shrugger

I feel like an actual solution for this is more literal.

I mean, if a box-carrying robot actually hurts someone, then the proper course of action is to detonate something inside it, and completely immobilize it, cut it off from whatever it's networked to, and preserve everything else so we can dissect what went wrong and prevent it.

This is a really interesting approach but I think a much simpler method would be a bit more practical in actual usage.

If you want to hand over all of your financial dealings to any government that wants to look at them, go right ahead. If GNU projects are so wonderful, then I should applaud those who stand by them.

GNU projects are really awesome until people start implementing them.

Whoa, who would've thought that a multi-billion dollar company would ever make a decision in order to promote newer versions of their own software?!?! /s

The whole point of Messenger is to consolidate messaging infrastructure. Being able to glean customer interests from that is just a bonus. Mobile web app is horrendous, and they know it, this is the solution.

I agree that Facebook lacks that trust with people, but they have every right to try and make their platform better and more efficient, and don't necessarily deserve the knee-jerk "they're up to something!" like this.

Coercion is criminal. Should I stoop to the level of a common racist by FORCING him/her to speak a certain way? I've no right to tell people what they can and can not say, nor will I hold myself responsible for their thoughts and actions. It's their burden to bear.

Moderation of discussion is unethical, imo.

Yeah, because Reddit has turned out great, hasn't it? /s

HN censoring is terrifyingly rampant, dang is an extremely egotistic, and objectively biased moderator. I don't disagree that HN is capable of producing interesting conversations, but it's a very limited window imo. HN suffers greatly from one of the major problems that plagues Reddit, and that's the hivemind effect that threads seem to have. I was a great fan of Slashdot because it was possible to see multiple threads with different opinions from a parent topic, but on HN, whatever the hivemind agrees with floats the top and the rest sinks like a rock. That people think HN is even close to a balanced platform is somewhat concerning.

I've never been hindered by Reddit's speed myself. Is this a real issue in other places?

I know it's one of those 'tabs or spaces' questions, but are there any decent alternatives to Reddit?

I've tried Voat, but it's literally just Reddit.

The world needs a p2p, anonymity-first, censorship resistant link-sharing and discussion site/app/thing.

If anyone could point in some such direction, I sure would appreciate it.

I really enjoy Julia, and I see such amazing potential from it but I talk to so many people who hate it, or complain about it. I know most people haven't had the pleasure (/s) of programming in MATLAB and so some of decisions might not make sense, but that aside it's a damn good language.

I really see Julia 'winning' in the longevity sense, but it makes me nervous sometimes seeing people misunderstand that. Do you think that similar misunderstandings have prevented Chapel and company from a more widespread success?

Also, Erlang is fairly successful. According to Wikipedia, Chapel was started in 2009, and Erlang was around back then too, what does Chapel provide that obsoletes Erlang? What problem does DARPA think that Chapel/x10/etc could solve that Erlang couldn't?

Those sorts of games are heavily vetted. Eve alone hires several economists in addition to extremely rigorous software testing to ensure that the economy isn't subject to any abject arbitrage from players.

It does happen, and I would think (not a lawyer) that in most jurisdictions that it would not be illegal. That case where the guy found a pattern in a video slot machine comes to mind. You are legally entitled to play the game in an authorized manner. Penetrating the server and giving yourself the money wouldn't be the same as playing the game and earning it.

Also in Eve, the money doesn't correspond to money, it's time. You can buy time playing the game with the money. Maybe there are places to exchange one for another, but that's not really the point and would be out of scope for the developers, imo.

Amateur hour.

If you want to rob a bunch of ATMs and get away with it, try keeping your vulnerable window longer than 2 hours...

I mean, it's going to be pretty straightforward to gather a bunch of footage and see what happened those 2 hours. These guys will get busted within the next few days basically guaranteed.

Which is not at all what I said. I didn't even mention coding abilities.

A developer does a lot more than just write code, but let me clarify: Anybody that's smart enough to hold a job should know when they are being asked to work too much.

Don't they have the right? I mean, a developer that's talented enough to attract attention from Google then surely they'd be smart enough to know what constitutes working 'too much.'

I don't think Google exploits its workers anymore than they exploit themselves. If you think you've worked too much, then go home? If they ask you "hey, do you want to pull a 80-hour week this week?" why should you say anything other than: "fuuuuck no"

Going even further, it wouldn't shock me if at least a subset of Google programmers go home and -- sit down and start programming something else. If they were going to do it anyways, and Google's going to pay them their dues, hell, I'm all about it.

Eat, sleep, code, get paid, repeat.

I understand the distinction, and you've articulated what I was trying to say. Where I think we differ is that I would argue the shirt is implying a positive, upbeat attitude. To me, that shirt says "Yeah, you rock, keep going" not "Don't come out until you're done no matter what"

Yeah, fuck enthusiasm! /s

I can understand that we might want to avoid the obsessive behaviors of some developers that could be considered unhealthy, but blaming a simple catch-phrase isn't going to get us anywhere.

What if the shirt said, "Coding is rad" ?

I say that all the time, and people just give me that look that says, "Ha, what a nerd" and it's fine for me because I can maintain my enthusiasm. Other people need a little bit more of a push to continue to push themselves to be the best developers that they can be.

Should developers be monks that only exist to program? No. Should developers take pride in spending their time learning and improving? Yes. Should developers be upset over a t-shirt that has no impact whatsoever on their life? No.

I hate this sort of reactionary outrage, it's more counterproductive than buying the stupid shirt is.

Uploaded this page as an image to imgur with no ads: http://imgur.com/DVwIQj0

Shameful that developers resort to blocking ad-blockers, especially with malicious adjacking becoming more and more prevalent.

