oldmanjay

You'd think after all these decades I'd no longer be surprised that programmers try so hard to minimize their typing, since it has no demonstrable positive impact on code quality. I guess premature optimization is in the blood of some people.

Buzzfeed made a game out of news as their founding principle, and we all lost. We just haven't accepted it yet.

I'm never impressed with the opinions of people who insist that Microsoft is some sort of failure. The utter lack of incorporating basic observation of reality into these theories is good for people who hate Microsoft, but little else.

Or do what I do, express yourself like a human instead of a business machine, leave, go do the rejected right thing for a competitor, and send the product brochure to the people who cared more about their feelings than the work.

You have to be willing to do a lot of walking away, but the inevitable "you were right" has been satisfying so far.

Or I guess another way to say it is if you can, do, and if you can't, by all means, coddle. Just hope I don't end up across the table from you.

What you see as "groupthink" is really your bias attempting to dismiss any number of people for disagreeing with you. I understand the point of your post, I just don't find that particular bias funny enough to let it pass uncommemted.

The Gang Group Dates

I'm not sure I believe any politically convenient social science anymore.

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia used this concept as a plotline, and managed to treat it with more subtlety. Granted, it's a comedy, so the tone was wildly different.

Copyright is totally functional. What you are really saying is you want cheaper sports and the people who don't give you what you want are dicks. It's a mistake a lot of people make.

No, because blaming the author for unnamed transgressions is not a fundamental aspect of not liking a book.

They object to the speech and decline to host it. Juggle the words however you like to make it more emotionally palatable to you. My goal is to speak precisely.

Mind clarifying the evil here? The word has a much stronger definition than seems suitable in this situation.

Wagging fingers in hindsight doesn't do a heck of a lot, does it?

And let's not pretend that it's some exceptional part of human nature to need to touch the stove.

It seems to be a problem in some abstract sense to a certain group of people, but the reality of widely available internet and all the content one chooses for gorging seems to belie the idea that it's bad in a concrete sense

Which in this case, just to keep things concrete, would be in the service of compelling people to host objectionable speech against their will.

There is definitely a surplus of engineering work available, regardless of whatever political spin you want to put on it.

Your excessive exuberance is not a hacker news problem, per se.

I'm not expressing an opinion about anyone with this; I would like to point out that being a genius is no bulwark against being a tedious windbag. Or heartbreakingly stupid. Or anything, really.

In the nerd community in particular, there is so much wishful thinking that Microsoft will fail that some people actually believe Microsoft is and has been failing. It's fairly amusing given the reality.

It also shows that trying to dictate the shape of the market from above is folly

Walmart isn't even close to market control, so what's the reasoning there? Just too big for you personally?

I'm not even close to a prude about nudity, but I utterly reject that you may have any say about my attitude toward it.

Do you really think of twitter as the center of right-wing lunacy?

A lack of understanding is a good basis for a question and a poor basis for an opinion

You'll have a hard time convincing me that a world with several orders of magnitude more humans is somehow less diverse than the times with fewer humans unless you somehow remove the ability to process arithmetic from my brain.

Emotional resonance in the service of opinion manipulation.

Given that humanity's track seems to be toward ever greater diversity, it's hard to imagine we'd become a one-dimensional archetype species.

When you're involved in modern journalism, the apparent first thing they teach you is to exaggerate in the service of emotional resonance to manipulate your audience into agreeing with your fact-free premise to follow.

I expected that to make more sense. Since it started out with the notion that humans are not natural, which is one of my very favorite silly falsehoods, my expectations were shattered rather quickly.

Do you specifically mean when AT&T acquires a company?