If your enemy is a national government, yes. But we're at the stage now where national governments should know better than to get into fights with each other. Unless the recent idiocy between America and Russia gets out of hand, likely enemies in the near future are nonstate actors like ISIS who would have difficulty shooting down something at that altitude.
> It's fairly hard to hide when your entire purpose is to transmit a signal.
I wonder if this would be possible to solve by going "the GPS way". As far as I understand how the system works, GPS signal as received on the ground is 20dB below thermal noise. We can still find and amplify it because we know the seeds and algorithms of random number generators on the satellites. But if you were an alien that just came to Earth, you wouldn't be able to find those transmissions. To read them, you need to know that they are there and what to look for (i.e. have a synced RNG).
If you have a directional antenna (which would be needed to actually locate the transmitters location anyway) it's actually quite easy to spot GPS signals. It's only because conventional GPS antennas need to receive signals from all directions at once (or at least half of a sphere) that the signal drops below the noise floor. Any signal which can communicate a reasonable amount of data will have to be high powered enough to be easily detected and located by third parties.
I'm not sure if these move fast enough to chase each other down; I bet it takes a while to get up to elevation. Even if that works it's still the same cost to shoot down as it is to replace.
Serious question: Knowing what it's like to feel burned out,I don't understand how you found the energy to create the app. Did you create it after recovering ?
Although I don't want to discuss politics on HN (there are plenty of more appropriate places to do that), the interesting issue to me is how (presumably) intelligent people in a certain field can drop all intellectual honesty when it comes to a different field.
I don't know enough about the subject to have the pretence to judge whether it can work, what I do know is that:
1. It seems the naysayers are doing nothing to try and change the situation, but then again, history books aren't populated with names of critics...
2. A partial solution is better than no solution. It doesn't solve the problem of microscopic plastic parts ? So what ? It also doesn't solve world hunger and global warming, but having more people with the attitude and vision of this young entrepreneur just might.
>It seems the naysayers are doing nothing to try and change the situation
You can thank the naysayers for serious research, otherwise people would just come up with stupid abstract ideas since no one would be skeptical or pessimistic.
I agree with your second point, but I also think we shouldn't rush for a temporary solution that would give people a feeling of "we have at least done something about this, now let's stop worrying about it". Startup culture shouldn't apply to public- or crowd-funded solutions.
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
It seems people always have a tendency to worship something, to let the means become the end or what is supposed to be their servant become their master.
TDD is a tool to ensure software quality. If TDD works for you then great. If you can achieve the same results with another method it's just as great. But I find the religion wars over it quite silly.
In that video, Louis is talking about himself in the third person: he's the one complaining on the plane. It's not about some group of "others" who are "bad" and don't appreciate the world; it's about our nature as humans.
Hmm, "the guy next to me goes 'pfft, this is bullsh*t'".
> it's about our nature as humans
Well, it's about our current generation of Americans (maybe Westerners). This complaining seems like unnecessary stress to me. I understand, because I used to do it.
I read (or watched) Louis say that he was the guy on the plane, but this was a couple of years ago and I'm failing to google it now.
I'm not convinced that this behavior is specific to Americans or Westerners; it may just be that we're most attuned to our own ways of expressing it. I'm also not convinced that it's a general property of the species, though; it would be arrogant for me to claim that kind of fundamental knowledge of how the human mind works. That kind of arrogance is the bread and butter of Hacker News, of course, so this is now necessarily a bad HN comment. ;)
I should've said something more like "it's about the way that we all act towards technology".
On the contrary. We should strive to correct all the "wats" that obviously exist in all these languages, but most of what I see is just complaints, most of them ignoring the amazing things that can be done with these technologies. Over 30 year I've been programming in more languages than I care to count, and I don't remember at any point having a specific language stop me from achieving my goal because it has some traps or design flaws. Always made sure to know about them and make use of the language's strong points instead of concentrating on the weak.
And we both understood the point of the video. The fact that there is much to be grateful for does not mean that we shouldn't improve on what needs improving. But for heaven's sake, if you're not going to improve on it, stop whining about it and be grateful for the amazing things it does enable.
"I don't remember at any point having a specific language stop me from achieving my goal because it has some traps or design flaws."
I have to admit, a language has never stopped me personally. But it most assuredly has hurt me when trying to program with other people, who do not have a direct psychic hotline into my brain that tells them what preconditions must hold before my code will work properly, and what things they can and can not do with a certain library, and most importantly, why they can and can not do those things. Languages that allow me to encode more of those things into the program itself, instead of the ambient documentation-that-nobody-ever-reads-even-when-I've-put-tons-of-work-into-it, work better.
And as my memory isn't all that great, it turns out that if I'm away from my own code for long enough, I become one of those people who don't have a direct hotline to my-brain-in-the-past.
> But it most assuredly has hurt me when trying to program with other people, who do not have a direct psychic hotline into my brain that tells them what preconditions must hold before my code will work properly, and what things they can and can not do with a certain library, and most importantly, why they can and can not do those things
Programming is hard. It's an ongoing process of mastery. This is true with any programming language. There is no silver bullet.
> Languages that allow me to encode more of those things into the program itself
There are plenty of tools that almost every language provides for you. It's an architectural concern to ensure that there is as little mapping between the domain and the code.
I personally find Javascript to be flexible, which allows me to architect my software in a way that is communicative of the domain, without many restrictions.
> I become one of those people who don't have a direct hotline to my-brain-in-the-past
A story is a great way to communicate information. Automated functional (black box) testing is also good. Also, try to reduce the mapping between the domain and the software. Ideally, the software (naming) should have a 1-1 map to the domain.
Also, keep the structures flat, as this idiom tends to reduce complexity.
Keep consistent & iterate on architectural idioms between projects.
