skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At some point an individual has to come to terms with the fact that 99% (or some equally large percentage) of human economic activity has nothing much to do with improving the human condition, but is rather beer and circuses writ large.

Shouldn't that say, "hero-worshiping wannabe-Elon-Musk entrepreneurship culture has to come to terms..."?

Because frankly, if someone handed me the kind of money Elon Musk has, I could work on ludicrously quixotic AwesomeCool stuff too.

No guarantees any of it would actually work or make money, of course, which is why the real business environment produces Angry Birds instead of "changing the world" (which is a lot harder than it sounds, since most changes aren't even that radical) every 6 months.
Nice post, but just a little too much corporatespeak for me. My take:

1. Be an egoless programmer.

I've heard this a million times and always hated it. I lost count of the number of projects I've witnessed that were saved when someone who knew what they were doing put their ego on hold. You know what you're talking about: you have a moral responsibility to speak up and do the right thing, ego or not. I prefer, "Don't be bashful but be nice."

2. Be a team player.

Oy, this sounds like something my PHB would say. I prefer, "Just do your fucking job."

3. Be a learner.

Absolutely! But don't restrict your learning to technology. Learn about your customers' and users' domains. Suffer with them and their problems. You'll probably get far more milage out of that than more technology.

4. Be a T-shaped person.

I like this, but again, I would add my customers' domain. Being the go-to person with deep understanding of the technology who knows how to apply it to the problem at hand is a deadly combination.

5. Be relentlessly resourceful.

What does this even mean? I prefer, "The answer is always 'yes'. Sometimes, 'yes but', but always 'yes'".
Hopefully by the time you need to replace it, they will be much more cost effective.

Bit of a gamble though...
Lotus notes!
I know of a Government organisation still using 25 year old software running on VAX/VMS ! Hardware support is the main reason they are getting rid of it !
It's possible to drink like a fratboy on the weekend and crush code from M-F.

You know what this is? This is my new fuckin' REPL. You know what that means? I'm writin' some fuckin' code tonight.
I don't understand to what extent this hasn't been previously done. The design is pretty standard.
Prehistorik 2 (1993) even displays a notice on startup "wow, this game still runs in 2013", blisfully unaware that it's inside DosBox on an Android tablet.

So indeed, the oldest software will probably be running inside a VM.
Orhan Pamuk Interview: On Taksim Square, Erdogan & Literature | New Republic
QUIC (which may become TCP 2.0 for HTTP/3.0 to run over) sounds like what you're looking for.
Amazing. Thanks for sharing this. I'd been searching for stock images like the ones offered here in which to superimpose screenshots but always came short so just didn't bother. Now I'll bother.
Shameless plug, I also work on an open-source pixel-art platformer [1]. It's written in Lua and runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux. If you're looking to learb game development, we're always looking for experienced developers to help out.

[1] https://github.com/hawkthorne/hawkthorne-journey
I would say that ego is something that every good programmer should have. It's not about being a rockstar or not. It's all about the code. This is what mainly defines programmers/coders/developers/makers.

It is always about the code and it's never not about the code. Having the ego to believe that your code is the best makes you a good programmer; because, inevitably, somebody will come and point out that there's a bug, a flaw in your beloved creation. That's when you get annoyed, your ego is crushed... you accept it and the next time you won't mess up again. That's how you improve your skills and that's how you get to be a better developer.

You shouldn't care if you're called a rockstar or not, and most certainly you shouldn't call yourself one; saying that you're a programmer should be enough! We should live in the shadows and let our code to do the talking.

PS: I have the feeling that "rockstar" programmer is starting to replace the beloved "guru" as the word that makes up for one's lack of coding skills
In Linux, "dc" will be GNU dc, which would have been written late 80s or early 90s, like most other GNU utilities. And it would have been maintained/modified over the years.

(A better example would be the bsdgames collection. It's a lot older and has barely been touched over the years.)
Index your site on Yahoo through Bing?
On HN job offerings expressions like "rockstar", "ninja", "guru", and other pompous expressions are used very often.

