I think I just witnessed the day Hacker News died. This thread is appalling, much like the article. I'm no Windows apologist, but the article was a ramble about windows 8 with a paragraph tacked on the end, and the comments here are even less relevant.
I wonder what he is talking about. I recently created a script that can build our whole cloud based test environment from scratch. It creates the servers, downloads and installs the platforms, builds and deploys our software.
Maybe he is talking about end-user software that can be scripted? But even that isn't true for devs.
I think he's talking about how scripting is less and less possible on Mac/Windows, and practically impossible on phones, which is where the bulk of computing will be done in the future.
Be careful there - the bulk of computing is always in the background - the consumption of the results of that computing may move towards phones.
Take banking as an example, pulling up your bank balance, or making an online payment, is nowhere near the computing power of actually balancing the transactions at all banks across the world each night. You get a tiny sliver of a tiny report of the computing that happens in the background.
Entertainment, personal tools, communication - those are moving mobile. But that is just the surface.
History lesson: It never was possible on 3270 smart terminals, either.
We've had a shift back to centralized data storage and processing.
There were a few decades - the 1980s & 1990s & 2000s - where the canonical master of a data set might have been local to the user, but cloud computing has moved data back to DCs for centralized storage & processing. And we are using very smart terminals.
Even in those years, the client/server model was the norm. Except for people using MS Access, or similar fiascos, there was always a centralized data store.
That doesn't invalidate the claim that scripting is dying. Sure, us tech folk can (and do) script all kinds of things, even even more so the Enterprise IT world, who practically lives and dies by powershell. But back in the 90s in particular, there were such a thing as "power users", who would script the crap out of their systems. That really doesn't exist so much anymore. Now people in that grey area between end users and the coders are more likely to be professional business analysts. The days of a true end user also creating their own custom scripts to merge data and functions from disparate apps is getting rare.
(Keep in mind, HN is an entire community of edge cases... of course we all can spit out exceptions to this trend.)
Now, I do not think this is a bad thing. On the contrary, most of those people were very hard to support, and the ones who did it well and were easy to support often ended up moving into IT/Analyst roles anyway. I think we are in a better place today, with a much larger population of coders and analysts, so the end users can just tell us what they need, then focus on the actual jobs.
But the claim that end user scripting is dying... Yep, I do agree with that much.
One of the first things I install in any Windows machine I'll be using on a regular basis is Python. Helps "unlock" a lot of potential from the computer (through scripting, obviously).
On Linux machines I don't have to install because it's already there :P
I should watch that movie, could be amusing. However I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I don't think the study reached a conclusion as to how many children someone might have, merely that the sperm quality was higher/lower.
The movie gives the view that dumber people get more kids compared to smart people. So the world will, after a point, contain more dumb people than smart people because they simply breed more.
the movie posits the dumb people reproduce faster because they start sooner (i.e. football guy gets cheerleader pregnant when 16, smart girl waits to have a career before getting pregnant) and since getting to reproductive maturity doesn't need special skills it still works out in favor of dumb people (i.e. by the time smart couple has 1 kid dumb couple has >=1 and their descendents have >=1).
Are you saying no game is relevant if there is a more difficult game (and that is assuming what you say is true or even provable)? And as someone who has played 100's of hours of both Starcraft and tournament chess, I can assure you that chess is much harder to master.
And just to throw around some unprovable opions, much like you, I declare that Starcraft becomes more a test of keyboard/mouse agility than strategy or tactics, because it has dominant strategies available for a master player.
Back to chess, I think it is actually entering a golden era of interest and popularity. The last 2 decades at the top level have been dominated by opening theory and computer assisted home preparation, which has made it a hard slog for the professional and spectator. However the last 5 years or so have seen the emergence of a new breed of player that is shunning that approach. The number one player in the world is a prime example of someone who doesn't focus on opening theory and computer assisted preparation, and he has been blowing everyone away.
In many ways, Carlsen reminds me of my two favorite champions: Like Capablanca, he plays the opening and the middlegame "naturally", seemingly just following "common sense" positional principles - sure, backed by calculations, but not by home preparation. And, like Fischer, he clings to even the tiniest advantage (even if it is actually not good enough to win) until his opponent cracks down and makes a decisive mistake.
I am just wondering whether you can write your own wrapper class that implements (exposes) the read method and doesn't expose a close method (or expose a close method that does nothing) and pass that in?
I am not suggesting this is a good solution, just curious.
That's cool. The io.Reader is an unnamed field, so its method is effectively pushed to the surface of the wrapping struct instead of needing to be explicitly forwarded to.
