skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you; in the cases you mentioned there don't seem to be any good arguments for not using a higher-level language with managed memory, properly implemented data structures, etc.

It seems like there are at least two threads of thought going on in the comments in general. One of them is, "does C have any role in any domain, and if so what is that domain?". I think that it does; software development is much wider than kernels, userland applications, and compilers, and there are fields where C and/or C++ are the right tools as things currently stand. I don't think anyone would argue that either language exists as a global optimum in any problem space, but from an engineering (rather than a theoretical purism) standpoint sometimes there are few practical alternatives. Maybe these domains are small, maybe they're unexciting, but they do exist.

The other is, "what is the point of learning C?". Maybe they want a deeper understanding of manual memory management, the concept of stack and heap storage, pointer manipulation, etc. Learning more about C to play with these concepts isn't a terrible idea, although it's not the only way to learn about these things. If nothing else, learning C and trying to implement your own parsers or data structures might be a good way to better understand why writing correct code in C that accounts for buffer overflows and string issues is so difficult, and what challenges higher-level languages face in order to overcome these flaws.
Oh, this is so typical: call something a "danger to society" when actually it is a danger to you and your government.

Not only they think that "government == society", but also they think that "their government == society".
I worked out one reason why software patents are so terribly troublesome versus patents for physical mechanisms.

Because we deal in abstractions.

You can always take this piece of code you wrote and notice that it can be abstracted to solve a class of problems. And then that this class of problems is in turn a subclass of a larger set of problems. And then it's increasingly vague all the way down.

Before long your patent application transforms from "Method to improve page retrieval on ARM7 CPUs" to "Method to improve caching in memory" to "Method to improve caching" to "Method to accelerate any computation".

That generally doesn't happen in the physical world, because physical inventions aren't easily generalisable. You can't take a tractor and, with a few lines of code, abstract it into a platonic ideal that can also spit out cars, buses, trains, planes, ships and the starship Enterprise.
You can ping me privately about this and I can explain our reasoning; it's always possible that one of our sister companies (iSec, NGS Secure/NCC) might work with telecommuters.
I'm sure you mean well, but dogfooding crypto software in this sort of situation seems like a bad idea.
You're right about blockbuster movies, though—nobody will make them anymore.

Yes, I can see this happening as well. Why is it taken for granted that they are a necessity? I think people are just too set in their ways to comprehend the world any differently so they just start trying to justify why we need to keep things the way they are.
> My emacs at times can't keep up with my typing. But I love what it does for me.

Try to set debugger on (M-x toggle-debug-on-quit) and when emacs stops responding press C-g to get to know what was emacs doing.
> Corporate America is a nation of social climbers

Well, yes, but you can only climb up to a certain point on the social ladder. In fact, adapting to corporate culture guarantees that you will never be a member of the highest class. You may reach the upper middle class, but you will never become a member of the upper class because the upper class not only does not work (they don't need to), but they look disdainfully upon people who have to work, especially people who sell things, because they consider selling things for a living to be vulgar. People who come from the corporate world will almost always, even if they aren't conscious of it, have middle class tastes, and middle class speech mannerisms. For example, Corporate America loves modern design (because it is boring, and thus cannot be offensive) and uses lots of euphemisms. Members of the upper class hate euphemisms, and consider saying "Fudge!" to be much worse than saying "Fuck!". This goes against everything a Corporate America drone has been taught. Social norms in the upper class are much different than social norms in the upper middle, and other classes. The obfuscatory circumlocutions known as "HR speak" or "BS" are reviled, and so are foolish compliments. If you are at an upper's house and praise their furniture, you could be ejected from the premises. Why? Because it is a given that an upper will have good furniture, and compliments about it suggest that this may not be the case, which is offensive.

Because the things we do, say, and the values we have are often subconscious, it takes a concerted effort to change them and it is almost impossible to do so. The things that determine your class cannot all be written down into a book. Even if you do pretend to be an upper, at some point you will commit a faux paus that gives you away.
The quote at the end, explains a little on how SV nurtures the entrepreneurial spirit: “One of perhaps the most compelling things about Silicon Valley is that it is a place where you can fail, and if you do, you can raise money and try again,” said Mark Leslie, a retired entrepreneur and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “It’s a miraculous place; the streets are lined with gold here.”
And youtube is filled with the videos of cats. If you are into that stuff and don't care about blockbuster movies, commercial music etc. then you should not have any problem with copyright. It does not prevent you from enjoying your free art.
Top 5 Popular Free Android MP3 Player Apps On Google Play
It's true that Rick Falkvinge is "preaching to the converted". But his preaching is slightly more coherent than the excesses of Fox News, and his target audience is an intellectual audience.

