lectrick

I think one of the points of human experience is to figure out how to reduce ALL human suffering, this included.

Very difficult to watch the embedded video. But of course I did, as I need to know everything. Was brought to tears though, FYI.

Killing is a pretty strong word. I'd say "euthanizing."

But perhaps part of the reason for existing is to be a constant reminder for researchers to get on that gene therapy research...

Somewhere, someone at Valve is noticing this and pitching it around as a new service idea :O

You are a gentleman for redistributing the credit. I have unfortunately worked for people who would not have. Regardless, thanks for your contribution to privacy, and may whatever karma exists rain invisibly on you ;)

Good. The quicker they go, the sooner they will hit the wall. ;) (hell, there already ARE walls. Subjective value, beauty, etc. is irrational.)

We have determinists ready to ascribe all consciousness, life and life experience to biological mechanism and yet we still don't know the answers to fundamental questions such as this one.

I have a possible diagnosis- Technical debt has reached critical mass!

I think we just need to build smarter. I've become disillusioned with the "runaway state" problem (as well as spaghetti-dependency problems) in OO languages which contributes to bugs and general nondeterministic behavior as well as making long term maintenance difficult, and at the same time I've become enamored of unit test suites and functional immutable languages like Elixir as well as static code analysis tools (I'm still coming around to Haskell-esque typing, but I generally think it's a good idea to write "potentially provably correct" code that has parts which provably have no side effects).

Just a minute ago they tweeted about it: https://twitter.com/united/status/618769524544942081

I have a nagging (intuition? feeling?) that software safety/reliability/security needs are going to explode soon (because unreliabilities multiply in non-resilient systems interacting with each other) and that these are simply foreshocks.

(yeah, I know security is already a huge deal, but as we come to trust software systems more and more, the safety/reliability factor will come more into play)

EDIT: This is also part of the reason I've been learning Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/) since it's based on the highly-resilient Erlang and is designed to embrace failure. This was also informed by me reading Nassim Taleb's book "Antifragile" as well as "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by the (late) Donella Meadows.

I have to say that in this case you're wrong. The Apple Mac Plus in my parents' closet, which I still fire up from time to time to play Dark Castle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCkbp4wurW0), had a zero latency mouse (or at least imperceptible) with zero flicker. Took Microsoft at least 20 years to get something comparable. This is not a nostalgic mis-memory, or an exaggeration. Please find an old Mac from the 80's and simply move the mouse around.

> they are recalling computers which had no networking

The very first network games I ever played were over AppleTalk on a Mac, like NetTrek (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z40VMsXtl0Y ... yes, that is digitized sound out of a 1984 machine), Maze Wars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoEpgfTtUYg) and the venerable Bolo! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz_gYZ5kMvc), the latter still one of the best multiplayer gaming experiences I've ever had

Vintage Macs also had 0% (seemingly) cursor lag and 0% cursor flicker. Took Windows 20 years to finally have a usable (coming from a Mac at least) mouse cursor.

The Apple Macintosh did this in 1984 (with the mouse cursor). Jobs understood the importance of this... If you get a chance, find an old Mac and just move its mouse around. There is absolutely zero lag. For a while it was the #1 reason why I couldn't tolerate Windows, whose cursor by comparison was flickery and laggy. (And today it's a reason why I don't like Android.)

Apple hardware and software still prioritizes this.

Glad to see Microsoft finally caught up ;)

Does the law create the criminal by perverting incentives, driving up price due to risk in a market that refuses to go away even when made illegal (see Prohibition)... or are sociopaths simply drawn to any high-risk/high-reward/non-society-cooperative work, becoming criminals?

Or is it a bit of both?

> but I'd put good money on them already having some skin in the game

The article says that they cannot find a money trail to these guys.

> Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.

The problem is that correlating things with sex (even when such a correlation seems apparent) is just as bad as correlating things with race, ethnicity, religion, age, index finger length, eye color, and pretty much anything else.

It disadvantages those in the arbitrarily-designated outgroup, and subjects everyone to the Fallacy of Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition.

Which means that you're STILL ideally stuck on evaluating each person on an individual level, anyway.

Correlating things to something like blood serum testosterone level would make more sense to me, than an entire sex.

No True Scotsman fallacy. Pessimistic bitterness. Is insane enough to read Kafka fucking four times. Appeal to some ominous nameless oppressive judgmental force in order to discourage (perhaps this was informed by all that Kafka reading). Is obsessed with nihilism. Spreads negativity unnecessarily, which does not help anything. Senseless comparison to optimistic soldiers entering a warfront... Getting rejected by art directors until you're successful is not the same as killing "enemies" in cold blood, I'm sorry.

