Pacabel

If anyone ever pulled crap like that on me during a conversation, I would be done with that person forever. I wouldn't care who he or she was.

If somebody is disrespectful enough to engage in behavior as pathetic as that, then I want nothing to do with that person. Maybe "hipsters" would be fine with such shabby treatment, but I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking it's an extremely distasteful thing to do to somebody you're conversing with.

That's a pretty broad and idealistic claim to be making.

"Correctness" itself isn't an absolute. While something either does or does not conform to whatever has been defined as "correct", it's perfectly fine for the defined "correct" behavior in a given situation to be a crash.

In some cases a crash is the best that can be hoped for. Continuing on, even in an attempt to handle the failure more gracefully, can potentially be more harmful than just crashing.

Putting your nonsense accusations and political correctness hypersensitivity aside, can you please provide us with a better single-word term that precisely describes something (such as an argument or a justification) that's so narrowly and uncompromisingly focused so as to totally miss how society at large will interpret it?

And, please, be serious about this. Suggesting words like "intolerant" or "wrong" wouldn't be helpful, obviously. If you have such a problem with the term used previously, provide us with one that offers just as much meaning, but isn't "offensive" to people who are overly sensitive.

Why not?

This site needs some kind of meta-moderation system, or some other way to moderate the moderation.

What you describe seems to be happening more and more often these days, and I think it's harmful. Comments will receive many upvotes, and then suddenly start getting many downvotes. Or it'll happen the other way around.

When that kind of fluctuation is happening, I think the only appropriate thing to do, especially when downvotes or downvoted comments are involved, is to show the comment normally, instead of obscuring it with harder to read grey text. Clearly there's some agreement, and there's some disagreement, so the only sane thing to do is to show the comment so readers can make their own analyses of it.

If some of the accesses were by people or systems within Mozilla, can you please address why a month went by before the problem was noticed?

If there was enough need to justify putting forth the effort required to export a sanitized version of these data for developers to use, then why didn't these users notice that something was wrong much sooner? And if they did notice, why weren't the appropriate parties within Mozilla notified sooner?

Could you please provide more specific details about these IP addresses that couldn't be accounted for, too? Perhaps a list of them, for instance? At least then affected users will be able to make their own call regarding their level of risk due to this incident.

It's easy to dismiss a one-in-a-million, or even a one-in-a-trillion event, as being unimportant when it happens to somebody else, especially when that person isn't directly known. But one's thinking can change very, very quickly when one is directly affected by such an improbable event, be it in positive or negative way.

The impact may seem irrelevant or minor to you, but to those affected it could very well be far more significant.

When read without putting political correctness above all else, the comment from bowlofpetunias is quite civilized.

I think it brings up some very good points about how non-technical people and technical people can interpret situations involving technology in very different ways, for example. And I think it's actually trying to hold the technical community to a much higher standard when it comes to justifying actions that society at large will very likely disagree with.

It's far more harmful and disruptive to see the perfectly legitimate argument of bowlofpetunias being totally ignored and even obscured, merely because some people find a single word in the comment to potentially be politically incorrect or potentially offensive.

Discussion is much better when the focus is on the argument or topic itself, rather than going off on political correctness tangents over a single word in somebody's comment.

When I read that earlier comment, I don't see "semi-autistic semantics" being used as an insult. I think it's actually quite relevant given the context, and appropriate given the argument that was being made.

Defining characteristics of autism (that is, the medical condition) include a deficiency when it comes to social understanding, a tendency to have an extreme focus on minor details, and an inherent inability to grasp the "big picture".

The earlier comment describes how certain attempts to justify what happened in a particular situation end up exhibiting similar traits. These justifications do not correspond well at all with how society at large interprets the situation, and they have a very narrow focus that ignores the larger social aspects of the situation.

I could see it being insulting if the earlier comment labelled somebody as being autistic in an attempt to discredit them, but in this case it's describing certain traits that correlate quite well with the medical condition and how those who suffer from said condition often behave.

If a person who suffers from a poor ability to understand the society around them, and who also tends to be unrelentingly focused on minute details, can be diagnosed as having "autism", then I think a similar diagnosis is perfectly reasonable when applied to an argument or justification that exhibits the same traits. It's a perfectly legitimate way of describing such arguments/justifications that don't mesh well with the social reality.

Who exactly are these "known contributors", and why did they have access to this data? Why did they not report the problem earlier?

And if it was downloaded "mostly" by "known contributors", who was involved with the rest of the detected downloads?

It's a shame to see that your comment got voted down.

That said, it is a good example of why the "downvote if you disagree" policy that has been encouraged here is a rather idiotic idea.

