alpatters

I think the comparison of bitcoin with gold is a better one than stocks. The value of gold today is not tied to the underlying precious metal any more. Gold is kept in vaults likely never to be looked at or touched. It might as well be a digital number. Instead gold is a place to store capital with a value agreed between buyers and sellers. It is limited in quantity and is very difficult to copy. Bitcoin is quite similar is many respects. It also doesn't have to be stored and corrupt governments cant easily steal it.

I don't think the history of gold changes the argument here. As a store of capital gold has also been stolen by corrupt governments in history.

I don't know Scanner Darkly and I don't have the app. But I have done a lot of my own images using the same algorithm as that used in the app. And, yes, it can definitely render photos is anime or cartoon like styles.

On the waiting time point. I was putting together a similar service to yours (though you got there first). We managed to get our processing time down to under 50s for a 300x300 image. How do you cope with such long times? Or, how long is the waiting time?

> "Practically, switching away from as many Google services as possible will help alleviate the most obvious issues like most of your personal data being in the hands of one company and the related issue of ads following you around the Internet."

Ads that follow you has absolutely nothing to do with Google services. These are retargeting companies using their cookies to track you. They use ad exchanges, so even that is not principally Google.

Well, the kernel does device, process and memory management and that is a likely culprit when looking into power usage.

You could use boost::range to make it even more succinct

So in no way did they copy Google's which is implemented in C++ ?

Though I agree with OP - these projects and Java are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

> Stack allocation is irrelevant for most of what the application is doing.

Well I disagree with that. In C++ it is quite common for most objects to be allocated on the stack. I have never heard stack allocation being described as irrelevant. Of course if the language puts everything on the heap then that statement might be true.

"None of these libraries (or many others) have competing implementations written in other languages."

Except the ones they were written to copy. Each example you give is an open-sourced clone of an pre-existing version implemented in a different language.

C++ gives you the option to just put your objects on the stack and have them clean themselves up upon destruction. Enforcing the placement of small objects on the heap, even a garbage collected heap, seems such a waste of time and efficiency. You shouldn't really use the term "always" either. You have the option of implementing a garbage collector manually, or an object memory pool to remove the malloc/free new/delete overhead.

You're a professional programmer, you use a keyboard all day, so you touch type right? hjkl sits right on the home row, where your fingers sit. It is just a natural place to put movement keys. Nothing to do with the number of keys on the authors keyboard.

Like you say when your jumping around a lot then it matters less. When you're typing a lot then it does matter to keep your fingers on the home row.

Well you have missed the point that they chose C over Pascal to implement Unix. I don't think that was by accident.