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Ask HN: What do you look for in a terminal?
Aside from "obvious" things like speed, accuracy, etc. what kinds of features do you really want in a terminal emulator (especially if you don't know of any terminals that do what you want)? What are a few really important things that just seem to have been dropped?

I develop a Mac terminal emulator, and a friend once asked me why. His reasoning was that the OS already had one, and that seems to be a recurring theme with bundled software: people don't tend to ask for features beyond what OS-bundled apps already provide. So I thought I would finally ask; are people really content with what's there out of the box?
Thanks for sharing that example. It bit me in the past too. When I harp to colleagues "use braces always" and they say "it's a style thing" ... arrrgh!! No, it's an engineering thing.

In the early 1990's half of the country went without phone service for I think it was several hours due to a rare case statement that ended up running, he forgot a break, code that wasn't supposed to, ran. Crash.
God forbid this guy figures out that Google changes their search results based on GET requests.
It sounds like Actian is going to continue to develop Ingres. Given that, it might be a bit soon to declare that Ingres is 'dead'.
And in these threads where you call us sheep, we are deciding that the data price is too high for the service rendered.

We have the right to use government to nationalize these programs if they are going to be so deceptive and intrusive.

Facebook falsely advertises their service as free. They don't tell their users that they are collecting unnecessary amounts of data to violate people's privacy, and that this data is payment for the service.
The javascript would just have to create a form and submit it. Not a big problem at all. Alternatively, create an iframe in which the form is autosubmitted via javascript.
You've effectively articulated my exact thoughts. There's a right way and a wrong way to do things.
This is kinda sad. I spent 3 years on my first job in 1989 on Ingres. Not just the database but creating applications using Ingres' tools (ABF, QBF, IIRC). I remember developers running a query and going off for coffee forgetting to type "commit".
I want a way to measure how complicated a program is that's independent of language and obviously extraneous things like line length.
In fact Google copied this from Bing. But the difference is that Google is a search monopoly whereas bing is just a distant second or third depending how you look at it.
FWIW, the Touchpad's (WebOS) browser is even worse than the Android browser (even Google often fails to render in it, since they released Google+, yielding horribly hilarious results); if you were using Android or iOS you might not feel the same away about browsing on the tablet being "highly overrated".
Oooh, a pen thread on HN. How fun. :)

The best pen in the world is not at all obscure. It's the "aerometric"-fill Parker 51 made from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. Costs between $100 and $200 today on the vintage market, depending on condition, color scarcity, and the seller.

A 51 has been my daily writer for about ten years now. I lost my first one, probably on the subway, and was heart-broken. Luckily, Parker made millions of 51s, so it was easy to find a replacement.
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HP last year had revenue of something around $125 billion from running a complex global supply chain spanning every continent except for Antarctica (who knows, maybe there as well). The company employs more than 300,000 people across dozens of countries, not to mention thousands of suppliers and subcontractors. They make money from selling consumer products, enterprise products, and services. Depending on the source, there are only about 55 countries in the world with GDP more than HP's annual revenue.

How many people in the world can run an organization of that size and scope? Not many at all. And surprise, surprise: those people are in high demand. Very high demand. Do you seriously believe that a guy getting paid $50 million a year at a Fortune 500 company had no other offers or alternatives, and so the board could have hired him at $5m instead? Right or wrong, they offered $50m because they thought that this individual could move the needle enough to make it worth it. Which is probably true, by the way: a 1% increase in HP's revenue is enough to cover the CEO's jumbo salary 20 times over.
If boards of directors are not currently filling the (apparent) goal of corporate oversight, is there an alternative system? I could imagine a corporate structure similar to the US government's checks and balances, a "legislative" board of VPs (and perhaps a couple external advisors?) and a peer-level executive president/CEO. Hmm, this doesn't really sound so different from what a board of directors is already supposed to be.. :\
This post is unfortunately more a sad commentary on what Posterous has become.

(The link goes nowhere but a front-page advertising "Spaces". I have no idea how to proceed to the article.)
Could be, I have used other devices. I find most web pages aren't especially easy to interact with on a touch device. Links are too small to touch and mobile versions are made for much smaller devices.
Absolutely agree. Drawing this parallel is something I haven't considered before but it definitely makes one think.

The new music sharing features are obviously reminiscent of Last.fm. I was an avid Last.fm user at the start but I found I quickly tired of wanting everyone to know everything I listened to.

It will be interesting to see how it pans out.
You may find that the Halstead metrics I mentioned are closer to what you're after.
No, it's a fine example. Last.fm has always been an opt-in service, and you know what you're opting in to because you have to go to the trouble of installing an iTunes plugin.

