przemoc

> I don't think it's an insult to anyone that the meaning of the word has changed.

I see that only people clung to their misuse of hacker and related terms are advocating that the meaning has changed. Well, for mass-media hackers are computer criminal, should we acknowledge it and stop using the term in an original computer-related meaning?

Hackers in fact rarely refers to themselves by this term. They are also quite modest and open to any critique, contrary to many boastful youngsters calling themselves "hackers".

> People call themselves hackers in admiration of the kind of hacking you point to.

Hackers admiration is fine, but the logic is flawed. Admiration alone doesn't change you into the one you admire, so it's quite awkward calling oneself someone she or he is not yet, don't you think?

> Also, as another commenter pointed out, programmers call themselves hackers to speak to say "I would be programming even if it didn't pay the bills."

"I would be hacking even if it didn't pay the bills." -> thinking or saying that doesn't make anyone a "hacker", even more if we're talking about "programming".

Hacker - programmer that is not afraid of starving. Amusing definition.

> If anything I'd say your reverence for the term itself is dangerously close to hero worship, if not outright hero worship.

Worship? I call it accuracy.

> Identifying with the culture of the hackers you're referring to helps us keep our sights on being our best selves and serves as a reminder what kind of work is top notch.

Sure, I don't see anything wrong in identifying with (meant as aiming to become part of) the culture of the hackers, but calling myself a hacker just because of my aspirations would be plainly wrong, so I cannot commend such practices.

> How about the most blatant redefinition -- from "a guy hacking trees with an axe"?

I'm not saying that words cannot get new meaning in some new emerging contexts. Languages evolve, that goes without saying. But when people start to deteriorate their meaning within the same context, mostly to be able to use these terms themselves, thus feeling a bit better or cooler (because these terms used to describe exceptional people), then something wrong is happening.

> As such, a lot of people here don't do deep hacking stuff. They do simple web services...

And it's fine, really. I'm not bashing HN community for submitting stories not worth of "hacking" (according to "old meaning", as you named it) emblem (it's really nice when such stories appear, though), because on-topic is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". I'm criticizing overuse of all hack* nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and what not. I believe that most people here can tell the difference between slick and shiny CSS date picker and system emulation done using JS for instance (to stay in the browser realm). Not everyone is like Bellard, but does it mean we need to redefine "hacker" to allow its wider use and prevent covering this term in dust as the time goes? Hell no.

> So, seeing that HN has tons of introductory or trivial Node, Mongo and similar articles, why should you expect to see the "old meaning" of hacker here?

Because it's part of computer-related legacy.

Doing fun things (everyone perceive "fun" differently) doesn't need to be hard and is quite healthy. Sharing and spreading the fun is definitely ok too. But let's not pretend that doing anything fun in CS field is immediately hacking, because it's not. HN is thankfully full of people aware of it, so I'm not afraid about HN future, yet.

> You are probably a little behind the times. Like 15 years. The term "hacker" has stopped meaning exclusively these kind of guys for agres...

No. What we're dealing here actually is the effect of the urge of wannabe-hacker kids using inflected forms of "hacking" in unheard before ways next to achievements often barely worth mentioning, especially under the "hack" hat.

I'm hacking new code - I'm programming new code.

I'm hacking in a new language - I'm learning new language.

I'm hacker - I'm a bit above average programmer/web developer/whatever.

...

I simply cannot agree to these alleged redefinitions. To be honest, I also don't care if it feels so-15-years-old or so-70s. HN as a community is the last place I would like to see wholeheartedly accepting casual things as hacking. Hacking is about deep, profound understanding of computer-related stuff and things (far from trivial) you're able to achieve thanks to that.

"My limited and very biased samples suggest that hackers have a much greater intrinsic desire to improve their skills than those in other professions. We want to be ninjas not just because it will mean better-paying and more exciting jobs, but because there is something innately cool about knowing how to properly wield Javascript, Erlang or Clojure."

ENOPARSE. Beginning looked promising, but examples of what is cool quickly spoiled it completely. Hacker is most likely a good programmer, but even very good programmer doesn't have to be a hacker. Seriously, using HTML+CSS+JS, while making over 50% (80%?) of HN content, isn't hacking-related stuff at all. Heck, you can "hack" some HTML/CSS/JS platform differences in particular browsers with some workarounds, but it doesn't make you a hacker. If the things will go on, it looks like a hacker term may become a synonym of the web developer. Or programmer using lesser known languages too. It would be huge slap in the face of real hackers.

Hackers are behind stories like:

- X86 MMU fault handling is turing complete -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5261598

- The 8085's register file reverse engineered -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5314442

- Dalvik patch for Facebook for Android -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5321634

to name a few recent ones.

I don't have any similar story to share ([un]fortunately?), but I have to say that parent and grandparent comments are what make HN that interesting and it's the reason why comments are often more valuable than the articles/stories they comment (and why I sometimes read comments without even checking the OP link at all). Thank you for sharing your tidbits, cek and tmoertel!

