Groovy 2.2 released - <AUTHOR> http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+2.2+release+notes <comment><USER2> I wrote a post awhile back, called "Groovy, the Python of Java"[1], which praised Groovy as a great language for Python/Ruby developers who are forced to work with the JVM and associated libraries.

In the post, I said, "Python is still my muse, but Groovy is my Winston Wolf."[2]

As for Scala and Clojure, these are wonderful JVM languages, but they force you into a new programming model. You go from Java's "object-orient all the things" to Scala/Clojure's "function-orient all the things". Groovy, like Python, strikes a balance by being dynamic and multi-paradigm. A true clean-up man.

Its only downside, IMO -- the JVM :)

[1] [http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2011/04/09/groovy-the-python- of-j...](http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2011/04/09/groovy-the-python-of-java)

[2] Scene from Pulp Fiction introducing Winston Wolf [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANPsHKpti48](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANPsHKpti48)

<comment><USER3> I can understand why in some circumstances the JVM is not the most appropriate choice, but to me, the sentence "Its only downside... the JVM", sounds like "The car's only downside... it's a Ferarri". I've worked with so many runtimes in my career but have yet to see one fit to kiss the JVM's feet. It's far from being the simplest, but in terms of sheer power (runtime instrumentation, runtime linking, performance monitoring, hardware/OS support and more) nothing else comes even remotely close.

<comment><USER4> I can't emphasize how easy it is to extract JVM runtime information and how useful that information is for performance tuning. Sure the JVM uses a bigger initial footprint when compared to a natively compiled application, but the ability to see how it's working is invaluable.

My program is RAM hungry...ish, but with its easily accessible garbage collection (GC) information, I can really get the most out of a 512MB VPS. Just have the GC logs written to RAM disk and have it rotate and you'll be amazed at what kind of useful stats you can generate.

You can see how I'm using it here:

[http://screenshots.gitsense.com/jvm- monitoring.html](http://screenshots.gitsense.com/jvm-monitoring.html)

The 10 minute ratio stat lets me know how much time was spent doing garbage collection within the last 10 minutes.

<comment><USER3> ... and VisualVM, and Flight Recorder + Java Mission Control, and BTrace/Byteman... the list goes on and on. If you need to, you can print out the assembly code generated by the JIT at runtime, modify your code on the fly, and see how the assembly changes. Erlang's BEAM VM has some of these capabilities, but not the JVM's performance. Other runtimes are decades behind.

<comment><USER5> > Other runtimes are decades behind.

To be fair, .NET also offers a similar level of support.

The only difference is that you have to pay for it, by getting Visual Studio Premium or third party tooling like dotTrace which plug into the CLR monitoring API.

For many people, the fact that they get such tools without paying a dime is a selling point for the JVM vs .NET.

<comment><USER3> Yes, .NET is excellent, too. But it's Windows only.

<comment><USER5> Many of us don't have a problem with it. :)

On my type of work, the tools are chosen by the customers, not me. So usually .NET in Windows only shops, JVM languages in heterogeneous shops, and a little sprinkle of C++ via JNI/Interop if really required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like groovy, it seems to be a good sweet spot between the power of java and syntactic sugar. I just wish there were more framework options, like something between ratpack and grails. I dont want to use ORM or a heavy duty framework, but something a bit more structured than ratpack. Grails seems nice for what it is, but it just isn't what I need.

<comment><USER7> Groovy doesn't get enough love as a post java jvm language IMO.

I agree that grails is a bit heavyweight. The people at my former place did some work on using groovy with dropwizard: [https://speakerdeck.com/kyleboon/webservices-with- dropwizard...](https://speakerdeck.com/kyleboon/webservices-with-dropwizard- and-groovy) which is seems to be more of a nice collection of libraries, rather than a box you in framework.

<comment><USER6> My biggest complaint with Grails is its reliance on GORM - You can do sql, but it doesn't make it easy and the whole framework is really geared towards the ORM functionality and the opinionated view of the database and naming conventions. I need to be able to integrate with legacy data sets, and need more control over the database in general. Grails works well if your database is just a simple store for your application data.

<comment><USER8> I've used it with legacy applications with good success. If you really want, you can completely ignore GORM. Leave the domain directory blank, use command objects for your DAOs and DTOs. You can add your validation straight to command objects.

On top of that, you can write your own hibernate xml on which your domain objects depend. If you get too fancy, you'll lose some of your GORM syntactic sugar, but you do have options.

<comment><USER6> This is interesting - do you know of any examples out there of the structure you're talking about?

<comment><USER8> I've personally used it in a few hairy situations, but I haven't had to in a long time.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/425294/sql-database- views...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/425294/sql-database-views-in- grails) is how you would do direct SQL without GORM, which you would use if you wanted to avoid hibernate entirely. The rest is just command objects - [http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/theWebLayer.html#commandO...](http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/theWebLayer.html#commandObjects) \- and more importantly, @Validatable. [http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/validation.html#validatio...](http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/validation.html#validationNonDomainAndCommandObjectClasses)

(Technically, command objects are a specific function within the controller, but what we're really looking to do is leverage the validation framework.)

It's extra work, but no less so than avoiding an ORM in any framework. But if you can do it in Hibernate, you probably don't need to bother with this most of the time. (When I had to do it, it was to interface with stored procedures.)

[http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/hibernate.html](http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/hibernate.html) is there if you want to bolt GORM on to legacy classes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone interested in using Groovy for web development, checkout our product (www.crudzilla.com)

here's a short video demoing coding in Groovy and other jvm languages:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqeOS2hqtMg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqeOS2hqtMg)

We use JSR-223 to support the various languages

<comment><USER10> I'd like to learn more, but your website is very scant on details. All I can tell is that it allows me to code in the browser and has quite a few screenshots, but how about a technology overview?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Our company inherited a Grails project, and I had to help the developer out occasionally.

Frankly, Grails seems horrible, especially since it mixes the nice language that is Groovy with just craptastic JVM stuff.

Is there any other mature framework for the language? I have a feeling Groovy is wasted for Grails.

<comment><USER12> > Is there any other mature framework for the language?

No. It's because Groovy and Grails are part of the same company that many developers are afraid of creating another web framework using Groovy.

Grails dictator Graeme Rocher was even one of the 5 Groovy despots for 4 yrs, and didn't leave until a few months ago. This could have been what prompted the Play! 2 framework to purge itself of all its Groovy code.

Unfortunately, Groovy project manager Guillaume Laforge uses "and Grails initiator" in this title, perhaps not realizing the message that sends to people thinking about using Groovy for something web-related but not part of Grails.

<comment><USER13> You keep repeating the same thing all over this discussion, are you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love Groovy, and am excited about this release. Pretty much our entire app stack is based on Groovy + Grails, and that's one decision that I basically could not be happier with. Switching from Java + (Struts|Wicket|Tapestry|Spring MVC|whatever) to Grails & Groovy has worked out amazingly well for us.

Not to say Groovy is perfect, as it's not... the performance could still stand to get better, for one thing. But it's "good enough" for what we're doing, and I do expect the situation to improve over time.

</comment><comment><USER12> Where did the traits go? The wording seems rather definite in this announcement and rather lengthy mailing discussion [1] in June this year:

> We're looking forward to implementing an often requested feature: traits! > Our existing @Mixin transformation isn't ideal as it's bug-ridden and hard > to properly fix, and has the drawback that Java frameworks don't "see" the > mixed-in methods -- like the recent thread related to Spring MVC showed. So > having an AST transformation that would be "static" would help in such > situations.

The feature list in 2.2 is fairly sparse for a point release, and still no traits and the mixins are still buggy and unable to see mixed-in methods.

[1] [http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Adding-Trait-to-Groovy- td...](http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Adding-Trait-to-Groovy- td5715831.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Groovy rose from below #50 to #18 in a mere 6 months (May to Oct) on the infamous Tiobe index, then dropped back down a month later. According to [1]:

> Groovy, which turned up in the [Tiobe] 18th spot last month, slid back down > to a number 32 ranking. "After a long discussion with one of the Tiobe index > readers, it turned out that the data that is produced by one of the Chinese > sites that we track is interpreted incorrectly by our algorithms. So this > was a bug," Janssen said. "After we had fixed this bug, Groovy lost much of > its ratings." The ratings slip takes Groovy from a 0.658 percent rating last > month to 0.393 percent this month.

I suspect someone at Pivotal, Inc has been gaming one of the search engines used by the Tiobe Index to promote Groovy in preparation for this release, and didn't expect to be caught out for at least another month. This has happened before. In April 2011, Groovy fell from #25 to #65 in a single month when something similar occurred. In December 2010, Groovy tech lead Jochen Theodorou had "volunteered" his services to Tiobe to help them improve their algorithms, after which Groovy began its short-lived rise.

Groovy really should focus more on features that help developers rather than search engine optimization.

[1] [http://www.infoworld.com/t/application- development/c-pulls-a...](http://www.infoworld.com/t/application- development/c-pulls-away-java-among-top-programming-languages-230603)

<comment><USER15> You are full of conspiracies...please stop posting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm wondering how easily Groovy will retrofit Java 8 lambdas when they come out. Groovy uses syntax

        {a,b-> a++;a+b}

for closures, whereas Java 8 uses syntax

        (a,b)->{a++;a+b}

Also Groovy uses delegates to make its closures dynamically scoped, whereas Java 8 uses lazy evaluation for its lambdas.

