skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fascinating. The above post should act as a reminder that Sarcasm on the internet is really not a good idea.

Don't feel bad, it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious, that's always the fault of the writer ( usually the mistake is to employ sarcasm in first place ).
The compiler chooses, probably based on the type and number of elements. In theory it should know how to do this efficiently, because this syntax returns only immutable collections, so the compiler knows up front exactly what the collection will ever contain.

This is what the proposal says about that decision:

It is likely to be higher in space and time performance, in that the
compiler can choose efficient implementations for small collections
(such as empty collections and singletons). On the other hand, it is
less flexible, in that you cannot specify the implementation type.

From: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-March/0...
This explains my disdain for almost everything Adobe on OS X. It's not just that Flash sucks on my Mac. It's that almost all their products suck... They're not focused on OS X.

And I'm not the only person:
http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php
Yes. Not a migration per se. You're right
He's not outlawing cross compilers. He's outlawing innovation in third party tools and frameworks on the iPhone platform. The clause is much more broad than cross compilation.
The 'Solver' (http://www.solver.com/) tool in Excel is widely used for many business optimization problems. If you have x & y quantities of two raw materials and products A and B consume different proportions of each raw material, then you can use the solver to determine the most optimal production strategy that maximizes your profit (or minimizes your labor requirements etc.)
Spreadsheets are the most popular declarative (or zero order functional) languages in the world. There were even talks about spreadsheets on the International Conference on Functional Programming 2009.
This article is, frankly, childish. Apple was a fading platform when Adobe made that decision, and it made perfect business sense.

Until about 2008, the last time I had even seen a Mac on this (Eastern) side of the Atlantic was about 1991 or so.
it's his platform, it's his rules.

you don't like it, Android's probably for you.
Whoa. 120k is a small town these days?

(EDIT: Context: the town in which I grew up would be around number 90 on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Aus... )
If you put your mouse exactly at the top of the page, a toolbar pops up. But this took me a long time to discover, and I kept using the arrow keys.
well the link is for the beta sign up. Looks good though
Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.

I don't 100% agree with Apple's decision to ban non-native language apps, nor do I 100% disdain Adobe (Lightroom is a phenomenal product IMHO). But my dislike of Flash, the now comical number of bloggers jumping on the "Apple is evil, look at their SDK" bandwagon, and this statement all together made me laugh.
> these cross-compiler vendors never support Apple as a first class citizen.

Apps should be judged on their own merits, not based on the original language they were coded in.
So it's impossible to write an innovative tool or framework in C, Objective-C, C++ or Javascript?
Jobs makes a valid point: intermediate layers hinder progress of the platform
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This certainly does appear to be a common point of confusion for languages that have both mutable variables and closures:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/271440/c-captured-variabl...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/233673/lexical-closures-i...

I remember bumping into the issue myself in JavaScript, but only once. After I became aware of the concept, it was never a problem again, in any language. Those one-time issues don't worry me. It's the problems that come up over and over again that are worth fixing at the language level.

A good way to explain it is to analogize captured variables to variables used in the body of a loop or conditional. Variables are only ever created when a declaration is evaluated, and a variable has exactly one value at any given time. The obvious alternative, copying the variable when it's closed over, seems more confusing to me. And the current restriction, that captured variables are final, is just going to force hackery.

Ultimately, if Java grunts want closures, they will have to understand variable capturing. It's part of the package.
Thank you, that was the sentiment I was trying to find.

It is also worth to point out that it almost never happens with the founder or even the original group that starts it. It almost always happens when the group get filled with holy warriors who go far beyond the original mission or when it gets filled with a bunch of rent-seekers.
The point is that flash is a fading technology now... in a few years HTML5 will replace it for video purposes. The iPhone is a better gaming plattform. What if Apple released a similar technology to run Obj-C applications in the browser (think of the market for the already developed games to the iPhone)
Reading the Acrobat Reader gripes makes me appreciate having a wonderful, lean PDF viewer (Preview.app) built into the operating system, and it actually fits the look and feel of the rest of the OS unlike Acrobat.
I actually tried putting a website together in a similar fashion a while back. All the hacks quickly got difficult to maintain, and the code was ugly. I was too ashamed of what I've created to share it with the world. Now I see someone actually built up that courage :)
It's impossible to innovate except in those areas - all those languages, as implemented on the iPhone, have significant drawbacks, which shouldn't need to be explained to anyone with any history of programming in multiple languages.
The tl;dr version:

Large consulting companies often tell their clients what they want to hear, which more or less negates the point of consultants but can often pay better. There are ethical concerns here.

I like the story, but the article itself has way too many metaphors that cloud the point.

