skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This:

"In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. "

is contradicted by this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz

"... settlement of the lawsuit ... under which ... PKWARE paid SEA to obtain a license that allowed the distribution of PKWARE's ARC-compatible programs until January 31, 1989, after which PKWARE would not license, publish or distribute any ARC compatible programs or utilities that process ARC compatible files.

...

After the lawsuit, PKWARE released one last version of his PKARC and PKXARC utilities under the new names "PKPAK" and "PKUNPAK", and from then on concentrated on developing the separate programs PKZIP and PKUNZIP, which were based on new and different file compression techniques."

Wiki also says

"The SEA vs. PKWARE dispute quickly expanded into one of the largest controversies the BBS world ever saw."

Any greybeards care to comment?
Mac OSX, Firefox 24.

Ah, looks like I installed AdBlock plus a long time ago and forgot about it, disabling it for this page fixes it.
On sidenote, the console fills up with a lot of

[TextShrink] Parent has no width. H1 yui_3_10_1_1_1382584857165_14 { _yuid="yui_3_10_1_1_1382584857165_14", _node=h1, _stateProxy=h1, more...}
common...-min.js (line 494)

No matter the AdBlock status.
If a website makes an update, all users will get the new version as soon as caches expire. Something like an iOS update can also reach a large majority of users within weeks. Hardware that you've already shipped will remain in customer hands, obviously unchanged, yet still need to be supported through the warranty period and beyond. I don't understand why you would say that's nothing different. Your QA department would need to test software against many more versions of hardware, your software engineers would have to fix those bugs, and your after-sales support staff would have a harder time as well.

Also, it's not as if other companies ship exactly the same hardware throughout the lifecycle of a product. New suppliers are added, parts that have been identified as a return driver are reworked, and even major mid-life changes (consider the slim versions of each PlayStation as an example) happen as a matter of course.
Can I upvote this like 30 times?
I guess fine as an exercise but, wow, is this awful from almost every perspective (usability, space usage, difficulty to crack).
Seconded. Logo bored me fast, maybe in part because I'd already experienced BASIC on our family Apple IIgs. When I was introduced to Pascal in high school, I really got stoked. It's funny how vividly I remember the teacher and everyone in class being totally aware that the week we spent on understanding pointers was going to be painful :)
Mostly disagree. My banking years (age 21-23) were really rough (100+ hour workweeks), but it definitely meant we learned much faster and earned significantly more over the long run.

I tend to lose interest if I'm not actively competing against my peers.

Now I just enjoy my job way too much to consider scaling back the hours.
I hate to say it, but that looks like my Smalltalk browser. Smalltalk has various built in code browsers that allow you different views of the code, your plugin behaves like one of them, the chasing browser.
What is this, exactly? Is it an anonymous forum? The page isn't clear...
Adobe Brings Flash Player Sandbox to Safari on Mac OS X
This is just incredibly dumb and disrespectful. I'm hoping this gets enough attention that people start calling them out.
It's still an incredibly stupid process. Sure it made it's way to the complex life forms we have today, but only after unfathomably huge amounts of time, and trillions and trillions of attempts.
Conversely, I could say why not use bytes for both, and that when I need an index lookup it's usually a byte offset. But I think neither statement is totally satisfying, and the more interesting question is why different languages settled on different encodings for strings in RAM.

Microsoft had reasons to pick UTF-16 for C# and the CLR. The Windows API speaks UTF-16, and when C# was first announced way back in 2000, UTF-8 was not yet a widely used encoding on the Web; Unicode was sadly not that widely used on the Web, period. The decision to use 16-bit Unicode in the Win32 API went even further back, to the development leading up to NT 3.1's release in July 1993. At that point, UTF-8 was a relative baby; it was presented at USENIX in January 1993. Also, back then, code points basically were 16 bits because surrogate pairs were but a twinkle in the Unicode Consortium's eye. The Unicode 2.0 standard added surrogate pairs to help them expand their CJK selection and generally let them add more chars of all sorts; it wasn't released until 1996. Now here we are and we have 😃, U+1F603.

Go came along in 2009; by then, many Web sites were being served in UTF-8, and Go'd be used in significant part in Web operations, and UTF-8 was also the default encoding in many Unix environments. Go initially didn't run on Windows at all and was ported by the community, so fitting in with Win32 wasn't an issue. Code points that wouldn't fit in 16 bits were a fact of life by '09, too. Arguments about inherent merits of encodings aside, it probably would have seemed to lots of folks that UTF-8 was a natural choice for that task at that time.