I've had similar ideas, and I've tossed a couple back and forth to my Dad but the problem that I've always run into is that it is REALLY hard to sell those sort of solutions to companies already locked-in to COBOL and Rexx and PL/I, etc.

Retooling all of that is hard, and while avoiding that problem they kind of set themselves up to those legacy problems. Java shops kinda have seen the same thing except that while Java grew with the times, COBOL and friends just stagnated. The world kept turning though, and that's brought us to the situation of these 40 year programmers leaving behind forty years of code that basically only THEY can really understand.

Whoa, that is super cool about how they trained you and everything. I have actually heard bits and pieces of sort of like folklore from my dad about CICS and other mainframe pop culture, it's always fascinated me in a certain sense. That there's another whole universe of programming that most people have never heard of or been involved with.

I'm actually in the process of getting involved with the US Army now (I'm 21) so that I can get some schooling and stuff done later, but I've thought that I might spend my off-time for the next few years trying to self-teach myself NetREXX or something and try to land a job in some MegaCorp. I'm not opposed to writing code all day in a comfy office chair with full benefits etc, especially compared to living in a dorm with couple dudes eating Ramen and trying to conquer Web 4.0 or whatever. Just doesn't appeal to me.

It's reassuring that it's a viable career path, I hadn't thought much about the new generation of mainframe maintenance, but from what my dad has told me about some of the people he's worked with it certainly makes sense that these big corps would be desperate for fresh meat right about now.

Out of curiosity, is it a very lucrative trade anymore? My dad has always wanted me to learn the trade, I've always assumed it's that paternal 'pass the baton to the seed' instinct, and I've never bothered because I've always been afraid that most shops wouldn't give any real consideration to a millenial who says he can program mainframes.

Has this been similar to your experience? I'm just curious because it's not a very typical thing, square peg in a round hole sort of situation.

Just the Javascript module the world was waiting on! I'm sure this will have a meaningful impact! /s

In seriousness: My dad was a COBOL programmer for about 30 years. It would frustrate him to no end to look upon Javascript programmers and to tell him, "these guys are going to be working on your code now."

I'd never advocate COBOL or anything, but I'm just saying that it took a certain breed of person to do it, and that those people aren't around anymore is a sad thing.

I swear this is just for headline generation.

I mean, a billion IS a lot of money, but it's a very small risk on BH's part, and an even smaller part on Apple's.

That amount of money is a lot of money relative to other money, but it's not really a big deal relative to either party here.

However, I think that Buffett is just making a statement of 'look how much I think of Apple' by throwing that bn around, perhaps inspiring other investors?

Not really my preferred science...

Patents have a shorter shelf-life than Google. I think eventually we'll come to the conclusion that software and hardware patents are counter-productive and abolish them.

All the sweeter it'll be for someone to come along and stomp them. Considering how high the bar is, there's all the incentive in the world to try and be Google better than Google, at least the way I look at things.

I mean, the company that comes along and figures out how to do search better than Google is going to take practically the entire internet by storm. Maybe some sort of computational knowledge, data-driven AI will find its way into being, or something.

I'm quite excited about it though. I don't think it's impossible at all. I don't think Google really can be split apart either, since Alphabet sort of already did that. Google isn't forcing anybody out of business, and by their own methodology, that would be counterproductive. I mean, putting optic lines down only forces Comcast and the like to step their game up a bit, they are more than welcome to continue doing business, and customers are more than welcome to tell Google to fuck off if they'd prefer their competitors.

There are currently other search engines that still exist, like YaCy and DuckDuckGo, ixquick, and others. They wouldn't be around if they didn't think that there's something they can do better than Google.

I think this is a GREAT thing for other implementations like JRuby. Rusty Ruby would be able to learn from some of the implementation tricks that impls like Jruby and rbx have learned along the way, and maybe those guys will learn something from the Rusty Ruby crew along the way also.

Rust as far I know (not at all, honestly) doesn't interface with Java that well, so for JVM projects, it's nice to have a familiar language like Ruby that can tie in and make prototyping way easier.

I think people misunderstand how awesome Jruby is, because Ruby has never performed that well and Jruby has performed very well. Performance is not the only reason to both implementing a language. There's also the issue of mindshare, where a large group of people might already know Ruby, and it'd be easier in those scenarios to just give them Jruby and let them go to town than try and drag them through learning Java.

Rusty Ruby will do the same thing for Rust, I think. Rust is a very intricate, well-thought-out language, and I think it would benefit a lot from playing off the shared knowledge of thousands of Ruby users.

I'm not really prepared to explain why being ignorant about your tools is toxic to good work, but I'll offer this:

If everyone knew C, would they keep writing the same code over and over? Obviously not. They'd find new ways to compose what they've already written to create whatever they want.

It's not a waste of time for more than one person to know how to do something. People start from the bottom and learn their way up. In your example, what happens the next time they need to align another element? They either copy and paste whatever they did before, or google it again, right? If they had taken five minutes to learn it before that, they'd already know how to do it, and could just write it.

Redundant knowledge is not a bad thing.

[deleted]

It's even a meta-issue!

So, how do we find out which people are whining and which aren't? How do we encourage people to just learn and self-improve rather than sink to escapism?

I don't agree with this. Developers should try to always understand the code they are working on. Keep your stack small, understand it as best you can, and use that knowledge to solve problems. That's what programming is.

Smushing a bunch of frameworks together until the code works isn't going to help anybody improve, and I think it's fundamentally contributive to the larger issue. If you don't understand the code you're writing or reading, it follows suit that it probably isn't going to work that well or be easy to maintain.