PopsiclePete

What is Dutch food anyway? Bitterballen? Just some salted fish on a thin slice of rye? Seems like everyone there in your neck of the woods eats Italian basically? I spent a solid month in Amsterdam once and the most "Dutch" thing I ate was....Indonesian?

We were extremely lucky, yes. Not to mention he was Jewish and being born, say, even just 15 years later than he was, could've meant he'd have ended up in concentration camp and we'd still have no theory of relativity. That's quite possible.

There was less competition but it was also tremendously difficult to even see what others are doing, or to learn from them, or to even talk to them....just being in possession of scientific texts was enough to get you killed not too long before Newton's time. That makes his accomplishments more impressive to me, not less.

Here's an analogy.

I'd be more impressed by a medieval European serf if that serf could create the Intel 8086 than by you if you designed the next AMD 32-core processor.

We can't prove that. It feels good to believe it, sure, but it's also possible that precisely zero people working in sweatshops have ever had Einstein's talent.

Sure, it's easy to say - take away the sweatshops, provide them with UBI and voila - suddenly we have 5000 Einsteins on our hands.

But it's also possible we'll still have zero. It's not like we don't have millions of people leading "cushy" (by comparison lives) in the West already, yet - no more Einsteins?

I think people are getting hung up too much on the "their own" part vs "full of geniuses" part.

Ok, fine, if three - instead of one - people - out of billions - came up with a revolutionary new idea - that does not, to me, discount the idea of the "lone genius", just because 2 > 1 and we can't strictly use the word "lone" anymore.

The idea would be discounted, if say, 500 million people all invented calculus independently of each other over a period of 5 months.

And yet - why are so few others capable of standing on the shoulders of said giants? Here I am, with more giants' shoulders to stand on, if I wished it, with easy access to vast wealth of information that Newton (or someone living in the 1980's) couldn't even dream of - and yet - my contributions to calculus are precisely zero.

I studied drumming for 6 years and could easily be outmatched (and have been) skill-wise by a 5-year-old with talent.

Are there just no "geniuses" at all? Could anyone paint the Sistine Chapel? Carve out David? Paint the Mona Lisa? Play drums for Led Zeppelin? Invent new fields in mathematics? Is 99.9999% of humanity just ... what? lazy?

>But you can't fire people because you think they probably have the wrong opinions based on things they said 5 years ago, that's Soviet level repression.

"Soviet level repression" would be sending Mr Martinez to a forced labor camp; maybe his relatives disappear, that sort of thing.

If I find out that a coworker of mine attended a White Power rally a few years ago, or stormed the Capitol this January, you bet I'm bringing it up to my manager in a "it's either me or them" conversation. And I won't be the only one on my team.

You may be cool working with all manner of assholes, doesn't mean other people should be.

If you started your adult life with the same help from Daddy that Trump had - and did nothing, literally besides putting all of that money into an index fund - you’d be richer than Trump is today. They did the math.

So what exactly are Trump’s accomplishments? It’s not like the dude started off selling hot dogs. He made a lot of shitty investments, lost a lot of money, and is one of the few people on this planet capable of bankrupting a casino. In Vegas.

Yes he’s famous, of course, but his “look at me I’m a successful billionaire” image is all smoke and mirrors.

Go back in time a thousand years and tell people that one day man will fly faster than a bird and land on the moon.

FTL is not impossible. The only thing physics say is that you can’t accelerate a particle that has mass past c because that would require infinite energy. But accelerating an object doesn’t have to be the only way to move “faster” than light.

Look at our civilization today and compare it to what it was a thousand or two thousand years back. Now imagine a civilization that’s had three hundred thousand year head start on us.

Who’s to say they haven’t mastered wormholes or bending gravity or harnessing dark energy to accomplish things that are purely in the realm of science fiction today?

What happens? You become the most-widely used language on the planet? The Python 2-3 wars are over. Python 3 won.

backwards compatibility is a bitch.

But yes, there's a reason why high-visibility C++ projects like Chrome basically white-list 30% of the language and keep it that way, to some small sub-set they feel is "good enough".

The problem is the fragmentation this causes. I pick these 5 features of the language, you pick another 7, I can't use your lib, etc, etc.

C++ is becoming extremely bloated. Bjarne said as much in one of his recent criticisms at the highly-specialized use-case proposals that people wanted to make "standard".

I enjoyed his C++11 book but now that's probably all outdated "oh we don't do it that way anymore" stuff and I can't afford to just buy 2-3 1000-page books every year to keep up. Got better things to do.

> on their most important product.

If Ubuntu depended on random users pointing their browsers to ubuntu.com and then clicking a download link to download and burn an ISO, they'd be long, long gone. There hasn't been any real $$$ in that since, well, forever?

I think it's a pretty mediocre language because of the compiler intrinsic data structures and functions like maps and slices that cannot be created by the language proper. It can be verbose and tedious, some of the std lib stuff like "context" ends up "infecting" everything (ala async/await), variable shadowing sucks, still has "nil" instead of something more modern and safe like Rust's Result<T>, etc, etc.

If I had designed this language in a "design a new programming language" college class, I'd probably have gotten a C+ for my efforts at best.

What Go is, is a great tool more than a great language. I like to use it because my output from it is usually reliable, is on time, is light on resources, is easy to deploy, and allows me to get kudos at my job and more $$$. It's wonderful screwdriver for today's screws.

But I don't think it's a great language the way a LISP is a great language, or Smalltalk, or Haskell, or OCaml. It won't really open your eyes to a new way of thinking about problems that you didn't already know from your C days. You still have too much interface{} stuff everywhere, or reflection (which is extremely tedious) or pretty-awful code generation compared to LISP macros.

If your application needs support for new emojis or some dead language, then yes.

So everyone is equally empowered to make decision on the strategic direction of the company?

If I got hired tomorrow at Google, I should just be able to decide to kill off Android and Chrome, yeah?