14 ms·

Be careful about what you dislike

351 points by JonoBB 10y ago

msinclair 10y ago
Except Internet Explorer... that will always be the same. :)
dorfsmay 10y ago
Part of the issue is efficiency, we have to make choices and cannot reevaluate everything constantly. Also, we can't be specialists in everything. So programming languages, we have to pick a few and become good at them. It's one thing to take another hard look when applying for a new job for example, but we cannot keep track of all programming languages and their evolutions.
andybak 10y ago
I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ness is a taint on his soul. Contrast that with reformulations that make it explicit that John's foo-ness is a fleeting association related to both his present situation, your current perception of it and the current socially accepted meaning of foo along with all it's implied baggage. I realise I might be rather off-topic :-)
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Interestingly in Spanish and Portuguese there are two verbs of "to be": "ser" and "estar". These have different meanings: ser ist mostly used for persistent states of being, while estar is mostly used for something that is only temporarily as it is, but could be different the next time.
  - praseodym 10y ago
    Isn't that a bit like "is" vs. "is being"?
    - pedrocr 10y ago
      The "is being" construct also exists by using the two verbs ("estar a ser") but it's not the same. Basically in order of permanence: ser -> a mostly permanent characteristic estar -> a current characteristic that could change in the future estar a ser -> a characteristic of the specific interaction
      - raldi 10y ago
        Is that last one like, "I am to be married on Saturday"?
        pedrocr 10y ago
        Not really, that's just a future tense. Here's the correspondence instantiated: "I am tall" -> "sou alto" (ser) "I am broke" -> "estou falido" (estar) "I am being boring" -> "estou a ser aborrecido" (estar a ser) What english doesn't have as easily without context is the distinction between the first two forms because it has a single verb for both.
      - wolfgke 10y ago
        In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879933 you gave an example of "estar a ser" for Portuguese. Since I currently try to learn both Spanish and Portuguese: Does a form similar to "estar a ser" also exist in Spanish or is it specific to Portuguese?
        schoen 10y ago
        I think that pedrocr is from Portugal so in case you're learning Brazilian Portuguese you should consider that Brazilians usually use "estar + present participle" where the Portuguese use "estar a + infinitive" (for example "estou a falar" vs. "estou falando"). Brazilians thus have "estar sendo" which can be used in many cases where English has "is being", but as a non-native speaker I'm not sure what I can claim about its connotations or whether it's the same as "estar a ser". But my initial guess is that the Portuguese say "estou a ser" just as they say "estou a falar", while Brazilians say "estou sendo" just as they say "estou falando". Spanish-speakers in turn have "estar siendo" with the Spanish present participle of ser, like "estoy siendo". I suspect this is the standard form of this construction in all kinds of Spanish.
- xiaq 10y ago
  I don't think you went off-topic at all. The article says "avoid judgement of a particular thing, since it will become outdated in future". E-prime says "now you can't make such judgements because I have taken away your tool of doing so". I think they have the same goal. (I wrote this comment in E-prime :)
  - schoen 10y ago
    In the case of the judgments of Python that the original article refers to, I can see ways that E-prime could help (because the criticisms might be phrased more concretely, like "Python 3 lacks the 'u' qualifier for strings" or something, allowing a reassessment of whether this problem was still true in the future) but maybe one could still say something like "its creators designed Python 3 hastily and sloppily without regard to programmers' convenience", which, if true or believed at first, never stops being applicable even if the language gets improved later on.
- gabemart 10y ago
  Who would admit to lying sometimes? Almost everyone. Who would admit to being a liar? Fewer people. But what is a liar other than someone who tells lies sometimes? I agree that the idea something "is" something else is a tricky one in language.
- martimoose 10y ago
  > Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best I was going to say this is ironic but I will rather say I find this ironic
- appleflaxen 10y ago
  completely on point, actually. Plus a link to a cool, thought-provoking concept. thanks!
- debt 10y ago
  English prime should help you become a better writer if only because it forces you to consider sentence structure which forces you to pay closer attention to what you're writing. I didn't use it here because I'm lazy.
- barrkel 10y ago
  The irregular nature of "to be" in English comes from it being a blend of three different roots with a somewhat similar division you're talking about (but certainly not as clear, division was more about tense than duration). The fallacy you're talking about I consider a specific instance of the labeling problem. If someone is marginally in a group and you apply the label of the group on the individual, suddenly it seems ok to use attributes of the group to reason about the individual. One jumps from specific to general and back to specific again without acknowledging the loss of information from the abstraction layers. Often comes up in post hoc rationalisation of harsher criminal punishment, for example. John is a criminal; we need to be tougher with criminals; therefore we need to be tougher with John - without regard for the specifics of John's case.
  - schoen 10y ago
    One analysis of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(fallacy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(fallacy) but there might also be other ways of thinking about it.
    - barrkel 10y ago
      The example given in that shows it's not the same thing at all.
      - schoen 10y ago
        How about in the other direction? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_accident While I don't mean to say that these provide a full analysis of the issue you're talking about, I don't see how they're unrelated to it.
- dahart 10y ago
  I had never heard of E-Prime, but this reminded me of Reginald Braithwaite's presentation "Optimism" [1]. He advocates becoming aware of when people use temporary or permanent language, and suggests using temporary language for criticizing other people and permanent language for praising people. This is a brilliant bit of human psychology that is highly practical in everyday situations. I don't know whether E-Prime is practical, it seems problematic to try to police the language itself, but the goals & rationale have a good heart. We probably would be better off if we could all speak less dogmatically and hyperbolically. I do recall someone here on HN mentioning attempts to create a new language in which one could not lie, I wonder if E-prime was what was being referred to... [1] https://github.com/raganwald/presentations/blob/master/optimism.md https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12298898
