skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Apple vs Java, Flash and optical drives?
What's going on with Apple today? Seems like they're ditching (in some ways) Java[1], Flash[2] and optical drives[3]. Is it all part of a greater master plan or just a mere coincidence. I'd like to hear your thoughts.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/JavaSnowLeopardUpdate3LeopardUpdate8RN/NewandNoteworthy/NewandNoteworthy.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010380-CH4-SW1

[2] http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/20/macbook-air-all-substance-no-flash/

[3] http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/10/today-apple-announced-the-death-of-the-optical-drive-in-its-laptops/
Database migration. meh. But also some startup i freelance for, a webgame I've started Saturday and my own startup. I tend to switch between them all week long.
On Safari market share, maybe the Mac OS X App store will have the unintended effect of promoting free (non-pay) software such as Firefox, Chrome and Opera, assuming there isn't some convenient rule that prevents including them.
The last part of your post is known as the Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation). I'm guessing you've probably heard of it, but it could be of interest to other people, so I figured I'd link it.
I thought the headline meant that the now HD-less Air also shipped without flash memory. That seemed a tad more serious...
I've heard the same thing is true of boxing vs. MMA fights; because boxers wear heavily padded gloves, they end up throwing and receiving many (less powerful) blows in a fight because it doesn't hurt your hand to hit someone in those gloves. But MMA fighters wear minimal hand protection, which results in fewer (more powerful) blows. Surprisingly, it turns out that this may be healthier in the long run.

This also reminds me of the whole "modern running shoe" vs. barefoot approach. Interesting what our bodies are optimized for.
Apple's "proper Coca bindings" was probably an overstatement. It had a binding that didn't really work well and was incomplete due to the dynamic nature of Objective-C and the lack of it on Java.
I thought designers had free will. Some choose not to accept the limitations of browsers and use sIFR to get past those limitations.

How can they not bear any responsibility for an implementation choice?
Why? http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/Ja...

The situation for Java will now be the same as that for developing in any programming language that Apple doesn't ship with OS X or that ships with a version lower than the one you are targeting.

My suspicion is that Apple is likely to drop Java in 10.8 which gives ~3 years for the JVM community on OS X to get their act together making OpenJDK work well with OS X.

That said, being a Clojure user this does increase my interest in seeing a Clojure-in-Clojure sooner than later. I'd like to see Clojure target LLVM the way MacRuby does.
@nileshk:
"I wonder if Apple is really going to stop maintaining their port of Java, or if this move is to be able to say "you can't use Java for App Store for Mac apps because we could possibly stop including it.""

From Apple's Mac App Store review guidelines:
"Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, [PowerPC code requiring] Rosetta) will be rejected."

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/10/20/apple_issues_r...

Java in XCode was already deprecated, but it sounds like there won't even be a (standard) install of the Java runtime in Mac OS X Lion.
It's based on IE7, albeit with a few bits from IE8 sprinkled in (some JS and CSS selectors, I think).
Ha, you got to that pseudonym before I could.

It could well possibly would have years ago but that name is now no longer a secret known pretty much only in the industry, so slapping it on the credits gives the impression that the movie is not worth watching.

http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jan/15/entertainment/ca-542...
Someone on the reddit thread argued that because it is CSP you do not need this. The idea being when you send your object down the channel you lose ownership of it. I don't know enough about the Go implementation to know if this is true or not.
>Languages? Javascript. One choice. And a very odd one at that. Markup? HTML. Yuck, no extensibility, barely updated for 10 years, way, way, way behind flash or xaml, it hasn't even got close to what's available to us on desktops yet.

Choice is a wonderful thing, but take a look at how different the browsers are at implementing these basic, single languages. Imagine if you had to worry about cross browser support for another language. You might not just have to write your webpage to support IE6, but have to rewrite it in another language. It'd be great if we had multiple web languages, but it'd also be great if we had one single web language that actually worked 100% consistently cross platform.
I think a big reason why people don't like Microsoft, is the anti-competitive behavior they used to get to the size they are today. A lot of people dream of starting a business one day (especially around here), and when a company was built by crushing start-ups/small businesses in illegitimate ways, people aren't going to be too happy about that.

Plus, they have that little paperclip thing that pops up whenever you ask for help...
I look at all she's accomplished and have to admit how incredibly lazy I am.
At the very least, I was forced to perform an annoying upgrade of a painfully outdated version of Flash that came on the XP install media. In that case, it's the same effort as an install.
They could have created FaceTime to be compatible in the first place.
If these had ethernet, I think it would be the most perfect laptop for me, ever. I'm still tempted though, but can't help think that the next Macbook Pro revision will be even more exciting.