They're incompatible, both syntax and semantics.

<comment><USER16> According to the Roadmap, they are planning on retrofitting Java 8 syntax in Groovy 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use Groovy quite a bit and like it a lot. I wish there was an easy way to use it with Android, I'd really like the groovy JSON or XML parsing libraries even if it meant I had to run my program on a device with Android 4.3 and at least a gig of ram.

<comment><USER18> I would use Kotlin for Android over Groovy, because it is

\- Much more lightweight and faster than Groovy

\- Statically typed

\- Offers about the same level of expressivity as Groovy (closures, etc...)

\- Much, much faster than Groovy

The only downside is that it's still in beta, but already working great and, obviously, with awesome IDEA support.

<comment><USER19> It seems like most people are excited for kotlin, but no one is really talking about ceylon which recently 1.0. Im curious why that is, have you looked at ceylon?

<comment><USER18> I have, it's definitely an interesting language, more ambitious than Kotlin and more bold too (lot of new keywords, disjointed types, etc...).

I prefer the most conservative, slightly incremental Kotlin myself, but it's purely personal and certainly not a knock on Ceylon, which was implemented by people I have a lot of respect for.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is true hacking dead? What we lost - <AUTHOR> http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2019/12/is-true-hacking-dead-what-we-lost.html <comment><USER4> I don't think true hacking is dead, its just lost in a sea of non-hacking.

The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was perhaps 35. Those 35 were amazing because they had to work to get access to a computer, so we had already eliminated everyone who was just "oh that's too hard". Of the 35 perhaps a dozen kept at it beyond one class in BASIC.

In my daughter's similarly sized highschool 400 to 500 of the students had some proficiency in writing code, and perhaps 200 had the motivation to keep at it on a serious level after graduation. Of those, perhaps a dozen were people who I would equate to the 'hackers' that we had at my high school.

This led me to conclude that its a small fraction of the population that has what I think of as the 'compulsive puzzle' gene. That is they find themselves driven to solve puzzles which they understand must have a solution.

There are ways to identify them. If you have the ability to give puzzles, leave some around to be found. Watch for the ones who solve them.

In the world where 'everyone is a coder' though it is super easy to not see them.

<comment><USER5> An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do!

We were surprised (if also for other reasons) because we confused the product with the means, or to paraphrase Feynman, hacking is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

<comment><USER6> > _An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone > in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what > they want the computer to do!_

I'm not sure if that's true all that much, if you take into account the scary things regular people do with Excel and Access, or did in the past with HyperCard.

I think a big part is that as an industry, we've told people that the right way to use a computer to solve your problem is to _track down and buy_ some piece of software that does it (proliferation of open source merely made the "buy" part optional). We then proceeded to take away the means of self- sufficiency, widening the initially small gap between "end-user" and "programmer" into a chasm and hollowing out the middle. It's no surprise people only consume apps, when solving any problem yourself without an off- the-shelf solution requires you to become a programmer. And now the final nail is driven into the coffin with proliferation of SaaS which take away both your data _and_ any ability to control and modify the behavior of an application.

<comment> yoz-y But excel, google sheets, IFTTT and other tools still exist. Some of them are just more successful than others. There is still a lot of people out there who can access computers and before couldn't, but have no interest in automating any of the work.

Case in point: a lot of people don't even use keyboard shortcuts, why would they use a hypercard clone?

<comment><USER7> Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google sheets output? That's not obvious. I use Beorg (an org-mode interface) on my iPhone and I still look up recipes the developer puts online showing how to hook it up with the Shortcuts app and do clever things. Mostly because I don't have a good idea of what interfaces between things are available on my phone.

The time of hoping that non-technical users would write little things on the command line seems to have past. I recently read an interview where Aho said that in the beginning awk was used by non-technical people. Now awk usage is probably even on the technical end of technical.

But I'm betting that there are plenty of savvy users who could put together complex automation workflows if they had a unifying tool that demonstrated the potential.

<comment><USER6> Right. Discoverability. And I'd also add, paradox of choice. If you have 20 different ways you could use to automate some things you need (but not all, and solutions only partially overlap in the problem space), you may as well have none. Defaults matter. I doubt we would be able to have a third-party solution reach ubiquity again, the way e.g. Flash had, so having powerful functionality integrated at the OS level would be very helpful, as it would remove the problem of figuring out what to use.

<comment> yoz-y macOS had automator for a long time and even usage of that must have went quite down for them to let Sal go. It's quite sad because as others have said I think the percentage went down mostly because of more people coming in.

Now that they have introduced Shortcuts to iOS I would be curious about how many people use them and to what extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was a time when I used to fret that the era of tinkering was coming to an end. Crypto was going to be illegal, they were going to put DRM on speakers, and our computers are designed to be completely locked down to the degree that you can't even add more RAM to a MacBook Pro.

However, I think that the rise of Linux, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, OSS and Github and massive package repos for every language, Adafruit, even 3D printers have replaced stuff that didn't want to be hacked with an endless array of stuff that is literally begging to be hacked. Between YouTube and coding bootcamps, you have to actively not want to learn technical skills.

The author also calls out Unity as part of the problem, which pretty much confirms to me that we're not reading advanced analysis. Unity is fucking incredible; not only is it an engineering marvel with cross-platform compilation capacity that makes Babel look like a total joke, but it is probably the single most capable, interesting and fun platform for artistic expression in modern computing.

Seriously, the way to get kids to keep interested once Scratch gets dull is to throw them into a AAA 3D engine that lets you build a compelling VR creation in an hour from free, downloadable assets. Unity should be in high school classrooms. The breadth and quality of assets available on their store is shocking. If you have artist's block, just scroll through a few pages of assets. Problem solved.

I think what really got to me was the overwhelming sense that the author wasn't talking about hacking but recreating the exact same conditions that existed when he was a young person... while completely ignoring the huge amounts of privilege that he enjoyed to be able to have a computer in the house and have such a incredible headstart on his learning compared to the other 99.99% of the population - many of whom don't look like him or believe the same things.

Today, even relatively poor kids have access to tablets which means that they can build games in apps like Roblox. Who makes him the authority on what counts as hacking? If a young woman makes a game where her friends all want to hang out together after school and talk about their lives in a safe space, isn't that the ultimate hack?

I really didn't enjoy this op-ed, and I wish people wouldn't bring it a larger audience by posting on HN.

<comment><USER9> Hacking is just interesting only if you are not following any "tutorial". Today you can run an embedded linux under 10 minutes with less that 20 bucks with a RPI by reading some tutorial or watching a youtube video. What's the fun about that?

I remember too _hacking_ my commodore and the only help I had was just a book in a strange language (english in my case) and my dad (he was into 8086 at that time) when I was a kid. Today everyone pretends there should be step-by- step guides on how to do everything.

The most similar thing to that _hacking_ feeling I get in the present is implementing some unknown HW component (i.e. a sensor, I2C device, microcontroller) that there is no source code or _help_ for it (of course, when doing it for fun and not work). When the thing starts to work, there is a very little _spark_ similar to those felt when I was a kid.

<comment><USER10> Linux is... a little alienating, isn't it? How many people can hold the whole thing in their head? Not many - and I don't think it's seamless enough to work as another layer of magic, either. People accept OS X because it's another layer of magic.

TempleOS was written by one guy, so I assume it can fit inside one head. Linux has been written by a lot of people over several decades.

Maybe I'm completely wrong about this, I don't know. But I'm getting old and lazy, so these days I'm on Windows.

I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days, now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video games.

<comment><USER11> > I'm a little surprised there aren't more weird OSes going around these days, > now that everything runs in the browser except text editors and fancy video > games.

Don't know what _you 're_ talking about, but I've used plenty of text editors and played fancy video games in a browser.

The day will come when your can run a hardware emulator in your browser and use to it run your hobby OS or even a C64 image for you to hack on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you define hacking as gaining access to scarce compute resources, then yes, hacking is dead because _compute scarcity is dead_.

If you define hacking as controlling your computer hardware at the lowest level, then hacking is dead because _no-one wants to write device drivers_.

If you define hacking as *making the lights blink in interesting ways"[1] then hacking is incredibly, richly, and totally alive! You can make the lights blink in so many interesting ways!

To sum up, that's one really good change, one somewhat unfortunate but understandable change, and another really incredibly good change. (BTW I don't think the OP's point about complex OSS really fits in this particular essay - minimalism is important topic and deserves it's own essay, but it's not related to hacking, IMHO).

[1] I don't recall where I read this, but Feynman wrote about being involved with the Manhattan project, with the simulations they were trying to run on very early, primitive computers, and how one or two scientists put on that part of the project had to be replaced because they got too fascinated with the "blinking lights" to get any work done. I find this anecdote very easy to believe.

<comment><USER13> I think people _do_ sometimes want to "communicate directly with the machine", but they don't want to deal with the huge and often crufty layers of abstraction that are currently in the way.

In the AT era, reading a byte from the keyboard could be done with a single IN instruction. In the present PC era, the bare minimum for doing that is a multitasking operating system capable of enumerating USB. Or indirecting it through something huge and opaque like UEFI.

