superswordfish

This is neither here nor there, but how could agile be a noun? Did you mean an adjective?

It seems like we're discovering a bunch of technologies that involve removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere now (and even using it as a resource). That isn't the only problem gas, but I'm optimistic that we will solve the "greenhouse effect" problem through this sort of climate engineering before the real disaster of rising sea levels gets too far. In a century people will probably be freaked out by a host of issues we've barely even thought of today (things like the Kessler syndrome that are not so top-of-the-mind).

You're going after my hyperbolic recommendation (it follows "hell,") and calling me ignorant when we merely disagree. This is a waste of time.

It really depends on the project. I'd prefer Clojure or Erlang for most frontends, a Lisp for the backend of an expert system, and C++ or OCaml for any heavy lifting. Python still can be a great choice for all sorts of systems too. Swift and Rust aren't quite there yet but for a startup might be worth a look in time. We're not talking about "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" business here and being risk-averse is itself risky.

> ignoring years of research and good ideas

And people are falling over themselves to use Go in places that seem inappropriate. Most of Go's strengths shine in a large team of mediocre developers: Low build times, low abstraction, quick ramp-up, etc. So why do startups choose Go? You're just shooting yourself in the foot. Use OCaml, use C++, use Clojure, hell, use Swift or Rust, just use something that at least pretends to care about expressiveness and abstraction. I actively avoid working for shops that use Go heavily, it's an indicator of cargo-culting.

This sounds like fear-mongering. Is there reason to believe that foreign researchers will have a hard time getting into the UK? This surely is not an issue for the US, which is not part of the EU.

They probably ought to recast ballots until the desired outcome. You can't let people make the wrong choice.

Would you say marmalade is healthy? It's certainly tasty. It has calories so in the context of starvation, it's absolutely healthy. What's so tacky about this is that there are only cynical reasons to discuss manifestly unhealthy candy in the context of a balanced diet. A candy bar has zero value in a balanced diet, like marmalade.

That woo is everywhere now though. Not sure why you're bringing race into it.

Worth noting that that is best fixed with a "viewport" <META> tag rather than CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/View...

Just as bad is how it's made trash-grade corn the preferred livestock feed.

Fair enough, I saw it as an attack on no-frills developer-oriented content in favor of some notion of beauty. Mailman pages, like most GNU HTML, are simple and excellent. They're accessible, resize predictably, readable, and they fill the window. They're light and download quickly. They have high information density. It's sort of baffling how narrowing the content, reducing contrast and increasing line height are an improvement over browser defaults. And if you want pages to look like that by default, you can put bestmotherfuckingwebsite.com's CSS in your browser's default stylesheet.

So your criticism seemed out of touch and (can't believe I'm quoting pg) "middlebrow."

In the US sugar is listed without a DV% as well. People might reconsider a Milky Way if they knew it had 70% of your daily recommended added sugar intake (per the article's 45g).

I LOLed at https://www.milkywaybar.com/nutrition

> MILKY WAY® is a delicious and indulgent treat that can be enjoyed as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle.

Why lie? It's heavily-processed, high-fat, high-sugar candy. Of course it's unhealthy, there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

There are many upsetting things about Whole Foods, but the food there is pretty varied, no?

Have you seriously never seen mailman before? You must've taken a wrong turn getting here.

Of course bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com uses #444 on white. bestestmotherfuckingwebsite.com probably dials it up to #777 with a light sans-serif.

Pensions. There will likely come a time when most of us are no longer employable. We have (or will have) put our lives into this and made a small group of people very wealthy. Without negotiating from a position of relative strength, we will be left with nothing when we are no longer necessary.

Almost every reply to my comment talks about saving jobs, but I never even brought that up. Organization is important because you want to be left with something more than a seat at the unemployment office when your job does disappear.

In any case, HN is not one person, and you will not find me defending those businesses.

We already have a post-scarcity economy. There is enough of everything to go around for everybody. Kropotkin talked about this in "The Conquest of Bread" in the 19th century. If history is a lesson, no degree of abundance will result in collective plenty.

This wouldn't harm me in the short term alone, it would be a lost career and a life catastrophe. A taxi driver can work as an Uber driver. I cannot become an automated programmer. So I don't give a damn about the "greater good" in this context, and question that premise also: Sibling mentions getting used to everybody being retirees, but what I see is collective poverty with token conveniences. Time will tell, etc.

Well that's why they're courting not just experts, but "strong experts" of machine learning, whatever that means :P

> 2. Build an agent to win online programming competitions. A program that can write other programs would be, for obvious reasons, very powerful.

The people on top desperately want us gone, and when it happens it'll happen so quickly you won't know what hit you. Software engineers need to recognize this common threat and organize (labor) sooner than later. Even more important is for all engineers to plan for an imminent future where developers are not paid like they are now, if at all. We have it good, but we will be automated away like everybody else, just a little later.

Once upon a time. Sadly, now a position as a Google SRE seems most prized here, followed by work for other big corps.

> triggered enough to actually do it.

What does this mean? Do you mean "provoked"?

Good point, either way it is ugly that normal code is now a string. It is in rollup.config.js so maybe this is imposed by "Rollup", but I'm not about to go find how the "outro" option differs from the "footer" option in yet another JS build tool.

I wonder what justifies turning normal code into a string to eval():

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/9310/files#diff-2ac7...

becomes

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/9310/files#diff-ff6e...

On the surface it seems bad.

That's assuming that what's in this book is exceptional (which you can't tell without a preview). I didn't think that Practical Object-Oriented Ruby was incredible, though it is a well-written tutorial of basic OO techniques. You could spend less than $49 on a couple good used copies of OO classics, or many more if you visit the right used bookstore. And it's not even a hard copy so it is competing with the wealth of good free information online about OOP. I might pay $99 for a hard copy of this, but no way I'd pay $49 for a PDF.

One objection I can think of is that Ruby is dynamically typed. Something that is elegant in Ruby might be a horror in Java.

This is nothing, I've seen some pretty substantial JS apps that are only one line.

This article was written by Robinson Meyer, for anybody else confused by the lack of a byline.