craigsmansion's comments

> is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal.

It might be the other way around in this case.

Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot.

Throughout the years when choices had to be made Mozilla didn't always side with the open web or the users, and whenever they were asked about it, the answer was always the same:

"Not our hill to die on. We need the clout we would lose, otherwise we won't be big enough to have any say when the next thing comes around."

and then the next thing came around, and the next...

The problem is that Mozilla seems to have revenue as an important goal. I imagine that's why people clamour for them to focus on the browser instead of pointlessly playing corporation with borrowed feathers.

They sold out.

> Buying new clothing because of yearly trends is way to damaging to the environment for what it's worth.

I read this as I rock along on my Thinkpad x200 and read it on a forum where people regularly defend the use of electron apps and gush over the latest sumptuous macbooks with gobs of memory.

"But, but, I need those for my work"

And so might these people who buy clothes because of yearly trends.

"But that's different!"

No, it's not.

It's not up to me to say anyone shouldn't enjoy your latest laptop, but I think it's good to realise that the large majority of people who work in software are in a precarious position to be handing out edicts about what should and shouldn't be considered "incredibly wasteful" and what is "damaging the environment".

>an insular club of engineers with a high bar of entry

and all the teenagers in all the high-schools who otherwise had no affinity with computers whatsoever.

/slap

But that was 20 years ago, of course. You can't compare the technical prowess of a random kid back then with a current well-paid software professional with access to portable hardware 100s of times more powerful.

Europe's ability to compete in the Technology sector is just dandy. It's the EU's ability to compete in the "tech" sector that might fall behind, and maybe that's a good thing.

> I think we should get used to the idea of just letting stuff like this happen. What's the downside?

Because in the end, actual progressive left thinkers could end up in a rice paddy with a tyre iron in the neck.

This terminology platform seems to be very much pushed by those who feel they should be leftist intellectuals, but who don't quite cut it in the thinking department so instead they just grab the microphone and make up in volume what they lack in depth, labelling anyone, regardless of political view, who speaks out against them as the enemy of progress.

Long term such actions are detrimental to the development of an actually better and fairer society.

Short term it's just grating to see the very real plight of certain minorities being abused by opportunists for their own selfish ends, again.

> I am glad that JP have done something sensible here,

I doubt that.

For over 20 years people have been pinning their hopes on new languages and "paradigms" to make things better. Things haven't progressed a lot with that strategy.

I blame this on how software architects don't, and programmers can't, and because of that they all hedge their bets on new language X with feature Y, hoping it will make all the hard bits go away.

It's akin to how in the creative writing world, writers sometimes dive deep into the grammar and vocabulary of a particular natural language whereas the real challenge is thinking up new and entertaining situations and characters, and then filling that in with words in whatever language you happen to be proficient in.

Literate programming has been a concept for a long time now: write a document that explains, understandably, what the software is supposed to do, then accompany it with some source in whatever language the programmer is most comfortable with.

In a perfect world, that would be called "doing you job". In our current world, there is no money to be made in "doing your job" and it will be heckled as slow or outdated; praying for deliverance is much more profitable.

The too long, didn't read: Turing and Church proved that, fundamentally, all languages suck, so no new language will ever save one from one's own incompetence. Maybe it's time we all stopped blaming or praising "the language" wholesale for the various inadequacies and blind spots in our branch of industry.

> [it will] make it easier to express complex human problems/domains into code

What is "pseudo-intellectual" about that answer?

> i'm sooo curious to study all of this and see for myself

Good thing SICP is available online, and there are even recorded classes of it with two legendary professors available online somewhere.

> life's too short and I'm already spending so much time in front of a PC

Yet, here we are.

"It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?

... Google knows."

> Edit: People are getting downvoted left and right. Why is this such a polarizing topic?

Likely because there's only so many times someone wants to reply with "Free as in free market, not as in free lunch."

And it's not that much of a polarising topic, but if Gerald Jay Sussman, professor at MIT, co-writer of SICP, board-member of the FSF, writes about "Free Software", and multiple people start off with complaints or comments about "paying", even if there have been multiple posts and corrections in the commentary already, it becomes very hard to retain good faith or discern any value in the post.

I think one of the nicer points to take away here is that prof. Sussman worked around remote teaching problems not by getting bogged down in meetings, but by calling a friendly admin and by himself installing a piece of free software on a computer he had lying around in his lab.

Free Software gives you back the agency to solve your problems in any way you see fit(be they hacks or not). It doesn't leave you helpless and dependent on the goodwill of third parties.

> I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more

"The Linux kernel was conceived and created in 1991"

> This.

