huntie

When did C add standard library functions for Vecs and HashMaps? You're putting words in his mouth, no one claimed C lacked "robust, debugged standard library functions". It's no secret that the C standard library lacks implementations of a variety of things that programmers use on a daily basis.

You're right, it would be a shame if the police had to face any sort of retaliation for blowing up people's houses. If we ban guns they can blow up everyone's house without fear!

The problem with the English Rule is that it protects the rich.

As far as I know, there is no way to legally verify that an animal is a service animal. I remember when I worked as a bus driver we were extremely limited (legally) in the questions we could ask, basically just "Is it a service animal?". It would be very easy to lie although I never had problems with untrained dogs.

The amount of "emotional support animals" at the local university is pretty ridiculous as well. I'm pretty sure students just lie so they can have a dog while they live in dorms.

There is something seriously wrong with Firefox if the default spellcheck dictionary is so bad that I might need to install a different one, especially for the English language. Hell they should just be able to merge theirs with Chromium's. Regardless, as I said I don't normally use spellcheck and I trust my own judgement over the computer's so it isn't a big deal for me.

Firefox's spellchecking is just generally awful, even for English. It fails to recognize even basic words such as 'surveil' with the closest suggestion being 'survive'. I've found several other words I wanted to use that weren't found too. I have spellcheck off by default but when I write something long I do a quick check at the end so I don't normally notice this.

Firefox is by far my least favorite piece of software that I regularly use and I've considered throwing my computer out the window because of it.

I wouldn't act like you're better than politicians when your "expertise" is based on a documentary. My experience is that factory work is not dangerous[1] and companies try to eliminate any danger if it's brought up because any OSHA/medical costs are very expensive. My experience is also that the work is pretty easy. It can be boring but so are most programming jobs. I don't understand how writing CRUD day after day isn't as boring as working in a factory.

As for whether it is something that should be done or not: why should programming be done? How do most apps benefit the average person. I'm willing to argue that FAANG companies have been detrimental to society.

I've also been well-payed at the factories I work at, but $20/hr in rural Iowa goes way further than in LA or wherever. There were quite a few people who had moved from cities to work where I was at.

The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are. A lot of people were worried that long-term our jobs would be automated or moved to Mexico.

[1] This may depend on what is being done and more importantly on the age of the company.

not a single county...

I'm going to call bullshit on that. Federal minimum wage is over $1000 per month at full time and I've seen 2br in my county for $550+utilities. I don't disagree with your general point but that report did a piss-poor job. I suspect they only looked in urban areas.

Unlikely, it will just eliminate the "easy" jobs. Just look at writing, mass literacy surely eliminated many jobs but lawyers are still quite well compensated. Another area is mathematics with actuaries.

Democratization of computing will lead to greater stratification of programming jobs. The "Excel Programmer" won't exist being supplanted by the "Office Drone" whereas the "Distributed Systems Engineer" (or whatever) will keep on going.

You can do that with the standard library, just do File::read_to_string and String::lines or String::split_whitespace.

This isn't a modern problem. If you read Thucydides you'll find that cities were often betrayed by a small, radicalized percentage of the civilian population hiding in plain sight. Their solution was sometimes to kill all of the men and enslave the women and children. Obviously this wouldn't fly today, but I imagine that a nation like China might simply surveil everyone, sending anyone suspicious to concentration camps. That seems like effectively the same win condition; making it effectively impossible to resist.

I work in a factory and I see all of the problems my older coworkers have. Along with that I think the company wants to move the whole plant to Mexico so there is no long-term job security. I've learned programming in my spare time but when I've tried applying for jobs I didn't get a response, which I assume is because I don't have a degree. I've been trying to get back into university but I'm not sure that it will happen anytime soon. We've been working a lot of weekends too so programming time is limited. I'd quit but this is the best paying job I've been able to get.

It wouldn't work as you imagine because it would be far too expensive for the government. In the Middle East it works out because none of our infrastructure is affected by the war; so our GDP, and thus tax revenue, is still strong. In a civil war where the government is bombing its own infrastructure the cost for each kill will skyrocket and the effect on the economy will be catastrophic. Fighting a defensive war is immeasurably cheaper than an offensive war as the defenders value the lives of their soldiers much less than the offenders do. Also keep in mind that a rebel faction could very easily sabotoge critical infrastructure like electricity which would be very difficult to repair in a timely manner.

Relying on very expensive advanced weaponry is the modern equivalent of relying on mercenaries, and Machiavelli told us why mercenaries are bad.

Windows is pretty common for control systems in factories. One factory I worked in used a web application, the one I'm in now uses VB applications. One of the control systems I use is running Windows2K. These computers have Internet access too.

