fuligo

SEEKING WORK, remote or onsite (EU and US)

I have twenty years of professional experience in web app and website development. I'm currently in Germany, but my schedule is flexible - I can accommodate your timezone. I'm also available to work on-site.

Core Skills:

* full stack web development

* server-side programming, especially APIs

* project rescue: if your project is behind schedule and your code is a mess, I'll come in and get you back on track!

* MVPs and early stage product dev: if you're looking to get off the ground and need a reliable programmer to launch and maintain your tech stack, I'm your guy

* performance optimization: is your web app slow? I can help!

Favorite Technologies:

* Programming languages: JavaScript (client and server side), Lua, Go, Ruby, PHP

* Libraries: jQuery, React, Three.js, D3, Bootstrap

* Databases: Firebase, MySQL, Postgresql, Mongo

Contact me: hn@openfu.com

SEEKING WORK: Remote (from Europe, mostly Germany)

I am a full stack generalist programmer with a heavy web background and more than 20 years of experience.

My favorite tools and tech:

  - HTML5/JS/CSS (browsers are awesome!)
  - JavaScript: jQuery, React, Three.js/WebGL, Handlebars, Isotope/Masonry
  - Server side: NginX, PHP, node.js, C, Lua, Java
  - Database: mongodb, MySQL/MariaDB
  - Tools of the trade: text editor, git, command line
  - Machine learning: Caffe framework +Python

Contact me: hn@openfu.com

This is why I fear net neutrality (and the internet as we know it) don't stand a chance.

A lot has been accomplished with public awareness and public outcry has repeatedly averted disaster - so far. But the proponents of this come back with another attempt at least once a year, in both Europe and the US, and they have money on their side. It's amazing net neutrality has gone on as long as it did, against vast corporate and political interests.

Whereas net neutrality advocates have to beat this back every time everywhere, their opposition has to be successful only once, and only in one of these regions, for the whole thing to fall.

It is, I'm afraid, just a matter of time.

As you can see, there is a lot of hate towards my comments above, and most people here seem to think my thoughts are a net detriment to the discussion so I will stop posting.

I'd just like to say in closing that I want to pay money for a product I'm not getting right now. The main argument against this seems to be that by allowing me to pay for it, this product would suffer. I will bow to the majority opinion and get out of here.

worth remembering that the guy in the sofa in front of his TV is not the only HBO customer

It's funny how those pass for prohibitive reasons why something can't happen until suddenly these reasons go away. This is exactly what happened to music downloading. There were international sales, fears of organizations competing with their own sales partners, and oh dear all those unsolvable problems that come with offering content free of DRM. Oh the horror. And then, all of that went away.

Arguing in favor of the status quo is always a safe position, because obviously you have current management on your side. That doesn't mean consumers don't have a nasty habit of breaking out of their straight jackets. There are good reasons why torrenting TV shows is so popular, and it only partially has to do with the price tag. I would argue that for most downloaders, the primary reason is actually quality and freedom from hassle.

Things are reasonably impossible until they aren't.

they would have to make sure that they are offering something far superior to torrented content

I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, so this is the last time I'm going to respond to that (no offense): I want exactly the torrent file. I don't want them to pile on any of the additional crap they assume I need or should need.

Anyone who wants subtitles, or dubs, or a free rootkit, or whatever can use the existing sales channels. I want you to give me your product, as is, without any additional considerations or features, just straight up. I want the torrent file, and nothing else, no guarantees, no contracts, no nothing.

Just me giving you money for the right to legally consume what you made. Not some version of it, just the thing, with nothing added or subtracted.

You seem to assume torrenting shows is popular because it's free. Well, it's not free, it carries a substantial legal risk. There may well be a big portion of downloaders who don't have the money to buy the show legally. But the rest of them do it because of the benefits of the medium, not its price tag.

Offer us exactly the benefits and the convenience of the bootlegged medium, just give us an option to pay you for it. It really is that simple. Nobody is advocating you should cease any of your current offerings. Just create an additional sales channel and allow the money to flow in.

big content providers are never going to sell you a file

This is obviously wrong in principle. The way music downloads work right now is exactly what I've been describing - music from iTunes or Amazon comes without DRM, and they allow me to purchase songs wherever I am, from wherever I am.

