skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, this is an excellent comment and should have a much higher score than my fanboyish original :-)

I agree that Scala is restricted by the JVM (and the aim of full compatibility with Java) and as a result type inference, pattern matching and more suffer heavily. F#, OCaml and Haskell are better examples of modern type systems as they're less encumbered. I am fairly curious about how F# works around the CLR (or rather, how much CLR accommodates type systems different from C#'s), guess it's up to me to RTFM.

> It's as if people are so tired of Java that they are looking for a way out, willing to compromise just for some syntactic sugar.

I think this hits the nail on the head, but I don't see it as a bad thing. If there's a very strong reason to be on the JVM (e.g., other projects or libraries, operations preferences), it's nice to have an option that lets one have a more productive and enjoyable experience.

There are times where it feels like a big compiler hack (which it is), but first class functions (even if they're compiled down to anonymous classes), closures, optional lazy evaluation, type inference, limited pattern matching, case classes, traits/mixins, "encouraged" immutability, the collections, etc... add-up.

There are occasionally bugs and performance issues with compiler and the collections library, but overall I don't see what's compromised compared to programming in Java itself. I'd argue syntactic sugar classification applies more to Java 7's planned closures and first class methods.

> OOP was designed for dynamic type-systems

Yes, that's literally true. OOP feels natural in dynamically typed languages, even when it's bolted on (CLOS in Common Lisp, Perl 5).

It's still a mystery to me why Java "won over", given that Smalltalk had (at the time) better performing virtual machines (compared to older JVMs which were superceeded by HotSpot, which was originally used by Strongtalk) and great tooling. There are known examples of teams of inexperienced programmers working under guidance to produce large, well working projects in Smalltalk.

> That's why I hope people will invest in VMs that support dynamic languages in the future ... static typing is a bitch to get right, and it would be easier if the VM wouldn't impose a strict type-system on you.

Clojure, in my view, suffers the most from the type system that the JVM imposes. It would be interesting to see if Clojure and Scala would eventually target less restrictive VMs (reverting to compiler hacks on the JVM to functionally emulate these VMs).
How to Choose a Good Scientific Problem
Not if they produce straightforward objective c. How would one even separate such code generation from the use of regular #define?
Yep -- old and true.
This argument is flawed. Given that there are already bad apps in the app store doesn't mean restricting the language of use to C based languages is a bad way of minimizing the number of future bad apps.

I am not saying I have proved the oposite: "That restricting the language will improve the quality of the new stream of apps submitted."

I am simply saying the above argument is flawed. I believe the author of the this article is correct. If you allow people to use flash, .net and other methods the quality of apps submitted will be largely lower in quality.

How do I feel about this strategy? Thats a different story. If I was Steve Jobs, I don't know if I would do it, I am still undecided. On one hand I feel this lights a fire underneath developers to compete with the iPhone using Android. Competition is good for everyone in the long run. On the other hand I want to be able to use Lisp on the iPhone and I want apple to encourage "think different"...
These are the same folks who brought us DENIM. Very cool.
Earlier discussion of the same article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1271933
when i was in high school, i had problems with my back and neck.

we were referred to a doctor about this. he sized me up in 5 minutes. then he revealed to us his chiropractor nature and said he'd do his thing. i wasn't asked if that's what i want. it didn't occur to me either, because he's an authority figure, right? so he did his thing. and it got worse. my neck felt bent out of shape and weak.

we had to see another doctor who prescribed muscle strength work. because that was the problem. fucked up muscles.

why the heck do people still believe in chiropractors? they're all frauds, every single one of them.
To be fair, the bun is chock-full of carbs (namely: energy).
After working in Mac-centric development environments for the past 12 years, I can't say I'm enamored with Apple's hardware track record. The desktops have been for the most part reliable, but the laptops and iMacs have not fared so well. All 12 iMac G5s we purchased were serviced under Apple Care at least once - some went twice. And the survivors all have obnoxious fan noise problems. I remember a generation of PowerBook G4s that had a problem with the display losing connection. Plenty of those went back as well.

Externally, they are designed very nicely, and the internals of the desktops have always impressed me. I'd love to see something else similar come along. The closest I can remember is the old MIPS-based SGIs.
> Tarballs let you do that as well.

No, they don't. I can right-click on any file and view all the changes as a diff, I can see exactly what I changed and when, and revert that file back to any previous version. You can't do that with a tarball -- at least not without significantly more effort. It's just better all around.

> Those people are working on their own code base (total disaster, much of it due to branching and following the VCS "methodology".

You're not required to use any particular methodology. I've seen people screw up with every technology in existence -- that's hardly a reason to head back into the woods and live like a cave man.

