eevee

The inventor of JavaScript will have to find something else to do. Woe unto him.

It's not a witch hunt if we really did catch him red-handed using his magical powers for evil.

One man can't be CEO because other people complained on the Internet. A great many people temporarily couldn't get married because that one man paid good money to make it so.

And your sympathies lie with the poor persecuted CEO. Won't someone think of the rich white guy for once?

I still can't imagine how you expect this to ever have gone. "Well, those other people are fighting to take away something important to us, so I guess we'll just quietly smile and nod"? I hardly expect anyone whose way of life is at stake to go peacefully, no matter how wrong that way of life may be.

Not so fast. Rabbling at a village gathering is surely the most ancient form of protest. :)

But you're dropping a lot of context here. This wasn't just some dude with some job holding some opinion. He acted to enforce his opinion on others, then became CEO of a company whose entire schtick is to not do that sort of thing.

That nobody has come out in support of Eich's opinion is exactly why he's unfit to be CEO: Mozilla believes in some things, the people who care deeply about Mozilla also believe in those things, and Eich actively opposed those things. He represents the company, and he has a known history of acting against what the company is supposed to stand for.

If it turned out Ballmer had donated to prop 8, would there be nearly this outrage? I seriously doubt it; I would still call him something uncomplimentary on Twitter, but it's not like I have any existing philosophical expectations of either him or Microsoft. People called Eich a dick two years ago, but nobody expected him to quit his job.

Then social forces were preventing him from doing his job — which has a large social component. Does he have the right to not be fired for being an inadequate employee, too?

He's still allowed to be CEO of Mozilla. (Calling a specific job posting a "right" seems a stretch — do I have the right to be CEO of Mozilla? Where are the complaints that I'm being effectively prevented from exercising that right?)

Nothing and nobody forced him to resign. He could've weathered the storm and risked Mozilla's most valuable asset, its goodwill, over his beliefs. It would've been a terrible thing to do to the company and made him a terrible CEO, but nothing stood in his way.

Claiming that someone's rights were violated because he voluntarily quit his job is patently absurd.

Marriage is both legal and social, and the two are heavily intertwined (hence the religious objections). The recognition itself is, arguably, a right. The argument is then that the government should respect the right, not "grant" it.

He didn't stand up for his beliefs. He dodged all questions about them, hid behind Indonesia (?!), professed his love of inclusion and free expression, and expressed zero regret for having donated.

If he'd at least come out and said "yes, I oppose gay marriage, but I have no intention of involving that with Mozilla" then I would still not be thrilled but I would respect him more. As it stands, I know he won't talk about what he believes publicly, but he will merrily support it privately.

Slavery seems a poor example, since the people with the "wrong" opinion were already rich and powerful, and the people with the "right" one were... well, slaves. A large part of this Eich fiasco has been rejection of giving power to someone who's already used it to "wrong" ends.

What are you proposing? That we shouldn't object to injustices, on the off chance we're wrong and too many people agree with us?

We can all only do what we think is best. Eich thought he was making the world a better place by trying to block gay marriage. It seems the world disagrees.

Free speech does not mean, and has never meant, freedom from social consequence. The Constitution does not say that you can do and say whatever you want and other people can't have opinions about it.

Eich paid good money in an attempt to restrict how people in Mozilla's home state live their lives — some of them even Mozilla employees. He expressed no regret for doing so, then became CEO of Mozilla, a company that virtually defines itself by freedom and inclusion.

There were myriad ways he could've attempted to resolve this, and he did precisely none of them. That he would rather give up the job entirely speaks volumes about what he finds important.

I'll admit I'm slightly alarmed that "you can't ever post another comment until other people do X" didn't set off some klaxons for you.

I've had an HN account for over two years.

I have 328 karma.

That's a whole lot of comments I'd have to post to get to 1000 karma. I don't feel that invested in HN, so it's more likely I just won't comment again.

This seems like a pretty good way to freeze the current set of commenters in stone.

edit: It also occurs to me that, while endorsing may be novel now, there's not really any incentive for people to keep doing a boring rote task into the far future. Plus you're threatening bans for people who do it badly. So why would anyone do it at all?

