vectorpush

It's not a jab or a judgement, it's a statement of fact to illustrate the point that technology from 1991 still works perfectly fine today and that nothing about today's technology prevents you from using technology from 1991 or any time if that is the best solution for your project.

>Unfortunately the web development profession has decided to shoot itself in the face and make framework-oriented development mandatory

Frameworks are commonly used across many programming industries. It's also not any framework's fault that the PM (or you) chose the wrong framework.

>just don't expect to be able to get a job doing that and do expect to be mocked as some sort of luddite.

I've never heard anyone mocked as a luddite for using the simplest solution necessary to meet requirements, that sounds like something programmer's are complimented for (if they can show results). If you want a job where the employer uses a trendy framework... just learn the framework; it's either that or learn the company's hand-rolled framework, at least with a trendy framework you're also investing in potential future prospects.

I'm not making a normative claim, my only point was that the same technology that worked 20 years ago still works today and it's the developer's fault if they don't like the tools they've chosen to use.

Web development is still that simple if you want it to be. Nothing is stopping you from writing for the web like it's 1991 if that's all you feel is necessary for your site.

They detail their reasoning in their tweet, otherwise I'd suggest you ask them, but I'd suggest that we avoid a speculative discussion about race based on some random person's twitter rant.

Oh. Well not everyone is a gamer and that's fine, but adult gaming is not a new phenomenon and it's not just pokemon, it's a pretty huge industry. I'm sure there is something you do for fun that others might regard as a pointless activity.

Still, I'd be willing to bet that there is a video game out there that you'd thoroughly enjoy (be it mobile, PC, whatever), 13 years is a long time to have never played any games and a lot has happened in the industry; I say this earnestly and not as a judgement, one day when you're feeling open minded, consider taking some gaming recommendations from a gamer friend who knows you well, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Is there a certain age where you're supposed to stop playing video games?

> miners can now choose to prevent the thief from spending his/her coins.

While that sounds like a very useful feature, I think there is still a stark difference between having to update your money with security patches vs just not even worrying about any of that.

A critical difference being that the traditional banking system insulates depositors from theft whereas cyptocurrency theft leaves depositors victimized without any legal recourse.

> can a human likewise be abstracted away to some substrate-independent program such that we lose nothing by deleting some running copies

Oh. Well, assuming our current model of computation, I think a "substrate-independent" human program is essentially non-human by definition (that is to say, lacking the particular qualities of 'consciousness' that we commonly ascribe to humans), so I'd conclude that "nothing is lost" insomuch as "nothing existed" in the first place. In theory, it seems plausible that we could create a program that could consistently pass a "Bill Gates" Turing test, but it is easy for a programmer to imagine how such a program could exist without actually being conscious.

I would, yes, though I'd be careful about drawing comparisons in this regard between computer programs (as we know them today) and the phenomenon that we call consciousness, since the framework of computation deliberately extricates the essence of a program from the physical phenomena that underpins its existence.

One's position in space-time is an inextricable component of "the self". Even in theory, a perfectly replicated individual has already fundamentally diverged from the original just by virtue of its existence as a duplicate (since duplication implies a distinct position in space-time). Ultimately, what I'm saying is that the idea of a "perfect duplicate" is something of a contradiction, and any theory of mind that attempts to define one's "homunculus" in terms of a physical brain state is in some ways moot because although our human senses might indicate that we are dealing with two identical individuals we are actually dealing with two fundamentally distinct beings, despite the apparent similarities.

See my reply to brokenmachine.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose that I, living in the USA, want to send money to my aunt living in the Caribbean. Let's also say that she has never used bitcoin (like most people) and that I don't have an account on a bitcoin exchange (like most people). How do I get her $1000 within 24 hours using bitcoin?

> Maybe useless if you need to convert it to paper dinosaur money at the other end

The vast majority of people on this planet use "paper dinosaur money" because that is what the overwhelming majority of merchants accept. There's also the fact that most people will have to convert their local currency into bitcoin before sending it because they aren't bitcoin enthusiasts who have arbitrary sums of bitcoin at their disposal. Most of the time acquiring bitcoin requires a bank account and can take days to acquire because of KYC and bank account verification (and that assumes you're comfortable uploading your photo id and other documents to bitcoin services).

> I think of Bitcoin as an awesome idea for a replacement of the current corrupt system

The cryptocurrency ecosystem is infamous for its association with fraud, abuse and incompetence. Whenever a bitcoin company goes offline for more than a few hours it's actually a serious concern that the operators might have absconded with the funds leaving users utterly powerless to recover their money or bring the operators to justice. Bitcoin operators have lost or stolen MILLIONS of dollars worth of money from bitcoin users... yet the current system is the corrupt one. My "dinosaur money bank" has never lost or disappeared with my money. Literally never.

> it is still possible for people to transfer Bitcoin between themselves with no middlemen

Which is useless if your overseas family wants to pay for goods and services like groceries, rent, medical care and other basic needs. You can say whatever you like about the ease of moving bitcoins internationally but it's a fact that almost everywhere in the world bitcoins are not accepted in exchange for goods and services and most people are not technically sophisticated enough to safely convert their bitcoins into local currency.

