serve_yay

A good writeup, though I don't agree with the statement about web devs and browser makers -- we read the web too, perhaps more than anyone! :)

It's possible to want to make the platform more powerful and not like some of the ways the power is being used.

By that logic it's more like an argument for disabling JS entirely - there is nothing about this that's specific to ads, and the reporter has speculated that it was placed by an attacker and only disguised as an ad.

We have a different form of redistribution, a non-socialist one, a crappy one that does not actually help citizens.

When capitalists screw up, as in the economic crash of the late 2000s, it is acceptable to give them huge sums of capital in a wealth transfer because they more or less hold the economy hostage. On the other hand, when capitalists succeed, our government works to ensure that their gains are as unaffected by taxation and regulation as possible. If they fail they win, if they win they win.

We engage in huge, expensive, idiotic wars where the government pays out enormous sums of money to defense contractors. Lobbyists get laws made and passed that alter the rules of credit and lending (think credit card terms, student loan terms, etc) in the interest of capital. People who approve and expedite those processes on the government side move on to cushy jobs at those financial institutions/gov't contractors/etc.

Sometimes, for these reasons (and for reasons like the one you raise), people say that the US economy is not really a capitalist one, and thus the US can not be brought to bear on critiques of capitalism. This is the same as socialists arguing that USSR was not really socialist because its behavior does not match up to a doctrine written in a book.

I think that sounds backwards. People decide whether they want to have babies and seek out an employer whose environment works well with that life choice. So if you as an employer see parents as typically older (therefore more experienced) and more stable than non-parents, you would provide benefits that would be attractive to those people. I am not saying this is necessarily the case for parents vs non-parents, just that some employers might see things this way and act accordingly.

On another note, I don't think it's a good idea to pretend like this is simply another in an endless variety of choices people make about their lives that can be incented one way or the other. When people have kids it tends to alter the way they see the purpose of their whole life. It's not "oh sweet, I can get a tax credit if I buy a Prius".

Inner functions and function arguments have function scope anyway, so it's not just about `var`.

From the acceptance of ES6 forward, JS devs (and devs of whatever languages consider themselves to be a superset of JS) need to accept that both function scope and block scope exist in the language.

Mm hmm.

Apple makes things that "do more" than their products of old, and we expect them to do more than devices past. The combination of features plus our expectation that all our devices be aware of what is happening on the others at all times is a recipe for a combinatorial explosion of unpredicted states, race conditions, you name it. I too miss the simplicity and "it just works" factor of past days. But it's a lot easier to pull that off with an iPod and a Mac, than iPhone + Mac + iPad + watch, etc.

They're the biggest company in the world and nobody needs to make excuses for them - I'm not saying "well, it's to be expected and it's not their fault." But I always think, who would be able to do this better than Apple? And I think the answer to that question reveals the depth of the situation we're in. As much as Apple screws up, could you imagine using a watch + phone + PC + tablet from some other vendor, and it being better? That's what really sucks about now - Apple screws up and they're the best we can hope for.

Yeah, having your version numbers mean something? What'll those wacky JS hipsters come up with next?!

Yeah, same here, I don't see how avoiding Pg (or other "real" RDBMS) makes things easier.

So much fun to read. Great post, thank you.

I agree. Bite the bullet and learn to work with Pg in your dev environment. The dev ergonomics aren't worth all the other stuff listed here. Think about all the time you'll spend reasoning about the differences between the two. This has nothing to do with your project.

I don't care if VCs waste their money like idiots. Let them. Plus, the sad part isn't that they wasted $10 million on this worthless "idea", it's that $10 million is probably nothing to them.

> Programmers typically don't like politics and tend to argue using technical language. But that doesn't make politics go away, it just makes it subconscious. In fact, I am tired of people pushing their political agenda under the disguise of technical argument.

That's well said, I'm tired of this too.

When anyone can publish something that goes viral, what is the difference?

So it's a currency, a contract system, a new form of law, a distributed computing system... I think I need to lie down.

These explainers I keep reading are not helping.

Can anyone tell me whether this is some giant boondoggle circlejerk, or something that is really going to be used widely and perhaps lead to things changing?

Hmm, I feel like such a revelation would break down fairly quickly. What happens when you check equality somewhere, or add two numbers? It's not only parens everywhere (although that is quite the eyesore), other things like prefix notation also makes lispy code unpleasant to read.

This approach reminds me of when people say, hey JS has classes and constructors just like Java does! And then proceed to write Java in JS.

A while back I enjoyed going through this, also allows you to get a feel without futzing around with tools: http://clojurescriptkoans.com

Yeah, and you can't arrest, try and convict people either. Or ratify treaties.

The reaction to what seems like an unalloyed good are dismaying.

We are insane.

I get that leadership was a role he ended up in and not one he wanted.

But, that quote above sounds to me like exactly what a leader is?

I wish every HN link had a separate comments section where people bitch about the page the news was served on.

Sucks when the free market doesn't work out in your favor, eh.

It's kind of crazy to me that its value even needs to be argued for. But then again, I use it every single day.

Not mentioned: read a book

Do this instead of white boarding or other coding during the interview. Please.

You learn to code that way or you learn to code this way, either way you're gonna pay the piper.

"It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, to the Middle Ages. One of its characteristics was that 'reasoning by analogy' was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today."

Nice.

You won't catch me defending open offices, but they're even worse when they're full and the meeting rooms are booked all the time. I even frequently can't attend a standup or other meeting because someone is in the room who shouldn't be. And of course they're always on a phone call with a customer, or some other thing that can't be interrupted.

I used to work from home, for 4 years. It's hard to deal with all the stupid shit you put up with in offices.