skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The smalltalk environment, while technically impressive, had a very low usability level for beginners. Just download Squeak and try to use it! It was basically academic in every sense of the word.

Or put another way: yes, smalltalk addressed programmability, but it did not address usability.
> Adding an alternative is not coercion.

It's not simply the existence plea bargains that is coercion, I don't think anyone would argue that, and it's easy to find situations where plea bargains can be good things.

But, this is not the point of the criticism - it is also easy to think of situations where plea bargains could be used to distort justice rather than to make it efficient. Wikipedia has a good discussion of this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargains#Controversy .

You can disagree that these criticisms are a problem in practice, that is fine and something that could be discussed, but you must recognise that plea bargains could in principle be used in a coercive way, and that many people fear that this happens in practice.
The option for reuse applies to both parties. Someone has to license use from the copyright holder with or without a transfer. In the case of software, the transfer is just an additional complication, by which I mean that the copyright to a Rails app is complicated by the license stack of Rails and the backend and other pieces. There's lots of pieces that the programmer doesn't hold copyright and therefore cannot assign it.
This is a good idea right up until something goes wrong. The client decides not to pay you -- what do you do? The client asks for revision after revision on a flat-rate job. The client refuses to buy stock photos, or refuses to provide some essential software component. The client insists, years later, that because they changed their requirements, something you did is now a bug, and they insist you fix it for free. You write software library X for a client and then the client sues you for using it in a different project. The client asks for a change verbally, later denies making this request, and insists that you reverse it (for free). I could go on but the point is that there really are some things that aren't covered by a handshake agreement that you really should have nailed down, because you have very limited recourse otherwise.

This should include the work to be performed, payment schedule and penalties for late payments (which are generally covered by usury laws, the workaround is often to offer a discount for early payment), what copyrights are transferred and when, responsibilities for providing assets, acceptance criteria, liability for defects, severability, and controlling law. Non exclusive list written from memory, IANALATINLA.

Relationships may be important, but that does not mean automatically getting screwed if the client decides to. A well-written contract protects both parties. We need contracts because this isn't a perfect world, things go wrong all the time, and it's very easy to burn relationships unless you both agree about what to do when things go wrong, before the lawyers start getting involved. And again, if it does get to the point where the legal letters start flying, without a contract you are going to be severely limited in terms of recourse.

Another way to look at it is that without a contract, you are both taking on risk; the risk of not being paid is probably the biggest factor. If you can avoid a $5k to $50k risk by spending a few hundred dollars, why wouldn't you?

If you need more than my words to convince you, I suggest either reading clientsfromhell.net, or watching "Fuck you, pay me."
http://vimeo.com/22053820
I wonder if creating a wrapper struct (let's call it Buffer) which combines an UnsafeMutablePointer and an UnsafeMutableBufferPointer would improve the language ergonomics while keeping the performance of the 'Swift*' version.

Buffer would have a constructor taking the number of items to store, and would upon creation create a buffer using UnsafeMutablePointer.alloc(). It would then use the UnsafeMutablePointer to build an UnsafeMutableBufferPointer. The latter type allows subscript indexing (e.g. myBuffer[10]) and iteration using for-in, which we could support by implementing a pass-through subscript() and generate() function.

Then, when using the struct, we'd pass it using inout parameters to ensure that it doesn't get copied.

This wouldn't fix the problem of Arrays being ludicrously unperformant, but it would at least make using the C-style buffer less painful.
if c++ initially came out with c++11 syntax and features. It might be a good language. Now. c++ became a monster including so many different styles, conventions, usages. It's too hard to choose it unless you have legacy system to support.
This is a real tragedy. Now they'll start selling this to other authoritarian regimes and it will begin the end of the internet as we know it.
This is a really interesting case and I think there are two paths you could take, depending on what you want to do with your life:

1. Do you want to be the businessperson? Do you want to raise money, start a company, deal with HR, have board meetings, and commercialize your software? If so, then it sounds like you would want to keep this competitor out of the market. At this stage, you could probably achieve that by sending some friendly, politely-worded emails to the parties involved explaining the true origins of the IP. I say you could do this in a friendly way because you are actually helping the investors by giving them a more accurate picture of what could've been a deceptive pitch. I wouldn't necessarily push for them to invest in you because they might be soured by the whole thing, but I'd be open if they expressed interest. At this point, I'd stress don't be mean or aggressive about it - just be helpful and honest.

