Criticisms often bother us when we suspect they might be true I find. Not at all saying that your boss was right, but a lot of people have 'imposter syndrome' so it can become a case of 'agh, my negative internal monologue has been confirmed by an outside source'.
Is your boss just a bit of a dick that a lot of people dislike? If other people like your work it's probably way more about him than you.
Contrary to what he thinks, I do believe I have improved since I began, albeit not to the level he wanted. The "should know X by now" quote has bothered me, though, where I have asked myself his question in my own head.
For the most part he seems okay around others, but there have been a few times where I think people have picked up on his attitude.
Yeah sounds like it's his problem. Maybe he sucks at on-boarding, or maybe he's over-worked and it's easier to blame the underlings. Hope it doesn't mess with your head any more.
It's pretty good. Mainly in 'maintenance' mode, doing minor improvements. The whole stop letting stuff you can't change bother you and focus on what you can change. Common advice, but easier said than followed.
What are people using C++ for in 2019? Last time I used it was for a Qt desktop application of all things. I would imagine its main usage is in high performance or hardware constrained environments these days, but I'm curious what people are doing with it.
I do a lot of node.js programming, which uses C++ to write extensions, so here's hoping I rememeber it if/when I need to.
Why I'm using it to write a Qt desktop program of course.
Actually a bit frustrating, since Qt is very opinionated in a way that hasn't aged well with newer C++ standards, but it is probably one of the best cross platform UI libraries.
It's interesting though how very well meaning utopian policies
The largest tragedy of the 21st century is that people still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning' or 'it just went a bit wrong'. It seems that only when we defeat murderous totalitarians militarily that we understand them for what they are.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're all the same, which makes them tedious and off topic, and they lead to flamewars, which we don't want.
What would an HN guidelines compliant post have looked like? Genuine question. This was an event that might have killed as many people as the holocaust, and someone said it was "well meaning". I thought I made a polite and non flamebaity response. Am I unable to disagree with that, or start a discussion about it? If I am, how would I do it?
You're misrepresenting the comment - they didn't call the event itself 'well-meaning', never said the policy itself went 'a little bit wrong'. Then you pile on with the "largest tragedy of the 21st century" bombast. This isn't polite disagreement over phrasing or substance and it's rude as fuck.
> still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning'
It’s awfully hard to imagine that Mao actually was hoping that people would die, and that they would die en masse of starvation: even if he was strictly self-serving and heartless, he must have known in the back of his mind that huge populations of starving people are unpredictable and difficult to govern. The only way I can picture this taking place is that he (like all dictators) successfully instilled such fear in his direct reports that they never gave him bad news or challenged what he thought sounded like good ideas at the time.
Mao had an awareness of what was going on. For example, like the Soviets during the Ukraine famine, Mao's government intentionally outlawed starvation being listed as a cause of death. He was also so utterly convinced of the correctness of his ideologically informed ideas about farming (e.g., he was under the spell of Lysenko's ideas about unproductively close spacing because crops of the same "class" would never compete with each other) that he would choose to blame failures on people's lack of purity for correctly following his ideas and on imagined conspiracies of deposed landlords.
However, what you're saying is also true; there are documented historical examples of local officials, terrified of Mao, setting up faked fields with scarce crops from the neighboring area being transplanted into a single field specifically to "impress" Mao during his visits and avoid his ire.
Mao was focused on re-imagining the state and purging old ways of thinking, governance, etc. The insanity of the cultural revolution is a testament to that.
Two times this video has been posted, and two times it's been flagged. Politician in center left UK party saying historys greatest mass murderer "did more good than harm".
It's useful to distinguish between deaths due to malevolence, neglect, and other factors. Capitalist countries have killed plenty of people through malevolence or neglect. The Bengal Famine if 1943, for example, was caused by a combination of overpopulation, British imposed inter-province trade restrictions, Japanese occupation of Burma, and diversion of shipping capacity by the British for WWII. It was not, however, caused by the means by which agricultural production was arranged in Bangladesh. (Which was more feudal than capitalist anyway.)
Socialist countries saw many deaths due to malevolence because it often took violent authoritarians to institute socialist governments in the first place. One can argue about whether those deaths should be held against "socialism" per se. But what's almost unique about socialism is how many deaths resulted even when the government was not acting malevolently or negligently. Tens of millions of people died in the Soviet Union and China not due to gulags and purges, but because socialism is a bad way to organize an economy. Socialist reforms of agricultural production, in particular, destroyed production.
Those deaths are squarely attributable to socialism per se. It's the result of removing market signals, distorting incentives, and replacing the capital-owning class who knows how to operate the economy, etc. What would happen to say Waymo if you replaced its investors and management with the folks who run the U.S. Digital Service along with "stakeholders" from among the employees and "local community?" You'd destroy it, because that's a terrible way to run a company. That's what socialist countries did with agriculture.
Agricultural output recovered in both Russia and China after massive famine. In fact, there has not since been a famine in China since the last whereas in the century previous famine was commonplace. Is this the part where you say that those countries stopped organizing their agricultural activity in a "socialist" way and that's why they no longer had famines?
Is this the part where you say that those countries stopped organizing their agricultural activity in a "socialist" way and that's why they no longer had famines?
Yes, this is the part[0] and it's worth reading about it at length (I've added paragraph breaks).
