I think the main problem is that we have our heads contaminated by too much "news". We live in constant fear, even when statistically we are less violent than ever.
For instance, terrorism works when its actions are published for the more people to see as possible. Statistically you have more probabilities of chocking to death on your breakfast or slipping in the shower than dying from a terrorist action in Europe/US.
Rational thought is on the backseat... So hence the pessimism and thoughts that something bad is comming.
I understand that is a real problem but you should know terrorism is not like the others. It's almost never about the absolute numbers of injuries or deaths.
Acts of terror (the number of them) follow an exponential curve culminating in civil conflict. The objective of terror isn't to kill large numbers of enemies, it is to stress society into dragging one faction into battling the other.
That is why you should be more worried about terrorism than slippery showers. It scales differently. Violence is a contagion.
People's intuitions about this are actually correct. Bear in mind I dislike both the media and democracy! Sometimes what the 'man in the street' thinks is more accurate than an expert opinion, and that is because intuition is more holistic than a collection of expert opinions in specific fields conjoined together.
> Statistically you have more probabilities of chocking to death on your breakfast or slipping in the shower than dying from a terrorist action in Europe/US.
I already acknowledged that so there is no need to make that point again and again.
It's interesting to see how the main philosophy behind Apple products is to prevent this kind of tinkering and that they are also used by a lot of hackers (tinkerers).
I know the answer is "they just work" but it somewhat troubles me. I'm also a pragmatic but then I think about cases like the Bitkeeper debacle and Linus Torvalds vs Richard Stallman positions then. And who was right in the end and how this concluded with the birth of Git.
Ok, it's exactly not the same scenario (HW vs a SW product) but maybe someday we will see a similar conclusion...
When people say this, they usually mean that HN is all in favor of X where X is something they personally disagree with. In fact, though, the community is divided on most issues. There are a few exceptions (anti-Snowden doesn't do well here*, pro-CFAA worse) but not as many as it seems.
I think this impression of 'the community lined up against my view' happens because when you read HN threads on any divisive topic you're inevitably confronted with comments you dislike and disagree with. That follows simply from the community being divided while the site content is all in common, i.e. non-siloed - no subreddits into which people partition themselves.
Such comments are unpleasant—indeed painful—to read, and therefore more memorable, so we notice them more. These impressions accrete into a mental model of the community all being on the opposite side. But this is actually a side effect of the site not being homogeneous—of the fact that for most X, everyone who feels strongly about X has anti-X comments in their face, and vice versa.
I have used it since 2 years ago or so to implement JSON REST APIs and some small admin pages for app backends. I compare with Python which I have also used for this.
Cons:
- More verbose than Python (returning errors and static typing make it not as succint as Python)
Pros:
- Static typing without being too ceremonius (compared to Python it's nice to have some errors catch by the type compiler that would popup in runtime. Refactoring also is nicer with a static typing safenet).
- Easy deployment (rsync the binary to the server and of you go, no more Pip and dynamic libraries bullshit)
- Low memory usage (nice to have the production backend running and see that it uses 15MB of mem where in Python it would be like 10 times more and with worse concurrence)
- Performance (somewhat minor plus for me because the bottleneck is almost always on the database)
Sincerely, what you say sounds great from a bussiness perspective but maybe not from a lifestyle perspective (putting myself in Tarn & Zach's shoes).
Maybe something like that would be the kind of thing that would transform a work of passion into a boring bussiness full of obligations (to users, press, investors, Steam and whatnot). Worse even, after reading interviews with the Adams brothers I guess following a road like that maybe would even burn them after some years and end game development.
It's the difference of doing something for the money that can be extracted from it in contrast with doing something for passion and the joy of doing it. In some cases (or maybe for some personalities) these overlap, but in other cases they don't and it's ok, every person is different.
Poor people are the one's who suffer the most from advertising.
First, it's calculated that a hefty sum of most product purchases is there to cover its advertising campaigns.
If you're rich of course those are peanuts -- what's 10% or 20% more on your groceries and other such purchases? Instead of, say, $40,000 you'll spend $45,000 but no big deal, since you make $1,000,000 per year anyway. But for a poor person, $500 vs $600 is a much bigger deal.
Second, most people (even if they think otherwise) would buy less stuff, and less pricey stuff, if it weren't for advertising. That's what sells a $2 dollar bottle of water that's basically glorified tap water over a 50 cents one, or even regular tap water. Without ads, it's mostly buying what you need, and based on utility, not rushed purchases because some ad hit some subconscious emotional strings.
Let's put it this way: if you're worth $N dollars to Google, those are $N dollars (and more) that Google ads will get you to spend. Advertisers (and companies getting advertised) are not doing it to lose money.
For instance, terrorism works when its actions are published for the more people to see as possible. Statistically you have more probabilities of chocking to death on your breakfast or slipping in the shower than dying from a terrorist action in Europe/US.
Rational thought is on the backseat... So hence the pessimism and thoughts that something bad is comming.
Please take a look at this: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...