skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft funds a lot of fairly pure research with some of it slipping out into the real world, e.g. Simon Peyton-Jones http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ of Glasgow Haskell Compiler fame (and perhaps the most interesting interview in Coders at Work, although that has a lot to do with my familiarity of the work of others in the Lisp and PARC worlds).

One of the biggest complaints about Microsoft Research (or whatever it's called) was how little gets out of the lab into the "real world", with things like F# being recent exceptions, and their funding of the GHC is another example of how they indirectly ship code. Although this mostly legit complaint is precisely your complaint about "not just research shops".

I'm pretty sure IBM is still doing some tech R&D, how much in the coding area I'm not sure, let alone for how long.

Hmmm, has such a beast other than Sun for a brief time ever existed? Obviously Bell Labs, and the UCB Unix project (and some other DARPA projects that had useful code as a required deliverable, e.g. their general VLSI infrastructure push: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project). MIT's exokernel project found itself reified in the real world as Xen, through yet another university lab.

Plus today there are other business models, e.g. look at Clojure (admittedly a one man project for the first few years), the cost of doing a R&D project that ships real world code is fantastically lower than it used to be when e.g. XEROX PARC was doing most? of its work on bit slice (i.e. not too fast) 16 bit Altos with 1-4 banks of 64KB RAM.

I came to the conclusion in the early '80s that some of the differences in the granularity of traditional Lisp and Smalltalk objects (the latter are larger) is in part due to the machines these people did their work on. Lisp has always gone for a big flat address space, Smalltalk had bank switching to contend with an I think that encouraged larger objects (larger than a cons cell, atom, numeric immediate, etc.

The architecture of X has a lot more to do with GAO "most preferred customer" rules/law than anything else.
I want something like this, but with the ability to record 8 to 16 hours video (lower quality is fine), and GPS. So if you wore it around your neck during vacation, for example, you could later view your movement on a map, and you could review video from a particular time or location. Anyone know if something remotely close to this exists? (On a related note, anyone know how one would get their photos with GPS EXIF data to display on a map? Do you need special software for this??)
I'm an iPhone developer and this doesn't change a thing for me. I'm doing it for fun & seeing my apps in the hands of ordinary people far outweighs all of Apple's nonsense. I have a deep hatred for everything Flash & Flex. Insofar as Flash is concerned I'm actually happy about Apple's decision, not so much for the other cross-compilers.
what vps provider do you use? i'm thinking on hosting at netbeans, but not really sure whether it is good or not.
And Pike and Ken Thompson have gifted us with Go (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28programming_language%29).
Apple are the only primarily-hardware company of the three, which would explain their lower profit/revenue ratio.
I've been through this discussion before on here actually:

I'm not much of a JS fan and I don't think "Javascript on both sides" is an answer either.
Many Of Apple's Supposed List Of "iPad Ready" Sites Don't Work On The iPad
Don't read too much into any one departure. Gosling has been working on Oak/Java for how long?

By the end of the year the pattern will be clear; me, I'm watching to see if they keep Fortress and Guy Steele.
nobody mentions Netbeans yet? it's an amazing IDE with support for html/css, javascript, php, java, phyton, etc and its totally free (GPL license I believe) and cross platform
As I recall didn't the Sun board say the price was too low?
I think this is the first time I've seen the 'death of journalism' blamed on the writing being too _good_...
You're not presenting any amount of believable evidence here to prove your point. Your quip of "You don't get it!" doesn't pass the muster.

Yes, computers promise creation. But this creation isn't always developing software. A device can simply create entertainment.

