calroc

Heck yeah blame the human race! If it wasn't for humans none of this would be happening! (heh.)

I'm from SF. People should realize that politics in this town (and Berzerkeley) are infused with an entire cottage industry of lunatics and freaks. Watch SFGOV public access to see what I mean. People sing songs, rant, dress up in weird costumes, it's a little slice of a Fellini movie.

Even if tech folks suddenly got bit by the community bug they're not going to be able to dialog with people who have basically NO interest in real working politics because they are simply using the public sphere to project their hang-ups and obsessions. Crazy people who want attention make up too much of the political scene out here. Basically SF is one giant open-air insane asylum. This is where you end up if no place else in the country (or world) has a niche for you and your particular weird.

Now all these fresh-faced, well-scrubbed tech workers are flooding in and displacing the nuts, who have nowhere else to go. Of course the nuts (and brother/sister/sophont I am one of the nuts) are upset.

Unless the techies can somehow develop the compassion for and tolerance of, say, Mother Teresa, for weird freaky shit they just aren't going to be able to engage with the old school Bay Area culture. And I don't think it's fair to expect them to.

Unfortunately, this means that the "gentrification" will proceed apace until SF has become the new, uh, Portland? Seattle? San Jose? Some other not-so-weird city anyhow.

Can we be sure these principles are misguided if no one sticks to them?

Is "retroreflective" anything like a phase conjugate mirror?

Is it weird that OpenBSD struggles to keep the juice on in the post-Snowden era?

This is bullshit. It got me so riled up I went and blogged about it: http://calroc.blogspot.com/2014/01/love-is-power.html (It is cool to post links to own stuff in a comment like this? I'm new to HN.)

tl;dr: The idea that you can and should "do what you love and love what you do" arose as a counter to the misguided idea that work is something you hate that you do just to get the money to pay your bills and keep the lights on and the pantry stocked. To confuse the basic concept with a sort of bromide for the blind egos of a privileged elite is a terrible mistake.

Okay, what are they? And I mean cons from the POV of users (and hosts are users too in this sense) not from the POV of an unnecessary commercial organisation overlaid (overlain?) on the infrastructure.

I'm not being snarky here, I'd really like to think a new thought.

(To be fair, or just contrary, I kinda feel that all the porn and ads might due with a little reduced service, but I'm not megalomaniacal enough to think that I should get to decide for everyone else..)

Bandwidth is infrastructure, like roads. It should be managed by civic authority for civic benefit, not exploited to increase private wealth.

Do you actually want to deal with a biased pipe?

Cheers, I will do.

Holy cow, I think you DO sort of understand what I was saying! :-)

Obviously I don't know enough about Node.js to put it down (and from what you've said if I knew it better I think I'd like it.)

Cheers (and I will check out ToffeeScript, thanks.) :)

First: Respect. Sorry for pissing you off. I was acting like a troll and I don't usually do that. I'm having a bad day.

Thank you for calling me on my B.S. in a way that I can really relate to and respect.

Next: Yes, I'm ignorant of Node et. al. but my point is kind of that I shouldn't have to know about it at all, because Node shouldn't exist, and all the effort that went into it would have been better spent on other things.

Really my issue is with the whole industry and I'm just picking on Node because that's what I saw this morning. The Tornado project gave me similar misgivings.

I feel like we are constantly reinventing things (GUI widgets, IRC/IM/chat, Twisted/Tornado/NodeJS/..., video codecs, and on and on) yet certain basic really simple and important things (like getting a file from one computer to another, or UI design) are eternally neglected.

Why the heck is Dropbox a thing? You feel me?

You have actually given me food for thought, and I will check out Node.js with ToffeeScript. I'm a little leery of 54000 modules but I take your point.

But, without meaning to be harsh on Node in particular, I really feel like our industry has to kind of grow up some how. I never thought I would hate on innovation for its own sake, but it is starting to get a little ridiculous, and, from my POV, JS on the server seems a little bit too much JS. Now that it's there, and someone with your XP says it works well, well there you go, I suppose that's not a bad thing.

I apologize again for being a mouthy ignorant punk. I'll try to at least know what I'm talking about if it happens again.

Um, as long as you're asking ME what to do...

Node.js should vanish (except for where it is already deployed and useful, in maintenance/legacy mode) and all those really smart and talented people currently wasting their time on it should go build something even better and more useful.

There. How's that? ;-)

(Like this: http://swannodette.github.io/)

Twisted is (would have been) a better choice because it is (was) already done. (And done really really well.)

To me it feels like people are busily (and happily) rewriting a lot of stuff in JS that might just be written better in some other language (Go) or have already been written (Erlang)

I actually like JS (Thank you Crockford) but it was startling to see it show up on the server side, and downright alarming to see so many people go apeshit over it.)

All points for working code, and let me confess ignorance up front right now.

Really my irk comes down to something along the lines of, "Well why not write it in Go or something? Why JS?" and thinking that the only really good answer to that is "Well, we really like JS."

I agree with you except that you left out the only really important (in my opinion) part of his pretty trivial message: "Sometimes unexpected things happen, and people are bad at expecting the unexpected, and then they FAIL TO NOTICE that they are bad at expecting the unexpected"

It can be difficult for folks (myself included!) to separate their message from their irascible personalities.. ;-)

Faulty frame. Try it with other basic infrastructure: "The more money I think I can make by owning ROAD infrastructure, the more I will invest to build it now."

See the flaw?

Oh no, nothing so prosaic as that. (For the record I am in favor of making a [good!] living via open-source software.) The scam is this:

I believe that Node.js is waaay too immature to be used as a foundational technology, yet so many people (both folks who should know better and their naive followers) are trumpeting it as a great wonderful thing, pushing it hard as hell.

If you really need dynamic programming on your back-end server use Twisted. Twisted.

If you just said "but my engineers only know JS!" reflect: you have people that won't or can't learn Python but who feel okay about writing your back-end code.

Fire them and hire a real programmer.

Toys are very fun, and I would never try to take that away from anyone, but (in my opinion) there are waaay too many people pushing Node for production work that should know better, and that's the scam.

Node is not ready for the position which people are hyping it for, and (again in my opinion) if you are telling your non-tech-savvy clients or students that they should learn and use Node because it is ready for prime time then you're lying to them or simply naive and misguided.

There are no "cons" to net neutrality. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous at best and duplicitous at worst.

The idea that we won't get enough bandwidth in the future unless the telecos et. el. are allowed to play gatekeeper makes no sense to me.

I started reading that book and I thought he was a genius, but then, right abut the point where he starts bagging on the Uncertainty Principle, I realized that he's actually kind of an idiot.

The book does make a good point though.

Node.js is a scam.

It bothers me that otherwise intelligent people are taking so long to realize that ubiquitous surveillance is never going away.

I would have exterminated humanity in the 80's if it hadn't been for ubiquitous surveillance.

Um this is just babble, and not about hacking?

This is, of course, the only safe (for the speaker) way to admit to normals what s/he is. Otherwise it is torches and pitchforks with you people. (Normal humans are far more frightening than any psychopath. ;-)

Bucky figured out most of the problems we would be facing about now, and many of the solutions. He pointed out that, if we used our technology to efficiently supply our needs, we would be able to work for about two years and then retire having paid for our the rest of our lives during those two years. This would be possible starting sometime in the '70s. The important thing to remember about Bucky is that he was an engineer. A real one, not a software "engineer" (like me), and he calculated what he talked about. He was not a philosopher.

"Don't silence KeyboardInterrupt or SystemExit. We aren't monsters." Hahahahha

Vernor Vinge wrote a Sci-Fi book where space-dwelling traders used a metric time system like this.