Steve specifically said he saw these as the future Macbook. They have higher resolution screens than the 13 inch Macbook Pro and have flash drives standard. Also, mentioning the no optical drive as the future if I remember correctly. It makes me super excited about the next Macbook Pro, especially the 13 inch (the 15 inch and 17 inch are way to big in my opinion).
how long have you been programming? do you have a lot of experience? I recently started on RailsTutorial. Checked out your blog and liked your stuff
2cts I think he said go to the harder side 1st (if it's supply, supply, if it's demand, demand) and then shift to the easier side. For me was the best talk from Startup School 2010 with its story: "Go to your users"!
Trying to get a project launched that has been 80% completed for too long: http://chatroulettespy.com

Does anybody still use Chatroulette? It should work on all Adobe Stratus based apps.
If you actually want to share this, you need to post a non-paywalled link.
It seems like you will do what you do on Windows and some Linux distributions, you will go to Oracle's site and download the JDK / JRE from them. I am really wondering if this is totally and Apple thing or partially a suggestion from Oracle.
This just tells me that we need to figure out a new way to debug concurrent/cloud processes more easily. The traditional debuggers just don't cut it anymore.
So far I've found this to be true with PPM.

It's hard to get producers to sign up without promoters being on board, but not nearly as hard as the opposite situation.
Those technologies could be seen as hurting Apple's ability deliver paid content via iTunes (streaming video with Flash, physical CDs instead of digital downloads). With that view, it makes business sense to try and herd customers toward paying for all their media content at one central location.
From Startup School as well, Adam D'Angelo said they answered a lot of questions themselves at first, Mark Zuckerberg said they had interns scrape the course info manually, Brian Chesky talked about how they recruited the first people themselves by door-to-door basically.

Summed up by D'Angelo: "it doesn't matter if it doesn't scale if it strengthens your position". Though I don't know how that applies to your case, if there's anything you can do to get things started.
This is what rugby players have been teasing football players about forever.

And really, the only way to make it work is if they also get rid of most of the padding. Because even with a rugby form tackle , if you smack into a full padded up football player, that's going to cause some trauma.
Basically:

iTunes vs Optical drives

iOS vs Java

Safari vs Flash
Because people here thought it was interesting. Is there a better reason?
Getting great content that is a true refection of sentiment is going to be a challenge. We do have a few ideas on how to make it tough to game, but I'm quite happy to have that problem.

Thanks for the feedback.
"It makes it sound like if that's ever a bother, they'll drop it."

Right, it's the same ambiguous phrasing that Apple uses to let iOS jailbreakers know that Apple isn't going to go out of its way to support them. If a future update breaks a jailbroken installation: too bad. Which isn't to say that Apple will actively work on making jailbreaking impossible.
I checked google trends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=justin.tv,+ustream,+livestrea...

I didn't know that, if true - serious props, since ustream seems to be a whole lot more.
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How does this help the consumer?
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Can you flesh that claim out a bit more? I read the post and it was almost all extra stuff that would make the language spec longer, not shorter.
The Lenovo doesn't run Mac OS X.

Not sure how much this matters, but the Lenovo is also using Intel Graphics, how well does it work on external monitors? Can it power a 2560x1600 30 inch monitor?

I'll give you the 12.1 inch screen though, I'm jealous of that. I would like to see it even higher resolution.

I'm just saying on paper hardware specs are not everything. I'd much rather have usability than a faster machine with more ports and options available. That's why I buy what my friends dub as overpriced Apple hardware.

It does exactly what I want and nothing more.
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I completely agree this isn't for everyone - until a couple of months back I used to overlook tough words or try to interpret their meaning in the context of what I was reading.

I've discovered though, that making a conscious attempt to identify these words is quite rewarding and I recognize that's my personal opinion.

Success for me will be helping a few folks scratch this itch. I really don't intend to monetize the app.
Please read http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005515.h....
This might go back to the problems with the Flash plug-in that shipped with OS X 10.6. At the time, due to needing to get the discs made, 10.6 ended up shipping with a Flash plug-in with a security problem. If I remember correctly, the patch Apple shipped was shortly vulnerable too due to another security problem.

I wonder if they've made a judgement that the basic installs of OS X will be like iOS and not contain 3rd party software that they can't control.
As an interviewer, the real value in this question is to get the attitude of the person behind it. The best candidates know it because they've read widely and know the tricks. They also then add "But I wouldn't use it."

The very best candidates add: Because it's tricky, hard to read, limited in scope, and usually you can avoid swapping variables by changing their usage downstream. Besides, the best compilers will sort it out for you if you write it clearly and cleanly.

