ytinas

Once again: disagreement doesn't equal down vote people. The orange Y at the top should tip you off that you're not on reddit.

Absolutely you are of that opinion? People should slave away their youth dreaming of the day they can retire and when that day comes they can't do anything because they're living on a fraction of what they had before? That sounds like an absolutely awful life.

As I said, I would like to see SS go away in favor of just mandating that people invest in some fund that is heavily regulated (regulating the risk, to minimize the risk of people losing their retirement money), but savings must be mandated in some form. If you don't then people simply wont do it. Then you're left with the choice of just saying "I told you so" while you watch them starve to death, or financially supporting them. Both of those are very bad options.

Is $50k/year that much in Berkeley?

Personally, I wish the government would do away with the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, a.k.a Social Security, and simply have some required retirement contribution (401k is still ok after the crash, no?), but until they do, what do you think this guy should be getting for his retirement? Surely you aren't of the opinion that one should trade the majority of their young waking life for money to have a decent standard of living, and then the moment they are finally freed from having to "earn" a living they immediately must ratchet back their standard of living to poverty levels?

>I don't think America is without problems, and I think the direction it is going, especially w.r.t corporations is alarming, but it cannot be compared to China.

Can't it? Bush was basically a criminal who used a convenient (for him) tragedy to make billions for his pals. Then "change" came and now Obama is making billions for his buddies on Wall Street. The corruption is open and obvious. It's not the same kinds of corruption as China, but it's hard for me to call one evil and the other a beacon of hope.

>The point is you have to trust systems, and the only systems you can trust are ones that are self-correcting, with independent actors and oversight.

True, but my point was that most people simply trust someone somewhere is doing this due diligence. Some of us may even bother reading up on it enough to satisfy ourselves that it's happening. But without actually being involved you can't be certain. Maybe people in China and North Korea think their government also has these kind of due diligence mechanisms.

>Some of it we have already heard about, some of it we'll hear about in the future. For that reason, it doesn't bother me.

This is actually something scary that's happening world wide. Gradually locking down the Internet so you wont hear about these anymore. I hope someone comes up with some good peer-to-peer technology to combat this soon.

>No, that would be impossible to prove. I can claim that I currently believe that I believe very little, but that doesn't really help. I mean, I don't actually know China exists at all.

But you can easily prove China exists by going there and spending some time there. But as long as people aren't willing to look for themselves, what I describe will be very possible.

I used to believe the US was the greatest nation on earth. Then I came to Europe and found it to be much better in so many things.

>Can I also suggest reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_society Obviously there is a trade-off with levels of crime, poverty and so on, but I'd rather live in an albeit imperfect western open society, or even India, than China.

Agreed, but what one has to keep in mind is: what is the end state? How do you want the world to be? Personally I want to live in a world where people only have to work on what they find interesting. Everyone knows that people who love something produce better work in that area than people who don't. This whole site is (or used to be) based around the idea of making a start up and getting rich from it some how. But why? So we can work on what we're interested in, of course. Wouldn't it be nice to just skip that middle part and start working on what you like from the start, without having to worry about financial independence?

Now, which government is getting me closer to that? The US? No, they seem to be rapidly going the opposite direction. China doesn't look good, but they are still in development. Who knows what kind of society they will end up with. Given the track record of humanity, probably not with a very good one, but no other country has anything to offer them.

Nit: This article is too new to be saying C# is "just java again". It started out that way but it's gone past java now in terms of functionality (e.g. closures, LINQ). The two look less and less alike with each passing version.

This isn't surprising. Big companies see that their employees can't easily leave so they take advantage of it. Of course when the economy picks up people are going to leave, but this will be happening to lots of companies so they'll have plenty of available talent to replace their losses.

The company I'm at made a huge profit last year. Half as much as the year before, but still a massive profit. In my year end meeting the manager who gave me my embarrassingly awful bonus check told me "we're lucky to be getting anything with the year we've had"!! Of course the CEO didn't get hurt much. It was pretty interesting. I never see anyone in the office after 5pm since that day...

I'm not a fan of China's government either (though I hate the US' about equally), but I really think this argument is vastly more complex than you're presenting.

For example, you think it's clear cut that US citizens being able to get some link on the Internet puts them above China citizens. There are many problems with this line of reason:

1) People in China can get on the web as well. Due to how the firewalling work, most probably don't even realize it happens. Just sometimes they try a link that times out. Happens all the time. Are you sure it isn't already happening to you?

2) Are you sure the information you're seeing is true? In some cases you wont have any way of completely proving one way or another.

3) For some countries, seeing the info doesn't affect anything because of the level of indoctrination the people go through. For example, you can point out what ever you like to a Scientologist, you wont change their mind because their indoctrination will prevent them from believing you or your source. Are you sure you or the citizens of your country don't also have this problem?

>And guess what, you do have a choice (modulo some paperwork) to live where you want.

Actually, not so much. For most countries you can't just go there, you would have to either marry in or get a job there. Getting a job can be harder because most countries have rules in place to force their companies to hire their own citizens.

I do wish it could be a lot easier to move between countries so that countries would be forced to compete with each other. Of course the countries would do what they could (as they do now) to make people think they are better off than they are now.