2. Or do you want to kick back and work on your open source software? If this is the case, and I'm guessing it is, then you probably want to encourage people to raise money based on your IP and then figure out ways to work with them to extract some licensing/consulting fees. If some one raises $1M based on your open-source software, it would be very reasonable for you to get $50K-$100K of that through fees over the next year. Some people are going to be defensive and think that you're "losing" $900K - but you were never going to raise that money in the first place, so how can you "lose" it? Now, how you get your $100K is dependent on circumstance, but it could be in the form of custom development for them, trademark licensing, premium support, premium software add-ons, etc. Overall, your goal is to maintain control/leverage over the IP and knowledge while helping others build a commercial market around it.

Good luck.
My understanding was that Ripley was originally written as male. From IMDB's trivia page:

"All of the names of the main characters were changed multiple times by Walter Hill and David Giler during revisions of the original script by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. The script by O'Bannon and Shusett also had a clause indicating that all of the characters are "unisex", meaning they could be cast with male or female actors; consequently, all of the characters are only referred to by their last name (Dallas, Kane, Ripley, Ash, Lambert, Parker, and Brett), and the few gender-specific pronouns (he/she) were corrected after casting. However, Shusett and O'Bannon never thought of casting Ripley as a female character."
Good point.

As an aside, Waking Mars is one of few games[1] that I actually enjoyed playing on mobile. It works well with touch and has a nice atmosphere to it that makes exploration fun.

[1] Tower defence games are the only others I sometimes play on mobile.
> Windows 8 on the desktop was objectively terrible.

No, it wasn't. It isn't.

(I liked the improvements in 8.1 but that blanket statement from you is false)
I think it is unfair to say that Aliens ignores the gender of the main protagonist. Rather, it makes great use of it. Ripley assumes a maternal role with Newt, the little girl survivor, which is something foreshadowed by the scene at the beginning when she learns that her daughter died while she was in stasis. Unfortunately, this scene was cut from the original theatrical release of the film but it is preserved in the special edition. They say Sigourney Weaver was furious that the scene was cut, and rightfully so, as it frames her character's relationship with Newt.
I'm thinking this fellows opinion is a minority one, and his psychology degree must have come in the mail so he probably isn't licensed to diagnosis people in my state.

Not a fan of Windows8. The 10 preview I played with was an absolute step in the right direction.
Yes. It was. It is. This disagreement by you is false.

See, we can both do that. Fun.

However in my case I'm supported by this very development, where Microsoft is essentially backtracking based upon enormous customer resistance and a backlash.
Ancient history question: What was the main problem the creators of the ELF were trying to address at the time the ELF was adopted?
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Interesting but it looks like the one iOS client for Mobac is geared towards vector maps, not the satellite imagery.
I don't think he realizes that he's critiquing and reviewing a preview OS.
> Windows 8 on the desktop was objectively terrible.

Not a chance. IMO, not only was the the best Windows from a technical perspective, I quite liked the interface. I use Linux mostly for philosophical and technical reasons (much easier to program in Linux), but Windows 8 has great UI.
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You're the author. There's no "So" about it.
CouchDB and Datomic are the only databases that I know about that have built-in versioning. Would love to hear about others that do too!
I was running a cluster of 3 RabbitMQ servers on 3 servers, all in the same data center, but different racks The page https://www.rabbitmq.com/clustering.html highlights that "RabbitMQ clustering does not tolerate network partitions well". Very true, I had this problem too often. The error recovering is manual and a nightmare. I didn't try the shovel or federation plugins as suggested. Because my needs for queuing were very simple, I decided to build a queue on top of Redis (cluster of 3 servers with redis-sentinel).
> Those people would be much happier, and society as a whole much safer, if we just gave all these people the money they need to live, and simply ask...

The money they need to live? So... from cradle to grave "these people" should simply be given all the food, clothing, shelter, education, entertainment, transportation, etc. that they need and no need to earn any of it?

I assume the plan is to confiscate the money from the other people, the ones that worked for about a century investing their money into developing the technology, processes, and software to bring that level of AI into the world. Pour money into the bottom, it's spent through the system, confiscate it at the top, rinse, repeat?

This doesn't work because it turns out if you can't actually keep the money you earn, you tend not to bother earning it.
Isn't the Apache license free of attribution? I'm not sure on the exact requirements on that license.

If I put a product together with open source components, does that make it less useful? Did I infringe on intellectual rights by putting together something with open source components?
I think it's fair to say a plea bargain put Aaron Swartz under duress.
It's an endless battle with different peripherals – you are never going to support every obscure device with community backing, when none of the developers have even heard of your gadget, much less owned it.

