nsmartt

Some will say that it’s necessary to balance privacy against security, and that it’s important to find the right compromise between the two. Even if you believe that, a good negotiator doesn’t begin a conversation with someone whose position is at the exact opposite extreme by leading with concessions.

And that’s exactly what we’re dealing with. Not a balance of forces which are looking for the perfect compromise between security and privacy, but an enormous steam roller built out of careers and billions in revenue from surveillance contracts and technology. To negotiate with that, we can’t lead with concessions, but rather with all the opposition we can muster.

http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to...

You're being downvoted because of your tone and because you dismiss him by comparing him to authority figures.

Huh. I was basing my comment on the knowledge that Mozilla feared IE would become the way to browse the web. I should have double checked.

How can open source software be in competition with anything?

Market share is power. Popular open-source projects can, and do, shape the industry. If you believe your trajectory is the right one for the industry, competition matters a lot.

As an example, Mozilla's Firefox was created to compete with Internet Explorer. It succeeded, and now Mozilla is working to defend the open web, so market share is still crucial for Mozilla even today.

Can now be found here: http://quantum-os.github.io/blog/2014/11/introduction-and-in...

From the article:

The function is short enough to paste below. It is pretty unique to Neovim, as it was wrought for its brand new event-oriented nature:

I didn't take your use of “documentation” to be so loose, but I agree that it should have an explanation for the use of “magical” in the title. The author has since added an explanation.

There are 61 commits and only one contributor. This isn't a good complaint, and the snark makes it worse.

The point of TL;DR is to summarize a longer piece. It literally means “Too long; didn't read”

The name is temporary, and discussion about the name has been temporarily halted because there are more important concerns.

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/272#issuecomment-370...

That's a good reason to downvote or stop reading, but I question whether attacking the author for having the audacity to publish the post is a good move.

People don't need to be experts to recognize flaws in tools aimed at consumers.

Writing bad articles is a great way to move toward writing good articles.

Writing in the public view is a great way to get feedback on your writing and the subjects you discuss—e.g. corrections, further education, etc. For some people, it also increase the pressure to improve.

Vanity is only one possible reason for writing in the public view, and it's an exercise with large potential gains. Your perspective is entirely off, and you've decided to take an opportunity to attack someone who was either brave enough or indifferent enough to risk being attacked in the first place.

It's a single file. It works with or without the ruby-dependent parallel plugin installations and upgrades. It allows for plugins to be loaded only when they're needed (e.g. only for JS files). That's minimalist.

I switched to vim-plug from Vundle a couple of weeks ago, and I'm in love. Lazy initialization and, if your vim is built with ruby, threaded plugin installations and upgrades. As a bonus, it's beautiful.

It would be a shame for man-millennia of work to be lost, but it would also be a shame for advancement to be stalled by these kinds of concerns. Experimenting with new approaches and ideas, direct competition between projects, excitement over new languages and frameworks. These are all factors that lead to advancing the state of the art.

It's worth being concerned about losing the lessons learned from Qt, but this is a kind of false dichotomy between the old and the new.

With that said, I don't think those lessons will be lost anyway. Qt can't (and shouldn't!) last forever or remain in its current form. C++, though it will live for a long time yet, will eventually fall out of favor, and large sections will eventually be purged from Qt as the project matures. The man-years that went into the portions that were, or some day will be, removed have taught Qt developers and users a great deal.

Qt developers and users will bring knowledge and wisdom to new projects that will compete with Qt (directly or indirectly). Some projects will survive and some won't. Some will be much the same as Qt, while some will be completely different from the start. Conrod, as it happens, is an approach to a different kind of GUI development (see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8244224).

This, of course, doesn't include developers who do their own things without ever using Qt. Hopefully, they will encounter blog posts and articles about some of those lessons, as well as attracting developers who've learned some of these lessons.

This isn't a case of getting away with reinventing the industry. In this nascent stage, computer science, with all the renegade hackers and developers, is still a necessary occurrence when new languages and frameworks are invented.

It's possible to use Qt from Python, so I would think Rust could do it in one way or another.

As a novice, it took several hours to wade through the configuration files when setting up an IRCd, and additional time to configure services daemons. I also continually run into issues with configuration decisions I made before using the daemon more actively.

While I could have relied on the defaults, I wouldn't trust my users' data with a default configuration. It would be irresponsible at best, and this is even more important to companies.

I assume the the people choosing the methods of communication for startups are capable of learning to use irssi or weechat, but both of those clients take quite a bit time to learn and require significant amounts of customization to make them truly comfortable. It isn't a good business decision to require your teams to learn to use these tools.

Is IRC an acceptable medium for a company? Maybe it can be. Is it wise? Not with tools like irssi.

I wonder which title attracts a larger audience. Maybe confident developers would assume “five things every competent Javascript developer must know” would contain nothing new to them, while “5 tips to become a better Javascript developer” promises to offer something new.

Improving education involves improving the approaches used by teachers, whether teachers already employed or new teachers. These kinds of things don't change overnight, but they can be changed over generations. Studies are, in theory, an effective way to determine what aspiring teachers should know and apply.

I don't think driving down the advantages of becoming a teacher is an effective way to improve performance. Many people interested in making a difference would, rightfully, forgo being a teacher for their own sakes and take a different approach.

yarou's comment is in response to a presentation about unrelated features, and his/her response suggests knowledge that Mozilla isn't focusing on memory and performance problems.

Many of the memory leaks have been fixed over the years, benchmarks suggest [Firefox can compete with Chrome in terms of speed](www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-next,3534-12.html), and Mozilla, realizing their UI still feels sluggish, launched a project (called Snappy) to fight this UI sluggishness.

Many improvements have been made over the years on all counts.

Mozilla is comprised of a lot of different people working on a lot of different things. There are people focusing on various memory and speed issues, but they can't (and shouldn't) allocate all their resources to focusing on just a few issues.

Kiwi seems promising, but I've experienced a number of frustrating bugs

What's your issue with Pidgin?

I actually find that the changes in contrast have emphasized important elements of the page. As an example, the buttons and text on the front page will probably only need to be read once unless you're actively looking for them.

The auto-suggestions have helped improve my results a few times, particularly when I can't think of a bang.

The red bar and default coloring are probably a little more subjective, so I can understand that. I do hope changes don't accumulate to become more negative, but I find these changes to be largely pleasant.

Has the DDG user experience suffered? If so, how? I much prefer the redesign, and I'm not yet aware of having lost anything in the move.

I had a discussion about this with someone on the Mozilla IRC, and the argument seems to be that users still have the option to add DDG on their own, so it's not being treated as optional. Users still have the option of switching.

I'm not a big fan of this argument, and I argued that DDG, or another privacy conscious search engine (though DDG is the best I've used), would be very much in line with Mozilla goals. I'm sure many users are still unaware of Google's practices (whether those practices are inherently harmful or not), and exposing DDG as a search option would be a means of raising awareness.

I don't quite understand the rationale behind it.

I strongly suspect moot posts anonymously on 4chan. Posting under moot would result in his dominating the conversation.

I thought of it as being more akin to the programming mantra of “use the right tool for the job.”

The part about the pendulum swinging back to some degree seems like a reasonable progression from flat design.