He shouldn't be, since it isn't true. Why did you leave this comment?

More often than not, I’ve seen web pages that are more easily scraped than one could connect to an official API. It’s so weird. It’s like in many cases companies don’t really care, so of course people are going to scrape your pages instead.

As I wrote:

> Like most WordPress blogs, my site has an API.

WordPress, for all its faults, powers a fair number of websites. The schema is identical across all of them.

I would agree that it was different, but I also think this may be history viewed through rose-tinted glasses somewhat.

> There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better.

In principle, maybe. In practice, you had to pay for everything. Open source or free software was not widely available. So, the profit motive was there. The conditions didn’t exist yet for the profit model we have today to really take off, or for the appreciation of it to exist. Still, if there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, that means the maturity of software was generally lower, so it’s a bit like pining for the days when people lived on the farm.

> There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users.

I’m not so sure this appeal was so important (and investors do care about appeal!). If you had market dominance like Microsoft did, you could rest on your laurels quite a bit (and that they did). The software ecosystem you needed to use also determined your choices for you.

> To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.

As I said earlier, the profit motive was always there. It was just expressed differently. But I will grant you that the image is different. In a way, the mask has been dropped. When facebook was new, no one thought of it as a vulgar engine for monetizing people either (I even recall offending a Facebook employee years ago when I mentioned this, what should frankly have been obvious), but it was just that. It was all just that, because the basic blueprint of the revenue model was there from day one.

I think the chance that your Rust application is going to be more performant or efficient than C, is whether you are focused on writing performant and efficient code. Out-of-the-box, I’m guessing people will use too many cargo packages, each that are over-engineered or written by less-experienced developers, so it will be less efficient and less performant.

In addition, you could more easily inadvertently introduce security problems.

Is Rust the right choice for Tor? Sure. Is Tor the right choice for security? If they moved to Rust, they increased security risks to make it easier to manage and find help from younger less-experienced developers, so no.

This was very interesting, and it's obvious from the majority of the text that the author knows a lot about these languages, their implementation, benchmarking corners, and so on. Really!

Therefore it's very jarring with this text after the first C code example:

This uses a static variable to have it persist between both the compare function calls that qsort makes and the main call which (potentially) changes its value to be 1 instead of 0

This feels completely made up, and/or some confusion about things that I would expect an author of a piece like this to really know.

In reality, in this usage (at the global outermost scope level) `static` has nothing to do with persistence. All it does is make the variable "private" to the translation unit (C parliance, read as "C source code file"). The value will "persist" since the global outermost scope can't go out of scope while the program is running.

It's different when used inside a function, then it makes the value persist between invocations, in practice typically by moving the variable from the stack to the "global data" which is generally heap-allocated as the program loads. Note that C does not mention the existence of a stack for local variables, but of course that is the typical implementation on modern systems.

How much human resources have been lost because women were seen as stupid and intellectually inferior? How did people even come to this bizarre conclusion?

Over the millennia many fathers secretly taught their little princesses to read and write. But apparently none of them wanted to upset the status quo.

You do realize self-signed certs are useless, could have been tampered with, and could have just as easily been created by a malicious actor?

There's a reason most default self signed certs are called "snake oil".

I'm surprised Firefox didn't warn me when I went to the page. Hostile teleco/MITM waiting for HTTP traffic are a real-world way that nation states deliver exploits.