The Internet is part of the real world. Whatever you dislike about the real world, you will probably eventually dislike about the Internet. And to save what you like about the Internet, you have to go into the real world and fight for it. Thomas Anderson has to leave the Matrix and go into the real world to save all the people who think they are living normal lives in the Matrix.
I agree about Kessler. Why would she write an essay about Yegge? Slow news day? Writers block? Who cares about Yegge's blog post? How did she even find it? Still, QZ has a big audience. QZ is popular in Silicon Valley. I feel like once something is up on QZ, people are going to respond to it.
I currently work for a client who has decided to shift away from PHP and towards Python. They had a monolithic PHP app with perhaps 250,000 lines of code. Now we are developing a series of Python apps in the microservices style. We've decided to develop everything as Python 2.7. We are not looking at Python 3.x. There are a few reasons. Some libraries that we want are in Python 2.7. And Amazon only supports 2.7. And we are not wild about Python 3.x's attempt to imitate a classical object oriented style.
We would look very closely at a Python 2.8, if it existed.
If I was your client I'd be pissed that you decided to rewrite my code into a legacy version of Python. Make no mistake: Python 3 is the future of Python. There will be no version 2.8 and there is no going back to 2.7.
Also, I don't know what you mean by "Amazon only supports 2.7" because boto (the main client for Python) has supported Python 3 for 2 years now. Perhaps you mean Lambda?
+1. Also it's easy to write code that supports both, so if you really need python 2 support right now (surely AWS Lambda python 3 is coming soon, you can already use it unofficially) that's a much better option than being entrenched in python 2 (mainly the string handling is the issue for buggy code that'll run in 2 but not 3).
Breaking it down to microservices, could you not have some parts as 2.7, like any that need a specific library that does not have Python 3 support, and some in 3. Or for that matter GO, or RUST?
Bringing "Islamic terrorism" up to a whopping 1.7% of all homicides over the same time period, 75% of which occurred in a single attack by less than 30 people.
And yet, were I to point out that firearms are responsible for the majority of all homicides from 2001-2016, I'd expect you'd have a very different objection to the numbers.
I loved jQuery when it first appeared, but it is from another era, for sure. The rise of the Single Page Application was one big strike against jQuery. Frameworks such as Angular 1.0 emerged which relied on jQuery, and the software built with those frameworks revealed the dangers of mutable state, especially when combined with something async like Ajax. Anyone who has worked on a large Javascript project is eventually burned by mutable state. Then other frameworks such as React and Om Next emerged, which advocated for immutable data. The team behind Angular realized their mistakes and tried to fix them, so Angular 2.0 was a radical re-write of Angular 1.0, and yet despite that, more and more developers continued to flock to something like React. The immutable frameworks offer the idea that all state should be held in a single immutable atom, and the views should merely be straight reflections of the state that is held in that atom. One could still potentially use jQuery in the background to handle the actual update of the DOM elements, but there are many other ways of updating DOM elements, and many of those other methods are more efficient than jQuery, so jQuery's importance has declined.
Back in 2007, if you wanted to add some simple visual effects to your CRUD app, then jQuery was like a gift from God. But nowadays, given the complex systems that people are building, jQuery has less to offer. It never had an opinion about managing state, so it leaves the core question of building a large app to other frameworks, and those frameworks have various built-in ways of updating the DOM, so the ease-of-use offered by jQuery is no longer such a noticeable advantage.
"when a community and its moderators tend toward free-speech absolutist positions."
But oddly, this doesn't describe HN, because another aspect of the moderation is in favor of blandness, for the sake of avoiding flamewars. In college I was taught that good writing entailed taking strong positions, but the moderation here sometimes sees strong positions as being the same as flaming.
Well, yes, they also want everyone to be "civil", as though that's the highest ideal to aspire to. As though it's ever "civil" to, for example, call for the denaturalization and deportation of all Jewish people (as one very prominent HN member recently did), no matter how polite a tone one takes in doing so.
"I am Muslim, born in Massachusetts. I love my faith. Muslims in the US are very scared. Both my mom and wife wear the hijab, so I'm always worried they'll be attacked in the street. Even in the Bay Area it's a concern. Of course I encourage them to continue; it's important not to be affected. A few years ago, my mom and sister were at a farmers' market in Boston, what seems like a liberal setting. A big guy ran up and called them terrorists, started spitting at them. My 60 year old mom and 20 year old sister were really intimidated. My sister cried for the rest of the day. People stood by and watched. I give them the benefit of the doubt; they were taken off guard. We have to be aware of our surroundings and be ready to act. It takes mental preparation, so you don't end up reacting like a deer in the headlights."