All of that and more in a mere 3 short paragraphs.

How did you NOT see why it was downvoted?

> In just finished reading the trial by Kafka for the fourth time

Well, if you weren't bitter and depressed enough after the 1st time, having 4 readings under your belt would go a ways towards explaining the nihilist pessimistic emptiness of your post. When you're done staring into the abyss, the actual meaning that we all have the opportunity to elect to participate in (and which young people still rightfully believe in, stop trying to extinguish it) will still be waiting.

Assumes the will of a single man would have been enough to rescue an entire economy based on what looks to outsiders like an ingrained culture of laziness

See also "why I use integers whenever possible"

I... guess I am. Is that OK? :) I like Erlang too... but I was one of the folks for whom the syntax turned me off originally. I can't explain why, especially if you're one of those developers (bless their pure-engineering hearts) who thinks syntax is irrelevant once you grok it. The best I can explain it is that some brains interpret computer code as a very abstract form of writing and some don't (or don't need to), and I may be one of the former, and that causes some syntaxes to "feel better" or "feel worse". It's... not very rational, sigh.

I don't see a loss. I see a win.

In Elixir, I have the full power of Lisp-level macros, in a functional immutable pattern-matching language, with a ridiculous level of concurrency (you can spawn a million or so processes in a second on your typical laptop), hot software upgradability (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96UzSHyp0F8 for a cool demo), access to the entire repository of already-existing battle-tested Erlang code...

... AND it's readable. :P

Lisp with its powerful macro facility has had literally dozens of years to find acceptance and still struggles (argumentum ad populum notwithstanding, a userbase with critical mass brings a plethora of other advantages). Ruby found enough of a niche that I think there is something to be said for Ruby's style of syntax. Elixir gives you both, and then some.

Yes, I was riffing on Lisp not really having a "syntax."

The fact that Erlang's syntax is (disclaimer: subjective) awful just adds further grist to the Elixir mill, assuming you think Elixir's syntax is (disclaimer: subjective) sweet.

Which a lot of people seem to be coming to the same conclusion on.

> but in Erlang you don't want to touch that feature with a ten foot pole. It's hairy and incredibly annoying to work with

It's pretty much the exact opposite in Elixir. The only thing you really have to wrap your head around is the switch between the quoting context and the unquoting context... which is pretty much no different from understanding macros period. The definition syntax looks just like a method definition, except it's "defmacro" instead of "def", and the macro body receives an AST instead of (or in addition to) your usual arguments. But I'm probably not doing it justice...

http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/meta/macros.html

https://pragprog.com/book/cmelixir/metaprogramming-elixir

Here Dave Thomas creates a simple "returning" macro, you can just watch the screencast if you're feeling lazy: http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/11/05/a-simple-elixir-macro/

After learning about Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/) and playing with it some, I now want an Elixir job. (I'm skilled in Ruby, and Ruby already back in the day wanted me to get a Ruby job... which I finally did)

One nice thing about Elixir for Lisp lovers is that you get "real" macros (full AST access within a quoting context) AND actual syntax. I am not sure there are any other languages which feature that combination currently.

Can you summarize how they quantitatively measure aspects of tech debt? Because that seems to be a hard problem and I kind of don't believe that they have pulled off this feat

Mac Bolo was one of my first networking games and it was incredibly awesome

private prisons seem to be the perfect example of when ethics are more important than profit motive

And when all costs (even extraneous societal ones) are considered in an all encompassing cost model, outlawing them would be the optimal course of action, anyway

The price of some things just seem severely disconnected from their actual value (or lack thereof)

The problem with private prisons is the conflict of interest.

As a private for-profit prison employing what is effectively cheap slave labor, you have zero incentive to actually reform or to reduce the amount of people who become imprisoned or the amount of time they are imprisoned for. You are in fact financially incentivized to do the opposite; classic perverse incentive.

As someone else in here posted, The Corrections Corporation of America noted relaxation of drug enforcement efforts as a RISK FACTOR in their 2011 10-K filing:

http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?f...

"The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws."

Does this not scream "conflict of interest not in the interest of the greater good" to you? It does to me.

For an example of what happens when you allow this on a larger scale, see North Korea. Not a country anyone should be taking after!

For what it's worth, I just so happen to have initiated a monthly $100 donation to http://innocenceproject.org/ just this morning after reading this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/23/fbi-evidence-...