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Dr_tldron Love for TypeScript

It's the classic "not invented here" syndrome, but on the level of languages. It's not enough to be able to have strong types in Javascript, they want people to stop writing Javascript, scrap the entire ecosystem, create all new browsers on every platform, and only write in their strongly typed language that's just as flawed as Javascript.

Dr_tldron A founder's perspective on 4 years with Haskell

JS runs natively on the web, it embraces multiple paradigms, it has a huge community, and you can get a job in almost any city on earth if you know how to use it. Haskell may be "better" as a language, (just as Esperanto may be superior to English) but if you want the widest range of opportunities in your life and not just in your language, Javascript/English beats Haskell/Esperanto.

Why not help bring some of Haskell's concepts to a more relevant language instead of bemoaning the entirely rational decisions made by millions of junior and senior developers?

Edit: the rabid insularity of the Haskell community definitely doesn't help. The Python community was dissatisfied with JS and created Coffeescript, and as of ES6 now everyone can enjoy the fat arrow syntax. Less pleasantly, the Java community got class syntax added to ES6, but at least they're trying to contribute. I'm sure Haskell has plenty of really cool things to bring to the table, but I've never heard of any of them, because all the Haskell community wants do is talk about how JavaScript sucks instead of embracing the functional side of it.

Dr_tldron Bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X

True, but one way to push them to fix their engine and make it better is for them to feel pressure to not be left behind. People are going to code in the way that makes sense for them, and if one mainstream-enough implementation works way better than another, eventually people are going to stop bothering with it.

Safari has become the new IE in a lot of ways, and larger and larger websites/apps are starting to only target Firefox and Chrome, leaving Apple with the options to either give up or rejoin the mainstream.

Dr_tldron By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines

Some of us are actually quite aware of what's going on in Russia. It's true that the US is also very corrupt, and its populace is easily led into believing it has enemies everywhere, but there are qualitative differences, here are a few:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Magnitsky

http://imrussia.org/en/analysis/nation/2224-a-new-emigration...

The most substantive critics of Putin tend to reside in Russia, and they tend to have the most decisive evidence of corruption, while Americans' negative perceptions of Russia do tend to be based in ignorance. So that point is true, but saying that A is mistaken about why B is bad does not mean that B is actually great, nor does it follow that if A is bad, B isn't.

Dr_tldron Epic Games founder says Microsoft's patches will make Steam progressively worse

You rarely read HN, then.

For most adults/businesses in developed countries, mobile is a secondary device, while PCs run everything from AAA games to filing systems to interfaces for medical equipment.

Dr_tldron React in patterns

It's definitely not standard, the almost universal standard is using ES6 import/export. There are several other suspicious patterns here, I definitely wouldn't take these as canonical, or even best practices.

Dr_tldron React in patterns

I think this is great advice for a beginner on their first project. Using React's localState for everything is a huge anti-pattern, but Redux adds cognitive overhead and boilerplate.

Later, when you do a real project, Redux makes debugging and state consistency about 10 times easier, especially on a team or coordinating between multiple teams.

Dr_tldron Equidate's new stock market for private tech offers in-depth data on startups

So this is either a glorified bucket shop or yet another company with the brilliant idea of setting up an unregulated secondary market selling an incredibly wide variety of different ownership instruments that were never intended to be sold.

IANAL, but if I was their counsel, I would definitely advise them to keep paying me a lot of money for a 10% chance it somehow works out with the regulators.

Dr_tldron Why Angular 2 Switched to TypeScript

Uh, my whole point is that JS isn't that hard to learn, so why invest so much time trying to make it look like Java and write worse code in the process?

Thanks for helping my argument, I'm glad we agree that you're a bad engineer.

Dr_tldron Why I’m never buying HTC again

Sorry, but I think most people don't consider a badly designed service that disenfranchises customers arbitrarily and coincidentally saves HTC a bunch of money to be a "weird quirk."

Plenty of other companies are able to both honor their agreements and prevent fraud, why can't HTC?

Dr_tldron Why we're Post-Fact

Chomsky can be a bit tiresome, but when talking about domestic US politics and media his descriptions fit the undisputed-but-largely-unknown record better than anyone else's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_Illusions

Dr_tldron Functional Programming Jargon

Is there a non-haskell resource on monads you could recommend? Anything that starts with "first, learn haskell" is probably not the easiest way, assertions from people who already know haskell notwithstanding.

