a user types a url into a text field and replaces it on the fly with a footnote-style reference number (much like your comment above). This is done to (1) minimize input string length, (2) draw the benefits of a consistent interface, and (3) avoid screwing around with the fragility of url shortening nonsense.
I may regret this, but here's a link to my dev environment for this feature (please be gentle), to see it in action:
...just start typing in the big text box and add in some urls.
It uses a fairly ugly-looking regular expression[0].
If you take out the unicode mumbojumbo, it's not really THAT tricky of a pattern. It does fail on IP addresses and it may be a little over-aggressive on matching, but, I wanted it to catch things like "abc.com" and "//xyz.com".
Edit: Formatting and clarity. Removed the explicit regular expression because it predictably got garbled.
[0] http://regexr.com/38vsq not exactly the same one I'm currently using, but it's pretty close. See source for most up-to-date version.
This is a symptom of psychopathy. A double edged sword in terms of societal value. While I find the argument in favor of psychological diversity compelling, I can't can't help but be revolted by psychopaths.
Thanks for the info. Do you know of a thread that contains this Google-lead debate? Or, are we talking about poking around the Chromium Github commits and reading between the lines?
It sounds like, with the shadow DOM, a lot of the discussion is about performance. I'd be curious how an element like a checkbox could have that much impact on performance even on mobile.
It's not a specific "how do I..." question. I have a lot of front-end experience and have always wondered why inputs present so many styling challenges. I'm aware there are some properties you can control, but, they're inconsistent, limited, and apparently arbitrary. For instance, try indenting the text of a select box option. That seems like it should be easy with CSS, but it's not. You have to manually (pre/ap)pend characters or go with a JS replacement approach. There are a lot of those little gotchas, and I'm curious if there are general reasons why that exist in a layer below what I'm used to working with.
That's a good question, but it maybe because at the root of it you have an object/class called check box and its attributes and methods are defined by object. These object are not rendered the same as formatting is by the browser.
So in your example that select box has a list method which doesn't have a property that supports indentation.
You'd have to write a new set of methods that extend the current form inputs. Depending on the browser I guess you could load as an extension or add-in.
"it would imply that we live in a deterministic universe..."
You say this as though it's impossible. You may not believe we live in a deterministic universe, but, that's just, like, your opinion, man. The rational stance (I think) is to: (1) admit you don't know, (2) acknowledge the possibility of a deterministic universe, (3) for whatever chance the universe is deterministic, delude yourself into believing that it's not, because the illusion of free will is probably good for your mental health.
I think you're doing #3 really well, but skipped over #1 and #2.
