I think you might be confused about what the GP means by pattern matching. This is not regular expressions: those are fine as libraries. There is another form of pattern matching, which is over parameters, including their values and types. An early example can be found inErlang, and another (quite different as it has a very different type system) in Scala.

This kind of pattern matching is something you either have to add to a language directly, or support macros powerful enough you are in Common Lisp territory.

Robotics can make sense in agriculture, but as every farmer will tell you, farming is really about economics: Getting good returns of investment on a weeding robot, given how relatively cheap pesticides are, is going to be tricky given regular year's crop prices.

The last time we had a boom in agricultural tech had nothing to do with the tech getting better, and a lot with a terrible drought in the midwest that made prices skyrocket. When corn pays $8 per bushel, instead of $3, suddenly everyone was willing to buy tech. Then prices drop again, nobody wants to keep buying, and many people that bought into the tech when they expected $8 forever just went bankrupt.

Eventually we'll have cheap enough robots that will also handle pests, and might even isolate or destroy diseased plants, lowering our chemical uses while still having great yields, but in agriculture, it's the economics that is stopping a tech boom, as aiming for the top of the technology chain, including the best seeds, is quite the gamble given what weather can do to your operation.

Forget about the word: A plane's autopilot augments the pilot's capabilities, and there are very clear delineations in when the pilot can safely pay a whole lot less attention, the places where the autopilot is useless, and the places where it's better to let the autopilot do the actual inputs because they are closer to correct than what the pilot will do. There are no 5 second windows from 'not really having to pay attention' to 'death for you and your occupants'.

We also have traditional driver augmentation tech in cars: ABS, automatic emergency braking, basic cruise control, sensors that beep when you are doing something terrible: Neither of those things make paying attention for even an instant safer, but many help in emergency situations.

Look at, instead, Tesla's Autopilot. it does a lot for you in some situations: so much that paying attention while it's doing its thing is difficult: It doesn't really want any input from the driver when things are going well. But things go from going well to catastrophically bad very quickly, and the warnings have proven to come way too late, and that's if they come. It's just not good enough to let to its own devices most of the time, and yet, it will make it harder for the driver to keep attention on the road, as it takes all the mandatory engagement away: It makes zoning out easier, and thus making able drivers worse!

Forget about that flaccid mind rhetoric of yours: It's the equivalent of broken UX, or bad industrial design. Yes, the consumer can make better choices... like never turning the thing on at all, as it's an anti-safety feature. Elon should be ashamed that he is selling it in this state: Self driving cars are the future, but Autopilot is crap. Technologically weaker, yet better thought driver augmentation systems from traditional manufacturers are safer overall.

Sure, there are no examples as long as we don't county a single plant variety of domesticated animal as an improvement. Have you seen how wild corn, wild wheat, or any wild fruit used to be like before human's major breeding efforts? Without Mayan corn breeding, they'd not have had a civilization at all.

I guess you also wish we did not have dogs, which have been bred for thousands of years to work with humans, as opposed to pack predators. Taming horses and cows? Oxes? All terrible things.

We have also done terrible things like introduce potatoes to Europe, and wheat and soybeans to North America, allowing the scourge of Tofu to spread from San Francisco to New Yorl.

So sure, we can pretend humans haven't improved on nature, if we also believe that humans shouldn't have left the hunter-gatherer stage.

But isn't the point to have news that a left leaning poster would be interested in, while the comments are only slightly to the left of breitbart? Slashdot comments nowadays makes Hacker news looks like a bunch of hippies.

Yep. I've made a career out of telling CEOs about key bits of information that people in their organization knew, but their inner circle did their best to never mention. It's crazy how often we think that there's something that 'everyone knows that everyone knows', but that in reality is unknown by execs.

Another common trope is how managers have both upward-focused skills and downward focused skills. So many managers of managers end up being completely unaware that a manager is terrible dealing with their reports, and only learn this when suddenly a team quits en-masse.

No you can't, as there are a million attack vectors, both digital an physical, for someone that is willing to blatantly mess with election results. I can invent bonus voters, make people think they voted, but ultimately have their votes thrown away in a variety of ways, MITM vote handshakes manipulating voting machines... and really, people that are willing to make such election manipulation can just make sure that the opponents that can win are just not in the ballot in the first place.

When one is afraid of election fraud, the weakness of the actual mechanisms used aren't really the problem.

I've been a part of aggressive, well crafted phishing tests in Silicon Valley companies. Some of those tests were secret enough that only 3 people were aware of the test in advance... and the results were terrifying. Thanks to HTML abuse, forged headers and very good copy, I've seen 70% of storied security teams fall for the phishing attempt, going as far as to enter their 2fa values for AWS. In a real world situation, just one person falling for it would have been a problem.

In practice, what I have learned is that against a sophisticated opponent, any security system that relies on just usernames, passwords, and simple 2fa might as well not exist. The bare minimum is unique usernames and passwords just to double check that the right human is on the other side, attached to client certificates that are unique to each machine, and strong mechanisms to make sure that nobody generates user + certificate pairs for new computers without big flashing signs popping up. Anything weaker is just relying on being an uninteresting target, which is not a good thing to rely on.

There's some trickery that is done with refuges and GMOs, to try to slow down the insect population's ability to resist bt toxins and their family members, but yes, ultimately there will be resistance to any and all pesticides and herbicides: The best we can hope for is good agronomy to slow it down, but that's difficult to enforce, as the behaviors that mitigate the risk also lower yields, and ignoring this kind of risk for a bit more yield this year is very tempting.