Or maybe I'm just too used to having all my stories condensed into 140 characters...
"What if Apple released a similar technology to run Obj-C applications in the browser"

Like Mircosoft tried to with with ActiveX? I don't think so...
Washington DC is there - it's labeled "District of Columbia"
> On a theoretical level, I think consciousness has already been explained and is not a hard problem unless you are using a hard definition. A state of consciousness is whatever neurons happen to be ON or ACTIVE in an arbitrarily small interval of time. The information held in a system at a current time.

That's a wild simplification. At least you must consider that the topology of the neurosis different from person to person (and in large enough amounts of time for the same person), the fact that nothing is as discrete as ON or OFF in the biological world and the possibility (as far as I know not refuted) that some neurons might carry more state than a single bit. I don't feel, by reading neuroscience papers, that we're in any wau close to a real understanding of how brains (let alone human brains) work.
That logic terminates in a place that disallows any company from making any business decision ever that might negatively impact any class of developer.
Also Apple had been dicking around with their OS strategy for years before Jobs came back into the fray. Initially Apple was not going to provide the Carbon API and tried "suggesting" Adobe (and other software firms) to port their software to this entirely different OS. Without the benefit of hindsight, Adobe made the correct decision.
Change the framing of this for a second.

Suppose instead of Apple, it was the government deciding which apps get approved, and which don't.

Would you support the government to make the correct decisions, by fiat? Or would you rather a free market see opportunities in crappy applications, and produce better alternatives?
wow, chrome on linux scores 137. Higher than the latest firefox!
E518: Unknown option: fullscreen
This is so true. My father took on a nightclub all by himself. It was a stupid move, he lost a lot of money doing that. What he was missing was a partner. Not only to lessen his work load, but also to keep him motivated.

This is the reason you see musicians take 5 year breaks, or even quitting music. They are lacking in motivation. Look at the band Queen, They are still making music and touring, but half the band has quit. Freddie Mercury died and John Deacon quit music altogether. What did John Deacon lose? His motivation. Brian May and Roger Taylor both had a lot of say in the bands creative process, and that process motivated them to continue, even after Freddie had passed away. Now, Deacon, he wasn't as involved in that process, and he was the one who quit.
Hey Xal, I'd like to take you up on that offer. How do I go about getting that deal?
This is the miracle of Markdown: everyone basically already knows it. I have read more than one story like this

http://atendesigngroup.com/blog/what-it-not-what-it-looks

where programmers thought Of course, these naive non-programmers will want WYSIWYG -- but in fact they preferred Markdown once they found it.
Apple is in the business of controlling its platform and that's how they think they can make money selling design driven consumer computer equipment. So, from that perspective, Apple's choice to have a restrictive list of supported languages makes perfect business sense too. Not saying I agree with Apple's choice, but it's theirs to make.
Safari on iPod Touch (3.1.3 OS): 113
Frankly, my biggest complaint about the article was that the sarcasm was far too obvious to be funny. Not that I disagree with the idea that Sarcasm on the internet is really not a good idea.
Isn't the headline offer he's talking about, which he goes into at the end, really just a very standard clause in a layoff agreement?
You seem to be missing the use of an absolute value function on your 'comparison' page.
Interesting. Chrome 4.1 (stable) on Windows scores 118.
I was working in the same markets at the same time - Magnetar's trade was widely known and considered pretty shady. We thought they were exposing themselves to big liability/reputation risk, but it seems like it worked out fine for them.
Exactly, I find all this outrage online to be a pointless exercise. A better usage of time is to write a cross-platform Objective-C based game engine.

http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/04/09/section-...
omg what if he came up with a decent syntax for tex? that would be truly earth shattering.
gvim doesn't need them either.

Goodbye toolbar

:set guioptions-=T

Goodbye menubar

:set guioptions-=m
Safari 4.0.5 / OS X 10.6.3/x86 - 120/160.

I believe various configuration settings might affect the score.
Whatever version of Iron that I'm using on Linux: 118.
Not really.

An innovative person could make an Objective-C game engine, or a C++ game engine or what have you. The language does not disallow innovation in frameworks or third party tools, it opens up a new avenue for that innovation.

Now mind you I don't agree with the path they have taken. But I do think it is important right now for cooler heads to prevail. Making statements like 'Apple is outlawing innovation...' is not contributing in a constructive fashion to the solution search.

What are Apple's concerns?

Are they legitimate?

How can the developer community address Apple's concerns?

If Apple sees not only real effort, but real progress towards addressing those concerns, perhaps it might be willing to loosen up on the reigns.

As it stands though, the concerns Apple has are legitimate. Now that we know what they are, can we move towards addressing them.

I just think that staking out these strident positions makes for good blog reading, but it is not going to solve anything.

