[rant] If you're going to claim that your strong opinions are facts, please treat them as such and give citations or back them up yourself. [/rant]
Ruby is not my favorite language anymore, but I still use it and see evidence that there is a huge place it fills in the dev community and ecosystem. I have never used a more expressive language. I'm stating this as a fact from what I have experienced, and I'm giving points that back it up. There are dozens of actively maintained Ruby projects, some of which are the most popular repos on GitHub. I don't see any evidence that the Ruby ecosystem is on a downward trend of activity and is "dying", so I have no reason to think otherwise.
This kind of stuff reminds me why I take breaks from HackerNews every once in a while -_- Yuck.
I love this game. It starts out simple, but as your country's relations with other countries change, the rules for letting people in and the amount of security in place changes.
"Diet" and "weight loss" are often used interchangeably, sure, but can you think of any instances in which diet Pepsi or diet Coke has been advertised as actually causing weight loss (ie; the product itself is a weight loss supplement)?
I think the name "diet soda" needs to go, as it really is misleading, but (and I could be wrong about this) I don't think these companies have ever claimed their products make you shed pounds by simply drinking them.
I agree that calories can have different impacts on people. We all require a certain intake of calories to achieve a certain weight or build. There are a lot of different variables that make this happen, such as exercise, lifestyle, genetics, and so on.
But where is the evidence that a calorie-free beverage can have an impact on your metabolism? You're eliminating the idea of calories entirely with diet soda, so I don't see how your argument stands any ground.
Er, this whole topic can be a little misleading. I haven't found a single reputable study that claims diet soda itself causes weight gain. Rather, just as the reasoning in this article suggests, the only scientific fact they present is that the consumption of diet soda itself does not encourage weight loss.
Side note: Do any brands really advertise drinking their diet soda as a method of (actual) weight loss? I can't think of any that actually present it this way.
It goes on to say that substituting sugary soda for diet soda isn't enough for most people to stop gaining weight. This is probably because you're likely to substitue the calories and sugars for something else, since your body notices its getting less of something and will crave it.
Yet you have things like this:
"One large study found that people who drank artificially sweetened soda were more likely to experience weight gain than those who drank non-diet soda"
This again is a correlation with the typical behavior of a diet soda drinker. They're not drinking diet soda because they want to lose weight. Rather, they're drinking it because they don't want to gain weight. They could have a terrible diet overall and this alone does nothing but move the problem over into, say, consuming two scoops of ice scream after dinner everyday. All because the soda they had during lunch didn't satisfy their bodily craving of refined sugars.
So this is a case of correlation not being causation. These types of articles do nothing but encourage this error to propagate. Perhaps the term "diet soda" is misleading in itself, but perhaps telling people that drinking a calorie-free drink will make them gain weight is just as silly as telling people it will make them lose weight.
Blaming your own incompetence on a library or an entire language is easy.
I've been guilty of this at times, but when you get down to it, it's your job as a software developer to understand how your software works and how to maintain it well. This doesn't just include the code you write; it includes your tools, third party libraries, and the internals of the language (VM, compiler, etc.). Its not easy, but it's part of the job.
On a more positive note, versioning packages in Go is already possible and is starting to gain momentum. Check out http://www.gonuts.io/
Has anybody seen their bulletins? Their first one advised people to go celebrate their "success" by drinking Champaign. Never mind that their exchange just lost ~half of its net value. Yuck!
And now, guess what MtGox advises everybody do? Go drink some Champaign! To celebrate their massive success! I'm not kidding-- look at their latest bulletin on why they're suspending trading for the rest of today.
You've got to be KIDDING ME. They don't seem to give two shits about their users or their money.
I'm sure it's been stated already... And well, I'm no Bitcoin fanboy, but didn't the price just go back up to what it was 2 days ago? That hardly sounds like a "crash" to me.
If it's as accurate as the team says it is, this is pretty astounding IMO. They'd have to be capturing some sort of baseline in the beginning of the conversation, and recording relative shifts of variables (ie; smile, eye shift/location) to come up with how "depressed" the person is. Just writing some software that says "oh this person is looking down" probably wouldn't cut it-- because shy people look down too. I noticed in the demo it seemed as if it started monitoring these things after certain questions were asked, which would be the correct way to measure a shift from baseline. Elicit a predictable period of what could be change and record.
I'm not an expert on the matter, but to be fair there are lots of things you can do to secure your wallet. Some of them are even discussed in that thread.
No matter what language or VM you choose, there are going to be tradeoffs. A good engineer understands these tradeoffs well and makes opinionated decisions with all the knowledge he or she has.
All the "my language is better than yours!" bashing is a result of being stubbornly opinionated and not willing to look at things from another perspective. There are always things that one VM will shine with where another will fall flat at, at vice versa.
Also, I don't think Ruby is nearly as bad as most people think. It's not as monolithically slow and vulnerable to exploitation as some people on HN claim. The VM is decent, and there are ways to tune the performance up that make it even "good". See, there's a tradeoff. The language is, IMO, fantastic, but you're going to take a performance hit for that that you need to deal with in some way or another. You're trading execution speed for "developer happiness", whatever that means anymore.