skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly disagree with your statement that Ruby excels and metaprogramming and DSLs. Other languages (Scala, C#, F#, etc) with coherent type systems have demonstrated an ability to define equivalently useful DSLs with the added property of validating correctness of a declarative language at compile time.

You mention LINQ as somehow deriving from Ruby -- it doesn't, it derives from set theory, relational algebra, and some very careful consideration of how to model those in a typesafe environment. You fail to mention that LINQ is type-safe, which is an enormous advantage to its use compared to traditional approaches of modeling set theory / relational data problems, and has value for things well beyond databases or querying simple data structures, eg: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609

You claim lambdas as Ruby-ish idioms, and yet totally ignore where "lambda" derives from: lambda calculus. This is not a Ruby-ism, and Ruby discards much of what is of value in lambda calculus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Lambda_calculus...

Ruby is a "me too" on those fronts, and not a particularly novel one.
I'm pretty sure that in the US, some kind of room and board charge is deducted from any income an inmate makes.
> Not to mention that nobody said you can only use the on screen keyboard.

Since the topic of discussion was how on screen keyboards compared to physical ones, I assumed we were talking about on screen keyboards.
To me, Y appearing repellently complicated means:

"I like X. I'm not interested in Y."

and not

"X is better than Y."

That's my point. I think it's a worthwhile distinction for developers.
July 2011 actually.

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/gco-official-url-sh...
I have yet to write an iOS app where I didn't at least once dip down into raw C for speed and/or control. On resource constrained platforms Obj-C's ability to go from high to low in a line of code is a big competitive advantage. I don't give that up lightly.

If RubyMotion offered a truly higher level abstraction over Cocoa Touch or offered cross-platform portability I might be interested but an arguably better syntax over the same API just isn't enough of a win.
Also, the || operator can be written ?: in Objective-C.
This is PROGRESS!
There is, of course, also Objective-C++. In my naïve younger days, I used that so I could have operator overloading in Objective-C. What a nightmare.
Ever notice how the speakers always have private speaker-only lunch rooms, and speaker-only bar events? Its because the speakers have less interest in networking with the masses. Being a speaker is a decent signal for being among the highest value people in the room. the speakers want to network with other speakers.

No actually. I don't. I speak at a fair number of conferences and I have had that experience a grand total of once.... and it felt very strange and "wrong". I remember several of us talking about how weird it was that we were isolated from the rest of the folk by the conference organisers (this was a French conference - maybe they generally do it differently there).

Occasional a single speaker dinner maybe - but that's it.
Your comment didn't add anything to the discussion. HN doesn't appreciate pure opinion like "This is good/bad".

You get upvotes for things which have additional information "This is bad because it contains mispellings, gets technical information wrong, and the author once slept with my mother."

You get downvotes for "lol irrelevant" because it's just noise.
Last time I checked engineering was about producing solid and creative results in smart ways.

If using Ruby for a developer to produce the same result is more productive, then not using Ruby Motion would be a crime against "true" engineering.
Monitor: An open-source Robo-Surgeon
Monetizing News: The Newsonomics of Pricing 101
By retina display, I assume you mean displays with high PPI. Yes, it is still noticeable. Not everyone notices it of course, but people who notice it (like me) define it as "grainy" or having a "green tint".
A possible Objective-C version to create the labels looks pretty much the same to me anyway:

#define MSTR(...) [[NSString stringWithFormat:__VA_ARGS__] UTF8String]

@implementation LotsaLabels

- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame
{
if (self = [super init]) {
CGFloat offset = 0.0;

[@[@"label1", @"label2", @"label3", @"label4"] enumerateObjectUsingBlock:^ (id object, NSInteger idx, BOOL *stop) {
object_setInstanceVariable(self, MSTR(@"%@_text", object), [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 10 + offset, self.frame.size.width, 40)]);
object_setInstanceVariable(self, MSTR(@"%@_label", object), [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 55 + offset, self.frame.size.width, 14)]);

UILabel *text = object_getInstanceVariable(self, MSTR(@"%@_text", object));
UILabel *label = object_getInstanceVariable(self, MSTR(@"%@_label", object));

text.font = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Arial Rounded MT Bold" size:40];
text.textColor = [UIColor redColor];
label.font = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Arial Rounded MT Bold" size:15];
text.textColor = [UIColor grayColor];

text.text = label.text = [object capitalizedString];
text.adjustsFontSizeToFitWidth = label.adjustsFontSizeToFitWidth = YES;
text.backgroundColor = label.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
text.textAlignment = label.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentCenter;

[self addSubview:text];
[self addSubview:label];

offset += 90.0;
}];
}

return self;
}

@end

The Ruby version is slightly less verbose, I'll give him that, but many of the lines are nearly identical.
Seen in the article:

"Why do I have to have huge statements like this?

static UIColor firstColor = nil;

static UIColor secondColor = nil;

static UIColor thirdColor = nil;

static UIColor fourthColor = nil;

static UIColor fifthColor = nil;

static UIColor sixthColor = nil;
"

Great, so someone who doesn't know how to use arrays is criticizing Objective-C as a language.