These are some ways to improve communicability of the codebase & to have insight into the business domain logic.
Ah, you see, there's the problem... this wasn't business logic. To put it in Haskell terms, I had code that was not in IO, but I couldn't actually encode that restriction in the language.
Most of your post amounts to "program better", which is vacuous advice. We've spent decades telling each other to "program better". We've proved to my satisfaction that's not enough. Have you used languages not from the same tradition as Javascript? It is possible, even likely, that you are not aware of the options that are available out there, even today.
> Ah, you see, there's the problem... this wasn't business logic.
What is "this"?
> Most of your post amounts to "program better", which is vacuous advice
No it's not. It's certainly better than dwelling on some edge case shortcomings and limiting your growth by blaming the tools.
No tool is perfect. Learn to use it better. Master it. Improve it. If you want to use a different tool, then use a different tool. There's no need to spread negativity.
There has been plenty of progress in Javascript idioms & programming idioms in the past few decades. You can accomplish many things with Javascript and the environment will only continue to improve. Programmers will continue to get better from the ecosystem & practices that have been learned over time.
Even your mighty Haskell is not perfect. Time to accept non-perfection & evolve :-)
> Have you used languages not from the same tradition as Javascript?
Yes, I have. I also draw inspiration from other languages & environments.
> It is possible, even likely, that you are not aware of the options that are available out there, even today.
Yes, I'm aware. When they prove themselves, I'll consider using them. In the meantime (and always), I'm happily mastering my craft free of unnecessary angst.
tl;dr: you can't necessarily change the troublesome technology, so you might have to leave. But in order to have a viable alternative to that "bad" technology, you need other people (case in point: mindshare of JS). In order to get more people to "your side", you might need to point out what is wrong with the original technology.
> But for heaven's sake, if you're not going to improve on it, stop whining about it and be grateful for the amazing things it does enable.
Sometimes you're not in a position to even be able to change something, even if you wanted to. The ideas you have in mind for a technology might fly in the face of how the community around that technology, or the guardians/maintainers of it, thinks of it - introducing these changes might break too much stuff that is dependent on it, the changes might fly in the face of the culture around that technology.
So if you have some technology that you think - subjectively, or even somewhat objectively if you have conviction enough - and you can not do anything about it, you only have two choices. Embrace it and try to work with it despite its flaws, or to abandon ship.
But if you want to abandon ship, you probably want to find a safe harbor, eventually. ie a place where you can develop or utilize some other technology. But that place might be sparsely populated, because everyone else is working with that other technology. So what do you do? You suggest that others jump ship. :)
Assuming that there is actually some kind of objective merit to complain about a specific technology, it might be wise to complain to others about that technology. That way they can hopefully use that info to make an informed choice, and perhaps abandon their current technology for another technology. In time, you might even get enough people to come over to this other technology that that community is big enough to support that technology as a valid alternative to the "bad" technology. But what if everyone just stfu'ed about what their "negative" thoughts are on a technology? Would that other technology be able to get enough "acolytes" in order to be a viable alternative? Probably not, because everyone was too "positive" and polite to point out how that technology might be better than the old technology.
Would JS even be so controversial if it wasn't for that it is so entrenched in Web development? Is that not a great example of how important mindshare can be?
Simply ignoring your feelings to get a job done is just a tactic, and IMHO, not a very good one as it is not sustainable. You should always want to do what you are doing; not necessarily in the sense that this is what you would like to be doing for the rest of your life, but in the sense of recognising that this unpleasant task will get you closer to that something you would like to do the rest of your life.
I think the best method to get something done is to first have a clear vision and passion for the bigger picture. Then, understand how this unpleasant task gets you nearer to the goal of that bigger picture that you want. If it does, you won't need to ignore your feelings. On the contrary; your feelings will push you to do it. If it doesn't, there's a good chance you should be doing something else.
As you say, it seems that the main point of creationists' argument is that historical science isn't valid, because "you haven't seen it happen".
There are so many things wrong with this argument that I don't even know where to begin, but let's play along with this ridiculous line of thought anyway. The obvious question that follows is why is the "historical science" given by the bible any more plausible than the "historical science" of any other creation myth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creation_myths) ?
Of course there is a difference between circumstantial evidence and direct evidence, but even if you can't guarantee that your interpretation of the circumstantial evidence is true (something which by the way you can't do with direct evidence either), one should strive to find an interpretation that has the highest probability of being true given all the evidence at a given moment.
Look I completely agree with you that the creationists are irrationally clinging to a fairly small nitpick and using it to bury their heads in the sand.
BUT that doesn't mean that the small point that they raise with regards to repeatedly observing in the now versus observing the record of the past isn't valid.
>one should strive to find an interpretation that has the highest probability of being true given all the evidence at a given moment
Agreed but until the matter is settled via direct observation by multiple people in multiple experiments you have to kind of play Schrodinger's cat with the evidence. Just because you think you've found the highest probability explanation doesn't make it true, and thus alternative explanations aren't "false" but merely "less likely" Others might disagree with your level of certainty and at this point we're all basically spouting opinions, not facts.
I'm a bit skeptical regarding the weight of these biases on everyday life. Looking at all these biases, and the fact that no one is actually free of them (except perhaps some enlightened few) would suggest that we're all making choices which most of the time are based on assumptions that have little anchoring in reality. If this were so, shouldn't there have been total chaos here on earth?
As heuristics, for familiar cases, these cognitive biases are acceptable; Why would you expect chaos from that, instead of expecting suboptimal results? And yes, we definitely see suboptimal results.
I guess it depends to how detached from reality the average choice is when affected by these biases, and obviously it's not worse than suboptimal as you said, otherwise we would not be getting anywhere. I guess just viewing that large number of biases made me feel like we're lucky to get through the day, let alone make progress as a civilisation :)