I see this occasionally on electronics.stackexchange: "how do I attach a light to the end of a USB cable and turn it on and off from the computer". The answer to that is astonishingly complicated.

<comment><USER14> Right this instant you can talk to the bare metal of a computer with more power than anything you had way back when C64's roamed the planet. Get yourself an ESP32 and you can talk directly to the metal with no OS to get in your way. Get two, they only cost a few bucks each.

> I see this occasionally on electronics.stackexchange: "how do I attach a > light to the end of a USB cable and turn it on and off from the computer". > The answer to that is astonishingly complicated.

It is astonishingly complicated because what they are asking the wrong question.

<comment><USER13> > It is astonishingly complicated because what they are asking the wrong > question.

No, I see this argument a lot on electronics.stackexchange and I think it's over-used. That's _their_ question. They have some larger objective in mind, which it may be useful to know; if they want to control the light from UI on the PC then that's a natural way of phrasing the question.

If you want to do this over the ESP, sure, then you've got to get networking involved, and that's how you end up with all the usual IOT disasters. How do you "securely pair" an ESP32 with a PC? Again it involves a huge amount of software. Whereas if you just had a wire you wouldn't have to worry about security.

Answers of the form "buy a different computer" or "install a different OS" serve to make the answerer feel smug without usually helping the questioner at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hackers were like the hotrodders before. Here's a thing. Make it work. Make it faster. Improve it. Change it. Know how it works. Master it.

I don't think its died. Its more likely morphed into something you don't recognise because its always been dynamic and now you're attempting to apply a static definition. Then you get frustrated or lament "its not the same as in the good old days". But the reality is that people are tinkering right now with the new tech or the new thing in ways you don't even know about.

This is definitely the case with cars, computers, electronics, gardening, clothes, food etc etc. Gardening, clothes? Why did I include those?! "Thats not hacking!" People are tinkering with these things. Making them better. Making them their own.

Hacking was never just bits and bytes. Learn how this puzzle works. Change it. Make your own. That hasn't stopped.

<comment><USER16> > Make it work. Make it faster.

This is not hacking.

<comment><USER17> Why not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like gatekeeping to me.

Hacking of yore largely was like theoretical maths. Isolated from the real world and of little practicable use, yet.

It was a closed eco system in the 70s-90s. You either had to steal or be rich to get access to a machine.

Yes, real steel from the likes of DEC, IBM, ICL et al were magic. The early days of networked OSs equally wonderful.

But.

Now, with an ESP I can have a battery powered, wirelessly networked computer to do pretty much anything I want, for $10 and power budget of 100ma.

If you want to see where low lever hacking has gone, look at the micro- controllers. They are literally taking over the world, run by no small part, by keen amateurs.

<comment><USER19> I'd setup a micro-controller based BSD 4.4 lite 2, but they are very short in RAM. If they were 4-8MB, they could be my main microPC setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've never understood the appeal of hot-patching and full process image save and restore. Yes, this technology is neat for _some_ use cases, but as a fundamental way of computing it's broken, because it throws reproducibility out of the window. Reproducibility is _everything_ in complex systems, and being able to reset and start fresh is powerful.

Evolution figured that out as well. It's why basically all species propagate via the birth of new individuals and the death of the old ones.

<comment><USER21> As soon as one works on a non-trivial piece of software and has a team >2 SCM becomes important. There was one SCM system for PP Smalltalk if memory serves right called Envy but it was quite expensive. But even more important than SCM is a module/library eco system. We can't trade without reproducibility. Without it we are destined to re-invent the wheel.

There is value in reinventing wheel - it is entertaining and stress free - <USER2> it does not matter for anyone but yourself.

<comment><USER22> You _always_ have a team >2, unless you're just writing a quick throwaway hack. Your future selves are members of the team, and there might be quite a few of them over time as you simply forget what you were working on earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Even the Demoscene, one of the last bastions of true hackerism, is > completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and contracts.

Demoscene never cared about this kind of stuff.

In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties.

This is one of the key differences between Demoscene and anything FOSS related.

And also why game developers as offsprings from Demoscene, also don't care about them, rather about IP and how to extract the best experience out of a given piece of hardware, regardless of the OS, API or NDAs that one has to go through.

<comment><USER24> _In fact of the interesting challenges of the Demoscene was trying to find out how competing groups achieved some demos, without having access to the said information, while in process outperforming their demos at parties._

The demoscene has its roots in software cracking, where reverse-engineering is the norm and you're not expected to be given source or told but to find out yourself, so that's not too surprising. Of course they don't care about licenses, because from that perspective they are merely arbitrary restrictions to be broken at will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Three things:

1\. I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is not.

2\. How come that someone thinks of himself/herself that he/she has the right to say who is a "true hacker" and who is not.

3\. AND THIS: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU) Thank you Jayson.

<comment><USER26> > I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so > glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is > not.

Going fast is revered, breaking things is not. And why is going fast so important? It is because an individual can't accomplish much when going slow. Why are individual works important? Because individuals do things that would never get funding, they make decisions that would never pass a committee and they can pivot the entire direction of a project many times in a single hour without any issues. Therefore many problems can only be solved by hackers as large teams are too restricted to do them.

<comment><USER27> It is entirely possible to do something slow and well and still do it alone and esentially without funding. As a film maker this is one of the things I love about writing and programming: there is no money needed only your time (which of course also costs you something). But it is perfectly possible to sit alone in your chamber and write a great piece of software that competes with the best out there. Try doing that in Film. This would be _really_ a field where you wouldn't get far without people and money.

Whether you hack it together quickly or meditate on it for ages doesn't has much to do with it, I've seen both. Maybe the person with the quick hack just tries to solve a problem while the slow person likes the intellectual challenge of solving it in a "good" way.

<comment><USER28> > It is entirely possible to do something slow and well and still do it alone > and essentially without funding.

Like?

<comment><USER27> Horizon EDA was started by a guy who didn't want to use a closed source EDA tool like Altium for his final university electronics project and wasn't happy with KiCAD.

He planned it very carefully (so I wouldn't call it a _hack_ ) and years after it is still going without any funding. This isn't that uncommon in open source IMO.

Of course this is not a value judgement, there are quick hacks that work perfectly well and slower more planned out projects that never work at all — each aproach has it's pros and cons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It feels like the word "hacking" is losing more and more meaning over time.

In the beginning it was a word only people heavily into computers used. Then around the time of War Games it became a more commonly-known word, and connotated breaking in. Over the last couple decades more people became aware that hacking sometimes refers to building technical projects. But it still has a heavy connotation of breaking into a system or program.

Hacking became cool once hackers started getting rich and gaining prominence in society. My son is 8, and many of his friends think they're hackers when they use a cheat code on a game. Most of them know they're not writing code and really changing the game, but they all want to think of themselves as hackers so they say they're hacking their games. Very few of them even really know what a line of code looks like yet.

Any notion of "true" hacking is bound to be about putting walls up to say who's in and who's out. In reality, there are always people building new things, and there are always people trying to break into systems and programs.

<comment><USER30> I don't think its lost meaning as much as it has a completely different meaning than it used to. It seems pretty common when something goes mainstream, as computing has, for original definitions to be tossed aside while the terms get re-appropriated by/for a more mainstream audience.

This happens all the time in other parts of culture whether music, fashion or whatever. So I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that it's happened in tech too. Doesn't mean one needs to like it, just accept it for what it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nice ideas. I think that complexity can be the enemy of "hackability."

Some environments like Pharo Smalltalk are simple enough to dig down to see how stuff works, and I would add simple Lisp implementations.

When I first started using Ruby and Rails, I kept the source code to Ruby and for Rails available for perusal and it was more or less understandable. Not so much now. Complexity.

I think that the Racket ecosystem will get more hackable once the codebase sits on top of Chez Scheme. Racket is well documented: 18 months ago I wanted to import trained weights and biases from a trained Keras/TensorFlow model into Racket and implement a runtime - fairly easy to do with good documentation and good library support for fast linear algebra.

Too bad that more people don't spend more effort on hacking activities because really understanding tools, modifying code, etc. is fun and I would argue a good career move.

EDIT: added 1 word for clarity

</comment><comment><USER32> So, what does C0DE517E think hacking is? I'm surprised nobody picked up on it...

2/3s of the way down is a link (by the way - wanna see something weird?). That link goes to [0] which is about 'Dark Enlightenment'. The key takeaways here are: democracy is bad, white people are smarter, Urbit, and Yarvin. But surely someone can link without advocating?

And then we get to this bit, "Whatever the causes, we have software and hardware systems that strive to be entirely open, yet time and again are closed ones that are more accessible in practice, that drive social revolutions." The author is making a roundabout case for the Dark Enlightenment, and ecosystems like Urbit which enforce a neo-serfdom and elimination of democracy at a technological scale.

I'm surprised nobody else picked up on who this person thinks hackers _are_. It's certainly hidden in plain sight.

[0] [https://breakermag.com/heres-the-dark-enlightenment- explaine...](https://breakermag.com/heres-the-dark-enlightenment-explainer- you-never-wanted/)

<comment><USER33> Author here - no, that link was to show something bizzarre, how (some) people lose their minds in weird elucubrations on the politics of software - <USER3> of actual hacking. I am definitely not endorsing in any way ever that cesspool that is D.E., I'm sorry if it wasn't clear from the text.

