adabsurdo's comments

> Life arising only once could very well be the more plausible option

Indeed I feel like coming to this conclusion is something that the authors - and most of us rationalist types - do not _want_ to come to.

Because if you accept that hypothesis, then it follows as a consequence that an alternative view of the world makes a lot more sense: what if, rather than living in an emergent, random universe where life sprouts up everywhere, hundreds of billions of times, but somehow _always_ disappears before we can ever observe it outside Earth, we are instead living at the center of a universe where we are the sole intelligent species that ever existed? In that system of the world, the universe is being directed by beings existing outside its bounds - gods. A simulation created and managed by uncaring observers - as hypothesized by the likes of Elon Musk? Or a benevolent God in the Judeo/Christiano/Islamic tradition?

The truth is that this alternative is being rejected a priori, indeed not even acknowledged, by the authors of the article or most people in this thread, because it is an affront to their core beliefs, not through pure logical reasoning.

>> But none of that really matters.

I would bet that you are neither a woman, black, jewish, poor, or gay.

So the fact, for example, that ron paul is a huge racist is something that you can discount at no cost to you.

edit: wow, i see the ron paul brigade is out in force, as usual. thank you all! never been so proud of being downvoted.

kind of ironic to say hackers are above branding, when here we are arguing Apple vs Google vs Facebook!

exactly. all those car-sharing services may become much, much more useful and prevalent when you can use your smartphone to whistle the car to come to you. that would also spell doom to taxis.

perhaps then only the very rich, those who live in remote areas, and true car enthusiasts will want or need to have their own car.

a bit like a 100 years ago, everybody from the middle-class up had a maid, but now only rich people do because machines now do most of the household work for us.

you know you're on hacker news when the most upvoted comment has found something negative to nitpick out of a cool story.

depression would be more accurate.

the problem, i think, is that there is a core contradiction at the heart of the euro system:

1) you can't have a currency union, without a fiscal union;

2) you can't have a fiscal union, without a true political union;

3) the euro area is a currency union with neither a fiscal or a political union.

in other words, for a currency union to work well, you need to shuffle money around. but you can't do that without political legitimacy, or if people feel like the money is going to "them", as opposed to "us".

The leaders who created the euro were trying to go about it the other way around: currency union would lead to fiscal union, which would lead to political union. but now, in a recession, with things going bad, they are finding that, in fact, they would need all three for any part to work correctly.

why are the Germans refusing to let the ECB be the lender of last resort? the core reason is that they see, correctly, that this would put them on the hook for the past and likely future mismanagement of the Greeks and Italians. of course, they can't say this publicly, so instead you hear all sorts of nonsense, hyperinflation this and weimar that.

or, to put it another way, would the Germans let this kind of thing happen to other Germans? I don't think so! Greeks and Italians are "them", and in bad times people feel less generous and fall back to the "us".

but at the same time, of course, their refusing to let the ECB, as it were, bail out the Greeks and Italians will inevitably lead to their default, exit from the Euro, and who knows what after that. at the very least, expect nationalist parties everywhere to rise in the polls.

let's just hope that we're not rebooting to the early 20th century.

>> Any action requires a hilarious number of clicks to get done.

like what? again, i'm not challenging you, i'm genuinely wondering.

for now i only use linux server-side, but i'm thinking of maybe swiching from osx to linux for my next laptop. i played a little with both mint and ubuntu in vmware, but i don't think i can make a fair assessment.

personally, i don't care for customization at all, so i was wondering if there were other issues besides that.

honest question: why are so many people hating on unity? is it the launcher bar?

my point is that this style of writing is pervasive within the scala world, including the official api. and it's not just the list class. look at the base xml class, NodeSeq:

http://www.scala-lang.org/api/rc/scala/xml/NodeSeq.html

no. the problem is that scala allows almost any string of characters as identifiers, and this encourages programmers to use symbols instead of english words for their function names. So you end up with identifiers that convey no meaning whatsoever, like /:\ or >>:.

Sure, this can be in fact very nice if you are writing a DSL for a problem that already has its own well-known set of symbols, like a branch of mathematics.

However, what happens in reality is that most programming is "business" programming. But still programmers use it for everything (because we're lazy and typing :: seems faster than "append"). The scala api leads the way here. For example the list class:

http://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/scala/collection/immut...

The following are all subtle variations on append and prepend:

::, :::, ++, :+, ++:, +:

Can any non-scala programmer guess which one is which? When you move on to the Map or Set class, it's a little bit the same and a little bit different. Sure, at one point you will remember all of this by heart, but the same pattern repeats itself when you try to use another library: it defines its own little language, instead of using the one common to us all: english.

