Well, the main problem is HTML sucks. It can't do things literally everyone wants to do at one point or another.
One example, scrolling table with fixed table head. Why is that not something I can specify declaratively? Why is that next to impossible, even with the aid of JavaScript.
Where are tabs? Where are image carousels? Why is it that styling forms elements is still essentially impossible? Where are <select> elements with icons? Where are calendar date pickers that allow me to select multiple dates and ranges?
Why was three columns with header and footer declared the "Holy Grail" of CSS for a decade? And does anyone remember building rounded corners with <b> tags?
Basic basic basic structures that literally every developer is asked to build don't exist. Every developer everywhere has wasted ridiculous amounts of time making something barely functional which should have been stupidly simple.
>if I help develop A.I. that can be used for all sorts of things, one of which happens to be military-related, is the effort "evil"
There's a famous quote for this:
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Of which I believe the meaning is yes, it's evil. It's handing a toddler a loaded gun sort of evil. If you DestroyBaghdad, you've limited the harm your program can do to what is specifically required by the situation. DestroyCity is easily misused in the wrong hands and should be carefully considered by ethical programmers.
Doctors solve this by disallowing unethical members of their profession to legally practice. Programmers should consider becoming an ethical profession, because depending on others in the field to do the right thing and police themselves hasn't been working out.
It's relatively easy to prevent the unlicensed practice of medicine. But anyone can buy a computer and start programming. There's no practical way to require that all programmers adhere to a code of professional ethics.
I completely agree with the loaded-gun metaphor, but doctors are a very different kettle of fish.
Doctors are healers. The Hippocratic oath - "do no harm" - is the logical conclusion of the practice of medicine. Medicine heals, which is the opposite of causing harm. Avoiding harm is the only consistent metric of success, which explains the oath's persistence for millennia.
Can you think of a consistent, concrete set of ethics that would draw unanimous support among programmers?
I think healing has less to do with it than liability. Snake oil salesmen used to be a thing.
What currently sets programmers apart is the lack of liability. Programmers write their own get out of jail free cards. We call them EULAs.
If a doctor screws up and leaves a clamp inside you after surgery, he is sued. If a programmer screws up and leaves a debugging backdoor in a shipped product, nothing.
>Can you think of a consistent, concrete set of ethics that would draw unanimous support among programmers?
I think if programmers can't come to a consensus on that answer, then legislators will do it for them.
If you look around, we're actually witnessing this happening right now. Populist anger has erupted after Equifax, Cambridge Analytica, and Uber. NYT opinion pieces call for changes in liability law around programming.
And it's not just talk. Changes have already started. Section 230 was recently modified to make small changes in liability of web hosts. In response, Craigslist went full nuclear option in protest and dropped their Personals section. Almost nobody noticed, which means in the next round, law makers will be much more bold in applying more liability to the businesses of programmers.
Google's "Do no evil" was the closest thing I think we've witnessed to a Hippocratic oath for programmers. That's long gone now. Now it's all jerk tech, exploit your users for content and then demonetize them with no recourse or redress.
I don't think the west can get any wilder, so the pendulum is going to go against us from here on out. Programmers should be getting ahead of this, but like all dumb humans, we will sit stupidly. We will only react to immediately obvious consequences instead of preparing for the storm on the horizon.
We started at submission about Google employees waving around a paper tiger petition, we proceeded to top ranked reminder to everyone of DARPA and how military funding is the One True Way, then on to crypto export controls, rolling onward into a gun control debate, conflating semi-automatic weapons with rocket launchers, and finally into yes, the meaning behind "fire in a crowded theater."
The comment section on HN is now second only to the comments from Yahoo news stories. Keep up the great work everyone.
"people like nicki minaj, miley, many others who have sensual things so inappropriate for children to watch, don't get age restricted. But videos, my workout videos, get age restricted."
Very valid points. Has coherent thoughts, and from her videos doesn't appear to be mentally crazy.
We're obviously thinking about this in light of the fact that she just went on an attempted killing spree. I can see how that might prejudice our thinking.
But I personally have had quite a bit of experience interacting with mentally-ill individuals both as a volunteer and through visiting family members who are in institutional care.
I am in no position to diagnose anyone, but I'd be very surprised if it does not come out that this woman had long-standing mental issues for which she refused any intervention or treatment.
I'm sure this submission will get flagged off the front page too because "Iranian woman bears arms against YouTube for censorship" doesn't really fit the narrative around here, but here's her page before it's wiped out too. Her YT and Insta have already been nuked.
For my edification, would someone care to explain the torrent of downvotes? I simply reported a factual, indisputable observation: That the grandparent, with a timestamp saying 16 minutes old, was displayed to me as 'flagged' and 'dead'.
I must admit my first thought on hearing there was an attack on YouTube was that their recent monetisation changes have put a lot of people out of work, and some of those people must be feeling pretty desperate.
Surprised google survived Panda and related changes that more or less stopped unpaid traffic to sites. Yes, it's their platform blah blah, but when people kill you for looking at them the wrong way, shooting at the "person" that took away your livelihood is much more understandable. I was making $1000x, now I make $x, no money for rent, food...and people go into revenge mode. My life is over anyway so, at least I'll get some of them with me.