<comment><USER32> My apologies then.

I've dealt with Yarvin's people in person and online. Many a times, they will sneak these kinds of things into conversations and slide these things like DE and Urbit in on the side. Had one, at the hackerspace I used to attend, quote Mussolini about how good an idea the DE was. So yeah I'm a bit on guard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I assume there is the same amount of "true" hackers out there. At least that is my impression from the Chaos Communication Congress and alike. Probably the percentage of "true" hackers is way smaller now as computers became cheap and more accessible. If you look at the "great and true hackers" from the 80s and before, most of them probably come from academia, government agencies or wealthy backgrounds.

I for one welcome the change, because I think the entry barrier to become a "true" hacker is probably the same as before, if not easier and we definitely opened the doors for more people.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ignoring defining what "true hacking" is defined as, I'm struggling to pinpoint exactly what has been lost here. Many new things have come into existence, but this feels like a list of laments against the direction technology grew, not something lost. Plenty of people are still tinkerers focused on making small personal projects, and if anything its highest concentration is here on HN. That doesn't mean all of the other things in the tech world are inherently lacking in value though. When focusing on technology why focus on "hacking", a somewhat odd and specific use case as defined here?

</comment><comment><USER36> Other people have already commented on the core message. I have a nitpick instead:

> That's probably why we still have textual source (great for git and merging) > over more expressive formats or even the old idea of serializing the entire > state of a VM (again lisp, smalltalk) which sacrifices merging entirely to > make hotpatching (dynamic software updates) trivial.

Good. Not being able to merge squarely belongs in the past, where everyone had access to only one machine. I'm incredibly thankful that I can merge the half- finished work on my desktop from last evening with the patches that I just pushed from my notebook while in the train.

<comment><USER37> More expressive representations of source code enables _better_ merging. Merging code as opaque strings of text is a bad choice, and causes lots of problems to programmers every day.

<comment><USER36> > More expressive representations of source code enables _better_ merging.

Merging is usually easy regardless of representation when all changes are comparatively local. The problem is always merging big far-reaching changes like a complete refactoring of an entire module, and I don't immediately see how any non-text representation would do significantly better (by a wide- enough margin to justify changing paradigms) than text at assisting with the merge process in this case.

<comment><USER37> Have you never got large merge conflicts because one branch made some changes to a block of code, and the other left it intact but changed its indentation?

That kind of thing would not happen in a better representation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> We're still here. More than ever actually. There's just more noise.

<comment><USER39> Do any communities still exist?

<comment><USER40> Yes. Though if they were easy to find they'd be overrun with people who don't feel that what they found is worth protecting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Graduated high school a couple years ago. Plenty of people coded, but I had only had one friend that actually was interested in doing more with computers. We found some pretty cool stuff on the school network, and ways to screw with our less tech-savvy friends. It even cost me a trip to the principal's office one time, due to my stupidity and inexperience.

I guess I'm not part of the right forums or boards, but I just haven't been able to find other people with that same kind of passion. I know I could and should just get started by myself, but I'm the type of person that just loses motivation and the will to keep working if I dont have someone else by my side. And I go to a UC. Sure plenty of people know a bit of linux and networking, but how many people actually want to go past their classes and actually take the time to research and learn more? It's hard to find those people. As a result, I'm moving away from hacking into more normal spaces like appdev and web stuff. Its definitely not as exciting, and I dont think I'll ever again feel that thrill of being called to the principal's office for hacking.

<comment><USER17> > I go to a UC. Sure plenty of people know a bit of linux and networking, but > how many people actually want to go past their classes and actually take the > time to research and learn more? It's hard to find those people.

Those people do exist, but they're probably not in a classroom for much longer than it takes to complete the final.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> TL;DR: Hacking is more alive then ever.

I might be missing the point of his article, but describing the c64 basic coding movement as a single movement is misunderstanding it gravely. The fact that Basic was licensed by Microsoft didn't stop us, it was the the default interpreter we had to programming, which soon was replaced by masm/tasm or machine code.

More so then than today, hackers of all kinds (hackers, crackers, phreakers) were all following their own individual paths and was way less uniformed than todays movements. I believe the main reason most are focusing on OSS today was because of the dis-content we felt with the development of operating systems that slowly but surely locked us in as users.

</comment><comment><USER43> Moving past the "no true scott's man" fallacy of the title; i feel that this article confuses the act of being a hacker with the tools that people use to hack with. Which is a common thing to do when a concept is new. For me, being a hacker means being able to work at a certain level of abstraction and, not being afraid to "open up the box" and start working at that level of abstraction. For example, being able to work with a raspberry pi loaded with linux and, then being able to start hacking at the linux kernel or libraries when needed is what makes someone a hacker.

<comment><USER44> I note that the author of the article appears to thing a raspberry pi would work just fine if it booted Windows. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> In some sense, I think that there is something of a tragedy of plenty happening in the maker/hacker community. When options were few, you had dense groups with deep knowledge about different hackable technologies. The abundance of options, while good in general, limits the usefulness of that kind of deep knowledge in favor of a broader kind of knowledge.

How many ways are there to blink a light or read a potentiometer? Expanding on a simple project can take hundreds of different paths depending on your hardware and software stack.

It's not dead, it's just adapting to the current landscape of abundance.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's kind of funny. The post thinks wistfully about the "real" hackers that wanted everyone to have access to computers. But that already happened. So is it any wonder that no one really cares about that ideology any more?

> [they are] completely uninterested in the ideology of software licenses and > contracts.

Sure, but who cares exactly? Isn't an interest in legal nuances of contracts rather orthagonal to "hacking"?

>Linux didn't change the desktop, nor the way software is made.

Here, I'll just flat out disagree. I think saying this is rather blind to history.

</comment><comment><USER47> "We buy cars and go to mechanics, right? We don't know how to peek inside the engines anymore."

I don't know which world you live in, but it sure isn't mine! Even at the height of working as a senior system engineer / technical architect in the heart of Silicon Valley, I regularly wrenched on my car; I even found a self- wrench shop near the Tesla factory in Fremont. In fact I just wrenched on my car this past weekend. I wrench on all my cars. How could I call myself an engineer without understanding what I use?

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe "old school hacking" is still present in the "maker" movement. For the pragmatic, practical hands on approach I mean.

</comment><comment><USER49> Hacking is not dead, but it has become complex because you have to deal with many layers of abstraction. In fact, we have to deal with complex concepts, implementations with different layers of complexity, more protocols... so the knowledge to hack something goes beyond that, because you have to understand how something works, maybe completely, to add something novel to it.

</comment><comment><USER50> The point of this article is all the harder to see because there isn't even a definition of what "hacker" means to the author.

There are many different definitions. If one subscribes to, say, Eric Raymond's, then there are many more hackers today and hacking itself is more prevalent than ever.

</comment><comment><USER51> Hacking has changed.

I tinker with a homegrown family information and media center with a dis-used Gigabyte BRIX behind an old flat screen running Linux and chromium-browser in kiosk mode. I bought a NES style USB gamepad and use it to make things show. It's a hobby, but it turned out to be nice.

For me that's hacking.

</comment><comment><USER52> Were early hackings done by "fairly despicable a-social people"? Maybe I did not get this.

</comment><comment><USER53> Maybe, but programming now provides a stable income for way more people, whether it's their passion or not. In this day in age, the ability to put food on the table trumps any sort of bit-banging nostalgia IMO. The fewer gates we keep, the better.

</comment><comment><USER54> Speaking of books on hackers, I can recommend Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. I enjoyed it thoroughly despite the title.

Did you know Beto O'Rourke was a member?

</comment><comment><USER55> True hacking is only for true Scotsmen.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman)

</comment><comment><USER56> <<I don't mean that we should not be political in our actions, today.>>

Y not?

<<...early hacking was a-political is because hackers were fairly despicable a-social people.>>

That is what made it fun.

</comment><comment><USER57> Did it ever existed to begin with? The myth begun with "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" from Steven Levy in 1984, and it was mainly propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER58> Does anyone else get a "no true scotsman" vibe?

</comment><comment><USER59> What exactly is "true" hacking and how does it differ from "normal" hacking?

</comment><comment><USER11> A hacker is someone who clicks on [https://www.sparkfun.com/](https://www.sparkfun.com/) and doesn't come up for air for at least an hour. Can you pass the test?

</comment><comment><USER60> I didn't personally get the sense that the author was reminiscing about the past. I just thought of it more as what he thinks is a lack of ambition and vision in computing today in ways that will solve larger problems rather than going with the closed environments that are available today.

tldr; Maybe having an open plane with few imaginative restrictions (as early computing did) allows one to rethink certain patterns we assume as truth today. For example, if no one is working on a new OS because of Linux, Windows - could that be worse for the world in the long run?

</comment><comment><USER61> Enter Firefox, press CTRL-SHIFT-I. It's pretty much all there.

</comment><comment><USER62> Git webgl

</comment><comment><USER63> Yes. It's dead. Killed by money.

</comment><comment><USER64> > The sad and inspiring story of TempleOS, a.k.a. what the Raspberry Pi should > have been.

Eh?

<comment><USER65> TempleOS is a really cool system to hack. You should watch some of the live coding videos the author did. It's really much more of a tinkerer's system than the stock Linux that runs on most Pis.

