Hemospectrum

This wasn't a deliberate decision on Apple's part to remove this particular functionality. Rather, they switched to a different implementation of grep (BSD instead of GNU) and it leaves out PCRE support by default. If word of this gets back to whoever made the change, it should be a simple matter to reenable it for future versions of OS X.

Since the introduction of the GPL3, there's been a steady purge of GNU software from OS X. This is why Apple's GCC, bash, etc. are stuck at old versions lacking a variety of useful features.

I'm kind of curious what they'll do about Emacs. It doesn't have a BSD-licensed counterpart like everything else they've removed... Maybe they'll just leave it out.

Sounds like your DNS requests are being intercepted at the network level. Probably an infected router, but it could also be an evil ISP.

If it happens even when you're on (for example) public wifi, then it's malware on your own computer.

Is the name a recursive apology for its own terrible pun?

> Any HNers interested in building me a site that's more secure than "a Wordpress theme designed for comics"?

Good question. Last month I was starting a comic and couldn't find an easy way forward, so I whipped up some Perl and served it from Dreamhost. About half the time I spend on the comic goes towards extending that software (so that features I'm going to need will be in place by the time I need them).

What kind of infrastructure would your comic need? Was it using everything Wordpress had to offer?

"Forced" doesn't have to mean robbery at gunpoint. It just means that your range of choices conflicts with your needs. Making decisions at gunpoint is only the most obvious case.

Consider food. You need a job in order to eat. You have to work a lot of hours (maybe with a long commute on top) in order to keep your job, or worse, to make enough money to afford your food and housing. You could save a lot of money and improve your health by cooking your own meals, but that's time consuming. Every minute you spend shopping for groceries or cooking your own food is one less minute you could spend at work. So you live on fast food and a big chunk of your paycheck goes to a fast food restaurant.

Now consider the corporation itself. Its foremost incentive is to provide wealth to its owners. Any incentive to provide value to employees or customers is incidental to that goal, and there are of course ways to avoid doing that. Ideally it's just funneling as much money as possible from the customer to the shareholder.

The poor can't afford to be shareholders. So where is the money going?

NBC is owned by a cable company (Comcast).

There are plenty of dangerous lifeforms we could realistically stamp out -- grizzly bears, for example. The pertinent question is whether it would be worth the cost. This organism can be defeated forever with handmade water filters, and we'll never miss it. But we could burn all the swamps in the world (along with countless "bystander" species) and still fail to wipe out malaria.

Think of it like a really crowded dormitory whose lower floors are overrun by a never-ending frat party. The first person you run into when you show up will likely be projectile vomiting, or teabagging someone who passed out. Bored jerks are free to wander upstairs and urinate in any room in the building, and the deafeningly loud music and incoherent screaming is a backdrop (albeit distant at times) to every stimulating conversation that takes place.

If you want to enjoy yourself, you kind of have to know where you're going, and how to knock. Even on "quiet" boards like /lit/, the front page is churning with new threads. Everything is steeped in weird slang and inside jokes. There is no respect for newcomers. People who don't "get" the culture are dismissed with "lurk moar" or simply ignored.

Also, there is always someone, somewhere, who will find any given post hilarious.

Sound sources can be anonymized, though. If the source of a given sound is on the other side of a wall, the player can't see who it is, and the client doesn't need to know.

I'd go so far as to not even notify the client about sounds that are too quiet and far away for the player to be able to hear in the first place. Calculating echoes on the server and having the client treat them as separate "original" sound sources should also help somewhat.

There's an anime character who ends every sentence with です (as I described above). GP is probably referring to a famous internet meme where that's the only word she knows.

Some context: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/desu

Yes. For example, if you wanted to tell a stranger "that person is a police officer," the most natural translation is probably "ano hito wa keikan desu." In other contexts, you might replace "desu" with the informal "da" or the ultra-polite "de gozaimasu" (or "de gozaru" if you're a samurai). In practice you wouldn't say it too often. Other grammatical structures (like "-te iru") are more appropriate counterparts to maybe 75% of English sentences involving "to be."