If your argument is those DRM-less music files don't make it onto Torrent sites, you're mistaken. Nevertheless, they sell them without DRM, because customers pressured them into it.

I buy it on iTunes, I put it into my music folder, copy it around to all my machines, it's just fine.

So I'm a German national being in France right now. If I decide to buy some music from iTunes, I click on the "buy" button and stuff starts downloading. However, if I try to purchase a TV show, it starts out by showing me only German shows. Deep down, I can find outdated US originals with subtitles - which is the best option they give me! What happens when I try to actually purchase one? "There is a problem with your iTunes account". Oops, I'm currently in the wrong country, no show for me! There is no getting around the fact that this sucks, it sucks needlessly, and to the detriment of everyone involved.

Would HBO make more money if they sold each episode separately to everyone all around the globe

They would make more than they make now, that's for sure. Because right now, there is no way for me to pay them.

Because, an extra cost, for example, would be the subtitling.

I don't want subtitling, just because I'm from a foreign country. What little legal content consumption options I have, they always and mandatorily come with either dubbing or subtitles.

HBO would have to hire people to do this job per episode, per show, etc.

Like I said, that's what they (or in this case you, if you work for them) think, but that's not what I asked for. I want the show, within a few days after it aired, in an open format, with none of that internationalization crap or any added "value". People who want those extra things can use any of the existing sales channels.

I want what I can have right now illegally and conveniently, made legal by paying for it.

This might not cover or replace the existing subscriber base, but it would be an opportunity to bring additional customers on board at next-to zero cost. Just by shutting up and taking my money.

What I want entertainment companies to give me is exactly equivalent to the result of downloading episodes from illegal Bittorrent sites plus the ability to actually pay for them.

I want a DRM-less HD video file that I can play on any computer, when I want. I want to be able to download it from anywhere I might be in the world, and my nationality should not have an effect on the availability of the content.

Heck, if HBO had a web-based tip jar, I would just pay something for every Game of Thrones episode and otherwise go straight ahead and torrent it. You know, HBO, don't "offer" me anything, just give me an option to pay you which makes my download quasi-legal, and I'll take care of the rest myself.

As programmers we're in a unqiue position to get a sense of this, actually. It's very very old spaghetti code. Some of it essential, there are even some cleverly re-used common routines, some of it is just ballast, some of it can't be taken out but isn't getting executed either, some of it now serves a different purpose, and none of it comes with annotations that allow us to easily find out which is which.

I'm not sure the original comment deserves this clarification, you'll be hard pressed to find someone on this forum who didn't already know about the nature of mutations.

The point is though that while the mutations themselves are "accidents" and the result is always characterized by a certain randomness, evolution as a problem-solving algorithm isn't itself accidental. While some (or even many) if the characteristics of an organism might be incidental, some major features tend to have a good reason for being selected. Self-awareness, I assert, is such a feature, because it carries implications too large not to have an effect on selection.

  Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially 
  when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system, 
  the military and economic and political system doesn't really need 
  consciousness.

I know it's just a thesis, but when you think about what our mindless AIs lack, it makes sense. They're characterized by a complete incapability for global reasoning and an inability for personal consideration. You might argue, as the article does, this is exactly how we want our tools to behave, but then we might have to accept there could be hard limits on the complexity of mental tasks these systems are able to perform without access to higher reasoning.

This is why the incident and all reports of it is so hard to navigate, there don't seem to be enough facts - just the differing perspectives of three people, which we have to judge on the merits of their plausibility.

In the linked article, I got curious about this paragraph:

"Everything was seemingly resolved, and there was no public reaction on Twitter. It was only once the man "posted about losing his job on Hacker News" that the pushback started, and then escalated exponentially, with even ostensible allies abetting the abuse by tone and choice policing."

If I recall, and I might well be wrong, the discussion was already underway when that guy posted. I'm also having trouble with identifying anything in the content of his post that would put him at fault for what happened afterwards (which was deplorable).