Note another huge drawback, for me at least: you can't google such symbols because of course search engines will treat them as noise. Even searching for them with regexes is tricky because you can't use word boundaries.

The argument I heard over and over is that you can make non-sense function words even if you're restricted to alpha-numeric. This is true, and it happens. However, if I call my function "append" or "xyz", and what it does is "prepend", it's obviously the wrong name and you can point it out.

Symbols, on the other hand, are arbitrary, and it becomes a question of taste.

edit: removed some list operators added in error, thanks Inufu

i used scala for a few months. it sounded very promising, java without the verbosity. but in the end i decided to stop using it.

The biggest problem for me was readabilty. Scala is the first language that i've learned where at first i couldn't just read code and immediately guess what it does.

I think the prime reason for this is that scala permits operator overloading; more than that, in fact, almost every character can be an identifier. This results in often very cryptic code and libraries, because you can't guess what that function does without reading its definition. quick, what's the difference between +++ and ::: ? what's /: and /:\ ? You can't even google it!

The other big problem for me was the type system. At first it sounded really great, and in fact the amount of compile-time code verification that you can achieve is indeed impressive. But in practice, i found myself fighting with the type system a lot, for example when trying to reuse a function with generic type restrictions that I had't written: some time these can get very long and your only choice is to copy-paste them from the original definition.

Also, how do you test that your type constraints are correct? you can't, by definition, write compilable code that would invalidate them.

Finally, it turns out that a lot of the bad stuff that's in java ends up in scala also, because of runtime compatibility concerns. in particular, scala's generics are an extension of java's. so, for example, almost all generic type information is lost at runtime, except for some extra metadata that scala stores in the object. this results in pretty ugly code when you have a dynamic object and you need to use it with a generic method.

personnally i find it quite amazing, and incredibly short-sighted, how developpers are willing to give up the freedom of the web in favor of the golden chains of the apple platform. because, make no mistake, this is where its going: in a few years nobody will want to try your stuff unless its an app, and the web will be a ghetto for porn and 4chan.

haven't we seen this movie before when microsoft controlled basically all of personal computing? at least on windows the user could install anything he wanted. now, not only developpers are at the mercy of apple's policies, but apple has decided to prevent any theoritical disruption from within by forbidding apps that host code (other than its own browser).

i didn't mean to imply that. i do agree that your db client should check for write errors if you care about your data, and that mongodb should make their official drivers have safer defaults.

but the poster to which i was replying seemed to be saying that machine redundancy was somehow optional. it is not. hardware fails, and the architecture of whatever db server you are using is irrelevant when it does.

> preferably without needing at least three machines

if you don't have such redundancy your data is not safe, no matter what database engine you are running.

Mr. Krugman's point, very succintly, is that money is power, political and otherwise, and that as it concentrates into fewer hands (as has happened to a huge extent in the last 30 years), those at the top start to behave like a ruling class - an oligarchy.

it will always be the case that politicians are more responsive to those with money, especially with the current judicial doctrine in the USA, that money is speech and therefore all attempts to regulate its use in politics is basically unconstitutional. that's the real issue with wealth inequality.

Mr. Mankiw is just arguing sideways to Mr. Krugman by making the very obvious point that more education betters your life's odds. And since Mr. Mankiw is a very bright guy, I can't help but think that he's doing this on purpose to muddy the discussion.

what you say is true, but i think your haircut example just glides over the more important question of what we can actually compare objectively and what we can't.

it's true that taste varies and is culture-dependent, some people hate punk rock, others love country music, etc. but i think we tend to over-exaggerate this. after all, nobody drinks vinegar by the glass, eats rocks, or likes earing really strident sound.

there is an objective basis to taste, rooted in evolution: eg sugar is energy, we need that to live, so we like it - a lot.

yes, but you have to agree this is really awkward, beyond sharing with fellow hackers. most casual users would never go to the trouble just to try your app.

my point was that the technology exists to make sharing apps easier, but apps like this are artificially crippled by apple's app store policies, because they want to control everything.

this would be great stuff indeed, but the restrictions you mention seem like a killer to me: you basically can't share any program that was written on this app. so how can this ever be more than a toy?

no, not all. the web is fully open. google is not the exclusive gateway to the internet. if google were to become wildly inaccurate,, or start to willingly leave out relevant results, other search engines (hello bing!) would take over pretty fast. remember, the cost of switching search engines is approximately zero. this is precisely why the market leader in search does not behave this way.

and obviously, there are other, extremely simple and effective ways to reach a website: typing in the address bar, links by email, facebook, twitter, etc., etc.

the app store is the one and only gateway to the iOS platform.