887 karma · joined May 18, 2013
Many of us have been listening to Stallman for close to 20 years and have been part of free software movement for that long. Having a good chuckle at Comrade Stallman expense is rite of passage in a way.
The book is roughly 300 pages. Even with a careful reading that's only a few days invested.
For instance I read Roberto Ierusalimschys's Programming in Lua and Niklaus Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. But have never really had a project which fit either of those languages. I still enjoyed the books.
I have been waiting for this book I have had this book in my wishlist for quite a while. Nim looks interesting and compiling to C is highly desirable to me.
I much prefer a well written book length introduction to reading through the documentation even if its good.
Ok, I found them. https://www.manning.com/books/nim-in-action?a_aid=niminactio...
I certainly do not owe another man's child my child's future and wealth because we have been christened 'White People' and are now responsible to atone for unfashionable property holding of 18th century English American Noblemen and be discriminated against by the state. If that is what the 'left' of America thinks this country stands for and that is how we should live then I am fairly certain they will continue on the downward trajectory into the pages of history and possibly the insane asylum.
A healthy and prosperous farewell to you my geriatric Boomer good man.
Affirmative action programs like most progressive ideology and policy has simply not produced any tangible lasting results. In most respects the focus groups of these programs are in worse shape now then they were 30 years ago. The presumption that 'racism', 'sexism' or 'oppression' is responsible for the failure of certain groups is simply unfounded blame shifting by sloppy ideologues. And the notion that gifting them undeserved employment opportunities is going to fix there problems is also a misguided and harmful idea.
The premise is simply wrong and will continue to fail at its stated goal but have the consequence of creating new groups of disadvantaged people who have been systemically discriminated against for having an undesirable skin color or genitalia according to the Liberal Lefts preferred fetishes.
Either out of social opposition or economic necessity these programs will be ended. The most egregious of policies such as race based admission quotas that certain universities use is already under sustained lawsuits and there is every indication that they will be forced to stop there racist and misandrist discrimination against European and Asian men.
> Every poll I've ever seen breaking out support for affirmative action policies by age groups, and I've seen a lot over the from the early 1990s through the last couple of years, has consistently found support higher among younger Americans.
The Baby Boomers cling to these ideas out of stubborn habit but people under 60 when asked if they think certain racial groups should get preferential access to job opportunities strongly disagree. That's not to say certain groups think they themselves should get preferential access to jobs for xyz reasons. Disparate groups claiming they deserve affirmative action for a cornucopia of mostly undefinable grievances like 'oppression' and 'reparations' is not going to sustain these misguided programs in the current century.
It's a shame that people cling to these misguided failed ideas. There is a lot of good work people could do trying to fix the broken communities that have problems. But I suppose that would be a lot of work and perhaps not as economically rewarding as keeping a failed and bloated bureaucratic failure on its feat at least until they can retire.
Your argument is confusing your very personal emotional cultural and racial feelings with what you assume to be the experience of other American citizens, this is a false presumption. You are further assuming that these feeling supersede Our legal framework and constitutional rights.
> "beneficiaries of our forefathers"
For my self and I can attest for most of my social circle neither George Washington or any of the colonial American founders or 18th and 19th century Americans are my 'forfathers'. The are the founders of America and I am legally an American citizen but I have no cultural or hereditary connection to any of these men or America previous to my families very recent immigration to this country.
"we owe a debt to continue their work and clean up their messes"
Again there is no 'work' that I or any other American citizen is legally obligate to do to as you say to 'clean up there mess'. On a general note one of the key freedoms that we enjoy in the modern democratic state that separates us from feudalism is the abolition of intergenerational debt. And again there is no intergenerational relationship between myself and any historic American hereditary.
Do you think that a Ukrainian immigrant who immigrates to this Country in 2017 should be denied employment to give the job to an Ethiopian immigrant who immigrates here in 2017 also to 'finish the work' of 18th century English American who farmed potatoes there whole life and probably never even saw a an African let alone owned any land or slaves?