dorianm 10y ago
For comparaison, Ruby 3 is gonna introduce a pretty big breaking change (frozen string literals) but they already shipped a way to optional enable it by-file (magic comment) and globally to the ruby interpreter (just a parameter) so that all the libraries and projects can slowly fix it in a compatible manner (often just calling .dup is enough). So that's when it's time for Ruby 3 the transition will be pretty painless. More info: https://wyeworks.com/blog/2015/12/1/immutable-strings-in-ruby-2-dot-3 https://wyeworks.com/blog/2015/12/1/immutable-strings-in-rub... (Frozen string literals allows strings to be in memory only once and not having to reallocate each time, so a pretty big memory and cpu optimization) (Also for instance rubocop already recommends adding the magic comment to all ruby files)
- uiri 10y ago
  (Frozen string literals allows strings to be in memory only once and not having to reallocate each time, so a pretty big memory and cpu optimization) Isn't this the purpose of symbols in the language? This seems like a pretty basic optimization, surely there were good reasons not to introduce it in earlier versions.
  - dorianm 10y ago
    e.g. 1000.times { "hello" } creates strings 1000 times but: 1000.times { "hello".freeze } only one time. The thing about frozen strings is they can't be changed "inline": e.g. : "Hello".freeze << " world" doesn't work but "Hello".freeze + " world" does because it creates a new string. (It's funny because << is often recommended as an optimization)
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Magic imports from __future__ are the usual way of turning on features in Python. The incompatibilities introduced in Python 3 weren't done that way to save on implementation effort among other reasons.
  - dorianm 10y ago
    Maybe python2 --enable-print-parentheses and other flags could have been useful to slowly detect future issues on python 2 code.
lazyjones 10y ago
It's not the responsibility of the author to anticipate future changes that might weaken his current arguments. The reader is responsible for taking into account the time and context of the text they are reading. It's why we like to have e.g. "(2013)" added to anchor texts on HN, for example.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  It is, when the author is writing them (or saying them) in 2016. I thought he made it pretty clear that was what he was complaining about.
simonhamp 10y ago
I think a sideline point here is to not appropriate other people's opinions from a specific point in time just because they happen to align with yours (opinion/bias) at the current time. And of course, try to have as wide and deep an understanding of the subject as possible before forming strong publicised opinion in the first place.
9mit3t2m9h9a 10y ago
I think the effect described in the text has another side: imagine that at some point using XYZ was obviously a bad idea for multiple reasons for a specific person in specific circumstances. Obviously, keeping track of the changes in XYZ will have a lower priority for a person who is not going to use XYZ anyway, even if one of the multiple show-stoppers gets fixed/changed/redesigned. This means that the person's opinion about XYZ slowly gets stale.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
> Then the entire thing spiraled out of control: people not only railed against TTIP but took their opposition and looked for similar contracts and found CETA. Since both are trade agreements there is naturally a lot of common ground between them. The subtleties where quickly lost. Where the initial arguments against TTIP were food standards, public services and intransparent ISDS courts many of the critics failed to realize that CETA fundamentally was a different beast. CETA has ISDS as well, and if only on that point alone, CETA is objectionable. This argument comes off as disingenuous, the similarities between the deals are not imagined. ISDS isn't even the only similarity; CETA also contained objectionable new copyright provisions (though apparently those are mostly gone now), for example.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  > CETA has ISDS as well, and if only on that point alone, CETA is objectionable. Author here: that is not disputed. However the ISDS in CETA is a permanent tribunal where both Canada and Europe elect lawyers equally. The processes also require transparency and there is an appeal process. None of that was in the original draft of it and has been added over time as a response to criticism.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    Well, that might be a slight improvement, but it's still ISDS. The fundamental problem with ISDS is not its lack of transparency, but that it allows corporations to sue governments for domestic policy changes in the first place.
    - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
      > Well, that might be a slight improvement, but it's still ISDS. There is nothing wrong with ISDS.
      - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
        In that case, can you explain how Canadian and European legal systems are so insufficient for seeking legal recourse for legitimate grievances that companies need to be able to sue either government in international tribunals? Because that's ostensibly the argument for ISDS, and I don't see how it applies to Western liberal democracies with properly functioning courts. The argument against is cases like the Philip Morris v. Uruguay case. Why couldn't the same happen under CETA? If you don't see ISDS itself as objectionable, it's not surprising that you disagree with the argument against CETA, but please try to understand where opponents are coming from.
michaelsbradley 10y ago
Hear! hear! I also recommend, more generally, reviewing logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and misconceptions as part of a regular self-review. It's important to keep a flexible mind, though achieving greater degrees of interior freedom is hard work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
crawfordcomeaux 10y ago
Our realities are each a collection of stories we each tell ourselves. Sometimes parts of the stories two people believe will overlap and we'll call those opinions or facts depending on situation. I'm finding it helpful to view every signal my body encounters as a chance to choose how to process it, including what I do, taste, or hear. Since adopting this view, I've effortlessly enjoyed eating foods I've hated my entire life (tomatoes, olives, CILANTRO?!), listening to country music, and doing things like chores that used to bore me to tears. If anyone sees danger in learning to view the world that way by default, I'd love to hear about it.
- immobilenopass 10y ago
  This sounds like an excellent blog post, or even a book.
  - crawfordcomeaux 10y ago
    I'm definitely going to blog about it, now that you've said that. Thanks for the inspiration :) I think I'll title it "Olive happier when olive olive the foods." (I live happier when I love all of the foods)
