mildtrepidation

Yeah, that's what I mean.

You can certainly put money in right before you execute a trade, and pull it back out right after. But that introduces significant lag, up to an hour for bitcoin, depending on how many confirmations you wait for, and several days for USD.

Thanks, that's definitely something to consider. I can see it being very inconvenient, though I still agree that the idea of keeping a balance larger than your trade volume in a service like this is hard to fathom.

It's also why I don't understand maintaining a balance with a service like this. Unless you're doing very small trades, the 0.2% fee plus the network charge for a withdrawal seems like a small price to pay to be mostly safe from this kind of thing.

It's invalid logic to assume that because some bitcoin sites have been hacked, all of them will be, but at this point it seems pretty clear the entire community needs to be a little more careful. Until that happens I don't think keeping a balance with a service like this makes sense.

Pushing for the group members to be treated differently to recognize their intrinsic value / contributions to a society, industry, etc.

If you mean treated differently as in no longer doing whatever it was you were presumably doing before that contributed to this group's "undue burdens," OK. But I'm not clear that that is what you mean, based on what you said.

If you're advocating preferential treatment due to "undue burdens" (e.g. Affirmative Action), all you're doing is discriminating in the other direction and adding an undeserved burden to other groups that didn't have it before. That's not progress; it will only ever 'work' at the expense of creating or inflaming animosity based on this attempt to counter inequality with unfairness.

But you will know that progress has been made when we start seeing stories about women succeeding or failing in the industry and the news doesn't associate those triumphs or setbacks with gender.

This I absolutely agree with. Women are underrepresented in all sorts of areas, but firmly planting that badge on their foreheads takes away from their individual successes and failures. Defining someone -- anyone -- based on their sex, ethnicity, nationality, etc. for the purpose of categorization serves only to tacitly affirm discrimination.

If you treat teaching as a lowest-bidder-wins "supply and demand" field, you may get passionate teachers who don't mind the pay, teachers who don't need to earn more for whatever reasons, probably some teachers who do find the benefits attractive, and all sorts of other people. But distilling this all to "people do it, so the wages are fine" misses just about all of the central points.

Consider that teaching isn't working in a bookstore or packing shipments for Amazon. It's not just a lot of work; it's a vitally important role in our world's future. I for one would not call "supply and demand" at the lowest possible rate a good way to treat such a profession.

Pedantic? Maybe. But to me this is a really childish way to make a point that could be better stated in a way that doesn't instantly, baselessly denigrate the reader, particularly when you're writing for a publication that banks on its credibility and reputation.

I know people who are involved in this. Just being able to bid takes decades and a network you either can't buy or need to be very rich to buy into. It takes either already being there or finding excellent bonuses (e.g. the kind of benefits that come with setting up your business in Detroit). And then you have to compete with the entrenched interests.

This is, or at least can be, far down the ladder from Lockheed-Martin. But it's the same kind of environment: If you're already there, it's easy money. If you're not, it almost certainly out of your league. If you know how to play the game, you still need to know the right people. If you do know the right people, you need to grease their palms. And once you've done that, you're part of the problem.

"Someone needs to disrupt x" is a magically simplistic and meaningless point of view.

...which, for some of us, isn't an argument, as we have basically no choice in the matter. But I'm still interested to know whether this is actually useful input or whether it's more holier-than-thou posturing.

To me, this is missing the forest for the trees. It's easy to argue about language implementation semantics when, in practice, it means almost nothing to anyone as we're stuck with the idiosyncrasies of the platforms we work on, even when we choose the platform.

I guess it's good that someone is looking at these things, but I can't see the utility in it. Best case scenario, this becomes a paradigm shift in new languages (which doesn't help us or anyone else for years) or gets implemented in the next major revision of language X (which doesn't go mainstream for years).

Sentiment like this is not valuable. The experience that it comes from is often informative, but as a conclusion, this explicitly ignores circumstances that sometimes do make rewriting a good, compelling course of action.

Truly bad, unmaintainable code exists. It exists on projects that have long intended futures. It exists in all sorts of environments on all sorts of projects for all sorts of reasons. To discount the idea of a rewrite out of hand is a failure to objectively review the specific circumstances around whatever it is you're working on.

Often there are better ways, and yes, often a rewrite is a bad idea. But absolutes are so rarely valid, and this one is most certainly not universally true.

Anyway, given the other questions already posted in this thread, I'd say it's warranted and constructive criticism for whoever might be running this.

Clicking through the tiny About link I found at the bottom of the page, this appears to be a platform for monetizing web-based games, at least some of which are WebGL-based (which I found out after clicking through one of them and being told, once again, that Chromium isn't interested).

So... new Newgrounds. Except with microtransactions. Unless I missed something?

Honestly, this article is pretty poor, even by medium.com blogspam standards. "Sure, PHP [weaknesses here], but it gets the job done." You know what? So does Brainfuck. And the argument there would be that it'd end up being unmaintainable, but the author has already dismissed that, because hey! You can write bad code in any language, so it's not a valid argument.

It’s just one of those pointless endless debates. Just use the right tool for the right job and sometimes PHP is the right tool for the job. A developer who doesn't understand that isn't a developer worth paying.

A developer that doesn't share the author's opinion that PHP is sometimes the right tool for the [undefined] job is not "a developer worth paying?" Even if we take the arguments presented here as valid or worthwhile, the only scenarios the author has presented in which PHP is "the right tool for the job" is when either you don't have a sysadmin or are so poor at systems administration that all you can manage is a LAMP stack (RED FLAG) or you don't know anything else (because if the argument is that you can write good or bad code in any language, PHP has absolutely no advantage over anything else). I'd say that person is not qualified to choose a platform, let alone build your business.

If you're going to argue that PHP doesn't suck, at least point out its merits. The political style of "I'm not as bad as my opponent, or at least I'm no worse" doesn't work here.

So much of the public perception of programming has gone from "ooh, you do what? I have no idea how that works!" to "oh, you do that? Anyone can do that."

Criticism isn't always about "you're wrong and I'm right." Pointing out a deficiency can encourage discussion. There's no necessity to be an authority or have a foolproof solution ready in order to make relevant statements; convincing people this should be some kind of requirement stifles ideas and prevents the advancement and improvement that "hey, there's something wrong here" can put in motion.

There's just so much assumption and ill will in this subthread. Get a grip, people.

Maybe you should get out more. Or perhaps just be even a little more generous in your assumptions. Many people do believe in... well, lots of things they pray to. You don't have to; I don't either. But that doesn't mean everyone else's motives are somehow always shallow and selfish.

Sorry, but your comment is a whole lot worse than his.

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