To everyone claiming that Objective-C's syntax is unintuitive/unwieldly/etc: remember that familiar != intuitive.

My two darling languages are Python and Haskell and I learned programming in C/assembly, and I find Objective C + Cocoa Touch quite nice, especially since ARC was introduced. Yes, there are things that can be slightly bothering, but once you pass the initial "wow this syntax is weird" hurdle, you're good to go.

It's great to have Ruby as an alternative, but all that Objective-C hating is silly and quite unproductive. Yes, there are limitations in the iOS dev stack (mostly with XCode— but hey, it's not that bad, people have gotten good things done with Eclipse and it doesn't exactly have a perfect track record either). But if the only thing that's getting in your way of developing a great application is the fact that Objective C's syntax makes you uneasy, then you should probably reconsider your abilities as an engineer.

As usual, the ones doing great things done probably won't be the ones tweeting & blogging about how Objective-C is lame and that if only $(arbitrary language) could be used for iPhone dev, then they would change the world.
Even in the past they had relatively little working class people in them. Even then they had tutors for people getting in, my dad went to grammar school(We're not working class, his parents were business owners) and he was tutored. His 63 now. Even I was tutored for the 11+(My county has them).

The only reason for populist support for them at the moment(Daily Mail, Telegraph, UKIP, BNP and other populist parties all support them), is most people THINK their kids will get in although most won't(By definition). When they come realise
that, populist support will disappear again, and they will go out favour once again.
Roger Penrose believes quantum mechanics will fail long before it conflicts with general relativity, which is a bold claim. In addition, the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics is popularly overstated. My understanding is that no one knows yet whether the non-renormalizability of gravity in QFT near the Planck scale is necessarily a sign that the theory breaks, rather than just a problem with perturbation theory. It's conceivable that non-perturbative effects will save the day.
Who Will I Know There?
Finagle looks like it is a bit lower level framework compared to vert.x. While Finagle aims to be a framework that supports services using multiple protocols, vert.x appears to be much more tailored for HTTP web services.
How do you respond to the folks that say it actually worked for them?

I've only experience with Remembering the Kana, but it worked, and worked very well, for me -- not because I immediately knew them by intrinsic sight, but because of the silly stories with each one would quickly bring them back into memory.
In my opinion lot of these threads completely miss the point of a tool like RubyMotion. It isn't about which solution is "better"...it is about ease of use for the large number of people that already know Ruby, and want to leverage that knowledge into exploring IOS development. Not everyone has the time or inclination to learn Objective-C right now, even though we can all agree that learning other languages is a good thing. This clearly scratches a market itch, will be supported by a great community that will layer tons of syntactic sugar and cleaverness over any verbosity/UI tool problems, and will likely grow into something truly great for the market it seeks to serve. I think it makes for one hell of a 1.0 MVP release.
Basically, but you're getting the opinion of a random person on the internet :). The third result is the 'real' one (the top two are unit tests for the named function.
did you not read the original post?
As far as I understand they required patches to LLVM so it may be that the resulting code would also work on older releases and don't need runtime support. But the version of Xcode that supports them is only available for Mac devs, as far as I can tell.
I don't understand why this person thinks spamming Apple's bug tracker will increase the chances of it being implemented. It's not a bug.

I don't understand why this person cares whether or not Apple agrees with them. The whole point of having a device capable of universal computation is to be able to make it do what you want without other people's permission.

A better use of time would be to implement this functionality for a computer that wasn't actively hostile to end-user extension. Android software keyboards sell quite a bit I believe.
Corporate Culture for Introverts
Using AlchemyAPI for semantic analysis and text mining
This is why i usually try to use some made up nationality/country in things like this. It's too easy for things to get distracted from your point by things like this. My personal favorite is Elbonia for any possible hypothetical country, [almost] everyone knows it isn't real and is just an example.
The lack of pronunciation information doesn't seem to me like a flaw; it's just not what they were trying to teach. After all, Chinese uses semantic logographs, not phonetic representations, and lots of different spoken languages use the same Chinese writing system (thus a Shanghainese speaker can exchange letters with a Mandarin speaker despite difficulty actually conversing). Unlike learning to read, write, and speak English, or Russian, or Hindi (e.g.), learning to read Chinese and learning to speak some specific dialect of Chinese are much more distinct tasks, and this is tackling only one of them.
People usually treat venue staff like crap, so it's no wonder that they might be surly. They are anticipating prima donnas walking in and screaming at them (and they do).