When I interview it's not the answers I listen to, it's the knowledge they expose, not of programming per se, but of good practices in programming.
Some feedback:

- when I tried to contribute, it asked me to login, but provided no links to login. Throw the twitter and google oauth links in that modal so I don't have to go hunting for it.

- provide a field for a url to the actual item in addition to the title, description, and image. I was trying to find some of the iPad apps that were recommended in a list, but had to hunt them down manually using google.

- on the list builder, I'd like to see some automatic link crawling so I don't have to hunt down the image and description. So if I paste in a link to an iphone app, it will crawl that site for an image, and use the meta description and page title (editable by me after the fact, of course).

- tried to create a test list, but it threw back validation errors. problem is, it didn't say what was wrong with the form.

- the tag field is not intuitive. I understand what you're trying to do, but I think saying "enter tags separated by spaces" would be more straightforward.

- A list building bookmarklet or chrome plugin would be awesome too.
Two things.

Programming is too broad an umbrella of a term for any meaningful generalizations to be made from it. It ranges from artisan type crafts work to engineering to pure mathematical theorizing. You can't tell the people doing machine learning, signal processing or physics engines that they won't need maths. That is just pure sillyness. It is very context specific.

---Second thing---

This person misses the point of math. Its not about arithmetic, its not about calculus or group theory or combinatorics or even numbers or proofs. No. those are by products.

The true point of maths is about distilling observations of past patterns into their essence and core attributes. Packaging them and then using them to lay the foundation to think more complex and less intuitive thoughts. Not unLike libraries in programming. Look at the history of the developments of mathematics - shoulders of giants and all that. Abstraction.

Maths is a creative endeavour and If we had more memory and faster thinking speeds and less fallible intuitions I dare say I doubt our maths would be so 'advanced', abstract. A lot of this would be built in everyday thinking, maybe this is related to why many programmers think they don't need maths - the mathematical principles of why what they do works and its mathematical nature may not necessarily need to be made apparent in order to get by. Or perhaps this is just a reflection of the youth of the field.

But I do believe though that our maths is so advanced only because we are so stupid!
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I would imagine Oracle will fix that problem.
I agree. As owner of some older Macs and trying to run a Java app written in Java 6 was a serious pain to get newer version of Java on a slightly older OS (10.4) Hopefully Oracle will pick up the ball with an easy installer for the Mac so we can install newer JRE's on most versions of OS X.
Incidentally, it wasn't killed by moderators. It got autokilled because too many users flagged it as offtopic. I just unkilled it.
It's already there:

http://chaos-pp.cvs.sourceforge.net/chaos-pp/order-pp/exampl...

But I do not envy the poor soul who would have to maintain all this cleverness.
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The problem, it seems to me, is the temporal separation between the impact injury and the symptoms, breaking any feedback loop.

What we need is a redesigned football helmet that has razor-sharp metal spikes, pointed both in and out, causing immediate excruciating pain to both parties in any impact.

That will stop concussions, guaranteed.
In many ways pagerank is a special case where you need a lot of resources for a short period of time. In such cases you could use PMI but that's not the hard part of scaling for Google.

From what I have read, Google treats its global compute infrastructure in a reasonably abstract fashion. To the point where their production systems share resources across datacenters so that losing a datacenter has minimal impact. Thus, when Google people talk about "scale" they often mean getting it to work for long periods of time, efficiently, on flaky hardware, spread across the world, which PMI does not do.
I am both surprised and delighted.
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I used to do that myself. Until I discovered I'd looked up "proselytize" on 6 different occasions and it just wouldn't stick. So I began building a personal list of to-revise words until it became bloated and unwieldy.
Have you considered Python? I'm a big fan of statically typed languages but that's the one I use for all my scripting on *nix and Windows. It's used by a whole slew of web developers. Nothing stopping it from becoming the new cross-platform development language of choice.
This is really nice. A great idea, and looks to be done really well. Good luck with it!
Another approach is build a community that either producers or promoters would want to be a part of. I'm not sure how that would look, but basically, you get one side to show up and then pitch to the other saying, you need to see what these guys are doing and that's your newsletter-style solution.
The logic "remove helmets and players won't make hard hits" is like saying "remove seatbelts from cars and people will drive safer."
Hadn't thought about the iOS vs Java possibility, but it makes sense, in a way.
Pie charts should be larger - Activities list should be shorter - Recent timesheet hours should scroll - Maybe some subtle background graphics. Everything is a little too small and a little too busy. Hope that helps.
This touched my heart, but I hope it is emphasized that sometimes the bullies are the people you love and trust the most.
It seems like more than a coincidence to me that this announcement is made right after Oracle absorbed Sun and made some pretty shocking announcements about their plans with Sun's open source portfolio (OpenSolaris, MySQL) and Java.
Everyone laughed at it because at the same time there were OSes available that could run unlimited number of daemons simultaneously.