- xg15 10y ago
  > Sometimes parts of the stories two people believe will overlap and we'll call those opinions or facts depending on situation. I'd argue that happens slightly more often than "sometimes" - this is the basis which communication, and with it relationships and communities need to function. > If anyone sees danger in learning to view the world that way by default, I'd love to hear about it. The main danger I see is not trusting your body. Your virw seems to treat all reactions to signals as equal - but that ignores that some reactions might be more justified than others. Some contain knowledhe by others, some evolutionary development by your body. E.g., even if you could bring yourself to like the taste of rotten meat, it would be a very bad idea to do so.
  - crawfordcomeaux 10y ago
datashovel 10y ago
It may be less the responsibility of the "consumer" of the information and more the responsibility of the "producer" of the information. If the argument is presented as if something is and will always be a certain way (or even if the argument is presented without admitting that something may change) it can probably lead a lot faster to groups of people assuming the argument will be valid forever. EDIT: Or can be misinterpreted that someone presenting an argument believes the argument will remain valid forever. btw. never saw the talks the author cites, and have not followed the trade agreements very closely so I'm only speaking generally here.
cyberpanther 10y ago
A very common cognitive bias or logic pattern our brain follows is to whitelist or blacklist things. When we trust something, we follow it without question or we begin rationalizing it no matter what. And in the day of the internet and Google we can confirm basically any bias we have on either side of an issue. You should scrutinize your own thoughts and opinions and others to see if they are just believing something because it was true in the past. In terms of Javascript, there is definitely a lot of hate out there for the language and ecosystem which was entirely true. But I would argue JS has the best trajectory right now of any language out there. So you better learn it if you want to stay relevant in development. Lastly, I've found it best to not be so opinionated about everything. Sure having some opinions are great but you develop too many biases otherwise. So what if something sucks, use it anyway. You might learn something new, or maybe you can help improve it if it has potential.
- eric_cc 10y ago
  > JS has the best trajectory right now of any language out there > I've found it best to not be so opinionated about everything Lol
  - jerf 10y ago
    To be fair, JS does have a pretty good trajectory. When you start from near the absolute bottom, there's nowhere to go but up. I do not mean that as a crack against the language; it is an observation that even JS partisans ought to agree with if they think for a moment. I'm looking back all the way to its creation, when it was a language designed to handle onclick events that fit into one attribute tag. There was a lot of up to go from there. However, looking into the future and seeing where a language with Javascript's technical foundation can end up, it's hard to see it ever exceeding Python 3 or Ruby, and both of those languages, while perhaps not in outright decline, are certainly looking at having peaked and entering their "maturity" phase. Confident declarations that it is the future are probably not warranted when it is at most the present. I don't think WebAssembly will "kill" Javascript any time soon, but once it really gets going it's going to start eating away at all the really big uses of it, because WebAssembly will permit languages that can fit into niches other than the 1990s-style dynamic language maxima. It's a nice maxima (totally no sarcasm, I'm just barely old enough to have tasted the paradigms it replaced and dynamic languages got as big as they did for a reason) but it's now in 2016 also abundantly clear it's not the only one.
ak39 10y ago
Good article. List of some of the things I don't like for which I have to occasionally take another peak to see if I'm finally wrong: 1. (In languages) Garbage collection and the idea of "safe code". I didn't like it then and still don't. 2. ORMs 3. (Relational) Data models with compound keys flying around as FKs everywhere. 4. The idea of self service BI (like PowerBI etc in the hands of a business user) 5. Regexp
- allendoerfer 10y ago
  It is your lucky day, I can solve 4 of your problems (I don't even know what 4. is). The answer is: They are neither bad nor good. They are just tools, whose usefulness depends on the job.
minusf 10y ago
for me personally it is news the_mitsuhiko is "not vocally against python3 anymore". i cannot find any other recent blog posts besides this one, where python3 is praised or encouraged fully. so why be surprised if people still think he is a big python3 critic? as i see it, the issue is less about parroting other's outdated technical opinions, it's about not being vocal enough about the change of heart.
- Veen 10y ago
  > i cannot find any other recent blog posts besides this one, where python3 is praised or encouraged fully. So why be surprised if people think he's a big python critic. I think this attitude is exactly what the article argues against. If (1) you read his earlier posts about python 3 and (2) understood the specific objections and (3) are aware the current state of python 3 is such that those objections don't apply, then you have no good reason to suppose he still considers them to be valid objections. If (3) isn't the case, you still don't have a good reason to assume his opinions haven't changed, because the world moves on and that has to be accounted for.
hellofunk 10y ago
I have realized over the years that it is wise to be naturally skeptical of any opinion that is strong, either positive or negative. People who have an appreciation for gray areas, even if they ultimately do have a preference, tend to be a lot more emotionally balanced than those who maintain a very strong stance on something. I have noticed this so consistently over the last 15 years that I now consider it a fundamental benchmark by which I can gauge my ability to work or socialize with someone in general, on any topic, over the long term.
- hiou 10y ago
  I find that people who sit in the greys tend to be very worried about their public perception or have very little passion beyond maintaining personal comfort. The people I look for are those that take strong stands but are willing and able to adjust and even quickly reverse those stances. To me it's the difference between a leader and a worker bee.
  - twic 10y ago
    > The people I look for are those that take strong stands but are willing and able to adjust and even quickly reverse those stances. Sometimes called "strong opinions, weakly held". I find this principle to be incoherent - if you understand something well enough to have a strong opinion, you understand it well enough to hold that opinion strongly. Holding strong opinions on things you don't understand that well seems unhelpful.
