fat-chunk

When I first learned to program at university we were taught Haskell. That was 15 years ago and I've not really programmed anything in Haskell since, instead I've racked up years coding professionally in pretty much all the major imperative languages.

I'm aware of why Haskell is not practical as a production language for most companies, but I have to say I've never really coded in anything else that feels as "neat" and it's a shame. Every other language feels like it has some idiosyncratic scaffolding one has to learn, reminding you that you're constrained by how computer hardware works, rather than just expressing an algorithm in terms of inputs and outputs.

I would say it has made me a better coder, I've still kept a preference for keeping data immutable, copyable and abstracting complexity into easily testable functions over classes with unobservable mutable state.

My wife only started learning drums a few years ago, and now she's regularly gigging with a band in a bunch of iconic venues around London. It's never too late to start! :)

I'm inclined to disagree. I believe the progress in music software has opened up new avenues and genres, it hasn't stifled existing ones. Instrument players are going to keep playing their instruments, just that now it's easier than ever for them to make their own professional sounding recordings and songs. On the flipside you have more and more people getting into music without requiring any formal musical background.

I also think the older we get, the more we think most music sounds the same because music inherently changes over time, and will be different to what we grew up on, but we also become more distanced from the subcultures and communities pioneering modern music trends. A young person today probably thinks all rock music from the 50s-90s sounds the same

I was at a conference called World Summit AI in 2018, where a vice president of Microsoft gave a talk on progress in AI.

I asked a question after his talk about the responsibility of corporations in light of the rapidly increasing sophistication of AI tech and its potential for malicious use (it's on youtube if you want to watch his full response). In summary: he said that it's the responsibility of governments and not corporations to figure out these problems and set the regulations.

This answer annoyed me at the time, as I interpreted it as a "not my problem" kind of response, and thereby trying to absolve tech companies of any damage caused by rapid development of dangerous technology that regulators cannot keep up with.

Now I'm starting to see the wisdom in his response, even if this is not what he fully meant, in that most corporations will just follow the money and try to be the first movers when there is an opportunity to grab the biggest share of a new market, whether we like it or not, regardless of any ethical or moral implications.

We as a society need to draw our boundaries and push our governments to wake up and regulate this space before corporations (and governments) cause irreversible negative societal disruption with this technology.

Respectfully, you don't know what you're talking about.

Nintendo has a history of hosting competitive tournaments for games such as Pokemon (and even in a limited capacity Smash Bros). They even made a Pokemon game targeted at competitive players called Pokemon Unite, which they continue to organise tournaments for.

For Smash Bros in particular, they partnered with an e-sports company called Panda Global to officially sanction a circuit last year.

However, their awful track record with e-sports comes from mercilessly shutting down events they are not involved with (even when the organisers have reached out to Nintendo in good faith to discuss their involvment). They even go out of their way to dish out cease-and-desists at the last minute so that organisers don't have time to consider their legal options and rights before going ahead with the event.

There was a big scandal last year when Nintendo were having positive discussions about a partnership with a circuit called Smash World Tour then turned around and proceeded to threaten them just as the end of year finals were about to take place, forcing them to cancel an event that had been over a year in the making, and involving many professional players, hired staff and a lot of money (they could have just let them continue without being involved).

And just as a clarification, almost all these Smash events are not organised for profit by your big bad e-sports companies. Due to Nintendo's actions they have been mostly organically grown community-led efforts, all they want to do at the end of the day is have fun and play the game together.

Nintendo have shown time and again they will abuse their status as a big corporate entity to destroy harmless fan activity if they are not happy about it for any reason.

So just because you have a disdain for something in particular, you shouldn't project that onto a situation and use it as a false explanation for what's happening.

I'm not very knowledgeable with how compilers or language standards work, but would there not be security implications with this approach?

For example let's say a security exploit surfaces in the 2015 edition of Rust, would that not mean all the libraries declared as 2015 edition would have to be updated or abandoned in that case?

Or now that I think about it, is it instead the case that a whole program including all dependencies will be compiled by the same compiler (of which newer editions will have the latest security fixes), just that the compiler will always have to support compiling programs using legacy syntax when it identifies the crate's edition?

Well geopolitics is simply not that simple. What if the Chinese government kept telling the USA that california should hold an independence referendum? Might sound like a stupid example, but Americans would be up in arms at such a proposition. What if China told the USA to end the trade blockade on Cuba so that they fairly take part in the global economy and climb out of poverty? Again, the USA would never consider such a proposition.

The reality is we don't know how many HK residents want to be independent. Ideally they could hold an independence referendum, but the Chinese government don't want that, and due to the geopolitical tensions in the world right now they're not going to take advice from Western nations.

You could make the same argument to the UK about Wales and Scotland, or Spain with Catalunia and the Basque Country. Neither government is going to let a referendum happen for quite a while.

It's really sad to see that even hacker news has now been plagued by sinophobic racism

We can all disapprove of what the current CCP is doing, but you cannot compare Hong Kong's situation to Taiwan, Tibet or Xinjiang, in fact you're muddling a bunch of completely different situations.

Hong Kong has historically always been a part of "China", you could say it was "invaded" by the British and then the Japanese during WW2.

I obviously disapprove of the suppression of the HK populace with force, but this is no different to how the CCP operate in the rest of China. If anything the British mandated China had to apply different rules to a portion of their own territory, in classic imperialist fashion.

It makes me wonder how the world would cope today with a Bubonic Plague or Spanish Flu, those two I reckon would probably be more similar to your hypothetical Sci-Fi disease.

You can't think of a single reason why somebody might choose to leave the country they live in, aside from the most obvious one which would be because they could be earning more and be able to obtain a much higher quality of life?

Here are a few others:

- being in a persecuted group that is at-risk or discriminated against in their country of origin (due to religion, race, sexuality, gender, etc.)

- being from a country with a high homicide rate, or some other high risk of violence or danger

- wanting to provide a better education and quality of life for their family

- escaping abusive family or relationships

- Wanting to access companies or institutions where the skilled worker feels they can have a much larger impact through their work

This list is just scratching the surface...