In practice, what is supposed to happen is that people are researching other insecticides all the time, and by the time resistance is common, there's replacements that ignore it. If we can't outpace insects and weeds, and suddenly all yields drop 15-20% it won't be pretty.

Growing anything to decent yields involves pesticides, in one form or another. Your typical Non-GMO, certified organic produce gets sprayed with pesticides too, it's just a list of old pesticides. Heck, compounds that you naturally find in many plants harm insects already. Humans have an immune system: Do you think that plants are helpless? What we do with pesticides, and GMOs in particular, is to make the plants 'win' their race vs insects and diseases faster than they would without is. Now, what really matters is how much of the pesticide remains in what we eat, and how toxic it is to humans or other parts of the ecosystem we don't want to harm. Take neem oil: OK for humans, not terrible for birds, but then when it's washed off into the river, fish get poisoned, and organic farmers raise their hands and claim they are not to blame for anything.

To our knowledge, bt toxins are not a big issue for humans: First, you have to still manage to eat a lot of that stuff, which is no easy, given that the toxins break down. But if you end up eating a huge dose for some reason, you might get allergy-like symptoms, and the toxins will break down in your body in a couple of days. There's many dangerous liquids to drink in a modern farm, but a swig of a bt liquid is not anywhere near the top half. Now, if anything, the GMO makes things better than the old alternative of spraying with the same toxin: It's produced in the leaves, which is probably not what you eat, and will stop being produced when the plant's cells die.

So the answer is 'we are pretty sure bt toxins are pretty benign compared to other pesticides and herbicides' If you want to complain about something GMO companies are doing nowadays, see what is happening with Dicamba, which is just too good of a herbicide, and either the tests for the new formulation's safety are wrong, or many farmers just fail to follow the directions.

There are entire categories of problems that are only possible because of tooling that we just should not use. Just like buffer overflows can only happen because your library allows them, the same thing happens with SQL injection, and even cross site scripting.

if one of the stairs in your house has a missing step, we do not tra

It's not really about the kind of people that pay for the credit cards either: A CC company can make plenty of money if you pay everything in full: they only really lose if you don't pay.

In most cases, the one that pays for the miles is the merchant, in interchange rate fees. In practice, a bank can end up charging almost 2% for those, if the card is really good for the consumer. People that get rewards use their card more. You get your 1% in cash back/miles, and the rest is what the bank really makes. Cards are worse in Europe because those fees are limited, and thus the bank would lose money if they handed you the same perks American cards give. As a merchant, you build your fees into the pricing structure.

So who really loses? In practice, the person that pays cash without the rewards and doesn't get a discount.

First, background: I have been using Java at work, at least part time, since 2005. I started getting paid to write scala since 2012. I've definitely ran large, critical applications in Scala: I am running some right now.

Scala is a far more featureful, complicated language than Java is. A lot of what it gives you is really very high quality syntactic sugar (case classes, lambdas, pattern matching), but the one thing that sets it apart is its type system.

The trick is that nothing forces you to use Scala as if you were using Haskell instead: You can use it as a more sugary Java, using the extra type system fun sparingly. Restraint is the name of the game here, and also the reason some people have Scala horror stories: A company decides that Scala sounds great, and then hire some hotshot scalaz committer to teach everyone else how it's done. Then your codebase is full of operators that look like line noise, every class extends a base that comes straight from category theory, and half the developers say 'screw this, let's rewrite it all in Go!'

There is value in the category theory, and using arcane libraries like cats or shapeless, but 99% of the time, you don't need to: Just like back in the 90s you had to stop people from overusing OO design patterns, or their code will end up looking like Spring, Scala shops have to remind people to do the same when it comes to higher kinded types, hlists and concepts out of category theory. You really don't need any of that to use Scala successfully. Just ending up in a world where you typically don't need either a mocking library or any dependency injection nonsense is more than enough to switch. (Curse you Rod Johnson!)

The one thing where I would make people spend some time studying is in basics of functional programming, the very first of which is to learn to remove side effects from code, and clearly separate code that changes state from computation. Chances are you were doing some of that already in Java if you were hoping for a good unit test suite, but it's more important in Scala

Career wise, the more is a no brainer IMO: If you write Java, you are one in a very large pool of completely generic candidates that can use Spring and Hibernate to do something super boring. In Sala, you enter a smaller pool that most of the most average Java developers will never try to enter, so, on average, the job will be more interesting, and the pay will be higher.

If they are such a simple software company they are going to sink anyway, because their engineering managers are insane, hiring over a thousand engineers for such a simple job.

Billing, payouts, routing, signups, multiple mobile apps... the smallest engineering staff I'd consider running that company with (and that's just engineering) is probably about a hundred, and that'd probably require throwing away most of their billing customizations and changing payments providers to something that provides a more comprehensive solution.

San Francisco could be easily four times denser than it is. SoMa might have all this new shiny startups, but it still feels full of warehouses, and 5 stories is considered tall. The east side of the Mission is also full of warehouses and single family homes, just with tiny yards. And that's without getting into the very low density of the west side of San Francisco, which is about as dense as the old, more cramped midwestern suburbs. San Francisco could, and should, develop in the same way a Madrid and Manhattan. Housing costs are catastrophic precisely because the people living there are refusing to build.