I really wish they aggregated the metric of build time (+ whatever).
That is a huge metric I care about.
You can figure out it somewhat by clicking on each language benchmark but it is not aggregated.
BTW as biased guy in the Java world I can tell you this is one area Java is actually mostly the winner even beating out many scripting languages apparently.
I have to agree (ignoring the whole C doesn’t throw exceptions).
I have been looking at our bugs, logs and exceptions recently of the past 6 years and an enormous amount of bugs are caused by methods/functions that have multiple parameters with the same type (Java).
This happens because (my theory) we use java and java doesn’t have type aliases or value types as well as easy destructuring. It also doesn’t have named parameters (well there is a compiler option to retain the parameter name but it’s not like ocaml label parameter or python kwargs).
So often times in boring business programming you are dealing with methods with 5 to six strings so it’s very easy to mix up the parameter order.
Very few “hard” bugs were caused by NPEs where as the previous problem caused serious pain.
Every time someone downvotes me it literally makes me feel like shit for like a day.
This includes reddit as well.
I’m not saying I’m looking for upvotes and I’m not on Facebook so it’s not about being “liked”.
When I’m downvoted I’m so afraid I have offended someone or I said something extremely fallacious.
It has gotten to the point where I have contemplated not ever participating again which is a shame because I’m nervous (assuming I’m not an extreme fringe case) there is some sort of convergent sheep opinion when there should be diversity in thought.
So if someone came to me and said hire me and look I have xyz karma on xyz platform I might even be less inclined to hire given how much I feel it has poisoned my own thought.
Or you could be incredibly wrong. And it can be hard to differentiate between the whether you're ahead of your time, or just wrong.
> I think there should be rewards for getting highly downvoted comments that aren't mean (but are constructive but express an unpopular opinion).
It's just as easy to express a viewpoint that sounds smart but is absolutely ridiculous. Some unpopular opinions are actually nonsensical, others have merit but people just don't want to accept the ideas. That's the issue with the karma system: people decide the merit, and people can't differentiate between the two unless they're incredibly open minded - most people aren't.
I think it's pretty clear by now there are both incredibly rude people and incredibly generous people on HN - despite that I understand how you feel, because this is a community, after all, and there is an inherent desire to be accepted when participating.
Karma scores are really, really irrelevant. To paraphrase an old saying, "90,000 karma and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee."
You know that when you get downvoted 200-300 points and you laugh, you have discarded for good the very idea of karma points having value. I did.
When I left left Reddit at the start of this year, I had something like 50,000 karma. To say it like that means I only remember the value to somewhere within 10,000. So that means my actual karma was somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000. 20,000 karma is quite a big range if karma has any value at all, and yet it is just a meaningless and irrelevant number.
Now repeat after me: "Karma is just a random number that has no meaning at all in real life."
The only issue with this mindset is posting restrictions (e.g. on reddit) if your overall karma score drops too low.
Karma systems work great if everyone used them as intended, for quality of content or thought, but they're more often used for how much you agree with the sentiment of a comment and if it agrees with the philosophy of the person voting, regardless of the merit of the comment.
For that reason, I'm sure there must be a better way to do karma for a site that is made to be productive, and not just an echo chamber.
I sometimes react similarly to downvotes, especially when I believe I'm saying something that isn't controversial. My solution is to just hide scores, I don't need to know when lots of people generally agree, and I'm hoping that people will comment if they believe I'm very much wrong/have missed something important. It's similar to all this "dance as if nobody's watching" self-help stuff: comment as if nobody is voting.
Create a new account and make its goal to gather as much negative karma on HN as possible.
This process may help you outgrow the fear and to grow as a person.
What's the worst that can happen? Your handle gets banned from the site? Nobody will miss a sleep over that.
As someone who might be a consumer of content written by that negative karma farming account, please do not do this. One of the most annoying things on Internet forums is trolls intentionally seeking downvotes.
There have to be ways to boost your self esteem without pissing off the rest of the world.
I especially hate downvotes with no comment replies. Leaves me wondering which part of my comment was not good and why. I always thought it would be a good idea to require a reply for any downvote.
I have a similar reaction. There are times I post a bunch of comments in a row just to push a thread off my user page so I can check replies to other comments without having to see that thread that's making me upset.
If I'm wrong, I feel bad that I was wrong but I'm happy other people have let the general public know I was wrong by downvoting my comment. More often though, I'm right and people just don't want to hear it.
The fastest way to get downvoted is by saying "I like typing on Apple's new keyboard, the Esc key on the Touchbar works just fine for me, and their Pro lineup fits my needs perfectly as a professional". Every statement in there might be true but there is a group of HN users who cannot stand the thought that any of those statements might be true and will absolutely destroy your karma for it.