<comment><USER66> More people should use RISC OS with the Pi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> A hacker is motivated to hack great software/systems.(Hacking in the "modern" sense has been more about software than hardware, since not as many people have the resources to tinker around with hardware,potentially breaking in the process).

I would argue the reason why hacking has kind of "died" is because of the massive amounts of garbage software that gets put out.

On top of that, hacking isn't actually dead,it just kind of moved in the shadows.(This has been de facto true after the 2012 "era of big-brother revelations", and shortly when the "big figures" of hacking have jailed.)

I'd say firstly modern hackers have to always adapt by "working twice as hard" while having the "penetrating" mindset towards software that becomes increasingly harder to penetrate(through different techniques,which CS has developed firstly at theoretical then practical levels). Secondly,software developers now usually work in groups and are incentivized by money.Even if they're less skilled individually, together they manage to create harder software to penetrate.

However,this "brothership" in the hacking community is very hard to acquire,because 90% of the time it is motivated by something other than money: ethics,sense of justice, etc.(What i subjectively consider a "hacker" isn't someone who "hacks" an ATM by putting a cloning device on a facade)

On top of this,you add the fact that governments try to gain more and more control over the internet and all-things computing, punishing people who "legally deserved it" but did the society a favor(Snowden,Assange,etc. basically any leak that has been "proven true" but the means of acquiring information left the boot-lickers unsatisfied).

On the bright side, i wouldn't exactly say hacking is dead,it's just that the computing sphere is changing so fast, it leaves hackers undecided.Some people don't even bother when in the relatively short future we'll probably see the "downfall" of classical computing as we know it.</comment>


Usenet History: How Binaries Took Over Newsgroups - <AUTHOR> https://tedium.co/2017/10/03/usenet-binaries-history/ <comment><USER2> Man, I'm convinced that half of my computer knowledge comes from jumping through the hoops of the early internet to find dirty pictures.

Back in my day, you had to buy a box of parts at the local computer store, put them together, buy a modem, figure out how to install it, find a local BBS that provided internet, install and configure Trumpet Winsock, get a usenet reader, script it to download the Base64 encoded data, write another program to combine the parts and decode it.

Now a kid gets an iPad and types "boobs".</comment>


Presentation anti-patterns - <AUTHOR> http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/06/speaker-style-bingo-10-presentation.html

<comment><USER2> This is a great summary. If you do a lot of speaking, there is a whole book on this stuff that is fantastic: [http://presentationpatterns.com](http://presentationpatterns.com)

It certainly made me a better speaker.

My solution to "The Notifier" is to take advantage of the fact that I can have multiple logins on my Mac. I have a "Presenter" account that has nothing installed, and has read/write access to my Presentations folder on my main account. Then I'm 100% sure I won't get a notification.

<comment><USER3> Another tip for OSX - the system notification center can put in "Do Not Disturb" mode, just like your phone. By default, OSX will do this automatically when mirroring to a TV or projector, and you can do it manually at any time by Option-clicking the Notification Center icon on the menubar.

[https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18740?locale=en_US](https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18740?locale=en_US)

<comment><USER4> Wow, OSX automatically goes into DND when mirroring? That's a neat feature. Does that require a connection that allows the mirrored display to inform the Mac that it is a TV/projector? Or will it go into DND any time you use a mirrored display mode, even via a VGA cable where the Mac doesn't really know what kind of device is on the other end of the cable?

<comment><USER5> I believe Win7 has a similar feature. I've seen prompts asking me about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Regarding bullets: respect your audience, and certainly don't just read or repeat what you've written, but do remember that many people will probably read your slides later. There's nothing more frustrating than clicking onto a slide deck and just seeing lots of beautiful stock photography with 'Why?' and 'But then...' written over it in large type.

<comment><USER7> This is a major problem, with quite an easy solution - make 2 documents, one for presenting, one for reading.

If you try and compromise you get slides behind you on stage with too much text, and documents that don't go into enough detail - not enough text per printed (or PDF) page.

I hate that most conferences ask for a slide deck in advance which they will print up for the audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cracked up when the author mentioned launching his browser in incognito mode, but a great detail to mention. I've seen way too many embarrassing things pop up in omniboxes during live demonstrations.

</comment><comment><USER9> Quick note about #2: Test it in the specific location where you'll be presenting. Different projectors and systems have different resolutions, and those differences can make a readable presentation unreadable.

I've noticed this happens a lot more with people who use Retina Macbooks. They plug them into a 1080p projector, and for whatever reason the fonts are a pixel high on the projection.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've always had problems with presenting in front of a crowd (it's pretty much my #1 fear) and I find the best way to improve is to practice. Presentation is really a form of performance art. It's easy to go down a checklist of things to do/not to do, but during the presentation it's difficult to keep it all in mind.

Some stuff I've learned in toastmasters that's not in the article:

\- consciously avoid filler words (um, ah sounds)

\- maintain eye contact with the audience

\- speaking with volume and authority

</comment><comment><USER11> Zack Holman has a great "The Talk on Talks" at [http://zachholman.com/talk/the-talk-on- talks/](http://zachholman.com/talk/the-talk-on-talks/) which lists some pro- patterns. Furthermore, his site at [http://speaking.io/](http://speaking.io/) is a great resource for preparing and delivering presentations.

</comment><comment><USER12> Excellent list of things to keep in mind.

Of course, being The Statue is allowed, if you happen to be John Carmack, legs planted firmly on the stage like a colossus: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a good list of things to avoid when presenting. I'd like to add another that I've commonly seen:

Don't give up control of the presentation until it is time for questions.

Sometimes people will butt in with questions, and you should answer them quickly and minimally. I've often seen this kind of thing fluster a presenter, and sometimes the presenter will say "okay, is there anything else? any other questions? " as if to invite more interruptions. This is a mistake, you should quickly address the person who interrupted and then get back into your flow without allowing others the chance to also interrupt.

Another one, that maybe only I am bothered by, is don't start every single answer with "That's a good question..."

<comment><USER7> This really depends on the presentation. Of course, you should be in control of the presentation, and let your audience know wether or not they can ask questions at any time, or at the end, or, if you've designed a well structured presentation, take questions at the end of each 'part' of your presentation.

The reason why it depends is if you're presenting something complex, say A and B and C, and if understanding B requires understanding A, and understanding C requires understanding A and B there is nothing worse than reaching the end of the presentation and the first question is 'What exactly did you mean by A?' and a lot of nodding heads. That means no one got two thirds of your presentation.

I've been teaching presentation skills for about a decade, and I've seen the above scenario plenty of times, mainly in legal presentations, but also in tech and sales presentations.</comment></comment>


All Star Trek Episodes from Every Series to Stream on Netflix - <AUTHOR> http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/04/08/all-star-trek-coming-to-netflix-make-it-so/ <comment><USER2> When I was growing up my father had dubbed copies of Star Trek: The Original Series. I watched every fuzzy episode dozens of times. Eventually enjoying TNG/DS9/Voyager/Enterprise as well. One of biggest hopes in _life_ was to own every single episode of each Star Trek series on VHS so I could enjoy them at will. The boxed VHS sets were always way too expensive for me then.

It's strange to think back because now I have all of them sitting on a tiny little corner of a 1TB drive.

I still often watch them to this day while I program. I'll go through a dozen episodes (playing on a second monitor) in a day.

Kids growing up today have it so damn good.

<comment><USER3> It of course remains to be seen whether it's actually good.

Perhaps I'm looking at things through rose-colored glasses, but things like having to look in the dictionary to learn about things and words (and I wanted to learn about a LOT of words), hunting snails for nickels, working as a stableboy... it's usually said these days with a mocking tone, but I have become at least a bit of a believer in the old, "it builds character".

<comment><USER4> I had an interesting debate with some friends after sharing this Tom Waits quote: "This is what's wrong with the world. Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now."

Via [http://www.bnox.be/2009/11/tom-waits-and-deficit-of- wonder.h...](http://www.bnox.be/2009/11/tom-waits-and-deficit-of-wonder.html)

I tend to agree that there can be some value in the gap between wondering about something and actually finding out (or never finding out). Letting your mind chew on a question means you have an opportunity to imagine your own answer or your own story. When you tighten that gap those creative mental wonderings get clipped short.

I don't think he is saying a world where you can never look things up in 5 seconds is preferrable, but noting the effect this has on the underappreciated benefits of wonder.

<comment><USER5> Ahh yes, but wondering something, running to the computer and finding out that its very likely that _nobody else knows either_ is a rare pleasure unavailable in times past.

<comment><USER6> Not when that thing nobody knows is how to compile that damn library in your specific environment :(

<comment><USER5> But when I finally figure it out, I get the elation of knowing a tiny thing that no one else knows... and then going and posting it on stackoverflow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> YESYESYESYESYES

Sorry, but Picard influenced me as much an any person in my life. This makes me so happy.

<comment><USER8> One could pick a worse role model than Picard.

<comment><USER9> It would be interesting to do a poll in relation to favorite star-trek character (TNG) and then cross-reference that to respondent's job/career.

I bet there is a strong correlation between Data (the character) and a programmer.

What do you think the correlation to Riker, Picard, Worf would be?

