fineline

Or even basic electrical appliances. I have a toaster, a kettle and a vacuum which are all bricked because of peripheral failures - two poorly (deliberately..?) designed mechanical switches and a charger - which in many cases would cause the whole otherwise functional appliance to be junked. Only somewhat resourceful and stubborn folk like myself bother to fix these things themselves.

APL disagrees too. Except when it doesn't.

"Safely assume" is an oxymoron. Assumptions are a form of risk taking. The upside reward is that you save the cost of testing (and thus eliminating) your assumption. The (potential) downside is the complete failure of everything resting on that assumption. In many cases, the upside is small and knowable, the downside is hard to predict or contain - i.e. the worst kind of asymetric risk. Thus as a rule of thumb, assumptions are very bad practice, and should always be called out as liabilities in contract terms - e.g. "The cost of repair or rework due to any bugs found in the provided libraries shall be borne by X."

Hi Jordan, a bit off topic and late, but do you have any update on chenglou's comment on this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12400397

that React bindings for Reason would be published on HN in a few days. I know there has been a lot of work in the repos for Reason for JSX support etc, but is there a public story about this yet anywhere that I've missed?

Thanks for any more info.

I haven't read the article yet, I jumped straight here to view the comments first...

We each have echo chambers, to which we endow trust and allow the source material to be filtered and pre-judged for us. The internet didn't start that. It's embedded in our tribal natures. But it sure does act as an effective crowd-fueled amplifier.

My work recently offered to replace my 2013 retina MBP, at no cost to myself, as it went out of (extended) warranty. I declined. I'd rather wait and see if they improve the offering later this year.

Come on Apple, lift your game.

"Old enough to remember CoffeeScript" sounds funny to those old enough to remember UCSD Pascal on Apple ][ or RPG2 on IBM System 34's.

So if they'd started in 1966 it wouldn't have been built until 2066? Good job they waited until the nineties so they could leapfrog their alternate destiny.

It also shares more than half its name. The recognisable bit. The other bit is the generic and largely interchangeable "base" / "db". I don't know if it's intentional, but there's no wonder people get them confused.

Tiger used to not charge for Mastercard debit. It has changed recently, but still only a matter of cents.

This looks great, although roughly 5 years too late.

Adobe's late 2011 communications around the Flash/Flex platform and the ensuing alienation and loss of a large developer community must go down as one of the low-points in corporate planning and communication.

Nobody has any experience of being any older than they currently are, but a lifetime's memory of being younger. Hence most people of all ages feel old.

One trick I like to play on myself is to imagine I come back from twenty years in the future. What advice would I give myself? First thing would have to be "shut up about being old! Your life is still ahead of you."

I like the other trick too, where I imagine being visited by a teenage me and thinking what he would say about where I'm at. It can be an awkward conversation. Where's the Ferrari?

As a less whacky version, pay really good attention to your parents and your kids.

Good point about "super valuable" maintenance skills. Some well paid COBOL programmers still, I hear.

Old guy here too. When I was a younger guy and first saw the web, after making a few web pages I naturally wondered "how can I program this?" At the time, the old guy programmers were old mainframe / terminal architecture guys, where a dumb terminal (teletype or monochrome) sent text to and from a smart "central processing unit". It was natural for them to follow server-side patterns, and invent PHP, NetObjects, ColdFusion etc. But as I'd started out in the eighties with BASIC, Pascal, Delphi, VB etc. writing stuff that ran on these "personal computers" I tended to think more about writing UIs that ran where the user actually is. Although I dabbled with various server techs, my real interest was on the front end, with Applets, ActiveX, DHTML, WebClients ... all ultimately flops of course. Then Flex RIAs, which ruled for a couple of years but were killed by mobile.

I mainly work with Angular now, React didn't quite float my boat, functional approach without a proper functional language. Elm is much more interesting, but the work they're doing on pairing React with oCaml / Reason could change that.

In short, I don't have a problem with keeping up with the new stuff - I'm glad it's finally catching up with where I was years ago:)

Keene's suggestion is basically a flat universal payment, if you have debt it must be used to pay down debt first.

http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/manifesto/

I don't really get how it's supposed to work though. What would ensure it increased consumption and productive investment, rather than just further fuelling asset price inflation.

This tool was essential for me when working with Flash, as it decoded AMF, the binary remoting protocol used by Flash/Flex. Nowadays with everything being JSON I haven't used it in years. I guess if you've got something outside of browserland you need to debug?

