> It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore.
No profession collectively made such a decision. Programming was always very splitted into many, many subcultures, each with their own (mutually incompatible over the whole profession) ideas what makes a good program.
So, I guess rather some programmers inside some part of a Silicon Valley echo chamber in which you also live made such a decision.
At that time there was less publish or perish and fighting to actually obtain a tenured position. In such a comfortable situation, you can invest more times into preparing good lectures.
For a lot of Germans who are knowledgable in this topic, being associated with such a company is nearly like openly admitting to have raped children. The hate for these law firms and their employees is extreme.
You don't have to refer to German grammar since the English grammar in this case contains all necessary ingredients; there is inflection depending on the case:
You don't say "You give I the apple.", but "You give me the apple." (similar for he, she, we, they), i.e. the pronoun is inflected depending on whether it is subject or object, so English speakers are perfectly aware on the difference between subject and object.
When you refer to the subject, you use "who" and when you refer to the object, you use "whom".
The C3's attendees are quite knowledgable in computing topics, so there is no need to bring coals to Newcastle.
The CCC is a German organization. In Germany, the general public already is quite skepctical of tablets in classrooms, so there is not such a necessity to inform the general public of something many people already think.
While there exist initiatives to use tablets in school in Germany (see for example [1]), these (in my opinion misguided) initiatives rather typically fail for financial reasons and because most teachers simply are incapable of using the technology. And, of course, tablets fail all the time.
So, in other countries this may be an important problem, but in Germany, any initiative for tablets in school already fails by the mere incompetence and the mills of bureacracy, so this is rather a potential topic for hacker conventions in other countries.
> Do you think KiwiFarms deserved to be banned from Cloudflare and all its other former service providers?
I do believe that providers of such services such as cloud, internet, ... have to stay neutral on such purposes under nearly all circumstances. If the team behind KiwiFarms did something illegal, this is a problem for the judicial system.
> HN uses "hacker" as in "the people who do the work that makes Y Combinator rich" rather than "someone who plays with technology"
I do believe that originally Y Combinator indeed did celebrate the people who play with technology, but I guess over the many years the focus has shifted.
> And it is not that inaccessible to non-US citizens. Sure, the current administration is not very welcoming, but it is easier than, say, Russia (where a lot of hackers also live) if you want to attract an international audience.
I would say that with the current US administration, it is similar hard to get to the USA as to Russia.
The difference rather is that in Europe's hacker scene there exist quite some people who, if they stated their opinions openly, would get in much worse trouble if they stated their opinion in Russia than in the USA (because in the USA these opinions are currently "more acceptable"). On the other hand, for Russian hackers likely the reverse holds: I can easily imagine that quite a lot of Russian hackers, if they stated their opinions in the USA, would attract quite a lot of trouble.
Just to be clear: I consider it to be quite plausible that in 5 years, the situation might be similarly bad in the USA as it is today in Russia.
No profession collectively made such a decision. Programming was always very splitted into many, many subcultures, each with their own (mutually incompatible over the whole profession) ideas what makes a good program.
So, I guess rather some programmers inside some part of a Silicon Valley echo chamber in which you also live made such a decision.
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