<comment><USER10> _I bet there is a strong correlation between Data (the character) and a programmer._

seems a tad cliched, don't you think? i'd bet that most people wouldn't want to self-associate with an emotionless android

<comment><USER11> Emotionless? This proves that you're not a Data fan. He had tons of emotion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I liked all the various configurations of Trek; some more than others.

It's interesting to see in this thread the split between TOS trekkers and a STTNG trekkers. I was always more of a TOS person myself: I think the creative tension that the networks put on Gene by making him "dumb it down" actually made for better, sharper analysis of the sci-fi involved. TNG seemed to meander a bit. But that's me.

What I find interesting about looking at the shows from decades later is the way the topics were addressed. Things like the episode where Daystom's M-9 computer took over the Enterprise and basically was a smart machine with a weapon -- we seemed to have come down on the side of that being okay, at least for now. But back then there were a lot of very important questions raised -- questions that are still valid. Or the Darmok episode, where the culture spoke only in metaphor. That still twists my noodle because that's all any culture really does -- speak in various metaphors. When you're asking a bunch of users from a certain societal niche to tell you what they want, not only is their jargon going to be unique, but the way they compare things and discuss things are too. (Insert Wittgenstein discussion).

Taking a short dramatic format and making a bunch of pimply-faced teenagers start _thinking_ about what's important in their lives is an awesomely good thing. Let's hope Trek keeps doing that for years to come.

<comment><USER13> Trek has always had two important elements which explain its continued popularity.

On the one hand there are rich, deep characters that we come to care about, become interested in, and become invested in. Just about every character in TOS fits this mold. They are all iconic in various ways. Later series did nearly as well, the characters in TNG and DS9 are also largely iconic, Voyager and Enterprise somewhat less so with a few exceptions. This creates the opportunity for rich story telling and character development and also greatly facilitates people becoming attached to the characters and the show. The last season of DS9 is an excellent example of this phenomenon with long running story arcs rich in development of multiple characters.

This in turn facilitates the flip side of Star Trek. A cast of characters that viewers are heavily invested in and a setting that viewers are intimately familiar with creates the opportunity to put on one-off stories that are more engaging than they would be otherwise. In this way most Star Trek shows become a kind of science fiction anthology. So the show can explore various standalone stories within a familiar context, elevating the emotional investment in the story.

This combination elevates Star Trek to an amazing level and many other SciFi shows have adopted a similar format to attempt to recreate Star Trek's success. Many of people's most memorable and favorite episodes of various Star Trek shows are one-episode short stories founded on their own unique premises (Inner Light, City on the Edge of Forever, Hard Time) rather than stemming from pre-existing story elements or being part of a multi-episode story arc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How far will anyone make it through watching them, before they all start showing "Available until a _date two weeks from now_ ", like 20% of my queue almost always does?

<comment><USER15> They will be streamable for at least two years, under the deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Star Trek was my favourite television show back in grade school. Never got to see them all as a kid, because TV was limited to a few (crappy) channels where I grew up, but I really loved it. To this day, an episode of ST can side track me fairly easily. So I was pretty pleased by this headline.

Unfortunately, it turns out this release is only for the U.S. Seriously, wtf Netflix? You don't need to translate the episodes into Canadian, just let me watch the damn things.

<comment><USER17> It's indeed too bad. I'm from Europe and I don't think such a service will be available here in the forseeable future.

Due to sticky politics it's impossible to have a proper global video streaming service. Sad, really.

<comment><USER18> It is certainly possible - you just have to ignore copyright.

At some point we are going to have to realize that we have enough movies, books, etc that we can't read/watch all of those which interests us and just kill copyright.

It is already half happened because most people flatly ignore it and the amount of draconian enforcement necessary to uphold it is too large for people to accept.

<comment><USER17> Ignoring copyright is what I'm doing right now. Downloading movies/series is not illegal in the country where I live.

But I would _like_ to pay for streaming sci-fi series online, to support them and make sure they are continued being produced. It's sad that the laws that are meant to protect copyright status are preventing me from doing that.

<comment><USER19> You could probably find some poor US based star trek fan that is pirating their content and pay for a netflix streaming account for them. I know it sounds a bit odd, but you could kind of look at it like buying carbon credits.

<comment><USER20> Which would acquiesce the moral issues, but not the legal ones. Sorta like papal pardons <g>.

Don't know of a better idea though if the content isn't reasonably available in your area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I live in Canada

/facepalm

<comment><USER5> I go to Australia fairly often and know quite a few people who live between the US and AU. Finally frustrated beyond the breaking point by iTunes and Netflix goe-location nonsense, I got one of these small servers(1).

I loaded openvpn(2) server on it and put tunnelblick(3) on all our macs (and a few openwrt type devices)

Cost of a tiny dedicated Atom server payable with paypal: $39/month. Having an IP address that that says I'm in New Jersey wherever in the world I happen to be: _priceless_.

1\. [http://www.interserver.net/custom-managed-dedicated- servers....](http://www.interserver.net/custom-managed-dedicated-servers.html)

2\. <http://openvpn.net/>

3\. <http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/>

<comment><USER22> For what it's worth, you're paying too much; if you don't need much CPU or RAM, just a network connection, you'd be fine with a cheap VPS or EC2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When Netflix first came out, I used the 3-at-time plan to watch every single episode of Star Trek available on DVD. I think I watched 4 a day for a very long time. Nice to see I can repeat the process now without even having to go to the mailbox =)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is the perfect Hacker News article. I learned something new and mathematically-interesting about the world, the author came up with a niche development to get us excited, and we learn how to apply that to improve our own lives.

<comment><AUTHOR> How far we've come:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014567>

[dead] Hackers News with Vuvuzelas (vuvuzela-time.co.uk)

<comment><USER24> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2419815>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wake me up when Netflix moves outside the US.

(To add to that list: Pandora, Hulu, Spotify. Atleast last.fm is available as a paid subscription option.)

<comment><USER26> Spotify and last.fm are both European

<comment><USER27> And spotify only works in 7 EU countries, due to copyright laws.

<comment><USER26> Not really due to copyright laws more down to licensing rights, historically licensing rights have been sold on a per-country basis.

If it makes you feel better the record companies hate it too, I know the popular fad is to blame the music industry, but there's so much legal red tape over contracts it's actually very hard for them to innovate.

<comment><USER27> > Not really due to copyright laws more down to licensing rights

Without the copyright laws, there would be no need to obtain licensing rights.

> I know the popular fad is to blame the music industry, but there's so much > legal red tape over contracts it's actually very hard for them to innovate.

The whole copyright-based legal infrastructure needs to be torn down and new ways to pay artists need to arise which don't rely on freedom- and innovation- resricting laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What, no ST:TAS?

<comment><USER29> They can be watched here: [http://www.startrek.com/videos/star-trek-the- animated-series...](http://www.startrek.com/videos/star-trek-the-animated- series/all/full/episode)

<comment><USER30> What a find!

Unfortunately I'm not in the correct geographic region to enjoy this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> All I can say is <http://i.imgur.com/eCOz1.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER8> You can also hit <http://www.allstepisodes.com/>

Not sure of the legality though.

EDIT: seems to be more ad laden than I remember.

<comment><USER32> full of annoying ads, unsynced audio, constant buffering, low resolution. it's a very poor viewing experience, and it's copyright infringement.

<comment><USER8> Agreed on the ads, which are thankfully only on the website and not during playback. I don't have any issue with unsynced audio or buffering. The TNG episodes only appear crappy if you full screen it, but NTSC resolution is crappy anyway. The Enterprise episodes are terrible quality because those were all filmed in HD, so of course. It's no worse than watching just about any random copyrighted infringed video on Youtube.

It's the modern equivalent of staunch's dad's dubbed copies.</comment></comment></comment>


Comodo issued valid certificate for [scam URL] amazon buckets - <AUTHOR> https://censys.io/certificates/7ff0e2dd7692fd12020c29298a67787e5b0d07d67d1ec471d536ab317b0e8dac <comment><USER2> That is not Amazon.

      ~ whois s3-amazonaws.com
       Domain Name: S3-AMAZONAWS.COM
       Registry Domain ID: 2246085106_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
       Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namesilo.com
       Registrar URL: http://www.namesilo.com
       Updated Date: 2018-03-31T13:23:14Z
       Creation Date: 2018-03-31T13:07:29Z
       Registry Expiry Date: 2019-03-31T13:07:29Z
       Registrar: NameSilo, LLC
       Registrar IANA ID: 1479
       Registrar Abuse Contact Email: email@example.com
       Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4805240066
       Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
       Name Server: JIM.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
       Name Server: OLGA.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
       DNSSEC: unsigned
       URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/

<comment><AUTHOR> It was from good faith, I was just checking s3.amazonaws.com and censys pop me that here, bad reading...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Buckets are at s3.amazonaws.com, the domain mentioned is s3-amazonaws.com.

You could certainly argue if Comodo doesn't catch stuff like this then what value are they bringing, but it isn't as serious as the title implies.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are some other shady stuff... [https://censys.io/certificates?q=sni182947.cloudflaressl.com](https://censys.io/certificates?q=sni182947.cloudflaressl.com)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the initial title, I was tricked by the result [https://censys.io/certificates?q=s3.amazonaws.com&page=6](https://censys.io/certificates?q=s3.amazonaws.com&page=6)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's via CloudFlare.

Also the "s3-amazonaws.com" looks like a scam domain.

