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If your solutions are bad, read a book on Lisp (that wasn't intended to be a pun, even if On Lisp was a good book and would fit the bill).

If you're not planning on leaving the OOP space, read a Smalltalk manual. It'll probably stick more, and I've never read a Smalltalk manual that was worse than contemporary books on OOP.

Knowledge is a problem that can be solved programmatically: profile where your bottlenecks are, then read until you understand the topics.

It doesn't sound like you've had any formal education (from the hobbyist comment), which actually means your situation is pretty hopeful. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit for people without formal education to grab that can sometimes even double their abilities. Grabbing a book on algorithms would probably do you a world of good.

You're using this word wrong.

Literally without scrolling at all:

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To point back to that comment, Chinese living in China have just as much a right to have opinions on it, and so do Americans living in America, but neither of their opinions are worth half as much as people living in Hong Kong. As long as they're representing themselves honestly (as Chinese or Americans, living in their respective countries), they've still got honest opinions, even if their opinions don't matter as much as the ones of people living in Hong Kong.

You're redirecting the conversation. Is this intentional? I didn't claim any which way as to the "validity" of opinion: I agreed with Saagar, saying that the fact of where you live is easy to obscure or lie about on the internet, and opinions that were possibly deceptively broadcasted should be taken with a grain of salt.

Suppose a foreigner posts a video on Youtube, showing that he's on the street in China, speaking about Hong Kong. Would you say that that is a valid opinion?

This is a fun question, because there are four or five layers to it! I'll try to answer it and the rest of your questions the best I can, because I don't think we're that far off from ideological alignment here.

First, I'll start off again by pointing out your usage of "valid opinion" isn't here nor there (all opinions are valid, even if some are deceiving and many are wrong): my statement wasn't on the validity of opinions, but on whether or not the opinions were coming from people who were being honest about where they were from. But I still like this question, so I'm going to answer.

You word this like it's a "gotcha," as if for some reason expats are primarily on the side against CCP (or China, because let's be honest, a lot of the hate directed in the CCP's direction is anti-Chinese xenophobia, despite there being a lot of valid reasons to hate the CCP and detest its actions), but most foreigners who'd be willing to film themselves talking in China and publicly broadcast it are pro-Chinese government. I don't think this is inherently a bad thing, and it's completely natural given that the Chinese government has some absolutely fantastic scholarships and has relatively accepting immigration policies.

But then, Hong Kong isn't China. I wouldn't trust an American living in France to tell me about Venezuela, even if their opinions are "valid" as long as they're representing themselves as an American living in France telling me about Venezuela. I'd trust a foreigner living in Hong Kong to tell me about Hong Kong, I'd trust a foreigner living in China to tell me about whichever part of China they're in (I'm not going to claim someone living in Chongqing could tell me much about Huangshan; people don't accept that China is more like USA than a tiny country like France, but I wouldn't trust a Californian to deliver a good summary of what Wisconsin is like, either).

It then follows that Chinese living in China and Americans living in the USA have opinions that are worth less than anyone living in Hong Kong, which I'd say is true if you think people should have a right to self-determination. Most online opinions claiming to be from Hong Kong online should probably be discounted then, solely because given the volume of people from both countries with an interest in interfering in Hong Kong's affairs (let's be honest, CIA is assuredly interfering too given the obvious benefits of an independent Hong Kong to US intelligence).

Also, if we're so skeptical about all sorts of online comments, do you believe I should consider all HN comments about anything political, to be invalid too because they might be disinformation campaigns?

Again, you're using "invalid" in a sense that I don't think is useful. Nonetheless, anyone claiming to be from anywhere online has a pretty strong chance of not being from there. Any dog can log on. So yeah, definitely discount HN pretty heavily. Even if HN isn't subject to any disinformation campaigns (ignoring that Amazon's been caught paying people to comment on here and some Amazon accounts have been banned for that), it's still primarily well-off people circlejerking about the dangers of economic systems they've only read the Wikipedia articles about; yes, absolutely throw the opinions away. Most importantly, do so when sides not directly involved (meaning not Hong Kong in this case, despite that China is 'directly' involved; China is 'directly' involved in the sense that USA was during Vietnam) have vested interests in making things go their way.

Petitions are bullshit, Quora is bullshit. Look for bodies, anything else is easy to fake.

Did the NYT fire a bunch of editors recently?

This is a terrible viewpoint: it's not difficult at all to find out Bolsonaro's viewpoints and actions. We don't live in the 1950s any longer: politicians broadcast their every move over the network, and through every light you can look at him, Bolsonaro has been terrible for his country; under any sensible light, he's also a terrible human being. Just look at the things he's said, you don't need to restrict what you know to "press snippets."

My only thought that has much public value is that the timing of the US President's sudden and strange willingness to wear a mask after mocking them for so long looks suspicious under this light.

The scale and scope of Wikimedia has been constantly expanding, and outside of a few terrible bets, it's generally been for the better. It hasn't been recklessly overspending and it's definitely not "providing relatively the same service."

False.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

Revenue: $ 120,067,266

Expenses: $ 91,414,010

I don't think that it's some absolutely amazing creation, but we probably shouldn't pretend like plagiarizing isn't something realistic about it. How many MySpaces had that line in them? Reddit's got hundreds of instances of it based on a quick search of comments. There are enough occurrences of it on twitter that I scrolled for ten minutes and didn't run dry of comments with it.

Books were sold long before intellectual property laws existed. Your argument is fallacious.

Piracy of songs, movies, and applications actually improves sales, according to a study that the European Union funded and then tried to keep from getting published:

https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...

The law shouldn't guarantee you a successful business model. If you believe in capitalism, this should be self-evident. If you believe in socialism, this should also be self-evident. "We're going to enforce with a military your right to a successful business model" is absolutely silly and bizarrely harmful.

See: the entire history of books before computers.

See: Doctorow's Little Brother, which was distributed freely and still sold so well it went on the NYT's best seller list.

eta []: and I genuinely mean: Just HOW should public policy look in order to provide some form of artistic protection for creators? It's easy to sit around and say "copyright is broken" (and I'd largely agree!) It's less easy to say what it might/ought become.

The law shouldn't guarantee you a business model under actual capitalism or better systems. "We're going to enforce with a military your right to a business model" is an inherently silly proposal. It makes more sense to guarantee everyone has enough to live off of, which is something the state is already capable of, and something the best capitalist and socialist economists are advocates of.

Beyond that, if you're looking for a less-radical proposal: shorten the copyright period. The NEL didn't have anything that was five years old or younger on it. Current copyright terms are insane and against the common good in every sense of the word.