There are very few things in the field of computing science that are universally agreed on. There are dozens of development methodologies, thousands of different programming languages, IDEs, etc. The closest thing we have in this business to consensus is the use of version control (even if the exact tool to use is still under debate).

You're simply mistaken to assume not using version control is superior in any way to using it. There's nothing wrong with your own methods of development and backup but that isn't version control and it isn't incompatible with it either.
> But my position on internet privacy is a little different. I feel that you do need a minimal technical understanding of the issue.

> Some technical understanding of this issue is prerequisite to understanding how the negative consequences outweigh the positive.

What technical understanding do you think that someone needs in this case?

I'll help - do they need to understand more than "if your mail is hosted by Yahoo, Yahoo stores it" and "if your mail is in outlook, it's on your machine or that of your employer"? Those those two pieces of information establish where your mail is stored both before and after reading.

Note that the distinction that the DoJ was trying to make, that read mail stored outside your control isn't private, is not a technical issue, but a legal one.

> And I said "tea-bagging protesters" as a quick, lazy, way to refer to a group of people.

If it had been a similar reference about a different group of people, you have been driven out as a racist.
Seven words: Federal Pound-Me-in-the-Ass Prison.

OK, yeah, I know, they're only civil charges. But a boy can dream.
> What Jobs should have done then was not ban apps by language, but ban "shitty" apps.

Whatever you think of the app store rules, you can't seriously be suggesting that a rule as subjective as "don't be shitty" would make life for developers any easier.
how'd you do the upside-down exclamation mark?
almost impossible to get included in these days

Not true! I've been included within the past year or so. It took a year before I was actually included, sure. But it's not impossible. I have no reason to believe I was merely lucky.
Which is about the same time (well, a little bit more) as the wait times in public hospitals in awfully socialist Norway. State covers 62% of the cost up to a maximum copay, after that they'll pay the rest for you. Having various chronic illnesses, I don't mind this at all.
Angular Momentum Replica Watches,  Fake Angular Momentum Watches
> If you allow people to use flash, .net and other methods the quality of apps submitted will be largely lower in quality.

There was a statistic posted early that 10 of top 100 applications in the store were written in .NET (MonoTouch). If that's true, a significant number of users are extremely satisfied with these products.

The fact is, your assuming that apps written in Flash or .NET are automatically lower in quality -- that it's a given from the start. You haven't proved that assumption.

(Now, I'll accept that for Flash it's probably would have been true -- but we were never even given the chance to know for sure).
Yeah, but it does pass the "accidentally spilled coffee on my keyboard test".
and what is it with "waiting months to see a doctor"?

i live in germany (socialized health care) and if there's something wrong with you, you either see your GP or walk into the next (teaching) hospital. whatever further referral you need is just days away, if not just an elevator ride and a knock on a door.

waiting months, docs who dismiss your opinion, trusting chiropractors... what is wrong with you?
Apple still wins because their platform is the first class platform.
> It is well established that socialized medicine entails rationing.

Every system entails rationing.

In a private system, your resources and your choices determine how decisions are made.

In a "public" system, govt decides. Yup - they'll take resources that you might have used for for your care and spend it on someone else and deny you care.

We already hear "we're not going to pay to care for fatties or smokers". If they're not going to get care, I think that it's wrong to take their money. That's just me.
<devils advocate>You can still do this on Android. Apple is private company, sell you stock and stop making apps for the iPhone. And I guess continue telling how bad apple is for doing this. Encourage people to buy androids. </devils advocate>

In the long run is this move bad for Hackers? or is just what we need?

Could it mean a big push for Android (opensource) development? Which one could argue is good for Hackers.

Maybe its good Apple is putting a bitter taste in hackers mouth. Apple just went from being a beautiful Siren[1] to a beautiful dangerous woman with a bad singing voice.

At my college every year I would see more and more people show up to the LUG meetins with macs. Maybe we will see a pendulum swing back to where most Hackers hack on linux.

[1]"In Greek mythology, the Sirens were three dangerous bird-women, portrayed as seductresses." Wikipedia
No one else makes a portable where every hardware component simply works, including suspend mode, while entirely freeing me from Microsoft.

Uh, everyone makes this? All decent laptops are Centrino these days, and guess what, all that hardware works fine under Linux. I haven't owned a machine in years that wasn't perfectly supported by Linux.

Suspend / hibernate also works fine with modern BIOSes.
MUD: Massive, Unordered, Distributed data
Suppose you're making a sports bet on an American Football game. You bet $10 that the Griffons will beat the Hydras by 3 points or more. It doesn't really matter to you if George or Bob are the ones to take your action, since they're both trustworthy friends of yours and they can't affect the outcome.

