The US started using mailboxes 14 years after the UK

In 1849, the Royal Mail first encouraged people to install letterboxes to facilitate the delivery of mail. Before then, letterboxes of a similar design had been installed in the doors and walls of post offices for people to drop off outgoing mail.

In 1863, with the creation of Free City Delivery, the US Post Office Department began delivering mail to home addresses.

I read newspapers in several languages and see your strawman in comments all over the world: Criticizing Israel means supporting Hamas.

In reality pretty much everyone is explicitly not supporting Hamas terrorists while arguing for a stop to the Israeli atrocities.

It’s not supporting Hamas to point out that Israel is doing horrible things.

Putting Ctrl in the home row by replacing the useless Caps-Lock is sufficient for me .

Alt is easily reached with the thumbs and shift is already close enough to the home row, with shift-ctrl using both pinkies.

If being against murder, war crimes, and genocide is being an antisemite, then so be it. I will be a proud antisemite. It will be a badge of honor.

You could make the same argument for voting. What does your little drop in the vote bucket matter? Do you believe voting is a waste of time too?

Some developers seem to enjoy making their code obscenely difficult to understand, either because it actually makes sense to them that way, or because it makes them feel smarter.

Be wary about this mindset. This type of explanation sets you up for conflicts with existing developers. Several times I’ve seen developers coming into a team and complain about the code, creating conflicts that can last the entire working relationship for no good reason.

Much of the time the people who constantly work with code are already aware of the problems and may not be happy with it, but there’s no time or big benefit in improving working code. Or it’s complicated for good reasons which may not be immediately apparent. (ie. inherent complexity).

Here are a couple of benign reasons which probably will serve you much better.

1. It’s much more difficult and time consuming to make code that is easy to understand. Even in open source, there’s a limited amount of time to spend on any particular thing. This explanation is like a variation of Twain’s “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”, or more abrasively Hanlon’s razor “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity time pressure”.

2. When writing the code, the developer has the entire context of his thought process available. You don’t have that, and that’s also the reason why your own code can make no sense a while later. Also it’s just much harder to read code than to write it.

Maybe it’s something about not knowing if the last element is the top of the stack or the bottom of the stack?

Yeah. Everything depends on the complexity of the product, but it’s just as likely that it’s the new CTO and his team that gets canned when they get bogged down in the details and the costs start racking up.