This got too long, but to summarize my point there's a vast amount of content on the internet and those people feeling that someone not finding them via google is a cheat are over-reacting. The world is so big that there are lots of people no one ever hears about, who may be doing interesting stuff. Feeling that people don't find your cool stuff is a complaint you can make against google, facebook, instagram, maybe bing if anyone used it, any indexing site.
For every person that youtube or whatever other ranking site give them lots of viewers, there are millions of people posting stuff that hardly anyone ever sees. It's not a conspiracy that no one really watches my son's youtube game discussion site. There are thousands of videos every day created with similar content.
So all these people mad that they don't have lots of viewers, a bunch of that can be explained because there are lots of people doing the same thing.
Now for the people who used to get lots of views and then things drop off after a google ranking change, sure, the change must have had some impact. So your site with videos in say Farsi about how to exercise with a particular style of workouts, probably there are 100 other people doing videos for working out in Farsi or whatever. There's basically no way google or anyone else can balance it out. They make changes that they think will serve their users. Google works for a lot of people because it's a good clearing house. But it's good for people cause they can find things they want. Google cannot show all the thousands of videos every day on say fortnight. But my son's video game discussion site hardly gets any views. but thats because he's not famous and he's not doing anything that other people are.
I also think people try to make their site go higher by paying for links to their site. In a previous job, (I heard) they paid someone who was a wikipedia editor to create entries for their company and the founder, of course this is a known problem.
I think I'm sounding like a google or big company apologist. I have seen a similar issue in phone apps. My friend had a bunch of android and ios programs for tracking various things that he sold for a dollar, and the ideas got copied by people doing similar things multiple times and now he's just one person is a sea of solutions. He used to get a few $100 a month from people buying his $1 software, now he gets $5. It's not a conspiracy.
> those people feeling that someone not finding them via google is a cheat are over-reacting.
> So all these people mad that they don't have lots of viewers
That's not the issue at all. They're mad they HAVE lots of views and their videos are being demonetised, and the rules around demonetisation aren't enforced consistently.
okay, maybe i don't get that. Is that what the point that was in the supposed shooter's screen grab with 300k views and 10c of payment was about? I had forgotten about the problems around terrorist or violent racist videos and ads for random stuff showing up on them so youtube was going to cut off advertising on such videos - I guess google screwed it up and went too far?
It seems very unfair the way this works at youtube and there's no human to appeal to. I can see that would be frustrating. So there's no other place to take their videos to get money?
I remember a time when there wasn't a place where people could get money for playing video games, except maybe a few people working at computer magazines writing reviews.
But I also still think theres also a lot of similar content for certain broad categories. Like say exercise videos.
> But I also still think theres also a lot of similar content for certain broad categories. Like say exercise videos.
Yeah but just because a niche is crowded doesn't mean that all creators produce equally good content.
You will notice that many of the top channels, say those that have more than 100K subscribers, very often have very good production standards, and are the creator's full time job.
Sometimes the reason why a specific channel is more popular than another is not obvious, but very often it's because they spent more time carefully crafting their videos, even if in the end they appear like candid shots.
>Maven...you have to write your own plugin. Not nice.
>If I wanted to change one thing in Gradle it would be for the Gradle project to focus on debugging
You've just explained why I have no interest in Gradle. You're writing one off, undocumented, anonymous plugins, in a weird domain specific language, with debugging tools that aren't very good.
Worse, when the Gradle guru decides to leave the company for greener pastures, everyone else is left with a mess trying to figure out WTH that person was doing in all the build files.
In Gradle, this is immediately understandable to everybody. You can't do this in Maven without plugin support or some very protracted constructs.
Sprinkling those small bits makes the Gradle useful. We are not talking about making a beast of a build system, just provide you with an ability to solve your problems.
You may not want or like to learn another tool and that's fine. But don't think that just because you don't see the reason it means its not useful for other people.
>I really find it difficult to figure out why things fail even though I have almost 20 years of experience
>In Gradle, this is immediately understandable to everybody
You pulled an easy example to defend Gradle for the exact problem you just complained about.
>You may not want or like to learn another tool and that's fine.
It's not about like or want, it's about having the wisdom to recognize a poor solution before investing time in adopting it. OP fell for the hype. Maven works fine for me, thanks.
This sounds like a process problem, not a gradle problem. I don't think there's inherent readability to maven, and I'd love to share my previous employer's pom files with you.
One example, scrolling table with fixed table head. Why is that not something I can specify declaratively? Why is that next to impossible, even with the aid of JavaScript.
Where are tabs? Where are image carousels? Why is it that styling forms elements is still essentially impossible? Where are <select> elements with icons? Where are calendar date pickers that allow me to select multiple dates and ranges?
Why was three columns with header and footer declared the "Holy Grail" of CSS for a decade? And does anyone remember building rounded corners with <b> tags?
Basic basic basic structures that literally every developer is asked to build don't exist. Every developer everywhere has wasted ridiculous amounts of time making something barely functional which should have been stupidly simple.