trgv's comments

edit - I'm removing this comment because I offended someone.

The reason your posts in this thread are so irritating is because TS has all the same junk people hate about JS. You say things like JS is "deeply problematic" and "full of pot holes and weirdness" but you don't address how TS has fixed any of these problems. (Hint: it hasn't. Fixing the language is totally beyond the scope of TS).

Typescript provides concrete benefits. Maybe it also provide some benefits that aren't so concrete, like encouraging developers to think about how they're representing data earlier rather than later. But it doesn't "fix the language".

If your .ts code differs massively from your .js code you have no one to blame but yourself.

I agree with your comment.

> Why would hunter gatherers not wear clothes, when they can offer useful protection against the elements?

I was curious about this and looked it up. Apparently there was some period of time during which humanity did not wear clothes. This has been determined by looking at the DNA of hair lice versus clothes lice and seeing where they diverged: http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2011/01/uf-study-of-lice-dna-sho...

React is not "batteries included". Angular is.

This isn't a weakness in React. I prefer react's approach. But it does mean the developer needs to make more decisions.

Angular comes with stuff like RxJS and a wrapper around XmlHttpRequest. React doesn't. Again, this isn't "correct," it's just a different approach. No one is being combative here (except you), just descriptive.

> Dogs got closer to humans thousands of years ago. Their role was to protect. In the process, they became less intelligent than their ancestors: The wolf.

I don't think it's fair to say wolves are smarter than dogs. They specialize at different things, that's for sure.

In general I disagree with your post.

If you imagine a dog living in a stone age village versus a dog living in a town today, it doesn't seem to follow that the latter is going to be smarter because human technology is more advanced. A stone age dog might recognize a knock on the hut of a door and the modern dog might recognize an alarm going off. Seems like the same thing to me.

If you want smart dogs the answer is eugenics. Breed the smartest ones. This is tried and true and it's how breeds like border collies or german shepherds got so smart: they were bred for obedience, intelligence, and ability to perform their jobs. More pets and fewer working dogs (which is definitely the trend) is going to result in friendlier, cuter, but less intelligent dogs (compared to working breeds anyway).

Whether a show, book, movie, song, etc is "worth the time" is entirely subjective. There are million dollar franchises based on material that I don't consider worth my time. But you better believe that stuff is worth Netflix's time.

A perfect example of this is "Bright," a netflix movie that was critically panned. But people watched it. And now they're making "Bright 2". Are you really suggesting that Netflix should stop making movies that people want to see because critics (professional or otherwise) dislike them?

Two things people need to keep mind:

a). There's no objective way to judge this stuff.

b). The existence of movies like "Bright" does not prevent "high quality films" from being made.

Werner Herzog, Kelly Reichardt, Wong Kar Wai, Michael Haneke, Mia Hanson-Love, etc can keep making movies whether or not "Bright" keeps getting made over and over again. Both kinds of movies have their audience, and that's fine.

I don't think anyone in this comment chain is saying "we don't want women building stuff". Rather, some commenters are uncomfortable with the assumption that moving from 15 males to 11 males + 5 females is necessarily an improvement.

Maybe 5 of the original 15 males were gay. Does that change your perspective? I find this whole way of thinking unsettling. Doesn't it simply depend on who these people are as individuals?

I'd also be careful with the argument you've (implicitly) made. It doesn't seem to follow that the distribution of gender of programmers should match the distribution of gender of users. Besides, there must be software projects where 95%+ of users are male or female.

In general, I think most of us here agree that gender discrimination is bad, people being discouraged from making career choices due to gender is bad, and sexual harassment is bad. We may disagree on the frequency with which these things occur or how to fix them, but I think we're a lot closer than it appears from these contentious comments.

I really enjoyed the interview as well. Borges' manner of speaking is wonderful.

> Borges says he's not a thinker in the interview. But I dunno, even if his influences are clear, his ability to understand, and then convey these ideas in such a way as to make them self-evident is in some ways the greater act of philosophy than the raw conception of the ideas.

I disagree here. Borges is a storyteller: he's interested in provoking a response from his readers. He's not arguing for or against a philosophy, but rather he finds inspiration in the philosophical writings of people who are arguing one way or another (ie philosophers).

What he's doing is no more or less impressive than what they're doing, but the two things very different. I think he's absolutely right to point that out to the interviewers.

It's written for a general American audience so it makes sense to use those units.

> Zuckerberg and FBI director Comey do as well. Seems common sense these days. Which is really, really sad.

Both of these people are public figures. You can argue that it's common sense if you're a public figure. If not, "common sense" seems like an exaggeration.

Whenever you're shooting up a human with something you need to be careful about what you're shooting them up with.

That doesn't say anything about vaccines.

That seems like a strange reason to love a movie.

I liked the visuals, but I think the script was a disaster, and the movie itself was only middling.