I am worried what happens to a diverse country, such as the USA, when it elects a leadership that is vocally anti-immigrant. We are about to find out. All of us need to do what we can to minimize the kind of bigotry that might escalate under anti-immigrant leadership.
It's a potentially very scary time for minorities. The president sets the tone of the country through their actions. A president being anti-immigrant could bring that same quality out in others...
That's already happening. I've witnessed people trying to intimidate minority folk here in the East Bay, yelling 'you're going over the wall!' unprovoked at people on the street for example.
This is sad, you really think Trump is anti-immigrant? If you paid half a moment of attention you would know he is anti-ILLEGAL immigrant which is perfectly reasonable in a sovereign country with immigration laws.
I really think Trump is anti-immigrant. The distinction between legal and ILLEGAL immigrants sometimes cuts across families, and doesn't matter to those of us who came here from elsewhere. We know once the ILLEGAL immigrants are deported, we're next up.
I'm sorry but I strongly disagree. There is a CLEAR distinction between who is here legally and who is here illegally. In fact we have specific laws that define precisely the difference. I don't feel sorry for people that have come here illegally, afterall they broke the law as their first action to get here. I think a big problem is that we've gone so long kicking the can down the road that people (esp in California) have become used to this status quo where we turn a blind eye. Now that Trump has come in and promised to actually enforce our already existing laws, the left has exploded in anger thinking "how could he?!". I have followed this election closely and I have yet to hear a single thing that leads me to think he is going to deport legal citizens of any background whatsoever or that he'll discriminate against them. It's simply untrue. DJT loves America more than any President in our modern time and our country will grow strong under his leadership.
One thing you must realize is that the median undocumented immigrant has been here 12 years. Many of these people have children who are American citizens, so if you promise to deport them, you're in effect saying you want to break up families.
Maybe that's fine with you. I don't think it sits well with a lot of people.
Realize as well that immigration status is a precarious thing, and it's not always clear who is here legally and who is not. Many people spend a long time in administrative limbo. I was in the US for seven years before I learned I was "legal".
Like many things, immigration is less clear-cut when you look at it in detail. I encourage you to do that, whether or not you end up agreeing with me.
> I don't feel sorry for people that have come here illegally, afterall they broke the law as their first action to get here.
You are casually dismissing the group of people who are the main focus of controversy: people who arrived as children and have been here all their lives. They have never known the country they would be deported to. They are Americans by lived experience. They broke no laws.
I am simply not comfortable deporting those people. It brings us no benefit whatsoever.
> I have followed this election closely and I have yet to hear a single thing that leads me to think he is going to deport legal citizens of any background whatsoever
If you have a "deportation force" that operates on the kind of scale he claims to want at the speed he wants, you are obviously going to deport some citizens. It happened during Operation Wetback and there is no reason to think it would not happen again. People just don't always have their papers in order, and the immigration courts are backed up for years.
Would you be more agreeable if we gave amnesty to all existing illegals and then cracked down hard and built a much stronger border going forward? Where is the common ground?
I don't know what "cracked down hard" is supposed to mean, so I can't answer that.
I do know that I would be hard-pressed to come up with a more expensive, pointless, and futile way to attempt to restrict illegal immigration than building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, though.
Cracked down meaning we are not letting in illegal immigrants period. As far as the cost, you're incorrect so please do some research. The cost of building a border wall is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of taking care of the illegals each year.
Look at what you're writing. The US has had the policy you advocate for dozens of years; that's why they're called "illegal" immigrants.
Meanwhile: since 2000, the number of by-land unauthorized immigrants to the US has plummeted, with the share of unauthorized immigrants who simply overstay visas approaching 50%.
"The wall" isn't bad policy because it's inhumane. I care deeply about not deporting unauthorized immigrants but not even a little about the social impact of a big ugly wall in our big ugly southwest states.
"The wall" is bad policy because it's an extremely expensive make-work project that won't actually meaningfully reduce unauthorized immigration. It doesn't matter how high the wall is. Even the unauthorized immigrants who get here on land aren't running across open field land borders. The policy is a con, meant to appeal to a popular misconception of who unauthorized immigrants in this country are and how they got here.
