stuhacking

I think you can be polite and terse, friend.

You mean when it wasn't up to your standard?

The total number of upvotes on an article determines what the wider HN community thinks of it.

On the other hand (and I'm slightly playing Devil's advocate here), books and other physical media go out of print eventually. It can become difficult to find a copy of some archaic technical manual that interests you. (Anyone selling any Symbolics manuals? :-))

There is no reason for a digital publishing to stop creating new copies of a digital work (once they finally develop an economic model that works.)

This is not bloat, it's flexibility.

Emacs does not come with a lot of features built in, it comes with lots of loadable modules. If you don't need them then don't load them. The notion that Emacs is bloated has not really stood since around 1985.

The power to write a first person maze (which just blew my mind since it appears to be written as a character based hack, rather than an embedded widget) is the same power that allows you to write powerful libraries for modifying text.

I'm asking a different question.

Rendering a page as a semantically structured document won't remove the ability to globally disable a feature. (In fact, I would argue that it would make it easier.)

It's fair enough that pg does whatever he likes... no one can argue that point.

Why not stop rendering HN pages in tables with inline formatting and render the page as a semantically structured document with a default style sheet. This will allow others to come along and restyle the site as they see fit. Don't like comment points? hidden. Post score is less than -4? hidden.

I personally don't understand the reasoning behind using tables as formatting and inline styles on a site whose content generally includes articles about web development.

Actually, I'm wondering what Haskell has to do with any of this at all.

You're comparing the size of the current incarnation of a fairly modern functional programming runtime with the capacity of computers that existed 10 years before the first incarnation was realised...

The only message I can take from that is that programs today are quite big. That's only really interesting from a nostalgic point of view, I don't see what relevance it has to the discussion of mutability?

Of course, I could have missed something obviously significant here...

1990?

I think the issue of mutability in OOP vs FP pre-dates that.

Mutable objects are there so that you don't have to create new instances whenever a field changes. The danger of shared mutable objects is that the ground can change beneath your feet.

Immutable objects enable safe sharing, however, if you have an immutable object and want to change it, you have to copy it and make the change during construction of the new object.

I guess the 'copy penalty' in either case depends on the size of your objects.

This is probably aimed at the subset of HN readers that haven't quite made it yet.

Freetard, iFag, luser, Microdroid, B1ff, Pointy haired, Marketroid.

The 'us and them' mentality exists across many boundaries and I don't think it's going away any time soon. Most just learn to ignore it because whatever you decide is good, someone, somewhere, disagrees with you.

I'm sorry, I misunderstood the situation you described.

Testing a DB connection sounds more like integration than unit testing.

Mocks are used to fake things that add significant overhead but no value. If you have a suite of 1000 unit tests, you really don't want half of them making actual database requests.

Simply making 'safe copies' of the database data does not solve the problem that Mocks are intended to solve.

So, maybe IE isn't a great browser, but it still has actual people working on it. I bet at least one person on the IE team uses Firefox or Chrome in the office for regular browsing.

Think of it this way: The people who work on IE are probably well aware of the areas that need improvement. They might not get to make the decisions about where the work is focused. There may not even be enough effort available to put into major changes. Then there's the issue of backwards compatibility that plagues Microsoft products.

Microsoft is full of really nice people and talented developers. This is a gracious gesture.