I hate to break it to you, buddy, but you've become saturated in your community. It's very hard from that point to see how very small your pool is.
I am a developer, just not developing apps on iPhone/mac. I am concerned but not angry at the new policies.
From what I've read, IBM was a top-notch R&D company up until the late 90s/early 2000s (with all the innovations you mentioned, as well as literally writing the book on software development -- they were in no way a pure research shop). Since then they've transformed into a professional services company, however (although they've always been known for having great sales/professional services).
Ubuntu Is A Poor Standard Bearer For Linux
If the new rules affect the number of quality apps, consumers will vote with their wallets. I have no problem with developers leaving a platform based on the new language, but Apple (and the developers) work for the consumer and should be doing what is in their best interests. Apple believes intermediary compiling spawns less-then-great apps, so they are doing what they feel is best for the customer and their bottom line.

If you're a developer who doesn't like it, switch platforms. If you're a consumer who doesn't like it, buy something else. If enough people do so, Apple will change or fail. If nothing changes and they maintain their quality and popularity, you really can't blame Apple one bit.
The overlap is large
People love being outraged by things. Gives them something to talk about I guess. That's why people buy The Daily Mail.

Personally I think it's a good move by Apple. Good for their business, good for iPhone users.
I hear calling people names is an effective way to change behavior.
the file does not need to be erased, the file can be encrypted with a key which is hosted on a secure server. after a user uses a key for sometime, it would expire and they would need to request a new key from the server. however you can set the server to stop issuing keys, and hence the file would never be opened again. this is similar to shareware distribution, it has been done for ages i guess. think steam.
I gather that the Gambit-C Scheme community is not happy; they've shipped multiple games and at least one for the iPhone, see "Scheme is also dead on the iPhone" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253420.

Outlawing modern programming language technology (C/C++/Objective C are all old, at base they are '60s to early '70s languages) along with what I'm sure is indeed a lot of awful multi-platform middle-ware can't be good.

For people like me who are used more powerful languages, one higher up on the Blub scale (including Lisp at the top, of course :-), this shows either a failure in execution (of the ToS language) or that Jobs doesn't "get it" when it comes to programming.

ADDED: (forget this early in the morning while editing this post): this is straight out of Dilbert, Jobs is demanding that i<whatever> programmers to work harder, not smarter.
reading my comment again, it sounds like a great app idea. steam for file ftw!
Summary: "Other distributions have problematic releases but other major distributions do not have significant problems in nearly every release. Ubuntu does."

To what extent this is true is unknown as the author only gives anecdotes.
I'll make sure to re-read that interview (Simon Peyton Jones), thanks!

There's certainly something to be said about it being possible -- more so now than ever -- for hackers to work alone, without affiliation with a large R&D organization or academia. Rich Hickey's work has been amazing and will be influential (the persistent immutable data structures are beginning to spread beyond Clojure). It's also interesting that Hickey was able to "bootstrap" himself from consulting rather than full-time work, regaining full rights to his work (not being subject to the all-too-common agreements which require one to give the fruit of all of their ideas to their employer).

Academia is still doing well (Scala from EPFL, some fairly interesting distributed systems work going on at Berkeley) and there are also university-based spin-offs e.g., Stonebraker start-ups (even though I disagree with some of his approaches, it's still great to see companies built to solve difficult and interesting problems). Historically these have been big on the West Coast: Google, Inktomi, Ousterhout's start-ups (Scriptics, Electric Cloud). I haven't seen any emerge recently, but perhaps I haven't been looking in the right places (or have been too cynical about what I saw).
Just because a single printer does not work out of the box does not a garbage OS make.

I wonder if the author tested every single other Linux OS with the same printer!

Instead of complaining regarding a free product I prefer if they submitted a bug report to ensure a better experience for everyone else and avoid this situation from happening again.
start a business? even if the business is only decently successful, testimonials from your clients would make great letter of recommendation for grad schools.
There were some well known major regressions with Intel drivers in Ubuntu (which are more popular amongst Linux users as they have OSS drivers) that didn't affect other distributions. The scope of those affected - nearly everyone with an Intel card - meant it seemed that there was no systematic testing of known-good hardware prior to declaring a release stable.
Provocative at best.

