I have similar observations as Mr. Gabriel, but different conclusions.
The idea of experiencing immersive virtual worlds is highly attractive to those for whom the real world is lacking in some way. People in the midst of an introvert period, people who lack an engaging work and life environment and so on.
I'm not trying to look down on such people, as I'm talking from personal experience. Whenever I've been depressed or isolated for some reason, suddenly immersive games and long story arc TV series become very attractive. But I completely lose interest in such activities the rest of the time.
VR is interesting from a technical perspective, but the problem it solves is way too specific, for a way too specific audience. It's too much of an elaborate setup and too much of a taxing way to play games (or do anything else) for most people, even if it's cool the first few minutes. Honestly, I'd rather play a game on a 4" phone screen, rather than completely lose visual and audio input from the real world while wearing a VR helmet.
Oh I see, Pinboard is so innocent, so pure, that a honest tip about how to reach more people who can find their service useful should be modded into the ground.
I've tainted the Jesus of bookmarks by even implicitly suggesting in my post that they might be writing with the intention to be read. No, I suppose their intention is way more cosmic and godly than such low earthly concerns, how stupid of me.
Aight, aight. I never stop learning when I'm here on HN.
A bit of a lost opportunity, because I've barely heard about Pinboard, and the fact of them celebrating the passage of time since they were found, is extremely trivial. BTW, MySpace recently turned eleven.
When writing posts and news, typically you want the headline to focus on a new feature, a new app, or if it'll be a number, focus on a meaningful number, like number of users, something that could engage those who aren't engaged right now.
Way it is, a birthday party of some company I know little about is someone else's party, and I won't even open the article.
When it comes to basic formatting, symbol naming and high-level code organization, sure.
But computer languages, unlike human languages, are precise. Their intent is clear. And you'll never encounter a case where the Python 3 interpreter hasn't heard of that particular Python 3 keyword you're using.
It's also not an excuse to avoid certain features of a language, when using them leads to a better and simpler solution, just because they're less popular. Programming is not an exercise in popularity.
On the other hand, human language is fuzzy and full of phrases that consist of statements having nothing to do with their meaning. Such as me saying "your argument doesn't hold water".
Human languages also have additional layers entirely separate from the primary meaning of a conversation, such as sending social cues like "how smart am I", "do I like you", "do I fit in this group", and "am I a leader or a follower". Each layer of concern drives a certain way of expression and imitation, none of which occurs (or should occur) when writing computer code.
A better example to compare to programming code would be mathematical notation. As long as you express your intent shortly, using the available mathematical notation, people will be fine, and your intent will be clear.
I've never seen someone ask in a math forum if their formula is more Mathematic one way, or another way.
I don't believe it, because I use SQL every day, and I need to tell it which rows to lock when reading, whether to read them in share mode or fully, sometimes I need to help it figure out which indexes to use (of course I also have to manually set up the indexes too), when doing transactions I need to tell it how exactly to isolate the transaction, and I need to be very careful how I order my queries in order to avoid deadlocks.
SQL is declarative only when you don't care about data integrity and performance.
Maybe a bit better example for this kind of behavior are compilers. They're pretty "declarative" these days. You write what code you want to compile, and the compiler will pass it through a thousand transformation stages, deciding which trick to apply at every instruction, which code isn't really needed and so on.
Of course, then you also need to deal with compilers getting it wrong too, so you start tweaking your code with special words like "volatile" and "restricted", mess with compiler options, and sometimes even disassemble code to see why turning the "fast" options makes your code slow. But in general, high quality compilers do this dance way better than SQL.
So what's the moral here? Two things.
First, calling something "declarative" doesn't really mean anything. It means the language is built on a very thick abstraction that lets the computer do more work than usual, so you can do less work.
Second, thick abstractions are leaky. Works for basic cases, past that you'll still end up doing a lot of work, but now you have to fight your computer while doing it, as well.
The Z3 Theorem Prover is an interesting toy, but I wouldn't trust it to do anything right in the real world. Much like most Microsoft Research projects, unfortunately.
So, we're all very very angry and we'll... do what about it?
Nothing.
This is hardly the first time this happens. There are about half a dozen cases of this kind in mainstream media every year. Plenty more go unreported. Nothing changes, because everyone feels comfortable being outraged talking about it, but they wouldn't touch the problem with a 20 foot pole when it comes to acting about it.
Don't ask what's "more Pythonic" or "less Pythonic", Python is not a cult, it's a very practical scripting language. Ask for benefits and weaknesses of a given approach in given circumstances.
You seem so passionate about this, it hurts to break your heart.
When you set your text to be bold, that's a separate font, made by a human hand.
Browsers have a fake bold look when the font is missing, but it's not a look you want on your site. They just, well... smudge it to the right. For Emoji the fake bold look is disabled, because bold or italic emoji is just non-sense on the face of it, so they don't support weight settings.