</comment><comment><USER5> Fortunately, this is not the actual S3 domain, but one that is very similar. s3<dash>amazonaws instead of s3<dot>amazonaws.

Regardless, this is still shady.

</comment><comment><USER6> The bit you're looking for here is the hostname:

> *.s3-amazonaws.com

Edit: but I believe real S3 hostnames are of the form foo.s3.amazonaws.com

<comment><USER4> It's s3-amazonaws.com, not s3.amazonaws.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's a pretty good scam domain. Can't big companies scan CT logs to be proactive about those types of domains?

</comment><comment><USER8> I reported this to Cloudflare's Trust and Safety team and it has been taken care of.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can the title be updated with the word 'fake amazon buckets'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Done

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have you reported the scam domain to Amazon Security?

</comment><comment><USER11> Is the title of this HN post the article? And link is the proof? Just trying to understand what's going on. Some kind of attempt of getting a trick domain?

</comment><comment><USER12> s3-amazonaws.com? That's not amazon, that's just some random domain.</comment>


Designer's Notebook: The End Of Copyright [2005] - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2470/designers_notebook_the_end_of_.php

<comment><USER2> I feel the deprecation of copyrights must come to pass (pure speculation). Have bought into that notion some time ago. It did make me wonder how did we end up in this situation in the first place?

I mean, having the copyright laws in place will bring about the current Hollywood lobby, that's clear (to me). What I wonder is why did we end up with the copyright model in the first place?

In the article it mentions games as something you'd rent which in the world of MMO's makes complete sense. But weren't books not kinda the same in the old days? Too expensive to own, so libraries sprung about. In that setting, you didn't need copyright either right?

<comment><USER3> > What I wonder is why did we end up with the copyright model in the first > place?

See Karl Fogel's excellent essay "The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World" for a good overview of how copyright laws came about back in the day:

<http://questioncopyright.org/promise>

TLDR: copyright is an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England. Copyright was designed by and for distributors. The modern romantic notion of copyright existing to protect authors is, at best, a post-hoc rationalization.</comment></comment>


Apple Gives Tribute to Newton with New 'What is iPad?' Ad - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/12/apple-gives-a-nod-to-newton-with-new-what-is-ipad-ad/

<comment><USER2> i dug my newton out the other week for a photo-op:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/4554719593/sizes...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/4554719593/sizes/l/)

<comment><USER3> I truly loved my MP 2100. The iPhone was the first electronic device to come along that worked for me as well (and in fact better) than the Newton.

Ah, what could have been... </wistful>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A subtext for the iPad ad could be: "it's all about color", to contrast it to the colorless Kindle.

All the shots (except for the sheet music) has lots of color.

<comment><USER5> That's a good one. The first thing I noticed was "it's all about motion": sliding to unlock, launchpad icons zooming into view, swipe-to-scroll, a keyboard popping up, a pin dropping onto a map, the screen rotating to the right orientation, turning a page...

And, in another layer, the people are all in motion in some way: some just their hands, a child's feet, someone on a bike, someone on public transportation, the implied motion of being out at a coffee shop, or just sitting out on your front steps.</comment></comment>


Should I buy a Macbook Pro 2015 or the new one? - <AUTHOR> I was planning on buying a change my mac book pro when the new version was out. Whats recomended atm? Buying the old version? Buying the new version? Waiting?<p>I am an Xcode developer so can't just jump ship to Microsoft products. <comment><USER2> I ended up buying a 2015 one, which was described as one of the best laptops ever in reviews [1]. Plus, I got a slightly used one for a good price (waiting for it to ship).

I'm pretty sure I'll get many years of happy usage out of it (it replaces a 7 year old Mac mini, althought I did upgrade memory/ SSD on that one).

The only thing I may end up missing is the touch bar, which does not get much love here, but could turn out useful. Do you develop stuff that needs to support touch bar? Then obviously get a new one...

Btw, do add "Ask HN " to the title.

[1] [http://www.macworld.co.uk/review/mac-laptops/apple-13in- reti...](http://www.macworld.co.uk/review/mac-laptops/apple-13in-retina- macbook-pro-review-27ghz-128gb-early-2015-999-3601221/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sharing. This is lame but I couldn't edit the title :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Buy the old or choose other like Dell and Thinkpad. The new MBP is very bad to programmer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Same boat. Bought the old one other day.</comment>


Working from home on the //c+ - <AUTHOR> https://gtia.com/2020/04/01/working-from-home-on-the-c-/ <comment><USER2> A lot of people are confusing the IIc with the IIc+. The former was a fairly early/popular "portable" apple II. It was superseded by the IIGS, a 16-bit machine that competed favorably (with respect to graphics/sound/etc) with the mac.

The later IIc+ was mostly a cynical ploy by apple to drum up some cash while assuring that the Apple II line didn't compete with the mac. In most ways it was a downgrade from the earlier IIGS. Its only real advantage was a slightly higher clock rate, which could be solved on the IIGS with an accelerator like the transwarpGS. Further, not only was it an 8-bit only machine, its major upgrade was the replacement of the 5.25" floppy with the 3.5". Which meant it didn't run most 8-bit apple ][ software which was overwhelmingly on 5.25" floppies. A number of applications were Prodos based and could be simply copied to 3.5" floppies, but most games were DOS 3.3/etc and effectively bound to the 5.25 format. By the time the //c+ was released, the much less expensive Laser 128 (a clone) was filling the "portable" niche in a much better way. Particularly the 128EX, which was clocked nearly as high but significantly less expensive.

Basically it was a fiasco of a product.

Apple ][ timeline from wikipedia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Apple_II_famil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Apple_II_family)

So, more expensive than a laser 128EX, worse software compatibility due to being 8-bit with a 3.5" floppy drive, and less capable in all regards than an upgraded IIGS. The latter were frequently in use into the late 1980's early 1990's with hard drives, cpu accelerators, multiple megs of ram, math coprocessors, x86 emulators, etc.

Which explains why its considered to be a fairly rare apple II.

<comment><USER3> I never used a //c+, but on the IIgs I remember the 3.5" floppy drive being a huge advantage. The 3.5" was faster and had much more capacity that the 5.25", so the first thing you'd do on a IIgs was copy everything over to 3.5" floppies.

My memory could be faulty, but I also don't recall having compatibility issues between DOS and ProDOS.

The big issue was 5.25" games, which would pull all sorts of low-level hardware-dependent copy protection tricks. Those couldn't be copied without special hacks.

<comment><USER2> Which is fine, because like most IIGS owners, you had both drives. The //c was the compact integrated apple II. It is all you needed. You could just buy a IIc, take it home plug it into your TV and there was a large software library. You never needed to buy another piece of hardware. The IIe/IIGS were expandable, you bought the machine, which by itself didn't do anything, then you bought a pile of peripherals.

The //c+ broke all that, you bought it, took it home, and discovered that literally nothing worked. All the software being sold on 3.5" was for the IIGS, and didn't work in your machine, and all the software for the IIe/c/\+ came on 5.25".

So, your nice compact standalone machine, suddenly requires you to drive back to the computer store and buy a 5.25" floppy drive. A piece of hardware that was a good 1/3 or so the total size of the machine. No longer was it a "compact" standalone setup.

The few times I actually saw //c+'s in the wild, they were lonely useless machines because the owner never purchased the 5.25" drive. Leaving them with a machine which booted prodos, and maybe appleworks.

A compact IIGS in that form factor clocked at 4Mhz with the 3.5" drive would have been a great product. Heck it would have made more sense to have put a hard drive in it instead of the 3.5". Apple did neither, because they just wanted to milk the II market a bit more so they could release the next mac.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember creating a math library in Apple BASIC, and a stamps collector application for my father, with its own database system way before I learned what a database was. Learned Pascal, and tried learning assembly but that was too advanced for me. I was in highschool, so many memories in the Apple //c!

Some more interesting things that I remember:

The packaging of the computer smell to apples and lasted many years.

Lots of experimentation with graphics and colors (with a green monochrome monitor), sound, poke/peek, disk and file formats, etc.

Trying to create a 3D vector game about a robot exploring a haunted house, got to complete a stairway climbing scene.

Playing around with text to speech: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIejqWEV_8w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIejqWEV_8w)

Playing some of my favourite games of all time: Wolfenstein (predecessor of the 3D versions), and Bard's Tale.

Testing a self-replicating virus in Pascal from some Polish magazine.

Trying to wire a circuit to the joystick port, causing sparks and damaging the port :d

</comment><comment><USER5> I had this exact model growing up, it was the computer that I first experienced programming on. My dad tossed it while I was away at college, I'm still unhappy about that.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, that was my first computer I had in our house growing up and used it to write a lot of 8th grade history papers using PFS Write, playing Lode Runner, printing stuff in Printshop. Oh, and I remember programming basic on it, where you'd even write the line numbers on each line of code.... I believe I made some version of an Dungeons & Dragons character generator. Don't forget about the sound that the Dot-matrix printers made then. Gave me my first taste of growing up to work with computers all the time....

</comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone explain what we are seeing here? I've never had an Apple II, unfortunately.

The guy is running a terminal emulator on the Apple II? Or does it understand vt220 instructions natively?

What is this interface, an editor?

Very cool stuff nonetheless.