No I mean it is not viable in any way if you leave the bubble of US cities which account for a small percentage of the total area. Rural US is struggling just to make school buses work. The distances are too great and the people too few to ever support public transit. Any tax on fuel/cars screws rural areas who have no other choice.

Public transit is not viable in most of the US.

3.35GHz is max boost frequency, they don't list the base clock speed. Last gen was 2.7-3.2 for the high-end chip.

I wrote a runtime assembler for a small subset of amd64. I had basically zero experience with assembly and I was still able to write what I needed in half a day. The hard part is understanding how the extra bytes work, which I did by running small bits of assembly through the GNU assembler and then calling objdump on the output.

I think a RISC ISA might be more difficult to start with, and supporting things like AVX might be hard. I only needed support for some basic instructions though. The amd64 manual is actually pretty good. Overall, it was much easier than I expected it to be.

(2017)

It's probably worth noting that this is only a runtime assembler, i.e. it does no parsing. It also doesn't support all of the addressing modes for the instructions that it does support. Nonetheless it does show that assemblers aren't that hard. Adding support for the various addressing modes and amd64 does complicate things but not too badly. Moving forward from this you'd probably want a better scheme for handling the various "extra" bytes (SIB, REX, etc.).

First thing I see is goatse.

Nice.

For your second example, I don't think that violates freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is the freedom to voice an opinion without fear of retaliation. Forcing others to listen to your speech seems tantamount to slavery.

I think that your first example is also not a violation, as it is not an opinion. I think that this example reveals a more potent problem: what do we classify as opinion? As to that, I have no answer; I am no philosopher.

As for the morality of restricting others' right to free speech, it is definitely a difficult problem. Morally I think that you have no right to silence others because you disagree with their opinion. There is some nuance here; if HN deletes a post advertising viagra I don't think this is silencing someone. Similarly, deleting a post containing the results of a football game to a programming forum is also not silencing someone. There is an aspect of relevancy at play. If you choose to operate a general purpose forum, morally you are pretty limited in what it is acceptable to silence.

These are just my off-the-cuff thoughts. I might be missing something obvious here; it seems like a confounding problem.

I don't know what you mean by "act of parliament". This video should most definitely be watched in order to understand this event in full. No description of what happened can impart upon you the brutality of watching him go back in to double tap the victims. There is a severe lack of understanding of the impact of our actions when we choose to censor events like this.

"I think capturing..."

This is a very American-centric view of slavery. Most cultures have participated in slavery at some point in history without the extraneous parts. Even if you treat your slave as family, the slavery is still immoral.

Similarly, your views on free speech are very narrow-minded. Many people have been murdered by oppressive governments for speaking out against injustice. Were they "idiots spout[ing] whatever crappy opinion happens to wander across what passes for their mind"?

If you are discouraged from saying something for _any_ reason, this is slavery of the mind. As for collective cultures, I don't think I know enough to effectively comment. I will note that many cultures that were okay at one time are now viewed with disgust as primitive, including your depiction of slavery in the Americas.

This has nothing to do with what I said. When I said it was wrong, I meant in a moral sense. Freedom of speech is a human right, which is ensured in the United States by the first ammendment of the constitution. Twitter is morally culpable for its censorship.

Companies may not be legally culpable for freedom of speech, but they are still morally culpable. Rights are not a legal construct, but a moral imperative. The founders of the United States recognized the importance of these rights and created a tiered system of laws in order to ensure these rights would be maintained by the government. Sadly we have no such guarantee from companies.

Twitter's censorship was wrong, and those countries and ISPs censorship would have been wrong as well. Free speech is a human right and censorship is immoral.

You need to reread what I wrote. I very explicity acknowledged that the US has problems with freedom of speech. Just the other day an executive order was signed in an attempt to restore free speech at public universities.

The US constitution is very clear in its wording on free speech: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech". It is unfortunate that our judiciary has chosen to turn a blind eye to this and many other affronts to the rights of American citizens.

The ISPs aren't banning sites for kicks. New Zealanders have been arrested for distributing the video.

First, I agree that the US has an incarceration problem. We're certainly not perfect, and I think much of the problem is due to the US's drug problem. Regardless, comparing incarceration to slavery is disingenuous as slavery requires no wrongdoing whereas incarceration should require wrongdoing.

As for my comparison of disallowing hate speech to slavery, it is a very valid comparison. The two are morally reprehensible for similar reasons; one is slavery of the body, the other is slavery of the mind. History has shown time and again that what is en vogue today may be hate speech tomorrow.

I don't know what you mean by hacked, but this would have been less of an issue if New Zealand had not tried to censor it. The Streisand effect is very real. If you're looking for a technical solution, there is none. The most valuable feature of the Internet is its resistance to censorship. Cut off one head, and two more shall take its place.