The announcement post says the actual type-checking happens in a persistent server that watches for filesystem changes. That sounds pretty close to continuously running a linter. It also says "without breaking things", so I'm a little fuzzy on whether badly-typed code will actually execute or not.

For that matter, can you call a typed function from an untyped one? Or, worse, a typed method? If the typing is purely static, there's no way to know the method you're calling is actually typed, so there's no actual guarantee that it receives the types it's declared unless your entire program is typed. It doesn't seem like a very strong guarantee if both the caller and the callee have to opt into the typing.

If you're looking for a tool that exists right now, you either have an existing codebase and can't port it to Hack if it's not already PHP anyway (for the same reason Facebook couldn't port away from PHP), or you're starting from nothing and could just use a statically-typed language in the first place.

I don't know if I'd even be excited about the prospect of optional static typing in Python. (It hasn't gotten me interested in Dart, for example.) I'd kinda rather see the effort poured into something that could do static duck-typed analysis/inference, e.g. balk if I pass an argument that could be a non-string into a function that tries to call `.startswith` on it. (Ah, but maybe it could theoretically be a string or None, and I only know it isn't None for reasons the type system can't see, and now I hate the type system.)

I didn't say it was a trivial problem. I just don't feel excited by the solution.

Why thank you :)

Statically-typed Python would ruin a great number of Python libraries you'd probably want to be using. It'd be a very different language.

Once you have type annotations, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to enforce them statically with a separate tool. You could even go as far as rejecting first-party code if you can't statically determine every single value's type. Pylint's underlying astroid library has a bunch of inference tools you could perhaps build on top of.

Ha, color me surprised then :)

nope

nginx?

The parent comment was about Hack's being good for a new project.

Er, `paste serve --reload` restarts small-to-medium Python projects faster than I can alt-tab, which is actually faster than my static blog engine can regenerate itself too.

Which is nonsense, because:

1. I have never seen a framework that didn't go to great lengths to update to new changes quickly in development

2. Which means you lose resources between requests, unless you stuff them into the interpreter/httpd itself. And anyway this is only a problem for PHP, where by default everything runs in the top-level namespace, versus in separate functions.

3. That's a funny way to spin "no concurrency", but you can get that in any language by just not deploying it threaded.

rsync will easily handle a few lines changed in a large number of files.

Or you could just, y'know, run the static site generator on the server. What Linux doesn't have Python installed?

I can't imagine why this sector predominately consists of men.

Android's default keyboard (at least on KitKat; not sure how far back this goes) has a setting to turn off the profanity filter.

From the keyboard, hold comma to get to the settings menu, pick Google Keyboard Settings, scroll down under "Text Correction", and uncheck "Block offensive words".

Conversely, I wonder how much time/money has been spent porting away from PHP, or working on stuff like hiphop?

I don't have an estimate, but it's an interesting question if you're going to argue in terms of economic impact.

I assume because even Back In The Day, PHP functions lived in a namespace, i.e. a hash table, i.e. a thing where you want the hashes of the keys to be somewhat evenly distributed.

This is completely false. Firefox extensions have access to everything the browser does and can contain arbitrary native code.

There's a reason Mozilla's addon repository has a review process.

What makes addons better than ActiveX controls is that they're understood to extend the browser for the user's benefit, not merely make a crappy website work. Fewer people would buy that a bank website needs to install a Firefox extension before you can log in.

Even Google, champion of HTML5, still forces the Flash player on YouTube for videos that have ads, regardless of what your browser supports (or doesn't). So immediately caving on h.264 wouldn't have gotten rid of Flash; it would've left the Web depending on one more not-quite-freely-implementable blob.

If nothing else, it's probably due in part to Mozilla's stance against h.264 that we're even having conversations about alternative codecs today.

So they need to do something like create a completely free codec that blows current offerings out of the water? :)

I read some of the Daala "demos". I don't know video codec technology from a hole in the ground, but it sounds pretty interesting. http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/

`git difftool` is pretty much just like `git diff`, except that it shows the diff with your tool of choice.

I assume if you're using `git diff`, you're not comparing adjacent commits. And asking git for "diff these two commits but ignore this third one" is nontrivial.