tps5

From Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon:

"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."

I don't necessarily disagree with you (or agree with Thompson), but I always liked that quote.

I do think "Objective Journalism" is a hard line to toe, and I don't think the NY Times does the worst job with it. Sure, the paper is clearly anti-Trump. My perspective is that this is only really a problem if they fabricate evidence. As long as they're presenting the world as they see it, it's hard to complain.

I'd apply that equally to right wing publications.

> All economics and social activities stem from the quest to live forever

This is quite an assertion.

> Think about all religions, they come from the quest to live forever deeply inside human's unconscious

Yeah, I don't agree with this one either.

I have no expectations about this stuff. I suppose I find it all pretty fantastical and I probably will until there's hard evidence all this hype is actually leading somewhere.

Where I grew up, in MA, canadian coins were accepted, generally.

I'm in a city now and I've had people refuse to accept 2 dollar bills (which are rare, though absolutely legal tender).

I got used to using workspaces to expand my desktop and I've had a hard time making use of a second monitor even though I have one now.

The advantages of a second monitor over workspaces are not totally clear to me. It feels like the same context switch is required in either case.

My coworkers do laugh at me though.

Chances are that your friend embellished this story. People do that, often. Think about the absurd amount of effort required to know that one of the thousands of people going through that airport that day had sex with a man of Arab descent sometime in the past few days.

I've had a few interviews entering and leaving Israel. It was a more pleasant experience than in the US because the security seemed engaged and efficient. I had my carry on emptied and searched in front of me while leaving the country, but the process was fast and professionally done.

Security workers also looked me in the eyes and paid attention to what I was saying. I've never had that experience in the US.

I think these definitions of being a sociopath are demonstrably very silly. You can easily think of people who "disregard legal and moral standards" whom no one would ever describe as a sociopath.

When you call someone a sociopath you are absolutely making a judgement about their internal mental state. I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue otherwise and I don't find any of your arguments convincing.

I think it's wrong on a few levels to use terms like sociopath in general, and especially about someone you've never met.

When you use that word you're talking about another person's mental state, which is opaque to you. No one knows what anyone else thinks and feels.

What you should really be concerned with is that person's actions, not what they feel about their actions. For example, you can be a murderer and not be a sociopath, as long as you feel bad about it. But it's really the murdering itself that's the problem. Does it really matter how the murderer feels about it? Some people think so, but the problem has to be dealt with either way.

I'm not saying you shouldn't criticize his actions, but I'd try to avoid criticizing his mental state or making assumptions about how he perceives reality.

Clearly a lot of people don't care if their text editor is using "a lot" of memory or "doesn't benchmark well" because all they're doing is writing code and running it occasionally.

There's plenty of competition in this area, so if electron-based text editors have enough downsides, people will use something native (as your comment indicates). If that wasn't the case, and we could only choose from electron text editors, then we would have a problem.

I think we should look at performance and resource usage as features on the same level as other features. Those things have to be balanced against whatever else the tool is bringing to the table.

I used Atom for a while. But as my projects got bigger, I got to the point where I was bothered by its slowness, crashes, and choking on large files (not even that large, honestly). I find sublime much better in these areas, so I switched. Looks like a healthy ecosystem to me!

> I think it's a toxic substance honestly, tires the adrenals and heart out

Do you have any evidence for this or is it a hmm-I-better-not-vaccinate-my-children-because-I-think-it-will-give-them-autism type statement?

Nothing kills a beginner's interest more than "you need to have a class and a main method, always, and I can't explain why, just trust me, you'll understand later."

Java was my first language. No one explained any of that stuff to me. And for whatever reason I lacked the agency to go figure it out for myself although I had internet access. Probably because I assumed paying attention in class and doing my homework was enough.

> there's a lot of this higher level stuff in a supposably lower level language

I feel like you're suggesting that "high level stuff" is bad because it's "high level stuff."

In my opinion, the goal of low level languages is to operate under certain constraints. If you can operate under those constraints and still include "high level stuff," then you should.