Can anyone with a better recollection than me weigh in on this? The article doesn't sound particularly unbiased, and neither does it have to be, but are the facts right here or not?

I avoid running near men (particularly groups of men) because of a fear that I'll come to harm

It's not irrational. I'm a man and I avoid groups of people at night, too. It's an absolutely reasonable precaution. I avoid other men because I don't want to put my life in danger unnecessarily, and I avoid women mostly because I don't want them to be alarmed by my presence.

These are what I would call rational fears, because they're about minimizing risk. It's also very clear that, say, if I required sudden medical assistance, I would probably trust any stranger I come across in the city at night to do the right thing 99.9% of the time. These are the mechanics of false negatives vs. false positives.

I don't expect other people to cater towards my fear

Exactly. This is an important point because being afraid of something another person might do doesn't necessarily mean it's an accurate reflection of that person's intent.

And this is the fundamental breaking point where I think reasonable people start to feel a disconnect in the flow of the dongle story, because Richards is asserting both now and then that her life was in danger, and while it's easy to at least consider this feeling was real, the main question becomes did those guys do anything to cause that fear?

Because if they did not, it's unreasonable to blame them for causing this fear. I don't think a lot of people would say this fear itself is unjustified, but using it to attack someone who apparently did nothing to cause it is, and this whole disaster is a missed opportunity to talk about the factors that cause it.

This is not to detract from the stupidity of genital jokes in general, which amazingly both parties appear to be fond of.

SEEKING WORK: Remote (from Europe, mostly Germany)

I am a full stack generalist programmer with a heavy web background and more than 20 years of experience.

My favorite tools and tech:

  - HTML5/JS/CSS (browsers are awesome!)
  - JavaScript: jQuery, React, Three.js/WebGL, Handlebars, Isotope/Masonry
  - Server side: NginX, PHP, node.js, C, Lua, Java
  - Database: mongodb, MySQL/MariaDB
  - Tools of the trade: text editor, git, command line
  - Machine learning: Caffe framework +Python

I do love PHP rescue and refactoring projects, so give me a call if you're in trouble: we'll get your project back on the road!

Contact me: hn@openfu.com

Dumb detectors can have the same problems. I'm not sure if they get contaminated or suffer some kind of other breakdown, but I had to switch out two smoke detectors in recent time due to their propensity for going off on a whim. Of course, normal smoke detectors don't come with the Nest's hefty price tag...

SEEKING WORK: Remote (from Europe, mostly Germany)

I am a full stack generalist programmer with a heavy web background and more than 20 years of experience.

My favorite tools and tech:

  - HTML5/JS/CSS (browsers are awesome!)
  - JavaScript: jQuery, React, Three.js/WebGL, Handlebars, Isotope/Masonry
  - Server side: NginX, PHP, node.js, C, Lua, Java
  - Database: mongodb, MySQL/MariaDB
  - Tools of the trade: text editor, git, command line
  - Machine learning: Caffe framework +Python

I do love PHP rescue and refactoring projects, so give me a call if you're in trouble: we'll get your project back on the road!

Contact me: hn@openfu.com

The original comment was a joke, then? Because these are really the only two contexts it can be parsed with.

I took a look at your brief comment history. The amount of feedback you're going to get here will be increasingly limited as your comments won't even be visible to most users. So this could be the only opportunity to address you:

You might have a serious problem without realizing it. Please, if it hasn't been already, get it checked out.

His colleagues and family went to considerable lengths keeping it out of the spotlight - so we can assume he didn't want people to know. That means it's probably an illness with a significant stigma, likely something with a strong mental component.

While personally I think it's a missed opportunity to raise awareness of a potentially fatal disease, and a missed chance for the people who admired him to make a final human connection (cause of death is generally considered a necessary element of reaching closure), it's their prerogative to keep it a secret. And if he wanted people to know, he'd probably have addressed the issue.

