altotrees

I have really been enjoying working with Rust lately. I also enjoyed working with Go prior to that. Maybe I will give D a try too, see if I have similar luck.

I can find things I like and dislike about each of the new languages I try, but it kind of feels like there are a glut of options for me right now, and each one has held mostly positive surprises. Good problem to have: too many new languages that don't give me a headache, hard to choose.

Clearly the progress being made in the area of self-driving cars is undeniable. Seeing the articles and discussions crop up on a daily basis are making me wonder if we are headed for an AI Winter scenario in this area within the next decade or if this is the real deal and we will see self-driving cars at dealerships within 20 years.

This is so far from being my area of expertise. Just one observer's thoughts/questions. Insane how far we have come so quickly, at any rate.

Agreed. Days of Rage is an amazing look into groups I had never heard of prior to reading it. Got it for chapters on the Weather Underground and SLA, but thought the whole thing was very well done

Being an avid cyclist, I found it insane two years ago that this feature didn't exist. I find it even more insane now. Perhaps they are spending too much time creating gorgeous photo editorials? I do love those by the way...but how does the reverse feature not exist yet?

Yes, they are her debts. It is still hard.

Do not apologize, this is an excellent resource. Thanks so much.

They brought on the global creative director from Beats by Dre. He had a hand in some interesting campaigns, but clearly it didn't do the trick.

Twitter is still insanely enmeshed in the American cultural fabric right now. Any newscast or radio show usually mentions it, businesses and publications fight for impressions, etc. There have Been multiple times I think Twitter is finally on it's way out, but it somehow remains relevant.

Yep, and Palantir also. I wish my company would be more open to using it, but the patent issue makes it a non-starter for us.

Took it, always mind-boggling how many new flavors and frameworks are coming out. Can't keep up! clojurescript, Typescript and vanilla js for me, all day long. Want to get into Elm also.

I would've started using Rust way sooner if academia hadn't forced me to use c++ or c for anything systems related. Upon graduation I felt like a kid in a candy store with all the languages and platforms I hadn't tried in my four years of fun.

I worked or a large company on several web-based apps right around the time React came out. There were some UI issues I thought could be sorted easily using React.

After going to our lead dev, who in turn went to our project manager, we received an email from our legal department a few days later that simply stated we would not be using React due to "certain patent constraints."

Having not done any prior research, I looked into what the problem might be and was pretty floored with what I found. At first I scoffed when they said no, but after reading about the patent situation I totally get it.

There is a big controversy about this in the area of Ohio I am from (overdose capital of the U.S., Coincidentally). A sheriff who presides over a country near my home is loudly deriding the use of Narcan, saying it will not be used by his deputies, due to moral and financial concerns.

Needless to say, I have lost 8 high school classmates to the epidemic at last count, and of those, 5 had been revived multiple times. So I can see both sides. There is no easy answer, and this problem will not go away on it's own.

A really interesting thought. I wonder what languages and platforms Kafka would favor...

This is amazing. Disgrace is one of my favorite novels of all time and I always found it fascinating how versatile Coetzee is. The man seems to be good at everything.

I've been getting back into using the terminal and bash recently, so these are nice to have.

>Wonder what they'd feel about us having this conversation now, over a hundred years later. Mortified or unashamed?

For some reason, I feel like Joyce would probably be nonplussed. I don't really know enough about Nora to form an opinion. In a way having someone talk about that aspect of your life over 100 years later is so surreal I just cannot even imagine.

Good question...I would say a positive sign. Although faded, the names were still there four years later — kind of like how initial infatuation fades but hopefully the deeper love stays strong?

Maybe a reach.

I always thought it ludicrous, even given the era in which it was published, that Ulysses was banned in places and on trial for obscenity. "Look at Joyce, look at those glasses, he is probably the furthest thing from an indecent pervert that you can find!" I thought, considering him to be a meek-looking, probably inoffensive individual.

Then I discovered some of his love letters to his wife, Nora Barnacle. I have seen lots of things in this age of the internet, but I blushed and read them twice in disbelief. Made me respect him even more as a human and writer for some reason...don't know what that says about me.

I tried to search for something I could take as a cosmic sign, inputting my girlfriend's name and then my own. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.

We were however eating in a restaurant last year, a pizza place where people scribbled on the walls in marker, kind of an added character thing. Above my girlfriend's left shoulder were our names in faded writing, dated 4 years prior. We do not have fairly common names, so I'll take that as my sign.

Anyway, I digress. This is pretty cool and I have sent it along to my friends.

I have to say, this is one of the most self-aware breakdowns of personal choices and the cost/benefit of those choices I have seen — at least on an internet forum.

