And in 2060 developers will probably think something like what would think today, if shown a tattoo of "ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y" in the flaccid forearm of a 70-year-old.
Speaking for myself, if I saw a COBOL tattoo, I'd most likely think "Duuuude, old school... respect!" ;) Not so sure about JS though - is it perhaps more likely to seem like Visual Basic in 40 years? As a JS monkey myself, though, I like it* :)
As for alternatives... would a Lisp tattoo be better?
* Apart from the i coming out of nowhere, which keeps setting off my this-is-a-bug alarm ;)
Well, I was thinking more about the contrast between the supposed permanence of tattoo and a programming language construct. Now that you have pointed it, however, it might give a certain feeling of "old school" ("self modifying code in COBOL!?") -- and I expect closures to be still "reverenced" in 2060.
Interestingly enough Hanzi Smatter focuses on mistakes with Kanji or Chinese, but I guarantee that those french translations of meals are equally hilarious.
I think we should also discuss two widely recognized fears which, in my experience, are frequently related to procrastination: fear of failure and fear of success.
Both usually go, somewhat amusingly, hand in hand, but I think they should be linked to the "mastery" discussed in the topic. Fear of both failure and success are, in short, fear of change, fear of losing control, fear of not being a master anymore.
It is indeed quite common to trade a, sometimes illusory, feeling of easiness with the known current situation for the potential uneasiness of an unknown situation given as one the possible outcomes of the failure/success. Particularly in the last case, I have seen that it is not unusual to rationalize that we have already gained achieved should not be "gambled" against the changes that would result from the success of the activity we are procrastinating.
In short, the "I'll do it tomorrow" is usually a "I'll do it when I will feel confortable with outcomes I now consider most likely". I personally have discovered that focusing in the positive aspect of the outcomes I consider most likely, even in case of failure, is usually my best weapon against procrastination.
I agree with this, but would also like to expand on it with something I've observed in myself and others that I believe is the root of fearing failure/success.
That thing is a lack of comfort with vulnerability. I believe this is because most of us hold onto dysfunctional value systems and we also live in reactionary state where we make decisions based on avoiding invalidation from our peers and authority figures, rather than striving to receive validation by becoming "better".
This is good. Brains are engines of prediction and they avoid doing things which will cause us harm.
The only answers to procrastination are "are you motivated to do it?" and "is that overridden by a negative motivation against doing it"?
Avoiding invalidation is much more of a strong and personal negative override than I ever thought years ago. It can hit you as the OP implies - fear that if I'm not in control of my life people will think I'm a weak and submissive person, or if I'm not in control thats like my childhood and makes menfeel invalidated by comparison to a helpless child - or like other people in this thread are replying - fears about doing something well (will people think me a swot?) or doing badly (my spouse will scorn me?) or all sorts.
The most common factor among the replies here is stopping asking he question "what bad thing am I avoiding by procrastination" far far too soon, and/or accepting far too vague and unhelpful 'answers' as soon as they are thought of without realising they are unhelpful.
Hugo Chavez rules Venezuela, not Colombia. In fact, under his leadership Venezuela has been at times close to going at war with Colombia.
I think you have a point, but using such an example makes you sound a snob western who divides the world in "countries I am fond of" and "countries I am not fond of".
Yes, I am quite embarrassed by this error. Now, if I'd decided to register a Colombian domain name, maybe I would have done a little more research.
Regarding your second paragraph, I think you may simply have a chip on your shoulder. My comfort with a German domain name is based on my knowledge that Germany's been a stable democracy for the last sixty years. I know very little about South America and am therefore more leery of domains backed by governments there.
I am quite fond of the UK and France, but given the curious libel and intellectual property legal environments of those two countries, respectively—yes, from my American and therefore evil, small-minded perspective—I wouldn't want to expose my business to those environment by using a registrar in the UK or France.
So sorry to not be the racist cultural-imperialist Europhile you'd like me to be.
Reading what I wrote, I now understand that it both sounded too harsh and completely lost the sarcasm in "snob western" (I should have added a [;)]). Believe me, as an Italian living in Brazil I have too often been accused of "western imperialism" to know what it feels like, and I hate it. I am really sorry, please excuse me.
And as I intended to say, I was agreeing with you: I would not trust my entire business to a .LY domaim, and do believe that .DE is more stable than, say, .SO. I was saying that the lack os research combined with the Germany/Colombia example was not the best way to defend your position, particularly in face of those who would probably consider it a cultural-imperialist one.
I too apologize for being so thin skinned. I spend a lot of time trying to be understanding and open-minded, so I get pissed off when I feel like people assume that I'm "part of the problem" because I'm white and male and whatever. Not that you'd know any of that.
One of the things I've learned in my travels is that people are very good at identifying other people's (and other cultures') weaknesses and significantly less skilled at identifying their own. Mea culpa.
The above conversation is a perfect example of why the HackerNews community is order of magnitude better than any other community I know of. Brilliant.
To a degree you're right, but it's a valid concern. Do you want to trust the gateway to your business to a country and by extension, a government you feel is either unstable or will do your company harm because they don't like your government?
It's less of a west vs <insert government here> thing and more of an A vs B thing.
I use LaTeX for something people usually never think about: critical editions of ancient and medieval texts. A good critical edition has many typographic details (say: parallel and aligned text, apparatus, typefaces & styles, footnotes, endnotes, margin notes, eventually hundrends of bibliographic references) difficult, error-prone or even _literally_ impossible in word processors.
Of course learning to typeset this kind of work in (La)TeX is not a walk in the park, but as a professor once told me it was easier (for a skilled operator, of course) to typeset a good, not to mention beautiful, critical edition with a Lnotype machine than with Word and similar software.
I do agree that TeX could be more "programmable", in the sense at least of integration with scripting languages; however, there still isn't a better tool and LaTeX 3/LuaTeX might indeed become a solution in the foreseeable future.
I am an Italian, living in Brazil, my girlfriend is Brazilian. The only minor hassle she had was once in Portugal, when the officer asked her three times in a row what she was planning to do in Europe (probably because, from his point of view, she was a single woman from Brazil in her early twenties). It was an exception, as in my experience Portuguese officers are in general extremely friendly and professional.
She has also crossed borders in Italy and France, and was treated very well each single time; I am sure that the fact that she speaks Italian fluently and has an advanced level of French was a positive factor, but nonetheless she was treated just like any EU-citizen there.
Long answer, it can run some parts of it if you join them (e.g., separating tokens, counting probabilities, some tagging and even some more advanced stuff). You cannot however, run everything (for exemple, modules and functions depending on NumPy) and must deal with how to import/export data.
Still, much, much better than those at Hanzi Smatter [ http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ ].