pekk

Apple IIs were all over US schools for this reason.

Why would I be digging through Red Hat's blog to find this, and not find it on the site of the actual thing itself?

I wouldn't read too much into changes of version numbers. vim was being updated continuously.

All they wanted was to fork the project to "clean up" the code in ways they wanted, manage the community themselves, etc. It wasn't like all their patches were flawless and Bram just wouldn't accept them.

Just dumping any old code into a project the first time it's demanded is a sign not of enlightened maintenance but of gross negligence. It's good if there's a lot of feedback on patches, it's not some kind of aggression.

I can already use the mouse normally in vim... is it that the configuration is too hard?

Devil's advocate - how is it really better to have a bunch of autogenerated Django migration files?

What does PG need to improve, then? I see a lot of discussion of how Oracle is better at this or that but not much discussion on how PG will come to parity and how we'll know when it's finally good enough to use.

It's worse than that. You're not just choosing a reliable solution, or even a solution with a conservative reputation so that your butt is covered. You're choosing a solution which may actually be worse because when you fail to deliver for someone else, you have someone to scapegoat. If there is nobody else to blame, you might take the blame for having chosen open source with no specific party to blame (the hot potato stopped with you).

You can absolutely do string handling in a common subset of Python 2 and Python 3. It won't work for legacy string handling code if you relied on implicit coercion, but then the same apps are unlikely to support unicode either.

FORTRAN 77 is just as likely to be abandoned in 2020 as well. And?

We've already had tools like 2to3, but they weren't all that popular, and this won't be either. Most things are ported to Python 3 now and most new projects just use Python 3. Never fear.

Pigs fly - he already has a draft of LPTHW for Python 3

Those benchmarks aren't any more standard than anything else.

Google produced more relevant results than Altavista. That's about it. They didn't build or save the internet. Without them, search engines would have improved anyway and we'd be just fine. Google was never a charity and we don't have to protect such corporate behemoths from criticism.

Ironic since Ansible's lack of Python 3 support was due to vociferous insistence by key Ansible developers that it would be wrong even to allow the use of Ansible with Python 3 as long as popular CentOS versions did not have it.

What product needed to be built that harnessed HTTP, when it was first created? It wasn't Google, Facebook and pets.com right away. It took a lot of time to figure that out. There is a place for foundational work, it's just hard to get funded for it.

Let's say you developed a Python-like language called Python 2.6, can you call on the Python-2.5 community to convert all old code? Come on, nobody was forced at gunpoint to port to Python 3, that's why there are still abandoned Python 2 projects all over the Cheese Shop.

This is simply not true. For example, Python 2.6 deprecated string exceptions. If you expect in any language to write code and have it run forever, you expect that language never to change.

Low-content jokes never did particularly well on HN. Like it or loathe it, it's been a cultural feature here for years.

Sure, if the wealthy voluntarily decide to do this, or if they can be convinced to do so in civil conversation.

Given the heat of pushback on small tax increases, I wouldn't bet on this happening without chaos. I wouldn't bet on it happening with chaos either.

The corollary is that entire languages and libraries dedicated to doing things cleverly, even if they are technically usable, are often bad choices.

But unless you can point at benchmarks, nobody will listen to you, and the better choice may even be described as blub.

You may be excited about your project, but this really isn't doing the same thing as SOLID at all.

"within a few months I'll release an open source ML powered browser that speeds up their web browsing experience by something between 10X-100X" sounds more grand than utilitarian to me.

Nobody has to change their code to support whatever odd thing you want to do with it, or even to think that what you want to do is worthwhile. It's open source, change it yourself. Or don't, but remember that other people have the right to say "no, I'm not doing that."

> It would be entirely wrong, however, to use these inputs to infer anything whatsoever about the respective propensity of Blue and Green people to become doctors in an environment in which such a rule or idea of a rule had never existed.

That's fine but it isn't the goal of these algorithms. It isn't the reality that is useful for them to learn. It's a different problem to try to build some kind of "unbiased" ontology rather than just to learn about words. Feel free to research or create solutions to this other problem, it sounds interesting.

Nobody would run a Hackintosh unless they were enthusiastic about Apple's software and Apple in general. Otherwise, why put up with the trouble? I think that most of these people have a long history of buying things from Apple and really are customers. The issue here isn't piracy, but whether Apple is willing to listen to people who use non-Apple hardware. And since Apple's PCs aren't selling all that well, why refuse to consider input from people who love your stuff and can suggest slightly different approaches?

Even people who never bought anything from Apple before are customers by definition the moment they do buy something from Apple. If Apple is trying to make money, it doesn't seem smart to take a dogmatic stance that the money of new customers isn't worth having. Everyone is by definition a possible future customer.

Apple has a long history with tactics like gluing things shut, obfuscating software, enforcing walled gardens, banning the GPL, and an unusual degree of legal aggression toward people trying to interoperate with their products. There seems to be a well-established groupthink among Apple and its fans that this is the only possible future for Apple.

But when Apple is more extreme on these tactics than almost any company that's still in the PC business, yet is not selling all that well, it really proves the viability of softer approaches. Apple can make money, depending on its execution maybe even a lot more money, by leaving this playbook behind. They could end Windows, taking all their existing fans, and adding new ones. But they can't do it until they can learn some humility from their epic steamrolling by the IBM PC clone market in the 80s and 90s. Apple swallowed their pride about PowerPC and started using the "Intel" from "Wintel" so why does it have to keep re-enacting the anticompetitive tactics from the dawn of the personal computer?

If Apple's products really are the best on merit, it shouldn't be necessary for Apple to lock everything down at a technical level or at a licensing level or to use the law aggressively against people who just want to interact with Apple products.

Can you imagine what humanity would achieve if we stopped developing pointless or redundant new database engines?

What if people want to develop game engines? What if people want to play games? What if personal passions are an important part of life? What if it isn't your time to allocate, but theirs? What if throwing a bunch of game developers onto protein folding wouldn't really help with protein folding anyway?

Naturally that group does not include you or most of HN.

Are typical Java GCs "badly designed"? The issue with nondeterminism and complexity is well known... you trade other things off when you optimize for throughput

Fedora's strong point is that packages are pretty new (not quite Arch). This is also its weak point. The idea that it's stable is just funny. It also doesn't even pretend to support upgrades. If you want stable, try CentOS or Debian Stable.

It seems like a valid point that many of the details of HTML and CSS, while you can use all kinds of fancy techniques to make them a little faster, impose limits on performance.