joshdover

I also agree with the parent comment here, but wanted to shed some light on your input.

The problem with your "negative" vs "positive" distinction is that it's quite subjective and not at all clear cut.

> “We want to empower marginalized groups” is positive and doesn’t bother that much people who.. don’t think it’s necessary, because it’s not a political position you can disagreee with per se

There are groups who have very big problems with this statement per se. See the numerous court cases over the past decade challenging affirmative action in university admissions. Many view helping one group as oppressing another (a view I find quite misinformed given the inequities in our society, but not completely irrational, given bad priors).

Maybe what you're trying to get at is progressive politics vs. oppressive politics. This distinction I can understand more clearly, however when you choose to oppress a group that is oppressing others, maybe this is justified?

For instance, banning ISIS from access to Twitter seems like a pretty morally sound decision to me as an American. Given that, is there really a difference between banning ISIS and banning white supremacists who discuss violence? Or Presidents who promote violence against journalists? What's the moral outcome of NOT banning any of these groups?

Any choice, including choosing not to act, is morally liable. I think Gitlab's stance here is quite morally lazy, if not wrong.

I'm normally one to see both sides in a situation like this, but this one struck me differently.

YouTube appears scared of extremists. They claim to fear a anti-conservative bias. If by policing blatant bigotry and hate makes you anti-conservative, there may be an issue with conservatism, not your policy.

If mainstream conservatives have gotten to the point where they'd defend blatant bigotry, disrespect, and just down right hateful behavior, and we yield to them, we need a reality check. This type of behavior does not make our society any better, promote a discussion, or spread any kind of well-being.

The same behavior would not be tolerated in many of the community spaces we share: schools, churches, theaters, restaurants. Why do we allow such things online? Why do we allow women to be harassed endlessly with death rape threats on Twitter but not in person? I do not understand. To mistake poor cyber behavior as less important and less influential on our culture may be the gravest mistake we keep making.

There's a good faith, honest, and respectful way to have differing opinions and discuss important topics. But this isn't it, and it's not ambiguous. If we want a world where goodness prevails, we have to stop being scared and start making choices.

The author's opinion of Rust being less is that, an opinion. It does have large advantages over C: memory safety, an incredibly powerful type system, a compiler that supports detailed error messages, a powerful build tool (Cargo), an expressive macro system, etc.

Others who have built applications with Rust seem to be coming away with a much different impression that the author. He does mention some gaps (lack of a spec, unstable ABI) but these are not hardstops for all usecases. The main thread of complaints appear to be from lack of choice of tooling and compilers.

I'd wager that the advantages outweigh the drawbacks for many projects, though not all.

Most of the author's points here derive from the fact that C has been around for nearly 50 years and Rust a mere 8. This post should really be titled "Rust is not a good C replacement _right now_".

Yes, Rust still has a long way to go to be the right tool for all the things you can do with C today, but that doesn't make it less. It clearly has benefits when writing concurrent and safe code. You pay for this with a learning curve, but the Rust team has been shaving this curve down through better tooling and documentation for the past few years.

> Yes, Rust is more safe. I don’t really care. In light of all of these problems, I’ll take my segfaults and buffer overflows.

I suspect that for the author's work, these things may not matter much. But to a programmer working on any software where security is paramount (many web infrastructure pieces), this feature is golden.

I expect that as Rust matures, we'll see a solidified spec, competing implementations, and expanded build tooling. C has a long head-start, not to acknowledge that is just wrong.

Good information, and based on that, I agree, Nielsen is doing similarly bad things, one distinction being that a child is unlikely to sign up for these services without their parents' knowledge.

I'm not here to defend Neilsen at all, but I do think Facebook has a bit more responsibility to make the right decisions here given their ubiquity, reach, AND the invasiveness of how a root certificate allows them access to encrypted traffic and even text messages (really?).

I understand your sentiment here, but the broader point here is that we as industry have been historically timid about taking hardline ethical stances. In my opinion, Facebook's behavior here is clearly wrong, and I'm going to state it as so.

By taking a hardline stance, I'm opening the opportunity to prove me wrong. This is an open forum and I'm not calling anyone names for disagreeing with me. In fact if you do have a valid counterargument, PLEASE DO disagree. I'm more concerned about getting to the truth than being right.

But if there isn't a counterargument, then I want my comment to stand out as a stark reminder that we should not accept or be complicit to these types of practices going forward. If we don't take these types of stances, I do not think we will change the culture in tech.

There's a huge difference between what Nielsen does and what Facebook did.

1) Nielsen doesn't explicitly target children.

2) The data that Nielsen collects is far less intrusive than what FB collects.

3) The consumer is much more likely to be informed about the data Nielsen collects, where as with FB, it's unlikely that a user (especially a minor) understands the extent of what FB was collecting.

And yes, Facebook was requiring "parental consent" to collect this data, but as we all know that is very hard to verify and children have been ticking the "I'm 13 or older" box for years without their parents knowing.

What Facebook did clearly crossed a line. End of story.