1,141 karma · joined June 27, 2012
Just the fact, that every little piece of software typically relies on hundereds of dependencies, half of which are not maintained and readily break with every major node version has always left me completely incredulous that anyone who ever worked with a language with a half-way decent tool chain and dependency management would ever put up with such a hot mess.
I mean, sure, PHP is certainly far from elegant and to this day suffers from the fact, that it started as a minimal template language (I got into it in the PHP 2 days). Most higher level language features feel a bit bolted on. But that's just as true for JS where everything actually has to be bolted on by the developer on a daily basis (Typescript, JSX preprocessors, etc.pp.) and in terms of effort to just get going and maintaining even a project of medium complexity PHP is still running circles around the node stack.
In terms of complexity, it really depends on what you want to do. Using a powerful framework like Spring can entail some config (albeit much less than it used to). Also you would typically use a build tool like maven or gradle to manage dependencies, build artifacts, etc.. Especially maven can be a little arcane. But another major upside of the aforementioned maturity is that there are reams of docs and stackoverflow answers which will almost certainly contain solutions for any problems you might encounter.
However, the propensity of American doctors to prescribe heavy-duty opiods is unheard of in pretty much the rest of the world. My cousin lives in the the U.S. and has top notch health insurance. After an accident and the subsequent surgery on her leg, she was certainly in pain but as European she was completely flabbergasted that she was offered Oxi for that. She vehemently declined and basically got by with 800mg of Ibuprofen per day for two weeks.
In Europe, doctors go for opiods outside the hospital setting if and only if all other options have been completely exhausted (incl. expecting the patient to tolerate some amount of pain for a limited period of time). I think the doctine in the American health care system that patients have to be completely free of pain at all times does much more harm than good.
For people making their living with graphical work (designers, photographers, etc.) Adobe is probably still the way to go (even if just to keep using the muscle memory). However for the many people who only need something like Photoshop or InDesign a couple of times a year, Affinity is just great.
So with increased supply from Netherlands and Norway, even a limited amount of LNG will probably be enough to fill the storage again and compensate the missing Russian gas (which accounted for about 40% of the German gas supply.
We, too, have not switched on the gas based heating yet. Instead, we are using a mix of wood and infrared electrical heaters to keep the rooms at a bearable (albeit not overly comfortable) 19 degrees celsius.
In the different collections, you see a history of 20 years of developer experience improvements coupled with an almost religious emphasis on backwards compatibility in the language and standard library.
In every (long term) JS/TS project I worked on, about 20% - 50% of the development time went into upgrading libraries and keeping everything running on the current node version. It was maddening. Stuff like the different types of collections are a very small price to pay, IMHO, if you can be sure that your current Java project will with very high probability also run on a current JVM 10 years from now.
With streams and the var keyword, Java is also not that much more verbose anymore than Kotlin and the code completion, error detection and refactoring capabilities are much better in Java. In Java I can also be sure that if I directly access a property on a class, there will be no side effects or expensive operation while if I use a getter, there might (and I dont have to write them either due to code generation or Lombok). So the parts where Java is still more verbose actually add clarity (and again, due to the IDE, you rarely have to type any of it): I dont really get why I would leave out the explicit types in the source code, only to be added again as non-editable, weirdly positioned text by the IDE (which is not there if just wanna have a quick look at the code on GitHub).
There certainly was some effort involved to make Twitter performant if someone with 100m followers posted a tweet. But that seems to have been solved for quite some while and since the number of active users is quite stagnant, I don't see any order of magnitude changes coming which would require a lot of "R&D" on that end.
There is a much easier fix. You give the airlines 2 weeks to refund the money. The have to refund it without any forms etc. because the damn well know who booked and paid a flight they canceled. Every day the overrun the 2 weeks, the refund is automatically increased by 5 percent. I have no doubt, 99% of refunds will be paid out after two weeks.