When you have simpler needs, like me – you want to run Linux software on a desktop computer that's comprised of well-known, widely used and well-supported hardware, desktop Linux with Fedora Core “just worked” over twelve years ago. (NVIDIA's proprietary drivers never came and never will come by default, but I considered that less a requirement when you had to install them yourself on Windows XP, too. The drivers were already back then top notch.) I wasn't that good with computers back then, and my biggest gripe, by far, were the fonts that didn't look like the pixelated fonts I'd grown used to with Windows'.
what eedjits keep 130 million credit card numbers in a computer that is attached to the Internet. Gross negligence is not a crime?
One of the advantages of a contract is that it is an opportunity to bring up potential issues before they become actual issues at that phase of a relationship where everyone is googly eyes in love.

Discussing contracts is also a good way to screen clients. It can provide a tell that allows separating people who don't sign contracts from those whose word is their bond. The latter have no trepidation entering a contract.
I think you entirely missed the viewpoint of the author

When people say that someone missed the point on HN, most of the time that means that they want you to read it the way they read it, and ignore those annoying bits that say something different.

Only this author not only undermines any disagreement with Windows 8 (just loss aversion), criticizes "old" interfaces (cars had 4 wheels in the 20s....give me my new style 3 wheel car), they specifically hold up its advantages on the desktop.

Not once do they mention the obvious solution -- that Microsoft should have gone separate directions on the desktop and the tablet -- but instead hold this as a cowardly backtrack.
> However, here's the thing: Windows are useful.

I'm increasingly convinced that overlapping Windows are not particularly useful (they are better than one-thing-maximized-is-the-only-option), but tiled windows are very useful.
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> No, it wasn't. It isn't.

Disclaimer: Emphasis on SUBJECTIVE before you indicate my opinion is wrong because you have a different opinion. That's pretty-much what subjective means. I thought HN was smarter than this.

Agreed, it's subjective. This is change aversion, not loss aversion. Humans don't like change, even if it is good for them.

People don't like Windows 8 UI because it was a change, and they don't like that they are changing it back. The Windows 8 interface was scientifically superior[1] to the old one: people just didn't like the change. The Windows 10 one is closer to the older interface, people just don't like it because it's change.

The big interaction areas (including the infinite one at the bottom left for the start menu) provided good mouse control. People would have found the keyboard control far superior if they had taken the 10 minutes to learn it, instead of complaining.

Something is not "objectively terrible" if at least one person like it and, including myself, I know people who like the Win8 interface. I haven't tried Win10 yet but I'll probably like the interface because Microsoft are terrific at interface design.

The only thing that Microsoft get wrong is that people don't like their cheese being moved. The Windows 7 interface was good, the Windows 8 interface was good and so will be the Windows 10.

The very reason that people praise Apple interface design is because they keep feeding you the same junk over and over again and you all love it, the innovation there is that innovation is avoided in order to not rile up change aversion.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
The iPad 2 WiFi didn't have any GPS, it uses WiFi Positioning to geolocate hence the need to have WiFi on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system

There are several good VNC clients for iOS, here are a few paid and free ones: http://www.thetechgadget.com/top-vnc-client-iphone-ipad-ipod...
Ok, but can they do something about the car that I do get saying "5 minutes" and actually meaning "9 minutes, including the bit where I watch him drive 2 minutes in the other direction"?
He sounds unicorny towards Windows 8. Nobody ever uses Windows 8 in Metro mode (because no, your PC is not a tablet), and the way which you randomly fall in and out of Metro is atrocious. A lot of things they just did not bother to think about; for example, wi-fi connection dialog overlays keyboard layout indicator, ruining hope of correctly inputting password.

The whole Windows 8 thing is embarrasingly make-believe.
Likely Huawei, they are big in the space and are under the control of the government (the ownership structure is secret, but well, it's secret for a reason).
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As far as I know, mobac is only for raster. The app mentioned in a sibling comment supports the tile maps:

https://galileo-app.com/manual.html#offline_maps

I guess it would at least be fine for visualization.
I worked at PARC (in the Learning Research Group) for most of a year in 1974, and later at Apple for 10 years. In both places I worked with Dan Ingalls and other Smalltalk folks. At Apple I was very involved in projects that led to various HyperCard related follow ons including AppleScript.

This article does not ring true to me at all. The problem with making a big fraction of users into programmers is that we don't know how to do it. The LRG at PARC and then various groups at Apple tried every way they (we) could think of, and other ways have continued to be invented and tried. So far none work. Hypercard was indeed the most accessible development environment, but only a small fraction of Hypercard users ever wrote code (maybe 5%).

Apple has continued to make user programming of Macs as easy as they conveniently can (as far as I can tell having been out of there for a long time). iOS has a different goal -- making devices safe and usable -- which is intrinsically in conflict with maximum programmability. Even on iOS there are plenty of "user programmable" apps.