I don't know what it is about Hacker News that guarantees a front page appearance for every article written by Falkvinge, but he is obviously getting the required votes. Perhaps many Hacker News readers are members of "the converted". Perhaps the moderators of Hacker News are among the converted.

I would recommend against "censoring" Falkvinge. But his writings do deserve to be carefully analysed and refuted, line by line if necessary.

I would like to start with the term "Copyright Monopoly". There is no Copyright Monopoly. Each copyright is one monopoly, so there are many "copyright monopolies" (and economically, those monopolies are a bad thing). But there is no "Copyright Monopoly".

There is a recognisable "Copyright Industry", and perhaps also a "Copyright Enforcement Industry", and there are various political lobbyists and interest groups associated with those "industries". But not actually a single "monopoly" in the technical economic sense of the word.
Excellent comment - the saga of stolen Jewish stuff took just a wee while to start to be repatriated...
Ta. Feel free to link to my website (chester.id.au).
Wasted potential?? Compared to who? Gosling, Jobs, Gates all pretty much look like posers by comparison. Everyone's entitled to their opinions and objections, and no individual can withstand comparison to some theoretical saint, but RMS has certainly earned his spot. I'd be thrilled to accomplish one percent as much good before I go.
And, most importantly, how are you going to compel authors to give their work into public domain?

People made things public before copyright law existed. People continue to make things freely accessible and public in spite of current copyright laws. People aren't forced to do this, but they are compelled to.
I'm not sure why you feel my post was disingenuous. There are many forms of self-protection that we need to ask our government permissions to obtain.
I just use Elpa, cross my fingers, and try not to tweak or memorize too many things. I am rather happy like that.
No, it's exactly like marketing; this is something I'm trying to convince people of. Recruiting is a sales process.

Which metrics? Depends on the role. If you can't tell me what makes a good developer for your team, how can you tell me you're managing that team? The answer is: of course you could tell me what a good developer is, push coming to shove; it's just an annoying and complicated question to answer, so we all tend to substitute an abrasive and counterproductive interview process for that answer.
> free elections

That's ironic, you being an American and all.

> the right to arm yourself

This is rich.
Here's one other thing to keep in mind: as with employees, contractors and freelancers are, fundamentally, being compensated for their time. If you don't provide your time, you don't get paid. And you won't get paid more than once for a given hour, week, or job. And there is an upper bound on what someone will pay you for an hour of your time, no matter how "good" you are at what you do.

That applies if, and only if, your contract is set up on something like a time and materials basis. For fixed price contracts, which become an option when you're working freelance, you are very much not being paid for your time, but rather for the results you generate. How fast you generate those results and earn your pay is down to you, and therefore how many clients you can take on and where any upper bound on your earnings fall is also down to you. There may in practice be an upper limit to what you can get paid for your time doing bespoke contract work, but if there is, it is demonstrably multiple orders of magnitude greater than what you could earn as a software developer on salary.
Beware, the file is 177 MB.
My favorite of TKF's packages is auto-complete: https://github.com/auto-complete/auto-complete

It's an elegant and very powerful extension of the built-in completion that works particularly well on reallyStupidlyLongMethodNames in programming languages - especially handy in conjunction with tags and cscope if you're jumping around a large codebase. Dunno if it plays well with Evil mode though.
It does not prevent you from enjoying your free art.

It prevents people from building on existing copyrighted art. Talent is redirected to creating work that becomes copyrighted. As a result, people have less to draw from without paying royalties, so it does effect those who don't care for copyrighted work.
Of course, that is only a workaround, not a fix.
You are insulting the intelligence of the HN crowd. Your user account created 5 hours ago. Are we supposed to believe that this post was written by "a friend on Facebook?"

>>However, AKP (and Erdogan) is definitely the best thing that has happened to Turkey over many decades, and Turks know it.

Wrong. Although Erdogan and his goons in the Turkish media do their best to give this impression. Turkey was not a perfect country before. But it was actually secular. And that makes it objectively better than what it is today. Forget about the surface-level improvements Erdogan made. He may be wearing sheep's clothes, but deep down inside he's a wolf who wants Turkey to become another Iran.
It’s a matter of taste
I had an offer from an extremely famous Silicon Valley company, did the numbers very carefully, and realized that I simply could not afford to live there on what they were offering. (I have kids and a non-working spouse.)