All those greats were writing in the popular forms of their days which constantly changed. There were not that many great "pure" fugues after Bach, not that many great piano sonatas after Beethoven. So why should there be so many great symphonies or string quartets now? Every form has it's time and it's place.
There will be a couple of great composers with similar skill as the "classics" left from the 20th century but just as all the great composers before them, they will have taken the popular forms of their time and enriched them with layers upon layers of musical complexity to be discovered (and enjoyed!!) by the generations to come. I believe McCartney/Lennon will be one example of that. Maybe Radiohead. It's usually for the future generations to decide.
I noticed, one typical trait of great composers is natural skill which often means unbelievable speed and quality at the same time. Bach produced a 20 minute cantata (i.e. a 20 minute opera) EVER WEEK for YEARS (while still doing lots of other stuff). Schubert produced lieder like a machine, many of them the best of the genre. One has to contend with the fact, that there are only a couple of people in a generation with that ability and it probably cannot be taught and is to a high degree inate. As can be seen in many documentaries now, the Beatles came up with some of the musically best songs of the 20th century in hours or few days.
So lets enjoy the great works in the forms of the past and the great works in the forms of the present and lets not try to force past forms on todays audiences.
China has about 1.8m Uygurs in internment camps = 14% [2]
I would call that a far cry.
Also, many other statistics of welfare, e.g. child mortality or GPD/capita in the West Bank and Gaza are about the same or better than in the neighboring countries (Jordan, Egypt). On the other hand, there seems to be quite substantial evidence for mass sterilizations and abortions forced on Uygurs in China. I have never heard of anything like that committed by Israel.
Again, I do believe that there are overreaches and overreactions on the Israeli side to actions by the Palestinians and there are innocent lives lost on both sides. I really hope, that they at some point manage to either live together peacefully or agree on a two state solution.
But there is a very substantial difference between that and the plight of the Uygurs.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/17/infographic-how-man... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide#Inside_internm...
What has it gotten us? A completely dysfunctional army with almost no working equipment. The part that is working is in large part outdated. As the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany pointed out, the Ukrainians have already destroyed more Russian tanks and armored vehicles and jets than the whole Bundeswehr currently has in working condition.
Just as in many Western militaries, the procurement is so f*ked up that most of the money is spent on the development of new weapon systems so at the end of the day, no money seems to be left to actually buy any. The US seems to compensate by just spending even more money. Germany just didn't buy anything and the soldiers are driving around in Wolfs (G wagons! Sans the louis vuitton leather seats, though) from the 70s and can hardly keep more than a handful of their jets in flying condition.
So, I'm pretty sure that a country with 68 million inhabitants, could easily house and feed a couple of 100k people. It does cost money, though. So...
1.) Start dating. It might be a drag and maybe embarrassing at times, but obviously not being a loser having saved up half a mil in 10 years, you will probably find someone. Don't buy into that Hollywood "soulmate" crap. More likely than not there is already someone you know or at max someone one graph edge away which will be a perfectly fine partner for the rest of your life. So finding that person will keep you occupied for 2-5 years.
2.) Get kids. Having never imagined to be a father and now having three kids, I have to admit I always feel sorry for people who don't have kids. I have a hard time to see any relevance in a life without children anymore. This might be complete bs but certainly floats my boat. I got my "finding meaning in life" completely covered by getting those three buggers into a good position for their life. That will keep me busy for the next 15 years.
3.) Don't take your job too seriously. There is Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Henry Ford but for 99.99% percent of the people here on HN (me and presumably you included) what you do in your work life will not really matter for generations to come. It pays the bills, it should be interesting enough not to bore you to death, you should have colleagues that are in their majority "friend material". That's it.
I always imagine my live as a pizza with three slices: personal (some sport, watching movies with friends, reading books, etc.), family and work. Ideally, each one should be about a third of the pizza, ie. have a third of your attention and time. There are times when this is not possible but it should be the state you are striving towards.