I appreciate what you’re saying but I thought McCarthy was not suggesting this is a world without good and evil. But rather the forces at work are beyond our ability to control or even understand. Termites never know why pesticide is being sprayed. At least that was my take from Blood Meridian, the Road and No Country. For instance, the scalp hunters are often horrified but in awe of the judge, subconsciously aware their souls have been signed away. And that part at the end where the kid falls before the dying woman and almost begs for some explanation for what is happening. As McKenna said, trying to use our reason and science is like “throwing an ice cube into a blast furnace.”
And I should say McCarthy is not fixated on just evil, but equally on the goodness that miraculously finds us. Only time I’ve ever openly sobbed from a book was the end of The Road.
> Static typing? One study, presented at FSE 2014, found no evidence that static typing is helpful—or harmful
And yet the abstract of the linked paper says:
> Most notably, it does appear that strong typing is modestly better than weak typing, and among functional languages, static typing is also somewhat better than dynamic typing.
If you click through the link in that sentence to https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ or read the study itself, you'll see that the paper doesn't support the claims made in the abstract at all.
It used automatic classification that's obviously wrong. Table 1 gives a list of "top" projects for each language and many of them are simply misclassified.
> ... the "top three" TypeScript projects are bitcoin, litecoin, and qBittorrent). These are C++ projects. So the intermediate result appears to not be that TypeScript is reliable, but that projects mis-identified as TypeScript are reliable. Those projects are reliable because Qt translation files are identified as TypeScript and it turns out that, per line of code, giant dumps of config files from another project don't cause a lot of bugs. It's like saying that a project has few bugs per line of code because it has a giant README. This is the most blatant classification error, but it's far from the only one.
> For example, of what they call the "top three" perl projects, one is showdown, a javascript project, and one is rails-dev-box, a shell script and a vagrant file used to launch a Rails dev environment. Without knowing anything about the latter project, one might expect it's not a perl project from its name, rails-dev-box, which correctly indicates that it's a rails related project.
There are other major problems with the study, but that one is sufficient to make the results invalid.
Agreed. Currently reading the biography of Disney, and it’s so depressing to hear he was the punching bag of every writer, journalist, critic, and university professor throughout the 60s.
Was Disney the conformist racist simpleminded backwater troglodyte they claimed, or were they?
It’s hard to not be bothered by the pettiness of the “cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat”. But I once felt hacker news had fewer of those voices.
Having read several bio's of Disney, I'd say he wasn't.
The worst factual criticism that can be pointed at Disney was he was overly sentimental for a past that never was. He painted American history in such a way to present a "smooth façade of sentimentality and stubborn optimism".
He was very much a man of his time, he wasn't known to use racial epithets - but was racially insensitive like most men of his era - he had several jews in his inner circle, and none of his employees (even the ones who didn't like him) would say he was anti-Semitic - but he allied himself with anti-communist groups that had a strong anti-Semitic bend to them.
I would argue on whole, he left the world a better place than he found it however, the technical improvements he and his company introduced to the world of animation left a huge and lasting impact felt the world over.
He was also known for massive investments into wind farms, divesting his petroleum portfolio, and rallying fellow conservatives to take climate change seriously.
You admit you’ve never heard of him, then read Wikipedia, and feel sufficiently armed with the knowledge required to self-righteously proclaim judgement on the life of another human being.
The prejudice and ignorance in these comments are astounding, so I'll try address the major themes.
I'm defensive because, though I rarely watch the games, I enjoy listening to postgame interviews with the Alabama coach, Nick Saban. He's found unprecedented success in a brutally competitive field by following a textbook stoic philosophy people in the south call "The Process", by encouraging relentless pursuit of perfection in each individual's role, and showing little concern if that results in a win or a loss.
In every speech to players and fans he recites a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr: "If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music ... Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well."
-------
> "If students are leaving early, they must not be enjoying it"
Alabama typically wins games by 30-60 point margins (a touchdown is 7 points). Like any sport, close games are more exciting than blowouts. The students are getting bored in the last quarter, and leaving to return to tailgate parties and get drunk or avoid the traffic. Saban felt it was disrespectful and demotivating to the players who worked hard to win such staggering victories. In the genesis postgame interview, he yelled, "I've never been to a tailgate in my life!"