Well, I often zoom it on the desktop computers too (depending on OS/Browser settings). :)

It could be like killing two birds with one stone actually, because making it mobile friendly quite likely would make it friendlier for non-mobile uses too.

Is it only me or the first paragraph is meant to be referencing someone well-known at Yahoo?

There is always some excuse, always!

BTW bug trackers generosity of having detailed WONTFIX statuses is yet to be seen... (but I doubt it would help much, though)

For core services like BIND I don't see any good reason to write them in more than one language (actually anything other than C/C++) and introduce cumbersome dependencies because of that. I wouldn't complain if it was some another DIY name server toy created for whatever reason (how much time it would take..., I can do it!, etc.), but it's software that will become widely deployed in upcoming years (almost) without doubt.

How much more work these 17% done in Python would take to be (re)written in C++? Would it make the code that much worse in terms of quality and managability? Having coherent, one-language codebase, is a good feature on its own too, often improving above mentioned factors.

I'm not sure it's really a bashing. I read it as he's glad after all that facebook didn't hire him, so it's more like a message for those who already "lost" or will "lose" in puzzle-based hiring process. A message that states it's not necessarily their (i.e. prospective employees) loss in the end, and the more important part that it's not a reason they should feel bad about themselves after such "loss", because solving riddles is about solving riddles and not about finding good programmers (being one doesn't necessarily exclude having puzzle-solving ability, but it's not like a symmetric difference of these sets is empty, really, more like quite voluminous, I would say).

I cannot say it's usability break if using back button allows me to go to the previously seen slide and after that forward button brings me back where I was. The only problem is that you have to wait a bit until URL is changed. OTOH it is quite useful too, because quick scrolling over the slides isn't recorded in the history, only the slides where you were for more than a mere second or so.

I have to concur, the visual side of the presentation is quite nifty and appealing.

Google, you forgot about a trackpoint.

Why I should use Bootstrap?

My friend in gamedev explained it me once. The problem with PS3 is that it is a bit esoteric platform. GPU is worse there than in xbox360, but there are 6 SPUs. OTOH writing for them is far from a pleasant task. You have to perform manual fiddling with DMA stuff. Slow bus, async requests to 64k cache (IIRC), where you must send everything and get results via DMA some time later, 64k load max, so you must do partial screen updates, syncs, etc. That makes the whole execution path in PS3 quite different from other platforms. To see good-looking PS3 games, you have to look for games developed exclusively for PS3. PS3 ports always look worse, because no one devotes at least 2x more time for them to write "proper" renderers etc. Middle-level psgl is not recommended by Sony itself, as you should use gcm, where you manually put bytecode to GPU's memory being command buffer. And for SPU asm is the way to go...

tl;dr PS3 is not the most developer-friendly platform, you can say...

But it has its own potential. Check Naughty Dog's Uncharted. Difference between U1 and U3 is huge. Same technology and 10 years of development - good engine leveraging potential of underlying complex hardware takes a lot of time.

I hate top-posting. To a degree that if I'm included in the middle of some on-going mail thread, I often rewrite top-posting quotes into bottom-posting quotes before replying.

Call me a mad guy, but it usually allows me to write much better response (in terms of quality and readability). (Incidentally, it would often allow writing better responses by previous interlocutors, if they only started doing so...)

Exceptions can be two mostly:

- Sending from the phone, where proper quoting is quite inconvenient and it's too easy to mess everything.

- Writing tl;dr summaries at the top of the mail, that are simply required for some people (but I use proper bottom-posting later).

The most important part of bottom-posting is ability to clearly respond to particular parts of the mail in a quote-response, quote-response manner. Top-posting usually works like obfuscation, making leaving some things unanswered much harder to notice. It's definitely useful in corporate environments, that goes without saying...

---

My second biggest problem regarding mails is that people rarely _really_ read them, which makes these textual conversations hard and longer than necessary. Sometimes I feel that I am the only one that reads whole mails before replying to them.

It's explained clearly at https://mega.co.nz/#blog_3

"Fact #1: Once this feature is activated [deduplication], chunk MACs will indeed be stored on the server side, but they will of course be encrypted (and we will not use ECB!). Fact #2: MEGA indeed uses deduplication, but it does so based on the entire file post-encryption rather than on blocks pre-encryption. If the same file is uploaded twice, encrypted with the same random 128-bit key, only one copy is stored on the server. Or, if (and this is much more likely!) a file is copied between folders or user accounts through the file manager or the API, all copies point to the same physical file."

So no, they don't know that two different users upload the same file, unless the key used for encryption is the same, which is almost impossible in practice.

"it’s actually really fast and responsive"

Is everyone today equipped with at least 4-core 3GHz i7s or what?

Text Edit demo is barely responsive on my Athlon 64 X2 4600+ in recent Google Chrome beta (25.0.1364.84) on up-to-date debian wheezy. To the point it's unusable, unfortunately.

