skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Objective-C is hands down one of my favorite programming language:

- It's compiled, not interpreted. Even Java and C# are compiled into bytecode for a massive VM to interpret. Objective-C has no VM, it's pure binary + a shared library to implement the runtime. It also uses the very best compiler, clang, which gives incredibly helpful error messages, warnings and suggestions.

- It's a strict superset of C. Even C++ does not meet this criteria. This means any valid C is valid Obj-C and behaves exactly the same way, in any Obj-C file. You can drop down levels of abstraction for performance, and can even write assembly if that's what it takes.

- It has an amazing and fully supported debugger in the form of LLDB.

- It's fully dynamic, allows introspection, duck typing and even monkey patching (with a little effort; method swizzling). Everything is an object, except for native C types.

- It takes the right approach to memory management. Realizes that garbage collectors are abominations, and that managing memory is really the job of either the developer or the compiler.

- It has the most fantastic concurrency framework I've ever used, in the form of `libdispatch`. Now, to be fair, it's a C library that ought to work anywhere, but practically it only works well on Apple's platforms and using clang.

- Apple is moving in the right direction, cleaning up the language, removing annoyances and making syntax more succinct.

- Header files. I think I'm on my own in liking this—but I think headers are amazing. They're a succinct and standalone version of a documentation file that is extremely useful to both developers and the compiler. Use them to describe well the public interface to your class, and you don't even really have to write documentation anymore.

- Solid design patterns and convention-driven. These are getting better by the day, with the recent addition of closures to the language.

There's two major annoyances:

- It's often needlessly verbose. Not in the syntax, mind you, which is just fine, but in the naming conventions. For example, `NSArray` has a method called `enumerateObjectsUsingBlock:` instead of simply `each:`. Add that up to every single name, and you get pretty ugly code—and good luck writing it with anything other than Xcode's context-aware autocompletion.

- It's tied to Apple's platforms, and well not run on anything else. Now, I'm fine with Apple-specific frameworks and GUI frameworks (like QuickTime or UIKit) being Apple-only, but I'd really love to use the language to write a backend service, for which I'd only need Foundation & libdispatch, for example.
I know many other people who love C# actually!

So I think it's more a matter of "personal sphere".

Note that I don't use it anymore at all personally either.

Thanks for your work on MacRuby! Did I mention I love Ruby? ;-) (really - all of my apps are Ruby/CoffeeScript based).
I do not know about others but I do it because not mixing up web server responsibilities with application server is a good idea. For example, I leave things like gzip compression and TLS handling to nginx without having to deal with them in my app.
The thing that most people don't realize and the media surprisingly never talks about is the fact that Medicare and Medicaid consistently underpay for treatments given. Somehow the government gets away with only paying 2/3-3/4 of the actual cost, leaving the hospital to foot the bill. It's so bad that many clinics don't accept Medicare because it simply causes them to hemorrhage too much cash.
If 5mph (or 1mph over) over becomes the new 10mph over, I assume that everyone would adjust. I go 10mph over all the time, I go 15mph over less frequently, and 20mph over less frequently still. (And, of course, the real thrust of the post you're responding to was a desire for autonomous vehicles.)

That said, I think most current speed limits are too low, so I wouldn't like having to drive 5mph over instead of 10mph over, but I'm not terribly worried about it: I doubt that technological changes will be perfectly handled by legislation initially, but I expect things to work out to a serviceable state eventually.
> The thing I've wanted is a way to post a per-message "non-nuisance bond" on incoming communications.
>
> Basically, a recipient can define multiple channels (mailboxes, call, physical mail, fax) to contact, and set a price for unsolicited communications on each. Maybe I'd say $1000 to take an unsolicited phonecall at night, and $1 for an unsolicited email during the day.

A good idea, but people will detect the perverse incentives and respond negatively. Give the bond to a (GiveWell recommended) charity instead, and it's perfect.
Yup. I remember the early 90's when my money market funds actually returned worthwhile rates. These days I may as well put my cash under the mattress.
Latest redis (2.4.15) and using redis-py 2.4.10. Just checked the CHANGELOG for redis-py, which is now at 2.4.13, and voila:

* 2.4.11
* Made the INFO command more tolerant of Redis changes formatting. Fix for #217.

Doh! Off by a single patch release. Thanks for the help.

See, folks? Celery is amazing in multiple ways.
Interestingly, the distinction was actually common among the founding generation of Americans, before even Proudhon, though Proudhon turned it into more of a fully worked out theory of property.

Benjamin Franklin, for example, wrote this:

"All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such a disposition."