I don't think of myself as being a particularly greedy or spendthrift person. I've never owned a new car, for example, and I'm typing this on a five year old laptop. But the Bay Area is simply a no-go for me, sad as that makes me feel.
Vimwiki's served me well on a shared dropbox folder.
checkout http://tkf.github.io/emacs-jedi/
In this case, the facilitator was almost certainly doing the work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5810711
Why would anyone think buying a 3D printer is not legal?
I don't think you addressed my point. How are you better off if a 200k/yr VP is replaced with a 50k/yr VP, and whatever benefit you get from that transition, why should it depend on what some other person makes? If you did work worth 150k/yr, you should be making 150k/yr regardless.
What definition of "rational" are you working from?
Anyone care to say why he's wrong? I'd like a bit more elaboration from his argument, but it's possible that he's right.
The internet as we know it will one day be used to enslave large groups of humans where it would be otherwise impossible to do so.
A redditor explains Apple's e-book price fixing case
This patent was issued on 2/28/2012. It's the related application that hasn't been issued.
It is very likely that during the hype I had misinterpreted the 7.4 plans. I was under the impression that the work on Python was trying to make it the dominant means of extending vim while keeping vimscript for legacy reasons. I mean this is still technically feasible, but would require the support of the whole vim community. I would go on about how it's weird that many vim users aren't familar vimscript, but I'd feel like I'm preaching to the choir. Thanks for clearing things up.
I don't think it was. The cars aren't consistent when you "walk" down the street like they are on Google Maps which implies that these weren't generated by someone driving around the GTA4 world taking screen shots. It kind of gives it a sort of an uncanny valley feel.

Also, what's wrong with doing it manually? That's how the real Google Street Views is generated.
Thank God for not being a police state dystopia like Singapore.
The space is dominated by security oriented companies. Bugs are oftentimes not security issues though.
How do we know which problems are fake problems and which ones are real problems, though? Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it might not be as clear.

Twitter probably seemed like a fake problem at its inception (post 140 characters to a personal blog from your phone), and yet it's been adopted and used daily by many, many people outside the Valley. Google's founders weren't thinking about ads when they first built their search engine, but apparently the ads they serve are considered lucrative enough by their customers to turn the company huge. (Of course there are the data privacy issues, but on a more cynical note someone's needs are being served.)

On the other hand, Better Place seemed like a useful idea. EVs presumably aren't more widely adopted because of range anxiety and charge times, so why not create a business model and technology to swap out batteries and make recharging as painless as filling up at a gas station? But Better Place is dead now and Tesla is building out its fast charger network and selling more and more cars.
And then again, they are pain in the arse (if not impossible) to use on Windows. One of the benefits of ELisp extensions is that they are multiplatform.
> I don't work with people who can't do the whole thing. So having a "generalist" team doesn't sound like anything special, even though I'm aware this is an odd thing in the corporate world.

Where do you work? and are you hiring?

I haven't met a company (even a startup company) that would prefer to hire a generalist over a specialist. At every startup I've worked at, being a "generalist" means you fill whatever position hasn't been hired for yet. I typically spend a few months in a specific job role and shift to a different one whenever a specialist is hired.

My preferred method of working is the same as the OP's: I like implementing whole features from start to finish. In my 10 years of experience, I've been able to do that in exactly one job and it only lasted 6 months before the product was finally sunset.
Thanks. This is much clearer description of the problem.
I think a lot of people, especially @jangosteve, mistake freelancing for contracting.

The way you're using the term "contracting" is not the way everyone does. What you're talking about is short-term, fixed-term contracts, and otherwise sounds a lot like disguised employment, and as you mentioned HMRC might have something to say about that if they had time. However, there are plenty of other models for contract work that don't have the structure and limitations you described but are still clearly contracting rather than employment.
I agree, I even know a friend who was studying computer science but moved over to law, his reasoning was how manipulating the law gives you a advantage over other people. The same is in Australia, our society values lawyers and they ruin almost everything.

Make no mistake, many lawyers would see the world burn just to make a bigger buck. Many of them truly don't care.
"I realize that Tor can't be used on iOS without jailbreaking it"

Not quite true.

While Tor can't be used for all traffic, there are Tor apps -- OnionBrowser works quite well; I just tried it.
org-mode has a pretty good phone app for iPhone & Android for when you're on the road: http://orgmode.org/manual/MobileOrg.html
This is a very good point. Check out http://vimeo.com/39938276, a video about Ensime, a Scala/Java IDE as an external process. Daniel Spiewak makes largely the same point as this article: interprocess communication provides much better reusability than baking things in to a single process, whether that be Emacs or Eclipse.

bitwize makes another good point: this is less the "philosophy of Emacs", and more the philosophy of Unix (or perhaps, more specifically, Acme). It's ironic that some of the best parts of Emacs are the ones that look less like a Lisp Machine and more like a Unix pipeline, but there it is.
Amazon aspires to automate access control
You are correct, wish I'd known about that beforehand!
While I agree that all programmers should learn how computers and compilers work. Learning C would just be a mean to that end. You could easily replace "Learn C" with "Learn Assembly" in this post.

