FlemishBeeCycle

Exactly. Being offended in and of itself is worthless (I'm sure we can find that Stephen Fry quote somewhere in this thread), it is not a motivator for a behavioral change, at least for me, unless I care about the person being offended.

When I do offend people, I often like to probe as to _why_ they're offended. In my experience, most people seem to be incapable of defining any concrete reasons as to why a given statement is offensive other than circular, "it's offensive because it's offensive" reasoning.

You're placing entirely too much importance on particular categorizations, "comfort" has much more to do with "what you're used to", than the idea that people are constantly fretting about how population densities in their environment match up to their own self-identification.

As a bi-racial male of the darker persuasion (which in America is basically "not-white"), I find myself much more comfortable around predominantly "white" groups because that has been the most common environment for myself throughout my life.

Why do you believe the github style guide to be the authoritative source for JavaScript style? There is no benefit for avoiding use of semicolons other than not writing semicolons, whereas there are several detriments for their omission.

> It gives Twitter, or whatever other start up, an opportunity to replace an outdated piece of software by a nut case!

I don't know where this ad-hominem is coming from, but Douglas Crockford is hardly a nutcase.

My guess is that rather than give an exhaustive list, the author wanted to give an example of a familiar language _without_ static typing. As Haxe is more similar to ECMAScript than Python, Ruby, Lua etc. - it's the most appropriate comparison.

As a person who likes (the good parts of) JavaScript, I read it as trying to appeal to me with promises of less debug time.

While I disproportionally use Ruby and JavaScript on a daily basis, this statement is referring to a specific type of (common) error, which is largely alleviated by the use of static typing, and therefore not exactly untrue.

I didn't take it as a disparaging of dynamic typing.

That's been one of my concerns, the best way to circumvent that issue is to do something like the following:

   <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
   <script>window.jQuery || document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='/path/to/jquery.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));</script>

[Edit: simonsarris replied with something similar as I was replying, however, the advantage of using unescape is that you don't get invalid markup warnings]

And what if you both sit in a life drawing class drawing the same model? What if for some odd reason you decide to sit behind one of the participants and draw a portrait based off their drawing?

I certainly understand what you're getting at, but everything that we do today is based off of some idea that came before us. Is a certain level of indirection required for an expression to be considered appropriately unique?

From the article, "..there is a line between copying ideas and copying the original expression of ideas...", I would consider that opinion to be both myopic and absurd. We stand on the shoulders of giants - nothing created today can ever be considered to be truly "original".

As individuals, we don't act the same way around our peers, our friends or our family. While we certainly present ourselves differently in different contexts, I wouldn't call these different "identities", rather the same identity applying the rules of the given context to their behavior.

Where it becomes tricky is when one is strips away the context isolation. For example, at your friend's bachelor party, some behavior might perfectly normative within context and participants, but the next day when people outside of that context can watch a video of your behavior - you might feel a little shame/embarrassment/regret/etc.

The internet, for better or worse, allows a complete breakdown of context isolation. While the rules of posting on 4chan or HN greatly differ, a person adhering to rules of a given context, will still be judged across both contexts by outside viewers.

The solution here is to create context isolation - which is very easy to do with anonymity.

Unless you have a specific example, merely omitting mention of both genders hardly qualifies as "sexism" to me? There are plenty of gender-specific magazines for females that do the same thing all the time. I don't see why everyone must now pepper their prose with "he or she" and use an exact 50/50 proportion of examples using both male and female names (actually, you wouldn't need an equal proportion, as it seems that sexism only applies to men) lest they be labeled sexist?

Secondly, just because it's popular today to think of men differently than the "old-fashioned way" doesn't mean that modern thought is "more correct" as to what defines a man, nor does it mean that people who disagree with the modern idea are "wrong" (I'm not suggesting that the "old-fashioned way" is in anyway correct either, but still people have different opinions - and the popular modern idea is just one more).

But I digress, the blog is quite self-aware and I've always read it with a sort of tongue-in-cheek sense of humor; the "gratuitously" throwing in of "man" and "manliness" is part of the writing style.

I'd recommend Mirah (https://github.com/mirah/mirah) and Pindah (https://github.com/mirah/pindah) as an almost Ruby over Ruboto for Android due to slow startup times from the poor performance of Reflection on Dalvik.

I understand your position, and perhaps I should have better clarified my own. I did not mean to imply that photography was not a technical or creative field, rather by "mechanical process", I meant the physical act of creation.

