1,446 karma · joined February 17, 2011
Is the guy a scumbag? Obviously. Should people go to jail for speaking their mind? That's probably where we diverge and think each other are crazy, but the key is: if you can be put in jail for, say, racism then a corrupt government need only make disagreement be framed as racist, for example. It's safer to just allow anyone to say what they want (with obvious exceptions like yelling "FIRE!") and point out why their argument is stupid.
As far as your example, I find it bizarre that you find a person threatening to kill you with a weapon in your face is on the same level as someone who empties your bank account behind the scenes. The latter is more financially devastating but the first is more terrifying to be on the receiving end of and could result in you dying or being crippled.
Further, I didn't really have in mind some guy doing a hold up. I was thinking more about murders and people who will do violence to others if not contained.
And finally, it's not about "evil" and it's not about what someone "deserves". Throwing someone in prison doesn't fix anything. It doesn't make them stop committing crimes, in fact it usually means they'll commit more when they get out. It might make some people feel better about themselves to know that someone is suffering, but I would question the mental health of that point of view as well.
If it is some other crime that can't be handled by simply giving the money back you could just scale up the costs, for example. E.g. if you make $1m/yr, then the penalty is 90% of your earnings. If you make $10m/yr, it's 99%.
Just brainstorming. I don't know what the proper solution is, but looking people in a cage seems crazy to me.
[1] I remember reading a MIME encoding library years ago. There was a point where the code would detect an error but if the error was at the end it would just drop that part and write in the last couple of bytes. In this situation, most clients won't care that this is happening but what about those that do? Since this code signalled error by returning NULL there was no way to signal "saw an error, but fixed it". In Common Lisp, signal could have been used for clients that would want to report on this.
Worrying about about health insurance is silly? What a moronic attitude. Health care is a reverse lottery and there's practically no top end if you end up with "winning" genetics/car crash/whatever. "Not worrying" about healthcare insurance is irresponsible and wreckless. If you end up needing expensive emergency care the rest of us have to foot that bill because you were so arrogant as to think it couldn't happen to you.
Unbelievable.
Big companies are just a game of musical chairs for managers. They just need to show something on their 360 reports so they can get a promotion and they couldn't care less what happens to their previous team once they get that. They don't even care about the company itself, only climbing the ladder. If the company fails then they can just move somewhere else with their new higher rung experience and start the climb again. If you're a developer in such a place either you're trying to play the game yourself or you're literally whoring out your mind and fingers for cash. The job itself is utterly meaningless and can never be made meaningful because what you produce is irrelevant. The only part that matters is the politics.
It's true that many of us end up here because we have no other choices, but it's important to keep in mind what you're actually doing. Don't romanticize being an intellectual prostitute. Save up as much as you can so you can get out. If you're happy to stay in such a place, then yea I do have less respect for you.
Your dad sounds like he probably effectively has his own business which I admire and aspire to.
Personally what I hate is this attitude that think if you didn't become google/facebook you failed. There was a reddit post a while back about some guy who opened a cleaning service that replaced his "cog" salary and allowed him to quit his day job. One of the first comments was "this won't scale!". He was able to quit his job! How much more scale does he need?
I suspect this is what the poster below meant by having 40 free hours a week. If someone handed me a billion dollars I would probably take a bit more vacation than now, but quite working? No way! I have a million ideas. I'd like to do as many as possible in the time I have.
For any amount? I'd even work for the Koch brothers for, say, $10m/yr. Of course I'll be gone from their company and the entire rat race after a year, but still.
For example, when I was exposed to Smalltalk I fell in love with it. So many of the patterns I was used to needing were not necessarily there. That's because Smalltalk is more expressively powerful than, say, Java. You see this directly in the GoF patterns book as several of the patterns only provide C++ code and say "Smalltalk doesn't need this as it does X".
Eventually, though, I begin to see that pg was right and single dispatch is a subset (in this case; inferior) of generic functions. The issue was double dispatch. Smalltalk needs it, Lisp doesn't. I never have to write boring double dispatch wiring in Lisp because of how generic functions work.
So I don't think it's OO itself that is flawed (though it's not as a big a deal as it's made out to be. It's a form of code organization, specifically global variable demarcation and code reuse), but rather many OO languages that are weak enough to require programmers to hand-code out these common patterns instead of either providing it in the language or providing a powerful enough language to let us solve it once.
I also disagree that HTML5 is any easier. After over 20 years of trying, it seems unlikely that browsers are ever going to converge on any kind of standard and even if they did there will probably always be people on a bad version.
Personally, I'm betting on a world with native front ends to REST web applications.