Dr_tldron Why Angular 2 Switched to TypeScript

So it seems like the logical thing to do would be to create a study with better construct validity since it seems you don't think my evidence is any good and you definitely don't have any of your own.

If we're both just throwing around opinions this is no different than arguing tabs vs spaces. I've noticed that Typescript tends to be embraced by teams with lots of subpar enterprise Java developers with limited knowledge of Javascript. The same is also true of Angular, so it's a good fit here, but it's more for mitigating a lack of personal knowledge and organization standards than a general benefit.

Dr_tldron Functional Programming Jargon

> Also, its very strange to see these concepts illustrated with Javascript. I imagine thats something like trying to learn Chinese using the roman alphabet. Not that it can't be done, but a lot of important details are necessarily missing.

I think you're being sincere in expressing a common attitude within the Lisp/FP community, but it's an unfortunately limiting attitude. It would appear strange to an ancient Sumerian to see the Epic of Gilgamesh translated into English, but the translation is far more accessible and thus far more influential than the original.

I'm a front-end dev and I got into Clojure and Elm because of some books/libraries for functional programming in Javascript. It's doubtful I would've ever had enough interest to learn if no one in those communities made an effort to translate some of their concepts into a language that I already use.

Dr_tldron With Launch of AU Passport, Africa Is Now Borderless

It's slightly better than the OAU, whose heads have historically been a who's who of corrupt and brutal dictators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chairperson_of_the_African_Uni...

But, on the whole, the AU is still an embarrassing dictator's club whose primary purpose is to run flak for violent undemocratic regimes and solicit foreign aid.

The vast majority of african heads of state are either outright dictators or president's of ethnically majoritarian effectively one-party states with election irregularities and numerous human rights violations.

Besides Botswana, South Africa, Ghana and one or two others, the rest of the continent exists in a state of totally irregular politics with governments that show little interest in civil or human rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

I would much prefer to see a Africa-wide organization made up out of democratic African nations and the democratic opposition within the rest of the countries, something like the early days of the ANC, although with less of a communist influence.

Dr_tldron Why Angular 2 Switched to TypeScript

Have you noticed that you never speak in concrete terms, only pejorative adjectives? Saying you find something "laughable" and not "agreeable" is a feeling, not a refutation.

Dr_tldron Why Angular 2 Switched to TypeScript

You didn't present an argument, you just put my words in quotes and then made an appeal to an irrelevant authority. John Carmack doesn't do web apps, he does high-end 3D engines You couldn't pick a more different field and still be in the business of writing code for computers.

Dr_tldron Why Angular 2 Switched to TypeScript

http://games.greggman.com/game/dynamic-typing-static-typing/

So we've got data plus my experience plus my team's experience in a large, very successful enterprise on one side, and we've got snark and defense of existing habits on the other? I'll take the risk, I think.

Dr_tldron Why Angular 2 Switched to TypeScript

I feel exactly the opposite. I'm continually amazed that Java devs have still not acclimated themselves to Javascript after all this time. If you notice that the style you're used to coding in is causing a lot of problems and that people coding in other styles have few-to-none of these problems, maybe it's worth questioning your approach.

I maintain a medium-sized (50k lines) codebase with frequent requirement changes that uses a functional style, and the closest we've come to ever needing a type-check is null checks. Type errors are maybe 2% of total errors when developing, and because our code doesn't have too many layers of indirection, they've all been trivial to fix way before production. I'd much rather spend 30 seconds every week fixing a type error than spend hundreds of hours writing type files and code in a dialect of Javascript that doesn't provide 100% coverage.

If you embrace functional programming with mostly immutable data structures and avoid mutation, side-effects, and gross mixins/polymorphism, you reduce the size of your codebase significantly, which makes it much easier to keep documentation terse and up-to-date.

On the other hand, if your team is so undisciplined and untrustworthy that you need to throw errors on compilation because you don't trust them to update comments and docs or name variables descriptively and your entire team knows Java but not Javascript, I could see the huge amount of boilerplate involved in Typescript being well worth it.