    - steveklabnik 10y ago
      One aspect you're missing here is time; just because something is true today doesn't make it true tomorrow.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - oxide 10y ago
xtiansimon 10y ago
Headline: Engineer cries Political Arguments are not 'valid'; Forks off own nation.
rdslw 10y ago
Paul Graham in one of his best text explained similar concepts writing "I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions" Highly worth read: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
pimlottc 10y ago
This brings to mind a fantastically lucid comic about the utility of questions vs answers: http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park After all, the an opinion is just an answer to the question, "What do I think of this?"
- Unman 10y ago
  That is superb. Thank you for referencing it.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Please submit this to HN. That's fabulous. (It's also much better than a few similar conversations I've been having myself.)
  - pimlottc 10y ago
    I took your suggestion and posted it, let's see if it gets any traction
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Not much, but if you check the HN guidelines, it's fair game to re-post after a few days or so. Again, really good, and thanks for sharing this.
carsongross 10y ago
I naturally see both sides of almost any argument, and my personality is such that I would rather synthesize the arguments of both sides into a final position via dialectic. I have lost almost every major argument I've had in a corporate environment.
- ahartman00 10y ago
  compromise is often wise, but beware design by committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee
Unman 10y ago
Hmmm... while agreeing with the sentiment I am unimpressed by the lack of evidence for one of his supporting examples. What stood out for me was this bald assertion with no reference to falsifiable specifics: "_Not_only_was_it_already_a_much_improved_agreement_from_ the_start_,but it kept being modified from the initial public version of it to the one that was finally sent to national parliaments." Either the writer of this is an expert on the topic, well-known in the field and the weight of this judgement on its own is a valuable primary source; or, the writer is referring to such an analysis conducted by other experts but has not bothered to include a citation/link; or, the writer has their own critique but instead of presenting _that_ has just stated an opinion which they know to be controversial. All of the above possibilities contribute substantially to the noise around any discussion.
- zanny 10y ago
  Same thing with this line: > TTIP was negotiated in secrecy (as all trade agreements are) That seems like a really steep assumption to try to start a conversation about changing perspectives with time. He opens with a purported tautology about how you must do trade deals, which I feel hurts the argument against moving goalposts - because that seems like the exact kind of sentiment that leads to the behavior in the first place. This has always happened, thus it must always continue to happen is rarely a way to start productive dialog about something.
  - Unman 10y ago
    That's another good example. The original post is actually nearly an example of "How to start a flamewar." You can even see the discussion of CETA spawning a long, subsidiary thread which distracts from the central thesis which we should be arguing about. (I am not offering an opinion on the content of that discussion.)
    - zanny 10y ago
      The real takeaway should be that if you want to make a point about the topic of discussion you really cannot use real world examples. Nothing is black and white, everything is nuanced, and online someone will argue anything (including the connotations associated with the word "is" in this very thread). It should be no surprise that if you make a post trying to talk about the meta of controversial topics, that if you start directly citing said topics the discussion ends up being a debate about the controversy rather than the original intent.
kstenerud 10y ago
It's unfortunate, but we have a tendency to take some beliefs so deeply that they become a part of our core identity. Once this happens, validation of the idea becomes validation of ourselves. Attacks upon the idea become attacks upon ourselves. Once someone has reached this point, logic simply cannot reach them. Successfully defeating their arguments will only strengthen their resolve (the backfire effect), because they're being driven by the amygdala, which only understands threat response. They will grab onto any argument, no matter how flimsy, and be completely unaware of how little sense it makes. Any further argument with them will at best do nothing, at worst make you look as much a fool as he. The wise man learns to recognize this state and back off.
mooreds 10y ago
Try not to move the goalposts. If someone compromises, acknowledge that and thank them for it, rather than saying "I am glad you finally saw the light, but now we need to take it a step further". Brinkmanship rarely serves to get anything done, and burns bridges when it does actually accomplish something.
profalseidol 10y ago
Two words: Socrates, Marx
danso 10y ago
As a relative newcomer to Python, I had no real interest in working with 2.x. But I appreciated Armin's critiques of 3.x -- it was really difficult finding thorough, thoughtful critiques that were focused on 3.x's flaws, not on the pain of porting/division of the community, which is of less concern to recent bandwagon jumpers like me. Most of all, I appreciate that his libraries -- Flask, flask-sqlalchemy, Lektor -- are 3.x compatible.
agumonkey 10y ago
This is a broader topic, it touches on how to deal with communication, debate, idea exchange, solution finding, society. I've seen the postures recently from supposedly right wings partisans that were mostly stuck up on old negative facts that don't apply today.
z3t4 10y ago
Web URL's are seriously underrated ... You can not go back in time and change what you told someone ... But if you have a blog that has an URL, you can actually update the content.
madsbuch 10y ago
We need to establish that all communication is the senders responsibility. In the case of CETA, bot parts are not senders. Only one part is. They have a clear obligations to let people know about updates and imprecision about their communications.
slavik81 10y ago
The bit on CETA was interesting. I was very disappointed when I heard CETA was signed last week because I strongly opposed the copyright term extension and anticircumvention clauses from the 2009 leaked draft. However, as far as I can tell, those are not in the final agreement. Opps.
sitkack 10y ago
I have to reference an Arthur C Clarke essay, "Hazards of Prophecy" with this quote > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that > something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When > he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong. I have found that the wisest, smartest, most mature folks will re-evaluate their opinions in light of new information, and often change their mind.

