ExactoKnight

I dev on a Mac, I'm anti-Microsoft through and through, and I thought the same. But seriously, their Mac version of Visual Studio (which I use) is now mature and I think in parts thanks to Microsoft taking steps to support bash, the ruby support so far has been great if you add the appropriate add ons. https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/

Seriously as a ruby hipster I know all the love our community has in hating enterprise IDE's, then I grew up and realized they give you out of the box amazing functionality (like dynamic runtime variable value inspection and automatic app-wide class name refactoring) that makes manual refactors look like amateur hour.

These features are so powerful that I implore any Ruby dev using Atom or Sublime to at least give RubyMine a look if they don't want to give VisualStudio a look. You will be a stronger and faster programmer having them in your toolkit. Especially, and I repeat ESPECIALLY, for refactors of class names.

I'm afriad we've swung WAY too far in the other direction. Almost all forms of environmental manipulation is now shunned, only manipulation in the world of bits is okay. It's slowly us down to a tremendous degree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxw-JDSvKTg

I'm in banking at a startup level and I'd have to disagree with this.

There is tremendous fear in the industry right now over being seen as outdated or dinosaur, especially with all the blockchain hype.

You can make simple technology choices like moving from a stateful SQL database over to a blockchain ledger like Sequence, and in doing so, you will attract a way higher calibre level of talent. You will also have way more people interested in working for you, and the skillsets and knowledge learned within the company for doing it will future proof you far better than going the boring old route.

Indeed. The mess we're in is one of crap upon crap.

I wanted to use a CSS framework the other day, and I all but had to rip the project apart manually just to get the files without them stuffing a heavy build tool like Gulp down my throat.

All of this... just to get some !@#$ing CSS.

Honestly, the strongest text editors are those that integrate with an IDE that also syncs with your runtime.

The kind of debugging and refactorings you can do in that kind of set up are mindblowing, and it took me years of doing it the old vim/sublime/atom way before realizing this.

This may sound like heresy but I seriously encourage checking out today's version of Visual Studio.

I dev on Ruby and I am a hardcore Sublime user, which is about as far away from Microsoft-friendly as you can get, and I have been really impressed by it.

Their app store is advanced, and crucially they allow Visual Studio to be setup with key bindings that match Sublime's, meaning switching over is really easy with almost little to no need to learn new macros. IDE's like Visual Studio can allow you to do code and class refactorings that make Sublime look like a joke.

Honestly, coming from a Ruby dev environment of all things, I have been really impressed Visual Studio lately. Never thought I'd see the day.

It's also becoming fricking obvious what happens when we allow environmentalism to make us deeply skeptical towards anything involving the physical manipulation of objects in the real world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxw-JDSvKTg

Our economy is stagnating, and as our growth stagnates, politics becomes a zero sum game. Our radical environmentalism is creating a world that no longer accepts change in the world outside of bits.

Do scaling issues really matter?! Bitcoin hasn't dealt with its scaling issues, and Monero is an extremely far way away from it in needing to deal with issues of scale.

Many of Bitcoin's scaling innovations could be applied to Monero as well.

Monero's FUD was refuted. The privacy attack was patched and it's solid now.

The brilliance of this service is they don't even need to do any real work in keeping their dictionary that up to date, and they've been given a license to print money.

The cheaper price comes almost entirely from the driver making less.

Love it or hate it, that's really the big difference now that most existing cab companies now have Uber-like dispatch technology.

It was first mover in getting real identity on the internet right. Social network is not an accurate term for what made Facebook "right" over its competitors.

Facebook was first in getting real identity on the internet right. The other social media sites before them never understood this well -- many had visions of people taking on avatars of other creatures, or defining their life around one myopic interest (in the case of MySpace: music).

It's now estimated there are more Earth-sized planets than gas giants on most stars, and that every star has at least 1 planet, likely more.

So that's 7 or more planets. That's many.

Fascinating video, but honestly the only thought that kept going through my head is: they've overcomplicated this.