There is little to disagree with what you're saying

On the contrary. There seems to be a lot of disagreement, or I wouldn't be so heavily down voted. Of course I'm not complaining about people who think my comments are trash, but I would prefer to know why they think that. And, to come full circle, I think it's telling that racist comments seem to be well received and regarded as worthy of consideration in this same thread, whereas my suggestion to draw a harsh distinction between the personal values of the guy in question and his technical accomplishments seems to court controversy.

life is a lot more devious than you're making it out to be

I'm having a hard time seeing what the criticism is here, maybe you could clear that up. Do you mean I portrayed life as being to cheerful? Do you think I was being too simplistic? If so, where, specifically? I'm also unsure about what you mean by being a man of principle and that being connected to prejudice. What, in this context, are your principles and how are they the same as prejudices?

I don't think you can rightfully accuse me of making simplistic judgements after reading my comment, but you are right that my reservations are subjective. My reservations say something about me and my values.

I choose to believe that he is both a good person and someone who says bad things.

You probably won't be surprised when I say I can't square that.

Let's for a moment evaluate a hypothetical about good and bad people, since you chose those labels. Assume you got two people. One is "a good person who says good things" and the other is "a good person who says bad things". Which of the two is a better person? Your answer seems to be: that depends entirely on the goodness part. My answer is: it also depends on the quality and quantity of the badness part. What they say is a part of who they are.

I however, place more value one what people do rather than what they say.

Thoughts do matter. When choosing your heroes, their ideology counts.

It's also a point of debate on what counts as "doing" something on the internet. Expressing beliefs and values is as much an action in itself as writing code.

It's hard to disagree with that. However, being offensive (in the way that word is most commonly used) is not even my point. I also never expressed doubts about his engineering prowess. People can have significant mental impairments and still perform math or engineering tasks, though the output of these tasks is often colored by their limitations as well. He is the same way. Imagine the things he could accomplish if he wasn't in schizophrenic mode!

My point was about whether he is an "inspiration" or not. Mentally ill people can be assholes, too. It's debatable and probably an unsolvable question to which extent his badness comes from his disease, so all we're left with at this point is to simply judge him by his behavior, and maybe charitably take some factors into account in his favor. But even after doing that, I can't get to a state where I can say: "this person is awesome and a continuing inspiration to me".

The nature of mental illness makes it very hard to talk about the core personality of affected people. Their illness is a part of them, just as all of our little hangups and traumata are a part of every one of us. These properties are us in a very real sense.

On a multidimensional scale of personalities, I do judge him way more harshly than a person with Tourette's syndrome, precisely because there is meaning behind the words when he speaks them - even after I make a conscious effort to discard the instances where that meaning was distorted, there is still enough content left that I'm uncomfortable with subscribing to this person.

Ultimately I'd like to reiterate: my frustration is not with him. With this illness, he got a bad deal in life. I hope he stays safe and gets all the care he needs. I hope he can continue to find creative outlets like his operating system. My frustration is with people idolizing him in his entirety, accepting or maybe even sharing his views. I do think it's possible to admire the work a person does without subscribing to their views, but when doing so you have to work extra hard to separate the two. You can't just admire that person without reservations. Frequently, on this thread and elsewhere, no reservations were even visible. We even got people talking about how he was factually right about calling black people dumb.

I wonder if he would get this much positive attention if he wasn't a Christian extremist. Would the article have conveniently left out his racism if he was, say, a militant antisemite instead of being focused on black people as he is? Would people admire his worship of a random number generator if he used it to spit out slogans of a religious text that isn't as revered as the Bible?

While his schizophrenia probably comes with very bad episodes, there is absolutely nothing that can be found in his own words allowing for the conclusion that this view is just a tourette-like symptom. On the contrary. His violence-laden hate speech is one of the constant factors defining him. Contrary to what has been suggested here he doesn't use slurs randomly and generically, either. There's a story behind his views that is just as coherent as the cute "god's own programmer" schtick.

Where his illness clearly manifests is the interpretation of random events all having a specific meaning. The radio talking to him, all the events in his life being just so that an invisible power is communicating with him, all the way down to literally a random number generator whose nature he cannot grasp. That's schizophrenia. If there was an adequate cure or means of suppressing it, this world view would completely go away.