But if you're betting against Hank, who manages the Griffons, that's something you want to be made aware of. Even if he can't directly influence the game, knowing that your opponent picked the players for the team he's betting against, he's got a lot of information that you can't easily come by, and it'd be a bad move to bet against him. It's a bit of a bait and switch to say that you're betting against another neutral party when you're in fact betting against someone involved in the game.
> How do you create a branch and not switch to it?

hg branch new-feature
hg update default

But why would you not want to switch to a branch you just created? Why create the branch if you're not going to work on it?
Manolo Blahnik pumps
You know it's getting hot when the vendor that came to sell to your company slips you a card with "your current salary + 15" scribbled on the back.
Well, then why do all the examples in the article look like those horrible skinned apps?

I have a feeling that what the author proposes leads us down the road of pretty but ridiculous interfaces.
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"entertainment content has no expertise to sell. It's either good or it's not, I don't really care who made it."

Entertainment is either good or it's not. But I can pretty well count on stuff coming out of Pixar as being good. So if I have limited dollars and/or attention to spend on entertainment and there's a Pixar film and something generic that I don't know if it's good or not, I'm going with Pixar. Clearly they have expertise to sell. There's also music I'll buy (or at least consider) just because of the label.

The challenge for Time or any other entertainment-content providers is cultivating the appropriate quality and expertise, fitting it into an appropriate business model, and cutting away the cruft. This might mean downsizing like crazy and outsourcing, or it might not. Some companies will find a new model that works and survive, while others will struggle and eventually fail. IMO, one big problem for the MPAA and RIAA is that they've made some actively-bad choices in that transition, inconveniencing and alienating consumers while not really protecting what they're trying to protect.
I'm glad you agree, because for the rest of the equation (Tarballs > CVS > SVN), Linus agrees with me. So you see, I embody the combined wisdom of both of you, as far as version control goes.
Naturally. We wish for things that we don't have. It's the same as flying cars- there sure as heck isn't a trend indicating we will have such a thing, let alone cars at all.

It's the same as how everyone in the movies is beautiful, nobody in the future will go hungry, and even aspirations to 'the good ol days', even though everyone back then was too busy dying of dysentery, cholera, starvation, or drowning in caulked wagons to realize just how great they had it.
Web Coupons Tell Stores More Than You Realize
I know you meant dialog boxes, but dialog boxes have that name for a reason. They usually tell the user something and then ask for a response. The problem is that the computer doesn't really understand what it's asking about, it's just a pre-recorded message. Dialog boxes on a computer are the equivalent of the automated phone menus and just as frustrating (although those are getting better with speech recognition).

I have some ideas that I think are pretty good but I'm not an expert coder so progress is slow. I think windows is mostly the right idea, but the current implementations are crammed with wastefulness of all types such as application windows that take up unnecessary screen space with menus and buttons that are rarely used (this is getting better, but in my opinion the idea of 'applications' is part of the problem).

Another thing is window resizing -- full user control over this is pointless, and a lot of time is wasted resizing windows so you can see things the way you want. Various X Windows versions try to fix this with smart tiling and so on, but I've yet to find one that's really satisfactory.

Another sad thing is that even simple drag and drop, which has been around for ages, is poorly implemented in the majority of programs, if at all.
What I find remarkable about the chart is the volume of tech jobs in D.C. relative to the population:

D.C. has a population of about 600 thousand versus about 8 million in NYC and yet tech hiring seems to be roughly on a par in these two cities.

That's mind blowing (to me at least).

If that's correct, it must be virtually impossible to be an unemployed programmer in D.C.
Their control group isn't very good. My hypothesis: listening to The Hobbit distracts you, and it's harder to concentrate right afterwards because you're still thinking about the book in the back of your mind.
For what it's worth, here's a link to my review/how to of an X25-M G2 RAID 0 array on my MacBook Pro with some basic benchmarks: http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...
It could also mean that it's still relatively hard to find a programming job in NYC, or that a greater proportion of DC companies use dice.com than NYC companies.
You're right, I was thinking of desktop Mac OS X there, and an especially annoying section of code where I was trying to get those three image APIs to talk to each other. Apple did in fact remove a lot of cruft and duplication in the iPhone API, and that's good. Still, there are a number of cases like that where you have to switch between ObjC method calls and straight C functions. Not a huge deal, but it's clearly not the SmallTalk-style pure OO.
There are different folks qualified for different size companies.

Some people do best at the 1-5 person company.
Some people do best at the 5-25 person company.
Some people do best at the 25-100 person company.
And some people do best at 100-250, and 250+.

The best people are the ones that grow with you as the company grows and take on bigger leadership roles as needed, constantly working for what's best for the company and it's people.