Also, Pike and Thompson are two of the three co-designers of Go and co-designed UTF-8, and UTF-8 was the encoding used by the Plan 9 OS/environment they built at Bell Labs, so, again, technical details aside, it was kind of a foregone conclusion which encoding they'd build the language around. :)

The one thing I do not want to do here is get in an argument about the inherent merits of character encodings, so I'm just not gonna do that. :)

On UTF-16 and Windows NT: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/99884, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

On Unicode adoption on the Web, UTF-8, and Plan 9: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/unicode-over-60-perce..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
Dunno, given how much my wife is on Pinterest checking things out, including intentionally looking for various products she may want to buy, I think Pinterest has a very bright future....
I really like the essay.
However one thing to be noted, The author and even most of society expects you to achieve a higher goal, be successful. We raise kids to care about themselves, bless them to earn money and so on and that's fine.

But once they do become successful, we expect them to be a little giving, be less of a selfish person and help others.
Unfortunately he/she was raised to be so self conceited, it would seem inane for them to be nice to others, stand up for others, and help them.
Just dropping 2 cents from someone else that had a profound impact on me.
You are describing the processes in our universe that allow the existence of the created universe. From within that universe, the actors would have no knowledge of these processes or even the existence of our universe unless the creators explicitly provided them with this information. To them, their universe would appear to be everything in existence just as ours does to us. That is why, to me, these universes are analogous to our own and since they are the only universes we know to exist besides our own (even though they exist within our universe), I think it makes sense to consider the possibility that our universe is no different and that our universe may exist within a parent universe and that our universe has a creator in the parent universe just as our child universes have creators in ours.

As far as evidence goes, there is no tangible evidence (and if the theory is correct, it would probably be impossible to get evidence unless the creator allowed it) but if you have 100 bags and in 99 of those bags there is an egg, it can be reasonable to assume that there is an egg in the 100th bag. That isn't really evidence though especially because that 100th bag is different from the other 99 as it contains them. It could be argued however, that this is is a type of evidence. I'm not sure how exactly but I think someone smarter than me could.

Regarding scale, I don't think that that is such an issue for three reasons:

1) If something is contained in something else, it is reasonable that it's container is larger so just as our universe is on a larger scale than our child universes, our parent universe could be on a larger scale to our own.

2) Only the actors and what they observe need to be simulated (I may be the only actor, maybe it's you) the rest can be approximated. Perhaps this is why it is so difficult for scientists to come up with a unified theory. Maybe macro and micro events within our universe are simulated in different ways and the simulator that runs our universe is inconstant when these two simulations need to be merged.

3) Perhaps it takes the equivalent of years in our parent universe to simulate a second in our universe maybe this very moment is the only one that has been simulated and the past is just the initial state.

edit: The bag/egg analogy isn't great but I am sure that you know what I mean.
One has to wonder how this will affect the TPP, and other greater patent wars across the world.
I loved the CodeBubbles demo. Not for every task, maybe, but I wish I had this tool in my life. Why don't I?
This is one of the reasons I love HN so much. Some people share really incredible things, which you wouldn't have found otherwise.
It's a decentralised network on which you can create a reddit-like forum. People are anonymous, and posts in forums are distributed from one client app to another.
I think the report number is 173358208.
In the event that anyone happens to be interested in knowing more about the conflict between SEA and PKWARE, here's a pretty solid collection of notes and BBS postings.

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/S...
It's an equality vs liberty issue. Either my free speech is violated because you have more money to voice your side, or my speech is violated because the government isn't letting me express my views by buying an advertisement. My point is that there is a tradeoff. Surrounding any different issue you have different people on different sides of the scale. i.e. you don't like the person buying the advertisement so it is undemocratic OR I am very passionate about the issue but the government won't let me spend money to advocate my position.
Haskell has very good support for imperative programming.
I wouldn't go that far.

First, to be honest, I don't trust the initial claim. I couldn't find a source for the 3.5 to 7 kWh figure, and their are a lot of ways it could be wrong or misleading. Firstly, you don't refine gasoline in a vacuum; when you refine a barrel of oil, you get roughly 45 gallons of refined petroleum products, including about 19 gallons of gasoline. Are they assigning the full cost to the gasoline, dividing it by volume, or by energy cost? And 3.5 vs 7.5 is a full factor of two. What is the average cost?

Even taking the energy cost as gospel, it still tells you a heckuva lot more about the vehicles than the fuel. ICEs peak at about 30% efficiency, so you ought to be able to apply a solid 12 kWh from a gallon of gas to making cars go. If the fifty miles you can push a particular electric car on 7.5 kWh is more than your typical car, that's hardly the fuel's fault. And indeed: the current record for fuel efficiency is 209 mpg.