I put a brush to canvas, or a pencil to paper. My gestures are effected by micro muscle movements, the interplay between the grain of the canvas and the camelhair in my brush, the way I personally perceive my subject. No two lines drawn by my hand, no two drops of ink flecked from my pen will ever be the same. My emotional state at the time will felt in my brush strokes.

All your points I agree with, but ultimately photography (by its process) has less potential for a physically variable and personal experience (for example the connectedness that a sculptor feels with the work physically formed by their hands) specifically in the dimension that I am talking about.

Also, your points on composition (perspective, framing,focus,exposure) are present in other visual mediums (although focus and exposure aren't generally terms that I hear a lot of painters use, it's still there), and arguably more under your creative control.

Finally, with photography you are limited to that which exists already in this world (once you start getting heavily into post-processing, it's hard to call keep calling it "photography").

> Merely reproducing something is not art, it's direct reproduction. Introducing unique style would be art.

One could then argue that photographs are merely reproduction of reality, and therefore not art. I fail to see why you think photographs introduce unique style but pixel art does not.

> The photo in question was beautifully captured, and the flippant way it's being treated is rather sad.

I apologize for suggesting that you dislike pixel art, but that's how I this sentence reads to me.

The burden of proof would be on the photographer to prove that it was a "copy" of their work rather than an independent creation. At a certain point it comes down to this intangible idea of intent and process.

Reminds me of the "What Color are your Bits" piece http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php

"Uniqueness" isn't a qualification for determining whether something is "art". Most art is not unique, and certainly not most photographs.

Calling the pixelated version a "flippant" capturing is disingenuous, as it seems to be a reflection of your (apparent) dislike of pixel art rather than the artist's intentions.

I don't follow your argument.

If a painter and a photographer both depict the same scene, your argument seems to be suggesting that the "degree of 'artistic' creation" from the photographer would somehow be greater than that of the painter? How would that work? Although painting from real life allows for perhaps better capture of a scene, it is arguably similar to painting from a photograph of the same scene.

There's a much higher degree of creativity / variability inherent in drawing / painting / pixelating over than in photography simply by the mechanical process alone.

I would blame poor/lazy devs inappropriately using JS rather than the evolution of the browser for this. For the average web page, it's unnecessary 90% of the time to require JavaScript for any core functionality ( not so much with web applications ). I have a hard time understanding why people do this as it's often much easier to test and develop when you're layering on JS unobtrusively.

You are a much less cynical person than myself if you think that society is a reflection of its members' values. There is a mismatch between what people say/think that they value, and what people actually value. It takes only sidelong glance at the current political climate in the US to see myriad examples of people voting against their own best interests.

By and large, people expect the status quo, and as it has been, so shall it be. Had the internet been born in some corporate boardroom - restricted, tiered, filtered - people would expect nothing more.

I suspect we only a few rebrands from control be wrested away - look at Verizon/Google's net neutrality bill making a distinction between wired and wireless internet access. Certainly a reasonable person might agree that wired vs wireless internet access are conceivably "different" - and if the average person can be convinced that there is a difference, they will accept the terms of this difference as it is given to them.

I think that like most things in life, the internet will be controlled by a few people with a desire to shape it. The question is whether or not the people who value freedom, take a vested interest as well.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Mirah is what finally got me started with Android development. Coming from a Ruby background there's practically zero learning curve, plus you can install it from RubyGems (which when using RVM makes it dead-simple).

That being said, for my first application I decided to do it in plain old Java - since I had never worked with Java, I imagined that a rudimentary understanding of its workings would help me down the road in debugging issues that might arise when working with Mirah (somewhat like knowing JavaScript before working with CoffeeScript).

There's even a tool for writing Mirah for Android called Pindah https://github.com/mirah/pindah/ .

All in all, it's quite a nice package.

No one is questioning the existence of the patent - it's the validity of the patent that's being doubted. Given the current processes followed by the USPTO, existence says _nothing_ for its validity.

Why should one identify with a country they may have never been to, or a culture they may never have experienced? What's the point of romanticizing an intangible connection that only exists if you want it to?

As a person of mixed-raced descent, the idea that I should somehow be confused over where I "belong" always amused me. I am myself - the incalculable chain of events that led up to my existence are not particularly informative or suggestive of who I am or should be.

What exactly goes on in a BitCoin party?

I don't think he seriously views Second Life as a real competitor - he was just using it to draw an analogy.

As for the community, I believe the "fakeness" he's getting at is the ability of the user to carefully cultivate their likeness and project a version of themselves that may or may not be truly reflective of "reality".