Quite frankly its a bizarre and brutish sort of racial totalitarianism that is being put forward by American liberals to deny opportunity to broad brush of people they have chosen to discriminate agaist.
Should a Chinese immigrant who works as a dishwasher be denied a spot at Harvard to make room for a Black American who comes from a Millionaire sport star family so that an arbitrary quota is filled?
These historical grievances are alien to an increasing percentage of the American public who has no racial or historical connection to any of these issues. And we are certainly no going to forsake out future wealth and prosperity and the opportunities of out children to 'make happy' a small wealthy group of mostly white Americans who think they have the right to discriminate against us for 'good reasons'.
They may not be opposed goals but if a method includes the exclusion of certain racial and sex groups then you can not call the method an equality of opportunity. You are simply trying to gift success to a preferential and privileged race or sex. That is the method the American liberal left has chosen. And it is racist and sexist methodology.
> The left, OTOH, recognized that the absence of the latter causes the absence of the former (outcomes at t0 define opportunities at t1; one of the most important parts of outcomes are the opportunities that they create) and so in the absence of equality of outcomes, corrective measures are necessary to create equality of opportunity, and those measures are in many cases going to involve moving toward equality of outcomes, both in direct nature and indirect effect.
Equality of opportunity will never, and can never guarantee an equality of outcome.
In most cases including employment and other competitive activities there will always be losers. When two tennis players play a game there will be one winner and one loser. When there is a management spot open in a company there will only be one winner and multiple losers. When 1000 applicants apply for a single job opening there will be one winner that gets the job and 999 people who lose.
What the Liberal Left has embraced by promoting equality of outcomes is the removal of equality of opportunity in its entirety for anyone they have preemptively decided should be the looser. There can be no competition in the first place and there is no opportunity. Winners are simply anointed by a committee of divinely anointed deciders.
If 1000 people apply for a job and 999 of them are White and Asian men and one is Black woman and the anointed deciders decide that a Black woman should get the job, which is what race based quotas do, those 999 white and Asian men had no equality of opportunity period.
If this is the sort of game that the Liberal left thinks they are going to play with hundreds of millions of people's lives, and they think they cap pick and choose who's hopes and dreams come true, and they can exclude hundred of thousand on a whim to meet an arbitraty and ever changing percentage of racialy balanced winners, good luck. The small window of accaptence of these sort of ideas are closing with the Baby Boomers. The vast majority of people under under 60 do not sees these type of policies as fair or good. And they have every right to reject them. These are massive iniquality that the left thinks they are entitled to try and engineer into a very fragile and tenuous democracy.
In conclusion promoting the equality of outcomes is erasing the possibility of equality of opportunity. And in the specific case of hiring decisions using race as a criteria for deciding who wins the job it's simply an act of blatent discrimination by the specific employer and the management who made the decisions.
If you are advocating for racial discrimination against European people then your no different then European people who advocated for racial discrimination against Africans.
There was many books and arguments that advocated for discrimination as a 'good thing' in the 18th and 19th century. They are as morally bankrupt as the arguments made today in favour of racial discrimination against Europeans.
A more perfect union is not achieve in any sense by adopting racial discriminatory policies. You are headed in the opposite direction. These policies will be short lived and overturned, but in the meantime cause enormous harm and injustice.
Its very important that well intentioned people understand that they are playing with fire that they will not be able to put out with this issue. Racial discrimination in the 21st century, especially in education and employment are for all intent and purpose a form of slavery. And the people who are being effected by these illegitimate racist policies are growing a fire inside and it is spreading and that fire is going to grow and grow.
Trump is just the first spark of this fire if you understand me. There is righteous indignation of these policies and severity of the opposition to these injustices are going to be much more explosive then the 1960s were in terms of racial and societal disintegration.
You can not fix the problem of a perceived under-representation of certain groups such as Africans by forcefully removing and ghettoizing hundreds of millions of Dispirit European ethnic and religious groups from employment and other opportunities. I simply do not think many on the left understand the gravity of the repercussions that are unfolding because of these policies.
Equality of outcomes enforced by excluding certain racial groups creates intergenerational systemic government oppression of the excluded groups. Again the goal and the means are contradictory.
