101–110 of 386 posts
> it is still hard for many people to accept that something that feels good may not in fact be good This strikes me as surprising. I have always been taught the opposite: if it feels good, it's probably bad for you, or illegal, or immoral, or all three.
> if it feels good, it's probably bad for you, or illegal, or immoral, or all three. Pretty much. The only exceptions I’ve found are exercising and saunas.
While his message is undoubtedly important I find his writing style is overly condescending and detracts from the message.
He probably has earned the right to be condescending as much as say Linus has. Dude risked it all to expose what he thought was wrong, and only someone as smart as him could have managed to stay alive and out of jail (albeit barely) facing off the most powerful country in the world.
For instance, if you like the Washington Post, and read this article you'll be quite annoyed at the "have to lose your spine" remark. The message is then diluted.
If you're just a regular consumer who likes the iPhone you'd be annoyed at the latte status symbol quip. The message is then diluted.
I don't think comparison with Linus is equivalent because he doesn't publicly advocate much whereas that's mainly what Snowden does.
(Perhaps I should have included this in the original comment.)
"For example, if you want to see Microsoft have a heart attack, talk about the idea of defining legal liability for bad code in a commercial product." That sort of discussion is quickly dismissed on HN. And probably elsewhere on the web/over the internet. Instead we frequently see discussion blaming users of the software, i.e., Microsoft's customers, or even suggestions to make the customer liable, or comments from "…
Most of the people I went to Uni with ended up in fields where the companies are liable for bad stuff, to a certain degree. It does exist. However: * you get paid a lot less * the companies and industries move very slowly * you spend a lot more time writing long-form, some time just re-using existing stuff wholesale, and almost no time building actually new things I mean like Real Engineering fields. What we do in so…
I agree.
Let's not use tools as a crutch. Roman engineers built bridges that are still standing today with little to no maintenance. There's no indication that those structures are going to fail anytime soon either. I think we can agree that their tooling was worse than our current bridge building tools.
> I mean like Real Engineering fields. What we do in software is not real engineering, not even close. That has pros and cons.
So the word engineer is probably loaded if not dated, a throwback to engineering's boom in the 19th and early 20th century. No idea why we still use it since software is more like math than anything else. Computer scientist just never stuck.
I tend to bang on about software not as engineering but as literacy. It makes some sense even here - that bad code is as common as bad law - and often for the same reasons, politics, money, and hard questions "Engineering" is a wide subject - the big stuff is carefully built and highly regulated - bridges and buildings. But as we go down the scale we see engineering give way to the problems of politics and money - to…
If a car explodes because it got hit by an artillery shell, would anyone hold the automotive engineers responsible? If a building collapses because a bomb was dropped on it, would anyone hold the civil engineers responsible?
> it is still hard for many people to accept that something that feels good may not in fact be good This strikes me as surprising. I have always been taught the opposite: if it feels good, it's probably bad for you, or illegal, or immoral, or all three.
even more so with Android & iOS.
I was all ready to post a reply... when I was hit by the darkest pattern of all... you must pay to do so, with no hint prior to that moment.
Thinking about this right now: annoying sure but why do you consider this pattern dark? I bet it reduces spam and trolling by orders of magnitude unlike say confusing cookie dialogs designed to make you surrender all your private info.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the people I went to Uni with ended up in fields where the companies are liable for bad stuff, to a certain degree. It does exist. However: * you get paid a lot less * the companies and industries move very slowly * you spend a lot more time writing long-form, some time just re-using existing stuff wholesale, and almost no time building actually new things I mean like Real Engineering fields. What we do in so…
Is moving more slowly in software a bad thing? I can just imagine an alternative world where people are better off, using sites that look like HN but are secure and work in their best interest.
I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again. On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from natio…
If there is one thing politicians are surely better at it than programmers is making decisions about what programming languages should be used! /s Yes on theme, but no on ”there aught to be a law” that bans C/C++ because of an evolving goal of memory safety. When Rust++ comes out surely there will be people complaining that Rust isn’t safe, and so on. Best case is you make the consequence punishable (as was described…
I know this kind of thing is a lightening rod for a lot of software folks, but it does have the nice property that it's proactive; you don't have to wait around for the obviously-unsafe practice to blow up in someone's face before you can do something about it.
And no one wants to have to get licensed to write some crud app in NodeJS. But maybe these kinds of high-stakes modules related to encryption, security, and so on could be a place to start with it; if you're going to work in these areas, and offer your work to the public (for money or otherwise), then you either need to be licensed by the professional body, or clearly advertise in the header of each file that the work has not be overseen by a licensed professional.
That's the kind of arrangement that could do things like specify languages, methods, interfaces, and so on.