Lots of random downvoting happening on this page. It's curious. Yours is perhaps one of the most innocuous posts I've ever seen on HN. Don't take the downvote to heart :)
Disparate outcomes on a spreadsheet organised by categories like sex and race are assumed to indicate only the presence of oppression and therefore something to be fixed by controversial affirmative action policies and other discriminatory practices. Incremental progress towards artificial 50/50 ratios of biological characteristics are lauded as unambiguous social goods - these are the "warm and fuzzies" alluded to above. I'm not denying that oppression plays some role in disparate outcomes, but I object to it being presented, as it plainly is, as the only major factor. The reality is highly multivariate.
I don't think it's a leap. It's the fundamental idea behind the corporate jargon. They didn't just say they want a diverse team because their users are diverse, they explicitly said that to empathize well with their diverse users they need a diverse team. I find that notion quite reprehensible, but it's parroted so much these days that most people now just accept it as somehow self-evident.
No signs at all? All green technology, efficiency improvement and conservation initiatives globally add up to zero in your book? Most reasonable people agree there's much more to be done, perhaps that we're only beginning to scratch the surface of what should be done, but to dismiss it is absurd. We should celebrate and applaud initiatives that are heading in the right direction - for example, UK power plants recently went 5 days with zero coal burning emissions, the longest coal free streak since the industrial revolution.
If taken at face value (i.e. putting aside other theories) Assange, Manning, WikiLeaks et al aren't attempting to decide or write new laws, but rather commit acts in the public good, as they see it. Such acts are capable of transcending mere legality - by that I don't mean that they shouldn't be punished based on the laws of the political moment, rather the state's response to such acts may lay bare either the intrinsic good or evil of the state, as judged by the citizenry of the time. In this way a nation's course can be adjusted, and legislators with different values may come to power. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Because invasion of public property is currently illegal, it should ethically never be attempted, even when one may feel there is an overwhelming case to, let's say, air dirty laundry in the public interest?
What specific "principle" are you referring to where you conflate private property with public property? That they are both just types of "property" and therefore the invasion of either is an identical ethical misdemeanour? This seems a rather crummy "principle" to me. There is a world of difference between the two types of property, and it's fundamental to the very definition of a nation - especially the US. Government property is publicly/collectively owned by the citizens of the nation, while private property, while coming with certain collectively agreed responsibilities (tax, licenses, codes etc), is controlled entirely privately by individuals. Invasion of private property as you say is unambiguously morally wrong, but I don't think the same can be said about collectively owned public property. I'm not saying everyone should have a "license" to ransack public property, but if there is an invasion then the morality of the act has to be gauged on case by case basis - if the public property of a non-corrupt state is breached for private gain then of course that's wrong. But what if property of an evil/corrupt regime is breached for the public good - surely the same can't said?
My point was its pointless and borderline disrespectful to project modern standards of ethics and concepts of "greed" onto people of the past that had different norms and extreme hardships to contend with. By all means we should discuss what to do about our present predicament and plan for a better future, but we can do that without denigrating those that came before us for failing against an impossible modern standard.
The people that felled that tree for its essential raw materials did so under hardships and conditions thankfully many of us will never know, and not in small part due to the toil and labour of previous generations.
The above command just installs a folder with plain JS files in it, I'm not sure what system pollution you're talking about. It's very convenient for web developers to use cli tools written using the same languages and stack as their end products. I'm guessing you're not a web developer ...
Auto-killing apps to save battery is obviously good - nobody is contesting that. The bad thing that is being highlighted here is that there's no user friendly way for app developers to request additional privileges from the user.
It's gratifying to see a deep understanding of the origin and current reality of this situation emerge after so many years of chaos and culture warring. Hopefully with understanding, and greater exposure to society at large, will come a remedy.
On the free tier you're just hosting static files on Netlify, so they can cache very effectively. Also since you're just hosting a set of static files you're hardly "locked in", so if for whatever reason the free tier stops being appealing you can just move on to a different provider.
For money is good enough for me. You probably doubt me, but I'm not callous, mercenary or indifferent to the experiences of others - I'm just buying into a system that is objectively working. Spend some time clicking through https://ourworldindata.org/ ... we're not doing as badly as you seem to suggest.
When we share personal observations, especially on a site like this, it's reasonable to expect that most people will interpret them as an invitation to treat them as insight into wider patterns. If your anecdata was of no wider application, and you only believe it be relevant to your specific circumstance, it begs the question why publish it at all?
In any case, no need to apologise - from your other comments I don't think we're on diametrically opposed sides in this particular political tussle. Go in peace.
I agree with you. My admittedly snarky/oblique point was that these days it's personally, professionally and politically advantageous to make negative generalisations about males, but not about females. Just pointing out a fashionable double standard, as I see it.
Who gets to define the bigotry? Because they have ultimate social power in your brave new world. Granted, the first wave of people to wield this power would generally do so out of compassion. The next waves that come to power would wield it ever more brutally in order to engineer ever more ideologically extreme visions of society. It is precisely this sort of extremism that caused 100 million+ deaths in the 20th century in the soviet union and china.
You don't realise it, but you have just expressed an opinion equally extreme and dangerous as fascism.