I find it childish; I would never attempt to consider an offer expressed in this way.

Being italian, I always considered my disgust due to a cultural difference: United States people tend to use a more "sensationalist" language. What do you think about it?
"what does this even mean?"
great explanation here: http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html
Using XCode will probably fix all your issues for development. For a build server look around for a ruby script that can pull down the provisioning profiles on every build. Very useful.
Regardless - the point still stands: it is a failure of the business if it cannot handle employees taking vacations or being absent for whatever reason. This is not the fault of the absent employee.
Hang up, dial your friend. If your "bank" answers, offer to sell them a ppppppowerbook.
Inside Big Data: Delving into its companies, processing, analysis and future
This article is pretty interesting because I was not aware there was some notion of French being lazy at all. In fact, as the author mentions, the fact that stats show that French work longer then they should, is definitely an indication of their wanting to work hard. Hopefully overworking is not negatively affecting other areas of their lives. I think that underdeveloped countries will always have overworked people willing to overwork (perhaps underpaid too), but developed countries give people the opportunity to work what they are paid for and step up to the occasion when needed - not forcefully, but because you want to and you can.
While there is a license for commercial use, db4o[1] might be a good alternative on Android. I'm not sure what CoreData is personally (sounds ORMie), but this tool is an embedded object database. Fairly quick. The con is it will increase your app install size.

1 - http://www.db4o.com/android/
Foxpro/Clipper Apps running on DOS , there are couple of shops using them still in India
According to Wikipedia, both iOS and Android have been around longer than five years.
Kovacs, Mozilla’s Exec Who Made Firefox OS Appealing, Now CEO at AVG
I've never understood the logic behind these software firewalls. If you have one enabled it's inspecting all incoming packets, exposing a large surface of what's often quite complicated C code.

Any service that has bound to a public-facing port on a machine I run has done so because I wanted it to; if I had a firewall I'd need to add an exception for it. Any service that's only meant to be accessed from the same machine has bound on loopback. Services that are accessed from another "internal" machine are properly authenticated, which means the network doesn't have to be trusted; spoofing packets won't help an attacker at all. Frankly if your defences rely on the idea that all packets from ip xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx are "safe" you're going to get burned.

Where's the value in a software firewall supposed to be?
Is there no car insurance question when the driver starts charging passengers for rides?
New iOS 7 Beta Supports Fingerprint Recognition In Next iPhone's Home Button
I was able to pick up SQLite much faster than CoreData.

This is what we did, but then we ran into growing pains of stale objects etc... with SQLite and moved to CD. CD is so much nicer to use and it's something I miss when working on the Android version of our app.
"How do you convince shareholders to invest their money if you can only promise returns on a 100+ year schedule?"

Use the religion biz model. It works for stuff like that.

Another alternative is the non-profit model.
I2C Protocol (2-Wire Interface) in a nut shell
I can't see how it's not a SOL situation, honestly. Question is how long this transition period is, I guess.
Nice find! Man page footer on current OS X says 1997-03-25.

I looked at some other man pages from ls, cat, tar and the like and the oldest that I found was rm, from January 28, 1999.

UPDATE! rmdir's man page is from May 31, 1993! Though I'm sure the actual code was updated since then.
As we would put it here in research academia, it doesn't require any original thinking, just mere effort.
As an aside, on the lower-end of the wage earner spectrum some of these people need time away from their job so they can get to their second low-wage job.
I wrote the lot traceability module of Compufact's ERP package in 1987. 3 years ago, I engaged a company that still used that software. Just for fun, I searched for my initials in their repository. Good news: that software was still being used. Not so good news: one of my programs had been changed 120 times, including bug fixes. I pretended that it was written by another "edw".
A UICollection view is complex solution compared to the CSS equivalent of "float:left", or "display:inline-block".

Furthermore, you will be responsible for resizing the collection view and its sibling views or getting auto-layout working correctly to do part of this for you.

