mykull

I'd like to say I love typescript, too. It's better for collaborative development than raw JS. My point is different, that working in the "low level" or raw JS, obfuscated or not, is where the substantive work happens. Good example is the people working on frameworks.

The substantive part is that nothing they wrote back to him, and nothing he wrote in this article was substantive aside from a vague claim about how CEOs who respond (with junk) are better CEOs.

Where's the part about not having a safety net? Rich, secure people love to tout their riskless efforts as perilous when they did it voluntarily with no potential for long term negative consequence.

This is some real ball-fondling born-into-privilege nonsense. I could write to CEOs too, but I wouldn't be so impressed with their boilerplate social interaction, and the predictability of it is why I won't.

"Enterprise development" is not the same as "serious development". Anyone still doing regular old JavaScript without the transpiling and megaframework dependencies is arguably taking their task more seriously than those who are.

Let's go out on a limb here and consider that people aren't overly self critical, and the problem is actually that they can't do anything about their failure to meet high self expectations, because they are in effect trapped in a prescribed lifestyle where they have no power to make meaningful change.

Let's go out on a limb and consider that while being less critical of yourself addresses the symptoms of disappointment, it doesn't address the causes of inutility of smart and capable people.

Let's consider that the quote "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" is actually pretty insightful.

We are, as a culture and a species, failing in myriad ways. In my humble opinion, we should feel bad and we should change as well. We're just powerless to do much because of the strength of institutions that exist out of ritual and not out of rationality.

We're left to hate ourselves, because nature and ignorant humans with money and power do not care what we think, and have an answer for everything we do.

If by chance this is not a joke, you should look into ECC memory and why it exists.

That is a fair concern.

No, I was a bit hyperbolic perhaps in response to the tone of the article or its headline. Of course there are responsible organizations who are affected and have costs associated with GDPR. Knowing nothing of what your clients do, 99% seems a bit hyperbolic to me, too. The reason email is so "hard" is because in reality not many people want to get the emails being sent. I find it annoying that I have to unsubscribe from a mailing list and sometimes even go out of my way not to get repeat snail mail when I'm being charitable and giving a donation to someone. Aside from all that, costs of doing business happen. I don't think the cost vs benefit is so out of kilter as you say.

The US expects to be asked permission before encryption technology can be used in a software product. Our copyright and general intellectual property policy has been pushed on everyone else. We (The US) even go so far as to heavily interfere in other countries politics, covertly or overtly, to maintain favorable trade conditions and protect our prevailing ideology.

Lots of companies are ready for GDPR, i.e. the ones that handle user information responsibly in the first place, and aren't opaque data hoarders as a central part of their business model.

I'm personally not a fan of the "lets collect it because we can" mentality.

"Data is the new oil" is a great analogy because not only is it valuable, the industry of data gathering is booming with little to no care about the side effects or long term consequences.

Had the right to privacy been enshrined in protective laws much earlier, requiring explicit consent to profile peoples behavior as it pertains to technology, things would obviously be a lot different. Obstacles often represent opportunities for improvement. Hypothesizing:

1. Alternatives to traditional advertising as a method for creating markets for products and services would have a better chance of taking off. A world where we have a relationship with the source of product/service introductions, where we can discriminate and depend on them to discriminate, could prevent a lot of manipulative, misleading and damaging crap from reaching people, and ensure demand goes to the highest quality products/services.

2. The difficulty of gathering would drive the value of peoples personal information higher, likely leading to better protection i.e. more careful handling, fewer data breaches and leaks.

3. A lot of "wasted effort" gathering and storing information as part of this data frenzy that ultimately doesn't provide value to anyone, despite all the moving money, could have been avoided.

Oh but regular collars must be animal abuse too, then, because tugging on a creatures neck is not pleasant. As well as not providing a square mile play area with ideal humidity and temperature and lots of fun toys.

The idea that our measurement of progress only needs to be binary (did we or didn't we progress?) shows indifference to the endless problems yet unsolved. Better than yesteryear doesn't mean good enough. Far from it.

You're assuming rich and high IQ go together. We don't live in a meritocratic society and as such, that's not true.

I'm not sure that it would be ruinous. Isn't RSA still trusted? People have a tendency to overlook or even defend broken protocol when it's "the good guys"

Oh realtek is Taiwanese, but I don't doubt they have reason to cooperate as well.

Isn't a national security letter enough to "break in" to any US company?

Just addressing the last thing you said, I think sophistication has to do with the level of knowledge required to implement. Whether that means knowledge politely asked for or through other means has implications for the difficulty of implementation but perhaps not sophistication of the software.

Don't you think many HN posters will object to using a chat service with a fishy as-of-yet probably-not-profitable business model and a big ol' database of all the messages sent? Discord is a great service for now, but it's unclear to me what their plans are in terms of monetization and user privacy.

Having a bigger, further away screen may prove to help prevent myopia, though. Eyes focused on near objects all the time tend to go myopic. I'm not sure a few extra feet is that significant though, compared to looking out a window at the hills or clouds.

Yes, the same one where people are convicted due to lying police on occasion, it's pretty flawed

Webassembly is the better thing we will replace JS with as a target language for browsers.

Lending isn't productive in and of itself. There is a nice gradient stretching from freeloading rent-seeker to visionary/socially responsible investor. Not seeing the difference and condemning the former is a problem.

The difference is in how many other people get fucked along the way as the investor gets their return.

Little is more naive than the broad claim "collectivism doesn't work" because the USSR and other states tried some form of it and failed.

Even if you are willing to massively oversimplify things and look at the cold war and all the real-politik business of the last century as a fair contest between the ideas of collectivism and capitalism, "which system wins in a war" is not exactly the same thing as "which system maximizes prosperity." Nor are we actually limited to picking between the two.

It isn't that simple at all. When the returns are pushed lower, the means of extracting wealth from low class workers get more brutal. Suffering builds up at the bottom because of decisions at the top, and decision makers don't care because their experiences are entirely disconnected.

no, this is wrong. secure enclave or not. radio chips have direct memory access. phones are only as secure as providers want them to be. Computers actually do what I tell them to --I don't need hacks to "root" them or inspect their behavior.

I don't understand the idea that living off investments is "independence". It's just a different kind of dependence. You're depending on other people to do work while reaping the benefits. Sounds great, except when too many people do it.

captive portals are an ugly hack that should be reimplemented properly (without MITM) based on the obvious need.

I really don't think coining the term 10x did anything to help developers or the state of development, and likewise here.

Your post hit a lot of notes I agree with. Programming dogma doesn't make a lick of sense sometimes. I wonder if the "don't implement cryptography yourself" rule is disingenuous, and really about not necessitating more work from our governmental APTs to get peepholes into everything. I'm also amazed at how often people cry premature optimization when there's potential to reduce hardware cost by orders of magnitude by not writing slow, memory hungry junk by default.