"We FOSS supporters get all on our high horses about proprietary software while we keep offering up "Linux for humans" that, in reality, is an oft broken mess, at least in the case of Ubuntu. I am back to believing Andrew Wyatt was right when he called the distro "garbage salad." This is a perfect example of what he was describing. No wonder CrunchBang Linux is moving to a Debian as a base instead of Ubuntu. Linux Mint may be moving in the same direction."

A specific complaint I could find from the author is about a printer driver. While I haven't used another distro for quite some years now besides Ubuntu and RHEL, third-party drivers often fail to work on every platform - Mac and Windows included.

While the user does represent a common user, and usability and reliability could be improved in Ubuntu - I find the article a bit too "garbage-salad" (to quote the author).
"They've spent the money and the time to create a great platform."

They've spent some money and time, and they have taken a lot of other people's work: Mach, gcc, Smalltalk, BSD, etc.

"they dont have a monopoly in the market"

That's not so clear to me. I own an iPhone and an iPad even though I think they really suck technically. But there is content available for them that simply is not available for other platforms.
I don't understand this 'China+hacker' hype. Millions of hacks happen on the Internet everyday, what makes Chinese hackers so interesting?
Really? Mac and Windows have pretty good third party driver support the last time I checked. I've never had to upgrade my entire OS to get a new piece of hardware working either

RHEL backports a lot of driver updates to its stable releases. Ubuntu LTS doesn't seem to do this.
The bug report was already submitted, and it is classified as "high priority". The author wasn't complaining about the printer not working; he was complaining that the bug wasn't fixed (and that it shouldn't have been let to the system in the first place (the printer worked on previous version)).

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/491133
Programming isn't a game for many people, it's a profession. The time you spend on learning their platform and languages are sunk costs, and you need to recoup them through money-making products. By restricting developers to their APIs and languages, they are trying to lock in developers and users.

Apple is trying to accomplish the same kind of lock-in that Microsoft managed with Windows. And we better nip this thing in the bud, because Apple would screw us even worse than Microsoft has.
Huge Number Of WordPress Blogs Infected By Malware
The Seattle crowd does the same kind of stuff, constantly. Makes it impossible to have a conversation in Seattle about start-ups because anything you think of can set someone with the "we're just as good as the silicon valley" inferiority complex off onto an endless rant.
I do know of many upgrading and downgrading from Vista to get ethernet drivers working as expected.

I agree, they do have "pretty good" third party driver support. But a non-intel mac from 4 years ago will not likely run a new printer, nor would an intel mac likely have a driver for printer 5 years old. A huge effort has been made for backwards compatibility, and driver support from commercial products, and that doesn't make driver support or bug-fix responsiveness inherently better.

The author could have not upgraded the OS and her printer would still work fine. I don't like that solution - but the Ubuntu bashing in the article seems contrived. Maybe Ubuntu LTS can be improved. But I don't see the article expressing this concern adequately .
The difference is that Windows users are used to using primarily shoddy, poorly designed software. Most PCs even come with some preinstalled.
All three of those companies are fairly entrenched, and probably have a far older workforce than you would think.
Strange. I use mine twice a day with no problems. Is your ringer volume down? Got to be a setting thats been changed I think
"If you worked as a receptionist for six years, for example, you aren't credited with six years of experience; I give you credit for one year." I'm sure Joel's next receptionist will be happy their years of servitude didn't go to waste.
Go has true message passing, which is far more important to OOP than anything to do with data modeling, and Go's composition model for data is far more object-oriented than the usual Linnaean classicism. Pay attention to Alan Kay, not Stroustrup or Gosling.