I believe that these kinds of debates necessarily boil down to an argument over the definition of art.

One essay on a similar subject that I always think back to is Orwell's essay, Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf

Orwell's argument is somewhat hard for me to swallow (because I tend to be opinionated about what constitutes good writing), but I agree that "Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion." I think that same concept can be applied more broadly to question of the definition of art.

Male Hasidic Jews have a thing where they refuse to acknowledge female flight attendants. I've seen this at least 5 times.

I thought this was an interesting review though I'm not familiar with the poet in question.

However, I reacted negatively to criticisms like this:

> Her closing lines are often summaries that feel tacked-on and avoid placing the scene in a larger context

Must poems "place scenes in a larger context?" Is that necessarily the goal of poetry?

> A striking aspect of Bishop’s early poems is that they rarely seem to go anywhere

Again, why must poems "go anywhere?" I often find myself appreciating poems that specifically don't go anywhere. These poems, I find, are often more emotionally evocative than poems that seem to be searching for "deeper meaning" or belong in a "social context."

> In short, many of her poems lack the spiritual or philosophical underpinnings

Again, I find myself wondering: so?

> Bishop largely ignored politics, charitable work, and the communities around her, living as a non-participating observer

This just feels nasty. Again, I see no relationship between these observations, which feel more like accusations, and the quality of a poet's work.

I might want to read an article about a language that is fast in principle due to its specification. But the question that actually matters to me is: do actual implementations of a language's specification exist, that I can use, that are fast? The answer is yes for JS.

Whatever flaws JS clearly has, speed is not one of them. All the widely used implementations of the language are fast compared to similar languages.

I'm unsure why you think it matters that this speed came about due to hundreds of thousands of hours of work spent on optimizing various compiles and interpreters. I never see anyone saying "Boy SQL sure is fast, but only because so many intelligent people spent their careers making it fast, so it doesn't count."

Remember, this little argument started because someone described JavaScript as slow. That claim is incredibly disingenuous. No, JavaScript's speed isn't directly linked to the language spec but...who cares?

Here's my understanding of this:

Aysnc and threads are fundamentally different.

Aysnc refers to intelligently pausing/resuming many different operations. This is fantastic for a lot of tasks, especially tasks that require io. A task can be queued up and a callback can be attached to it. Then, while waiting for some condition to be met, your code can keep running. This results in "non-blocking code," which is familiar to all JS programmers.

Threads, in this context (web workers), refer to CPU cores. The Async model described above is all handled by a single CPU core. Most web applications don't require more than one core, but some do (or, at the very least, the demand is there). Using web workers, you can access other CPU cores, each of which has its own stack and its own separate Async event model.

The problem (from this article) with web workers is that data cannot be shared between CPU cores in JavaScript. Any data you want to pass from your main thread to a web worker must be copied, as in a bitwise copy. This article is about a solution for that, a way to share data between different threads in JavaScript, using a new standard that has been accepted by ECMA.

As far as your question, most of the time you don't want or need your promises or Async code to be handled in another thread. It would be insane to offload every single non-blocking line of code to another thread. Threads are much "heavier" than Async. Languages that have good support for threads also have Async.

However, wrapping web workers inside promises (or async/await) is absolutely something that makes sense, and something you can do now.

The specifics of how this will work are not totally clear to me, but web assembly will have a text format that will be human readable and editable according to:

[0] http://webassembly.org/

[1] http://webassembly.org/docs/faq/#will-webassembly-support-vi...

Just an aside, I think it's insane that women in tech are pressured (or feel pressured) to wear heels. Is this common in California?

> Maybe the women just hustled harder.

Doubt that explains it.

I went through a large software development course, about 70 people. 60-40 male-female. Was a positive experience. The women all landed jobs instantly. As in, the day the camp ended, they all had jobs. The men, mostly, did not. It took months and multiple interviews for the men to get hired.

The demand for female developers is higher than the demand for male developers. (not that the demand for male developers is low). This doesn't particularly bother me, but it does appear to be a thing.

