piccadilly's comments

Developed countries might provide a safety net and strong job retraining programs

That isn't because they were so big that they could say programmer, it is because that is what it used to be called before self-promotion inflated all job titles to the point of hyperbole.

It only gets respect because it's a kind of lie. You aren't an architect. You aren't an engineer. You write code, making up programs.

A secretary is a secretary. If people decided that's a bad thing to be, that's a shame. But it doesn't help to change the word to 'administrator,' which means something different.

God forbid you use existing mature tools appropriate to your task.

Well, a measured quantity of violence ('violence' being a very broad category) targeted at someone who is clearly causing harm is sometimes the only effective way of stopping a greater amount of harm. No-violence is clearly better, but assuming that (say) a rape is being committed, some degree of violence is a reasonable response to stop things from happening or deter other things.

I agree the hacker scene is full of assholes.

I ask this not to argue, but because you seem both pleasant and informed/opinionated and will likely have something useful to say: what as a male hacker am I supposed to be doing about the issue in this thread?

Let's assume what I know's not true for many men - that I am not even slightly coming on to or harassing or creeping on anyone and am very polite to women personally, or abusing position over them, etc. (I used to be treated like some kind of rapist by many women for prosaic things like opening doors or walking down the street, I guess from inherent suspicion of single men - now that I am usually with my wife when I'm outside of work/home, nobody looks at me twice or gives me dirty looks, which is vastly less awkward).

I don't often see situations where women are being harassed these days, so I don't even have scope to act like some kind of gender-police hero. Nor is it always called for, that I can see; I like to reassure or express solidarity with people who are getting treated in a normally dickish way, but usually not in the form of a giant "you are a huge asshole" confrontation, which can be bad for one's career and such, especially when 'the hacker scene is full of assholes.' But if I noticed sexual harassment or implicit threats or something I would already try to make sure something was said.

So what else is there? Should I just admit some kind of privilege and say it's really bad and then I don't have to do anything else, or is there some specific thing I should be doing? Because I can't get a specific reading on what I ought to be doing and sometimes suspect in these conversations that I am just supposed to feel bad and say something submissive, which really isn't satisfying when I have honestly spent my whole adult life consciously trying to be nice and even-handed to women.

Some of what has happened to Zed Shaw really isn't acceptable, it is straight up harassment and not funny trolling. It is considered acceptable to threaten men with violence because they are men; it's the same as the pervasive belief that men cannot be raped and the idea is funny.

If you haven't ever been afraid of being beaten, killed, or raped, that doesn't make you a man, that means you have had a very safe life. There is no necessary reason why women must think that. I am certainly not doing ANYTHING to make women rationally afraid of being beaten, killed, or raped, so why should my penis make me responsible for that? Some vague handwavey notion of 'privilege'?

What's up with the jaw thing? Women don't have especially fragile jaws. I guess you are saying that women have especially fragile emotions?

I love vim more than almost any other software. But it really is not very discoverable 'by accident.' You have to read documentation and grok the system or you don't get much benefit.

Especially at the beginning, when you do something like starting to type words while in normal mode and the screen scrolls and a bunch of crap gets deleted, there isn't any highly visible way to see what happened and it's easy to get discouraged.

Accidents like that might provide motivation to find the correct way, but rarely much information on what to do.

Vim is excellent software and usable (as in easy to actually use, once you are at cruising altitude) but easily discoverable it is not (until you grasp the system's fundamentals, then you don't need to 'discover' much - you just express what you mean to do without needing to memorize 40,000 hand-contorting ctrl-alt-chords, or configure your text editor in LISP)

We don't "really need" recruiters specifically. But finding a job is ridiculously more complex and old-school (dependent on who you know, etc.) than finding a restaurant or a vendor for a replacement part. If that friction weren't so high, the market for recruiters would dry up as everyone did it themselves.

Now the question to ask is why that friction is so high. It's not a law of nature. It's not because of the perfidy of the government. It sure isn't because job seekers want it increased. But it might just have to do with the interest employers have in maintaining leverage over employees; the same reason job interviews are usually demeaning.

It wouldn't work because of inflation.

Is that a good argument for artificially maintaining poverty and enacting policy which specifically advantages the ultra-rich to the detriment of people who are having trouble getting by?