Without any penalty for downvoting unpopular opinions, it's just something we have to deal with. And if it starts to get too much, I jump ship to Lobste.rs for a bit where the community is less toxic overall and downvoting is substantially harder.
Deep cycle lead-acid batteries have fine cycle lives, and indeed were (and are) used for driving golf carts. However, they trade off for lower specific power, which makes them unsuitable for a full-sized, highway-speed-reaching car.
I’m just not comfortable with this. Maybe I’m just getting old and maybe I have seen too many movies but I feel uneasy about our children and maybe us having another “grade” put on them.
I’d like to think this would be good so maybe some one will comment how this won’t eventually go too far.
If altering starts happening which I would imagine it will at one point will be no longer human (and maybe that is a good thing).
Maybe at some point like in the Altered Carbon series it won’t even matter and it will just go back to money (or maybe it will always be the case as the ultimate grade).
But these studies are merely going to give you a correlation. It will always be very hard to prove direct causality without experimentation, which on humans is not really feasible or without a full understanding of how the brain works, which we are still very far from.
The other thing is that the way I like to think of our brain is like a muscle. Our DNA drives much of the range in which we can develop our muscles, people born with a certain body type will never be an athlete, but even if you are born with good muscular capacity, a KFC-eating couch potato will never get to the olympics. What one does with this capacity matters a lot. Only science will tell but I like to think that the brains works in a similar way. Some kids will never be geniuses but there is still a wide range in which they can evolve so there is no reason to corner them in a box.
One general rule of life I've learned: it's never better to live in ignorance. If you have a chance to learn a fact and the idea of knowing it fills you with dread, you should regard the hesitation as a strong signal that you should go ahead with learning it anyway. Even if it's initially painful, the knowledge will be ultimately useful.
Scientific facts about ourselves, both general and specific, are among the most painful. We go through lives deluding ourselves. That's why modern scientific introspection is so important and why it'll ultimately lead to a better world.
If it were possible to obtain this information completely anonymously, I would jump on this chance. But I certainly don't want to give my genetic info to insurance companies, especially since I don't know what it says about me yet.
It's not my reaction I'm worried about, it's the reaction of the companies I interact with that want to make a profit off me.
Long before we'll have the technology to alter genes reliably we will be able to select embryos before implantation. This is possible even today. Better genetic testing and improvements in fertility medicine only makes it cheaper and more effective.
The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.
- Andrew Tanenbaum Computer Networks, 2nd ed., p. 254.
I think all developers go through some experience where they want to just "unify" everything because that will supposedly make it easier for them and other developers.
Overtime as you become more experienced or I guess jaded you realize that reality of a "GUT" technology platform or programming languages is a pipe dream and the effort to get people to use said new format/language/tech is more effort than what you get in return.
Anyway to be short about it I think most should just pick the best tool for the job and stop rebuilding things that don't need to. And if you do please make sure you have a plan to how you are going to replace all the old working stuff.
> I think most should just pick the best tool for the job and stop rebuilding things that don't need to.
I think you just contradicted yourself. Sometimes the best tool for the job is something new, something improved over what already exists.
I don't think the author intends to "replace all the old working stuff". But if this tool is better for new projects, then why not? I don't get all the negativity... do people here really love XML/JSON/YAML that much? There's a whole lot to complain about in all of those!!
I am not averse to new formats. I am averse to formats that try to “unify”.
And yeah I don’t have a problem with XML or JSON. Those two combined with some flatbuffer other men binary protocols cover most of my use cases... like really what’s with all the XML negativity.
I remember once someone who posted their blog and it was just a listing of markdown files in a github repository. Not even a jekyllyzed version... just a folder with date prefixed markdown and rst files.
I have to say it hit me and I was like... damn I should just do that. Forget all this blogging platforms and getting caught up in look and feel. Just write text files.
Even with Jekyll (and its variants) I got caught up on making it potentially look nice but this person just said ... f-it... let google and github figure out how to organize the content.
I've come to the conclusion that all the design stuff is a waste of time. In most cases, it doesn't impress me on other sites, and if someone cares, they can use Reader View or Pocket or something like that. Unless you are good enough to create a design that makes folks say wow, there is no benefit at all from doing so.
This is only slightly similar, but Ive played around with hexo to acheive a HTML only driven blog based on github hosted markdown files. Once setup and secured it is pretty much just me writing and publishing text files.
https://hexo.io/
It seems to be very popular in Japan as most guides I read were google-translated Japanese blogs.
Now I'm intrigued as to what that looked like. Was he using github.io or did you have to just click through the Github source code browser? Also was he really writing some of the posts in ReStructuredText, or was that a converted output?
That is a huge metric I care about.
You can figure out it somewhat by clicking on each language benchmark but it is not aggregated.
BTW as biased guy in the Java world I can tell you this is one area Java is actually mostly the winner even beating out many scripting languages apparently.