In the tag layout, it would be about as easy to just write line-wrapping code by hand, than to use a UICollectionView.
Egoless "team players" are pretty easy to manage, and they do a lot of the junk work without asking for much in return, but they're pretty poor strategic thinkers and they don't age well. I might not use the word "ego", but it takes a certain self-preservation instinct to keep growing a skill base in a world that doesn't give jack about your career or future. You have to take responsibility for that, and "team players" often get loaded with grunt work they don't learn much from.

Obviously, there's a middle ground that's optimal. People who can't work with others at all aren't good hires, but neither are the Clueless "team player" types who top out at middle management (because people with strategic talent avoid getting stuck doing someone else's grunt work).
I'm doing an internship at a mainframe shop right now.

I took a look into it and the oldest macro I could find that I use semi regularly is SYS1.MACLIB(DCBD). A utility for working with data control blocks which dates back to 1977, putting it at 36 years old.

There are definitely older programs on the system, but I'm not sure how often they're used.
When I use Windows, I tend to use PFE as a text editor.
Every time there is a US/UK article about how much better things are in Scandinavia/Netherlands/Germany, someone from the latter pops up and starts listing a number of negatives, usually with a strong right-wing/libertarian bias.

None of these are false in themselves, but these same issues are largely common to all Western societies (the US being a bit of an outlier in some aspects), and not a sign of total failure of a specific model.

Name one Western country that isn't struggling with public spending, globalisation, automation and education issues.
Core Data, as someone said earlier, has a much steeper learning curve than straight SQLite, but it pays off in the long run, saving you from writing enormous amounts of repeating, mindless code. I dread having to maintain my older non-Core Data-using apps, and am in the process of migrating them where I can.

I'm in the process of writing the same repetitive database code for an Android app at the moment and would love a (high quality, I've tried a few bad 3rd party libraries) Core Data equivalent to use.
This isn't the oldest, but is definitely one of the oldest softwares that is used at almost every restaurant in the US and maybe other countries as well.

Aloha Restaurant POS

Watch this youtube video, then watch what servers use at your favorite restaurants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlXCfs75SkI

I used it back in 1998 at a restaurant and it felt old then. Still used at almost every bar, restaurant I go to.
nbench from 95/96
http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html
I got the same from Discover once; I was at a computer shop picking up a new PC. They ran it once and told me "it didn't work" as my phone started ringing. It was an automated call asking me whether the charge was legitimate. I told it "yes" and asked them to run it again. Makes sense considering that to Discover, it's an out-of-the-blue $1k+ purchase at a store I rarely visit.
Small Empires with Alexis Ohanian episode 001: ZocDoc
We are tidy people:

http://www.datendieter.de/item/Buchstabenhaeufigkeit_von_deu...

(In german, but the picture speaks for itself)
Do space probes count?
http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html
If you destroy and corrupt businesses and the way of doing business, the only way to "do stuff" without having to hold your nose as much is new areas.

People have been curing cancer, admittedly at variable success rates, for decades. Medical industrial complex is much older. You're going to have to hold your nose pretty bad to eliminate cancer. Your triumphs will be via paying off political candidates to purchase laws, and patent warfare. Maybe something the "smart kids" do in the lab will matter, but probably not.

On the other hand mobile apps aren't as corrupt yet, therefore they're effective, therefore you can make money and businesses in them... for awhile, before they get tainted.
What is so difficult about encrypting HTTP with an SSL Layer?

SSL is a key you keep and an unlocked padlock you give someone. They use it to give back a box with no idea how to open it.

You configure a web server with a key and a padlock. It keeps the key and serves the padlock. How can this be improved? (Serious question, maybe it can - this concept still seems esoteric to many)
The oldest stuff I've seen in use would be PDP-11s, Wangs, NetWare 3.x and assorted OS/2 Win 3.1 desktops.

I used 90s versions of Winamp and Xnews until I just stopped caring up local MP3s and USENET.
World's first open source aircraft could cost as little as $15,000
Not sure if intentional, but every member of this list is derided by a vocal segment in the community... :)
That is a great idea, thanks – will definitely add to the product ideas log.

