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Yeah. Coda's a good guy, and I'm not saying otherwise.

What I'm saying is that Stephen Colebourne is being a dick, because he used some leaked email as some sort of "justification" for his poorly argued "attacks" on Scala.

His whole post is a "I told you so! Look!" even though his original argument had no technical merit what so ever, and pales in comparison to the sort of constructive criticism that Coda is providing to Typesafe in the leaked email.

I mean, half this email is about performance/micro-opts. These things aren't really unknowns to anyone using Scala in a production setting.

FWIW, we're using Scala at a bigger scale than Yammer, and yeah, there's some things that aren't great, but on the whole, using Scala is a joy compared to straight Java. We also have no issues with sbt or using the latest Scala (we're on 2.9.1, it was a fairly easy upgrade from 2.8. Our 2.7 -> 2.8 upgrade was more a pain in the ass. :) Our only major issue is insanely long compile times.

This whole thing is amazingly pointless, because no one is saying Scala is magical and without room for improvement (no one I know, anyway). Constructive criticism is great, but there's nothing here that hasn't been said on the Scala mailing lists.

The real shame about this whole thing is how much respect Stephen has lost in a lot of people's eyes. Joda Time is the best library for date/time manipulation on any platform/language. I love it. But now I have this irrational compulsion to rewrite the whole thing because I want nothing to do with Stephen. Not because I disagree with him, but because I think he's gone about everything entirely the wrong way.
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I had been thinking about something like this, but in the context of recreating riot crime scenes. After the last riot in Toronto the police received over 1M stills and thousands of hours of relatively low quality cell phone video. The main task for them is to connect different shots of individual offenders over time to build a) a coherent story demonstrating premeditation, b) an unbeatable description and connect it to some identifying info that might not necessarily be present at the exact time of the offense.
You can certainly automate crossfaded audio between multiple sources to try to get the cleanest copy, but it's hard. For instance, how do you decide whether it's noise or the letter "s" or the "chk" of a pick across muted guitar strings? The heuristics for "better than any constitutent audio source" can be extremely nuanced, algorithmically intensive, and still difficult to pin down, akin to speech recognition. Speaking purely to SaaS'y automated purposes, natch.

Typically what it seems you're talking about for audio here is similar to a matrix mix in the amateur/live audio world. People have been (manually) mixing soundboard audio with audience-recorded audio to improve the audio quality of recorded shows for some years now.
Most stations in the US are now posting content transcribed directly to their own websites with clips of the appropriate story already. Promotion is the then directed to twitter/fb on an automatic or selective basis. Is this basically what you are talking about? In the scenario above, people find out about the content through search or directed discovery or one of the aforementioned social streams.

If so, then please understand that I don't think you've thought through your hypothesis and gauged demand enough. News shows purposefully put the best content at the end of a show because they want people to slog through the 15 or so commercials in the 3 breaks before consuming it. Notice this whenever there is a juicy story or big weather prediction.

Enmass show viewership pays more than selectively pulling out the good bits. AftEr the fact, the value of the content would be zero anyway, so it's repurposed for web use.

I would validate your hypothesis with both the consumer and customers. If you can't see it working, pivot. Perhaps a subscribable video playlist based on topics (like good alerts) not channels (like YouTube).

if you use this idea and it generates revenue, I want 2 percent.
This is from March 2011, I haven't found any newer articles on the same subject. It seems no new news on this front since then?
I've always felt that I'd love to use Path if any of my non-tech friends used it.

But I reaally don't feel like trying to explain to everyone I know why its different/better than just posting everything on facebook. And I'm normally the one convincing them to use the latest tech.
> Oh, why'd you switch companies if everything was so great?

Please keep it classy here.
I worked for startups that were acquired.

How about you?
Most people who trot out that "10,000 hours" figure don't remember the second part - it's 10,000 hours of _meaningful practice_. Being the best at something, including video games, isn't something that you just stumble into.

Would you say that about someone who enjoys sports as a hobby? You say "may as well keep playing and become the best" as if video games somehow involve less skill or practice to become the best at than other hobbies.
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Ask HN: Why is it so hard to quit a corporate job to a startup?
I am 24, and have been working for 3years in a major US software company. Very excited at first, I learned a lot, but feel like the sparkle has gone away. I am not particularly passionate about my current project, and have many ideas/projects I would like to pursue on my own. I try do during my free time, but it is very hard while working full time. Also, with this entrepreneurial dream in mind, I have been saving up money (~$100k) to make up for potential periods with limited income.

