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Comment by mosdave | Hacker News Reader

> Would you say people aren't software developers unless they are employed by a company to predominately develop software?

Yes, without question. It's tautological.

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It would perhaps be tautological if the OP had qualified professional software developers, but the tautological definition for "software developer" is "anyone who develops software (irrespective of whether they do it professionally)". If we're going to pick nits, we may as well be accurate, right?

Which was exactly my point. They are limiting the title of "journalist" to exclusively people who have been anointed as journalists by some gatekeeping entity. This rules out hobbyist, freelancers, self employed people, people just breaking into the industry, and all sorts of other people. The software developing equivalents of those people are inarguably part of the software development community. Why wouldn't their counterparts in another industry be considered journalists?

If you don't rule out hobbyists, freelancers, and the self-employed, I can declare myself a journalist, start a blog or a Twitter, and start throwing Molotov cocktails, and if I get arrested for it, that's another arrest of a journalist.

And as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing opponent of the regime, I want to raise the number of arrests of journalists, because that makes the regime look bad, as shown by this thread. Even if every single arrest is of someone like me - a left-radical with a Twitter account, not Walter Cronkite or whoever - it's unlikely that anyone will bother to check, and even more unlikely that, if anyone bothers to check, very many other people will hear about it.

Where is this trope of Molotov throwing journalists coming from? I have seen it multiple times in this thread and it is just bizarre. No one would consider someone throwing a Molotov a journalist, no one would count such an arrest as the arrest of a journalist, and no one would consider the arrest an attack on press freedom.

what about unemployed/retired software developers, and open source contributors?

Doesn't the fact that you had to use different language to communicate their status lead into their point?

no, it questions it

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