351 points by JonoBB 10y ago

Except Internet Explorer... that will always be the same. :)

Part of the issue is efficiency, we have to make choices and cannot reevaluate everything constantly. Also, we can't be specialists in everything. So programming languages, we have to pick a few and become good at them. It's one thing to take another hard look when applying for a new job for example, but we cannot keep track of all programming languages and their evolutions.

andybak 10y ago

I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ness is a taint on his soul. Contrast that with reformulations that make it explicit that John's foo-ness is a fleeting association related to both his present situation, your current perception of it and the current socially accepted meaning of foo along with all it's implied baggage. I realise I might be rather off-topic :-)

wolfgke 10y ago
> If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Interestingly in Spanish and Portuguese there are two verbs of "to be": "ser" and "estar". These have different meanings: ser ist mostly used for persistent states of being, while estar is mostly used for something that is only temporarily as it is, but could be different the next time.
- praseodym 10y ago
  Isn't that a bit like "is" vs. "is being"?
  - pedrocr 10y ago
    The "is being" construct also exists by using the two verbs ("estar a ser") but it's not the same. Basically in order of permanence: ser -> a mostly permanent characteristic estar -> a current characteristic that could change in the future estar a ser -> a characteristic of the specific interaction
    - raldi 10y ago
      Is that last one like, "I am to be married on Saturday"?
      - pedrocr 10y ago
        Not really, that's just a future tense. Here's the correspondence instantiated: "I am tall" -> "sou alto" (ser) "I am broke" -> "estou falido" (estar) "I am being boring" -> "estou a ser aborrecido" (estar a ser) What english doesn't have as easily without context is the distinction between the first two forms because it has a single verb for both.
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879933 you gave an example of "estar a ser" for Portuguese. Since I currently try to learn both Spanish and Portuguese: Does a form similar to "estar a ser" also exist in Spanish or is it specific to Portuguese?
      - schoen 10y ago
        I think that pedrocr is from Portugal so in case you're learning Brazilian Portuguese you should consider that Brazilians usually use "estar + present participle" where the Portuguese use "estar a + infinitive" (for example "estou a falar" vs. "estou falando"). Brazilians thus have "estar sendo" which can be used in many cases where English has "is being", but as a non-native speaker I'm not sure what I can claim about its connotations or whether it's the same as "estar a ser". But my initial guess is that the Portuguese say "estou a ser" just as they say "estou a falar", while Brazilians say "estou sendo" just as they say "estou falando". Spanish-speakers in turn have "estar siendo" with the Spanish present participle of ser, like "estoy siendo". I suspect this is the standard form of this construction in all kinds of Spanish.
xiaq 10y ago
I don't think you went off-topic at all. The article says "avoid judgement of a particular thing, since it will become outdated in future". E-prime says "now you can't make such judgements because I have taken away your tool of doing so". I think they have the same goal. (I wrote this comment in E-prime :)
- schoen 10y ago
  In the case of the judgments of Python that the original article refers to, I can see ways that E-prime could help (because the criticisms might be phrased more concretely, like "Python 3 lacks the 'u' qualifier for strings" or something, allowing a reassessment of whether this problem was still true in the future) but maybe one could still say something like "its creators designed Python 3 hastily and sloppily without regard to programmers' convenience", which, if true or believed at first, never stops being applicable even if the language gets improved later on.
gabemart 10y ago
Who would admit to lying sometimes? Almost everyone. Who would admit to being a liar? Fewer people. But what is a liar other than someone who tells lies sometimes? I agree that the idea something "is" something else is a tricky one in language.
martimoose 10y ago
> Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best I was going to say this is ironic but I will rather say I find this ironic
appleflaxen 10y ago
completely on point, actually. Plus a link to a cool, thought-provoking concept. thanks!
debt 10y ago
English prime should help you become a better writer if only because it forces you to consider sentence structure which forces you to pay closer attention to what you're writing. I didn't use it here because I'm lazy.
barrkel 10y ago
The irregular nature of "to be" in English comes from it being a blend of three different roots with a somewhat similar division you're talking about (but certainly not as clear, division was more about tense than duration). The fallacy you're talking about I consider a specific instance of the labeling problem. If someone is marginally in a group and you apply the label of the group on the individual, suddenly it seems ok to use attributes of the group to reason about the individual. One jumps from specific to general and back to specific again without acknowledging the loss of information from the abstraction layers. Often comes up in post hoc rationalisation of harsher criminal punishment, for example. John is a criminal; we need to be tougher with criminals; therefore we need to be tougher with John - without regard for the specifics of John's case.
- schoen 10y ago
  One analysis of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(fallacy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(fallacy) but there might also be other ways of thinking about it.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    The example given in that shows it's not the same thing at all.
    - schoen 10y ago
      How about in the other direction? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_accident While I don't mean to say that these provide a full analysis of the issue you're talking about, I don't see how they're unrelated to it.
dahart 10y ago
I had never heard of E-Prime, but this reminded me of Reginald Braithwaite's presentation "Optimism" [1]. He advocates becoming aware of when people use temporary or permanent language, and suggests using temporary language for criticizing other people and permanent language for praising people. This is a brilliant bit of human psychology that is highly practical in everyday situations. I don't know whether E-Prime is practical, it seems problematic to try to police the language itself, but the goals & rationale have a good heart. We probably would be better off if we could all speak less dogmatically and hyperbolically. I do recall someone here on HN mentioning attempts to create a new language in which one could not lie, I wonder if E-prime was what was being referred to... [1] https://github.com/raganwald/presentations/blob/master/optimism.md https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12298898