-- Pete, founder, Pixie Labs
I wrote a set of Nagios plugins for z/Linux in 2008, to monitor a DOS/VS application, running under VM/370 running under VM/ESA, running in an LPAR next to the z/Linux.

I don't know how old the application is, but DOS/VS is from 1972, and depreciated since 1980 by DOS/VSE.
The notion of a rockstar is silly. I think it's somewhat common to find developers that can pickup languages in a short space of time. Once you understand the concepts of OO/procedural and functional paradigms something would be wrong if you couldn't pick up a new language in a day (plus some more time for best practices, patterns, etc.).

Greenfield development is always easier than having to work with 200K LOC codebase that is crappy for all intents and purposes. Let's see how quickly a developer can jump on, wrap his/her around everything, then make significant changes and maybe I'll believe in that nonsense.

Personally I think if a job ad includes the word rockstar, I would expect hot groupies and coke on the job (2 or 3 times a week to allow some time for actual work :)).
I was just at Oracle 12c presentation, and I'm not pushing for Oracle (and not associated with them), but just going to mention something they have, that maybe your database provider also has.

Oracle (I believe starting from 12c) has masking for data. They were saying how you can mask everything except last 4 digits of credit cards. So if someone gains credentials of a regular employee, they will be able to query data, but sensitive data will be masked by database itself.
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Why? Because it rocks.
I'm a Carleton CS student in Ottawa and thinking of going.
Presumably L1Bs
I'm not a fan. I have never seen a statement of what it gains over gitworkflows(7) and similar (models that prepare releases in 'master', integrate in 'next' which is eventually rewound, and support existing releases via 'maint'). The most critical difference is that git-flow eschews the integration process that allows new features to interact before they are merged to 'master'. Instead of having topic branches tested together in 'next', someone has to be make the difficult decision of whether a topic branch that has only been tested in isolation should be merged into 'develop' (or hotfixes into git-flow's 'master', which is most similar to 'maint' of
gitworkflows(7)).

This generally means that a git-flow 'develop' is less stable than a
gitworkflows(7) 'master', so it's more common to be working on a new
feature and find bugs that were there when you started. That's
disruptive to development and its unpleasant to users that would really
like the latest stuff that you think is actually ready for them to use.

Thus any decision to merge a topic branch comes with the pressure that any bugs introduced in the merge (possibly through indirect semantic conflicts with other work) will disrupt any developer starting new work between the merge and the time a fix is provided.

In contrast, merging to 'next' in gitworkflows(7) comes with relatively less pressure because bugs there only affect integration and eager users, but not new development. Furthermore, merges to 'master' come with knowledge that the feature has already been playing nicely in 'next', which contains everything in 'master' as well as some other new features.

I wrote a more extensive comparison in http://mail-archive.com/search?l=mid&q=87zjx4x417.fsf@mcs.an...
Let's define "still in use," because that's the heart of the question. Technically speaking, I'm sure someone could dig an Apple IIc out of storage somewhere and successfully run a game on it. Hell, someone out there might be doing that right now. To me, that anecdotal experience doesn't translate into "in use."

I'd define "in use" to mean still in productive service to a group of people or institutions significant enough to represent a niche market.

For that, I'd probably look to things like avionics software in certain airplanes, navigation systems on old ships, firmware in medical devices and diagnostics, or perhaps to inventory management systems in old warehouses.

And who knows what firmware we loaded onto our Cold War-era ICBMs, for that matter? Or what dusty, backwards-compatible systems we would need to maintain control over them? Would anyone like to play a game? :)
Here's how one composer made sure his ringtone won't drive you nuts.
Hi there, you're absolutely right, the invitation workflow isn't perfect yet. There's actually quite a lot of complex mechanics at play, given that a user can own a group, be an account IN a group and also a member OF a group.

