stuhacking

It's called "Vulture's Eye" these days and I think it's still in development... http://www.darkarts.co.za/vulture

I think you can be polite and terse, friend.

You mean when it wasn't up to your standard?

The total number of upvotes on an article determines what the wider HN community thinks of it.

On the other hand (and I'm slightly playing Devil's advocate here), books and other physical media go out of print eventually. It can become difficult to find a copy of some archaic technical manual that interests you. (Anyone selling any Symbolics manuals? :-))

There is no reason for a digital publishing to stop creating new copies of a digital work (once they finally develop an economic model that works.)

This is not bloat, it's flexibility.

Emacs does not come with a lot of features built in, it comes with lots of loadable modules. If you don't need them then don't load them. The notion that Emacs is bloated has not really stood since around 1985.

The power to write a first person maze (which just blew my mind since it appears to be written as a character based hack, rather than an embedded widget) is the same power that allows you to write powerful libraries for modifying text.

I'm asking a different question.

Rendering a page as a semantically structured document won't remove the ability to globally disable a feature. (In fact, I would argue that it would make it easier.)

It's fair enough that pg does whatever he likes... no one can argue that point.

Why not stop rendering HN pages in tables with inline formatting and render the page as a semantically structured document with a default style sheet. This will allow others to come along and restyle the site as they see fit. Don't like comment points? hidden. Post score is less than -4? hidden.

I personally don't understand the reasoning behind using tables as formatting and inline styles on a site whose content generally includes articles about web development.

Actually, I'm wondering what Haskell has to do with any of this at all.

You're comparing the size of the current incarnation of a fairly modern functional programming runtime with the capacity of computers that existed 10 years before the first incarnation was realised...

The only message I can take from that is that programs today are quite big. That's only really interesting from a nostalgic point of view, I don't see what relevance it has to the discussion of mutability?

Of course, I could have missed something obviously significant here...

1990?

I think the issue of mutability in OOP vs FP pre-dates that.

Mutable objects are there so that you don't have to create new instances whenever a field changes. The danger of shared mutable objects is that the ground can change beneath your feet.

Immutable objects enable safe sharing, however, if you have an immutable object and want to change it, you have to copy it and make the change during construction of the new object.

I guess the 'copy penalty' in either case depends on the size of your objects.

This is probably aimed at the subset of HN readers that haven't quite made it yet.

Freetard, iFag, luser, Microdroid, B1ff, Pointy haired, Marketroid.

The 'us and them' mentality exists across many boundaries and I don't think it's going away any time soon. Most just learn to ignore it because whatever you decide is good, someone, somewhere, disagrees with you.

I'm sorry, I misunderstood the situation you described.

Testing a DB connection sounds more like integration than unit testing.

Mocks are used to fake things that add significant overhead but no value. If you have a suite of 1000 unit tests, you really don't want half of them making actual database requests.

Simply making 'safe copies' of the database data does not solve the problem that Mocks are intended to solve.

So, maybe IE isn't a great browser, but it still has actual people working on it. I bet at least one person on the IE team uses Firefox or Chrome in the office for regular browsing.

Think of it this way: The people who work on IE are probably well aware of the areas that need improvement. They might not get to make the decisions about where the work is focused. There may not even be enough effort available to put into major changes. Then there's the issue of backwards compatibility that plagues Microsoft products.

Microsoft is full of really nice people and talented developers. This is a gracious gesture.

I'm afraid I can't personally provide a detailed run down - I played the game for about 6 months near the end of university and after that I never really found enough free time to justify continuing the subscription.

The Wikipedia page seems to be comprehensive though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Online#Economy

I would take a look at the development section also. They use a Python variant called Stackless (http://www.stackless.com) which provides lightweight threads and message passing. I actually started using this as an alternative to regular CPython.

I just realised I screwed up the second link - should have been:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8132547.stm

You mean like Eve Online? :-)

http://www.eveonline.com/

Actually, this response is directed towards shogunmike also. Just in case you haven't heard of Eve, it's a spaced themed MMO very much to the tune of Elite. You can make a living mining, trading, fighting. The factions are split onto two levels: Corporations (companies that employ/hire individual players) and Alliances (gropps of corporations with similar vision/goals)

The ecomony is almost entirely player driven.. the materials are mined by players, the equipment is built by players from those materials. You are free to engage in hostile activity even in controlled space, although the penalty is severe.

It's worth a look. The freedom of play has allowed some players to gain notoriety even in the mass media (Note: exchanging game money for real world currency is a violation of the rules):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7256069.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7256069.stm

2) the ``This sucks'' response lets you vent anger. Now there are two conflicting theories about controlling strong emotions... ;-)

I realise that this is intended for humour, but more seriously, I have experienced much better anger reduction when actually chatting amiably with someone and making a friendly recommendation. ``This sucks'' just passes on the negativity to others.

I would say a lot of Brits really do enjoy talking to people, not as an obligation of 'politeness'. The culture of politeness is more likely to be a cause than a symptom. (Speaking for myself) I find it hard to talk randomly to strangers because it's imposing on whatever they may be doing at the time.

Watch for Brits asking each other for directions, or for the time, even in plain view of a clock tower. It's sweet in a repressed kind of way.

DMs and @mentions will now be redirected to the new account until the original user is able to send the change of username notification. There's now a chance, however slim, that a private message will arrive at the wrong person as a result of Twitter's actions.

I'm ignoring the question of whether Twitter should be a medium for private communications.

It's certainly a lot cheaper than ~$3000 /year (MSDN?), or ~$4000 /year (IBM?) or ~$3600 /year (Lispworks?).

In the grand scheme of things, Apple's tools and developer membership schemes are fairly generous. It's still making a big step from free to non-free as others have already said. I'm not going to rush to upgrade.

Apple are really driving me to put Linux on both my machines.

I'm not happy about that, but it's seems ever more likely since Linux is getting a lot more usable and the Apple tax is getting a lot more expensive.

A collection of essays like this would make a very nice book.

It's taking me a while to read in short bursts during work ("It's compiling.") but I'm determined to finish.

I agree. There's plenty of literature supporting almost the opposite of what Dijkstra preaches. While it's good to aim for formal specification, in practice you're likely to overdesign, deliver late and potentially find yourself unable to react quickly to changing requirements. The key is to deliver a working piece of software because handing your customer a page of beautiful mathematical notation is not going to solve their problem.

(I'm aware of the danger of referencing Worse is Better... but I'll do it anyway :-) ) http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...

In addition, the books 'Hackers' by Steven Levy and 'Coders at Work' by Peter Siebel demonstrate various scenarios where a groups of Hackers had to get something done in a short space of time. Almost invariably, they aim for the final product.

Isn't it poignant though? These were quotes with all the cruft removed to reveal the heart of the message. It was minimalist in an almost Ive-esque manner.

Mythical Mammoth

Is this a quirky, alternate title? :-)

We can see what it measures. I'm just saying that it's a pretty nebulous metric when used out of context. Taking 2 numbers and condensing them into 1 (à la Megapixels) is an exercise in marketing.

but, Tests/LLOC seems to state even less than LLOC. LLOC gives an indication of the complexity of the application (or a component).

All Tests/LLOC seems to state is that some lines of code exist and potentially, some test cases are testing them.

We all love farmers in our group - fighting to join up those fields to try and swing the game in the final few tile placements is really fun. :-)