Yes, you are missing a statically typed language. Tests or assertions? Neither. Security or efficiency? Both.

> No, we are borrowing from each other in the present.

Not according to the Bank of England.

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte...

Four positive, one neutral, one negative. Balanced?

Where is the sadface to go with smile? The warface to go with heart? Or the facepalm to go with party?

My motorcycle instructor advised me to "treat all car drivers as a lower life form, and treat taxi drivers as the lowest of the low." That mindset saved me a few times. U turns without warning, pulling over in prohibited areas without indicating, opening doors right in front of you - they probably aren't actively trying to kill you, but certainly can give that impression.

Or they did, and are pointing out your mistake. It wasn't Berry in the interview scene.

My watch (with mechanical hands, not digital) has some kind of kinetic energy generation, it has run for years and years without stopping, charging or winding. I wonder if something similar would suffice for energy needs of a device like this with no screen to power?

Interesting point - but why wouldn't the business model that worked for Facebook - ads - work on a decentralised web? Instead of posting content to FB alongside which they run ads and generate revenue, individual publishers could keep the ad revenue themselves, perhaps with a brokerage / commission model like Google operate. Seems to work OK for blogs, which are quite decentralised. Why shouldn't it work for status feeds?

In terms of targeting, once you're dealing with "small data" instead of centralised "big data" you need a lot less algorithms to figure out what ads might work. A FB neural net probably does a lot of deep learning to guess that a bunch of mountain-biking friends might be interested in saddles. Decentralised operators could probably figure that out themselves.

There is a multi-billion dollar industry selling people all kinds of fashionable, pharmaceutical and surgical means of "preserving their youth". If only people realised that what they are trying to relive is the state of not knowing or caring about that crap, and that "Living the dream" is not about acquiring material accessories, but preserving a sense of wonder, excitement and imagination. Whenever an old person is described as "youthful", its not because they've had plastic surgery, it's because they haven't grown out of dreaming.

It was probably about a year ago. Glad to hear they've simplified the story, I'll take another look.

You're very welcome.

I guess the profusion of pointer types was one thing, and the syntax, while not a showstopper, didn't really "speak" to me the way Nim did. But I cut my teeth on UCSD Pascal (after Apple BASIC), that might have something to do with it...

I've admired Bruce's work since Thinking in Java. I've also enjoyed a merry-go-round of languages in my own career. I too was interested in Scala and read Odersky's book - and improved a lot as a programmer because of it, despite not using Scala for any "real" project. I can't say I've ever found Python that compelling. Rust and Go don't do much for me. The 2 languages I'm excited about right now are Elm and Nim.

Nim empowers the programmer to do just about anything, use GC or switch to manual MM, target any computing platform that supports C (i.e. everything), reinvent the language with macros, while packaging it up very elegantly indeed.

Elm promises almost the exact opposite. I mean it's elegant, but it's also limited - purely functional, immutable, no nulls, no unchecked list access. And that's the kind of limitation that addresses the problem that Bruce has with other languages - dealing with all the complexity of how something's working. The promise of Elm is that if your code compiles, it works, leaving you to focus on getting the important stuff right - information flow and business logic - instead of tracking down another silly invalidity that never should have made it to runtime.

They're both young, but I wish Andreas Rumpf (Nim) and Evan Czaplicki (Elm) and their teams all the best in taking on the "big boys" with these plucky languages, and would encourage Bruce Eckel to consider skipping ahead of the curve and writing for these alternatives.

This is really interesting and welcome contribution in an important space. Three features that would make it compelling:

1. Offline. Making the local datastore as "invisible" as the memory cache and the cloud - keeping everything in sync under the hood. 2. Push. Notifying clients when changes occur. 3. Diff. Efficiently handling changes in larger values.

I realise none of these are central to the challenge they faced, and congratulate them on an elegant solution for their situation.

I also didn't have great experience of team competition as a kid. I've since learnt that kids can be introduced to sport far more inclusively and positively, and now enjoy coaching my kids sports teams. But my own activities remain largely solo, uncompetitive and somewhat introspective - there are plenty of very physical activities that fit this bill, and you don't have to go anywhere near a gymn (which I personally don't like at all). Think surfing, skating, climbing, cycling, hiking, kayaking... You can get a great workout without "working out".