I admire the project, it must have been a great fun to build it and it is impressive achievement. Really!

I still hope it may be optimized more, so it will be truly responsive. Even then it doesn't mean it's the right way to go. Web developers, please, do not write your websites as Qt apps to compile them later with emscripten-qt!

It's really slick YT front-end. You should also (unobtrusively) include your TangleTube's [1] functionality in Toogles.

[1]: http://tangletube.com/

You meant PySide 5, right? ;)

My old and somewhat related PoC project for screen casts, but still working. Just checked (debian wheezy with stock kernel 3.2.0-4-amd64). It requires building and loading simple kernel module, though.

Apparently nowadays debugfs is owner-only rw, so you have to change it or start it as root.

https://github.com/przemoc/kaos

Look for the top-right corner to see the effect while you're typing or clicking something.

P.S. Funny thing is that I don't know why I wrote >>Kprobe dependency can be easily removed by writing own input handler and it will be done in future<< back then, because when I evaluated this statement year or so ago, it didn't look that easy, and there would be more code in the end, I suppose.

Well, in Poland we do use D.[M]M.[YY]YY too, which is unfortunately quite popular, as a short version of the format with verbal month "D MMMMM YYYY r." (r. stands for "rok[u]", i.e. year). This long version is predominantly used in lots of official forms and letters here.

Sometimes I'm really baffled by the dominance of American date formats instead of clear, natural and sortable ISO 8601.

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.ffffff+ZZZZ

No reason to downvote me (whoever it was). The PDF

http://oreilly.com/openbook/utp/UnixTextProcessing.pdf

has _scanned_ pages with text layer on top of it. That's the reason why it's so big.

I applaud retyping effort, as it's always better to preserve real content than images of it (even if OCRed), but I cannot say that I'm happy about troff being used for this purpose. It can be a matter of taste, but I don't like the way formatting is done in troff/nroff. That's why I never use it directly (e.g. using ronn to convert markdown text to man page, etc.).

But I understand it's done that way to preserve "the creation process" too, which is also appreciated. And the book is about troff/nroff, so dogfooding is present. ;)

26.7 MB is because it's scanned book with text layer on top. If it was retyped in, let's say, LaTeX, and outputted to PDF it wouldn't take more than one tenth of the current size. Remember that scanning the book has also archival purpose.

Maybe it mimics twitter in this behavior? What is now is the only relevant stuff. Present doesn't see beyond 5 days time horizon.

I don't use any Apple stuff, I don't have any Apple product, and possibly won't ever have such (unless there will be MacBook with TrackPoint, but it's rather impossible), as many things are repelling me from "culture" surrounding Apple.

But! The thumb thing is one of a few things that they are justly considering in design process. It's not like I don't like big screens, but there is no one-size-fits-all, sorry. If I want to read book or comics, check some article on the net without powering on my desktop computer, etc. I can use my GoTab ION 7" tablet (I've chosen it over 10", because 10" are too big, 7" really looks like optimal size for book reading and such purposes). But my cell, i.e. mobile phone, is, as the name implies, meant to be phone mostly, thus I want it to be mobile. As a mobile thing I want to be able to operate it one-handedly, because it's damn easier and more convenient if I can pull it off from the packet, do comfortably a few taps to check this or that or make a call and put it back in the pocket. Am I a cripple? No, but my second hand is often bothered, e.g. keeping to some grip in the bus or tram. That's why I have Galaxy Ace 2, which is considered small nowadays (compared to oversized phones), having "only" 3.8" screen with quite good density (480x800 gives ~246 ppi). I sometimes do read stuff on the net using phone, but it's not its main purpose, so I wouldn't change my phone for something bigger than 4". Actually I really don't understand this trend of making ~5" and bigger phones. Yet people buy them...

So once in a while Apple do things right and limiting the phone size is definitely a good example.

My question was in fact about features that this command bar does not provide. Part of the ones you mentioned was already available before (like file editing), but simply not in a CLI-related manner. Some of these they could surely add, i.e. whatever can be put in this command bar yet not turning it into terminal.

If you're going to do real job, just do in your real terminal emulator, xterm, rxvt, you name it. What's the point of having GitHub terminal in browser? If you want to do quick'n'dirty fixes/improvements directly from the browser, then it's like asking yourself for troubles, because there is quite higher chance that you'll commit a mistake (even literally speaking) than if you'd be using your own terminal that you work with on a daily basis.

You may want to check a few CLI tools:

https://github.com/defunkt/github-gem

https://github.com/defunkt/hub - http://defunkt.io/hub/

Keyboard is at least 100x as productive as mouse (assuming you know what to do and what to type). Even the best peachy UIs cannot change it. Still there are things that aren't convenient to do from CLI like photo retouching, but these are quite obvious exceptions.

That said, I'm not sure what would you like to do in such terminal?

What about Opera users?