So a part me, definitely wants to quit, and give it a try. But another part of me is confused in terms of how to stay in the US for a startup (I'm under H1B). Finally, the biggest worry is whether I am foolish to throw away, in this though economy, a very respectable situation with good work, good salary, and exciting projects from an absolute perspective.

Have you ever felt the same, and how have you dealt with this feeling? Thanks!

-Donito
> > the WWW was coming.

> In 1998?

I built my first HTML page in '93. NCSA Mosaic was the rage in the lab.

> > it's spirit certainly lived on in Visual Basic, Borland Delphi,

> > Macromedia Director and a bunch of other things.

>

> I have used all of these, and beg to differ. The spirit of

> HyperCard was that of radical simplicity, and it does not

> live in these systems.

???

Drag and drop, double click to add script, how is that not the spirit of HyperCard? HyperCard was the preeminent RAD development tool. Easier than Visual Basic? Sure, but not by much. The gap between BASIC and HyperTalk is not that great a leap. If you can't see the parallels between Macromedia Director and HyperCard, you're being blinded by your own weird sense of what's what - considering they both used the same basic language back then.
The code for this could have simpler/less verbose. It's been a while, but I believe in the number buttons this would have worked:

put the short name of me after fld "lcd"

and in the equals sign button:

put the value of fld "lcd" into fld "lcd"

(edited to fix a missing quote)
I think you can take both interpretations. Someone might think "if Spotify is paying artists virtually nothing, I might as well cut out the middle man and just pirate music".
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Hypercard is different from systems like Director in what isn't there: the cancerous complexity.
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The problem is the copyrighted material, like songs. If the songs weren't there, then people wouldn't be able to use them illegally. You know, like the war on drugs.

We need a war on songs.
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Thanks!

Also there is an extra eval (the first one is unnecessary, I think.) But I am too lazy to revise the screenshots.
That rant is was quite nice... had me going for a minute.

But I'm sure it is one of many in a line of "reasons the software crisis didn't have to happen" - riiight. The "mythical man month"? It's 'cause they didn't do it right in 1960/1970/1980/1990/2001/... If only "they" would learn...
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Thumbs down.

When will the US realize that it is already far from its peak and that today there are (possibly) better alternatives elsewhere?

Get a point based system - now - or watch Chile, China and the rest of the world ROLFStomp you to death.
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This is a very good overview on the psychedelic research currently taking place. What really caught my attention was the last section in the article that suggests that a woman suffering from incurable leukemia may have gone into remission as a result of a psilocybin session that was intended to help ease anxiety related to dying. It's just one anecdote, but it raises intriguing possibilities.
what happened to TechCrunch's website? It's completely crashing on the iPad. It loads fine, then comes an avalanche of ads and stuff that slow it to a crawl until it quits.
This is a very good overview on the psychedelic research currently taking place. What really caught my attention was the last section in the article that suggests that a woman suffering from incurable leukemia may have gone into remission as a result of a psilocybin session that was intended to help ease anxiety related to dying. It's just one anecdote, but it raises intriguing possibilities.
>Care to explain how multidecade wait times for the two >biggest groups while the rest get visas in a matter of years >is fairness?

To be fair, each country gets quota for working visa based on a size of population. Unfortunately requests for working visa from those two countries outnumber that quota. This is the fact and everybody knows that. So if you are from country with more than one billion people where maybe 100.000+ ask for working visa per year you have to understand that the process can be complicated. And you have to understand as well that getting working visa here is a privilege, not a right.
So doing "it" right is a physical impossibility, then? Care to say why?
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Anyone keen to beta test a personal wiki?
Markdown + Dropbox + WikiWords = awesome!

I've been using Markdown for all my personal notes, links, and information. I keep my markdown files on Dropbox of course, but wanted to be able to work them in the cloud. I found an awesome iOS app that turned my Markdown files into a wiki, but I still wanted to get the wiki onto the web so I could interact with it with a browser on my desktop machine.

So I whipped up a prototype web app, augmented the Markdown with WikiWords, and it was great! A few months of tinkering in my spare time later, and I have a live system that's fully integrated with the Dropbox API to turn Markdown files into a fast, searchable, interlinked wiki!

What I really need now are some eyeballs in front of it to help drive the direction of new features.

If you're keen, or know someone else who would be, please drop me a line at beattie dot mark at gmail dot com, or http://twitter.com/beet

Cheers
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> Hypercard is different from systems like Director
> in what isn't there: the cancerous complexity.

No offense, but you're reaching for straws now. Any stack of any complexity was just as complex as the equivalent in Director. I'm not sure what you were doing in 96 or so, but I was making a living with Director after cutting my teeth with some serious SuperCard action. I wrote a precursor to AIM/ICQ for our feeble AppleTalk network with SuperCard and that was not simple at all.

