AlwaysBCoding

I just re-read Righteous Indignation by Andrew Breitbart -- Fascinating in retrospect as it accurately describes so much about the emergence of new media and what manifested itself in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Twitter's book burning of conservative accounts was horrific. One of the grossest displays from a tech company that I can remember. I have no idea how employees at Twitter aren't up in arms over it.

Yup. Whatever replaces twitter will be an open-source decentralized system that ends at the API layer with multiple competing client implementations. So, not Gab.

But I do like to see a bit of momentum in the tech world against neoliberalism, I think it's healthy for everyone. The "censor all competing ideologies" cultural authoritarian nonsense has gotten out of hand.

great hackers do though

The logic (agree with it or not) is that the biggest threat to homosexuals in 2016 is Islam and Sharia. There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, at least half who want homosexuality banned. And Muslim countries are much more likely to legislate religious doctrine than Western countries right now.

Conservatives tend to be more combative with Islam than liberals are, so the thinking is it's logical to be Conservative now if you want to push gay rights forward. Especially since the Orlando massacre which saw a Muslim terrorist kill 50 unarmed gays.

I understand that the first amendment protects against government censorship, and not the censorship of a private company.

But honest question, what is the difference between a private business refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding (which courts have ruled illegal), and twitter refusing their platform to a conservative writer.

You can use the stats without the league's permission for sure. Check out http://www.bitlaw.com/source/cases/copyright/nba.html if you want the actual legal grounds for why you can use stats.

You probably won't beat them for B2B. The service is good but not great, but the switching costs are too high that even if your service was better in some way you wouldn't win any customers. They're competent and get the job done and with B2B if you have an existing foothold that's normally enough.

The service is definitely too expensive, the data is occasionally wrong and I have to hound them to fix it, and the developer experience is surely lacking, but at the end of the day a working JSON API of sports data is a working JSON API of sports data, all the other stuff is just noise.

The proper way to beat sportradar would be to find a way to pursue a B2C model instead of a B2B model. i.e. instead of 3k a month to license the data if there was some way to pay $25/month for a similar experience you might be able to capture a much larger market share that sportradar prices out. If you could get college kids hacking on sports stats to use your service because it's the only thing they can afford you might be able to grow that into something.

I currently use sportradar. People will definitely use a sports data API -- but you would have to beat sportradar somewhere (either on developer experience, price, accuracy, feature set, number of sports covered, etc...) to make a viable business out of it.

lol @ Vim users that have to write configuration files, memorize complicated keyboard shortcuts, and install 20 plugins just to be able to copy and paste text between files. It's 2016, try using a real editor like Atom.

(Am I doing it right?)

You probably don't need Redux* but React is awesome

No, use React Native

For better or worse a Trump presidency would almost certainly be a fundamental rewrite of the way the U.S. government functions in the world.

You're definitely right, and from my experience the community has no interest in actually making the developer experience better. It's one of those "the first step to fixing the problem is admitting you have a problem" situations and for the most part the Clojure community can't even admit how bad their tooling is, they'd rather shift blame to the users and pretend that if you can't figure it out it means you're not smart enough to be using it.

I find Clojure is a lot more approachable if you start with Clojurescript / Reagent and go from there. You don't need to be running Clojure on the backend to make use of how awesome Clojurescript is, and it's about 10x more approachable.

You nailed it. I feel like I've been permanently damaged from digest cycles, ng-filters, providers, transclusion etc... I feel like others must have been damaged enough to write off new Javascript frameworks entirely, which is unfortunate given how great React is.

dude, what are you talking about. I've used Backbone, Angular, and React extensively, and React is a significantly better paradigm for building stateful UI's than any of those other frameworks. It's not just a matter of stylistic preference, it's better in an objective way the same way git is better for source control than FTPing files to a server.

Flexbox is life-altering though.

I always take Lyft over Uber because they actually TELL YOU THE COLOR OF THE CAR on the app. Uber not showing you the color of the drivers car is one of the weirdest UI decisions I can ever remember.

Because you want to start a business that supports itself with profits instead of outside monetary investment.

Because you want to build a great version of some X but don't necessarily want to disrupt or reinvent an industry.

Because you want to be financially secure and not risk your financial future on an idea that isn't guaranteed to work.

Because you like traveling or taking time off or playing around with a lot of different ideas and aren't at the place where you want to commit to working full-time on a company for five years.

etc...

This isn't a knock against YC at all, there are just other ways to grow and scale a business than hyper-growth + raising outside capital, and sometimes even if you have a great idea, bootstrapping can be a better approach for you depending on what kind of person you are and what point of your life you're at.

I'd imagine abolishing time zones would add billions of dollars in developer productivity back into the economy, doesn't seem like that bad an idea.

But if the question is getting a single one-bedroom apartment for < $1,000 a month I think that excludes a lot of cities. New York, DC etc... So it's not meaningful to say SF is a bubble because of a trait that exists in many cities.

Bernal Heights, Portrero Hill, actually there's < $1,000 rooms all over the city, just look on craigslist.