It's more complicated to separate the man from the illness when it comes to pretty much anything else. At the very least I would be extremely hesitant to call him, as people do in this thread, an "inspiration". I'm not even sure it's safe to be in the same room with him.

Closing with a quote straight from his most recent account:

  "I spend my days clubbing retard-n$ggers. CLUB! CLUB! 
   DIE N$GGER! CLUB! RETARD! N$GGER! DIE!! CLUB! N$GGER!*"

My first reaction to this, and especially to the "hn" wall, was: this is very cool, we can all collaboratively write some weird/interesting/funny stuff and overall it's going to be artful and inspiring in some way.

Of course, that's not how it turned out.

I've been looking at the "hn" wall there periodically for a while now, and it's interesting because you can see what becomes of people when they're acting anonymously - even when they come from a relatively tightly selected non-anonymous group.

The vast majority of edits are what I would characterize as destructive, because they have one or more of these properties:

  - deleting or defacing stuff other people wrote
  - leaving boastful remarks on the size of their penis
  - posting hate speech, including misogynistic and racist comments
  - posting ASCII pornography
  - filling the page with kilobytes of garbage

  "<- and somehow we wonder why there are so few women in programming "
  "No, that is due to innate sex differences. Read up."
  "Yeah right, it can't possibly have anything to do with crap like this"
  "It's both, but mostly innate. It's the same with race. 
   Look up race and IQ studies. (OMG! Did I just say that?!?!)"
  "The more relevant question is would you say it with your HN 
   username attached to that comment?"
  "Of course not. The Matriarchy would eat me alive. "

Generating SQL statements always involves string manipulation at some stage, doesn't it? I mean at some point even PDO has to send query strings to the SQL server.

The question is whether Drupal really needed to implement their own engine for this, though.

let's also explore this way of building games

That's what he said, isn't it? He also actively encouraged people to write their own languages which address what they care about.

nobody is doing anything worth looking at, garbage collection is a no go, too much safety is bad and it's a first initiative ever just like the moon landing (which was kinda secondary to actually going to space first time anyway)

Those are his views, he needs those in order to make the new language. It's similar but not equal to your judgement of JavaScript and HTML. Those things are not bad per definition, they are just something you don't happen to like. The bigger theme here is that working with things that you don't like makes you unproductive.

So yeah, it does bother me a little when he says these things so emphatically, but they're still well distinguishable from global blanket judgements because they are expressed within the context of designing the new language.

He is not a messiah, it's already happening

That's a lot of negativity towards a guy who's said from the beginning he's just building a language that he wants to use himself. I don't think he's presented himself as "a messiah" in any way. He laid out some things that irk him in C/C++, and then he set out do make something that suits him better. These may not be the same things that are important to you (as demonstrated by your parallelism and concurrency criticism), but that's absolutely fine. People use different languages for different purposes and different tastes.

It worries me how makers are attacked here. "oh, we don't need that, X did the same thing ages ago" "why even bother if it doesn't do X" "oh dear, please not yet another X, people should just stop" "nobody needs X when we have Y1, Y2, Y3..."

That's some seriously bad attitude.

The fact that he since the last video came out he not only built the lexer, parser and C-translator for this, but that he also made a complete bytecode runtime blew my mind. This guy is one hell of a productive programmer!

For anyone interested in a bit of background about him and some other indie gaming greats, I highly recommend checking out "Indie Game the Movie" - it's a documentary about the development process of Braid (Jonathan Blow), Fez (Phil Fish), and Super Meat Boy (Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes).

At about 10 USD it's a bit steeply priced, but I found it well worthwhile: http://buy.indiegamethemovie.com/

I disagree, because actively supporting limiting the rights of minorities over what amounts to an appeal to religious tradition seems more than a matter of opinion to me.

Also, I understand that you downvoted me above, but going to my other comments in another thread and giving them the same treatment is abusive - especially since I'm a new user. You have single-handedly destroyed my karma balance. So I guess the message is that I'm not welcome here because I support equal rights?