I guess if you were writing simple back and forth stacks, then yes I see your argument. But anything truly useful beyond that was just as complex as anything else. I appreciate your romantic notions to the contrary however.
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I agree. The web stack is a castle on a swamp, except that swamp is itself built above a hyperspace junction linking everything in the world together.

The web surpassed HyperCard from day one, simply by locating its resources on the network. And that's why people put up with it, even if we have to dive into a fetid quagmire every time we use it.

HyperCard versus the web is a classic example of Worse is Better.
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Is the story the same with other services like Rdio? I only seem to see stuff like this talking about Spotify but the models seem similar.
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This is a great illustration of the difference between designing to help your users do what they want to do, and designing to make your users do what you want them to do.

I think most of the design changes we've been seeing on Facebook and Google fall into the latter category. People designing for the latter category probably also broadly explains why there are so many terribly and professionally designed sites out there.
If I were in the market for a tablet I would certainly look at the the Galaxy Tab.

If Apple considers them their biggest threat, then that's quite an endorsement.
I wished Hypercard was the BASIC of Macintosh. However, when I tried to build something with it (a manager for the offline game Car Wars), I quickly ran into some trivial obstacle, and was told that I'd have to write a C extension. (iirc, it was the lack of a random number generator.) Enough of that.

Hypercard was mostly useful as a sort of personal wiki or address card book; I used it quite a bit as a notepad with hyperlinks. It didn't die for any real dramatic reasons. It was programmatically stuck in the 9" B&W Mac era and never quite fit onto larger color screens, so once the web came around, Apple dropped it.

Also you history is way off, because BASIC morphed into VisualBasic, which did everything Hypercard could and ten times more, and was the leading programming environment for a generation.
I think it's pretty obvious from keywords such as "green cards" and washingtonpost.com.
> It's not governments that make stupid decisions, it's people; take the decision away from government, and someone else will make those stupid decisions, but stupid they will be.

Except that only a government can make me care what they decide.
> I'm not sure what you were doing in 96 or so

I was a boy. A boy playing with Hypercard. As hinted at rather transparently in the article.

> But anything truly useful beyond that was just as complex as anything else.

Complexity of interface is different from complexity back-stage.
Yes it does. Just because the recording was permitted doesn't mean that the recorder has the rights to publish or replay the recording.

Another example: owning a DVD does not mean you can then stream the DVD over Justin.tv.

The thing about rights is that infringement must be claimed by the rightsholder for any action to be taken. Once a rightsholder claims infringement then the content/stream/video must be shut down or removed, and if the site or person continues to infringe, THEN action can be taken.

This is one of the good things about the DMCA and the reason YouTube, Soundcloud and even justin.tv can continue to operate. It is also exactly what the much maligned SOPA bill is trying to change - for the worse.

btw, you should sign a petition against that bill on votizen or similar.

They climbin in yo' windows, snatching your youtubes up.
I just went through the ordeal of creating, launching and failing at building a successful LMS. The good news is that I learned what teachers/professors really need, and it took falling on my face to learn it. If Coursekit fails, I hope they figure out a better route as well.
Having read this, there are so many skills you can pick up from the gaming culture that helps you integrate with working as a programmer.

He probably knows how to do scripting from IRC... maybe he's written a bot or knows how a bot works from IRC. I remember lots of bots that work in different way and what you can learn from watching it run.

At 16 I remember seeing my very first bot and being amazed by it. The problem was that I was on a Windows box and everyone around me was on Linux. Then the problem was which language did I pick. Then the problem was that the most popular language was a bitch to install... then there was the problem I had no idea what the error was and if it was something I had done.

Oh the list goes on.

What I'm trying to say is, not everything is a waste. Knowing when something is valuable enough to spend time of is a skill in its self.

+1 procrastination proclaimer
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>To be fair, each country gets quota for working visa based on a size of population.

Right now, that's not the case, each country is capped to 7% regardless of the population. Making it proportional to population would be much fairer than the current system.

>And you have to understand as well that getting working visa here is a privilege, not a right.

What a strawman. Maybe you should tell that to Mr. Lee who said the following:

> Hosin “David” Lee, president of the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association, said the bill would force engineers from South Korea to wait an additional two years in their immigration process to get green cards.
1 - you'll note I didn't call grellas stupid, so watch your accusations

2 - some opinions are stupid

3 - This has nothing to do w/ standards or whose side I'm on, except that running around looking after

4 - grellas believes everyone should be free to express his or her core beliefs "without being accused of nefarious motives". Sorry, bs. Some people are looking out for number one, are in a position to exploit others, and should be called on it.

