Dewie

> To play the devil's advocate, maybe they deserve to die out.

In other words "let me present my genuine opinion by wrapping it in a more presentable delivery".

Damn it - it seems I mistakingly replied to the whole thread, when I intended to reply to this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9276508

> On the other hand, in a statically typed language there is necessarily a distinction between code that is executed at runtime and (although we often don't talk about it this way) code that is executed at compile time.

Is the distinction or separation necessarily obvious? Statically typed languages which have a unified term- and type-level seem to get a bit subtle in this regard, since a type can be used as a value. And Idris passes proofs around, and has to use proof erasure in order to not let it infect the runtime: proofs can remain until run-time if you're not careful.

I am asking this as a question since I don't have enough experience with such languages to really know myself.

A friend wanted to become a lawyer in LA (he's not American). He travelled there once, and he changed his mind about that for some reason. That saved him some time from starting to study American law, I guess.

Ugh, my bad. I don't even know why I thought it was a landing page to begin with. Still, the same argument applies: for a personal website by a non-celebrity (status), it's pointless indirection to have to (for newcomers) explicitly have to ask for how to access other sites, and accessing other sites is the whole point of the website (besides the "novelty"). Oh, that and changing the 'terminals' background colour, I guess.

Well, I never thought that I was an innovating or unique grumpy mofo. ;)

> You are suggesting using screen space for the use case of a new user. Some people optimize for people that are already familiar with the program.

It's a landing page, man. Unless you're a celebrity, you should "optimize for new users".

This should be good for the Apple stocks.

> Humans assume that standing, walking or running (or even sitting!) is something that you just pick up along the way. It is not.

People are so presumptuous. What are they going to arrogantly assume next? That they can breathe properly without proper training; that they can socialize without a dating coach; that they can chew food properly without getting digestive problems; that they can listen to their own intuition without a consultation by a life coach?

> Because I'm already standing, I have an easier time walking away from my desk - to get a drink, go to the bathroom, confer with a colleague, go for a walk, etc. - and I've also been incorporating squats, calf raises and stretches into my daily movements.

But if you were sitting, you would get a half squat out of having to get up to get coffee etc. ;)

Maybe first travel to the West Coast on a vacation or something to get a feel for what it's actually like. If you haven't already.

> In the end, simplicity won out.

But the overly ambitious title remained.

> Lets say I turn this into some kind of guard dog system (bear with me). Imagine someone wanders onto my property. I'd rather get a text/mms than an email which might get lost in my inbox.

You can't have push notifications for certain subjects or email addresses? If you're going to make home security part of this, you might as well set up your email to be accommodating to it as well. If you're gonna use email.

> Maybe like me you use Fresh

> and you have a OCD of hitting save every 2-3 seconds as you are thinking

Please stop with this "OCD" bullshit.

> Full disclosure: I work at Google,

Good for you buddy.

I'm referring to the "nothing is perfect argument". It gets used to muddy the water so that one can imply that it's all a wash. "Nothing is perfect" should be taken as a given on almost all topics, so it's useless except for as a dishonest rhetorical device.

I don't like to compare programming languages and human languages, but for different reasons. (Hint: because they have so little in common.)

> The thing is, there are no perfect language, just like programming languages.

There has got to be some name for this argument tactic. It's so trite and useless.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9259764

* rite of passage

The difference is that a user doesn't feel like just using his computer normally gives him any backup. But if his folder is inside Dropbox, he might be lulled into a sense of comfort since he thinks of Dropbox as a kind of backup[1]. So if he uses Dropbox instead of just using his plain old computer (hard drive), then he might start to get more careless than when he didn't feel that he had a safety net.

[1] Though personally I would disagree.

So I guess the conclusion is that no mainstream cloud service is to be relied on.

Manifesto:

> We called ourselves Autistici, instead, for the passion we have for understanding the technical tools and for exposing the politics implicit in the digital world; even if software is created in a virtual world it doesn't mean it doesn't have a political impact on reality. Starting from the technical tools we use we came to develop a clear array of political stances, crucial to both cyber and material world and lives: privacy, anonymity, free sharing of knowledge just to mention a few.

...

> Autism with invention generates sharing

So uh, yeah, that actually seems to kind of be the case. Inasmuch as "passion for understanding technical tools" is about autism.

http://www.autistici.org/en/who/manifesto.html

> and the article linked from that comment is why I think Go is posed to become dominant over other new languages like Rust.

Is there some law that says that any top comment on HN that mentions either Rust or Go, a mention of the other is bound to happen in the same sentence? Like some kind of magnetic, rhetorical force. Heh.

If either, or both, Rust or Go succeeds, it will be for widely different reasons. edit: to whoever is adamant about downvoting my questions for today; you forgot the one previous to this one.

> That capitalism is being used at all to describe our current system, is a misnomer.

Well then I'm confused, since I was just going by what you seemed to refer to. And I assumed that you were talking about a contemporary (now, + recent history) capitalistic system. What kind of capitalism were you talking about? Something that existed before but doesn't anymore?

Today's "good enough" is tomorrow's technical debt. But that works perfectly, if you know the exact lifetime of your codebase.

> Experimentation is the key to science.

A sort of humanitarian science, since almost everything we touch have been made by other humans. But somehow STEM people are famous for looking down their nose on the non-hard sciences.

> As it should. If it weren't for capitalism we would not enjoy any of the abundance we have become accustomed to having in the past century.

That argument can't be directly applied to the future. Just because a system worked in the past, doesn't mean that it will work in a future world with different constraints. Hence why many think that today's capitalism is not a good political model for the envisioned future of mass automation.

And of course we can't hold on to an idea out of reverence and respect, i.e. "be grateful for what it has done for you, you privileged first-world dweller, you".

> I had been using it for a while, and assumed it had been around for ages, based on how it seemed to be so oriented around a unix file system and using the command line.

Unix culture seems to be alive and well to this day, and still seems to get infused with new blood. So I wouldn't even have been surprised if something like git was made by a college student instead of a 40-something inventor of the most popular Unix-like OS.

Logic systems can have bugs in them that make them inconsistent, which means that you can prove false (or bottom or whatever), which means that you can prove anything in this logic. And that, in turn, makes the logic system useless since for any given formula, it is provable in that logic. And being able to prove everything is not fun.

Then you have to patch your logic and make sure that none of your proofs relied on that inconsistency. Or something like that.

On the other hand - I'm impressed or even astounded by how people are able to fumble through life and still end up in good situations and circumstances.

Because if there is one thing we've learnt about programming languages, it is: throw enough features at a language and it gets transformed from bad to good.