<comment><USER8> _The guy is running a terminal emulator on the Apple II?_

It looks like it's exactly that. The zany CHIP computer 'wifi modem' used to connect is itself a more powerful computer than the vintage 'terminal'.

<comment><USER9> You can do this with just the serial port and a USB to serial converter with something like a RPi that will emulate a modem for you.

[http://podsix.org/articles/pimodem/](http://podsix.org/articles/pimodem/)

However that can be replaced with a plipbox (I believe he has open sourced it and you can build your own).

[http://lallafa.de/blog/amiga-projects/plipbox/](http://lallafa.de/blog/amiga- projects/plipbox/)

You can just plug this into the back of your PC. This is a good demonstration of how it all works.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egi3MiSgV1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egi3MiSgV1k)

<comment><USER8> No doubt. I just meant it as yet-another mildly entertaining way to think about exponential growth. Apple put this turd out about a decade after their first computer. It's, at best, about four times faster than the original.

30 years after it was discontinued, you need a computer many thousands of times more powerful to connect the //c+ to a network. That computer costs $9.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a DEC 440 and a HP 700/96 terminal and I love and use both. I can do almost anything using them (I still can read most of the web using one of the several text-based web browsers as well), but the main problem for me is using multi-byte encodings, mainly UTF-8.

I though about writing a terminal application that would stand between the physical terminal and /dev/tty* to translate a UTF-8 multi-byte character to a predefined ASCII character. It would be confusing, but still less confusing than the mess I get today when I try to see information code d in UTF-8.

iconv is not a good choice because, AFAIK, there are hundreds of code points impossible to be translate to character sets that have 256 possible values.

Any tips?

</comment><comment><USER11> Damn this is a hoot! Love that people are keeping these machines alive. I had a Mac LC with the Apple IIe card in college. After college I tried to keep it alive as long as possible. I connected a 56k modem to it to connect to the internet by PPP. I saw the modem lights flash on and get faster and faster, and then stop and come back on dribbling in slowly only to speed up and then stop again, over and over. I then learned that the LC didn't have hardware flow control. I then admitted to myself I had to let go of the LC. :(

</comment><comment><USER3> What that //c+ could really use for Apple's 44th birthday is a deep clean!

Along with a "Retrobrite" treatment to remove the yellowing from the ABS case parts and restore it's original "platinum" appearance:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright)

<comment><USER9> While retro-brighting does make it look nice, it can make the plastic brittle. Also on some old computers (Atari STs) you can damage the look permanently if you use even slightly the wrong solution (many people use the Hydrogen Peroxide from ladies hair bleaching producs and it not advisable on some models). It also takes a fair bit of effort and if you aren't in sunny climate the process can be very slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember salivating over the IIc ads in magazines at the time, also around the time I saw War Games. Don't think I ever touched one though. And shortly after the Mac came out and a few years the Amiga so its days were numbered.

<comment><USER2> This is a IIc+, not the original IIc. It came out much later than the mac and IIGS, but was sadly only 8-bit and did little but confuse the market.

<comment><USER3> Any _true_ fan of classic Apple knows it's //c, not a "IIc"!

There was also the original "Apple ][" and "Apple ][+". Only the IIe and IIgs were stylised with "II".

<comment><USER13> I am strongly tempted to start calling it an Apple 2, now; to go with MacOS 10. (-:

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, just realized the movie Explorers has that model of computer!

<comment><USER15> Explorers was actually using a IIc, not a IIc+! The main difference is that the "plus" is much faster (4 mhz, I think?) and has a 3.5" floppy. I had a IIc growing up... only 1 mhz, 5.25" floppy.

<comment><USER14> Got it. So cool, though! Never thought of looking it up so I'm extra pleased to see its successor on HN. Going to have to rewatch it soon!

<comment><USER16> If you haven't seen it, check out [http://www.starringthecomputer.com/](http://www.starringthecomputer.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why is this article so small, couldn't the author take a bit of time to explain some things?

</comment><comment><USER18> That is absolutely fantastic!

</comment><comment><USER19> how much are they for on ebay?

<comment><USER19> the old apple machines of course

<comment><USER20> This is one of the rarer specific Apple II models (happens to also be the fastest and the last released). They're maybe $300+ or so in good shape. The more common Apple IIe goes for significantly less. I bought one for $50 4 or 5 years ago.

<comment><USER21> Weird to hear it described as "rare" because it was the only Apple that I had as a kid, but there were a _lot_ of Apple IIe/II+ around at the time. (I remember that we had a 300 baud modem, actual Bell equipment, hooked up to it.)

Still the IIgs might be more rare? I seem to recall the world had moved on by the time that came out.

<comment><USER20> Are you sure you had a IIc _+_ and not just a regular IIc? The easiest difference to notice is that the IIc+ has a 3.5" floppy drive, while the IIc has a 5.25" drive. The IIc+ came out in 1988, as opposed to 1984 for the IIc.

I don't have hard data of course, but I've been an avid Apple II and Mac hobbyist for a while, and own every model of Apple II. I think the only Apple II model that's rarer than the IIc+ is the original II, and that might not even be true. (The original II is _definitely_ more expensive, but I assume demand is also much higher.)

The IIgs is pretty easy to come by. It came out two years before the IIc+ and was also on sale for a lot longer than the IIc+. The IIe is definitely the most common. It was in production and on sale for 11 years, and schools bought tons of them.

<comment><USER21> Yeah it was a IIc - I had overlooked the plus because I didn't even know the IIc+ existed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Plug and play predictive customer analytics platform for digital marketers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.customerlabs.co/#.VZYa8NjnVTQ.hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> Digital marketers spend lot of time on analysing data rather initiating conversations with prospects and customers. We decided to build an system which will be a great assistant to digital marketers help them to be more productive.

Few clicks you would know which segment is best, where they will engage and start an engagement campaign.

We are looking for early adopters with whom we are looking to co-create the product.</comment>


Four conspiracy theories proven to be true [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/BuzzFeedVideo/videos/1936506359823570/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR:

1) "Acoustic Kitty"[0] - not really a conspiracy theory. To be a conspiracy theory you need two things, at least - a conspiracy, and theorists. This was just a failed attempt to weaponize a cat.

2) That the government poisoned alcohol during the Prohibition. I've heard that this was confirmed, and debunked, so I don't know. Half points I guess.

3) MKUltra[1]. Yeah, but that's like the one conspiracy theory just about everyone who knows about conspiracy theory knows about.

4) "Is Area 51 fact or fiction?"... also not a conspiracy theory. No one doubted the existence of the facility (other than the government of course) so much as its official purpose.

So - not four conspiracy theories, and certainly not four _proven_ conspiracy theories. You can do better, Hacker News.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.buzzfeed.com/rickysans/4-conspiracy-theories- that...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/rickysans/4-conspiracy-theories-that-are- true#.xo7wX9jDp)

<comment><USER4> I can't see the article, the whole domain is blacklisted by adblock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYZ44Vc03xs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYZ44Vc03xs)</comment>


Apple selling iPhone SE at lower $249 price on its clearance store (Again) - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MP8G2LL/A <comment><USER2> Hoping that this means there'll be a replacement at this form factor!</comment>


Craigslist reportedly blocks search engines to kill competitors - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/craigslist-reportedly-blocks-search-engines-to-kill-competitors/

<comment><USER2> As a PadMapper user this saddens me, but I can only wonder why they didn't do it sooner. Craigslist posts are so short-lived, I don't know why they would want them indexed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did these people do any fact checking? I just ran another test:

visit <http://sfbay.craigslist.org/bia/>

spot ad for a kids Giant MTX 250 bike <http://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/bik/3189980073.html>

perform a google search for the same thing [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acraigslist.org+giant+m...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acraigslist.org+giant+mtx+san+francisco&btnG=Search)

result number two in the set is that posting, with the following summary:

Giant MTX 250 Kid's Mountain Bike sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/bik/3189980073.html 4 minutes ago ... Giant kid sized hardtail mountain bike for sale. It is a 21 speed, and it has front suspension. The bike was always taken care of, and is in perfect ...

"4 minutes ago" tells me Google is having no problems hitting craigslist.

<comment><USER4> ...Do you do any fact checking?

I just checked the source:

<meta name="robots" content="NOARCHIVE,NOFOLLOW">

<comment><USER5> Nothing new. That tag has always been in place. It's to prevent using an ad for SEO purposes</comment></comment></comment>


If you're worried about the GitHub acquisition, here's what to look out for - <AUTHOR> https://userinterfacing.com/if-youre-really-worried-about-the-github-acquisition-heres-what-to-look-out-for/ <comment><USER2> Nice in-depth look at all the facets of this deal including the ToS stuff! I expect the most compelling bit will turn out to be the lack of anything nefarious happening after MS bought LinkedIn -- everyone thought the sky was going to fall then too...and it didn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> LinkedIn said in it's ToS update post acquisition that they'd keep their own terms separate, which I imagine will be the same for GitHub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Solid summary!</comment>


Programming Sucks (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

<comment><USER2> A great read, I actually laughed out loud in places with some of the descriptions, and I think I've met half the bridge engineering team in a past life.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to be a lot of text with a lot of random complaints about code. I think the author has misunderstood the value of code. It's not inherent but related to the corresponding business value.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> cfeduke linked to this from the comments on 'What is Code?', seemed worthy of its own submission.</comment>