If we put our 'crowdsourced' heads together we can come up with a solution that could allow the situation to develop with positive impact with respect to everyone's interests.
It's the same link as the story, http://draftboardapp.com
The way my prof told it: "I'm really not sure why people keep asking if P=NP. Of course it does, when N=1."
Hyperbole, probably.
Yeah of course, but languages which compile to C also have (huge, IMO) drawbacks, especially with regards to debugging and profiling, things that have a profound effect on the end user experience.

I'm not trying to defend the restriction or anything. It's Jobs' right to pull this shit and its everyone else's right to move to Android. I just think it's less about innovation in tools and frameworks and more about keeping the platform isolated for business reasons. This is just an extension of the "no interpreters" rule, which more severely (IMO) hampers language and tool innovation.
I've found a cool wiki-like software that is fairly simple to use and might fill your CMS needs. It resides within one HTML file meaning good portability, and has a large community attached. However, I forgot the name and spent the past half-hour looking for it.

http://www.tiddlywiki.com/
For lists, you can also do this:
List<String> strings =
new ArrayList<String> (Arrays.asList("one", "two", "three"));
It's comming up fine now on IE 7.0.5730.11 + FireFox 3.5.1 + Chrome 4.1.249.1045 all on XP Pro SP2 behind Zone-alarm with mobile code control off.

For development, you can see what browsers are in general use right now with this link:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Here is Evolt's browser archive for downloading older browser versions if you need any:
http://browsers.evolt.org/
I have to agree with the laughing part, and I might say that calling this a "religious war" is going a bit too far, but I'd say that for emacs vs vim fanatics as well.

I'm frustrated with Apple for their choices, but I expect that developers will work with it, and Apple does have some good points to their aid. Overall, Apple will happily bicker with their developers, but in the end they will always be trying to support them. On the sarcasm part, I think anyone coming across this and missing that won't think too much about it, and no harm done will be remembered.
Trendy boutique
Use your professors. There are no stupid questions only stupid answers. I am sure they will be glad that you ask, assuming you are a CS student.
Sarcasm?

I'm no Adobe fan, but give them some credit. They may be influenced by Apple's position, but whatever we're seeing from them now has surely been under development for a long time (i.e. months, not days).
TiddlyWiki: A Personal Web Notebook
The free market allows Apple the freedom to limit who can enter their app store, just as it allows me the freedom to limit which apps I approve of and buy.
I don't think this is specific to business consulting, or to Dubai. I know several people who were hired by high-powered technical consulting firms here in the US; all of them were fairly bright, attractive young people with very little experience of any sort.
I think the article is unduly harsh but I think it makes a valid point. It's sort of a live by the sword, die by the sword thing. Adobe made the right business decision in 2002 and I don't think you can fault them for that. But Apple's making the right business decision now and I don't think you can fault them for that. So I think the bottom line is that Adobe's falling victim to the same thing that they did to Apple back in 2002 and that's just the reality of the world.
"Given its immense importance..."

You're seriously going to argue that NYC isn't immensely important?

From Wikipedia:
"New York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is one of the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over global commerce, finance, media, culture, art, fashion, research, education, and entertainment. As host of the United Nations Headquarters, it is also an important center for international affairs."

When the aliens came to Earth in "Independence Day", they didn't blow up Philadelphia... they blew up New York.
iPhone is the same, not surprisingly.
tl;dr version:

Consultants suck.

It was TL, I DR it.
Interesting, thanks for the advice. I guess I was basing my assumptions on the experiences friends have had at larger firms, where all the salary changes were relegated to yearly reviews.

This is my first time working at a company with more than 40 people, so it's all been a learning process. Glad I asked about raises here-- otherwise, I probably would've waited till my first year was up, only to be disappointed!
Adobe at that time could not support the development of an extensive platform for a small user base OS.

But right now, there are no reason why limit the options to develop for the iPhone OS.
No, it really isn't.

Not at any of the small businesses I ever worked for, where the guys at the top probably decide these things themselves.

Not at a very, very large business I worked for, where the guys at the top probably didn't know the name of anyone in my building and everything was done by HR and Legal automatons.

And not at any medium sized businesses I have ever worked for, either.

The only time an agreement like this is standard is when you know you're doing something you shouldn't be, and you know you're about to lose your legitimate influence over people who could out you, so you try to buy their silence because to you the cost is cheap.
Sorry, but your reasoning is just plain wrong in a number of ways.

I saw news about plans for Creative Suite being able to export to HTML5 months ago. Adobe knows that that Flash is going to lose market share, they're smart enough to see the writing on the wall and prepare accordingly. Their designer tools don't have to be tied to Flash's fate. I think it's beautiful that the same tools can theoretically target Flash Player, HTML5, native iPhone, Android, etc. Everything is just an abstraction to ones and zeroes in the end.