> I'm going to hazard a guess that you have never sent money to family overseas.

Bitcoin is utterly useless in this regard. Converting bitcoin to usable currency is very impractical in most locales and nearly impossible in others (no, meeting up with strangers to exchange bitcoins for cash at a 20% markup does not count).

Let's say the members of the DAO voted to make an investment. How does the subject of the investment receive the funds and what mechanism ensures that the DAO actually receives any returns to which it may be entitled to based on the terms of the investment?

Cruz's father helped to assassinate JFK.

Obama is secretly a muslim and wants the terrorists to win.

The Clintons murdered Vince Foster.

What if the century long bubble concluded with a pop that resulted in total economic collapse? I'm not suggesting that is likely, just that the defining characteristic of a bubble seems to be the magnitude of the fallout after the pop, not the span of time leading up to the pop.

> IME It's easier to teach junior devs not to use integers than it is to get them to think holistically about security.

IMO, explicitly prohibiting unauthorized access to an API endpoint is a basic security tenant, not a "holistic" one. if iterating through an API's integer key sequence results in unauthorized access to data, replacing the integers with UUIDs only masks the problem and I'd say is a classic example of how relying on obscurity for security can be a pernicious mistake, especially for a novice developer.

Excuse the morbidity, but if this type of asphyxiation is essentially pain and stress free, would it not be a humane method for euthanasia or even for capital punishment?

Perhaps the supercomputer does experience a kind of proto-consciousness.

This sentiment is selectively applied based on one's values. I am confident that there exists a set of principles that someone could espouse to cause you to shun them, it's really only a matter of where one draws the line.

I think the problem isn't so much that the tech isn't ready, it's simply that the software is immature. Everyone has been rushing hard to get this tech out the door, but software developers haven't really had time to produce much beyond "app-store" quality content which tends to lack lasting replay value. We all know it takes a lot of time to produce high quality software and there is still a lot of experimentation that needs to happen before developers lock onto the techniques that provide the optimal experience.

People aren't going to keep putting on their headset just to look at tech demos, they're going to keep coming back to experience the well designed, super fun, highly addictive title that they've been playing obsessively, just like on every other platform.

Totally agree. I'll also add that we don't even need to definitively eradicate the possibility of cancer to consider it effectively "cured". If we can reduce the rate of cancers such that they only start to appear in populations that are approaching, say, 80+ years of age, it will probably become more effective to focus on other leading causes of death rather than dwelling on cancers that end up killing people in their 100s (if general life expectancy rises to the point where cancer becomes endemic among the bustling 100+ age demographic, we can cross that bridge when we come to it)

> Women are very prone....

> Look at any middle or high school female clique.

Which "n word"? Do a simple twitter search with the two spelling variants and you'll immediately notice completely different results.

Headline seems a bit misleading. "Half of online abuse" seems to suggest that this study is representative of the internet as a whole instead of just twitter. While the findings are still worthwhile, I think we'd see different results if the study could have included sites like 4chan, reddit, tumblr or even facebook. Of course, there are practical challenges to getting accurate demographic information on those platforms, but I suspect that fact also factors into the nature of abuse that persists on those sites.

> Once you start talking about systemic racism vs the rise of single-motherhood and destruction of the family and glorification of violence within the black communities you're called a racist and the discussion stops there.

How is this at all relevant to the topic at hand? Why does every black individual have to account for the cultural and socioeconomic complexities of being born into a low income black neighborhood? Nobody needs a lecture on the struggles of the black community when they're talking about their own experiences and interactions in silicon valley. I don't think you're racist, and I'm sympathetic to the argument that the term "racist" is sometimes abused to the effect of shutting down discussion, but it's not surprising that someone might think you're racist if your response to racially charged interview questions is to bring up black single mothers and the glorification of violence in rap music.

Agreed. Ethereum seems like a pretty cool iteration on what bitcoin was able to achieve, but just like with bitcoin we're left with a gigantic deficit when we subtract real-world-applicability from the incredible levels of hype.

Running arbitrary decentralized code on a shared public ledger... I have to admit that this is pretty damn cool and I feel confident that there will be some useful projects or developments that will eventually emerge from this technology, but at the moment there aren't any obvious problems that this technology solves better than the existing centralized solutions. I saw a lot of talk about "autonomous corporations" in previous Ethereum threads, but it seems pretty clear that these entities are not capable of much autonomy beyond shuffling around eth between other Ethereum wallets/entities.

ActiveRecord is terrible for any kind of complex database work. If your data models are simple or you decide to shoehorn your entire data model into an "object" representation then ActiveRecord will allow you to work, but if you need to run queries like "return every product that represents less than 2% of total revenue for the last year excluding products purchased by our top 10 most profitable clients" ActiveRecord is going to give you a very inefficient solution where you'll also end up writing Ruby code to accomplish what the database is already capable of.