This is opt-out.
Kinda explains.
I'd love to hear your reasons why. Keep in mind that the population of tech savvy people in the world, of which we both belong to, is a tiny percent of the worldwide population. Tens of millions (maybe even billons? Please correct me) of people are struggling just to survive. I believe that the 'our world' you're thinking of is middle class+ and teens with regular access to computers (how many are there, really?)
I can answer this with a healthy dose of confidence: It was Mike Arrington. Passion is difficult to argue against. Why on earth he chose Uncrunched is beyond me, but I'll read along anyway.
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"I've heard it said for years that studies show the number of bugs grows roughly linearly with code size and that this holds true across any programming language."

I have absolutely no reason to doubt this, but I suspect this does not look deeply enough at the process.

Bugs, normally, get fixed, especially towards the end of a project, and it is much easier to eradicate bugs, and verify eradication, in a small project, than it is in a large one.

Poor bug-fixing, in the late stages of a large, buggy project, may well introduce further bugs, as well as discovering latent bugs, masked by the original ones.
To make something simple for the user it means that it needs to be well thought... Surprisingly even though humans have had brains for a really long time its hard to think :)
I'm surprised by how often the "junk food is cheaper than healthy food" meme gets repeated. It seems so obviously false, I can't understand why people believe it when they hear it, and I really struggle to see how it can survive after people give even a back-of-the-envelope calculation in response.

What am I missing? Is it that people think "healthy" means organic, out-of-season produce? Are they assuming the cost of a whole bottle of ketchup for each hamburger? Is there some experience people are having that makes this "feel" true? I'd appreciate hearing from someone who believed it up until now -- what was it about this idea that resonated with you?
This can't be reposted too much. This secret changed my life.
She didn't actually do much with the technology when she was at eBay; she left that to lieutenants.

She also fostered a culture where people on the "business side" (mostly Harvard MBAs, like her) would sit in one building while software engineers would toil away in another building. The idea was to maximize worker flexibility and prevent businesspeople from getting too attached to engineering resources, but in practice it really felt more like you were outsourcing projects to teams located 300 yards away.
In the Computer Language Benchmarks Game, they compare GZip'ed code size. I disagree with removing comments, since comments tend to be important, and comments generally document weirdness and bugs inherent in the platform/library/language.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#gzbytes
One way that I could see where actual lines is a more useful measurement is if there is any correlation between what percentage of the code you can see on-screen at any time and bugs.

Not saying that there is such a correlation, just that there may be cases where it is useful to measure by line count.
And the other 99% of the time sales is king.

The users that use and the advertisers that advertise don't care 1 bit about the backend.
I thought he was just being clever or passive aggressive initially.

Link to the Article: http://blog.thirdyearmba.com/two-ways-many-entrepreneurs-scr...
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In the case of most projects, copy/paste code is not just because of the language. It's because of lousy programmers. I've seen large codebases which are made up of a full 40% duplicate code. There's no way to blame that on the language.
unless I was dealing with a security based application where data needed to be wiped - I would never delete, but just flag as deleted. I don't see it as evil from a development perspective. Losing data is about the worst thing that can happen - all other errors can be fixed.

I have many times ran into a situation where having that deleted data either saved us from losing a customer or was used to show that our app was not mysteriously "deleting" their data.
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I don't think the argument is that some language will completely "save you from bad programming" but rather that it will encourage bad programming less some other language.

Some languages like Java require more lines of code and provide less mechanisms for dealing with complexity than other language (say Erlang), which means that you're more likely to write bad code in Java than Erlang.

All languages are equal, but some are more equal than others.
I had a lot of confidence in Netflix as recently as 6-8 months ago.... enough to buy a substantial amount of their stock. Obviously that confidence turned out to be expensive to indulge.

It would be different if they were merely catching bad breaks like the loss of the Starz content, but they're actively acting stupid. I didn't know WordPress had a 5000-comment default limit until the Netflix corporate blog overflowed with angry messages from customers after they destroyed the Web front end for their instant-watch service a couple of months ago. The movie browser page still hasn't been fixed, and is still completely unusable, but it looks like they have learned how to disable commenting on most of their subsequent blog posts.

And now, the Quixtar/Quickster/Quickstar/Qwikstar/Quicster/Qwickster/... business, and the... interesting way it was announced by Hastings. Not much can be said about this move that hasn't already been said. About all I can suggest, as both a customer and a stockholder, is that a certified laboratory be engaged to check the Los Gatos municipal water system for heavy-metal content.