When you bring a big event to a venue you are creating an immense amount of work. You're only there for a short time, you show up for a few days and then leave. They're there all the time. A janitor can make or break your conference. Can you imagine what 1500 people do to a venues' washrooms?

Before our events, we always go and introduce ourselves to the staff. We try to keep things friendly and it's always paid off for us. I hand out my business cards to every staff member from hotel clerks to cleaners to security guards. If they have any problems or questions, they have my personal cell number to call.

If we have pizza brought in for the volunteers, we always offer some to the shift workers there. We try to be pleasant and courteous to the staff ahead of time, you won't believe what a huge difference it makes.

On the 2nd day of our last event, one of the security guards bought me a screwdriver set out of his own money because he saw we needed one. Doesn't always happen but people can surprise you.
Because I wanted to? It's the Internet.
RubyMine doesn't support RubyMotion or the iOS SDKs now, but they're considering it (cf. http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5458781#5458781). You can vote up the feature here:

http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RUBY-11039#tab=Comments
Can you give some examples please? If there are people out there who can run large conferences cheaply I'd love to go look and figure out how :-)
The High-Heel Bubble never popped, and the Education Bubble may not either
Speaking from anecdote, my relatively crappy, rural, public education in the USA was not like this. I'm guessing the article is written as hyperbole, not to paint a picture of the average US public school.

Of course, it's been ~15 years since high school for me. Perhaps things in the USA have greatly degraded in that time. Public education standards are a major a concern for me with respect to my son's education.
The Vignelli Canon
In addition to your points; I'm not a fan of sensationalist blog posts that start off with whining about how something is hard even though the 'about me' section states how awesome they are at writing code. This seriously just screams hey come read my blog!
EU rules that computer languages cannot be copyrighted
Thanks - that is a benefit.
Well, I stand (somewhat) corrected!
The boomlet in financial services startups - one VC's perspective
I don't know how old you are, but I'm pretty sure Penrose overtook you by the time he was your age.
Calling All Startups: TechCrunch New York Just Posted Office Hours
Show HN: Rescue struggling Kickstarter projects closing soon.
While RubyMotion is by far, the best alternative to Objective-C but it is hard to tell 48 hours after its release what people will do with it.

What about MonoTouch? To be honest I think I'd look at that first if I wanted something other than Obj-C. At least I could take my non-UI code and run it on Android.
That’s the en-US for renaissance‽ You live and learn.
Another point: Degree inflation. College has become so prominent and watered down that almost everyone has a degree, and thus having a degree itself has a lot less meaning than it did in the past. This does mean there are more half educated prejudiced people who might discriminate against you because you don't have a degree, but that works as a filter to keep you out of organizations that are destructive to your life.
Southwest's procedure used to be better when you had to get to the gate to get your number. That really encouraged people to get to the gate early. Now that you can checkin at home you can waltz to the gate.
He does oppose it being thought of a syntactic feature, ie part of the syntax.

He says it should be thought of as an error correction feature.

That is: do not in any case rely on ASI. Add your semicolons and only let ASI do it works when you do an actual ERROR and forget to add one.
Seeing as we're splitting hairs... :)

In the Ruby version I wouldn't use that selector with any parens. The resulting line would be one character longer than the ObjC version but use the Shift key one less time and would avoid two pinky trips out to the square brackets. (unless I am miscounting)

All other things being equal between the two options, and of course they aren't but let's just keep splitting hairs for a moment, it sounds like a typing win for the Ruby option. Readability is of course in the eye of the beholder.
Your Next Gadget Might Be Packaged in … Mushrooms?
The Road to Reality, while certainly not a technical work in the traditional sense, is not light reading.
Ruby's a neat thing, but the way some Ruby programmers come off like they can only think in Ruby and want everything to be Ruby is a little off-putting.
Is Programming Scala any good? I'm trying to learn Scala on my freetime, and $15 for a book about Scala seems hard to pass up.
Hacker News ★ (HN iPhone Client)
Isn't RubyMotion always going to lag behind Objective-C in terms of implementing any new features by Apple?

In the same vein that allowing Flash and C# toolkits above Cocoa Touch would slow the adoption new features (http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_...).
If we can get the antiDRM movement coming from both content producers and consumers, perhaps distribution will join in.
I don't think the aidenn0 is talking about falsifiability, but accuracy. As in, Newtonian mechanics is not 100% accurate, but it works well enough for macro-level calculations.

