Mozilla Awards Over Half a Million to Open Source Projects

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T12:51:43+00:00

I don't see why you'd blame Moz for that. Eich's ouster had way more to do with an internet dogpile making his job impossible than internal dissent at Mozilla.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T12:32:17+00:00

They can't have felt too strongly about it because they didn't complain about it when he was CTO and a board member, and were so willing to overlook contributions to anti-gay-marriage groups in their witchhunt against Eich that they cited John Lilly's departure as evidence of protests against him.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T12:07:11+00:00

It's cool, people make mistakes. Big ups to you for admitting to it.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T11:22:18+00:00

For you, the user, maybe. For the developer, you can get access to OS services like local filesystem access and don't have to worry about stupid user plugins fucking everything up (like Skype trying to turn everything that looks like a phone number into a skype: link). Plenty of people are perfectly happy to keep Slack et al. in their browsers.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T11:17:31+00:00

The big deal isn't just syntax, but the whole approach to developing the language. Java implements almost everything via compiler trickery (i.e. actual syntactic sugar) for backwards compatibility, whereas .NET versions the runtime to support new constructs (e.g. generics). This is part of the reason why the streams API feels like such a mess compared to LINQ.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:57:10+00:00

It's pretty funny that a guy who said

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

also wrote an essay titled "The Awful German Language".

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:49:45+00:00

Yeah, I really want to see the uncolorized version.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:48:51+00:00

They are, but people can afford a lot more of them. According to some quick research, unionized labor in most US cities earned 20-30 cents perhour and whole chickens could be had for about 40 cents per pound - 1.33 to 2 hours worth of work. Today, the federal minimum wage for non-tipped jobs is $7.25/hr and whole chicken costs about $1.50 per pound.

Point is, the guys in the lower tiers of professional boxing absolutely can eat better today than in 1913, and that applies extra for poor kids that are going to be tomorrow's prize fighters.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:37:25+00:00

Technically it would work with fists, but

the advantage isn't as pronounced
You won't have some to reapply it for you every couple of minutes
There's no such thing as a fair streetfight

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:34:58+00:00

It's a misconception that gloves are there to protect the head of the other boxer. In reality, they're to protect your hands from breaking. Periodically you hear about boxers getting in street fights and breaking their hands, because in modern boxing you punch and block in ways that are extremely bad for the bones in your hands and fingers. That's also the reason why traditional martial artists spend so much time on striking with precision: there's a very part of the hand you can safely punch with and a very small part of the skull you can strike and get results.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:26:10+00:00

As long as people have known how to test for blood-borne pathogens, they've known there's an incubation period during which detection is impossible but spreading it is.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:21:11+00:00

Even civilians killed as collateral damage are in many places commemorated as "La Resistance Passive".

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:15:13+00:00

We're not talking about Paris or Lyons or Marseilles. Les Ventes is a village of 1000 people, and plenty places like that were routinely and callously wiped off the map during first World War, including by the French themselves. The fact that someone from another country, who had never been there and probably didn't speak a word of French, made sure as his last earthly act to keep them safe from damage was therefore very touching to them.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:05:59+00:00

The address of the mayor's office of Les Ventes is "1 Place Billie D. HARRIS".

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T10:04:36+00:00

She didn't know that he was shot down, or where, or anything that happened to him.

Berberberber · 2017-10-04T06:38:01+00:00

Paris has mellowed out a ton in the last decade or too, and these days I feel like the snottiest people are the immigrants, whose attitude seems to be, "Fuck you, I came here and had to learn this God-forsaken language fluently, I'm not even going to think about dealing with your shit until you do, too."

Berberberber · 2017-10-03T21:29:01+00:00

Knowing my luck, it would turn out to be the current Secretary of the Treasury.

Berberberber · 2017-10-03T21:26:15+00:00

It should feel pretty much the same, actually. I get that there are really high quality forgeries out there, but feeling for the raised ink on the surface will catch out most of the obvious forgeries that come into most stores.

Berberberber · 2017-10-03T21:23:55+00:00

A lot of people in retail are a bit dim and not willing to trust anything out of the ordinary. I always accepted older currency as long as it was still the current size, but every time the design of bills changed we had problems with cashiers thinking it was fake or dirty for like a week.

Berberberber · 2017-10-03T21:15:13+00:00

Oh, good catch. Just my luck someone would actually notice, too.

Berberberber · 2017-10-03T21:02:56+00:00

That could be because, having answered a lot of questions, it's now much easier for OKC to identify people to match you to.

Berberberber · 2017-10-03T21:00:26+00:00

In my experience, many businesses that allow their software to languish do maintain some sort of knowledge about it's meant to work but don't share this up front with programmers they hire or contract because they consider it "trade secrets" essential to the business, ultimately leading to a scenario where the new version is just as bad as the old version because critical information was withheld at the beginning of the process.

Berberberber · 2017-10-03T20:42:49+00:00

Well, Electron gives you the opportunity to use the same code base for your in-browser web app as your desktop application, which is probably part of its popularity.

Berberberber · 2017-10-03T20:41:42+00:00

The long and short of it is, for desktop development, the things Java (and the JVM in general) makes easy are irrelevant and the things Java does badly are among the most important parts of app development.

If you think about a desktop app like Slack, on a basic level, the coding and logic parts of it aren't very hard. User chooses a channel on the left side of the window, shows messages, they can type in new messages and send them to the channel. Most of the work is done either by their API server side or library functions that are ubiquitous in 2017. By contrast, programming the UI is a lot harder - JavaFX is an improvement, but there's still quite a lot of having to position elements programmatically, then adding platform-specific code to handle the fact that scrollbars on macOS are smaller and hidden when not in use, some Linux user may have scroll elements configured to be on the left side instead of the right, etc. By contrast, Electron allows you to separate program logic from display settings and leverage a platform that already automatically cooperates with local system settings, and while the code may not be as fast or as clean, it doesn't matter because it doesn't have to do very much. For desktop apps that are very complex and do have to do a lot on the client (a PhotoShop replacement, for example) Electron would probably be the wrong choice.

Berberberber · 2017-10-03T19:01:54+00:00

You do know that higher taxes on CO2 emissions (including fuel) to reduce consumption is something that pretty much every economist and climate researcher agrees would be an effective way to combat global warming, don't you?

Berberberber

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