All snark aside, it's going to take a smart, agile, innovative, and above all, customer-focused company to deal with the Comcasts and the AT&Ts and the Starz and other middlemen who stand between Netflix and a sustainable business model. Unfortunately the events of the past few months are telegraphing precisely the opposite signals. What in the world is going on over there? Either the world's first corporate suicide plan is in progress, or a brilliant and utterly obscure rope-a-dope strategy is being executed. Either way, the MBA program case studies are going to be really interesting when Netflix finally pulls off whatever they're trying to accomplish.
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Big companies benefit from economies of scale, but is there such thing as too big? Shareholders might get better return if a company was split into small companies, where management could be more closely involved (and paid less).

Considering the public good, big companies lead to monopolies (bad for consumers and innovation), "too big to fail" bailouts (bad for taxpayers and employees), and backroom political lobbying (bad for democracy). Perhaps antitrust laws could be proactive instead reactive, prescribing limits on company sizes for some metric(s).
I came from Seattle to Boston/NYC for this and YC NYC tomorrow. Thanks for the post, it made up for me not taking notes :)

Not much of what was said is new or ground breaking, but a couple things just click and get everyone inspired. Just being there and meeting a whole bunch of smart people who are into startups is a great boost.

The speaker I enjoyed most was Patrick Collison, especially with his big picture view of how software will become more and more integrated into everyone's lives. It's one of those thoughts which have been in my subconscious (with some peeks into my conscious every once in a while) and hearing it said out loud just got me fired up.
A common LOC metric for languages in the C family is to count semicolons ("real" lines of code).
Still using Subversion? I think that should be your next improvement target.
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I remember that that exact program (written in C!) won a prize at one of the IOCCCs.

Admittedly, I'm pretty sure it won the prize for the "Most Egregious Abuse of the Rules", but it won nonetheless.
No features has no bugs.
Is her paper available online, I'd be very interested in reading it.
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Wow really? So they would use a completely terrible product too if that's what it was? I don't see too many people clambering to advertise on Myspace
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Wouldnt authorize twitter...
At my school (Epita, France) our C coding style standard mandated that all functions be <= 25 lines.

Even though some lines didn't count (like those containing a single curly brace), it was very tough, but always possible. This applied to all projects, small and large. They made us write mostly Unix apps, like an FTP server, a command-line NNTP client, a POSIX shell (I still remember how meticulous you had to be when reading all the man pages to implement process control and terminal control correctly!). Plus the code had to be portable across all 3 Unix OS running at the school: NetBSD, Solaris, Digital Unix. This was in 2000-2001.

For example I just checked the FTP server I wrote for one of the assignments (I still have a copy): 3123 lines and all the functions are <= 25 lines of code. Such rigorousness definitely shaped the quality of the code I now write professionally, 10 years later...
You're mangling your buzzwords. Lua doesn't need a global interpreter lock because it already is thread-safe.

Lua also starts up far faster than Python, and has a vastly smaller overhead for loading code (which is easily verified).

C indeed makes that stuff vastly cheaper, but Lua also has a much clearer C migration path than Python or Ruby - it was designed for embedding.

Also, Python and (especially!) Ruby are slow, they just spend much of their execution time calling out to string libraries in carefully-optimized C.
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With the gigahertz race largely abandoned, both AMD and Intel are trying to pack more cores onto a die in order to continue to improve processing power and aid with multitasking operations. Miniaturizing chips further will be key to fitting these cores and other components into a limited space. Intel will roll out 32-nanometer processors (down from today's 45nm chips) in 2009.

Intel has been very good about sticking to its road map. A six-core CPU based on the Itanium design should be out imminently, when Intel then shifts focus to a brand-new architecture called Nehalem, to be marketed as Core i7. Core i7 will feature up to eight cores, with eight-core systems available in 2009 or 2010. (And an eight-core AMD project called Montreal is reportedly on tap for 2009.)

After that, the timeline gets fuzzy. Intel reportedly canceled a 32-core project called Keifer, slated for 2010, possibly because of its complexity (the company won't confirm this, though). That many cores requires a new way of dealing with memory; apparently you can't have 32 brains pulling out of one central pool of RAM. But we still expect cores to proliferate when the kinks are ironed out: 16 cores by 2011 or 2012 is plausible (when transistors are predicted to drop again in size to 22nm), with 32 cores by 2013 or 2014 easily within reach. Intel says "hundreds" of cores may come even farther down the line.
Superlinear is anything above linear. This includes pseudolinear (e.g., O(nlog n)). Exponential is O(m^n). Linear is O(n).

Edit: And polynomial is O(n^m).
What's stopping me from using arbitrary tags in HTML?
I'm not normally massively wary about privacy, so I don't think I'm being pedantic - it's probably the first time I've really complained about data privacy. I signed up, started using the tool, and halfway through a warning bell went off.