It is nonetheless grammatically possible to contrive every sentence to end in "desu." This is an unusual habit, though. It's a little like beginning every utterance in English with "it seems" or "Simon says."

Absolutely. In Japanese, for example, you'll sometimes hear conversations littered with なんか (nanka) and かしら (kashira).

The list comprehension rules seem to be lifted straight from Python, where the "foo for bar" part always comes first.

You're supposed to register within 5 years, but if you put it off it's possible that an infringing party could register before you. I can't think of any cases where this actually happened, though.

Assume for a moment that all authors in a given genre are interchangeable. In other words, they're unskilled labor, and it's really the publishers who bring all the value to the table.

Come to think of it, I am sure a lot of very successful people in the publishing industry view it this way.

The original Perl script gets very little use, but the formatting conventions established by Markdown have become enormously popular the past few years, displacing older conventions like BBCode.

Some implementations (like the one here on HN) support only a couple of features. It's more of an archetype than a proper standard.

> I doubt anyone would be buying music if Napster hadn't been shut down.

Did you actually use Napster during its heyday? Of all the P2P software I've ever tried, it was probably the worst--or perhaps just the one most poorly suited to casual piracy. The search system was a joke. Even when your search turned up results, it was hit or miss whether they were actually what you were looking for. My favorite example was a file named "Beethoven's 9th symphony - by Mozart" (it was actually a Handel piece).

Now it's easy to find private torrent trackers with huge, well-maintained collections in very high quality. Comments and ratings make it easy to decide which of several versions to download, and moderators will even help look for rare files if someone can't find what they want.

I think the death of Napster was a big favor to pirates everywhere.

Looks like Vivify clobbers (or just doesn't output) terminal colors. Here's a tool to fix that: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1809

There might be better approaches, of course.

I deny it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)

C++ occupies an interesting point on the curve of fascination vs. utility, but to call it the most fascinating language (by your own definition especially) is just hyperbole.

I think modules vs. typeclasses are a bigger difference. The Haskell approach to IO isolation would be much more horrible without exploiting features peculiar to the typeclass system. The IO system in early versions of Haskell did not exploit these features, and it was a disaster (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...).

Sounds great on paper. In real life there's a certain degree of collusion between the major carriers, and it's possible AT&T could convince Sprint and Verizon to play the same game. It's also possible one of them had the idea to begin with, and AT&T won't even be the first to implement it.

After a couple of years you might get a class action lawsuit far enough along that the FCC says the whole thing is perfectly legal and it doesn't see the problem. Or the carriers might backstab each other for secret reasons. But this matter cannot be trusted to the market.

Is there a version of awk that has interesting default behavior when you leave out the program like that?

Whenever someone mentions that they want to learn Vim, I send them this tutorial. It's the only one none of them have ever complained about. And from first-hand experience it's as useful for intermediate users as it is for beginners.

> Note that if you're on a Mac, your system's gcc is likely several years out of date.

To be precise: Apple stopped maintaining its GCC branch after the switch to GPL3. The last version available with Apple patches is 4.2.1. There will be no further updates to this branch.

The chief complaint I have with HN's lack of reply notifications is that interesting questions like this one will go unanswered forever.

Growl gets a lot of things wrong and stagnated for years with (until recently) no sign of improvement. It was ripe for disruption. Maybe Apple's implementation will be less depressing.

I can imagine this being a real issue if it happens at the toolkit level; for example, GTK dropping X11 support. But until Wayland proves itself in the field as a real and superior competitor to X, it's absurd to suggest that even a significant proportion of distros would abandon X altogether. And as long as any distro of note (Linux or otherwise) still ships with X, it seems really unlikely that the major toolkits would indulge in such madness.

I wouldn't worry about it for another decade or so.

Cathode was made as a third party replacement for GLTerminal. The original was never finished and had lots of horrible bugs, and the author never even released it to the public and (IIRC) had no idea how it wound up on the internet.

For what it's worth, he hasn't seen the movie. Any differences in message between his comic and the adaptation have either found him strictly via hearsay or are lost on him entirely.