Now it's a matter of choice for system owner. And of course all those single-daemon VMs run inside OS that lets numerous VMs run at the same time.
Then who would maintain them? The hardware manufacturers? :\
How many YC companies failed to get in first time but got in on later applications - any knowledge on this?
For the most part, we do have a single web language that is reasonably consistent across platforms... if you keep things simple.

Where things get dicey is when designers demand a high level of control over the cosmetics (i.e., pixel perfection) or developers demand a high level of control over the interactivity (i.e., making rich internet apps, etc.).

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with pixel perfect design or rich internet applications, but it is the desire to make the browser a design/media/application platform that created all these cross-browser issues.

--

On a side note, sometimes I wonder if there would be more fat clients if Windows did not introduce DLL hell. DLL hell and app maintenance contributed to the enterprise market's desire for browser based applications.

If you take iOS for example, you see a lot of apps for site content that are native and richer than a browser, but still rely heavily on http. That model seems to be thriving.
Yup, the service at its very core is a list of words you've looked up so that you can go back and repeat.

Quizzing sounds like a good way to make repeating fun, so I'll put that on my to-do list.

I conceived the idea with the vocabulary-mastery use case in mind, but as you've pointed out, it seems to fit the get-proficient-at-new-language use case quite well.
The number of bacteria on earth is estimated to be 5000000000000000000000000000000. This is five million trillion trillion.

All of them are eating. Some of them are mutating.

Let them do this for a few billions of years and what seems to be a very unlikely event suddenly becomes almost certain to occur. Complex life FTW!
Google's effective tax rate:  2.4%
http://www.w3schools.com/

Seriously.
Eggs, beating -- I see what you did there.
Optical drives have outlived their usefulness, IMO.
You can get more data, in a smaller space, on a USB drive. Granted, the price of an optical disk vs. a USB disk is not at parity yet, but I also remember switching from 3.5" floppies to CD's, even when a CD cost 5x a floppy.

Optical drives have also always been kind of a bitch to write files to (the process was always cumbersome and long for the amount of data you were writing), so they never really seemed to catch on as a file exchange medium. Plus, there are compatibility issues that crop up every so often.

Bottom line, I'm surprised it took this long for CD's to start getting replaced by USB drives.

Flash on OSX has sucked for a very long time. Not sure where the blame lies, but it seems to me that Adobe hasn't put a lot of effort into Just Fixing It. Now, we start to see alternative (and, IMO, better) video delivery methods on the intarwebs. Everybody browses the web a little differently, but I think that for the prototypical cutting-edge Apple user, Flash brings minimal value to the average web experience.

Java, I have little opinion on. I thought though that Apples changes to Java just related to the custom JVM Apple has used, and not an overall killing off of Java on OSX.
Ask HN: Will  you or anyone use this service? 
One liner : Build Linux servers on cloud platforms(aws,racxkspacecloud/slicehost etc.) to your specification.

Workflow :

1. You provide your specifications(linux distro, web server, app server, database server, other software) for your Linux server and the cloud platform you want it be build on.

2. Receive a quote of price and expected delivery time for you specific build.

3. You agree on price / delivery date/time

4. Build server for your specification

5. You verify

6. You pay.

Idea is to help potential customers to save time at least on the following but not limited to

1. Installing required software and its dependencies
2. Hardening for security
3 .. etc...

I still need to figure out how to deliver the custom machine image after building it on racksapcecloud/slicehost. On AWS it is straight forward
Because the only programmers who post on the various forums are all web programmers.
Agree that it's nice to have. I wouldn't die without it myself. Which is why I don't really have plans to monetize it. It'll be a fun project to work on made even better by the knowledge that it's solving a problem for a niche.
Ok, then don't make it tasks but measurable goals.

"We should have 100 signups."
"We should have a first paying customer."

And so forth.
You should design it to work for people learning foreign languages (as well as your initial goal), and also take into consideration the successes of supermemo.
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Then do some research. I just found some bits by 2 minutes of internet search. You can find more. (And do include Russian sites. You do not even have to learn Russian with machine translations being bearable now.)
True. Android is Google's trademark, much like you can't fork Red Hat and call it Red Hat or have little red fedoras in its icons.