-------
> "American obsession with college football is absurd"
Generally, we hear this from self-hating Americans who wish to be European and American-hating Europeans who feel America is the source of all of their problems.
And generally, they share an obsession with soccer, or superhero movies, or something equally ridiculous as football.
American public universities are spread relatively evenly throughout the country, but major cities that support a professional team are not. So in the southeast and midwest, people rally support around local universities in the way that people in cities do for professional sports in America and in Europe.
Most of the fans of these university football teams never attended the university, but they are proud to still be apart of these traditions and it contributes tremendously to community cohesiveness. If you go to any southern tailgate, you'll see people from all ethnic groups and economic classes enjoying their time together.
Yes, this is tribalism. But maybe a little tribalism is good when half of the posts on hacker news are about the profound loneliness emerging in American society.
-------
> "It costs too much money"
Small private school football programs are struggling, yes. But many of them will not survive education changes in the coming decades regardless.
But football is very profitable for large public universities and funds other Title Nine sports programs like, most importantly to me, women's soccer. Title Nine is the best explanation for why we are so dominant in the Women's World Cup.
-------
> "Sports are a waste of time"
Yes, as are many of the things we choose to do with our time. Hopefully, no one is judging you for your unproductive time. But it sounds like many here are apart of a subgroup, like me, that didn't have much of a connection to the popular or well-adjusted kids in school. And so we find solace in looking down upon the things they enjoy. But being unjustly judgmental does not make us better than them, it makes us pathetic.
Sounds like your response to "students are not enjoying it" is just explaining why they are not enjoying it. They want to be elsewhere and do something else.
It is not disrespectful to not attend sport event you are not interested in, no matter how hard players trained.
This Alabama coach is famous for erupting in anger during the last play of the game if his player makes a mistake, even when they are winning 60-0.
To him, every moment matters equally, whether in practice or in the championship. And he considers support of the students and fans to be key in the performance of the players.
The students there LOVE being apart of a winning program. They enjoy the first half when Alabama walks over almost every team in the country.
Saban, i think, feels that the students are threatening the part they enjoy by not staying to the end.
I agree with you that he's probably wrong about that, but I also kind of respect the attitude. And so do most of the fans as you'll see them now happily sitting in the rain until the last second to show their solidarity.
European universities have lots of intramural sports, including soccer. They just can’t understand our massive commercialization of college level sports, but no one else in the world could either, it is uniquely American.
The way this whole thing started was between very urban Ivies in the USA:
> The first organized college sports club was formed in 1843 when Yale University created a boat club.[4] Harvard University then followed in their footsteps, creating a similar boat club a year later. These boat clubs participated in rowing races called Regattas.[5] The creation of these organizations set the stage for the first intercollegiate sporting event in the U.S. This event took place in 1852, when the rowing team from Yale competed against the rowing team from Harvard at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.[4] This marked the beginning of intercollegiate competition and triggered the creation of numerous college athletic organizations.[citation needed] This historic race sparked the venerable rivalry between the two schools, the Yale-Harvard Regatta is considered the cornerstone of intercollegiate athletic competition in the United States.[6]
...
> The first intercollegiate football game between teams from Rutgers College (now Rutgers University) and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) took place on November 6, 1869 at College Field (now the site of the College Avenue Gymnasium at Rutgers University) in New Brunswick, New Jersey.[citation needed]
I don’t disagree the sport started in the ivies, but not where it became massively commercialized. Right now the Northeastern football programs are not very competitive, with the exception of Notre Dame. I can’t do this analysis right now, but I’d bet that there is a strong correlation between college football revenue and distance from professional teams, adjusting for the date at which the professional teams were founded.
Segment the continental United States into quadrants. In which quadrant would the Notre Dame pin fall? It’s also about 1.5 hours from downtown Chicago. Tuscaloosa, Alabama is about 3.5 hours from the nearest major city with a sports team, Atlanta.
"Investments in IT" by the german government means we somehow funnel money to the big companies to make sure they dont fire people. Deutsche Telekom daughter T-Systems decided in september to cut 6000 jobs in germany (10k worldwide) to save 600mio €/year. Now the Government spents 3B on "AI". Coincidence?
T systems. Do not think I have ever worked with people more incompetent than the 'senior consultants' from that place. No surprise it is not going well with them.
