otabdeveloper's comments

The people having 4-5 kids aren't the people who got laid in highschool.

Moreover, some of the most successfully reproducing people are those who have sex once a year.

'Sex' is, by definition, something that's supposed to lead to reproduction. Whatever you're discussing here isn't.

What they call (incorrectly) 'sex' is not mating.

Having kids is strongly inversely correlated with 'having sex'. (People who are most successful at reproducing are also the people with the fewest sexual partners and a less active sex life.)

Venus' atmosphere is a better colonization target than Mars from every conceivable angle. I don't think they have really thought this through.

Nobody is going to brute-force my git keys, especially when it's so trivial to gain access to the repos via social engineering.

All of human civilization is a 'series of hacks on hacks'.

We're going to settle Venus way, way before we're going to settle Mars.

These projects should focus on exploring ways to build big blimps instead.

> CPU software rendering seems like a step backwards for performance.

In my real-world benchmarks -- no, CPU rendering for the purely 2D case is vastly more efficient than trying to shoehorn it into OpenGL.

Check out the language I wrote for that exact use case: http://tkatchev.bitbucket.org/tab/

> we never see an orc perspective or pov

Offtopic, but this is false. There's a whole chapter of orcish perspective at the end of book IV.

> all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.

Google's customers are all the businesses buying ads from Adwords.

And yes, Google is a monopoly, the cost of switching away from Adwords will probably drive you bankrupt in 2016.

Full-blown scripting languages are a poor fit for livecoding. (Which is really what shell commands are for.)

I had to go and write one: http://tkatchev.bitbucket.org/tab/

> So, then, best non-JVM alternate language for backend servers?

The vast, vast majority of 'backend servers' are written in C++. (Those that aren't are legacy that was written in C.)

P.S. Of course, for some people when they say 'backend' they really mean 'anything not Javascript'. In that case PHP is the world's most popular backend language, and that would be just silly.

P.P.S. The disconnect of the online discussion bubble with reality always shocks me. D? Go? Seriously?

Up until a just few years ago the Internet was fueled by extensive growth: router manufacturers (among others) made profits by selling to people who had never bought routers before.

This has all but ended now, and people shopping for their second or third router will be making different decisions.

> ...it's the gigabytes of RAM they consume

We'd need a sandboxing and module system for Javascript to solve this. A problem that is both technically complex and not 'sexy', so don't hold your breath.

> That's why Firefox users left it for Chrome.

No, the real reason is Google's highly aggressive 'bundling' (i.e. crapware) strategy.

> Does that mean that one can use system threads as frivolously as goroutines (e.g. spawning new thread for each incoming request)?

Yes. In fact, under Linux oftentimes spawning a thread and then running a system call can be faster than just running a system call.

> Conventional C++ wisdom advices against it.

With 32 bit CPU's you might run out of virtual memory quickly, since each thread allocates virtual memory for its stack.

With 64 bit CPU's there are no issues. (Also never forget that virtual memory isn't real memory, it's just a page counter.)

> ...but without the invisible man in the sky.

'天', "Heaven", is literally a pictogram of the 'invisible man in the sky'.

The ancient Chinese were monotheist, and Confucius was no exception.

Trying the fit modern norms over historical people and cultures that existed 3000 years ago silly, don't do that.

Lua has been the standard extension language in gamedev and adtech for years and years.

The "really lazy desktop app" choice is Qt, not Visual Basic.

Visual Basic hasn't really existed for decades.