Maybe the city planning commission that decides how many apartments can be built, shouldn't be stocked with current property owners whose wealth is tied to the artificially low supply of apartments in SF? Just a thought.

To be fair, Gaussian is orders of magnitude worse. See <http://www.bannedbygaussian.org/>.

Doesn't Schrodinger own PyMOL, which is open source?

Amazing that the covers wouldn't have existed if infinite copyright existed just a few centuries earlier.

What, are you implying that infinite copyright exists now? Because copyright now is lifetime plus 70 years.

There's a pretty solid pattern of late of it being extended at the same rate as the passage of time, so it might as well be infinite.

I'm sure they could have. But would they? The story would have at least played out differently if that initial conversation had gone, "hey, let's pay someone to painstakingly draw animals and then transfer them to scratchboard" rather than "hey, look at these gorgeous woodcuts".

We now go to the original sources of the old engravings (we have a big library of old books full of them), and we also have a few illustrators who are able to work in that style. When we started out, we had no money for high-end illustrations; luckily the animal images I chose for the series were in the public domain. Fortuitous.

I agree that you should never use 1 character loop counters, but a lot of the lazy programmers out there don't agree. They've never had to do maintenance programming (or heaven forbid make old code actually work/bugfree/do something new) that has the following variable names:

i ii iii j ij jj ji jjj jij jjj

One letter loop counters and their ilk are always a bad idea. But saying so angers so many people because they can't possibly ever be wrong.

It's an example of using a language's idioms. If you use i in a loop, there's no need to explain yourself since there's a common understanding as to what this means.

If you use i, you're a bad programmer. You can't search for the variable name, you can't make sure it is used correctly everywhere. You're a bad person.

You may not like the company, and you are entitled to have that view (I might even share it!), but to state that everyone that works there in some form of engineering capacity is lacking of praise for their engineering feats is quite disingenuous.

Take a look at all the different repos they have on their github page, along with projects like HipHop-PHP, Cassandra, Tornado and the thousands of commits they have contributed to MySQL, PHP, memcached, Varnish. Let alone the number of sites they integrate with and their active user base, Facebook's engineers are quite intelligent and have solved some amazing problems. I'd like to think that most of HN thinks like engineers and marketers, positions that generally do best when their time isn't wasted by flinging mud for political "gain". Please keep it that way.

I finally found the manual that scientists used to write their code!

I remember a physics student ahead of me lamenting the fact that scientists had written their own software (ROOT & Geant). He said it was hard to use.