erik14th's comments

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method

atheism is dumb, whoever thought that opposing a metaphysical concept that lies way too close to the heart of those who believe in it was a good idea to curb religious influence wasn't on their brightest day.

Determining the lack of evidence of connection between religious entities and a supposed god is possible, saying a concept as ill defined as "god" does not exist doesn't even make sense to me.

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: 5-MeO-DMT Associated with Improvements in Depression, Anxiety

I think LSD gives you that feeling of unity, that everything makes sense, and so, yes, you may feel enlightened by trivial stuff.

I don't think LSD puts ideas in your head, it just gives you a different perspective over the stuff that's already there. So it's a silly idea to believe it'll enlighten you by itself, but if you've been reading poetry, philosophy, if you're in contact with nature it may help you see things you didn't see or realize before, which is enlightening.

I think that's one of the properties that help with depression/anxiety since it may help you deal with trauma or with inconsistencies in your own personality that you have repressed, ignored or just don't know how to deal with.

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: React as a UI Runtime

React sure sounds interesting, what puts me off of it is its license.

edit: disregard that...

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why do tutorial writers combine 10 technologies when 1 or 2 would do?

Popularity is King.

Even if the Python solution is vastly superior, there is significantly more people who know or want to learn Javascript, so if your game is to sell stuff, it's only reasonable to pick the bigger market, and the kind of complexity you're talking about is very common to modern Javascript.

Most devs know some Javascript and as complex as the current js ecosystem is, it still seems like those devs would prefer to deal with some libs in a language they already know rather than learn a completely new one.

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Elixir v1.8 released

I didn't like Elixir's syntax at first and I like Erlang's syntax, but Elixir is a lot more than "Erlang in rubyesque syntax" it's a brand.

Elixir is a well-thought ecosystem designed by professional developers, it includes tooling(mix), documentation(hexdocs) and most important of all: an excellent community and community support. Plataformatec often posts about design decisions and best practices and it doesn't take long till you hit a forum post or github issue or SO question answered by Jose Valim, Elixir's creator or Chris McCord, responsible for Phoenix.

You can very easily use Erlang code in Elixir projects, so I think it's worth taking a look.

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Response to 'Reasons why Lisp games suffer'

I think it can't be reduced to that, I think a more important aspect is expressiveness, which isn't exactly terseness, I think some historical memory is pertinent here as even classic "blub" languages such as java have adopted plenty of functional characteristics since then, so the options available were very different.

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Response to 'Reasons why Lisp games suffer'

eh, it seems you got it backwards, pg's main point seem to me to be productiveness, he even talks about python being one of the best(lispier) of the mainstream languages, so in that context python would be more powerful than asm and not the other way around.

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Researchers study the genetics and behavior of elephants born without tusks

Clearly I'm at fault here, my comment was pure garbage, I'm sorry(I'm not being sarcastic).

But I think there's a valid point there amid the nonsense, I see a qualitative difference between natural selection such as the elephants losing their tusks and selective breeding such as the bulldog example.

Mainly due to the fact that on the first case elephants are still choosing their partners and on the latter we're forcing dogs to mate which I see as a conscious interference in the process of natural selection.

Yes, bulldogs still exist, but were we to go extinct and they'd probably go with us as our selective breeding made them dependent on our technology which I think is true for some of the domesticated animals at least.

I say nature, as in natural selection, is incredibly smart because it seems to be a system to act based on pure, cold, although short sighted logic. The advantage our intelligence have over nature's, in my perspective, is long term planning, but given a bigger context there's no objective base to claim that's actually smarter as we might be running towards our own extinction, and I believe life will survive us.

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Researchers study the genetics and behavior of elephants born without tusks

Well, yes there is a difference, evolution works by natural selection since nature is incredibly smart and the only changes that get actualized are those that are beneficial for survival and reproduction and those that do not hinder it.

Artificially controlled selective breeding doesn't mean evolution, take for example bulldogs which have been overbred by humans that prioritized looks, so a modern bulldog's health is frail compared to its ancestors, hardly what one would call evolution.

But on the elephants case, yes it is evolution as human interference seems to be mostly as a "regular" predator.