If you really want to know what OOP is / was / can be, read Cardelli and Abadi's A Theory of Objects. The first half is available online, and covers the parts you'd care about: http://books.google.com/books?id=4xT3LgCPP5UC
Professionalism in Python or: How To Not Do Bad Things
I have actually become stupider after reading this article. Her cheap laser printer stopped being recognized after a full distribution upgrade, which makes Ubuntu's developers out of touch, its policies unfitting for mom and pop who want things to "just work" (thanks, never heard that one before!) and the contributers to open source software meanies for breaking people's stuff.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

I could go on, but how about some choice quotes? Keep in mind this is a fluff article that's only 7 paragraphs long, and sticks to the idiotic grade school "introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, concluding paragraph" nonsense formula, so it's more like 4 paragraphs long.

No wonder CrunchBang Linux is moving to a Debian as a base instead of Ubuntu. Linux Mint may be moving in the same direction.

Man, at this rate, Ubuntu might as well move to using Debian as a base, too.

It seems I haven't printed from the netbook, only the desktop running SalixOS, since I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). .... We can't have hardware magically stop working after a routine upgrade."

Yeah, they should put in a giant locked button and several warning signs that say you are about to replace almost every software component on your computer, with repeated warnings, explanations of what it means, and instructions. Well, I guess that's something you'd only do on a non-routine upgrade. Wait, oh.

The one conclusion I have reached is that Ubuntu is a very poor standard bearer for Linux. It isn't what I want Linux judged by. Other distributions have problematic releases but other major distributions do not have significant problems in nearly every release. Ubuntu does. So how do we, in the Linux press make people outside of the Linux community aware that Linux does not equate to Ubuntu? That is the real challenge we now face if we want Linux to be more widely accepted.

I had to stop to vomit between each sentence in the paragraph. It may be the most contrived thing I've ever read, and I've read Sonic the Hedgehog fan-fiction.

The best part about her article (3rd grade essay?) is the solution to her problem, which she did not include: unplug the printer and plug it back in.
I know it can be frustrating to have a software not work as expected but, I don't think Ubuntu is doing too bad in this respect (I have been using Kubuntu @ work and Fedora at home for the past 2-3 years). The author IMO is a bit too harsh on Ubuntu. On a somewhat related note, I think people should also read this while passing judgement on another OSS (esp bug fixes):
http://ryanbigg.com/2010/04/want-it-give/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255905
You're welcome.

And to take this further, the recent explosion of new and successful languages shows something right is going on. Around of the turn of the century I was about to give up on this one field in pure CS I like, we seemed to be in a Dark Age where almost everything I could use in practice was of 1960's origin (maybe repackaged and improved a bit ... and, well, it helped (hurt) that I don't like Perl, despite learning it on my own for my own DP, and never took a liking to tcl).

Since then Python really broke out, need I mention Ruby, Clojure has given Lisp a new hope, Haskell is simply fascinating, the ML world is moving out of academia (e.g. F#), and those are just some of the big names (I don't know much about Scala, especially its trajectory).

In terms of getting new stuff into people's hands, this is probably the best period since the '70s for language geeks (I'm not counting C++ and Java, which are firmly based in the '60s/very early '70s).

I also "blame" the dot.com bust, which has required people work smarter (e.g. use Ruby on Rails), not harder (e.g. J2EE).
http://www.caitlynmartin.co.cc/resume.html
From what I can see with the bug report is that it is still active (Triage), awaiting someone to deal with it.

That does not mean it will not get fixed in the future, I'm fairly certain with the high exposure of this article will get it done more rapidly.

Once fixed can the author come up with something else that supports their argument?
This article is one that makes me wish I could downvote. "My crappy printer doesn't work with my free operation system. Therefore that operating system should be scrapped, it's community is a failure!$@!!@$"

Or maybe printers are all cheap pieces of garbage, somehow worth less than the toner inside of them, so full into the idea of planned obsolescence you just buy a new one when it's time to replace the ink..
Quoting Steve Wozniak's description of Jobs' job back when he worked for Atari: "... Steve would examine their design and make changes, like adding sounds, etc. It's like modifying a program to do different things, just barely a step under designing them yourself, and a step that all design engineers go through." http://www.woz.org/letters/general/91.html

If that gives you any sense.
I was thinking about the arrests, charges and probation for scamming ham radio users out of electronics equipment and [redacted], but I agree, that resume is definitely more ridiculous.