So you have phone GPS (like many phones) and you can read your email (like many phones) and you can make calls (like most phones) and you can use it to browse web pages. There have been small electronic devices doing combinations of these things for a long time, none of this is in any way exclusive or original to the iPhone. This all rests on decades of preceding technology not proprietary to Apple. Steve Jobs didn't make it new, he just made it white.

It's always very sad when a human being dies. But excuse me if I don't worship the corporate hero who produced the object you use to do things which aren't necessary using non-unique technology.

I'll grant that one thing Steve Jobs did develop was the brand strategy that makes you rabid when someone challenges your decision of buying small electronic devices you don't need at a significant markup, because it's become a part of your personal identity.

Making fat piles of cash on status-symbol widgets.

I guess it's too bad that I won't see what other slightly-rounded, double-priced white objects he would have produced.

How can you even compare that to developing the C language?

I can get insanely concise one-liners out of C and shell, but that doesn't make those inherently more-productive languages.

I forget what bash does, but when I write a block of shell in zsh, it is saved as a 'line.' This is a tool issue, not an issue of language expressiveness.

If you can't write concise Python, maybe that's just because you aren't that comfortable with Python... that's a perfectly good reason not to use it but it isn't some sort of dramatic limiting case requiring all system administrators to use Ruby instead.

I'm not interested in this Fibonacci benchmark until someone does it in TriINTERCAL.

PLEASE GIVE UP

Seconded: if you're still on 8.04 and don't like how fast Ubuntu moves, then it sounds like you were born for Debian Stable, which is in many respects a very similar system

You wouldn't necessarily know this until you had done the described change, but Ubuntu's packaging of Gnome Shell is in various small but annoying ways not as polished and together as Fedora's.

That might partly be because Ubuntu has thrown its effort into its default Unity, while Fedora has put effort into its default Gnome Shell.

I'm not persuaded that the arrow of causality has been drawn correctly here.

I.e., it seems rather that Ruby has gained a high profile in system administration, not due to any inherent characteristics of the language or library, but because Puppet and subsequently Chef happened to be written by people who wanted to use Ruby.

Based on TFA, this was a matter of taste. I can't, for example, see why it should particularly matter for system administration whether "‘len’ was a function instead of a method)." It doesn't. But the fact that the guy who went on to write a reasonably important tool preferred to do so in Ruby on the basis of such personal prejudices made Ruby important just insofar as the tool was important, and probably contributed to Chef being written in Ruby as well.

Most of the reasoning in this article is no better than complaining that len() is a builtin. I fail to see how Perl-golf style conciseness is inherently more "productive" (particularly when it makes it harder to understand and maintain operationally important software). I fail to see how the crushing burden of spelling out 'import re' makes regex unacceptably distant in Python. I fail to see how Ruby is inherently stress-relieving or better for people who use vi, and if you don't think there is magic in Python that is probably because you have not gotten that deeply into the language. All this is pretty spurious, I think.

And if I wanted Perl, then Perl is the best possible Perl, already familiar to tons of sysadmins; and lots of good things are happening in Perl development.

What isn't spurious is if you happen to like Ruby, even if only for stupid reasons like Luke's; or if you really want to work with a tool like Chef that requires you to write Ruby. Those are perfectly good reasons for using Ruby.

But multiple languages will be used into the far future. In reality, the reason that Ruby and Python (and for that matter Perl) are so frequently put head-to-head is because they are so very similar in their abilities. That's okay. Write what you like.

Well, there is plenty of point avoiding blocking on IO if blocking on IO is your bottleneck, and blocking on CPU is not. For some reason, a lot of people have focused on that case for many years.

I have no idea whether that is true and I'm not arguing with it.

Why are you writing web request handlers containing heavily recursive code, and why do you seem to think that indicates anything meaningful about Python?

Please tell me you are not also using SimpleHTTPServer to try to prove points about Python's performance (like http://joshuakehn.com/2011/10/3/Diagnosis-No-Cancer.html and http://blog.brianbeck.com/post/node-js-cures-cancer)

The original Node.JS is cancer article is a silly troll.

But it's totally ridiculous how in response, people keep writing these terrible, straw-man Python servers to try to prove that Python is so horribly slow.

If you want to write Python web apps, there is a correct way to do it, and it isn't to use SimpleHTTPServer. Write a WSGI application, and serve it with any of a number of decent WSGI servers (just for starters, try uwsgi behind nginx; but if you really insist on directly serving requests out of a server written in an interpreted language, you could try gevent).