The first effect of Apple's clause has been to brew up a shitstorm among developers who understand how computation works and how arbitrary business practices aren't aligned with technical reality.
I think most developers agree that unit tests are a good thing(tm).

I do agree that the authors assertion that not writing tests come down to A) ignorance or B) laziness. There is, after all, a third option. In a startup environment, where you're trying to rush a product to market, unit tests are often just not feasible. It's not ignorance or laziness, it's lack of resources to actually do it.
Im Translator - Terjemahan Bahasa Inggris,Arab ke Indonesia Add-Ons Mozilla
i have the feeling, children or not, that we wouldn't have been hearing this story if the $16,000 offer had been a bit larger.
Yeah, that was my only complaint. Satire is so much better when halfway through you go, "Oh, I get it!". This is just simple, if fun, sarcastic ranting.

And I am extremely surprised there's a person out there that didn't get it.

Sarcasm on the internet is totally a good idea!
"Perhaps being an 'important' well-known city counts against being displayed..."

Then why are London, Paris, Mumbai, Shanghai, Tokyo, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco on the same map that New York isn't on?
Me-ware, Us-ware and Them-ware in Science
There was another important point: a guy new to the consulting business and with no significant amount of relevant training or support wound up being marketed as an expert and became the senior person on each project he joined.

I've seen this in action, both from the client side (management brought in absurdly highly paid consultants to back up what they wanted when their own people wouldn't support it) and the other side (friends and friends of friends who went into consultancy firms; few of them have stayed there much longer than this guy).

What I don't get is why shareholders (for big companies) or government auditors (for government organisations) don't openly criticise the policy of wasting money hiring these completely unqualified people who either offer no real benefit or actively cause harm to the projects they join. Obviously a genuine expert could offer useful consultancy in their field of expertise, but that doesn't seem to be the MO of these big multinational consultancy shops.
The first Mac came out 1984 and it was just a sketch of what it could be.

In the following years the Mac and its software was shaped by the people using it and developing as much, if not more, as by Apple itself.

Desktop Publishing was one of the areas where the Mac first showed in a practically useful form (1985) that its base was useful. But it was not new. ALL the basic ideas existed in the Xerox Star ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star ): laser printers, document publishing, layout, networked workgroups, user interface metaphor (the office), page description language, object embedding, ...). Apple designed the Mac to be much more affordable - but a useful system with disk, large screen, network, memory, laser printer added up to a substantial amount of money.

I'm not sure that I can name ANYTHING in early Mac-based desktop publishing that was not already presented in some form in the Xerox Star - the implementation of Desktop Publishing on the Mac then was joint work of Adobe (Postscript), Aldus (PageMaker), Canon (the laser printer) and others.

I don't believe in a company that thinks it can define the 'progress of a platform'. In my view progress it is a joint process by many people and companies, a process of ideas, implementations, failures, retrying, improving, feedback, ...

For the iPhone OS developers are degraded to do what Apple pleases. Innovation is no longer happening between people on the same level - Apple thinks it can control the process and the results. I think that leads to a shallow form of progress and innovation.
Even so, there's a difference between disallowing frameworks and disallowing bindings to other languages. Bindings are relatively simple to keep up to date.

I find it difficult to believe Apple would add a language feature to C/Objective-C/C++ that wouldn't essentially already exist in Java/Python/Haskell/etc. Not because Apple wouldn't be willing to do it, but because there aren't any game-changing language features waiting to be incorporated into modern programming languages. Blocks already exist in most languages as (more powerful) closures.
He's an excellent computer scientist but he's never claimed to be a good language designer ;)
I don't agree with the video ratings - codec support isn't defined in the HTML5 specification. It's not really fair to give a rating based on unspecified decisions.

There's still a big debate about who's wrong and right, why should this test get involved? Surely some people will just see that Chrome gets 30/30 and think that Firefox/Safari are thus inferior.
OmniWeb 5.10.2 sneaky peek (v622.11 r128512): 113
(not in the rakaz.nl list)
I think that the grandparent meant that you could sell it to end users.
This site design is totally unusable on android devices, I cannot workout how to change slides.
> Or use Google Collections in Java 1.5 or higher.

See Sandman reply.
Thomas Pynchon and the Badass Luddites
I have been recommending it to many. I bought the audio CD last year, and am anxiously waiting for Freedom to come out on Audio CD, as well. Makes the commute so much nicer :)

The technical details are accurate, to the best of my knowledge, making it a much more enjoyable high tech thriller to me. Driving story line, as well.

I just picked up Freedom in hard bound, so I may disappear (yet again) for awhile.
It's nicely formatted, and it wasn't written by a retarded monkey, which is always good, but I really don't see how it rises above 'minimally acceptable' - it's all worded in vague HR speak, which is expected, but prevents it from being 'very good' in my opinion.