derringer's comments

I feel this is a very insightful comment that adds meaningfully to this discussion. Through the use of cutting and witty satire OP has demonstrated that there is in fact an overabundance of programming languages to choose from with support and tooling, not only stating the obvious, but also serving as a blistering put-down to an individual who worked very hard to provide something useful and did it for absolutely no compensation. Good show sir. I would like to humbly request a subscription to your newsletter.

Stereotypes often ring true, no one attributes this kind of stuff to northern Europe and there's a reason for that.

As to your claim that he's lying about the vegetable cart story. In order for his car to get swarmed, at least one of those vegetable sellers has to make the first move, sometimes this happens, but 9 times out of 10 people look out for their own skins ahead of righteous vengeance.

Please enlighten me. I know the story of how Argentina wound up in the situation of needing to prop up their currency. It's an old story, the same as Greece's except for the ending which is uncertain. The government went into massive debt mostly for public works projects (yes, for the people of Argentina), but when the debt came due, the people of Argentina voted to default. Now all future governments have to try to clean up this mess. Is there corruption? Absolutely. But that is only tangential to the real problem.

1) http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/14/141365144/friday-p...

2) http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2011/11/argentin...

To be fair, they also have the right to tell you to shut up about telling them to shut up. How about we all agree be angry at eachother and call it a day. Or we could continue flipping the fuck out and impotently messaging eachother over the internet. I'm up for either.

You speak of this as though it is a inherently bad thing to have centralized control. I'm as techno-libertarian as the next HN user, but I know that when the market riegns completely free there is a non-trivial chance that boons can swiftly turn into depressions.

There is a reason the Greek government will impose draconian currency controls. It is for the benefit of the Greek people, so their savings accounts will only drop 50% rather than 80-90%.

A purely decentralized currency may be the way of the future, but it will be replacing old problems with new ones. Whether it is ultimately better is anyones' guess.

Identifying power lines and people isn't necessarily as hard as you say. With a simple image, it's true machines can't match human perception. But when you take into account infrared for viewing human profiles, magnetic sensors for checking for power lines and the fact that the bots are mobile and can investigate and base their analysis on 3d space. The computational bang for your buck is also continuing to improve and sensors are continuing to get smaller. These systems aren't possible yet, but they may be in the relatively near future.

You're likely being down voted because since the invention of programming the field has been continuously becoming "easier" often by leaps and bounds. However, programmers always remain at the edge of the boundary so there is continuously more work for programmers, not less. Every component of what made things "easy" can be improved by making it more flexible, performant etc. and doing this most believe will always require a skilled programmer.

But to play devils advocate, if we were to create true artificial intelligence (I guess it would just be intelligence at that point) then not only would programmers be obsolete, but all of humanity would be obsolete. We'd all just be WALL-E style mouths to feed. This seems difficult to imagine, but we already see it happening in some ways. Unemployment is high almost everywhere and there's no fundamental economic law that every human on the planet can contribute sufficiently to match said human's consumption.

Essentially what this means is we have two pretty rough options. First, all of these people fall under the welfare state. The homeless and hungry all get what they need through governments, NGOs and charities. The other is the Darwinian approach, nature's great equalizer. Both of these options suck pretty hard, but that may be the world we're looking at until our robot overlords turn us into batteries (although it's more likely we'd become pets if anything at all).