Like Asimov said, "when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Mark Suster, GRP: the Cocktail Party Pitch
"Writing Objective-C in Ruby is really fantastic, ..."

This disqualifies the entire article.
http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

Part of the reason I have written at such length is that the quality of the arguments for the other position are so very, very poor. And oft repeated.
As many other posters have noted, learning Obj-C is about 5% of the battle. Getting to grips with the APIs is the hard part and you have to learn them whether you decide to use Obj-C, RubyMotion or MonoTouch.

So if you think that Ruby is providing you with a significant shortcut here you're in for some disappointment.
47 points and no comments? How can this be such an important story if nobody has anything to say about it?
Johnson Controls decision has more weight compared to the EU decision.
I agree, I think choice B is in fact the closest since the only word from the original string which is completely different is BROWN. FOX and COW have the O in common and the rest of the words match completely, while Choice C has two words which do not match at all.

At least as far as levenshtein distance goes, choice B is indeed the correct one, even if its not whats closest logically.
I could implement this pretty easily in an app or as a library that people use as a replacement for the existing keyboard. So while I could not fix built-in apps, it could be a nice fix for downloadable apps. The only question is if I build it, would people come?
Disclaimer: I'm not the author! I just saw this on MacStories (http://www.macstories.net/reviews/reading-news-with-hacker-n...) and though it should be posted here.

It's 99-cent and iPhone-only: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news/id514166419?ls=1&...
I've been programming a 3D application in Objective-C for a few months. There are things I like, dislike and find really confusing about the language. The thing is, you have to learn and understand it before making assumptions based on "hello world"-like pieces of code. The best "feature" I found so far is not even a feature. It is the way the language is designed simultaneously with the framework/os. It feels more compact and makes reasoning about programs easier.

The second is the way in which complex applications are built. Some programming languages are known for having many design patterns around them, which often feel artificial. Objective-C and the Cocoa libraries use only a handful of them, but they come very natural.
This is the power of Ruby + Objective-C: you get Ruby’s powerful and expressive enumerators, metaprogramming, and reflection, but Objective-C’s APIs and libraries. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter, they just go together so well.

Not the best researched sentence. Much of this is possible in RubyMotion because of Objective-C's metaprogramming and reflection and other powerful features. This makes me suspect the author's depth of knowledge of Objective-C. That said, he's right that Objective-C has a lot more syntactic noise than more recent languages like Ruby and Python.
req.response.sendFile('webroot/' + file);

!!!!

I'll have file='../../secret.txt' thanks
Jim Henson’s Violent Wilkins Coffee Commercials (1957-1961)
I was considering a conference that will be happening next month. After researching it a bit more, I realized I would have been really ticked if I had actually gone. The conference was not expensive at all, but going to it would have meant a flight and hotel, as well as valuable time away from our startup. Looking at the info, I discovered two important things:

1. They still have not announced the topics, just the speakers, which makes me think that the talks will be ill-prepared at best. A good presentation takes time to hone.

2. They claim that the conference is two days, but in reality, the second day will occur at a different location still TBD (probably not near the first day's venue), and is just an open Barcamp for the attendees. Don't get me wrong, I love a good Barcamp. I've spoken at ours several times. The thing is, a good Barcamp is free. Like Amber, I am from Nashville. We can put on a good one and it doesn't cost attendees a lick. Maybe it's just our volunteer spirit, being the Volunteer state and all.

I am still interested in the conference, but the time away from our startup, the cost of the flight and hotel, and the concerns I listed above make me want to avoid it like the plague.
Light Table creator: “I’d like to see someone like O’Reilly take an interest”
Yeah, it matches up with how Americans pronounce it, too. British English speakers (like me) pronounce it 'ren AY sonce', while Americans pronounce it 'ren uh sonce'.
What is there to say, really? As the article points out, the RIAA has a serious amount of influence on the government, and they can do whatever they want.
Do you really like C++ better than Objective-C? I've been writing both for the past few years and I have to say I greatly prefer Objective-C.
Is this "regional American English"? I've never seen renaissance written as "renascence" in the midwest, northeast, or California.
The YouTube Experiment
New college grads stay clear of startups
When a stream is just a trickle: LastGreatThing: one item a day, no archives
Amazon.com to produce its own TV shows
It certainly does, especially for genetic (rather than developmental) defects. Wikipedia has a good summary

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect

Still, the mother's age is a lot more important, all things considered.
Doesn't seem to work for Unix power tools.
Pipistrel [Slovenia] wins first prize in NASA Green Flight Challenge
It has been on hacker news some months ago..