I think part of the problem here is that many developers take themselves and their developer friends as "typical" but that is totally not the case. This really treats most of the population with (unintentional) disrespect.
A contract can limited the damage from working with a bad client, but not as much as screening out bad clients in the first place. I'm not saying that having a contract isn't better than every alternative, but it doesn't substitute for selecting good clients in the first place.
Everyone loves consistency, but it really is a fools errand to try and make a universal OS experience. Desktops with keyboards and mice require different design paradigms than touch screens with no physical buttons. Vendors like Microsoft that try and cater to both will simply face an eternal tug of war, and nobody will end up happy.

Very few people on a tablet want to touch-type code for eight hours a day. Very few people on a desktop want to hold their hands in the air tapping their expensive monitors for eight hours a day.

What Microsoft needs to do is produce a clean "OS base" (kernel, drivers) used by both, and then produce two separate products: Windows Office (for desktops) and Windows Metro (for touch devices.) They should have never tried to merge the UIs together.
... a tactic to undermine people's opinions by ascribing them to unproductive emotional reactions, rather than objective evaluations...

Isn't "liking" Windows 8 less than Windows 7 an emotional reaction?
how that's a fallacy? Google's cash cow is its ad platform.
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> People don't like Windows 8 UI because it was a change, and they don't like that they are changing it back.

No, people don't like the Windows 8 UI because it's terrible on the desktop. Comparatively, the classic Windows UI is terrible on touch-screen devices. Even combining both interfaces on one OS isn't terrible. But in Windows 8 they both bleed into each other in a way that is not good. Windows 10 combines them even more but I'll reserve judgement until I've tried it.
having learned to code in a place were a copy of the OS and the most basic compiler was ten times my parents income, i can see how that helps a little.

i do try to pay back my youth of buccaneering shame by always trying to send a patch with any big report to open source projects
How would he know if they are stripping his license off the files?
No, it was terrible, unless you installed a classic shell.
Wi-fi connection dialog painting over keyboard layout indicator immediately disqualifies UI from 'great'. Great UIs are not like this. Maybe it's novel, an eye candy, but not great.
Because the "anti"-fascists are fascists and PEGIDA are anti-fascists. Their anti-fascism is one of the reasons why they are against Islam -- anyone who is against suppresion, violence, and fascism ought to be against Islam, just as they should be against Communism and Nazism.
If you can see them coming, yes. There are some people that even if everything goes well it's not worth working for them. But the contract is often the difference between a disagreement that gets worked out, and a posting on Clients from Hell.
Turing test is an allegory. IA too
> When people say that someone missed the point on HN, most of the time that means that they want you to read it the way they read it, and ignore those annoying bits that say something different.

Hmm, you're commenting from entirely desktop machine perspective. He's talking only about tablet use perspective. I would say those are totally different viewpoints and more importantly, usage patterns?

>Only this author not only undermines any disagreement with Windows 8 (just loss aversion), criticizes "old" interfaces (cars had 4 wheels in the 20s....give me my new style 3 wheel car), they specifically hold up its advantages on the desktop.

I think saying that those interface elements are objectively bad on tablets is not far from truth, so again, see my first point.
Ah, my mistake. Here it is again.
http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2015/01/15/fast-dev-roundtrip...

The video shows live-reload development in Tabris.js, with a developer app so you can test and debug on your device as you go. Pretty neat, huh? :)
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is there an open source implementation I can use?

What about that sentiment analysis NLP tool that someone posted on HN last year? That was also very good.
Well yes there were commercial implementations, but people bemoan smalltalk 'dying'. Compared to C++, C or even Java for example.
wow. that's even worse.

and i wonder if companies continue to receive that free lunch even after they inflict DRM on their customers.
I hope that CloudFlare at least can support DNSCurve too.
Of course it is not. Linux needs to offer something new, something fresh to the table. Almost every software available on Linux is available on Windows too, which means that there is no reason for a user to make this switch.

Luckily, Windows screwed up with Windows 8, and ended supporting XP, which did gave a certain popularity to Linux platform. Most people I know (now to be clear, I'm talking about non-tech related people) learned about Linux in that area of time.

This is coincidentally the same time when I made the switch, not because of those reasons, but it happened around that time.

So, to really have "a year of Linux", Windows will have to make a lot of screw-ups, Linux will have to offer something new to the table, and there are many other prerequisites as well. Moving most of the Windows applications to the cloud does definitely help. I love being able to edit Word documents and to use Evernote without anything installed on my hard drive.
I wouldn't even say eye candy. More like eye abuse.
+1 on the classic shell.

Totally unusable without it.
This author has obviously never had to deal with ADHD...
If you replace work with going to the gym, discipline says "go to the gym" but regardless of discipline you cannot lift the 300 lb weight." Likewise, discipline can get me to sit at my desk, but it alone cannot make me do the work. It is not physically possible. There really does need to be something else. Motivation, incentive etc.