I've never been a drinker, too much of a problematic family history attached to the stuff. I think what made things harder for those with an issue in my family and those I know currently battling problem drinking is the dynamic of silence. Forget about whether a person has a "problem" with drinking, the most trouble seems to happen when people avoid considering or talking about their consumption and retreat into themselves. This leads to destroyed relationships, depression, and in some cases leads further down the rabbit hole of drink.

To the parent, whether or not you will face alcohol-related health problems remains to be seen. The fact that you have clearly thought about your drinking and how it connects to other parts of your life speaks volumes, to me at least. I wish more people would be open and willing to talk about matters like this.

Escalated quickly in a manner I wasn't expecting. Anyway, congrats to antirez on 4.0.

Yeah this was my first thought too. I way prefer just coming here than trying to navigate the shared HN stories on my Facebook timeline. There is something unsettling to me about seeing HN stories shared on Facebook anyway but maybe I'm weird.

Uh, at least in my circle of developer and hobbyist friends Elixir and Erlang are blowing up. And reading the front page here, I would think the popularity of Elixir is not some small isolated phenomenon. What past language trends are you thinking of when you provide your source and make that assertion? Curious.

If education loans and repayment plans were tied to future income, I feel like we would have a much healthier higher education system in the U.S. As it stands now, it seems to be one of the bleaker spots in our overall current situation (I know, I know there are a few bleak spots right now and no one is forcing people to take out these loans).

I studied both English and CS in a hybrid program in college. One of the things that appealed to me about writing great code is that it did parallel good writing. The process of writing, especially a paper or a longer thesis relies on logic. There have to be clear bridges, or segues between sometimes disparate thoughts, connecting them.

I find when I am writing code, I try to use the same principles. I don't want anyone to look at two isolated pieces of code and think "what the hell, these don't even belong in the same universe, let alone the in same repo." Whether through comments or just good self-documenting code, I want things to connect in some way.

Jeremy Ashkenas made the connection in a piece of his writing about coffeescript as well. Kind of an ah-ha moment for me.

Unless Craig Wright comes out with further proof, proof that is undeniable and unquestionable, I am left feeling sick to my stomach.

I have read several articles this morning which tout this event as total fact (BBC, Venturebeat, NPR and more), and it just saddens me. If this is a hoax, I have lost even more respect for these outlets. If this is a hoax, I have also lost respect for Gavin Andersen, unless he has an ulterior motive for backing Wright in the first place, or was hacked as some have speculated.

Whenever this kind of "unveiling" happens, I get disheartened. It makes a serious technical community and set of ides I care very much about look like little more than a soap-opera or disorganized group of gossip-hounds, as protrayed in major media outlets, overshadowing everything else.

Total bummer (until further proof and/or notice).

I have read through every comment here, and fail to see a lack of self-awareness in any of them. Perhaps you are seeing things from a perspective I have not considered...or you are boldly trolling from a throwaway account. If it is the former, please elaborate.

Being a cycling fan and rider, and reading quite a bit about the various allegations and methods of cheating over the years have led to me becoming quite jaded — and not surprised in the least at this announcement.

Thinking of all the ways riders have cheated, from Lance's blood-doping to the Festina Affair to Marco Pantani...it just seems like many of the icons of the sport are mired in cheating and doping scandals, and this story is further evidence that while testing may have evolved, so too have the methods of cheating.

This leads me to wonder why cheating is so rampant in the sport? I used to think it was only due to lax testing policies, but now think it is more a product of the insane amount of stress the grueling courses put on a rider's body, along with the likelihood that anyone in this very individual sport is probably more competitive than most other people by nature.

It just disheartens me as a fan. I truly wonder sometimes if the testing and oversight can ever catch up with all the cheating. A part of me wants to think yes...but stories like this continue to make me think otherwise.

I agree with this. Part of what makes Hacker News great, in my opinion, is the fact that it contains few of those usual social media bells and whistles mentioned above. I feel like it places more emphasis on quality content and in-depth responses. I don't really feel the need to "follow" anyone, but do take a look at the top user list from time to time.

That is not to say that things like notifications might not be useful, just that I come here more for the content and intelligent thought, and less for the social aspect.

Really well-written piece. Someone else mentioned Brett Easton-Ellis in this thread, and I totally got that vibe from the early paragraphs on.

What really got me though, was thinking about my earliest days building small Beavis and Butthead fan sites on Geocities, browsing Netscape for hours and waiting five minutes for a certain page to finally load. I was only 12 then, but everything just felt so new and shiny, and as someone else said like it could and would change the world.

Having now lived around and worked in tech for a while, stories like these make me feel a bit like I have been punched in the gut. It just seems negative and gross, but in a really captivating way. I connect with what the writer is saying, but also still get butterflies in my stomach when I think back to the 90's and my earliest exposure to startups and internet use.

At any rate, just me rambling. Well-done and insightful, I would read an entire novel like this.