The way I look at it, most of the personal attributes that get you an entry-level job will end up having nothing to do with how well you will perform in that job. Gender is just another one of those.

I spent my college years pretty invested in computer games, mostly dota.

I stopped when I got a job that I actually wanted to have. For a while I tried to do both, and did. But I was exhausted all the time. Computer games are not passive entertainment (for me anyway), they require a lot of energy.

If I could invest 2 hours a day into a computer game, I'd like that. But I can't. Even aside from the energy requirement, I have trouble playing games casually. Performing poorly at something bothers me and the only way to improve is to invest more time (than 2 hours).

Anyway, I think this is an uncommonly good article. Computer games taught me that value is totally subjective. You have to pick your own goals, and you'd be making a mistake to adopt the goals of the people around you just because they outvote you.

I found value somewhere else, but there's a large segment of the population working boring, low paying jobs that they hate. For some of these people, games will provide far more value than what they're getting out of work. And that's totally fine. It's life and life only.

I want to live in this world too. But we don't live there, and I don't think we ever will.

I don't understand how you got this out of my post. I clearly said that some speech will be denied a platform, and that's an unavoidable feature of communities of people living together.

All I said is that we need to step back and reassess what is being denied a platform, today, and whether we're denying too much speech a platform and dismissing too much speech as "fevered ravings."

No matter how much a university in 2017 might laud free speech, that university is not going to invite a speaker who openly advocates for genocide.

When you accept this, you accept that "censorship" is unavoidable. Some ideas will not be given a platform because of that platform's perceived (correctly or not) distance from the mainstream. There is no society that has ever existed where this is not the case.

So the question is: which views should be denied a platform?

Obviously there's no perfect way to answer this question, but it seems to me that the solution to this problem isn't as difficult as this essay claims. I think that, quite clearly, the criteria that define acceptable speech on a college campus need to change. Specifically, those criteria must expand. Dissenting views need to be given a platform, even if they make some students uncomfortable.

As far as I know there are no plans to directly compile (JIT or otherwise) typescript. Typescript is always (again, as far as I know) transpiled into javascript whereupon it gets JIT'd in the browser just like "normal" javascript.

The gains that come from using typescript are productivity gains: in big projects static typing, generics, decorators, and interfaces are supposed to be a boost to productivity, not a boost to performance.

I get paid per hour. This isn't a freelance thing either, it's just how my company does things.

So yes, I could absolutely work one more hour and get paid for it at the end of the pay period.

> I see extremely wealthy individuals who are afraid of dying.

This is exactly how I feel about this nonsense.

It has always been funny to me that Ray Kurzweil keeps predicting functional immortality within the next decade or two. How convenient that, based on his prediction, humans will attain immortality right as he nears the end of his lifespan.

> An appropriate real-world metaphor for the program might be something like this: In every room of every house and every apartment, cameras and microphones are installed, every letter is opened and copied, every telephone tapped. Everything that happens is recorded and can be accessed as needed.

This is why I hate the media.

I don't understand how making this analogy helps to explain the spying program discussed in the article. Why do we need "an appropriate real-world metaphor" in order to describe a real world spying program that actually exists? I strongly feel that this is a misleading way to relay information, and I'm sure it confused a lot of readers.

Ignore this blog. Pursue whatever you like. Don't ever worry about whether you have sufficient "passion," that's a trap.

I think they're likely making an example of him to send a message: "people with clearance and access to classified data, take this shit seriously."

If your reaction to this news is "something more is going on here" then I think you need to take a step back and re-calibrate your bullshit detector.

Could there be more to this than meets the eye? Yeah. There could also be more to the moon landing than meets the eye.

It seems to me we all must, in our attempt to be rational, do our best to check our biases. For a lot of people on hackernews, that means second guessing your immediate "NSA cover-up" reaction to any item of news involving the NSA.

I think the most likely scenario here is that the government is making an example of this man. I don't think that's right, and I hope he gets off with as slight a punishment as possible, but it is a fact that governments have secrets and have enacted laws in order to try to keep them.