Maybe not a single apartment to yourself, but definitely a room in a shared apartment.

There are a lot of cities btw where you can't get a single one-bedroom apartment for < $1,000

Yes, there are a lot of dumb startups but I'm still not convinced this is a bad thing. Why does every 24-year old have to be changing the world?

Imagine you have a 2x2 matrix where the x-axis is positive value added to the world and the y-axis magnitude of impact. You want your job to be in the top right corner, high impact, high value added to the world but there's two ways to get there. You could do something that has high value but low impact like working at a non-profit in DC helping with excel spreadsheets or whatever, you're delivering value to the world but making a very small impact. The other approach is that you could learn how to build a large scalable system for delivering a solution to millions of people first. Maybe you're making the 100th best photo sharing app and it will never add large value to the world, but you're learning how to deliver impactful solutions you just need to figure out how to deliver real value. I'm not sure why there's a bias against the second approach. I lived in DC for five years and most of my friends are doing less interesting things than my friends in SF. Someone who gets experience at a startup that builds interesting technology but never takes off could be the next CTO of a political campaign for all you know.

Also, it's a complete myth that San Francisco is expensive to live in. You can leave cheap or expensive in any city. SF has a culture where being poor is totally cool. Everyone gets it, you're in tech you're an entrepreneur etc... There's no pressure to go to nice restaurants for social status like there is in New York. I spend much less money in SF than I did living in DC just because of the lifestyle I'm living. Buying a house in SF is impossible due to the insane prices, but it's really not that bad living in an apartment here.

I don't think people are spoiled here, I think your perceptions are off. First, programming takes place entirely inside a persons head. Mental state is really important, and the 9-5 office job with a commute to and from the office every day doesn't work very well for engineering. I like to break up my day into two halves. The first half of the day and the second half of the day, this gives me two discrete time periods where I can do work and I like to take a bike ride in between because I can think about the problems, and then not have to go to the gym later in the day. When I was working for a company in DC there was no way I could have left at 2:00 to take an hour bike ride, even if that's how I work best. I think it's ridiculous to say that people working in their optimal workflows makes them spoiled.

And again, it takes probably 3 years to become a high-quality engineer. So I'm not sure what you would want coding bootcamp graduates to do after 3 months, get together and talk about how hopeless life is? I'm glad that people are getting into the industry, the only way you're going to get better is by getting real world experience. So what someone with 8-months experience isn't a great engineer yet? By continuing to get better over the next couple years he will become a better engineer and then be able to add significant value to the world, I'm not sure why you would want to discourage developers from perfecting their craft. This would be like heckling a Med School student for not being a great doctor yet.

I mean, I like R, I think R Studio is an incredible IDE, but I would never build anything meaningful in R code. It's messy, slow, and has an antiquated community where people share library documentation in PDF's.

Julia seems promising, I haven't used it on a real project yet though, but I really like how easy it is to do data visualizations in the browser with Clojurescript and don't see Julia really having an answer for that.

It's a good thing they had great documentation... oh wait.

Oh man, and having to manually configure your server logs just so you can see what requests are being made and where errors are popping up vs. just tailing log/development.txt in Rails...

Hm, I guess that's a valid point. I normally think of web apps as a frontend to a database, but could see why that's not the only use case. If you don't have a database associated with the service, can't you just use AWS Lambda or something? Is it necessary to maintain an entire separate project for it?

Yeah exactly, for building UI's less is more and the Clojurescript approach works really well. For building web apps, I really don't care how storing sessions, or configuring your web server or parsing HTTP requests is done, I just want it to work out of the box.

I don't think Datomic takes that long to wrap your head around, but it does take a long time to actually use. There's no inherent equivalent of Model.all or Model.where(x = y), so chances are that you'll have to write your own DSL for mapping domain objects to datomic queries which is a time consuming non value-adding activity. You'll also likely want to transact through some DSL so that you can do validations, and post-creation lifecycle hooks, where in Rails or something you'd just get that for free. The Devops is pretty frustrating imo, there's no equivalent of the Heroku Postgres or AWS RDBMS one-click deploy for Datomic, so you'll need to set it up and monitor it yourself, which can get tricky when doing things like REPLing into the db from your local Emacs shell can crash a process downstream somewhere because you went over your remote peer limit without realizing it. And there's no view that shows you the IP address of every connected peer, so it's kind of hard to debug what exactly is going on sometimes. I think the query engine is really cool, I just feel like I waste a lot of time using Datomic that I don't with other databases.

My $0.02 on the state of Clojure -

For building stateful UI's Clojurescript + Reagent beats anything else out there.

For data science and algorithms Clojure beats anything else I've used.

For backend web development Rails is still miles ahead of any Clojure workflow.

Datomic is interesting but there's still too much incidental complexity to be super productive with it. It's hard to build a startup on Datomic because of the pricing and productivity hit, but could see it being useful in the enterprise where speed is less important.

I'm very interested in mobile development with Clojurescript on top of React Native, but haven't found a tutorial that wasn't written in hieroglyphics, so assuming that needs some more time to mature.