Fully agreed. This is also extremely prevalent in any economic discussions here in HN where most of the first-world dwellers are cozying up their minds with the generic statement "it is all getting better on average" which I think is utter BS.

As a guy who has been to pretty poor parts of the world and lives in a country that touts any small bill that will benefit zero common folk -- but is always advertised as such for 30 years now -- I have to say, most first-world population is tragically misinformed on how are the average people around the world living.

It was mostly talking about the amount per day needed to have proper nutrition. Why do you shift the goalposts to abstract terms like "it's improving faster"? Sure, if you are on the rock bottom, it's only up from there on, and obviously you want to go faster when distancing yourself from the bottom.

Zero relevance to the article.

Sure, keep moving timelines. It's what makes you money in the area. I am sure when around mid-2019 hits, it will suddenly be "most experts agree that the first feasible self-driving cars will arrive circa 2025".

You guys are hilarious.

Usually such machines don't need best CPUs around but they definitely do need ECC memory and serious NAS-like capabilities. So maybe older-gen Xeons? I am no expert though. Hopefully somebody publishes a blog post about it.

No offense, just seems fishy.

In my observations (and some bias; I am openly admitting it) which were sometimes reinforced by meeting real Japanese people, most Japanese are xenophobes, racists and very easily collectively agree not to speak about stuff they dislike / feel threatens some imaginary dominance / endanger their prejudices.

For all the glorification the country and its people get around the globe, and for all the romantic blemish their fatalistic and stoic philosophy receives, the Japanese I've encountered and observed remotely are pretty ordinary people with a lot of prejudice and hostility towards foreigners attached.

Not impressed. And this news comes as no surprise as well.

Guess people just love to glorify stuff that's very different from their own, with zero thought if that's actually a good thing?

I lived in Japan for several years on and off. Near the end of one of my longest stretches, I clearly remember walking by the glass window of a storefront in Osaka. I saw someone in the reflection that had an absolutely startling appearance, and gasped aloud. Taller, with different hair, eyes, and skin than anyone I'd seen in months. It was me.

The experience of returning to the USA was particularly jarring that time, too. I remember feeling surprised at how fat everyone in the airport was, how there were people with different skin colors everywhere, how loud and lacking in politeness social interactions were. I was born and raised in the USA but there I was, experiencing fight or flight response in completely ordinary situations.

I learned to forgive the Japanese after these experiences.

You know, I couldn't give two shits about xenophobic and racist people like them, really. Let them do that and be happy.

As we say in my country however: "be stupid but get the fuck off the road".

Bad influences on young people from old and prejudiced (and bitter?) people is never good. We need a world with more open-minded people and societies like the Japanese aren't helping matters at all. But to be as objective as possible -- not sure our societies help matters either.

You've just described most groups of people, particularly in the older age brackets. People are afraid of what they don't understand and generally dislike change and unpredictability.

That's not to say that xenophobes/prejudiced people can't produce anything interesting or worthy of admiration. Isolation in many ways has led to interesting solutions to problems, and the preservation of culture can have benefits just as it has disadvantages.

Related: have you seen Japanese wood joinery? Gods, that thing is next level!

The "cruft" from the Phoenix framework is absolutely minimal -- mandatory 4-6 files per project at the most. And they're quite small, too.

This is what I call living in a bubble, dear sir/madam.

I grew in a small town in Eastern Europe (~100k population) and me plus the local 50 or so programmers (using Apple II and 8086-based computers), in 1996, while we were in our teenage years, were painfully aware that games like chess and Go are brute-force-able with some elements of recognizing and memorizing viable strategies (and throwing out the unviable ones early on). And that was what, 15-19 year old late teenagers, and we knew it. So be sure that many people knew it -- they just never chose that area of expertise specifically.

This also says a lot about the quality of the average professors and textbooks, but let's not go off-topic, plus it's a huge discussion area.

Cynically speaking, to me that's a paid article to keep hype around the persona since he's losing a lot of PR points lately.

I am not taking such a "visionary" seriously unless he manages to ship the one consumer-level product he promised.

And yes, many of his ideas are COMMON SENSE, I can't for the life of me understand the praise.

Hasn't been a good month for Essential. The phone he promised in June didn't ship in July, lost VP's of marketing and communication and today Google hired away his lead UX designer to fill the same role for Google Home.

Both of these aren't promising.

You're thinking of hygrometers, which measure relative humidity using capacitive, resistive, or gravimetric methods.

New devices and manufacturers don't typically improve the 3rd or 4th generation.

Rushed devices are largely premature, unusuable, and still move things forward: iPhone 1, Galaxy Note 1..

When did quality, functionality, delivering on scale and time get better? iPhone 3-4, Galaxy Note 3-4, LG G3-G4, Samsung S3-S4, iPad 3-4, Nexus 4-5.

Hype aside, the first effort isn't something that should be undercut.

What I am saying is that writing such articles is embarrassing and reads like a paid hype. Plus the guy really doesn't have much under his belt.

I and many other practical people dislike person cults. Especially such forced ones.

Guys like Rubin have built something that touched a lot of people, and grew to be much larger than them. I think that's not really something I can look to anyone to credit, or discredit, than, say someone else who has done the same.

I'm not sure if everyone is the type to take an the article immediately as gospel, or trying to immediately debunk it as gospel.

Maybe Wired has been been in my life through a few internet generations. Wired once was a key way of bringing attention to corners of the internet that weren't always easy to locate.

So IMO it's absolutely pointless trying to argue with them in the first place. They are set in their ways and while a good chunk of them are pretty strict and excellent in what they do, they are not open to any changes.

I would be the first to agree that Go and Rust aren't ready to start replacing drivers but IMO people should start trying! (Or invest in LLVM some more?)

C/C++'s faults aren't ever going away. They're too convenient in their target area. I am against the overly-used "disruption" term -- I happen to believe the USA tech blogosphere bastardized the term long ago -- but IMO the systems programming area is very, VERY overdue for disruption.

It's time.