You are like 2-3 Google searches away from verifying for yourself how stupid this particular use of funds is regardless of your opinions about immigration.
First off, the southwest states are anything but "big ugly". The wall isn't an endgame solution it's part of a larger shift in overall policy to actually enforce our existing immigration laws which will also include booting people who have overstayed their visa. We should also look to revamp our immigration process to allow legal immigrants in faster (10 years is way too long) and incentivize those who will ADD to America to come here. I agree the wall is in some ways symbolic but it is functional as well. Google secured fence act as HRC was also on board with it.
We already have policies that have demonstrably curbed unauthorized immigration over our southern border. Unauthorized land crossings have plummeted since 2000. You are again just a few Google searches away from the numbers. The wall is in almost every sense symbolic, and will not address the concern it is meant to address.
Again: it's annoying that we'd consider investing billions of dollars in a make-work project that really serves as nothing but a giant monument to racism --- couldn't we just paint the statue of liberty white, or something? --- but the real issue with the wall isn't moral, it's that it's a gigantic waste of money. It won't even prevent unauthorized immigration over our southern border, because that's not how unauthorized immigration works.
It's just a deterrent, part of a broader restrengthening of our nations' sovereignty imo. It sends a message. The amount of money is quite small when compared to real sources of government debt such as entitlements or the military.
The thinking here being that the best response to a spiraling national debt is to spend tens of billions of dollars on worthless public works projects?
Uh, did you support Obama and 800B he spent on infrastructure? Were you gonna support Clinton and her proposed $300B borrowed from the public for infrastructure (copying Obama's failed move)? If you could relax off the vitriol you might find that Trump's ideas could lead to an uptick in our economy. You might even give him a chance. Afterall, every newspaper and "economist" in the world predicted the market would plummet if he were elected and instead it rose to it's highest levels.
There have been some fantastic conversations on Hacker News about type systems. I've learned a lot about the different arguments for dynamic typing, versus strict typing, versus gradual typing. Java's type system may or may not have represented new thinking when it was under development in the early 1990s, but it certainly seems a bit dated in the year 2016. The limits of the Java type system have been discussed both here on HackerNews and also elsewhere, many times.
For those who want to consider arguments against Java's style of strict typing, 2 things I would recommend include "Agility & Robustness: Clojure spec, by Stuart Halloway":
He offers a chart that shows the strengths and weaknesses of strict typing versus unit tests versus the run-time checks offered by Spec. It's worth a look.
The discussions around gradual typing have been interesting, but to see how far the limits of this can be pushed, I would suggest everyone check out the Qi/Shen programming language:
"Qi makes use of the logical notation of sequent calculus to define types. This type notation, under Qi’s interpretation, is actually a Turing complete language in its own right. This notation allows Qi to assign extensible type systems to Common Lisp libraries and is thought of as an extremely powerful feature of the language."
This next quote is from someone who has spent a long time experimenting with different Lisps:
"Qi (and its successor Shen) really push the limits of what we might call a Fluchtpunkt Lisp. I suspect it requires a categorization of its own. A few years ago I was looking for a Lisp to dive into and my searching uncovered two extremely interesting options: Clojure and Qi. I eventually went with Clojure, but in the intervening time I’ve managed to spend quality time with Qi and I love what I’ve seen so far. Qi’s confluence of features, including an optional type system (actually, its type system might be more accurately classified as “skinnable”), pattern matching, and an embedded logic engine based on Prolog, make it a very compelling choice indeed."
Mark Taver, who created Shen, posted a comment and then turned it into an essay here:
"The underlined sentence is a compact summary of the reluctance that programmers often feel in migrating to statically typed languages – that they are losing something, a degree of freedom that the writer identifies as hampering creativity. Is this true? I will argue, to a degree – yes. A type checker for a functional language is in essence, an inference engine; that is to say, it is the machine embodiment of some formal system of proof. What we know, and have known since Godel's incompleteness proof [9] [11], is that the human ability to recognise truth transcends our ability to capture it formally. In computing terms our ability to recognise something as correct predates and can transcend our attempt to formalise the logic of our program. Type checkers are not smarter than human programmers, they are simply faster and more reliable, and our willingness to be subjugated to them arises from a motivation to ensure our programs work. That said, not all type checkers are equal. The more rudimentary and limited our formal system, the more we may have to compromise on our natural coding impulses. A powerful type system and inference engine can mitigate the constraints placed on what Racketnoob terms our creativity. At the same time a sophisticated system makes more demands of the programmer in terms of understanding.