The socially acceptable way to increase participation by a perceived underrepresented group is to target that group with sustained improvement programs with measurable outcomes. This is the only serious way to address the problem. The opportunities are there but talent with proper skills is not.
>> This would also presuppose that we have successfully eliminated systemic racism from our society, which is... an argument that would require substantial supporting evidence.
The burden of proof is on the accuser to prove that 'society' is in fact guilty of 'systemic racism'. The presumption of Innocence until proven guilty is a cornerstone of western law. Whey you have an indictment of 'society' in a court of law then we can have a fruitful discussion of 'societal systemic racism'.
>> And with respect to the whole "taking of jobs", I will add a more comprehensively researched rebuttal to my own anecdotal experience: if you're good, you're in no danger of getting caught up in a quota system. Competent white folks are doing just fine. The less-competent.... probably should cowboy up. As my exploited millennials would say: "git gud".
Once again your presenting a contradiction. You want to argue that 'systemic racism', for instance against blacks is a horrible injustice. But also claim that other racial groups such as whites are being excluded because there is a racially discriminatory quota system, but you have no problem with that.
So what I gather from your post is that you support racism as long as its against Whites and Asians.
And you also think that its perfectly fine to remove 'less-competent' people as long as they are White or Asian and replace then with presumably even 'less-competent' black people?
If leftists/liberals wanted everyone to be treated fairly without prejudice of their race or sex then they would not continually push for the expansion and entrenchment of race and sex based affirmative action programs which deliberately exclude people from employment opportunities, scholarships, networking opportunities and many other essential resources.
The goals and the means are contradictory. If you abandon the goal of equality of opportunity as the left has for the more dubious goal of equality of outcomes then your create a system that treats people unequally based on there race and sex. And furthermore, a system that artificially transfers burdens and hardships onto select races while giving others races 'privileges' and opportunity.
No 'reasonable human' will ever accept exclusion from employment because of there race or sex. And that is exactly what is happening to many qualified and ambitious people at this point. The pool of disaffected people is only going to grow until these polices are changed to reflect a meritocratic model based on objective qualifications.
struct A {
int x, y;
};
struct B {
union {
struct A 2d;
struct { int x, y; };
}
int z;
};
...
struct B foo;
foo.x = foo.2d.y = foo.z = 0;
popularly known as Bill Nye the Science Guy, is an American science educator, television presenter, and mechanical engineer. He is best known as the host of the PBS children's science show Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993–1998)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nye
Bill Nye is a media personality. Where he draws the line between 'presenting the facts' and 'entertaining the crowd' is hard to judge. Global warming disaster porn gets him exposure and helps his career. I would take any of his predictions with a grain of salt unless backed up by some serious research and studies. These claims by Nye and others are usually just intuitive guesses made by the presenter.
I can compile Sylpheed form sources it in a few minutes on any recent version of Linux or BSD with little or no dependencies.
> A secure coding standard form CERT should focus entirely on describing conventions and program properties that do not already follow from the standard as a matter of correctness.
from CERT 1.7 "The wiki also contains two platform-specific annexes at the time of this writing; one annex for POSIX and one for Windows. These annexes have been omitted from this standard because they are not part of the core standard."
So while the CERT does use some examples from system interfaces its not a standard for programming the system interfaces for POSIX or Windows. It looks like there trying to limit the standard to ISO C. The examples you gave fall into the system interface category. POSIX is huge and the same for Windows, much bigger then ISO C.
I think in order to explain conventions for a system interface you really need a longer form publication like a book. So you can take 50 pages to describe an interface and how to use it and show examples etc.
The best way that I have found to figure this stuff out is the standard way. You get a copy of all the relevant standards as a foundation, ISO, POSIX, Window and stuff like CERT. Then you you get some of the system programming books (listed below). Then you find get some good reference code that show best practice. usually code from the operating system or utilities. Lastly read all the compiler docs and tool docs to set up the best code analysis framework you can.
These are a few system programming books that I use.