So it's duplicitous to say that electricity is more efficient for running cars than gasoline, or claim gasoline is somehow energy negative. We get so much energy from gasoline we can be extraordinarily wasteful in how we use it.
And the great story to go with the cover, delightfully relevant to many of the topics we rant about on Hacker News:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24035/24035-h/24035-h.htm
>We lost the fight with viruses a decade ago. If you get infected with a deadly viral disease, like rabies, it's curtains. There's nothing any hospital can do for you except sedate you until you're dead.

What? We never had effective antivirals. We have a few useful drugs (oseltamivir, protease inhibitors, etc) for particular viruses, but there has never been a point in human history when rabies was a treatable disease. The Milwaukee protocol, which is the only effective[1] non-vaccine treatment for rabies, isn't even drug-based!

You may of course be confused. The major antiviral used in replications of the Giese case, amantadine, was also an anti-flu drug, resistance to which is now widespread in influenza (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amantadine#Veterinary_misuse ). However, I do not believe amantadine resistance has ever been described in rabies, which in any case is usually treated with vaccination -- the challenge is to get the immune system to respond to the virus before the host dies! Giese herself was treated with both amantadine and ribavirin. In any case, your claim is confusing at best, misleading at worst.

[1]: controversial, see http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/712839_7
That happened at work a few weeks ago---basically, one of our components did a health check of of DNS when the health check DNS record was mistakenly deleted. Because of the way the health check code was written, that component thought the DNS servers were down and shut down. That in turn, shut down other components that were health checking that component. Boom! Instant virtual dominoes.
As nly pointed out - the virtual template function just does not make sense if you understand what it is. As for the operators I'd guess you mean && and ||? You cannot make them shortcut because the user defined operators are just functions and functions in C++ do always evaluate their arguments.
How Did I Get 38 Willing-to-Pay Customers Before Writing Code?
Cool, found it. Will respond in the email thread.
What if the law was that NPEs are barred from litigating patents, unless the NPE was the original inventor. Wouldn't that solve this?
the above is also directly ignoring the text immediately below on the page:

This is dumb! I already figured out how to crack
it, and yes, of course I realize that the production
version will render the MAPTCHA as a single image,
not as separate elements, and it will draw from a
practically limitless database of images.

I'm not saying this is a good captcha, but if your first response is seriously to not read any of the text on the page and go for the easy "hey, look how dumb this is" answer, are you really trying hard enough?
The bacteria is acting purposefully I guess in the same sense that a hammer acts purposefully to drive down a nail. I don't know if that's a correct usage of language or not but it's essentially the same thing. But it is correct to say the hammer's purpose is to drive down the nail, and the bacteria's purpose is to survive and reproduce successfully.

So what if a species goes extinct? That doesn't mean it can't evolve, only that it didn't adapt quickly enough.
I did read that. And that is why I added the "in jest" part, followed by my serious comment. However, rereading my comment, I should have said "in jest" instead of "mostly in jest."
No. But any decent programmer could (scaling aside of course).
U.S. Spent $3.7 Trillion on Welfare Over Last 5 Years
Gaining trust in a niche
I have had 5-6 bounty bugs answered in very short order.. this mush have slipped thought the cracks.
Equivocating isn't a bad thing, and I don't see how OP can be described as equivocating. He made his position quite clear...
They also aren't supported very well by browsers. IE8, in particular.
100% agree with #1! I would have written the heading as something like "Be relevant," though-- a little more focused on what you were saying about using real tools.

I remember thinking this while watching a TED talk by a guy who created one of the programming-for-kids websites. Like, cute game and all... and I suppose it ingrains concepts like variables and "for" loops and whatnot, but how intimidated will these kids be when they see real code files in an IDE? That's the real barrier to learning to code, I think-- especially for little girls.
Well said. However...

> "Agriculture only uses a few antibiotics, ones that are cheap in bulk, nontoxic to livestock, and can be mixed with feed..."

The reality is much worse. Factory meat producers will abuse any antibiotic if they are allowed, even the most powerful last-resort antibiotics. For example, many poultry producers were routinely mixing fluoroquinolones into their feed until very recently. The practice was outlawed in 2005, but there is good evidence that some poultry producers continue to do it in violation of the law:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120405131431.ht...
If you can do your work remotely through a terminal, then you can get away with speeds slower than 1Mbps, even dial-up. If you need to do video chat via Skype of Google Hangouts, then you probably wouldn't want to go much slower than 1Mbps.
Node.js is just full of Worse Is Better. I think there's a danger for more pure/forward-looking environments to look down on that, because there really is some Better in it – I think the work done to get us forward is going to have to meld Worse Is Better with Actually Better.
Actually, it's because I originally matched the Glyphicons names. I was never crazy about them and they weren't terribly consistent. Tried to solve much of that in this version.
If their products are crap, who cares how often they release them? But take a look at what they are offering for $300:

Specs:
http://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_mi_3-5678.php