As someone who's primarily a Javascript developer who does Clojure on the side, I feel that the Java approach is fundamentally impoverished. I've never met anyone who chose to develop in Typescript whose background wasn't enterprise Java, just like I've never met anyone using Ramda (before lodash replicated it) whose background wasn't in FP.

Dr_tldron I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court

I still think it's a great story that's funny and well told while being respectful to the people involved. It's definitely indicative of a meaningful part of the culture that's very different from the western/american bureaucratic mindset.

Dr_tldron I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court

While speaking a common language usually (but not always) helps, being a US citizen is the way more important part of the story.

Police in the United States are used to generally treating everyone (including foreigners) with impunity, while cops in other countries dealing with US citizens are more wary of causing a diplomatic incident. There's also the novelty factor: people from high status countries are seen as interesting, and the more uncommon your presence is there, the more friendly interest officials take.

He's making a mistaken inference by assuming that how the police treat US citizens also reflects how they treat locals.

Dr_tldron Training Computers to Find Future Criminals

I'd just like to cosign your rebukes to both of us, they're very reasonable. Showing that you understand why I reacted how I did but that it wasn't productive is a totally legitimate call-out. I'm working on being a less confrontational/snarky/douchey person and rationalizing everything I do is a big impediment to that.

Sorry for the trouble, and thank you for moderating in a thoughtful and engaged way.

Dr_tldron The last living member of the German moon rocket team

I think the lesson is really a universal one: if you let your passion for your field overwhelm your moral judgement, the weakest and worst parts of your character will be immortalized along with your accomplishments.

There's obviously no karmic justice, but that's still something.

Dr_tldron Training Computers to Find Future Criminals

When someone engages in dehumanizing language towards a group of people and their baseless characterization is satirized for being reductive, you're saying that the problem is the irony, not the bigotry?

Obviously it's your treehouse and you have the right to set whatever rules you want, but this interpretation of civility seems tilted towards creating an echo-chamber that nurtures increasingly authoritarian views among an increasingly homogenous community.

Or is there no way to couch that opinion in such a way that it won't be considered uncivil?

Dr_tldron The Surprising Ease of Plain Text Accounting

So you're saying "it was already broken when I got here, who cares if I make it worse"? Sounds like a really selfish and unenlightened attitude.

Dr_tldron Training Computers to Find Future Criminals

Or it's that non-specialists with only a vague understanding of what you're doing don't know what you're talking about. I don't consider stem cell researchers to be lacking in empathy because some of the hyper-religious accuse them of dangerous experiments and "playing god", even though their work "resembles a work of dystopian fiction."

Of course we can question where technology is going, but saying "gee, group x commits crimes at 27 times the rate of group y, on average we should consider them to be more at-risk" isn't 1984, it's how car insurance, the job market, dating, the stock market, almost everything works.

It's not optimally fair by a long shot, but neither is the alternative of analyzing no data and making social policy out of how you wish things were instead of how the data tell you they actually are. The solution to data telling you unpleasant facts is to try to change those facts with policy, not put your head in the sand and bleat "totalitarianism" every time a fact enters the conversation.

Dr_tldron Training Computers to Find Future Criminals

I know, it's almost as if they don't consider you the sole and undisputed arbiter of the limits of technology in creating social policy. What a bunch of psychopaths!

Dr_tldron Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

It's explicitly not "opt-in" since the default setting is turned to "on" (tested with multiple accounts) without any prompting. Opt-out is better than nothing, but it's a pretty suspect move to say "oops, you were accidentally opted in to something that would make us money without your permission."

I'd respect them a lot more if they came right out and said "let us sell your data or start paying for our services." That would at least be a fair choice, and I'd be happy(ish) to pay google 10 bucks a month if they promised not to sell my information on the side.

Dr_tldron Justice department 'uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests'

Hobbes whole point is that the state is created and maintained through a monopoly on the use of force primarily by means of force, aka violence, so that wouldn't make any sense in the context of what you said.

Still, I'm glad you read the wikipedia page: B+ for effort.

Dr_tldron Maintainable JavaScript (2014)

Only if you're so ignorant of how React works that you don't realize the JSX isn't HTML, it's syntactic sugar/an alias for the React.createElement method.

It's no different than $(<p>) in jQuery, so unless you're referring to some pre 2007 attitude, what are you talking about?