(Elsewhere he clarifies that what he means by "necessary to a man" is essentially personal possessions, work tools, and shelter.)

Thomas Jefferson made a similar distinction in some of his letters. There's some speculation that Jefferson+Franklin's view that property isn't a natural right, but a social convention, is why the Declaration of Independence discusses "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", rather than the formulation, "life, liberty, and property" that was otherwise more common at the time.
Can you expand on "shows its age"? Code entropy doesn't increase as a function of time alone. An ANSI C "Hello, World!" from 1990 doesn't show its age in the context of C today, for example.

Is age an issue in its own right, or is it what informs what you perceive as a poor implementation that precludes the implementation of "modern" features? Also, I wonder if you perceive any possibility that progress might actually occur in the form not of accumulating more features on top of the modern fashionable designs but of starting from an earlier base and pursuing an alternate path of evolution to that of extant runtimes — do you?

For example, is it possible that there is some innovation which could occur on top of C which would not be possible in the context of some modern language and its modern runtime which would make it a more desirable platform than the modern alternatives? As someone who works primarily in C (and is a little tickled by commentary elsewhere on this item about C programmers in the '80s and '90s that suggests everyone moved "up" from C to C++; very Microsoft!) I would say that's certainly the case, because there are already things that make C more appealing than C#, Java, etc. An extension to the type system to do optional, minimalistic reference counting rather than having to use GC in a modern language or the STL's reference-counted containers (or something home-grown) in C++ would be a huge step forward for example. The locking annotations available with Clang and GCC have removed much of the value-add for using a language which does more hand-holding around synchronization.

If it isn't that age precludes the possibility of progress, then what's the problem with age? Code rot is an illusion.
Agree with a lot, it's also my favorite, and not because any big company told me to like it. In fact, I found Objective-C even before NeXT, let alone Apple picked it up.

One nit: the language is actually not tied to the Apple platform (although Apple bought the name at one time and is definitely the biggest user). There are actually several runtime/compiler/Foundation combos, most prominent of which are GNUStep and Cocotron. I have used both and run my (non GUI) code on Windows, Linux, Solaris, heck even AIX.
Again, a misunderstanding of the philosophy. Libertarians tend to believe the States should be free to legislate what they want. Forcing Abortion legal at the federal level is controlling what States were once free to decide. What they want to do is eliminate federal control of abortion law; and let the states decide. I have never heard them suggesting Abortion or Gay Marriage be illegal at the federal level.

I personally don't agree with all aspects of their philosophy, but it's still consistent.
If you charge enough (and in a recurring way), you learn to like calls from insufficiently technically skilled people. It's a kind of lock-in -- surely, no one else would put up with this. You also learn how to deal with it efficiently.

The trick is to not worry about any 1 particular person, but the whole burden. The average for us isn't bad -- if I could, I'd want to get more calls.

Also, if you have the kind of product with addons, you possibly get a chance to offer them (softly). In any case, they usually are the ones that promptly pay the maintenance contract (or can easily be shown the value of it if a manager asks -- here's your call log).
Dragon Nest Indonesia
Depending upon how this evolves, it could cause legal issues for employers who make postings. It's illegal to discriminate by a lot of personal information such as nationality, age, race, whether they have children. All of this information is quite obvious when you look at someone's Facebook profile.

IANAL and don't know enough about employment law to know if this is a legitimate concern. It doesn't sound like this is a very serious effort ("Facebook had a third-party developer create the new site"), so maybe there's nothing to be worried about.
I am a fan of large surface desks with nothing underneath. My favorite desk I've ever had is just a 6ft banquet table like http://www.lifetime.com/tableschairs/rectangular/6-foot-adju.... It can be packed in the back of an SUV/minivan, relatively light, and very sturdy.
Not saying a "virtuous circle" can't exist, they certainly do. However, it's good to keep in mind that a virtuous circle is by definition a feedback loop, and there are other kinds of feedback loops which aren't nearly so desirable.

In fact, taking a very dim view, one might say that "virtuous circle" in this context, and "tech bubble" are synonymous in denotation.
Yeah that's the scary thing. The actual cost is much higher. How much of this is inefficiency/"overcharging" is up for debate but it's pretty clear that since the bulk of the cost of healthcare for most people is paid by someone else, there's no incentive to economize.

Plus modern medicine is AMAZING, but the surrounding economy isn't strong enough to support it. People simply aren't productive enough to pay for the cost of the most advanced treatments.
Is Data Is, or Is Data Ain’t, a Plural?
What we found even back in the NeXT days was that programmers who had never tried Objective-C thought it really sucked, but most who actually tried it really, really liked after a short while.