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Phoenix 1.4.0 released

Those were two separate points, I should have used a linebreak there in retrospect.

My point was that if you look at the changes and new features, all of it seems to me as stuff that improves core functionality, there's no feature creep.

Yay webpack because that's what I use so less work for me next time I start a new phoenix project (:

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Phoenix 1.4.0 released

Yay for webpack as default. My perception of phoenix is not only that it is the best in class but that it also keeps getting better instead of bloated.

erik14th | 7 years ago | on: Improving Ourselves to Death

It is also incredibly painful when your conscience and your actual means to achieve what you can conceive are way too far apart, and one of your addictions is to actualize your conscience further neglecting whatever little improvements you could be doing, because not only your end but also your midgame seems hopelessly far away.

Life is way too short to actualize all the improvements you can learn, the speed disparity between learning and executing can be just downright atrocious.

Unpaid work is not ok for a vast majority of humanity, lest we forget that what still kill most of us is not disillusion pain but the lack of basic needs, and that kind of stuff kills you way faster, yes money robs most of us of life, and most of us simply do not have the time or mental space to ever come close to realize it, since we're either strangled by basic needs or entangled in a web of distraction/disinformation.

While information has been made widely available to almost half of humanity, the power to act on most said information is still in the hands of a pretty darn small minority.

Sorry for the rant :E

erik14th | 8 years ago | on: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

Money is similar to the peacock's tail, the main difference being inheritance, social stratification make it so it matters very little to the individual how much money he starts with due to the fact that you'll be immersed in a social circle with people from the same economic strata, thus to differentiate yourself you need to make more money, otherwise you're a loser.

Wealthier males work more because they have access to better paid, more fulfilling and more prestigious kind of work. Poor males work less due to the fact that they have access only to shitty jobs with shitty pays and no prestige, so, for a lot of poor people, working may actually degrade your quality of life, since you won't be able to match or improve upon the lifestyle your parents provided you.

Women work more because they need to, either because they have children to take care off by themselves or because they've grown up watching the suffering of their mothers due to the oppression on females in society, and they sure as hell don't want that for themselves.

People mostly buy stuff to show off, and then lie to themselves that it is because they like the stuff they bought, illusion of power. Being well off doesn't really matter socially if people don't know about it, bragging is seen as offensive so people do it in an indirect way, by purchasing expensive stupid shit, so that they can feel they're not just bragging, they have "good taste".

People don't want to be well, they want to be better than others, and they'll seek to achieve that in the way that is easier and more convenient, which is vulgar display of power, since hitting people in the face usually leads to problems, that is now achieved through the purchase of excessively expensive items just to show you they can.

erik14th | 8 years ago | on: Is This Genocide?

My guess is that the West is trying to copy the East(China), and by that I mean that we are gonna see the rise of extremist governments that will pass as an answer to extremist groups but whose real interest lies in the ultra-efficient "social"-capitalism that China perfected. The tighter your grasp over people lives, the easier is is to have them buy stupid shit all the time and keep the wheels moving. And there we go again, till everyone is repressed enough that innovation will once again be a luxury of crazy people. Social and economical changes are usually the work of people that fail fast, move fast and break things. "make something people want" would work if people actually knew what they wanted, but most people have no idea about what their priorities are, so "make something people will get addicted to" works a lot better.

erik14th | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is your yearly passive income?

in Brazil it's actually subtracted, if your stock is worth a dollar and you receive a cent of dividend the stock will be priced at 99 cents. Like, it's as if the dividend money you receive is actually a part of the stock you own.

erik14th | 8 years ago | on: Is Haskell the right language for teaching functional programming principles?

Well you got a point, indeed the actual community is really nice at a personal level, I was talking about the image of the language you get from advocates you see on random discussion boards and blogs posts, so my use of the term "community" was probably imprecise to say the least. And I remember having issues with documentation in general, there's usually a lot of academic jargon which is kinda unique to Haskell, monads is the obvious example but there's a lot of concepts that seem to be treated on a much higher level of abstraction that I think is actually needed to get things done, and I'm sure things improved since I last tried Haskell, but that's why I think Haskell is elitist and pedantic.
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