I'm not sure about the last point. I would think hardware dedicated accelerators were done because it was the cheapest way to achieve that performance not because it allowed to somehow bypass GPL. However, choosing to not run Linux but some proprietary OS could most certainly have something to do with that.
At the end of the day, was it a good thing? I would say it was. It opened many generations of home router hardware to being modded/replaced with user controlled software. It even created a market of its own where certain consumer router hardware is advertised as being designed to run custom/third-party software and where vendors themselves ship with some heavily modified software and release the sources for it from day 1 (which are the only wifi routers I shop for these days).
That hasn't been the experience for me. I have much fewer questions now than I had when I started to program 30 years ago. Not to say that there aren't a lot of new things I don't know about that are coming up every day but that doesn't impact in any meaningful way my ability to solve real problems with software.
What previously was an issue of "I have no idea how to even approach this problem, not to mention write code that solves it" it is now a question of "I have at least 5 ideas how to solve this problem, I need to analyze which one is best solution for this particular context". It's much less about learning the tools and a lot more about how to correctly apply those tools for the right situation. I feel that this latter part could take my entire life but I can definitely tell I'm getting better at it every year, even if I significantly change the problem domain I work in.
As a matter of fact, every time I change the problem domain now I noticed less and less time necessary to become proficient in the new domain as I am able to pull from the experience I gathered previously. Computer science seems like an "infinite" problem domain but actually what I found in practice is that the more problem domains I move through the more I notice similarities and solving the same problem over and over again (albeit, with some small differences which may matter if you work in a performance or resource constrained environment).
Maybe workplaces (and the public in general) should adopt the same rules as to what constitutes political discourse and then we'd stop having threads around "everything is political" statements...
I seriously doubt that. Most companies are pushing internal "respect your coworkers" rules that can be linked with politics but that's not really discussing Trump. I suspect that even Coinbase with their newly declared "apolitical workplace" rules does have plenty of anti-discrimination, harassment, etc rules, for one because lacking those can result in very bad consequences for the company in a trial.
It's unfortunate discussions can't be kept over ideas and policies instead of veering towards persons. While I believe Trump is the worst president the US has had in recent history that doesn't mean I'd be unwilling to entertain a discussion of anything he may have done that people think it was a good thing. I suspect in most cases we'll end up with "we agree to disagree" which is fine.
That said, one thing we have to consider is the environment in which the discussion takes place. At work people shouldn't have to get stressed with non-work related things, that's not in the interest of the company nor of the employees. So even if you know you can have respectful deep conversations of controversial current day politics with your colleagues, a better question would be, should you even have those conversations at work?
I feel for people that suddenly need to discuss such topics, it means that they probably don't have IRL friends or friends outside of work if they really feel that they have to talk about no-work related issues at a work lunch. It's sad.
Even if COVID-19 fatality rate is _lower_ than the regular flu, if it infects people faster to the point where those very few severe cases cannot get the help they need because of health services being overwhelmed then it will potentially be resulting in a lot more deaths than the flu.
> Except it does not affect Google, because Google has this install ID to use both for tracking and preventing ad-fraud.
So when Apple releases a privacy feature, that doesn't affect them as a business, we praise the feature or we say "except it doesn't affect Apple" and somehow try to argue how the feature is less valuable because of that?
Quite a lot of reasons. I assume you asked that because you're thinking it's used to gather information on its users. That could be one of the many reasons. At least initially it was because Mozilla/Firefox didn't want to adopt a multi-process architecture.
In terms of strategic reasons, as a company that depends on people browsing on their websites other reasons are obvious: avoid lock in that could be pushed by third-party browser makers/competitors (say IE becomes the most popular and it implements proprietary extensions that work only on their websites[1]), ensure there exists a fast secure browser so that people can keep browsing even if everyone else stops making good browsers out there.
[1] Now before you go ahead and point out how Google proposes HTML/HTTP features that get implemented in their browsers and on the server side, all such features have public specification and source code, so anyone else could implement them too. This is very different from the IE days of yore, where MS was extending IE through ActiveX. ActiveX was developed in house and they were releasing binary plugins/SDKs to develop ActiveX plugins, effectively maintaining full control over it (one would have to develop ActiveX compatible technology from scratch if they wanted it open source, with Chrome all they have to do is fork the source code).
TL;DR I think whoever posted that is trying to bury the UA anonymizing feature by derailing the discussion.
What I'm seeing is an RFC for anonymizing parts of User-Agent in order to reduce UA based fingerprinting, which improves everyone's privacy, that's a good thing!
Then I see someone comments how that could negatively impact existing websites or Chromium-derived browsers, comments which are totally fair and make an argument that may not be a good idea doing this change because of that.
Then someone mentions the _existing_ x-client-data headers attached to requests that uniquely identify a Chrome installation. Then a lot of comments on that, including here on HN.
To me that's derailing the original issue. If we want to propose that Chrome remove those headers we should do so as a separate issue and have people comment/vote on that. By talking about it on the UA anonymizing proposal we are polluting that discussion and effectively stalling that proposal which, if approved, could improve privacy (especially since it will go into Chromium so then any non-Chrome builds can get the feature without having to worry about x-client-data that Chrome does).
Saying that "you're not payed for that" is risky. Yes, you're technically right but when you will be at your new fancy job you may need to do MANY things that you aren't technically being payed to do, so that you can deliver. That IMO is one of the essential skills a senior developer has, not that they can do things a junior developer can't, but that they have a breath of knowledge and skills that make them good junior developers at many things they aren't specialized for and are able to make use of them to get the job done. In that light, picking on "one little thing" such as the interview process using something you may not be used to or like or ever need to do when actually hired (whiteboard coding), seems wrong.
I would say that's because Eastern Europe has changed, to the better, and ironically in some regard because of his previous contributions. When Eastern Europe was still largely communist, his ideas of government and society (even if you don't subscribe entirely to them) were much better than the systems in place at the time. So of course everyone loved him.
Nowadays with much of Eastern Europe having pretty decent democratic societies (lots of problems still and the Russian influence has grown a lot lately) his ideas aren't seen as a pure "positive" contribution but more like a variation with its own pros and cons of the systems already in place.
Personally (like I said elsewhere in the thread) I own much of my professional life to one of his foundations and as such in my book he is a hero and a person that had a huge positive contribution on my life.
Democracy without a Bill of Rights is simply dictatorship of the majority. That's why modern democracies have a Constitution and a justice system that is independent of the election system. You are technically right that if someone from outside tries to influence the result of some election that would be meddling with the democratic process but at the same time if that democratic process is considering getting the majority to vote against human rights of certain ethnic groups I don't think it deserves much defense to begin with.
In other words, democracy is a tool, not an end in itself.
I owe most of my professional life to one of Soros' foundations that donated computers (with a Linux server mind you) to poor cities in a poor country many many years ago. Ironically, I ended up working for one of the companies he's complaining about so I don't know how to feel about this. But I do agree that populism is generally bad (or nationalism, or religion etc), generally any idealism that places other things as more important over human life. Of course, the irony is some of these movements start from humanistic values, but end up losing their perspective.
At the end of the day, was it a good thing? I would say it was. It opened many generations of home router hardware to being modded/replaced with user controlled software. It even created a market of its own where certain consumer router hardware is advertised as being designed to run custom/third-party software and where vendors themselves ship with some heavily modified software and release the sources for it from day 1 (which are the only wifi routers I shop for these days).