ised

If a language is effective for its user(s), then is it a "success"?

Is there some minimum number of users that delineates a threshhold for "success/failure"?

What about DSL's that might have a limited number of users?

I like that the author recognized the "success" of shell and C as tied to the "success" of UNIX . But he forgot others, such as sed.

Some my favorite and most powerful languages are not widely used. I have no idea what "succeed" means to others in the context of programming languages, but these languages have "succeeded" for me. They get the job done. Efficiently.

Nothing has surpassed Snobol for pattern matching. (If you are in doubt, post a pattern matching challenge and let's see how the solutions in various languages stack up.)

Meanwhile other implementations of pattern matching have become more popular (=successful?)

Perhaps the word "succeeded" here simply means "succeeded in becoming popular?" If so, then I apologize for the gibberish.

However whenever I see autotools documentation I think of only one thing: it's worth learning how this old system works because, even if you will never yourself use it for your own projects, so much code written by others over past decades requires autoconf, automake, often libtool, and sometimes pkg-config.

For me, understanding how these old hacks work is very important in getting a large majority of open source software projects to compile after I make modifications, e.g., removing code.

Oftentimes I think that people who use autotools do not truly understand _how it works_, they have only figured out _how to use it_. This is reasonable but the problem is that autotools is very brittle, and if it breaks they have little idea how to fix it.

   s/OpenTable/Microsoft Word/g;
   s/Microsoft Word/Microsoft Windows/g;

In my humble opinion, to which I am entitled, current Apple hardware is still well-designed like the Apple hardware of the past, but none of it resembles a "bicycyle for the mind".

These phones and tablets are "computers" but are programmable only by permission; they are consumption instruments that are meant to support some plan to dominate the communications, media, entertainment industries. Not my idea of a programmable, pocket-sized, networked computer.

All due respect to Apple and their wild commercial success, but looking to the future, I get more excited about my RPi or Teensy than I do about my Apple devices.

I have little interest in paying for a license to a bloated, complex, proprietary IDE (Xcode) and seeking approval from an "app store" when I can write ARM assembly from a netbook or laptop using a free and open source assembler and run it instantly on the RPi.

The revolution is yet to come. I hope. kparc.com/o.htm

It could also be less than a page. It could be a dummy resource. For example, in the case of an ad server and a smartphone app that has some screen space reserved for ads. You might want your own resource to appear in that space instead.

Another example is reverse engineering API's and protocols for popular web services, social media, storage, etc. In that case you might want a "dummy server" that serves certain responses.

If I were going to place blame (I think a better approach is to skip that and just solve the problem), then I would blame developers, not the language.

To me, the code you are criticizing is very "regular" -- it follows predictable patterns. I find it easier to follow than most other C code I read.

More importantly I believe it is worth following. Obviously he is doing something right as reliability, performance and paucity of bugs shows.

All this despite not being in the "right mind", whatever that means.

I wish all the programs I am forced to use were written with such care.

For example, do you have an httpd listening on 127.0.0.1? Do you bind any other daemons to 127.0.0.1 or the broadcast address?

If you operate your own root you can reassign the authoritative nameservers for doubleclick.net to nameservers you control. You may or may not choose to return "A" records.

Everything could be coming from the same domain/IP? This might make blocking ads and tracking more complicated?

My solution as HTTPS spreads is to MITM my own connections so I can see what is being sent and received over the wire. As the article says, it is a PITA. But it is necessary.

  *.doubleclick.net

Great stuff.

Blog posts are just too boring most of the time. We need more direct quotes from the people toeing the creepy line.

That is the behavior that should be tracked. What do you think these "engineers, designers and policy makers" get up to each day? Maybe lots of "pretending to believe" they are doing something meaningful?

Why are alleged "services" provided for "free"?

One group will tell you it's because advertisers are picking up the costs for "content". Another group will tell you that it's because no user (cf. advertiser) would pay if a "fee" were charged to use the www.

Of course, no "free" business model will dare test the theory of the later group, so I guess we'll never know how the user values these "services". Instead the investors and advertisers set the value. Grossly inflated.

In the early days of the internet as I remember it the real (non-hardware) costs for the internet were tolls on telephone calls (dial-up). Organizations picked up the tab for employees who used the internetwork. Tuition-paying students also got access.

Then came UUnet and "ISP's". And then people had their own personal computer, at home, with a network card.

As far as I'm concerned, the internet connection fee is still the only real cost.

I think the browser you allude to is possible. But I think some changes in thinking in how information is structured and presented on the www is needed. If we let the www be shaped solely by web developers with a lust for layers of abstraction and increased complexity and being given carte blanche to run code on others' computers, then it forces the "browser" to be something that is far too complex and too much trouble for any open source volunteer programmer to deal with.

Make the www easier to parse and then the www "browser" becomes easier to replicate. This is only my opinion. Others would certainly disagree.

This statement is rather enticing because I have been executing this exact process for years using one of the free, open source kernel/userland options available for download. The "OS" is kept small and runs entirely in RAM. Works well enough for my purposes.

It is also interesting to juxtapose this statement against the usual negative comments on HN anytime the discussion turns to building home routers using "basic computers".

But maybe the meaning of "basic computers" by the journalist here is not what I think it is.