I could see your point of view for the most part until this post. You think there are some people fated to be in the "leading" class and we need to just let them lead?

Personally, I question the need for government at all, but above all I find one must be practical. What works... works. I think a real, advanced anarchist system has never been allowed to be tried (for obvious reasons) but without testing it I'm not convinced it couldn't work.

I certainly don't approve of a people who have, frankly, produced a pretty awful system condemning someone else who also has an awful system (which has a different set of plus and minus points).

Disagree does not equal downvote people.

Go look at how many people US government accidentally kills (e.g. stun gun mishaps, shooting unarmed even innocent people, innocent people receiving the death penalty, etc.) every year and multiply that by 5 (they have 5 times more people). I would be shocked if the number is less than 1700.

I don't think China is a fantastic country, but if what we do produces even worse results and even more misery (I don't know that we are, but it could obviously be argued) then how can we say we know better?

Fair point but don't forget that the US, while being known as one of the most free countries is also one of the most violent in the world. It's a tricky question to be sure.

While I disagree with some of what you say here, I really get sick of this mentality that we know best and places that aren't like us are wrong and should change. Let china do what they want (so long as it isn't something horrific like genocide, etc.) and we'll see how it goes. If everyone does what we do, they'll just get what we have. Maybe we could be better.

Well my mistake, I didn't realize this point was still under contention. I was under the impression that it's common knowledge that new connections are not created in the brain after a certain age (15-ish as I recall) and all new connections must be formed from existing ones.

This is why e.g. bilingual kids learn new languages much faster than people who only speak one language, people who learn an instrument as a child can pick up new ones much faster, etc.

What is a personal theory of mine is that if you don't have language to understand a concept by a certain point you can never truly understand it. The only places I point to that support my theory are the few cases of children being raised away from humans [1] and this Pirahã story. It's pretty difficult to prove scientifically since it would require destroying someone's life.

But on this site, of all sites, I would expect discussion about it, not a simple down vote.

[1] I've heard of at least 2 seperate cases where through some odd circumstanced a child reached teenage years without learning any kind of communication with humans. After they were rescued, in both cases they were never able to grasp concepts much further than a young child (around where chimps who learn sign language get to). This is by no means conclusive, since they obviously went through an incredibly traumatic experience, but as I mentioned above, there is no easy way to apply scientific method to this theory.

I'm certainly not trolling and I've paid more than enough attention to the perl community. Please point out where my comments are inaccurate?

I most definitely was voted down due to "some weird fanboyism" since when I go to the thread page I saw that all comments got a down vote even though at that time only this comment had anything to do with perl. I've also seen this exact same behavior on reddit and other sites.

Anyway, I would expect and admin can check this pretty easily.

Ok, but it's still more work than if throwing an exception were simply the default.

And this is just one example. I programmed perl for the better part of a decade and every day I felt the pain of how "anti-Huffman encoded" it is unless you're making 3 line scripts. If perl people wish to concede that this is all perl is good for then I'll happily concede that perl does indeed have good Huffman encoding. :)

But they've been exposed to other concepts, perhaps these new concepts don't become important because they don't understand them. :)

Does it not violate ycombinator etiquette to just vote someone down past 0 without explaining why? My comment wasn't remotely snarky, nor something I wouldn't say to anyone's face.

Fine, but what about error handling? It's been known for quite some time that C-style return code checking is a fail. And it certainly makings coding a lot more verbose. There are lots and lots of situations where doing something in perl is just a lot more wordy than other languages that are better about "Huffman encoding".

I wonder if people think placebos are magically "getting more effective" because people in the US are actually taking way more drugs today than they actually need to? Out of all my friends back home in the states almost all of them are on some kind of prescription for something. One couple pays over $2k per month for medication! Is all this really necessary? In this couple's case, some of the drugs are apparently only needed to counter the effects of some of the others.

Nice, a perl fan saw this post and actually appears to have gone through all of my posts and voted them down (bringing some to 0). Welcome to reddit!

Personally I've always found Larry's talks very poor. They seem to wander all over the place, full of buzzwords and much of what he claims doesn't seem to have any connection to what he actually did.

Huffman encoding? Then why are so many of the defaults wrong? Nearly any perl programmer would tell you that your programs should start with "use strict", so wouldn't Huffman encoding dictate that "strict" would need to be turned off if you didn't want it? And choosing "special return value" to signal failure can't possibly be shorter than using exceptions, it can only be as good if you don't handle any errors.

He's always reminded me of someone trying to be "deep" after smoking a joint.

But this is circular. They don't think about it because they don't have a word to describe it... because they don't think about it....

The children can learn to count. The issue is reaching the age when your brain stops forming new connections without having language for certain concepts. If you lack the language to describe something you can't understand it. The only way an adult understands new concepts is in terms of previously known ones.

I disagree. A joke will always be more concise than the explanation of what (possibly) makes it funny.

Because everyone who does do this will provide a better user interface than you do. You can choose to make your life easier or your users experience nicer.

Personally, my strategy is simply to not write HTML or CSS. I write to a DSL that is implemented based on what browser is being served, so there are no sniffer scripts in the pages themselves. True, this does mean the same, otherwise static pages, may need to get generated over and over, but this is where caching comes in.