Design:
http://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_mi_3-pictures-5678.php
Just the CSS.
FWIW I just viewed source at http://wordpress.com/ and I didn't see anything similar. However I have heard Matt Mullenweg mention that they hide messages for people reading through the wordpress source code.
ah, I can re-read and see how that is meant as a joke specifically targeting the text I quoted. Gotta love the internets, where no one can hear your intonation and subtleties
Anyone who thinks we're using programming technology of the 70's probably wasn't programming in the 70's. Today it's routine to create systems in a handful of days that would have taken a larger team a much greater amount of time to create in the 70's, 80's, 90's, or even 00's. In fact, for years now, power users do certain kinds of applications with spreadsheets and similar tools-- without programmer intervention-- jobs that were previously handled by systems analysts and development teams.

Interfacing different kinds of computer systems together today is orders of magnitude simpler than it was even in the 90's, much less the 70's.

Sure, we're not all talking to our computers while they program themselves and driving around in flying cars. But software development technology has come a long, long way. Users are tons more empowered to do their own work now than they used to be. And the amount of knowledge and training needed to make a developer effective today is nothing like it used to be.
Just learn JS already. It isn't that hard.
Merkel calls Obama about NSA spying
The reason I state that is because the OP glosses over the positions and power dynamics at play, turning the prime actors into just two regular old people.

Context matters and purposefully taking it out to make a point about moral relativism is disingenuous in my opinion.
Regarding (1), it seems you're comparing individual incomes with household incomes. Due to the prevalence of dual-income households, this is a fatal mistake. Two engineers married in Silicon Valley, both one year out of college, will easily hit $180k in combined income, probably even $200k or more. That's why the local 5% mark is as high as $350k for households.
Even bad/negative stories deserve their moment of sunshine on the HN front page, perhaps even more so. How else would we be having this discussion?
Null is NOT the same as "zero"

Ruby has "nil", and 0. They are not the same, and should not be considered the same.

Would you say that accessing coordinate 0,0 is a "logically invalid operation"? What is an array but a 1 dimensional coordinate system?

Are you suggesting that accessing an array via an uninitialized parameter will show up as a runtime error because of 1-based indexing? That only happens if your language initializes values to 0.

Ruby initializes everything to nil, not 0, and yes, indexing by nil will fail.

Perhaps I'm not seeing your problem or solution because Ruby doesn't even have the kind of problem that is solved by a 1-based array index. See: the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity , your thinking may be suffering due to the language you are typically working in.
Regarding (3), I think if you need 25 feet of screen real estate in a graphical environment, then your code is probably not organized well, regardless of whether it's textual or graphical.

Regarding (1), I think we need to understand why it's been tried and why it's failed. Knowing that it's been tried before and failed should be enough to make you skeptical, but it shouldn't be enough to outright reject something unless it's a copying an old idea wholesale. That said, I think NoFlo specifically has very few new or interesting ideas.
So my guess is they want to do something similar to fancy.com but probably on a more massive scale? What do you spend $200M on in less than 10 months with max 150 employees?
That's very similar to the effect we're trying to achieve. I was happy to see it was received well by the HN community. I think the same approach would work well in an IDE.
Indeed. On the plus side, with this comment chain, I doubt that anybody else will miss the subtlety.
I like this. Anyone can put groceries in a bag, but there's more complexity there than one might think.

A bad bagger will just throw stuff in without thought. A good bagger will put the heavy stuff at the bottom and fragile stuff at the top. An expert bagger will do that but also keep cold items together, separate raw meat from everything else, optimize the use of space, evenly distribute the weight between the bags, keep the center of gravity as low as possible, and do it all with a smile.

Most baggers never make it past good. It doesn't take talent. It doesn't take strength, agility, or high intelligence. It takes a different way of viewing the world. It takes having pride in your work, even when no one else cares.

Find the experts and hire them.
Safe object traversal: if you can traverse objects you can start to create search algorithms (which is what Prolog's solver really is) that work across different domains and objects. I think this is a path towards goal-oriented programming.

ASTs: by representing the program in a more abstracted way, we can start to build tools that manipulate them in ways other than ASCII editors.

Direct manipulation of data: well, Bret brought this one up, not me. I thought it was a little odd. While spatial representation of code was about stretching our ASCII into something else, I chose to interpret this as stretching our concrete editing tools towards code. In other words, how do you add abstractions to concrete editing tools. I think the simplest task would be the one to start with: how do you parametrize something in a concrete data editor?
I feel I made a cogent, reasoned point and topped it off with a forceful reproach.

Some people are more swayed by the former and others the latter.
I whipped up a FontAwesome 4.0 library for iOS: https://github.com/sweetmandm/FontAwesomeTools-iOS