Readit NewsAnd don’t even get me started on flexing an imperial muscle. South America and the EU would like a word.
What America loses by gaining Greenland is that worldwide market and those close defense relationships forming a common bloc. The US dollar stops being the reserve currency; America's cheap credit line dries up. American soft power in Europe is gone, and Europe aligns itself with China or Russia for stability, and becomes an American adversary. All so you can have, what, a bunch of melting glaciers?
I don't understand how you can defend this, a supposedly smart person on Hacker News is advocating for the invasion of an allied nation. It's flabbergasting to watch this kind of opinion appear even here.
I don't agree with rayiner's opinion, but it's a completely rational point of view. Every empire thinks like that. Which part of it is so flabbergasting that is has no precedent many times over in our human history?
Dead Comment
Jokes aside, the Harris campaign openly manipulated Reddit to get their opinions on the top [1]. I was there on election night. The entire site slowed to a crawl. Opinions of people you normally never read gained hundreds to thousands of upvotes. It felt organic for exactly one day.
[1]: https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...
In his free time Ivan comes to HN and poses as a free speech absolutist.
Writing a toy one? Sure.
Writing a real one? Who's gonna write all the drivers and the myriad other things?
And the claim was not that it's "so much easier", but that it is so much easier to write it in a secure way. Which claim is true. But it's still a complex and hard program.
(And don't even get started on browsers, it's no accident that even Microsoft dropped maintaining their own browser).
The point is if it were much easier, then they would overtake existing ones easily, just by adding features and iterating so much faster and that is clearly not the case.
>>difficulty of building safe, fast and highly-concurrent C
This was the original claim. The answer is, there is a tonne of C code out there that is safe, fast and concurrent. Isn't it logical? We have been using C for the last 50 years to build stuff with it and there is a lot of it. There doesn't seem to be a big jump in productivity with the newer generation of low level languages, even though they have many improvements over C.
This is anecdotal, I used to do a lot of low level C and C++ development. And C++ is a much bigger language then C. And honestly I don't think I was ever more productive with it. Maybe the code looked more organized and extendable, but it took the same or larger amount of time to write it. On the other hand when I develop with Javascript or C#, I'm easily 10 times more productive then I would be with either C or C++. This is a bit of apples and oranges comparison, but what I'm trying to say is that new low level languages don't bring huge gains in productivity.
That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.
I believe this attitude is pretty common in many parts of the world.
That being said, I do think the extremes of wealth (there is a big difference between a millionaire and a billionaire) have a particularly detrimental effect on society by completely distorting our economic system (there can be no such thing as a free market when such a small number of individuals control such a large proportion of the spending power).