Of course, one could argue that we are always cultivating a "desired image" of ourselves. However, Facebook and similar platforms provide visual and textual clues that allow users to more concretely realize social relationships. This in turn may allow them to go above and beyond the normative level of image moderation. Whether that is "good" or "bad" is another question altogether.

While it may be "depressing", isn't it logically consistent with how the world appears to work?

One way to make a lot of money is to sell a lot of a product.

Most people are of "pedestrian" (average) intelligence; ergo, to sell a lot of product you must appeal to those of average intelligence.

As any industry grows you see this "regression towards the mean" - one only has to cock one's ear slightly to the side to hear the lamentation of readers, gamers and movie-buffs about how "everything has gone to the dogs".

You seem to be missing my point - which is not to criticize JS (I use JS frequently, and actually like a lot of it) - I'm merely suggesting that its success is not due to the language itself and its merits, but to the domain that it has found popularity in, the browser. Were there a competing language to JS (not Flash, not Java - but a comparable language for scripting the DOM), we might have a real comparison. How can you really gauge 'popularity' when there is no real choice?

> I choose JS because it is the only language that runs in the browser as well as the server (<--- Killer feature)

That's what I was getting at - that JavaScript is popular because of the position that it is in (not because of the ECMAScript specification). JavaScript could have been a number of languages, the fact that it happened to be JavaScript, is more a result of a externalities than the language itself.

JavaScript was originally developed on an incredibly short development cycle, so I would be very surprised if we couldn't create a better language for the browser after 15 years of experience.

As far as JS on the server - I don't really see the advantage (other than it's a language that people already know). Having written several Node apps, using a single language didn't strike me as a "killer feature" (especially since their usage is fairly distinct - manipulating the DOM vs manipulating data stores and what have you). Different tools for different problems. I don't see JS as being superior for solving server-side problems.

I don't know if JavaScript had much to do with its own success. I would say that JavaScript has succeeded, in spite of itself, due to increasing focus on web applications.

Not to imply JavaScript is a "bad" language - I just don't think people are rushing out code in JavaScript because of the language itself, but because the position that it is in.

I didn't mean to imply that I was condoning the author's actions. Perhaps I misinterpreted, but I was responding to the parent comment's decrying of the author's actions due to the perception that the author justified their actions through the belief that their opinion was superior (specifically parent's remark about requiring omniscience to justify the action)?

It does raise the question of whether the means justify the end. As people in this thread have noted ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867043, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867162), that this technique may be more effective than a more neutral route. But again, I'm not condoning anything.

I imagine it has to do with political correctness, but it seems there is an undercurrent on HN of treating all opinions as equally valid?

Even if both sides of the argument are incorrect, if the second opinion was formed through rigorous scientific investigation and represents and the best understanding that we currently have, why should we treat it equally with the opinion that was not developed through any sort of discourse and research?*

* Assuming that methodology described in the article is sound, "...searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments ..."

I can't help but draw some parallel to AOL/CompuServe/etc. Like Facebook, they were attempts to make the web both more accessible to the average person as well as present in very clear terms what they could do on this new "Information Superhighway".

A lot of technical people look at the collection of services that Facebook is offering and can easily enumerate instances of prior art and thus I imagine feel somewhat dismissive of Facebook.

"Farmville? Why not just go to any of the number of flash game portals that have existed since the early 2000s?", "Messageboards? Older than dirt".

Technical people tend to forget that the average person doesn't like searching, and needs to be told what they "should be doing" (topically, that was probably part of the problem with Wave's lack of adoption - too much freedom, too different - people need to be guided). People prefer having "everything in one place" with explicit parallels (rather than absolute freedom) to what is important to them.

I would hazard to guess that to the average person, Facebook is the web. That part is kind of game changing (and arguably, not necessarily in a good way).

Most things come down to luck, both bad a good. One developing a terminal disease and one winning the lottery are both an instance of chance (luck).

To say that Zuckerberg got to where he is purely because of luck is as equally false as saying that luck has nothing to do with it. I think the real issue that people are arguing about is, colloquially, whether the success is "deserved". You have people who look at the circumstances and assert that "given the opportunity I could have done the same thing", to them - it is an instance of luck, and undeserved success.

To others, they perhaps are recognizing that more went on beneath the surface that we know about - perhaps even though technically what went on is nothing special, there may be other factors in play that only a select few would be able to surmount.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but the digestion of the circumstances will vary from person to person. There exist many people who could have made "Facebook" and been equally successful; there exist MANY more people who would not have been able to.

I think that the polarization of responses has a lot to do the framing in absolute terms. Whatever attributions that are ascribed to him, cannot be said to viewed with equal validity for all observers.