I thought wasm was going to have a human-readable equivalent, called wast. See: https://webassembly.org/getting-started/advanced-tools/

My understanding (maybe wrong) was that this was going to be available in the browser.

On a fundamental level I agree with your point. Truly absolute morality implies some kind of external rule of law, which implies some kind of external lawmaker.

Where I disagree is this idea - whether you intended it or not - that non-absolute morality is somehow arbitrary, or worth less than absolute morality.

I don't agree with that: I believe that torturing someone is immoral because humans dislike being tortured (if you're in that 1% who doesn't mind torture, it's not immoral - torture away). You reduce that to "most humans don't feel positive about being tortured". But that's not a choice that 99% of humans made: it's a fact of human biology. Humans don't choose to feel pain when someone rips out their fingernails. You can say "disliking pain is arbitrary". It may be arbitrary in some sense, but not in the context of humanity, and we're all humans.

If you want to say that this kind of "moral thinking" isn't "true morality" because it's not absolute, fine. That's valid stance to take. But whether you call it morality or something else doesn't make it less valid or less useful. And to suggest that humans should not take our innate likes (warmth, safety, respect) and dislikes (pain, insecurity, lack of respect) into account when we interact with each other simply because human biology isn't "absolute" is - pardon me - fucking insane.

I thought this was a good article.

I think the relationship between streamers and their audience is a more extreme form of the relationship between celebrities and their fans (some of whom may tend toward fanatical).

It's not surprising that things end up this way. When you remove the music/movies/whatever that the celebrity is producing and give the fans direct, real-time access to the celebrity's life things were bound to get weird.

One area where I disagree with the article is this characterization:

> [Viewers] are immersed in an online culture that believes that “social-justice warriors” and political correctness are the main obstacles to self-actualization

In my opinion this kind of "extreme speech" should rarely be taken literally. Instead, misogny/racism/xenophobia/ranting about "SJWs" on the internet should be viewed as a weird kind of performance art rather than an expression of genuine beliefs.

None of that makes it pleasant to an uninitiated spectator, but I'd compare that to how someone might find a dead baby joke terribly offensive. Really, I'd compare the whole thing to an inside joke between friends that would be considered "over the line" if someone else heard it. There's nothing new about that.

I don't agree.

Take Dick for example: whether his writing deals with "the highest kind of truth" is not important to me. I've read just about everything he's written because I enjoy his writing.

I think this is equally true for Dostoevsky, Conrad, and other acclaimed writers. When I read those authors, I have an emotional reaction. It's not research. I didn't come away from Crime and Punishment with a better understanding of why people commit murder. I don't understand "nautical psychology" any better for having read The Shadow Line. I was moved by those novels. I'd say that makes them entertainment.

I don't think acclaimed literature belongs in a different category than teenage supernatural romance. Twilight elicit an emotional response from its audience just like Ubik does. The emotions, technique, and the audience could hardly be more different, but I see no reason that one of those novels should be categorized as "base entertainment" and the other as "high art". They're both entertainment.

Some literature may contain a thesis but, in my opinion, it mostly doesn't. If someone has to "study" a novel to "get the point" then that novel has failed, at least with regard to that reader.

Just my opinion.

More on topic: I enjoy Roberto Bolano's thoughts on Philip K. Dick: http://www.electriccereal.com/roberto-bolano-on-philip-k-dic...

Companies (and people) are not pure good or pure evil. It's always a mix.

I'm not thrilled with windows 10 ads, but typescript, chakra js engine, dot net core, and others are open source and being developed in the open on github - and that's pretty cool.

In my opinion Microsoft's open source projects are not a scam to trick people into liking them. They're part of a broad realization that projects run like this will see broader adoption and generally will be higher quality.

Whenever I read these kinds of posts on this website I think of Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove. (The crazy SAC commander who thinks the Russians are plotting to steal Americans' precious bodily fluids).

I understand that people don't trust the NSA/US government. And they shouldn't: the US government will always put its interests above yours and mine, and above those of allied countries.

At the same time, this stuff is bordering on parody. Very few of us (maybe none of us) need to worry about "the NSA MITM-ing our NPM packages". If you're that paranoid then you shouldn't be using github, NPM, or non-local dependencies. And of course you should be reviewing everything manually.

It seems that some people view the term "meritocracy" negatively because they believe it implies that everyone has the same opportunities. I don't see that implication, but if enough other people do, maybe it's worth re-wording their governance docs.

At the same time, the proposed replacement seems off the target:

> "Mozilla is an open source project. Our community is structured as a virtual organization. Authority is primarily distributed to both volunteer and employed community members as they show their ability through contributions to the project. The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority through active interventions that engage and encourage participation from diverse communities."

What's wrong with something innocuous, like: "We strive to encourage contributions/engagement/participation from diverse communities"?