> I design and build technology in Vancouver. I spend most of my time working on Slack, a paradigm-shifting tool for team communication. In my work I strive for usefulness, beauty, and positive impact on the lives of others.
From this chap's tag line on his home page it seems like he still identifies strongly with his work and over emphasises the importance of it.
The fundamental concepts haven't changed but the applications certainly have. The amount of things you can "do" with technology these days is far more vast than it was 25 years ago.
It seems to me like you expect that coding itself should provide you with interest and excitement. Maybe you should try focusing less on the skill itself but what the skill can be used to build? Do you think that an engineer would look at a drone for the first time and think "boring - its just a bunch of propellers provide lift for the device, I've seen this all before.."? Similarly, do you think that a programmer would learn about RSA crypography and think "boring - its just modular arithmetic and prime factorisation, I've seen all this before"?
All knowledge is built upon that which came before it, so in that sense I dont see how anything could be considered "a new challenge" by your standards?
> Asking him to change his personality and what he "enjoys" just so that he can fit in is so absurd to me because it hints at the idea that you should surrender your individuality in order to fit in with the group.
I think you are completely misinterpreting the comment your responding to. That's really not what he said at all. You are essentially take what is a thoughtful suggestion to try and see beyond your prejudices/preconceived notions and turning it into a dumbed down "Just be like normal like everybody else" kind of statement.
But perhaps you do not like the post because maybe you are also one of these "I am smart and interesting and clever and everybody else is a dull, dumb, zombie" types? I might be wrong but I would guess that thats the case.
Its possible. More likely is that this attitude is a defense mechanism for this person to feel better about their lack of emotional and social intelligence.
A stereotypical jock/lad will look down on guys who are not athletic or can't get girls and make fun of the nerd who prefers reading books and contemplating philosophy.
A stereotypical nerd (like the commenter here) will look down on guys who only talk about sports and girls and will write posts like this on hacker news about how dull these people are.
The reality is that all of these aspects of life are important. Knowledge is important for reasons which will be obvious to most HN readers. But so is sport - all humans need physical exercise, the body and mind do not function well without it. So are attractions to the opposite sex - do I need to explain how new humans come to being?
So to say that somebody is dull for wanting to talk about sports or kids is as narrow-minded as it is to say that your dull for wanting to read books.
Nice work, I have been using puppeteer with chrome recently and it is a great piece of kit. If the prototype is successful will you keep the chrome and firefox packages separate or merge them and have an abstraction layer so puppeteer can issue commands regardless of chrome/firefox being used for the browser?
Sure but now there are two separate codebases for the same API. A lot of code will be duplicated between the two codebases, you'll have to maintain two sets of issues on github etc.
If it were me I would aim to merge the firefox puppeteer into chrome puppeteer but fair enough if they want to keep them separate.
EDIT: I guess it depends on how much of the code in the puppeteer chrome codebase is tightly coupled to chrome dev tools. Like if 25% of specific to chrome, then that would mean that 75% of the code can be shared between the chrome implementation and the firefox one, in that case I think merging and hiding the 25% chrome/firefox specific stuff behind an abstraction layer is the best option.
Consider that you might not be as intelligent as you think you are. I'm sure you are aware that there is more than one kind of intelligence right? Although you might have a PhD and be very knowledgeable in many subjects, you sound like you are severely lacking in many other kinds of intelligence. So maybe you are not so different from the "dull" people you speak so poorly of?
No they don't. Gypsies are a large ethnic minority in many eastern european countries. Also, although a religious minority instead of racial, there are a large percentage of Muslims in many of those countries too. Don't forget that the last european genocide over ethnic and religious lines happened in eastern europe too.
Also don't forget their is currently an ONGOING war in the Ukraine over divisions between those who are ethnically Russian and those are ethnically Ukranian.
I'm not preaching diversity as a virtue in itself but the idea that places like Eastern Europe are some kind of ethnic utopia where you can leave your doors unlocked and kids play on the streets just because everybody is white is just absurd.
Saying that a country like Romania is not ethnically homogeneous is absurd. Gypsies exist but in low numbers and stay in ghettos. Muslims only exist in some countries of the south of the Balkans.
Ok fair enough, but then why is Romania such a sh*t-hole? (Sorry Romanians). Surely the racial homogeneity there should mean that things are better over there?
I'm form different Eastern European country so I can explain it to you pretty easily.
Communism. It's pretty much same reason in whole Eastern Europe. Some countries managed to recover faster for various reasons whether it was more useful industry which was pretty much centrally planned in whole Soviet block from Moscow, so some countries where more industrially orientated and other remained pretty much agriculture only.
Second important reason is geographical location, especially presence of wealthy neighbors - compare Czechia with Germany and Austria as neighbors to Romania whose economically best performing neighbor is Hungary (which is economically worse off than Czechia itself).
Absolutely, you are right about that. My point was more to argue against the idea that in eastern europe, kids can run free on the streets because its a mostly white society. More likely is that the kids run free because the parents are not infected with american-style parenting and media-induced fear of everything. Literally nothing to do with race at all.
>Saying that a country like Romania is not ethnically homogeneous is absurd.
My team has two people who came from Romania. My company's site here has many more. I know a bunch of them. Your statement is absurd. I've had more than one Romanian literally tell me he doesn't hang out with that other Romanian because of the ethnic differences between them.
You know what else has a carbon footprint? The computer that your're using to post on hackernews. How about instead of wasting electricity you go volunteer in your community?
From this chap's tag line on his home page it seems like he still identifies strongly with his work and over emphasises the importance of it.