Also, you can't set the color of Windows Emoji via CSS. They're already colored.
Come on now, you don't need to be "female, teenager and from Japan". "Emoji" are simply "emoticons" aka "smilies". People all over the world have been familiar with those from instant messengers going back to the 90s.
And before graphical "emoticons" people have been using ASCII smilies going back to the 80s on IRC.
If someone doesn't get the appeal, the reason is much simpler - they don't text chat a lot. That's fine. If they would, they'd instantly see the need, because plain text can't by itself properly support the subtlety of what one says in a conversation.
It's not "the future of color fonts", it's just the present of emoji in Windows. And I really don't like the way they did this.
The technical approach is smart, but lazy, and the resulting emoji look bland and lack definition. No wonder, since this approach doesn't support the way artists work. It's not SVG, it's not PostScript, it's not a bitmap, it's just a glyph sandwich. No opacity, no gradients, no effects. It must be a pain to split your pictures in layers so they can be in a font like that.
As far as using this for text... the novelty of such effects faded out sometime in the 90s when Word Art was all the rage among design-blind office workers.
In the modern world of Unicode, it's even less likely we'll start making fonts with hardcoded layers of cheesy effects when you need to cover a good range of international characters, weights, cursive, hints, kern pairs, ligatures, alternate versions and so on.
Thank you for showing us. I have two pieces of feedback.
1) The score isn't most important. The headline is. This is why the headline is in black, and the score is in gray. We don't come here to compare news importance, the site already does this for us by sorting. We come to read news. And having a small pale gray score replaced by a big attention-drawing glowing orange square goes against where the focus should be.
2) I do part time design and understand the temptation to style your presentation so it enhances your concept, like add perspective, drop shadows, and so on. My team does this when presenting business card designs to clients, because the actual graphic looks so simple and boring on a monitor, the client won't "get it", if we'd show it as is.
But a website isn't a 3D slab floating in space, so in this case the styling is a distraction from your presentation, not an enhancement. Keep it simple, when simple works.
I'm an idiot, but I'm willing to believe there are still people out there who love what they do, and would stand by it, even if Corporation X comes knocking on the door with a pot of gold.
I'd rather cheer for them and be disappointed, than dismiss them in advance and live my life perceiving the world through a cynical lens.
Huh. I didn't know I can write so dramatically. You catch my drift, though.
No, why would this be something to try to avoid? Sexism and racism is a kind of cultural trait, I hope you realize that.
A culture may be selective on very different criteria. It can easily be blind to gender, race, age, religion, nation and many more, yet have certain very specific values. And letting people in who have the opposite values are toxic to that culture.
You can't have a culture that's "open to everything". It means you have no culture, you just adopt the zeitgeist unmodified. Everything goes. If this was the goal, this thread wouldn't exist.
I'm sorry, but I'm starting to get a bit sick of Hacker Schools constant whining about rules.
If you want to encourage a specific culture you do this by starting with a small set of people who have this culture in their bones, then growing slowly and assimilating more people into that culture, addressing deviations swiftly and letting people get back to their work afterwards, without skipping a beat.
Not by writing manuals, and then stressing everyone with looooong, reaaaaally long and exhausting "we need to talk" style posts, where we hold hands, talk about how it's so difficult to open your mouth and say something that's not offensive, and how we're far from perfect, and in fact, we're all sinners.
It's not that the intent is wrong. But this way of going about it is so extremely taxing on everybody, creating an atmosphere where everything people say is judged on the "-isms" scale.
It means when you talk, you're terrified of what you're saying.
When you listen, you listen for someone to say something so you can point your finger at them.
Well, as usual most arguments revolve around misunderstanding terms, and not substance, heh. I was too harsh in few places, as well. Sorry.
I really don't feel there's a need for us to separate "native" database transactions and app-level transactions. They're both implemented using the same underlying principles. But I've noticed people see a huge difference between them in blog posts, articles and conversations.
I think it reveals a kind of thinking that database transactions look like magic, while those we roll ourselves... we see all the ugly parts of the sausage factory there, and it no longer feels as "atomic" or magical as what databases expose as an encapsulated abstraction.
The idea of experiencing immersive virtual worlds is highly attractive to those for whom the real world is lacking in some way. People in the midst of an introvert period, people who lack an engaging work and life environment and so on.
I'm not trying to look down on such people, as I'm talking from personal experience. Whenever I've been depressed or isolated for some reason, suddenly immersive games and long story arc TV series become very attractive. But I completely lose interest in such activities the rest of the time.
VR is interesting from a technical perspective, but the problem it solves is way too specific, for a way too specific audience. It's too much of an elaborate setup and too much of a taxing way to play games (or do anything else) for most people, even if it's cool the first few minutes. Honestly, I'd rather play a game on a 4" phone screen, rather than completely lose visual and audio input from the real world while wearing a VR helmet.
It'll remain a niche.