He's right-- if you're about to die, there are no limitations. You can, for example, cook meth with one of your former students.
The problem is when you're not about to die. Then embarrassment and failure are real issues. You do have something to lose-- your life! Your friends, your house, your possessions, your family, so many things to lose.
If you're going to lose it all anyway, taking risks is not a big deal. If you're 20 something and have your whole life ahead of you, taking risks is a really big deal.
If you haven't achieved anything, you haven't got anything to be proud of in the first place. You can't go backwards from step 1. I don't care when I lose at street fighter, or if my player rating sucks compared to my friends' - I'm not good at street fighter yet.
And believe me, if you think it's difficult to take risks now, at ~25, without children to feed and send to school, without a girlfriend who requires upkeep or friends with high-paying jobs who want to eat at Michelin restaurants... you're never going to get off the boat.
I'm not telling you how to live your life. Please, feel free to take ridiculous risks. Give up all your worldly possessions and move to the SF bay area. Start boring web 2.0 apps. Do a startup or whatever. Go to burning man. I'll be over here enjoying my nice, stable life.
It just prolongs the inevitable. If the average life expectancy is 70 years or 200, it still doesn't matter much in regards to things left undone; on your death bed, you'll still regret not loving your children more, not having the courage to ask her out, not traveling, not working on your ideas, etc... Consider that some opportunities only happen once, and then pfff, they are gone forever. Most of use are full of regrets until the end, and growing organs in labs is only a small comfort.
The other dream of course is for us to become immortal, but that's magnitudes harder than growing a liver in a laboratory, not to mention that even if possible it would open up a huge can of worms in society, problems that are even harder to overcome than technical issues.
Also, for all the advancements medicine appears to have, remember that we aren't even able to cure cancer and HIV, we aren't able to cure Alzheimer, we are only able to keep asthmatics under control and my child's doctors weren't even able to tell me the reason for why my child had the Lyell's syndrome a month ago (thankfully he's fine now, but it did freak us out).
We aren't even able to solve the problem of freaking bacteria becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics, and should I mention we aren't even able to find a cure for the flu or for common cold?
So don't kid yourself. You are going to die, you probably won't get past 90 years and your children, your grand-children and everybody you know will die too.
For those who are late to the party, Breaking Bad is now available on Netflix streaming, in case you didn't cancel your subscription in moral outrage over Quikstergate.
As someone who runs a site to help those who are feeling depressed and runs it with what seems to be a genuine level of concern and caring for those the site intends to help, this seems like a really fucking bizarre comment to make.
> I'm suprised that party which seeks to seriously impair (if not completely blow) the software industry gets so much applause here.
Yeah, you may want to explain exactly how. To me it seems like the pirate party's values are right in line with your average software developer's values.
Just because you don't agree with a political party's agenda does not mean news about that party isn't HN material.
> No basic string manipulation, only RE-based stuff
It's trivial to write, there are lots of libraries that do this. I've worked on a lot of string processing code in Lua. It's not as easy as Perl or Ruby but it's not by any means hard.
> One-based indices instead of zero-based.
Other than violating the expectations of people used to other C-like languages, this is not in any way even remotely a problem. I don't know anybody who's spent any significant time with Lua who regards this as more than a minor detail.
These are pitfalls and usability concerns. Languages that make you actively work against the nature of the language are not good; programming languages should be making this stuff easy.
One-based indices stop being a "minor detail" as soon as you realize that out-of-bounds indexing doesn't fail, but returns nil. Time to re-examine all of your code. Combine this with the natural mathematical awkwardness of one-based indices and it can get really frustrating, really fast.
I had to do Lua for some game design stuff a few years ago, and these were the two things which stuck out at me almost immediately and bothered me during the entire ordeal. Maybe I've been spoiled by Python, Perl, Java, C++, C, and other languages, but it's deeply frustrating how wrong Lua is about this.
Lua is not perfect. But saying you shouldn't use it because of 1-based indexes is an overreaction.
> Maybe I've been spoiled by Python, Perl, Java, C++, C, and other languages
Probably. :)
One of Lua's main goals is to provide a language easy for beginners to use for small tasks. This affects its design in some other rather annoying ways (like for example, variables being global by default rather than local) but they were pretty carefully made decisions.
The context of this thread is, "what could be a good replacement for PHP?" I think because Lua aims to be easy for inexperienced programmers, it's a rather good choice, even if some of its characteristics can be surprising or annoying to established developers experienced with other languages.
Subjective. I use Firefox because it's a more stable, modern, and featureful browser than Chromium in my opinion. That doesn't make one of us more "on the edge" than the other.
You're basically saying that since one community prefers strawberry ice cream to chocolate, they're more modern somehow.
Good suggestion, but many people are happy to pay someone to do a task which they have no interest in, and the process of which may be highly foreign to them.
I've seen plenty of folks use a CMS to completely botch up their site, suck up 6 hours of their time, and end up worse off than when they started.
If someone is making continual changes, the CMS makes sense. If it is a business that does 1 or 2 updates per year, it might be better to outsource the web stuff.
I've had little success with CMSs. People find them too complicated and I end up either holding their hand, fixing their mistakes or just doing the update. For free.
How much do you value your evenings at? £250 would be 1-2 evenings. One evening and it seems like reasonably easy money. Two evenings and suddenly its not quite so generous. Surely any technical person can charge $50 an hour? My day job charges me out at $1000 a day. I have also found that when it is an amount less than that I tend to resent the fact that I've had to give up an evening.
Stand up for yourself. Charge an amount that makes you happy.
Exactly. Some of these sites are hosted on my own server. After having numerous PHP sites hacked (and my machine wiped twice) static html is the only thing I trust these days.
Content changes could require new CSS styles (which would require a new round of cross browser testing), image editing, and cleaning up mal-formed text from an email or Word doc. You also need to factor in how much you should charge to make it worth your time to come up with an estimate, fire off an invoice, etc.
The problem is when you're not about to die. Then embarrassment and failure are real issues. You do have something to lose-- your life! Your friends, your house, your possessions, your family, so many things to lose.
If you're going to lose it all anyway, taking risks is not a big deal. If you're 20 something and have your whole life ahead of you, taking risks is a really big deal.
Rest in peace jobs, you will be missed.