The TL;DR, with a Hacker News spin: a small startup of entrepreneurial Chinese hackers working in stealth mode disrupted the existing socialist system of agriculture and changed everything :-)
In more detail:
In December 1978, eighteen of the local farmers, led by Yen Jingchang, met in the largest house in the village. They agreed to break the law at the time by signing a secret agreement to divide the land, a local People's Commune, into family plots. Each plot was to be worked by an individual family who would turn over some of what they grew to the government and the collective whilst at the same time agreeing that they could keep the surplus for themselves.
The villagers also agreed that should one of them be caught and sentenced to death that the other villagers would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. At the time, the villagers were worried that another famine might strike the village after a particularly bad harvest and more people might die of hunger.
After this secret capitalist reform, Xiaogang village produced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined. Per capita income in the village increase from 22 yuan to 400 yuan with grain output increasing to 90,000 kg in 1979.
This attracted significant attention from surrounding villages and before long the government in Beijing had found out. The villagers were fortunate in that at the time China had just changed leadership after Mao Zedong had died. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping was looking for ways to reform China's economy and the discovery of Xiaogang's innovation was held up as a model to other villages across the country.
This led to the abandonment of collectivised farming across China and a large increase in agricultural production. The secret signing of the contract in Xiaogang is widely regarded as the beginning of the period of rapid economic growth and industrialisation that mainland China has experienced in the thirty years since.
The Irish potato famine, or the famines in India were absolutely caused by malevolence. You don't 'accidentally' have a famine in a country that is, in the middle of the famine, is a net exporter of food.
The Irish famine is in particular awful as the British wrapped themselves up in heart-wrenching moral concerns. They wouldn't want the poor Irish wretches becoming dependent on charity -- so what if the pig eats better than the farmer.
I didn't say it wasn't caused by malevolence. But it wasn't caused by "capitalism" as an organizational structure for the economy. My point is simply that while capitalist countries often kill people through malevolence or negligence, socialist countries do both of those things, and are also uniquely adept at killing their own people by destroying previously functional production systems.
It doesn't make any sense to me why some people try to rehabilitate Stalin, Mao and company. There is absolutely nothing to be gained in doing so. In truth, modern Socialism is far removed from Soviet Communism and modern Socialists need to recognize that "but Stalin" is a trite bad-faith argument and the people who employ it should be ridiculed.
Stalinism killed many people for several reasons that probably aren't relevant to "modern socialists." But some of the main reasons are still relevant. "Modern socialists" are still advocating the nationalization of industries, having vast amounts of economic activity being directed by the government, etc. (Ironically for Corbyn, some of his ideas will only be possible if the U.K. brexits, because of the E.U.'s deregulatory posture.) Those ideas are bad for the same reason Mao's collectivized farms killed tens of millions of people. Central planning is a bad way of running the economy. Businesspeople are better at running industries than government bureaucrats or political scientists.
2019 manifestos are not yet available. So I guess you are thinking of the Labour policies in the 2017 election. Which policy was only possible after Brexit? The IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies who fact check all public finance here) were critical of both 2017 manifestos, but were far more directly critical of the Tory one as being damaging to the UK economy.
It is a very long time since the Tory party could be considered a safe pair of hands economically.
Im not sure if I understand what you are trying to say they were. Are you claiming that Mao and Stalin were sadists? I think it is more plausible they were altruistically motivated (greater good, ect).
That gets closer to the problem, but the solution is further away. You don't want to return "Functor" (which is like a vtable, the interface itself) but instead the thing itself which is implementing the Functor interface.
So you end up with
interface Functor<A> {
map<B>(f: (a: A) => A): Self<B>
}
where `Self` needs to recognize that the type being defined to implement this interface has a "slot". This tends to make things tough.
I'd like to +1 that "tends to make things tough." Not sure how it is today, I think it was remedied in Swift 4.1 or something... but holy-shit, that "slot" problem gave me endless grief trying to implement functors in swift for composing UI structs (I was ahead of the curve, heh).
You've lost me. Returning an interface isn't returning a concrete thing. It's returning the thing that implements the interface
I'm a very low level functional programmer. I'm big on immutability, big on not using loops and instead using map/flatMap/filter/fold, I tend to roll my own either and option implementations when they don't exist because it's the tidiest way of handling errors I've come across, etc etc. But when it comes to stuff like functors I don't get what it's buying me. What interesting stuff can I do if I know that both an option and a list can be mapped over?
I really need to look more deeply into it at some stage. I might be missing out on some powerful tools. Or it might be a bunch of stuff that's theoretically interesting but practically useless.
I think you may have misunderstood their point. They're just saying that specifying `Functor` in the return type of `map` isn't enough to resolve the issue because you could still have a case of `List#map` returning a `Maybe` or `Either` since they are all implementations of `Functor`.
Sorry, you're right. I wasn't thinking with subtyping. Rockostrich demonstrated the other weakness of this approach, but I'll say it outright: if you return a supertype then you've lost information.
It's very important for the type of `fmap f x` to be identical to `x` except in that its "inner" type has been modified. Without that, these kinds of interfaces lose all of their value.
The functor it returns should be the same functor it was called on, i.e. calling map on a Maybe should return a Maybe. The parameterized type can change so map can bring you from a Maybe<Int> to a Maybe<String> which is why in the above description we have Functor<B> instead of A. But what typescript is lacking is a way to describe that the functor returned should be the same.
I don't understand wealthy Americans at all. It seems like they want to abolish the concepts of borders and immigration control entirely. I assume it's so they can more readily access cheaper labour, which would explain why poorer americans generally take the opposite stance.
Is your boss just a bit of a dick that a lot of people dislike? If other people like your work it's probably way more about him than you.