The runtime really is great, and the fact that it is, essentially, the "C" runtime (~= native platform ABI) + one additional function (objc_msgSend()) is wonderfully minimal, and that this is all you really need to have a highly dynamic object oriented language is something even academia is only slowly figuring out.
If a manager hands me a toy ninja and asks me to take pictures with it in interesting places, I simply tell him to fuck off.

Culture eh? :)
Scrum and Kanban don't speak to testing; they are meta-procsses. There are, however, plenty of implementations to "agile" testing (for lack of a better term) that "plug in" to scrum and kanban. My stuff, which is all over the intarwebs, ain't terrible, and there are plenty of others who have written in this space - I am Matthew Heusser.
Of course a human did it.
Have you got a link to a source for that? I'd be interested in seeing the precise figures.
Not sure what you mean with "zero support for runtime state inspection", can you elaborate? Objective-C supports inspection of instance variables and messages (name + send/return types), so once you are dealing with live objects you can find out pretty much anything you want.

There's even some support for rudimentary stack inspection, but that's more limited.

Yes, it's a dinosaur, but a mighty cool one :-)
I suppose it is possible to fake metrics without lying...you just have to be very misleading. The "number of users" metric, for example, is not clearly defined. Does it mean total number of warm bodies who signed up? That's hard to fake. Is it the number of rows in your user table? That's easy. If people can register multiple accounts, then 1000 people could have 10,000 accounts and claim 10,000 unique "users".

It is also easy to get users by having a free tier. You could have 100,000 free users and 10 paid, and claim to have "100,000 customers". Or if your service is targeted at businesses, who then resell to their customers (an MLS service for example), then you might claim that your service is "used by 100,000 customers" even though you only sold to 100 businesses.

You also have to read the wording carefully. There is a dentist near my house that advertises "We specialize in Zoom teeth whitening, as featured on Extreme Makover". You might assume the dentist was featured on the TV show, when in fact it was only the Zoom product/technique that was featured.
Amazon.com also provides a similar service to their customers: delivery to lockers that are available at all hours:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/17/amazon-lockers-come-to-ny...
GM & Facebook friend each other again
I like the Autechre album based version naming convention
Burning the Cathars
I actually copied the title straight from Drudge. I wouldn't have read "The Drone Zone" either.
My limited experience with GNUStep has been disappointing. It's missing too many useful libraries to be useful. I haven't used Cocotron, personally, though I imagine they're related. So while technically what I said is untrue, I believe that practically, it is.
Steve Coogan pretty much did this last year, with Alan Partridge's Mid Morning Matters. It went out on youtube, sponsored by Fosters and then I think it got bought by sky and shown on TV. They were only 15 minute single camera things though. Plus, he already part owns his own production company, so I guess it's not a direct comparison.

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

Also, just last week there was a 20 minute comedy pilot called People Just Do Nothing on the BBC which started life as a series of 10 minute youtube shorts. It had various industry people behind it, such as the producer from The Office. It'll likely get a series.

It seems that in UK comedy at least, instead of pitching your show to commissioning editors at the channels, who probably won't understand it, you just make your own pilot and put it on youtube to demonstrate the concept. Peter Serafinowicz did this back in 2007: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peter_Serafinowicz_Show
I do for Errormator task queue, since 2.5, no issues at all.
If the United States passes the startup visa act, it would be vanishing much quicker.

I'd most certainly be in line to apply.
Yes, I learned this from a talk at the University of Chicago Hospitals -- Medicare/Medicaid almost always paid less than a dollar for every dollar in costs that they incurred (I think the quoted average number was closer to 50 cents on the dollar but I could be wrong). The only way they made up for these costs was from patients with certain types of private health insurance (not all types because some like Blue Cross had essentially negotiated rates very very close to cost). Without these patients, the hospital would not have been able to afford the Medicare and Medicaid patients.
> Could Apple deliver the specs of a Retina MBP with a replaceable battery?

They can certainly deliver the specs without switching to proprietary screws. That colors their other actions and makes it far more likely that the unreplaceable battery is about control and not about delivering certain specs.
Ask HN: What can we do about the deterioration of the community?
I'm sure most of you have noticed this. From random Reddit posts to nonsensical Tumblr links HN is starting to be a lot more noise then actual good hacker interesting content.

While that's to be expected when a community grows it's reaching a point where sorting through all the garbage, especially if you're using the RSS feed, is just too time consuming.