dorianm 10y ago

For comparaison, Ruby 3 is gonna introduce a pretty big breaking change (frozen string literals) but they already shipped a way to optional enable it by-file (magic comment) and globally to the ruby interpreter (just a parameter) so that all the libraries and projects can slowly fix it in a compatible manner (often just calling .dup is enough). So that's when it's time for Ruby 3 the transition will be pretty painless. More info: https://wyeworks.com/blog/2015/12/1/immutable-strings-in-ruby-2-dot-3 https://wyeworks.com/blog/2015/12/1/immutable-strings-in-rub... (Frozen string literals allows strings to be in memory only once and not having to reallocate each time, so a pretty big memory and cpu optimization) (Also for instance rubocop already recommends adding the magic comment to all ruby files)

uiri 10y ago
(Frozen string literals allows strings to be in memory only once and not having to reallocate each time, so a pretty big memory and cpu optimization) Isn't this the purpose of symbols in the language? This seems like a pretty basic optimization, surely there were good reasons not to introduce it in earlier versions.
- dorianm 10y ago
  e.g. 1000.times { "hello" } creates strings 1000 times but: 1000.times { "hello".freeze } only one time. The thing about frozen strings is they can't be changed "inline": e.g. : "Hello".freeze << " world" doesn't work but "Hello".freeze + " world" does because it creates a new string. (It's funny because << is often recommended as an optimization)
maxerickson 10y ago
Magic imports from __future__ are the usual way of turning on features in Python. The incompatibilities introduced in Python 3 weren't done that way to save on implementation effort among other reasons.
- dorianm 10y ago
  Maybe python2 --enable-print-parentheses and other flags could have been useful to slowly detect future issues on python 2 code.

lazyjones 10y ago

It's not the responsibility of the author to anticipate future changes that might weaken his current arguments. The reader is responsible for taking into account the time and context of the text they are reading. It's why we like to have e.g. "(2013)" added to anchor texts on HN, for example.

johncolanduoni 10y ago
It is, when the author is writing them (or saying them) in 2016. I thought he made it pretty clear that was what he was complaining about.

simonhamp 10y ago

I think a sideline point here is to not appropriate other people's opinions from a specific point in time just because they happen to align with yours (opinion/bias) at the current time. And of course, try to have as wide and deep an understanding of the subject as possible before forming strong publicised opinion in the first place.

9mit3t2m9h9a 10y ago

I think the effect described in the text has another side: imagine that at some point using XYZ was obviously a bad idea for multiple reasons for a specific person in specific circumstances. Obviously, keeping track of the changes in XYZ will have a lower priority for a person who is not going to use XYZ anyway, even if one of the multiple show-stoppers gets fixed/changed/redesigned. This means that the person's opinion about XYZ slowly gets stale.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

> Then the entire thing spiraled out of control: people not only railed against TTIP but took their opposition and looked for similar contracts and found CETA. Since both are trade agreements there is naturally a lot of common ground between them. The subtleties where quickly lost. Where the initial arguments against TTIP were food standards, public services and intransparent ISDS courts many of the critics failed to realize that CETA fundamentally was a different beast. CETA has ISDS as well, and if only on that point alone, CETA is objectionable. This argument comes off as disingenuous, the similarities between the deals are not imagined. ISDS isn't even the only similarity; CETA also contained objectionable new copyright provisions (though apparently those are mostly gone now), for example.

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
> CETA has ISDS as well, and if only on that point alone, CETA is objectionable. Author here: that is not disputed. However the ISDS in CETA is a permanent tribunal where both Canada and Europe elect lawyers equally. The processes also require transparency and there is an appeal process. None of that was in the original draft of it and has been added over time as a response to criticism.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  Well, that might be a slight improvement, but it's still ISDS. The fundamental problem with ISDS is not its lack of transparency, but that it allows corporations to sue governments for domestic policy changes in the first place.
  - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
    > Well, that might be a slight improvement, but it's still ISDS. There is nothing wrong with ISDS.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
      In that case, can you explain how Canadian and European legal systems are so insufficient for seeking legal recourse for legitimate grievances that companies need to be able to sue either government in international tribunals? Because that's ostensibly the argument for ISDS, and I don't see how it applies to Western liberal democracies with properly functioning courts. The argument against is cases like the Philip Morris v. Uruguay case. Why couldn't the same happen under CETA? If you don't see ISDS itself as objectionable, it's not surprising that you disagree with the argument against CETA, but please try to understand where opponents are coming from.

michaelsbradley 10y ago

Hear! hear! I also recommend, more generally, reviewing logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and misconceptions as part of a regular self-review. It's important to keep a flexible mind, though achieving greater degrees of interior freedom is hard work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

crawfordcomeaux 10y ago

Our realities are each a collection of stories we each tell ourselves. Sometimes parts of the stories two people believe will overlap and we'll call those opinions or facts depending on situation. I'm finding it helpful to view every signal my body encounters as a chance to choose how to process it, including what I do, taste, or hear. Since adopting this view, I've effortlessly enjoyed eating foods I've hated my entire life (tomatoes, olives, CILANTRO?!), listening to country music, and doing things like chores that used to bore me to tears. If anyone sees danger in learning to view the world that way by default, I'd love to hear about it.