Consider this: approximately 32% of Deutsche Telekom is owned by the german state[0]. Its in their interest, that the money goes to the "right" company.
German firms (like Deutsche Telekom) have a ton of redundant jobs because of their inability to make needed structural changes because of the work councils and labor laws.
This is why firms like Google are hiring in Switzerland and the United Kingdom instead of France and Germany.
Labor protection laws limit options with direct employees, they do not interfere at all with a company's relation to suppliers. That's why subcontracting exists, it's employer-side redundancy insurance.
This is nonsense. Gmail is free. Inbox was free. Google Search is free. You can launch a profitable business on Google Cloud or Firebase in the free tier. They built Kubernetes and Go, for free, and it's very easy to port your Cloud infrastructure anywhere. You can translate text to any language, for free.
What exactly do they owe you?
Not enough people were using Inbox. It was an experiment and now they're moving on.
Gsuite also had inbox and Gmail and they are not free. Users who pay for those care.
Next time I have to make a choice on Google product, most likely will reject it coz I can't really on them to either maintain it or give actual human support either
MS is probably supporting XP in the embedded world. If you are not selling to consumers you have to be prepared to do that
That's the difference between with MS and Google(i.e. enterprise and consumer), it doesn't matter how small the user base is, once a feature/product is GA to paying customers, you maintain it for a reasonable amount of time (>>> 1 year ) If you are not sure whether it will have usage/ interest, do your research , but once you go GA stick to it. Even if you are maintaining it for one customer, it shows the commitment you are showing to your customer , builds a lot of confidence on the vendor - Google doesn't get mine today.
* I meant the SLA for notice of deprecation not the lifetime of the product
You're right they owe you nothing, but that goes both ways!
When companies launch experiments and features that people actually like and then take them away, they piss some people off.
The bad PR they are getting from this means they didn't make it clear they were going to discontinue the service in 2020 (or something like that) and make it super easy to transition.
It's pretty weird they wouldn't just keep their Inbox service up and running and minimize maintenance costs.
Seems to suggest they want to make big changes to the underlying data storage and don't want to worry about backward compatibility.
> This is nonsense. Gmail is free. Inbox was free.
> What exactly do they owe you?
This is oversimplified. Google makes products expecting something in return: users provide it data and ad revenue. More directly, users invest time and thought into learning it and integrating it into their lives. Google invited people to depend on it, and after they did, it killed the product. That's real hours wasted for real people. It's not irrational for them to feel betrayed.
Yes, Google has the right to kill a product, just as you have the right to tell a party guest to leave your house. But don't expect them to love you afterward.
> Not enough people were using Inbox. It was an experiment and now they're moving on.
Why weren't enough people using Inbox? Speaking personally, I never tried it because I expected exactly this. I don't want to waste my time on things that will be shuttered.
Google seems to think that each product is an independent experiment. But it seems more likely that each "experiment" they end contributes to the failure of subsequent ones.
Google doesn't owe people products. But people don't owe Google goodwill, either. And without goodwill, it can't launch new products.
Honestly, I'd love to see examples of rotted code that could be made exponentially faster. I'm likely guilty of this.
And I agree that it's disheartening to watch how horribly we use these incredible tools. But thankfully as programmers we're in a position to design these tools to offset the worst parts of humanity.
And one field in which more powerful computers will be needed soon is deep learning. It appears that progress is beginning to stall, as larger networks are necessary. Better tools for distributed computing will make up the difference in the short term, but the current infrastructure appears to be insufficient for general intelligence.
>And one field in which more powerful computers will be needed soon is deep learning. It appears that progress is beginning to stall, as larger networks are necessary. Better tools for distributed computing will make up the difference in the short term, but the current infrastructure appears to be insufficient for general intelligence.
"In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure."
The Botanical Garden setting could be part of the problem. The article says that your location is weighted into the results, considering past occurrences of species found near you. If you tried non-native flowers to the garden, it could have been weighted incorrectly.
I think it's a more interesting topic. Another article on animal emotions would be inconclusive. But this represents real progress in ecology and environmental protection. A GPS sensor that fits on the back of a bee is incredible.
And I should say McCarthy is not fixated on just evil, but equally on the goodness that miraculously finds us. Only time I’ve ever openly sobbed from a book was the end of The Road.