svs

Childish Western philosophers. Not a single mention of Indian metaphysics which has deeply studied this problem. Not to be taken seriously.

Coding is transforming a set of problems into a particular level of abstraction. Higher levels of abstraction exist (team, business model, etc.) and it's perfectly fine to find them more fulfilling and interesting as one goes. I haven't coded in years as a result of being a founder and then CTO of a largish company. I don't miss it because my head is in a completely different place but equally absorbed in solving problems. And people are fascinating - hacking people, groups, teams, customers etc. is much more fuzzy and presents interesting problems as well.

Biometric collection is always for specific purpose. General purpose, compulsory biometric ids exist only in Malaysia IIRC.

If the creator of this is reading this - can you please stop flipping the board every time we click 'Next move'? It makes it impossible to follow the game. Thanks

Try having a default value for a key in a JSON document that isn't null. In Go, this is pure torture. Then compare with the serde library for Rust. Go's lack of generics makes this kind of use case much harder than reasonable.

so is not having women in STEM. Pick your poison.

The JQ stackoverflow community is VERY helpful.

Cannot accept user inputted script for json transform because Security nightmare! That's JQ's and JMESPath's secret sauce.

JMESPath is nowhere near us powerful. No unique(), for example, which is very important when munging JSON

The problem is not of small modules. The problem is lack of dependability. If the language patrons stand behind a set of modules and guarantee continuity and availability, it really doesn't matter what is in them and the world can continue regardless of how insane the module or the whims of any one author. This is not about the technical merits of having or not having a stdlib. The module in question could have been anything.

Making this about is-positive-integer misses the point that this is a social/political problem not a technical one. A language ecosystem must address concerns of business continuity as first class concerns.

Correct. You can discharge any financial obligation with the legal tender and the recipient is obliged to accept it. We're saying the same thing.

Which one do you prefer? Alan Parson's sombre take (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNiie_zmSr8) or Judas Priest's angry laser-tinged screed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1B_pZC8aWU) as the soundtrack to our state of total surveillance?

Yes, all of these are reasons why gold got started. A gold backed system is perhaps not even possible anymore let alone desirable.

Please see http://svs.io/post/69301254342/bitcoin-fud There are only two things we've used as money (metals and state power)

Yes and at some point you need a token of value. Imagine the plight of the itinerant tradesman as he herds his chickens through the forest from village to village simply so he can trade.

No no, food is far too cumbersome to be a token of value. Much better to slip a tiny token into ones waistband and exchange it in the markets. Gold was an exceedingly good token of value.

Diamonds are not currency because they are not easily divisible. But they have been a store of value for centuries now, and that makes them money.

The value of gold depends on the supply of it. The value of silver depends on the supply of it. The value of gold does not depend on the supply of silver. The two are separate currencies.

So for a currency to be stable, its supply has to be stable. The supply of other things need not be.

Tungsten was first isolated in 18th century. Gold was already established by then.

because of those five properties of gold.

granted, but gold can be used as an ornament and money at the same time. use as an ornament does not detract from its use as money.

Yes, but not at the time gold rose to prominence as a currency. In those days people needed mostly swords and axes.

Paper money (fiat currency in particular) gets value because you can pay debts and taxes with it.

Sorry but this theory is completely wrong.

Gold has value because it is a currency (medium of exchange) and money (store of value) due to the following properties:

a) Indestructible - bury it in your garden for fifty years, still the same.

b) Infinitely divisible - use it to buy a goat or the neighbouring kingdom.

c) Easy to detect adulteration

d) Stable supply (around 2% growth in supply annually since time immemorial)

e) No other use - Gold is terrible for most other things (swords, stirrups, axes....) so demand for it is purely for its value as a currency.

This is why rich people had a lot of gold - rich people have money and gold is money

There is one other very precious thing and that is diamond, basically the same except not divisible. Silver also caught on but not as much as gold. Pretty much every other metal lacked on one or more of the above properties.

Bitcoin is exactly the same, except you can send it over the wire.

Over the millenia, the properties people have looked for in currency have not changed.

Quitting smoking is about practice. Keep quitting and do it sincerely. Eventually you will learn how to quit.

The trick is to avoid the "F* it" mentality. After yet another failed attempt, it's easy to say f* it and go back to smoker mode instead of staying in quitting mode.

Quitting is not something that just happens. It takes years to quit. Nicotine rewires your brain to the point where you identify as a smoker. Deprogramming that is a lot of effort. Therefore quit as often as you need to. As long as you do it sincerely, eventually it sticks.

Allen Carr's book is also very nice. It is a mild hypnosis, repeating the same four things over and over again until they become as ingrained as the habit, so read it cover to cover and don't stop half way through

Also, every time you smoke, focus on the bad things about smoking - the smell, the taste, the cancer.....

Good luck.

Carpooling has fundamental challenges that are perhaps impossible to overcome.

For one, dynamic routing for two or more people is always going to hurt the user experience. Imagine you're running late and your car re-routes to pick up another passenger - ugh!

Shared transportation for anything more than a neighbourhood trip should be professionally driven and to a schedule. That schedule can be dynamic as anything but must be solid and offer guarantees BEFORE the trip starts as to start point, route, etc.

Basically a very smart and discoverable bus.

DPR Karpeles = DPRK = Democratic People's Republic of Korea = North Korea! I knew the North Koreans would be somehow involved!

Ashley, I find your objections to be valid. If we're bemoaning the state of gender equality in tech then it is everyone's duty to provide a space where stereotypes are not indulged in, people are not judged based on extrinsic factors and the discomforts of the minority are taken seriously. Thank you for making the effort to point out my mistake and for accepting my apology gracefully.

I'm apologising, sincerely, to anyone who took offense to the fact that the programmer was a female. It wasn't my intention to cause hurt and I've updated the parody with a hopefully less controversial male protagonist. For context, the original poem has a female as the main character which is why the female sprung to mind in my poem.

As for the lack of wit, well, I'd suggest that's a more subjective thing....

Thanks for that. To all female programmers - I meant no offense.

On a related note, when are we getting genderless pronouns for English?

Since when has what Yahoo Mail does become relevant again?

Why limit your choices to these two? There are more great frameworks and great languages. Ruby on Rails is an obvious candidate. Ruby is a lovely language and Rails is a solid framework, perhaps even the best web framework out there for many tasks. There's also plenty of demand for Ruby/Rails talent.