...That said, not all type checkers are equal. The more rudimentary and limited our formal system, the more we
may have to compromise on our natural coding impulses. A powerful type system and inference engine can
mitigate the constraints placed on what Racketnoob terms our creativity. At the same time a sophisticated
system makes more demands of the programmer in terms of understanding. The invitation of adding types was
thus taken up by myself, and the journey to making this program type secure in Shen emphasises the conclusion
in this paragraph"
I'm only quoting two favorites of mine, but of course I could post a hundred examples, all making a similar point. Java's style of strict typing is both weak and incomplete, and yet overly rigid at the same time. It's worth noting how many other strategies exist, that deliver more robustness, with greater flexibility.
This is a long-standing problem (decade plus). Wikipedia deletionism interacts badly with research programming language pages. They tend to get deleted for "lack of notability", failing the test of "someone other than the people involved, wrote about it on a sufficiently high-profile piece of dead tree". And the pages face a recurrent threat of "heads you get deleted, tails we flip again in a few years". Some pages have been through deleted/recreated/deleted-again cycles. Some language communities manage to scrape together notability, others browbeat the deletion nominator, but it seems most pages get deleted. Fixing Wikipedia appears intractable.
Absent a wiki associated with something like LtU, creating an alternate wiki has been beyond the capabilities of the programming language research community. Which ends up reflected in balkanization - for example, people working on category theoretic type hierarchies in different languages, being unaware of each others' work. Shoemaker's children.
I am surprised you were downvoted. The 4 points you make seem straightforward, and are accurate.
The timeline for economic damage (from global warming) is fairly long. Even in the worst-case scenario, the Earth as we know it is still recognizable for the next 50 years, and all of the seasons and climate patterns remain roughly the same. The major changes will tend to show 50 to a 100 years from now.
Also, I'd like to point out that the increasing acidity of the oceans is a much worse problem, in the long-term, than the warming of the atmosphere. Carbon washes out of the atmosphere, and ends up as acid in the oceans. At current trends, in less than 100 years the oceans will be more acidic than at any point since the Cambrian Revolution. It is not clear that life in the oceans can survive with those levels of acidity (other than organisms that live in volcanic vents and love acid).
I'm not. Many people seem to have lost sight of what downvotes are supposed to mean on HN. They are supposed to mean, "This comment is not constructive." Instead, people use it to mean, "I don't agree with this." So controversial opinions often get downvoted into oblivion rather quickly. It's damned annoying, especially when people don't follow up with any explanation of why they disagree.
> It is not clear that life in the oceans can survive with those levels of acidity
Actually, that's pretty clear. Some kind of life will survive, even if it's just bacteria and jellyfish. Life is incredibly robust. This is exactly the kind of hyperbole that undermines the arguments for policy changes.
This is not to say that acidification is not a serious problem. It is. But not because it will sterilize the ocean. It won't.
I downvoted because the comment wasn't a response to the article, nor did it really seem to be responding to other comments. I agree that many people make the same complaint you do, claiming that many downvoters are simply disagreeing with content. You might want to consider topicality, too.
I would have posted as a child comment, but I saw a lot of those kinds of things in the discussion even at that early stage. That's why I decided to post top-level.
> So controversial opinions often get downvoted into oblivion rather quickly. It's damned annoying, especially when people don't follow up with any explanation of why they disagree.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticing that. There are certain topics - e.g. progressive taxation, Steve Jobs, Apple and socialism - that are impossible to criticise on HN without triggering a flurry of downvotes.
I suspect that some of the life in the ocean _could_ adapt, if they were not also being over-fished (or having their prey over-fished). You need a large population for variations to crop up, and then some period of time for the beneficial variations to spread out. 50-100 years is _breakneck_ speed as far as evolution goes, but if you have an annual-breeding fish then they could get 50-100 generations to adapt. Whales & dolphins may have a bad time though.
This is exactly the kind of hyperbole I'm talking about. Whales and dolphins and fish are not the totality of life in the oceans. There's krill and algae and bacteria and a bazillion other things.
Now, losing whales and dolphins and fish would be catastrophic (IMO). But that is not the same as losing all life. It is not that "some of the life in the ocean could adapt." Life in the ocean (and on land) will adapt, no question about it. It just might not be the kind of life we humans want to see. That is the problem.