Your comment is clearly not commercial spam or anything of that nature. And it does present an argument, with justification for why it may hold true.

It might "offend" thin-skinned people associated with some of the well-established academic institutions you'd listed. That's not a problem with the comment, however, but rather with the people who can't stand to read an argument that they may disagree with badly enough to want to censor.

I don't know if I agree or disagree with what you said, but I do know that it wasn't a waste of my time to read it, and it did get me thinking somewhat. The most bothersome part was dealing with the unnecessarily gray text.

I don't think it was an attempt to be rude.

"Hipster" is a term commonly used to describe those who advocate so-called "Web 2.0" technologies like Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, HTML5, NoSQL, and so on. These people openly admit that they dislike the previous generation of web development technologies built around languages/platforms like Perl, PHP, and Java.

There are many of those people here, so it makes sense to refer to them collectively, especially given their typical stance toward PHP. Asking them to revisit their current state of PHP is a reasonable enough request.

Now, "hipster" is also often used as a derogatory term, too. It's quite understandable, after dealing with some of those kind of people. But I don't think it was used in that sense in the earlier comment.

Sorry, that's total nonsense. Far more of the Internet depends on C, C++, or some mix of the two. Software written in them runs the networking gear, the servers, and the clients that are critical to the Internet's existence.

And keep in mind that the major JavaScript implementations today are all built using C and/or C++ in one way or another. So pretty much anywhere that JavaScript is being used, then C and C++ are being used, too.

It's too bad to see that your comment was voted down. It's a legitimate question, deserving of an answer.

It isn't the late 1990s any longer. Perl and PHP aren't the only viable options available for web development. We have more alternatives now than ever before.

It was one thing when a team chose to use PHP because it was all that their preferred hosting provider supported, for instance, but those days are long gone. There really is very little reason to use PHP these days, especially for new development.

Don't assume that just because an account is new that the person behind the account hasn't been reading the site for years.

The presence of some quirks isn't the issue. Of course every programming language has some.

PHP and JavaScript, however, have unjustifiable quirks with some of their most basic functionality. We're talking about stuff as basic as their comparison operators being quite broken, for example. That's where the problem is. Furthermore, the fact that these issues have been around for well over a decade or more without being properly addressed just makes the situation even worse.

Compared to other mainstream languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Ruby and even Perl, both PHP and JavaScript are quite inferior in many critical ways. Perhaps things will improve over time, but we really haven't seen that happen so far.

So let's not pretend that they're "good" just to be politically correct or to try to avoid offending anyone. PHP and JavaScript aren't good languages, and they won't really improve until their communities admit that there are some very serious issues, and then commit to getting them resolved properly and rapidly.

Even if we disagree about the other matters being discussed earlier, I do have to agree with you about the misvoting you've been subjected to.

There is no legitimate reason for your comments to have been voted down.

I'm seeing this sort of blatant and unjustifiable misvoting happening more and more often here. It's really making it harder to read a lot of legitimate content, and it's discouraging participation in otherwise perfectly fine discussion.

Can you name some names?

Don't worry about downvotes here. They aren't indicative of the quality or value of a comment any longer. The whole "downvote if you disagree" concept just encourages the disconnect even more.

These days, it's best just to read all of the comments, including any that have been grayed out. A lot of the time they're perfectly legitimate. It's just unfortunate that they're harder to read.

Please actually read my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090097

Here, let me quote it for you: "With optimizations disabled, I tend to see a 30% to 40% reduction in compilation time when using LLVM/Clang instead of recent releases of GCC."

Do you see the first part? You know, the part that goes "With optimizations disabled"? Do you see it?

I'm talking about running both LLVM/Clang and GCC with optimizations disabled. -O0. Even with optimizations disabled, GCC is still significantly slower than LLVM/Clang on all of the various C++ code bases that I have tried it with, and especially those that I work with on a daily basis.

How are we supposed to have a discussion if you aren't actually reading what was written earlier?

You're obviously implying that the GCC developers know of the Linux kernel mailing list archives, they could potentially read the emails, the content of the emails could potentially hurt their feelings, this could potentially be considered insulting to them, and that makes it wrong, and so on and so forth.

What I'm saying is that the scenario you've built up isn't very realistic at all. The GCC developers I've dealt with would not waste their time getting offended. What was said in the mailing list, and its tone, is pretty much irrelevant. Getting the problem fixed is what matters to them.

Well, the GCC developers that I know or have otherwise worked with at one time or another are mature men in their 30s or 40s, if not older at this point. Being adults and professionals, they accept that they may just accidentally make mistakes when working on rather complex tools. They don't really care how the problems are pointed out, as their interest is in getting the problems fixed, and not taking it personally.

