chrismonsanto

That's exactly why it would be the most voted question. It's a common thing to Google, and the Google search leads to the StackOverflow page linked, which leads to lots of upvotes.

I much prefer communicating without capital letters. I have a hand injury and I find any extra keystrokes to be annoying.

For IRC or chat, it doesn't make sense to use capitalization or most punctuation. The beginning of the line serves as a delimiter between messages; capitalization is redundant in this capacity. Likewise, the end of the line serves a similar purpose, which makes periods (generally) redundant. The addition of a period in this medium adds extra emphasis to the message, which is often interpreted as aggressiveness (hence this article).

Also, it is unfair to associate lack of capitalization with poor grammar and spelling. Poor grammar is associated with lack of education. Lack of capitalization should not be! You probably were not implying an association, but many others I have spoken to over the years have. (For some reason, I've had a lot of conversations about this stuff...)

Comments here currently call this strange. I personally thought this was common knowledge, and it's not a new thing, either. I own a large video game IRC community and we've used periods for this purpose as long as I can remember (since ~2001? it's a bit fuzzy...) "fine." is about as passive-aggressive as it gets. TFA is spot on about line breaks being the new periods, as well.

It's also a bit odd when people use capitalization beyond "I"--one of the best ways to tell newer users from older users.

I feel so weird dropping by, say, freenode, where the customs are so different.

(EDIT: Since people here are mentioning age, for the record, I am soon to be 26)

You were downvoted in that period, which might have something to do with it (people are seriously overzealous about that)

What is OnSwipe and why is it so bad? Never heard of it until now. I'm not even sure what it is from the front page of their website.

Get ready for these to be deleted too! :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6672029 -> http://nypost.com/2013/11/05/microsoft-com-is-stuck-in-the-1... -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6681746

Or (fn [f] 25)

I feel you are overreacting if you consider the other poster's attitude "sociopathic".

This is the only example of parallax scrolling I have ever liked.

For me, it has nothing to do with the number of lines, but the amount of actual computation I am doing. If all I need to do is wire up the inputs and outputs of X commands, then shell script is the best tool for the job.

If I actually need to do something with an input or output before sending it to the next command, I'll switch to Python.

For CLI tasks in Python, http://docopt.org/ and http://shell-command.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ are invaluable tools. Yes, I know about Envoy, but shell_command is much nicer to use in my opinion. Envoy doesn't automatically escape arguments, which is annoying for all the reasons that SQL injections are annoying.

The API endpoint is an e-mail address, and you send a request by e-mailing it a link to a JSON file. Said JSON is read by downloading it with wget.

If you're interested, please read our ToS here: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer...

This is the feeling I get too. We try to host content on YouTube due its reach, but a lot of our content creators (and viewers) have requested that we use Twitch instead. Esp. for its xbox integration. (We're a gaming site btw)

Most of your argument is that each OS uses a different IO multiplexer. Lightweight abstractions over these multiplexers have been around for decades: feel free to use libuv if you want a fairly 'modern' one.

That the contour of the API differs slightly means nothing. An example of true incompatibility would be, say, supporting UNIX-style mounts on Windows. If you wanted to support that cross-platform, either you or a library would have to directly implement the semantics of UNIX mounts, as opposed to just making a shim over what the OS already provides.

Please don't underestimate how much it helps to have an adviser who has been through the ropes, or how awesome it is to have peers that are brilliant and working on similar stuff. I'm a self-taught programmer, so I know exactly what it's like to wing it, and I loved the PhD experience. The anti-PhD attitude on here is so weird, considering YC seems to be largely the same thing on a smaller timescale (weed out everyone but the very best, have them make things, give them connections, ...)

> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support.

OpenSSH might count, from the rant on their homepage:

Please take note of our Who uses it page, which list just some of the vendors who incorporate OpenSSH into their own products -- as a critically important security / access feature -- instead of writing their own SSH implementation or purchasing one from another vendor. This list specifically includes companies like Cisco, Juniper, Apple, Red Hat, and Novell; but probably includes almost all router, switch or unix-like operating system vendors. In the 10 years since the inception of the OpenSSH project, these companies have contributed not even a dime of thanks in support of the OpenSSH project (despite numerous requests).

I'd like to add to this remark that the Japanese as a whole are not as proficient at English as one might expect. I know I had some expectation that the Japanese had some working knowledge of English (maybe because many countries do encourage learning it?), but after visiting Tokyo I realized my assumption was way off the mark.

At least now there is a 'base income' of sorts, and if you are unsatisfied with your job and/or the bonuses you get, you have ample time to find another job. You also have the opportunity to try to improve. This is a great improvement over 'pack up your shit and leave.'

I remember reading about this. It would really help if Git supported inotify; there is no reason to stat every file on git status/diff/etc. I remember a mailing list thread about this in the past, but I don't think it ever got off the ground. I know there was a lot of discussion on how to support the feature cross-platform.

On a slightly unrelated tangent, the tup build system supports inotify, which I appreciate.

OCaml is a good language, but I agree that it's dying out. Its primary market has generally been academics, and that group has almost completely standardized on Haskell, which is a better language in almost every respect.

What does that even mean?

To be pedantic, assembly languages do generally have multiple types, if by 'type' we mean 'a set of values disjoint from other sets of values'. For example, x86 has the types integer, floating point, MMX, SSE, and registers of these types cannot be confused for each other. It's just that these classifications/types aren't so useful, and we can't make our own (and perhaps all we really wanted was a distinction between integer and pointer)

"I'm practically John Smith" means "I have a common name". He wasn't trying to hide his identity.

This has gotten way worse now that we have Tumblr and Twitter. Tumblr is just crazy about sassy.gif posts. As for Twitter, I would have never imagined that the hashtag would become this generation's </sarcasm>.

Maybe it is just that the Internet is more popular than it was in the 90s. On the other hand, I think rich media offers more opportunities to be snarky, and of course we are going to take advantage of this. #smh #justsayin

(defun f (x) (x))

There are two main vendors: Xilinx and Altera. Don't bother going to their websites, they only sell the latest and greatest directly (this will easily cost over $1000).

Instead, there are discount vendors that will sell older chips (generally 2-3 generations behind the curve) for cheap. The names to watch are Digilent for Xilinx and Terasic for Altera.

I tend to prefer Xilinx stuff. I don't really have the time to write a more detailed reply, but you can browse around here [1]. Get something with lots of ports, or you won't be able to make anything interesting without a lot of pain (where interesting means "I want to hear/see/communicate-to another-computer my results"). The Zynq boards also come with an ARM processor that can talk to the FPGA fabric.

[1]: http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,40...

I am of course not referring to this particular instance, but posing a counterexample to the overly broad language in their intellectual property policy.

Who gives a crap about what they deem acceptable. That's definitely non-enforceable in cases like "ubuntusucks.com"

See also: personal blocklists for search, which STILL aren't available for Firefox.

Might have been copied to a different server and someone forgot to copy the metadata too.

A serious question: why should you be allowed to 'opt-out' of history? Is this really your call, as a website owner?