immobilenopass 10y ago
This sounds like an excellent blog post, or even a book.
- crawfordcomeaux 10y ago
  I'm definitely going to blog about it, now that you've said that. Thanks for the inspiration :) I think I'll title it "Olive happier when olive olive the foods." (I live happier when I love all of the foods)
xg15 10y ago
> Sometimes parts of the stories two people believe will overlap and we'll call those opinions or facts depending on situation. I'd argue that happens slightly more often than "sometimes" - this is the basis which communication, and with it relationships and communities need to function. > If anyone sees danger in learning to view the world that way by default, I'd love to hear about it. The main danger I see is not trusting your body. Your virw seems to treat all reactions to signals as equal - but that ignores that some reactions might be more justified than others. Some contain knowledhe by others, some evolutionary development by your body. E.g., even if you could bring yourself to like the taste of rotten meat, it would be a very bad idea to do so.
- crawfordcomeaux 10y ago

datashovel 10y ago

It may be less the responsibility of the "consumer" of the information and more the responsibility of the "producer" of the information. If the argument is presented as if something is and will always be a certain way (or even if the argument is presented without admitting that something may change) it can probably lead a lot faster to groups of people assuming the argument will be valid forever. EDIT: Or can be misinterpreted that someone presenting an argument believes the argument will remain valid forever. btw. never saw the talks the author cites, and have not followed the trade agreements very closely so I'm only speaking generally here.

cyberpanther 10y ago

A very common cognitive bias or logic pattern our brain follows is to whitelist or blacklist things. When we trust something, we follow it without question or we begin rationalizing it no matter what. And in the day of the internet and Google we can confirm basically any bias we have on either side of an issue. You should scrutinize your own thoughts and opinions and others to see if they are just believing something because it was true in the past. In terms of Javascript, there is definitely a lot of hate out there for the language and ecosystem which was entirely true. But I would argue JS has the best trajectory right now of any language out there. So you better learn it if you want to stay relevant in development. Lastly, I've found it best to not be so opinionated about everything. Sure having some opinions are great but you develop too many biases otherwise. So what if something sucks, use it anyway. You might learn something new, or maybe you can help improve it if it has potential.

eric_cc 10y ago
> JS has the best trajectory right now of any language out there > I've found it best to not be so opinionated about everything Lol
- jerf 10y ago
  To be fair, JS does have a pretty good trajectory. When you start from near the absolute bottom, there's nowhere to go but up. I do not mean that as a crack against the language; it is an observation that even JS partisans ought to agree with if they think for a moment. I'm looking back all the way to its creation, when it was a language designed to handle onclick events that fit into one attribute tag. There was a lot of up to go from there. However, looking into the future and seeing where a language with Javascript's technical foundation can end up, it's hard to see it ever exceeding Python 3 or Ruby, and both of those languages, while perhaps not in outright decline, are certainly looking at having peaked and entering their "maturity" phase. Confident declarations that it is the future are probably not warranted when it is at most the present. I don't think WebAssembly will "kill" Javascript any time soon, but once it really gets going it's going to start eating away at all the really big uses of it, because WebAssembly will permit languages that can fit into niches other than the 1990s-style dynamic language maxima. It's a nice maxima (totally no sarcasm, I'm just barely old enough to have tasted the paradigms it replaced and dynamic languages got as big as they did for a reason) but it's now in 2016 also abundantly clear it's not the only one.

ak39 10y ago

Good article. List of some of the things I don't like for which I have to occasionally take another peak to see if I'm finally wrong: 1. (In languages) Garbage collection and the idea of "safe code". I didn't like it then and still don't. 2. ORMs 3. (Relational) Data models with compound keys flying around as FKs everywhere. 4. The idea of self service BI (like PowerBI etc in the hands of a business user) 5. Regexp

allendoerfer 10y ago
It is your lucky day, I can solve 4 of your problems (I don't even know what 4. is). The answer is: They are neither bad nor good. They are just tools, whose usefulness depends on the job.

minusf 10y ago

for me personally it is news the_mitsuhiko is "not vocally against python3 anymore". i cannot find any other recent blog posts besides this one, where python3 is praised or encouraged fully. so why be surprised if people still think he is a big python3 critic? as i see it, the issue is less about parroting other's outdated technical opinions, it's about not being vocal enough about the change of heart.

Veen 10y ago
> i cannot find any other recent blog posts besides this one, where python3 is praised or encouraged fully. So why be surprised if people think he's a big python critic. I think this attitude is exactly what the article argues against. If (1) you read his earlier posts about python 3 and (2) understood the specific objections and (3) are aware the current state of python 3 is such that those objections don't apply, then you have no good reason to suppose he still considers them to be valid objections. If (3) isn't the case, you still don't have a good reason to assume his opinions haven't changed, because the world moves on and that has to be accounted for.

hellofunk 10y ago

I have realized over the years that it is wise to be naturally skeptical of any opinion that is strong, either positive or negative. People who have an appreciation for gray areas, even if they ultimately do have a preference, tend to be a lot more emotionally balanced than those who maintain a very strong stance on something. I have noticed this so consistently over the last 15 years that I now consider it a fundamental benchmark by which I can gauge my ability to work or socialize with someone in general, on any topic, over the long term.

hiou 10y ago
I find that people who sit in the greys tend to be very worried about their public perception or have very little passion beyond maintaining personal comfort. The people I look for are those that take strong stands but are willing and able to adjust and even quickly reverse those stances. To me it's the difference between a leader and a worker bee.
- twic 10y ago
  > The people I look for are those that take strong stands but are willing and able to adjust and even quickly reverse those stances. Sometimes called "strong opinions, weakly held". I find this principle to be incoherent - if you understand something well enough to have a strong opinion, you understand it well enough to hold that opinion strongly. Holding strong opinions on things you don't understand that well seems unhelpful.
  - steveklabnik 10y ago
    One aspect you're missing here is time; just because something is true today doesn't make it true tomorrow.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - oxide 10y ago

xtiansimon 10y ago

Headline: Engineer cries Political Arguments are not 'valid'; Forks off own nation.

rdslw 10y ago

Paul Graham in one of his best text explained similar concepts writing "I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions" Highly worth read: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html http://paulgraham.com/identity.html

pimlottc 10y ago

This brings to mind a fantastically lucid comic about the utility of questions vs answers: http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park After all, the an opinion is just an answer to the question, "What do I think of this?"