These people are very different from, say, the young Rubyist who will have his feelings hurt when legitimate flaws are pointed out with something he's worked on. The GCC developers won't cry if you report a bug, and they won't deny that it exists to try to save face. Getting the bugs fixed is what matters to them, so they don't waste time allowing their feelings to be hurt by hyperbolic mailing list discussion.

I don't think those results really support the point that you're trying to make.

The top result, which is the most significant, is pretty much irrelevant, for example. It's limited to Haskell-related packages. Most Debian users have absolutely no reason to use those packages.

After that, we start running into rather obscure options that only GCC supports, or bad code that GCC accepts, or code that's just bad in general, or extremely obscure packages that very few people would ever consider using. These don't indicate a problem with LLVM or Clang.

The fact that FreeBSD managed to very successfully switch to Clang for compiling the kernel and base system, and the fact that it's very widely used on OS X, suggests to me that LLVM and Clang are more than robust enough for everyday use.

I'm talking about development time. I can use LLVM/Clang and develop significantly faster than I ever could using GCC. I'm not seeing there waiting as long for the C++ compiler to do its work.

If I need better optimization of binaries that I'm preparing for release, then I can always use GCC or ICC instead, for a single compilation.

That way, LLVM/Clang save me a huge amount of time on a daily basis. Then on the relatively rare occasion when I need better optimization, I'm only subjected to GCC's noticeably worse performance for a short period of time.

I never said that GCC hasn't been widely used, nor did I suggest that it isn't widely used today, or anything like that. Of course it has had a big impact.

I just see its impact as diminishing these days. An award like this would have been more deserved in the mid-2000s, after it had successfully recovered from the struggles of the late 1990s, and when we did see significant improvements with the releases of GCC 3.x and 4.x.

I've found LLVM/Clang's better performance when compiling C++ code, while still offering all of the functionality I need, to be a very significant win over GCC.

With optimizations disabled, I tend to see a 30% to 40% reduction in compilation time when using LLVM/Clang instead of recent releases of GCC. That has a noticeable impact on the time it takes to develop code, especially when dealing with large systems with lots of C++ code.

So at least how I use it, I haven't really seen LLVM/Clang "catch up" in a long time. They've been delivering me better compiler performance than GCC, better diagnostic messages than GCC, suitable optimization, and very good C++11 and C++14 features, without depriving me of functionality that I find useful.

The timing is odd, but not because of that particular bug.

I think the past several years have been a rather low point for GCC. It hasn't been as bad as the 1996-1999 period of stagnation and strife, mind you, but it hasn't been particularly good, either.

LLVM and Clang have offered the first real competition that GCC has had to face in a long time. We've actually seen Clang be the leader in some cases, offering improvements that have then been implemented in GCC sometime later (like better diagnostics, colored diagnostic messages, the use of C++, etc., etc.).

Meanwhile, we haven't really seen anything truly compelling come out of GCC camp. Recent versions of have offered some optimization improvements, but nothing earth-shattering (in a good way). Its C++11 and C++14 support is quite good, but so is Clang's. The Go front end might be the most interesting development, but Go isn't a particularly interesting language, and GCC's version lags that of the main Go implementation.

I could see an award perhaps being deserved after successfully coming back from a period of stagnation like we've seen, after delivering several positive and revolutionary changes in a short period of time. But small, incremental improvements, or merely catching up with competitors, doesn't seem all that remarkable.

The most striking thing is the number of downvoted gray comments. Probably 10% of them are like that, at the moment!

It kind of gets distracting when so many are like that. With that many being grayed out, I know a lot of them aren't obvious commercial spam or anything like that. So I end up trying to read them all, which of course is awkward because of how they've been grayed out.

As I've worked with more and more younger developers ("Millennials" or "hipsters" or whatever you want to call them), I've noticed that many of them consider criticism of somebody's work to be a criticism of the work's creator himself or herself.

I don't really know for sure why this is. Maybe they're more attached to what they've created, seeing it more as a work of art or something like that, instead of just a tool?

It really isn't that big of a deal, even though it does come off as immature.

A professional would handle it like this:

1) He or she wouldn't choose to use such phrasing himself or herself, but also won't shy away from being firm and asking hard questions if they need to be asked.

2) If somebody else chooses such wording, the professional will engage his or her thick skin and ignore it, instead focusing on the parts that actually matter. It's resolving the problem at hand that's truly important, not wasting energy getting worked up over phrasing that somebody chose to use when describing the problem.