The people Google is hiring at 20,000 are generally not the people I want as we go from 25 to 100. That's not universally true, but when we lose a candidate (which is rare) it's because they go to another start-up and they had to make a real tough choice, often resorting to commute and other lesser factors to decide. It's not because they went to Google or LinkedIn.
Livestream to bring you Hackers live
Live from Mountain View
Hackers and Founders meet in HackerDojo http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/calendar/13098136/
Here’s Goldman Sachs’ pitch book for ABACUS, the synthetic collateralized debt obligation at the heart of the SEC charges. http://www.scribd.com/doc/30036962/Abacus-2007-Ac1-Flipbook-...
No, not at all. I think the point I'm trying to make is that what lots of people are thinking is that the rule change was to prevent apps of low quality in the store while what Apple was probably actually thinking with the rule was "let's make it hard to put apps on competing platforms".

In other words, the argument that it to improve the app quality is a red herring -- it has nothing to do with that. And as you rightly pointed out, the new rule is not even a sane proxy for a policy of "no shitty apps" (which is even more absurd). The only rational business reason is to raise the level of effort of cross platform development such that it's not worth it to spend the same effort to write an Android app with that platform's much smaller user base and lower average cost of purchase.
"No matter where you are everyone is always connected" -- Lain
Exactly. I keep hearing App Store being compared to physical stores. Something like: "Walmart gets to choose the items they place on their shelves, so why should the App Store be any different?".

In fact, Walmart is fairly picky about what they put on their shelves, especially when it comes to music CDs. We can argue that Walmart's control on the CDs it distributes might have a stifiling effect on the type of music that gets released. However, Walmart is not the only place allowed to sell CDs. Yes, it might suck that you have to make a Walmart-specific release of your album, but that doesn't prevent you from releasing a more explicit version elsewhere.

This is not the case with the App Store.
You would have to demonstrate that C* apps are qualitatively better than non-C apps (or apps that use some other language for runtime scripting like Lua).

I don't think that has been done yet.
The underground
Is it because of government related jobs?

"So you lived in the imperial seat in the US, the one are where 75% of people are working for the government (directly or indirectly), and the one place that actually GREW during the current recession."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1271560
The key here is less limited $ and more limited attention span. We simply don't have enough time to consume both our user created content (facebook etc) AND still support pay content as well. Pixar absolutely has expertise over movie making, and I'm not saying they particularly are going anywhere, but the competition they have is NOT with other movie companies, it's with ALL media for attention span.

When you bring the long tail into this, and as it gets easier and easier to create what we would call "quality" media for a smaller, fragmented audience, it's going to be very difficult for consumers to see the value of a Time magazine-like broad, high level view of the world. This IS going to be competition for companies like Pixar because the choice isn't "I have 10 movies to see pick one," it's "how should I spend my day," and it's going to be rarer and rarer that the answer to that is go see the new mass market movie.

Now of course we are years ahead of the curve here. HNers tend to be pushing boundaries on stuff like this. So there are still a few years before places outside of metro America catch up.

I DON'T agree with you about the MPAA and RIAA. Their goal is not to protect long term, it's simply to slow this transition down so they lose fewer jobs and have more time to think about it. They NEED to because they represent the mega companies that need to move this slow. Think of it like a two lane highway, MPAA and RIAA are side to side trucks driving at 5mph. We'll just keep hitting detours and exits and eventually there will simply be no one behind them. So I think their goal is wrong, but I think they've succeeded in carrying out their mission relatively well.
Taiwan: The world's most misunderstood island
I'm still wondering why nobody has funded a web-app store for iPhone and other modern phones. Hell, it doesn't even have to be limited to mobile devices (but supported resolutions, features, and device support should be prominent).

There's clearly a huge market for systems that make it easy for customers to find and purchase apps, and for devs to reach those customers. People shouldn't be implementing payment systems over and over again for each product they create. It gives devs exposure and a market base.

I guess the problem is bootstrapping such a market. That's no easy task and the pay-off might not come for years.
DC's metropolitan area population is more than a quarter the size of NYC's, so it's as much of a surprise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metropolitan_Area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
I can echo this. I've had two Fortune 500 companies, several recruiters, and even Google all contact me (unsolicited too) within the past month. It's the oddest thing I've seen in the 13 years I've been a developer.
Nice game, I like how I can use dying as an aiming tactic.
I was really really interested in applying for a dev position with RIM out here until I actually tried a Tour. Man, what an awful interface. Everything about it just dripped "don't care".

Reading this makes me glad I chose to skip them.
One warning if you install the app - it requires .Net v1.1
Very innovative UI.
It's not the secrecy, it's the monopoly on the sale of iPhone applications.

Monopolies are OK as long as...