This whole thing is merely cheap online snark masquerading as wisdom. No, not all SWEs know how to maintain Linux servers, and many (most?) SWE roles have all of zero overlap with that kind of work. If businesses could fire all their expensive server admins and replace them with some college kid and a $5 VPS, they would long since have done so.

If this is anything more than poseur snark, put your money where your mouth is and either write a comprehensive resource yourself, or at least compile a list of resources that would suffice for someone to be able to securely run and maintain a live server in production. No, not Hello Worlds, actual prod. Then, when next this comes up, link us to your guide rather than just spraying spittle on the plebs who lack your expertise.

Do something more constructive than low effort snark.

If it's so easy, surely it's no big undertaking to explain how one self hosts a fully secured server. No shortcuts, no "just use the usual setup" (we don't know what it is!), no skipped or missed bits. Debian to Caddy to Postgres, performant and fully secure, self upgrading and automated, from zero to hero, documenting every command used and the rationale for it (so that we may learn).

Or is it perhaps not as simple as you say?

If I ever write a compiler - God forbid, because language design is exactly the kind of elegance bike-shedding I'll never crawl my way out of - it's going to be a straight-up C89 transpiler, with conditional asm inlines for optional modern features like SIMD. It would compile on anything and run on anything, for free, forever. Why would I ever give that up for some self-hosting social cachet?

So, as someone only very peripherally familiar with Lua, can someone please explain the table thing to me? I've heard Lua fans gush that Lua is tables all the way down, except it seems like there's these tables on the one hand that work like arrays, and those other tables on the other hand that work like objects, and you can't mix them up...

Is that not just an ordinary dynamically typed language with arrays and objects then, except it overloads the word "table" to refer to both?

I'm sure I'm missing something, happy to hear what that is.

The thing is, it's very easy to get caught up in this kind of rhetoric and lose a lot of perspective. This is the kind of logical chain that leads people to end up deciding that Germany had "legitimate grievances" about the Treaty of Versailles and end up in some pretty dark places. Not saying that's you in the slightest, just noting the problems with that rhetorical style. It's fast, somewhat lazy, and greatly lacking in perspective.

If there's something I think we can agree on, the US role in '53 (corrected date) is nothing to be proud of, any more than *points generally towards the Strait of Hormuz* whatever the hell this is.

Why stop there? France engineered and supported an anti-British coup in the underdeveloped but resource rich American colonies in the late 18th century, setting in motion the train of events that led to the Islamic Revolution!

And the Polish General Kosciusko fought valiantly for the Americans, on account of the partitions of Poland. Were it not for those partitions, he'd have been at home! So it is the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian Empires - the partitioning powers of 18th century Poland-Lithuania - to blame for the Islamic Revolution!

But why did Austria desire to get involved in the partitions of Poland, and what long game was it playing vis-a-vis the Shiite scholars of then-Persia...

Hold up, we need a corkboard and some pins. Where's Pepe Silvia in all of this? Who has the Jack Ruby?

You can draw the bowstring all the way to Mars if you want to, but the only people to blame for the monstrous regime of Iran are the people who put that regime in place, and that certainly wasn't the Americans. No amount of "well this encouraged that, which caused blowback to this, leading to that" Substack-level motivated reasoning is going to change that fact.

The gay kids being executed by Iran are not cursing the name of America, or Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, they're cursing the ghouls who are hanging them, who are their countrymen.

You've listed a whole bunch of alternatives available to you, but for some reason you demand that Apple change its unique offering into just another one of those for you. Why? Is that not a completely enforced monoculture?

Apple has always been off to the side, doing their own thing, and for some reason that fact utterly enrages people. They demand that Apple become just like everyone else. But we already have everyone else! And in every single field Apple is in, there is more of everyone else than there is of Apple.

Have you considered people like Apple products precisely because they're not like everything else? That making Apple indistinguishable from Facebook or Google is no victory, but a significant loss for customer choice?

It is a disease of the Western mind - and particularly Western academia - to deny agency to others, especially people in the Middle East, as you're doing here with your painfully unsubtle attempt to link US support for the Pahlavis in 1956 to the 1979 Islamic Revolution 23 years later. Worth noting that the Pahlavi dynasty started out as autocratic as it ended, well before the US ever showed up.