5 - I have a sincerely held belief you all owe me $10k. Each. See? Stupid.
You don't think there's a benefit to XML formats that have an XML Schema, so you can do automatic data-binding (at least in Java, with JAXB)?

There are also many visual XML mappers (mapforce, biztalk mapper, stylus studio, IBM and Oracle integration products)... but truly, these are enterprise-expensive tools which I think are only used in the enterprise (with its more complex data and, some say, unnecessary corporate inflexibility).

While it's true that disruptive tools tend to start at the bottom (e.g. with startups) and bubble up, the complex data needs of the enterprise have to be addressed in some way, either by sticking with conventional tools, or the new tools growing in ability. The common consensus seems to be that if JSON's ecosystem developed a schema language, a "JSLT" etc etc, it would be just as ugly as the XML ecosystem (i.e. ugliness is partly due to irreducible complexity) ... and we already have one.

I wonder if the technology development path might be similar to Twitter, iterating quickly with agile, featherweight Ruby, then switching to Java only when scaling demanded a heavyweight solution: start with light JSON when the needs are straightforward; move to XML when complexity demands a heavy solution. For many wildly successful startups, that might not happen, and JSON might remain perfectly fine; just as many startups stay with Ruby.
great summary of architecture trends. i think there's a room out there for someone to build a framework with the server-side simpleness of Rails and the client-side elegance of Backbone/SproutCore
Coursekit is free for professors to use. There is no purchasing decision. People seem to be missing that point here. Wouldn't the main difficulty for the professor, besides adding the course content, would be to input the grades back to Blackboard or whatever system the school uses?
I'm having trouble seeing how Carrier IQ could be given the benefit of the doubt in this. (edit: the phone producers / carriers, possibly, though I'd hope they'd audit what they're selling. Expect, no, just hope.)

1) their software logs all keystrokes. 2) their software sends all keystrokes to their servers. 3) they denied it did so.

Those don't add up to reasonable doubt any way I can see it. If they were using that information for understanding crashes, dropped calls, etc, then they would have seen that it was recording everything, and would have seen it many many many times. It can't have slipped past their notice unless it was totally un-used, and then they should've raised an eyebrow at the massive numbers of signals being sent to their domains.
I would certainly prefer a startup that uses non braindead languages.

If I were to code in Java all day I might as well get a more secure job with a real company.

Of course there is a slighting scale here -- I would still prefer interesting problems, great environments, vesting, etc.

But if I worked at Yammer now I would be pretty annoyed.
The author seems to consistently confuse architecture, languages and frameworks. None of his arguments have anything to do with Rails, Ruby, PHP or whatever else he mentions, except partly Javascript.

This seems to be a recurring pattern with developers who have "discovered" design and architecture through frameworks and can not seem to separate that from the tools used.
First thing I thought of was the Nine Inch Nails fan project "This One Is On Us". It works. Very cool and I wish you all the best.

http://www.thisoneisonus.org

http://www.ninwiki.com/This_One_Is_On_Us
Presumably, licenses to stream this music were acquired by Spotify from the artists' designated representatives. Presumably, too, those representatives are receiving some proportion of these licensing fees. If the deal is acceptable to the representatives but clearly abysmal to the artists, I wonder what percentage of the fees are being exacted by the middlers.

I know the amount of money received by a typical artist with a typical contract on the typical sale of a typical CD is, typically, very small.
C++ isn't a badly-concieved cross. It is a bucket with everything thrown in.

That said I wouldn't want to write larger programs in C and would prefer C++ simply because it scales better (assuming the other programmers don't use all the features it has, but confusing code can be written in any language). Also RAII is awesome.
One year ago I wrote on Scala:

"In 15 years of Java I never had those problems. I could focus on writing production code."

http://codemonkeyism.com/scala-unfit-development/

Promises have been made in the comments, things did either not get better or even got worse since then (Collection API, the nightmare that is SBT 0.1X, binary compatibility).
1) I know for sure that in my business, lack of information (about customers) leads to less accurate fraud detection. End result of missing information is that both me and my customers suffer more.

I don't see why it should be different with government.

2) Loss of freedoms in the last 10 years was caused by people being scared of 9/11. You cannot do much about it anyway. But you can choose what freedoms are more important to you. If I have to give up some freedoms, I'd better give up surveilance, but keep freedom of speech and freedom from being arrested.

If you don't make such choice - that choice would be made for you.