I think these type of posts reinforces the over-emphasis on languages, frameworks, and tools in general we have in this industry. People restrict themselves into camps of certain tools and then use that specific tool as a general purpose tool for all problems they face in a sort of nationalistic way. And then go on the internet and start arguing over which over-used hammer is better, so to speak. Now, what is worse is that newcomers to programming quickly adopt this attitude which makes it even harder for them to learn the right things.

The other day I made a trip to the Academy for Software engineering NYC[1] and it was a great experience watching kids learn how to program. They were using Python to learn. However, I was really disappointed when a few kids expressed interest in learning Foo language because someone told them that Foo was the best language ever! I told them that after learning how to compute, they can go on and learn all the languages they want to learn and even create their own.

[1]: http://www.afsenyc.org/
New York journalists sure are interested in software developers on the other side of the continent. They can't write anything serious about the tech industry because they don't understand it. But they've perfected the art of link-bait titles. How many so-called 'real problems' has this writer solved? Zero.
Remembering Tim Samaras: Veteran Storm Chaser Killed in Okla. Tornado
If I were in the same position as those workers in China were, I certainly would work in the factories. When you options are working a dangerous manufacturing job getting paid relatively well, or a slightly more dangerous farming job where you can barely afford to live, the choice is easy.

The US investing in Chinese manufacturing has and is increasing the quality of life (and safety) for the workers in China. This takes time, and there is nothing we can do to avoid that. If we were to go in and demand North American manufacturing salary and safety standards for the entire supply chain, you can bet their goods would cost more to produce than if we just did it here and we would therefore just make them here. That would destroy the Chinese economy and send everyone back into worse conditions than we currently have. Therefore I would argue that the result would be a net harm if we force conditions to rise too rapidly, rather a balance must be maintained.
It's not patent trolling if you sue based on patents you implemented in your own products either. That's the whole point of the patent system, dammit.

I don't think you know what patent trolling means, neither how patents work.
Anyone that ever watched Storm Chasers on Discovery knows Tim Samaras. He was fun to watch, and given how cautious he seemed, its crazy that he was taken. Sympathies to his family.
I used iChat all the time until it was replaced by Messages. I've since been using Adium and haven't looked back.

Every single time I receive a text though, Messages opens on my Mac without my permission, often getting in the way of what I'm trying to work on. The rare times when I actually use it, the conversations are reordered and many are just missing.
>It prevents people from building on existing copyrighted art.

Does not prevent existing copyrighted art to be build so does not look like an issue to me.

>Talent is redirected to creating work that becomes copyrighted.

Authors prefer to be paid for their work? Let me ask you - if you had not been paid for whatever you do, would you continue doing that or found other, more productive occupation? As somebody who is being paid for creating copyrighted work I can assure you - I would not work for free, I'd do something else.
School is only interested into that the kid submits to authority and will be scared of authority the rest of his life, because the people that make up school all are what they want the kid to be, they are more afraid even of the kid than authority.

The parent describes a fantastic kid and should trust the kid and make sure to soften the impact of that school and prepare the kid for better times after school.

In my country in Europe there are schools that care about natural curiosity and will not try to kill it, I don't know about the situation in the US where this takes place.
"If that is the best way to use money (and you choose an effective charity) that is what they will do."

There are actually a lot of legal constraints on charities that make "invest the money for decades and then spend it" not work well for them. If you think this is what makes the most sense at this point you pretty much need to do it yourself, potentially with a donor-advised fund.

"Prevention is better than cure."

Sometimes. There are tradeoffs, and depending on what you're working on either can be more efficient.

(I agree with your bottom line, that giving money now is important, but for different reasons.)
Is implementing agile methodologies enough?
How does one become a 'tech arch'- sounds like one of those niche jobs that only specialized companies have.
Sure, post-WW1 France vs. Britain are a fairly good natural experiment that was conducted - France devalued and Britain did not, and despite the natural advantage of not being destroyed in the war France's economy generally outperformed Britain's anyway. In the current situation one can look at the US vs. Europe though that is more of a less-austerity vs. more-austerity example and of the course, as with all natural experiments the two subjects are not entirely the same.

That, and the economic models that are consistent with recent behaviour in these economies are saying that the alternative is better. Also, we know the trade-off here - austerity is bad for wage-earners, the poor, people with few, no, or negative assets in the denominated currency. Inflation is bad for net asset-holders in the denominated currency and importers.

Now, given that most of the vulnerable people in a society fall into one group that can be a moral basis for action and it is easy to see which side of the political spectrum is more likely to align on each particular side of the debate.

(I post this feeling assured you probably won't read the response since a whole day has passed, but what the heck!)