This is a lazy reverse Orientalism, where people in the Middle East are othered and cast as a perennial victim incapable of taking any role in, or responsibility for, what happens in their own countries. It's disempowering racism in academic garb.

Iranians caused the Islamic Revolution and only the Iranians can undo it. I wish them the best of luck in doing so.

Not that I see why that matters? The popularity of an opinion is a very poor proxy for its veracity. Not everything in life is about optics. (One's public image being of especial concern to the young, I might playfully add. :) )

If I seem disagreeable, it's because I'm quite literally disagreeing. You're telling me I'd seem less disagreeable by not disagreeing. Cool? Noted? Obviously? This little pile on strikes me as a fairly hamfisted attempt at peer pressure. It's a bet that I care so much about the social approval of a bunch of anonymous usernames, that I would pretend to have changed my opinion so you can all feel vindicated and we can all feign harmony. It's a very bad bet.

I don't think they were trying to recreate the thing you were expecting, but it seems a little harsh to call it low effort. It's neat! A fun little nod to their history.

As someone with all the memory of a fruit fly, I love a good REPL when I'm trying to recall the various magic incantations that make the computer go.

Sometimes people respond negatively because of tone and phrasing, but sometimes their response really is about the underlying substantive content of what is being said, no matter how gently. Conversely, at other times, their primary concern may be one of 'face', and the importance of being perceived as 'winning' an exchange, the substance of they may not actually care about at all. I agree with you that thoughtful phrasing is a potent tool, but its power is not unlimited and it cannot fully bridge every gap.

I would venture to suggest that I phrased things about as kindly as I could, in the broader context of an interlocutor who was already treating the discussion as a zero-sum contest. (Note their read of the exchange as my "desperately" wanting to "discredit" them, when I was merely disagreeing.)

I think it's pretty clear that I tried to phrase it as kindly as I possibly could. Not intended as an insult in the slightest, merely a purely subjective observation. You're welcome to disagree, even if you do seem very resistant to extending anyone else the same courtesy?

> All of your comments here trying to rebut it have been moving the goalposts each time I point out where you got the facts wrong.

I don't think I've moved the goalposts once. We're still on the original two claimed inconsistencies, neither of which I find inconsistent.

You're framing this discussion as though it were me that were hellbent on attacking you (for some reason?). I would respectfully suggest that it seems to be you that is irrationally upset over someone not agreeing with you.

> I don’t see any reason to continue trying to discuss anything

Awesome. Have a good one! :)

I honestly don't even know who you are, or really care about your credibility at all, so I can't imagine why I'd want to 'discredit you'. If you're confident in your take, that's great!

There's just an awful lot of armchair theorising in your posts, and a lot of it doesn't sound like it's backed by much actual experience. If I'm being honest, you sound very young to me. Which I do not intend as a slight at all, youth is great, but it does sort of explain your deep familiarity with Reddit and your absolutely unshakable confidence in your own takes.

The thing is, even if you do turn out to be right - which is entirely possible - there's a big difference between (a) following the clues to reach a conclusion, and (b) reaching a conclusion and then gathering up some factoids to support it. The former is good science, the latter is high school debating. The latter is very easy to spot, and that's why I find your argument unconvincing. It would have been possible to make a much more convincing one, but it would have required a humbler approach.

They also have access to easy means of verification - phone numbers that are linked to the account, etc. Hell, you could just call Google from your own Google Fi number, just as one example.

I think you're hanging your hat on a pretty absurd theory, whereby it becomes factually impossible to contact Google ever again if they freeze your email, and it's prima facie evidence that you're lying if you claim to have done so.

> These Reddit stories always get some people invested in the story before the inconsistencies show up. You have to read them with some skepticism. You can do enough mental gymnastics to convince yourself that all of the Reddit posts are true and accurate if you try hard enough.

I get the feeling you've concluded that the OP's claims are unlikely and are now rationalising that conclusion by trying to construct some arguments to that effect, but I find the specific arguments you're giving to be fairly weak. That doesn't speak to the veracity of the original story, it just makes your attempted debunking unconvincing.

It's possible that this is real, it's possible it's made up, but I'm not seeing much more evidence in your armchair scepticism than in the asserted facts. Last week everyone on HN was telling me that social media must immediately be regulated because it's 'directionally correct' to assert that teenagers are suffering, but this week we are to disbelieve that Google would ever arbitrarily close accounts, something it firmly asserts it has every right to do?