(best intro book) GNU/Linux Application Programming https://www.amazon.com/GNU-Linux-Application-Programming/dp/...
UNIX Systems Programming https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Systems-Programming-Communicatio...
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Programming-UNIX-Environment...
Windows System Programming https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Paperback-Addison-Wesley-...
The Linux Programming Interface http://www.man7.org/tlpi/
edit: I'm not sure your skill level, you may have seen all of those but I posted them regardless. There is a lot of security and convention in those books.
Just for future reference when you quote put the page number or section so people can look it up and see the context.
From my experience expert arguments about C end with a reference to the C standard. The C standard is authoritative. If you can quote the standard to back up your argument you win. Arguing C/C++ is different from most other languages in that respect because we have an official ISO standard and expert C/C++ programmers take the standard very seriously.
The language of the C standard is very terse and hard to read for most people. (myself included) And a lot of the issues are very subtle. As a result anyone quoting the C standard starts to adopt the C standard style of language and idiom. So you get some arguments and documents like CERT that end up being kind of hard to read and terse also. I have read some arguments where I have to open the standard to read the argument because its essentially two people quoting the standard arguing about the correct meaning of a particular passage.
If they give a section reference to the C standard the purpose is to be authoritative. So that people reading it can look those up in the C standard and know that they are official undefined behaviors. There are lots of arguments about specific undefined behavior. And the only way to settle the dispute is to refer to the standard to see if the behavior is actually an official undefined behavior or someone who is making there own judgment which is usually wrong if its not backed up by the standard.
And I'm fairly cretin that all the major compilers have a check and warning for it in various forms.
If you make a global simple type it is initialized to zero.
If you use calloc it initializes to what ever digit you want (ie) 0.
If you use malloc etc then you set it with memset.
if you use automatic variables you set them on creation, int i = 0;
If you make an automatic aggregate type you set it like so, struct bob = {0};
and so on.
if you want to make sure your pointer is not uninitialized you set them to NULL on creation and set them to NULL on un-assignment or free. And then always test them for NULL.
All of that is very beginner to intermediate level knowledge and anyone who is going to use something like CERT is expected to know all the basics.
There are valid reasons why you can claim that C memory management is unsafe or not as safe as other languages but its not related to initialization.
The purpose of the standard is to allows a piece of software to get CERT certified. You have to actually submit your code to CERT and they analyze it and give you a certificate and add the software to the list of conforming systems.
This can intern help to gain other certifications. For instance if you are working on software for the Department Of Defense they have there own sets of certification standards. Some of which may be satisfied by conformance to CERT.
I would start to investigate static analyzers and compilers and see what you can find. Specifically look for claim that diagnose standards violations and which ones.
Also take a look at section 1.7. There is a difference between the 99 coding 'rules' and the 185 'recommendations'. Recommendations provide guidance but do not necessarily indicate a defect. So a recommendation is not necessarily exact.
As time goes on I'm beginning think that no matter what the original design of the platform was they will all inevitably regress into something like IRC.
The rules will be changed so that groups can split of or filter and focus on some specific area to try to keep the discussion on topic and productive. And inevitably there will be some group that captures control of that group and turns it into a dictatorship.
Dissenters will start a new group if they can or leave the platform. Any other design will just become so noisy and unproductive that it turns into a dumpster fire.
The reason why HN is not a total shit show is because they sometimes put down the hammer and knock out off topic discussion from the core set of topics that revolve around the practice of programming.
> Going one step further, I would propose an invite system.
Some of the most productive people who make the best posts are hermits. There people who rarely check in to social media to see whats going on and have little or no friends they could ask for a invite.
And on the other hand some of the most crap people are online all the time and have huge networks and can get an invite to where ever they want.
I seriously doubt that a shortage of H1B visas would be an issue for a company that decides to hire someone into a senior position. Senior positions are handled with more care then junior positions.
The only real change is that recruiters will have to change there talent pools. There reliance on H1B is mostly because no one stopped them not because there is a lack of us talent.
They would love to get back to the days when they could just throw crap over the wall onto the TV and people had not other sources of information or any way to collectively discuss its validity.