You say "this", and then proceed to state the exact fallacy the OP made as a truthful observation.

> Sweden's path has been conventional.

Yes. Sweden's path has been conventional. Italy's path has been conventional as well.

There is this whole wave of misapprehension and misunderstanding on HN, especially when it comes to the pandemic: "My opinion is backed by facts, therefor all other opinions must be political and I do not need to think about them because my opinion is correct", which is a form of circular reasoning.

> This ultimately comes back to

This ultimately comes back people whose day-job entails shoveling data with computers and being (or at least feeling) smarter than average, and as such feel at least somewhat qualified as a statistician/epidemiologist.

One of the few things that is clear is that the spread and the course of the disease has an enormous amount of unknown confounding factors.

This means that any approach within general ethical boundaries is valid: from making future prediction based on the most advanced epidemiological data to date, to a system-wide shutdown of "doing the things that are very likely to worsen the situation".

None of the scientific advisors to the various democratic governments are complete idiots, and even none of the elected government officials involved are out to willfully wreak havoc on their populations.

Find out what works. Find out what doesn't work and why it doesn't work even though it seems to work elsewhere.

Sweden's approach is valid. Italy's approach is valid. The chances of any one person getting it exactly right the first time are negligible, so there is no point in cheering for what one believed to be the "winning team".

To spell it out for you: you are not right. You are, at best, less wrong. And to paraphrase the OP, "it is about their own opinions, trying to prematurely pat themselves on the back for believing the right thing."

With the corollary advice being:

a grey beard will protect you from accepting positions where looks might be more important than skills.

No slight against your friends, if they needed the money they did what they had to do. But if one doesn't, there is nothing wrong with letting your beard guide you: somewhere out there is a lisp codebase just waiting for your love and attention.

Regrettably, also back in the day and probably around the same time, companies who wanted to hire "outside of the box" asked for Python. Not because they were python shops, but because they figured that people who had an interest in a new but not-quite-commercially viable language must have some sort of intrinsic interest in programming, and would likely make for better programmers.

> there was no one left who could support an Erlang system.

If you have $200k "python engineers" on the payroll who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to do some additional Erlang, maybe it's time to reconsider your hiring practices and that is the real cautionary tale.

"you’d fire them because that one wrong answer is emblematic of a serious cognitive deficiency that permeates everything they try to do. "

Oh, if only, John. But then, who'd write for your blog?

(if you feel that's unwarranted: "Daring Fireball" was the outlet that wrote a character assassination piece on rms, backed by some irrefutable evidence, that turned out to be about esr, and nobody performed even the most casual of fact checking, and it's still up there with some sorry-not-sorry half-hearted retraction, and probably all because rms told Jobs they couldn't grant him an exception to turn gcc proprietary eons ago.)

> I'd like some source material on your claim about freedoms

Let's start at the bottom then:

>> The other countries you speak about have already lost their rights, or never had them to begin with.

>and New Zealand is a tiny island, very easy to control

What you're saying here is basically: "even if you back it up with source material, I'm going to claim the US is more diverse/different so it doesn't really apply."

In other words, it's US exceptionalism both ways around, that is, circular reasoning. Why should anyone bother to try and have a good faith argument here?

> Or is it literally that cache invalidation is hard?

It's literally that cache invalidation is hard. You can also think of "cache invalidation" as a substitute of concurrent programming: keeping multiple related threads of logic synchronised.

>Isn’t cache invalidation on a completely different level as naming things, both conceptually and in difficulty?

I'd say it's on a conceptually different level, but not less difficult, and because "naming things" is easy, it's more insidious.

From my point of view "naming things" is a substitute for architecting software instead of coding your way out of dead ends whilst inventing a lot of off the cuff names in the process. (of course, in the current climate, such ad-hoc solutions are now the standard, called "design patterns", and people find names that have "Factory" in them twice a normal thing.)

> I'm not a full-time computer professional.

Emacs is used by non-computer professionals as well. If your profession relies on the manipulation of text, emacs is the tool to use.

>their investment spent optimizing and maintaining their Emacs setup.

It's really not that bad. Say you're a fiction writer: you only need to figure out your preferred workflow once, but then you can use it for decades with only minimal changes.

Of course, once you get the hang of it, you might think it convenient to be able to write short mails directly, or do a bit of your own typesetting all from the comfort of your, by now, favourite editor, but .emacs files usually see very little churn. What's in a .emacs has usually just accumulated slowly over the years as one's usage of the program increases.

> Generally, I think my rights end where others’ rights begin

So invading someone else's privacy, without their consent, for your own monetary gain, should be your decision, because it's fairer?