Edit: probably not appropriate, didn't want to make a big deal about it.
That probably says a lot to someone who understands the implications in this context, but many of us don't.

So, could you expand on that please?
Mac OS X has good driver support only because Apple implements their own drivers for every device, and bundles them with the OS. Leopard had ~5gb of printer drivers alone in the default install! In 10.6 they moved to a system that installs drivers for stuff on-demand, automatically downloaded from Apple.
Ubuntu reluctantly decided to support proprietary drivers in 2006 http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7895189911.html
I didn't think they had deep fryers back then!
I don't see how this is relevant, I could care less about someone's past.

I've done stupid shit that I'm glad happened before search engines and Facebook.

My advisor for my M.Sc had a sex change, didn't stop her from being an excellent advisor.

So, not the greatest article, but does that mean break out the character assassination Google-fu?
That games point is worth mentioning again.

Using an engine can result in crap-ware. But is also allows developers to focus on the gameplay/story/important stuff. Planescape Torment wasn't good because it had a new engine (it just used the BG engine) - it was good because of the story/artwork/effort put into it.

Apple should focus on discovery. It doesn't matter how many crap apps there are (put it this way - There's far more crap webpages than there are crap apps) - as long as I can see and find the good ones.
I can't work out how 'official' that statement is, especially given that it conflicts with what Unity have apparently said (perhaps there are updates on that story that I've missed?) - http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/08/adobe-flash-apple-sdk/

There seems to be an 'official' response from Novell here:
http://www.mono-project.com/newstouch/archive/2010/Apr-09.ht..., but the email linked here is doing the rounds on blogs/aggregators as an 'official statement' - is that guy one of Novell's lawyers?

Further to the link this post gives, this email form later in the thread is useful/gives more context:
http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/monotouch/2010-April/00188...
What's your point? Are you a school teacher or something?
Monotouch has been out since November 2009, Adobe CS5 isn't out for the iPhone yet, and as for Titanium I don't know the exact time period but it's not been long.

The only platform producing apps for a longer period of time has been Unity3D, which now advertises itself as having over 600 appstore games.

So your argument about raising the barrier to entry is weak, as these tools have only just emerged in the last 6 months. Prior to that we've seen thousands of poorly written, leaking objective-C applications on the AppStore. I've seen 2 RSS readers and the official digg.com app crash straight to springboard in the last 2 weeks, all written in objective-C.

Just because the language is closer to C and enforces memory management doesn't make its barrier any higher or require any greater skills - it means you'll get a tonne of apps that aren't releasing or reference counting and crash. I'm sure all this was hotly debated 10 years ago and garbage collection won.
I don't see how this is relevant, I could care less about someone's past.

Uh, I didn't say it was relevant either, dude. You're the one implying her history has a bearing on a shitty Linux critique.

I've done stupid shit that I'm glad happened before search engines and Facebook.

I once heard that search engines can let you search for things that existed before they were indexed, but that may just have been a rumor, or a tautology.

My advisor for my M.Sc had a sex change, didn't stop her from being an excellent advisor.

Apparently it didn't stop this person from being a shitty writer and an idiot.

So, not the greatest article, but does that mean break out the character assassination Google-fu?

I don't need Google to assassinate someone's character, I'm perfectly capable of doing that with some stupid crap they cough up onto the webbernets.
>like Jobs claimed that 'nobody reads anymore' and some time later Apple now sells iBooks

The point Jobs was making was that a device used exclusively for reading would never be successful. He wasn't suggesting that it would be pointless to participate in the ebook market, just that it would need to be on a general purpose mobile platform.
You really think developing software in 25 year old technologies (Objective-C, Cocoa) is fun???