Despite it's impressive number of steps, this does not look like good engineering.

Instead, it looks like a design by committee, with engineers going drunk on complex parts coming together rather than dumbing down the unfurling of this telescope down to its most basic possible mechanism, with the fewest moving parts possible (where failure is chronically always possible).

Seeing how overcomplicated this is, it's no surprise it cost $10 billion to build.

You're thinking about this wrong. As long as we can send probes and/or communicate within compressed timeframes than physical transportation of humans doesn't matter.

E.g. Breakthrough Starshot can get us to many exoplanets within 20-30 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

What you're describing is actually a brilliant approach for increasing NASA budgets. Simply put, make astronomy a matter of national security. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_(international_...

Not at all. I don't care about traveling there, I want to know about what other life exists.

Once we find a good target, the Breakthrough Starshot program is one example of a promising project that could get us results within our lifetime.

Promising developments, but christ, could they move any slower?!

We know what technology we need to build. Why must we wait a full two more years for a report to get finished before even beginning funding proposals on which path to pursue, before beginning any construction or engineering?!

None of us are getting any younger. I know this is complicated technology to build, but contrast how fast technology moves in the valley compared to this, and you can see the ways in which NASA could really use a bit of startup hustle... (like back in the 60's, when NASA engineered and landed people to the moon within a decade.) There just appears to be no sense of urgency at all.

Watson's Natural Language Classifier, in particular its categorization API, is actually pretty impressive...

Sure, it doesn't need to be all or nothing.

The point is to grab perspective about how achievable these goals are, using money that's being wasted in such large supply right now on tools to kill people.

If we found strong evidence of life existing on another exoplanet (due to finding oxygen in the emission spectrum of an exoplanet's atmosphere), it would be a game changer. A story of the year, and influence the outcome of the rest of our century.

It would compel, very likely spending on space probes and exploration to go way back up to levels seen in the 1960's or even higher. That was a time when we had both robust spending on space exploration and social programs...

The money is there. U.S. military spending far exceeds spending on science.

By another commentators estimate, the 100 Metre Telescope would cost ~$15 billion to build. In comparison the F-35 fighter jet program cost $168 billion, and in 10 years the U.S. will spend roughly $5.5 trillion on its military.

No, something has come from it. We now have a growing massive list of habitable planets. What's lacking now is the extra tooling to study them more extensively.

Having near certain evidence of life existing on another planet, due to seeing oxygen present in the emission spectra of an atmosphere of another planet, would be a true game changer for space probe and exploration funding.

Astronomy funding stagnates when its about rocks and geology. Bring real evidence of aliens into the mix and you've defined humanities focus for the next century.

> If the TMT costs X, then the 100-MT should cost about 11X, and with the 15% doubling factor, its ~15X for only a 3X increase in radius.

The Thirty Meter Telescope cost $1 billion. So the 100 Metre Overwhelmingly Large Telescope would cost ~$15 billion using your ~15x multiplier. That's large, but for perspective: The F-35 fighter jet program cost $168 billion.

Like with the Large Hadron Collider, if the extra cost means the difference between being able to crucially measure the atmospheric spectra of nearby exosolar planets and not being able to, then the extra cost is worth it.

I'll take getting definite answers to humanity's most pressing questions, over new tools for killing people, any day.

I dream about the day where the U.S.'s spending on its military, and its spending on science research, are flipped.

You can nitpick the exceptions, but his general point about affluent living standards existing for 100 years in the West for most people is true.

Even a negative finding holds important implications: if we successfully survey all of the exoplanets within 100 to 1000 light years and find no life or anything even close being habitable for humans, then it would gravely inform us of the ways in which we must preserve the Earth that we have.

Yeah, I really used the first questions as a way to give importance to how big the "Are we alone?" question is on the scale of humanity.

That is to say, that arguably "Why are we here" is the only question of more significance than "Are we alone?"

If this telescope can answer the second most important question to humanity, that's pretty good.