Eg. I use Facebook to signup for lots of sites (eg. AirBNB), but they get a basic level of read access to my data and I see that clearly. To use IFTTT effectively I would have to give them the highest level of read-write access to ALL my social networks, plus mobile phone information, personal preferences, email account, blog bla bla bla. Even Facebook or Google doesn't get this level of access (although they probably can extrapolate it from somewhere I guess).

I'm not one of these people making paranoid rants about facebook and privacy constantly, but I think IFTTT needs to inspire more confidence that my data is in safe hands before I'd hand over everything like that - seriously, it would solve a lot of problems for me and I'd love to use it!

eg. are they going to download all of my information from facebook/twitter bla bla as soon as I authenticate? Or do they just store it as/when they need it? Will it personally identify me, or will my data be aggregated anonymously. Who has access to my personal data? What's their revenue stream? Am I going to start getting spam text messages along with my notifications??
No, it doesn't. It also has vastly more efficient coroutines.
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IME, working with large groups of developers on a correspondingly large project where quality varies widely over different bits of code was the quickest way to learn to be grateful for such little syntactic annoyances that however helped catch bugs (or better, prevent them) quickly.

The problem with compiler warnings is, unless you have a warning-free base build, they're difficult to see. And in turn, a warning-free build more or less depends on the very first developers to have turned the warning flags on while they were checking in stuff like mad trying to get someting to ship.

So, yeah, I could claim that I don't too many such silly mistakes (and that might even be true), but I can both understand and approve of such coding standards.
ExtJS is open source. (GPLv3) Since Graphite is Apache 2.0, it looks like they're only able to use it due to some sort of exemption from Sencha.

I don't know of any total replacements for ExtJS but something like Sproutcore may come close.
I've changed my mind. I'm interested in what I originally said: what's the best way to measure code size, and what are those studies (if they exist). Otherwise we get into debates about size vs. complexity, which is actually less interesting IMO. Size as a proxy for complexity is good enough for me.
I appreciate the replies guys, it explains a lot about why I see a lot of expensive software when there are open source alternatives which are just as good.

I'll try get some introductions to people who make the purchasing decisions. I think the bureaucracy will be more difficult.

Pricing may be difficult also. I know there are higher expectations for academic institutions in terms of support.

Is there any general thoughts on SaaS for these institutions? I don't see too much of it going on (with the exception of GMail).
Wow, what an amazing reading comprehension fail. Here's the text from the article:

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"but if you had practiced lean software," and "have you even tried it for real?"

sure. I have (and your assumption otherwise, as evidenced in your "if only people knew what they were talking about" opinion is revealing).

Here is a war story fwiw I didn't decide the methodology on this project, I was just part of the team - (the only "methodology" I believe in for sw dev is "hire bright people and let them figure it out")

On this particular project,there was a "lean and agile coach" (who had a PHB backing his efforts) who had a card wall where he monitored the "work in progress" and "queue size" and so on. It was obvious he had zero manufacturing experience, had never seen a real assembly line (or work cell or kanban card) and had just read this stuff up in the 'lean software' books (the authors of whom, in common with the agile gurus have zero credibility as devs or product designers) .

As expected, the project ran into trouble, the devs revolted at being treated like assembly line workers, the "coach" eventually got fired (along with the middle manager who mandated the change) and the team went back to their previous "we figure what makes sense to us and fits our environment " 'methodology' and software delivery improved, the clients were happy and all was well again. The lean terminology is a source of team jokes now -eg: "I just visited the bathroom to get rid of some muda", "Anyone monitoring he WIP for a coffee?"

And oh yes I expect to hear the "No True Scotsman" defense. "That wasn't real lean software. Hire me and I'll tell you how to do it 'right' ". Right.

The more important point is, without experience in both manufacturing and software dev, it is terribly easy to get carried away by stories about Toyota's success in car making (and the 'lean software' authors and consultants are careful to sprinkle Toyota anecdotes throughout their books and slides - none of them have worked at Toyota afaik) and adopt random elements of their assembly line processes, (or to be more precise, what you THINK is happening in a Toyota factory) into your sw dev.

"cleverly tailored" my ass. "Cleverly marketed" is more accurate. Any successful "tailoring" would need the tailor to be an accomplished expert in both sw dev and lean manufacturing and be at the top of their game in both fields - a combination of Linus Torvalds and Taichi Ohno. I am not sure such people even exist.

What we have are consultants with mediocre dev skills and zero manufacturing experience who scramble from RUP to agile to lean software to whatever-fad-is-next and are always looking for the next fad to ride, the next book to write, and the next conference to speak at.
I can't argue with that one, but gravity's a bit tough. Several of my colleagues are using git-svn, and would probably love to flip over to git.