Unman 10y ago
That is superb. Thank you for referencing it.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Please submit this to HN. That's fabulous. (It's also much better than a few similar conversations I've been having myself.)
- pimlottc 10y ago
  I took your suggestion and posted it, let's see if it gets any traction
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Not much, but if you check the HN guidelines, it's fair game to re-post after a few days or so. Again, really good, and thanks for sharing this.

carsongross 10y ago

I naturally see both sides of almost any argument, and my personality is such that I would rather synthesize the arguments of both sides into a final position via dialectic. I have lost almost every major argument I've had in a corporate environment.

ahartman00 10y ago
compromise is often wise, but beware design by committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee

Unman 10y ago

Hmmm... while agreeing with the sentiment I am unimpressed by the lack of evidence for one of his supporting examples. What stood out for me was this bald assertion with no reference to falsifiable specifics: "_Not_only_was_it_already_a_much_improved_agreement_from_ the_start_,but it kept being modified from the initial public version of it to the one that was finally sent to national parliaments." Either the writer of this is an expert on the topic, well-known in the field and the weight of this judgement on its own is a valuable primary source; or, the writer is referring to such an analysis conducted by other experts but has not bothered to include a citation/link; or, the writer has their own critique but instead of presenting _that_ has just stated an opinion which they know to be controversial. All of the above possibilities contribute substantially to the noise around any discussion.

zanny 10y ago
Same thing with this line: > TTIP was negotiated in secrecy (as all trade agreements are) That seems like a really steep assumption to try to start a conversation about changing perspectives with time. He opens with a purported tautology about how you must do trade deals, which I feel hurts the argument against moving goalposts - because that seems like the exact kind of sentiment that leads to the behavior in the first place. This has always happened, thus it must always continue to happen is rarely a way to start productive dialog about something.
- Unman 10y ago
  That's another good example. The original post is actually nearly an example of "How to start a flamewar." You can even see the discussion of CETA spawning a long, subsidiary thread which distracts from the central thesis which we should be arguing about. (I am not offering an opinion on the content of that discussion.)
  - zanny 10y ago
    The real takeaway should be that if you want to make a point about the topic of discussion you really cannot use real world examples. Nothing is black and white, everything is nuanced, and online someone will argue anything (including the connotations associated with the word "is" in this very thread). It should be no surprise that if you make a post trying to talk about the meta of controversial topics, that if you start directly citing said topics the discussion ends up being a debate about the controversy rather than the original intent.

kstenerud 10y ago

It's unfortunate, but we have a tendency to take some beliefs so deeply that they become a part of our core identity. Once this happens, validation of the idea becomes validation of ourselves. Attacks upon the idea become attacks upon ourselves. Once someone has reached this point, logic simply cannot reach them. Successfully defeating their arguments will only strengthen their resolve (the backfire effect), because they're being driven by the amygdala, which only understands threat response. They will grab onto any argument, no matter how flimsy, and be completely unaware of how little sense it makes. Any further argument with them will at best do nothing, at worst make you look as much a fool as he. The wise man learns to recognize this state and back off.

mooreds 10y ago

Try not to move the goalposts. If someone compromises, acknowledge that and thank them for it, rather than saying "I am glad you finally saw the light, but now we need to take it a step further". Brinkmanship rarely serves to get anything done, and burns bridges when it does actually accomplish something.

profalseidol 10y ago

Two words: Socrates, Marx

danso 10y ago

As a relative newcomer to Python, I had no real interest in working with 2.x. But I appreciated Armin's critiques of 3.x -- it was really difficult finding thorough, thoughtful critiques that were focused on 3.x's flaws, not on the pain of porting/division of the community, which is of less concern to recent bandwagon jumpers like me. Most of all, I appreciate that his libraries -- Flask, flask-sqlalchemy, Lektor -- are 3.x compatible.

agumonkey 10y ago

This is a broader topic, it touches on how to deal with communication, debate, idea exchange, solution finding, society. I've seen the postures recently from supposedly right wings partisans that were mostly stuck up on old negative facts that don't apply today.

z3t4 10y ago

Web URL's are seriously underrated ... You can not go back in time and change what you told someone ... But if you have a blog that has an URL, you can actually update the content.

madsbuch 10y ago

We need to establish that all communication is the senders responsibility. In the case of CETA, bot parts are not senders. Only one part is. They have a clear obligations to let people know about updates and imprecision about their communications.

slavik81 10y ago

The bit on CETA was interesting. I was very disappointed when I heard CETA was signed last week because I strongly opposed the copyright term extension and anticircumvention clauses from the 2009 leaked draft. However, as far as I can tell, those are not in the final agreement. Opps.

sitkack 10y ago

I have to reference an Arthur C Clarke essay, "Hazards of Prophecy" with this quote > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that > something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When > he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong. I have found that the wisest, smartest, most mature folks will re-evaluate their opinions in light of new information, and often change their mind.