The only sane way to run a society is through the free exchange of ideas, good and bad, and the unfettered right to discuss and criticise those ideas.
I hear you, your criticisms are valid but you've identified the wrong cause. It's not the tooling, or languages themselves, rather the web platform.
With the web platform everything is sat on top of shifting sand ... i.e. changing browsers, standards and devices. Almost nothing in the tech world has changed so fast over the last 15 years than the software and devices web platform code is expected to run on. I'd say that given that churn, the quality of modern web languages and tooling is remarkable.
Writing backends vs frontends is a totally different thing. Backends tend to run in stable environments, and mainly you concern yourself with data in and data out. That's not to say its easy, there can certainly be be plenty of "essential complexity", and infrastructure and scaling is a whole additional set of concerns. Frontend by contrast is a much more fuzzy issue, clients need to run across many unstable environments and require skills very far from traditional programming - sensitivity to design, UX and animation for example. If you're good at backend, it doesn't mean you're going to enjoy frontend too. And if you don't enjoy frontend it doesn't mean all the frontend tech is "bad".
> I do. C++ is an excellent example of accidental complexity got out of control. Actually, C++ complexity has been a main reason of why Google created Go. And Go embraced pursuit of minimizing accidental complexity at its best.
Fair enough, but every HN thread about C++ isn't flooded with non-C++ devs crawling out the woodwork to complain about it being too complicated from a position of ignorance.
I've been working in and out of the web industry for 14 years. Until 2014 I was a Adobe Flash designer. I learned modern JS and web development in 2014, before that I had never written a line of JS or CSS commercially, and never opened a unix shell - it took me half a year or so of effort while working other freelance gigs. Other devs that complain about it are either are ignorant, or not willing to put in the required effort to learn something worthwhile.
Web developers get pissed because its a strawman. Nobody uses the layers of complexity needed to preprocess, compile, load, link and finally run C++ as a fundamental criticism. Everything anybody does when they work on modern programming platforms is stand on top of layers of complexity that would make anyone's head spin. But when you're writing code for a living what matters is the quality of your hand-tools, the quality of the open source code you rely on and the expressiveness of your language and thus your ability to ship products. Modern web-dev and JS-dev has no problems in this area, but hey what do I know I've only been doing it for 14 years. My day is spent working on products and features, not fighting the language or tooling. Just like anything it requires a little effort and experience.
You're completely correct to highlight this, it's a coming challenge to be sure. Developed nations need to fine a way to increase indigenous fertility rates without simply replacing their own populations and culture with immigration. For my part I think the solution is multi-pronged:
- Make child rearing more financially feasible (big tax cuts for families)
- Foster reliance on family and local social networks, rather than reliance on the state
- Nudge younger generations to take responsibility for the future of their nation, rather that the nihilistic individualism that currently pervades our culture
> If one wants to survive, one has to prepare for these shifts, and not emotionally invest in a particular tech stack.
Couldn't agree more. I'm already a refugee twice over from previous tech stacks, and keep on enjoying where I end up! That said, I've always stayed within the realm of creative, visual and UI development. I'm just floating the idea that transitioning into a web/UI development stack from a backend or systems programming background might not be all that easy, whether ones favourite programming language now compiles to WASM or not.
I'm a senior JavaScript dev and consultant - we ship create-react-app and angular-cli apps to production frequently, having to eject and dig into the build process is the exception rather than the norm. The win for keeping things zero-config is so huge, its worth working around some of the restrictions.
Not sure I follow the reasoning here. I mean, it's not like JavaScript and its associated tooling is the barrier to entry to frontend anymore for anyone that has the energy and interest to spend even a trivial amount of time looking into it.
The tooling and framework outlook has stabalised massively over the last few years, and settled on zero-config build tools (create-react-app, angular-cli etc.) and mature frameworks (React is 5 years old now) with great developer ergonomics (components and uni-directional data flow are here to stay).
JavaScript itself has sorted itself out to a large extent if you just want to roll ES6+, and there's any number of compile-to-javascript languages to satisfy every stripe of programmer - ClojureScript, ReasonML, Elm, TypeScript, etc.
Respectfully I'd suggest that the reason the majority of Go or C++ devs aren't building single page webs is not because of the tooling and languages around the web platform, but because they're simply not sufficiently interested in it - there's a lot required to work on the web platform that has nothing to do with what flavour of programming language you find acceptable ... you need design sensitivity, experience with UI, UX and animation/motion, experience working cross platform and cross browser, experience working with graphic designers and CSS skills to name just a few.
Best practice is to use a zero-config build tool like create-react-app or angular-cli. Or a next-gen static site generator like GatsbyJS. From the developers point of view this is one moving part and one devDependency. I think your assessment of the SPA ecosystem is out of date, it has stabilised hugely in the last few years.
Did you read the article to the end? The author isn't sticking his head in the sand, he puts his money where his mouth is and it currently developing a Slack-like client built on XMPP. The protocol can support many of the Slack-style features you cite, but a lot of the clients are currently lagging behind. Also, if you let hatred of other people's imagined smugness drive your technical and tooling decisions then ... well, I'm not sure it's the most effective metric to use.