mrr54

Calling something "the shit" is still unnecessarily using profanity. It's impolite. It's not a surprise it would be flagged as offensive.

I think today it's a lot less explicitly aggressive, but it's actually more meanspirited. It might be controversial to say this, but online discourse is a lot less male and a lot more female than it was. Is this any great surprise?

If I could filter out the overuse of profanity shown in this article, I would. "Fuck yeah!!! That bad bitch is totally the shit!!" gets caught by a profanity filter. No great loss, IMO.

If you get normal not-always-online not-gen-Z people to evaluate these messages and label them as Good or Bad then you will get results like this. If I got any member of my family over the age of 30 to evaluate these messages, they'd label them all as offensive.

I imagine it could have something to do with the physical fixedness of a book. I can remember the positions of the line breaks in some of my favourite books as a child and it wouldn't surprise me if the physical layout of the words on the page (and how far through the book you are) somehow factored into the way the brain stores the memories of reading the book.

With an ebook you have the same little device with exactly the same dimensions for every book (no memorable covers or different formats) and there's no physical indication of how far through the book you are. And you can change the font size.

>In these later letters, Wolf sounds like the kind of alarmist digital enthusiasts often deride. After all, they say, reading is not dying; it’s thriving. Wolf herself quotes a study from the University of California, San Diego, showing that an average user consumes 34 gigabytes of data per day—the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words.

How is that the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words? I appreciate people read a lot of text messages, articles, posts, etc. But they don't read 100,000 words worth of those things on average a day by any means. 34 gigabytes of data is also definitely not 100,000 words, more like 5,100,000,000 words or 17,000,000 pages.

Is it based on some 'a picture is worth 1,000 words' argument?

Reading is not thriving. It's hard to find anyone that actually reads books, even if you count reading on eReaders, even if you count listening to audiobooks! People consume a lot of data because they're watching Netflix, YouTube videos and Instagram (and downloading the same JavaScript over and over again on every website).

The whole article is just bizarre. It conflates so many unrelated things and doesn't seem to have any real thesis. People not reading books doesn't really have anything to do with people using phones except for the indisputable fact anyone here will attest to: going back to reading books after not doing so for a long time is really hard. You find your mind wandering, you find it hard to read linearly one line at a time without skipping around, etc. The kind of reading you do of a blog post is totally different from the kind of reading you do of a novel. That people read pamphlets in the 18th century has nothing at all to do with the decline in people reading books today.

I literally have students coming into tutorials that cannot write. They cannot write down answers on paper. They struggle to write (to write!) because they've been told they can just type and never have to write. It's absolutely bizarre, but that's what they're told by their school teachers, apparently. They also can't sit still and read something without getting out their phones. Students complain that their lecture notes aren't put online and they have to actually attend lectures and take notes themselves even though it's been proven again and again that handwriting notes in lectures is much better for information retention and synthesis of ideas than typing or god-forbid not taking notes at all.

Personally, I'm really unsure whether I would even let kids have access to the internet. I had a lot of great experiences online as a kid (I have very fond memories of RuneScape from ages 9-12), and I learnt computer programming online. At the same time, I think you have to be really careful to limit it. It shouldn't be the primary means of entertainment. Mobile devices are probably the main issue: avoid them and at least you can ration and supervise their access to the internet. It can be a tool for research, homework and learning (and fun and games) without the dangers. The mixed messages ("don't share your personal info online" + "put all your personal info online on Facebook and Instagram") are unhealthy and confusing to kids too, I think.

The Linux kernel uses lots of macros, many of them with lowercase names that are barely distinguishable from function names. Given the quality of that codebase, I think not using macros is a bit silly.

You could make a proposal to the C committee to add a keyword `_Nullptr` and to add a header `stdnull.h` which has `#define nullptr _Nullptr`, like they did with bool.

(Please do write code like this anymore.)

Learn C the Hard Way is considered by the community to be, not exaggerating, one of the worst C books ever written.

To use a trivial example:

    int free;

Why are you posting a SubscriberLink to an LWN article to HN? That's not really the point of the links. They're for sharing in small groups not for giving away paid content to thousands of people.