We're working on some improved user journeys and they'll be rolled out soon. MVP, and all that ;)

Thanks,

-- Pete, founder, Pixie Labs
Compilers are pretty interesting- the current compiler was compiled by the previous compiler. Theoretically, our modern compilers embody ~40 years of history..
Link to the site before time runs out? I love seeing "antique" websites.
It isn't. National pride is a bug.
The democratic vote was over whether Norway should become a republic or a monarchy. Prince Carl (to be King Haakon) was already chosen as a candidate at that time, and had agreed to the seat as long as the the Norwegian people would accept him.
PC-DOS or DOS/VS? (Intel or /360 architecture DOS)
Hi Polynomial, this feature is the one we're working on right now :)

-- Pete, founder, Pixie Labs
The science lot usually call simulation 'In silico' in their papers. Personally, unnecessary latin makes me cringe.
Nicer: http://placeit.breezi.com/e0d7579
How I've Used Twitter to Network & Find Work (Yammer, Simple)
Right, we should calculate average hours per week by total hours worked per year divided by number of weeks one was paid. So if you work 50 hour weeks but get 6 weeks paid leave, that should be taken into account.
Going All In - Dropping out, starting a business
There is an accountant at a company I briefly worked for who still uses an Apple II and some archaic accounting software that he learned to do accounting on. He refuses to change, so they just have a big stack of Apple IIs in a closet to replace them when they wear out. That software probably hasn't been touched since 1980 at the latest.
I can understand ending the call if they start asking for personal information, but if you get a call from the bank to take you through a suspected fraud case then all they do is ask you some 'pick-the-odd-one-out' style questions to verify your identity. They then list all your transactions, including the fraudulent ones and ask if you recognise them. After that they cancel the account and start a new one.
New Robot Takes Your Blood With Higher Accuracy Than Nurses
realistic Apple environments :-)

(I realize there are one or two Android and Windows phones in the list, but still...)
Which is better: getting your cancer successfully treated and then playing Angry Birds, or playing Angry Birds and then dying of cancer?

That is why.
I was unaware of an L^2 (or better) algorithm - can you provide a reference? Even just a term to search for - my Search-fu is failing.

Thanks.

Added in edit:

OK, I've found these - hoping I'm on the right track:

1982 LLL Lenstra Lenstra Lovász
1987 BKZ Block Korkine Zolotarev
2002 RSR Random Sampling Reduction
2002 PDR Primal Dual Reduction
The safe bet would be on corporate/academic mainframe software. While lots have been patched or replaced, I bet there's code from the 70s (perhaps 60s) still running out there somewhere.

Let's put it this way: there's a market for teaching people how to program like it was 1975. Nobody around can do it anymore, and the code base is large enough that both the teaching and skillset are highly valued in some circles.
Try Foobar2000.
http://orig.anywherenotes.com/

If you click something that goes to page-not-found, make sure the link has 'orig' in front of it, because in some places I went directly to www
or a taxi?
Sounds very much like Australia, too. Pick just about any quality-of-life measure, and the top 5 will usually be a smattering of scandinavia and Australia... yet the public perception is we're just terrible, the worst place in the world for -foo-.

The funny thing is, referring to the inferiority complex, there's this amorphous mythical country in Europe that doesn't have a name and we can never measure up to - we're just provincials, unlike those cultured people over there, wouldn't life be so much better if... (oh, just don't look at quality of life measures!)
Arts and sports improve the present, science improves the future.
I see he has a cozy little room just up the road from my house. Allenwood low is an easy ride for a Federal Prison stay.

So why is his reasons for incarceration more disturbing than the stuff he has done over the years? What I see is an intelligent guy, who could really do a lot of good if he could actually be civilly disobedient. But instead he chooses to go the antisocial way with some "moral highground". He played with fire, and he got burned. There are better, more respectful ways to be an activist and be an agent for change that would produce far more fruitful results.
Emacs was launched in 1976:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs
Wow, that's so simple and clever. It seems so obvious but I wonder if I'd remember to do that if I was shaken up by my "bank" calling to tell me my account had been compromised. I'll write it down for future reference.