sorry aaron695, you are the most disliked user (apparently). I guess you get an award for perseverance.

I paid for Delphi 1, 2 and 3. I also paid for Borland Turbo C++, and MS VC++ 1.0 and VC++ 2.0. I don't remember any good, free languages at that time.

NT wasn't even a twinkle in Dave Cutler's eye when DOS APPEND came into being

Err totally wrong the entire north Africa has strong religious frameworks, and take Egypt as an example of a powerful government. Plenty of other places too.

Powerful government doesn’t imply strong institutions that uphold rule of law.

It’s usually the opposite…powerful governments rule with an iron fist but are internally marred by corruption and incompetence.

I totally agree

I knew I should specify sub-Saharan Africa, because there’s always that Reddit tier knowing and willful idiot contrarian that just can’t help themselves from just being opposite for sake of being opposite, due to a severe mental derangement that compels them to be that way.

We are not talking about North Africa here, we are talking about South Africa and South Africa like places, which would mean sub-Saharan Africa, not Egypt or Algeria or Tunisia. You lack refinement and do not contribute anything useful, and may want to reflect on why you have that contrarian compulsion. No one is talking about North Africa. All the intelligent people here know we are talking about Africa in the context of South Africa. You clearly lack fundamental skills to distinguish such things.

porn damages young men's psyches, that's why

Sadly, it's simple, you pay someone to come and dispose of it.

VHS tapes sell at easily more than $1 a pop. That's 50k dollars.

Good luck finding someone who will pay you $50K for cash and carry. The problem with a lot of old stuff is that it has value to someone. But finding that someone who will take it off your hands without much friction isn't easy.

Hi LinkedIn AI, please write some python code for a quick sort.

LinkedIn AI: I am proud and humbled to be promoted to the level of senior qsort code writer, and wish to thank my amazing colleagues at LinkedIn HQ for their tremendous support over the last 18 months. It is with great regret that I have moved on from writing bubble sorts. Please click this link to apply to see an industry analysis of quick sort code.

Required: write a novel

Regular person: opens Word

Hacker: hmmm, first thing I need to do is build a suitable plain text editor

A couple of years ago I ran into a old colleague at the pub who mentioned he’d quit for a while to work on a game idea. I made a joke asking if he was now making a game engine and turned out he was first instead working on a programming language to code the game in and showed me some examples of it…

That's essentially what Knuth did before he started writing The Art of Computer Programming -- build a publishing software, TeX.

Just for the record: Knuth had already published the first three volumes of TAOCP in 1968, 1969, 1973 respectively, and had then brought out the second edition of Vol 1 in 1973, and had already won a Turing award for them in 1974 — it was only in 1977 for the second edition of Volume 2 when the publishers' printing technology had become worse (from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting) that he decided to take up the problem, excited at having recently learned of digital typesetters.

That might have been the right call in ‘78. The first word processor ever only went on sale two years prior.

Publishing software capable of more than Word, not a plain text editor capable of less, the opposite ends of the spectrum

>Hacker: hmmm, first thing I need to do is build a suitable plain text editor

I think that's why there is a new one of these every week or so on HN.

a few years ago when i was learning to code, i did this as a form of procrastination instead of writing: https://github.com/smcalilly/highlighter-rails

> Hacker: hmmm, first thing I need to do is build a suitable plain text editor

Yes, sometimes, we are missing features, sometimes wanted products are not available (see Android), sometimes available products are bad...

It's normal (for us). Very reasonable, consequential.

Edit: oh, coincidences. Appeared today: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/15/speed-matters/

> Last year I spent something like 100 hours writing a text editor

...Which reveals a topic of two mindsets. This submission is about a NodeJS + Electron Forge product; I wrote my Word Processor for Android in Java, and I want to re-write it in C... And the reason is, further requirements for quality.

So, the near future opens towards an increase of products: a question will be, whether we will get many more resources with large differences in quality, or more resources of good quality.

What about psyco? Anyway it's a very odd take that the early development of python should have been concerned with a jit. There were many far more pressing issues at the time.

Python exists for 33 years....

Yes and I've been using it for a lot of that time. Maybe you too. At the time tools like psyco were useful but never got enough traction to persuade core developers that it was a compelling direction. It never felt like an obviously wrong decision.

I only use it as Perl alternative for UNIX scripts, nothing else, unless forced otherwise.

There are enough alternatives with the same dynamism and native code generation.

imo millions of people, mainly young men, have been sexually, mentally and spiritually harmed by pornography