grabcocque

If your idea really is worth a lot, you'd probably be better off starting with media-focused venture capital and indie production studios. That way, you could build the momentum required to make Netflix take you seriously.

The self-pitying language from Hollywood is hilarious.

How DARE people want to work for Netflix intead of us, just because it pays better, is sexier and cooler, is technologically cutting edge, and allows much greater freedom from executive meddling?

NOT COOL GUYS.

This is the same argument left academics have been using to excuse the repeated failure of electorates to vote for socialism for a century.

It's not a new argument. And it nicely avoids left wing thought ever having to take responsibility for its own electoral failures.

Remember the first law of Google services: if it's not useful to sell you better to advertisers it's not useful.

The theobromine in chocolate is highly toxic to dogs, but is what makes humans feel good after eating it.

It's an argument which is so demonstrably wrong that it beggars belief he would ever have thought he could get away with it.

I note its molecular structure looks like MC Hammer

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/DD...

DDT: you (shouldn't) touch this

Actually, I can't deny that I'm a language snob. I also don't think that's a bad thing. I find Go's magical maps and slices, its null pointers, its verbose error handling and its lack of generics to all be in fairly poor taste.

So, yeah, I'm a snob.

This entire piece sounds like the Blub Paradox made real.

http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

It's written with knocking down a very specific set of straw men in mind, but rather carefully avoids coming anywhere close to addressing the legitimate criticisms of Go as a language. One of the things that's most irritating about Go enthusiasts is the way they try to close ranks on legitimate critique and reframe their language's warts as "simplicity".

Also: 20 bonus blub points for pulling the old 'I don't need generics, therefore NOBODY does' gambit.

Debunk implies rational argument. That article is ranting.

It's not necessary. I mean if we use organic farming methods, we could achieve the same thing except not only do they produce more emissions, but because of the lower yield of crops, organic farms require more land.

In the tropics this means cutting down more rainforests, affecting not only emissions but wildlife.

The scientific and technological solution is disease and pest resistant GM crops.

All very interesting theories, but the US isn't an amazingly hard working nation by global standards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time

Cotton itself is a very unsustainable crop. It takes 20,000 Kg of water to produce 1 Kg of cotton, and it's mainly produced in countries that do not have sanitation provided to a majority of their populations.

Cotton farming has had a devastating effect on drainage basins across the world.

http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshw...

He has a point, but this is Hacker News. VCs most certainly do not want to invest in you if you just want to "make a dent". Everyone is searching for that next unicorn. If you don't want to be a unicorn, the VCs have no use for you.

This is hacker news. If you look down on hacks, you may be in the wrong place.

Yes, Spacemacs is a pile of hacks on top of emacs which is a pile of hacks on top of elisp which is a pile of hacks on top of a terminal emulator which is...

Does it matter if they're hacks? Or does it matter that they're good hacks?

I ended up on Spacemacs (for making emacs discoverable and tractable to mortals) and VS Code (for its thoughtful and clean design).

I was amazed I ended up falling in love with an editor from Microsoft of all people, but they seem to have learned all the right lessons from Atom.

And IPv6 penetration will have hit 20%.

There are a lot of baryons fyi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_baryons

I have to admit, I rather admire their putting a brave face on things, with their mildly-too-insistent claim that the LHC is vital for finding new physics despite the increasing likelihood it's not going to find any.

In that sense the LHC is a political failure, because it has failed at its primary political job, which is to make the argument for an even bigger collider.

TBH it's a lovely thought, but it sounds like a legal nightmare waiting to happen. Your employees have access to proprietary code, how do you stop their code from being "tainted" by that access?

I've used ANTLR, which is relatively easy to comprehend by being primarily a LL(k) recursive descent parser.

Sadly, it also suffers from the usual problems of LL parser generators, like barfing on left-recursive grammars.

It's a shame parsers are such a PITA to write. So many problems could be trivially solved if writing a grammar and generating a parser for it were in any way a pleasant process.

Isn't trying to hack a language to have the type system you wish it had, rather than simply using the language you wanted in the first place, something of a futile exercise?

If you want a language with ADTs and exhaustive patterns out there, there's plenty to choose from. Using a language with a weak type system and then trying to wish that fact away seems pointless.

Importantly Wikipedia doesn't strive to be "true" or "accurate", rather it strives to be well-sourced and verifiable. That would understandably be a difficult concept to grasp for an outlet that simply fabricates what it wishes the truth to be.

This was one of those TIL xxx was still alive moments.

Bear in mind, Trump has already rescheduled a state visit to the UK leery of the reception he's gonna get from British people, whose attitude towards him could be described as "lukewarm" at best This sort of thing most certainly won't help.

The State Department has issued an apology to GCHQ via diplomatic channels. Which is unprecedented. The US should not be needing to apologise to one of its closest allies, ever.

I agree with John Gruber on this, POTUS's allegations are the actions of a man whose elevator does not go all the way to the penthouse of Trump Tower.

Something I always felt 20 years ago when doing my physics degree, and now 20 years later when no measurable progress has been made down the road of unification feels even more appropriate:

General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are two astonishingly successful theories. They don't really have any massive gaps waiting to be filled. The belief that there must be a way to unify them always seems to me to stem from the human desire for tidiness, not any sound epistemological reasoning about how physical laws behave.

We want the theories to be unifiable because we're human. Sadly the universe doesn't much seem to care what we want.

One thing I'm never quite sure of in these discussions as to what extent D-Wave are a bunch of shysters and to what extent they're actually honest believers that they've built a quantum computer and that their repeated savagings are nothing more than the reasonable expectations of sceptical science being done.

Basically do they really believe they've built a quantum computer or do they actually know they haven't and have decided to pretend?

Did this win an Ig Nobel and if not, why not?

I think they want F# to be their more experimental functional test bed, and C# to be more conservative.