Can we at least have downvotes at less karma?
The problem extends beyond financing. As even the article says, successful companies like Shopify are able to raise $$$ from the US. It's also a scale problem. Canada has has, by my count, four micro tech scenes (Waterloo, Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa). In a Country with such a small population, there really still isn't a "hub" for tech. With talent so dispersed (and much of it moving to the US as it is), it's hard to get talent for good ideas in one place.
Face detection is one of those things that gets better the more examples you have. There's an incentive for it to centralize.
Poor title. It's not clear that these very expensive patients really account for the bulk of the cost problem we're facing.

On the other hand, it is worth considering the ethics of such a situation. At least as depicted in the article, it seems hard to understand how prolonging treatment in this case really benefited the patient, regardless of the cost.
Where startups are located is much more important to a VC than it is to a developer. VCs want to be within a reasonable distance to all their portfolio and potential portfolio companies. Developers only need to be close to one company. At least that's my theory.
I completely agree about header files. Having all of the type signatures and argument names associated with a library in one place is great.
Hi Samrat, I'm a little confused: is it really true that you can't make any online payments from Nepal? If you have got a credit card, you could always just give another country of residence when you're filling out a payment form if that's a problem. Also, don't you need webspace, too? Or could you rent that in your own country? Tell us a little more about your problem!
It would be nice, given the thread, to hear experience of someone that makes money in SL. I watched the show about some guy that sells sex toys and was making seven figures. Wonder how hard it is to get there (I assume hard but would be great to hear some real users' opinion).
No, I assume (or rather hope) that traffic regulations will be enforced strictly, and that drivers will respond appropriately to the incentive and obey the law. I assume local regulatory boards will respond to any economic impact caused by the law by setting regulations that they intend to be followed consistently. I expect a period of confusion and litigation to give way to a much safer, saner roadway.

The current system of semi-arbitrary rules with extraordinarily selective enforcement is utterly inane, and has nothing to recommend it except that it may be somewhat safer than having no rules at all. But, again, I cannot comprehend where people get the idea that they have a right to ignore the rules when it suits them.
Indeed. Big companies like Microsoft and Google tend to snatch a good portion of highly skilled engineers, while most designers (product and visual) tend to head towards New York City or San Francisco for better growth and money.
If your lumber is leaking sap, then you've got problems.
Employers aren't generally allowed to search for, or look at, most 'demographic' information (age, race, gender, etc.).
That's part of the big problem with this...
> For mobile payments, isn't the key having merchant accounts set up for vendors rather than accounts for consumers?

Yes, but Amazon clearly knows how to handle merchant accounts. All they need to do is to figure out the right market to get the ball rolling.
Depends on the MIME type the server requests.

If your browser requests a html page, it will respond with a html page... and vice versa.
All digital goods have infinite supply and yet even for goods that can be acquired for free (say Ubuntu distributions), there are markets (the $10 starter DVD). Once a digital good is 'produced' replication costs and distribution costs approach zero, or at least to a marginal cost of zero given the sunk cost of the infrastructure (one pays of internet bandwidth but doesn't normally charge it against digital purchases).

So my claim is that in a digital marketplace the quantity supplied of a good can meet any quantity demanded. Thus classical Keynesian economic theory doesn't work well. Since by the math if supply is infinite even selling for a small cost can give good returns (cost to produce is now zero after all) there is no compelling reason to sell at a fixed cost, but demand isn't infinite.

So why do people pay for 'free' information? (and yes some don't, this isn't a piracy discussion). Given these sorts of questions I've been working on what it is that gives information value. What are the economics of information?

One answer to that explains Google's success. Information can become valuable if it is timely, which is to say it meets a need in a very time efficient way. So high frequency stock market traders pay through the nose to know a few milliseconds earlier what the trades are. Google sells the fact that someone has just looked for <query terms> to someone who thinks they have an answer related to <query terms>. Someone is looking, the advertiser can provide, so what makes a search advertisement so valuable is that the intent behind the search is 'known.' Previous venues tried to sell the 'kind of people who are looking at these pages' the demographics. A less precise form of targeting but similar.

But back to the Parse discussion, one of the factors that appears to influence information value is its rarity, or difficulty in obtaining. So a picture of some celebrity's new baby is 'rare' and 'hard to get' so a paparazzi gets a big payday when they get that picture. But a picture from the agent's press packet on the birth? Not so much.

Applications seem to be more valuable if they are perceived as being 'hard to write' (perhaps this is a variation on bike shedding) than ones that are perceived to be 'easy.' And that affects personal statements of value as well, how many developers refuse to buy an app they feel they could write in a weekend and yet non-developers flock to it?

My claim is that classic economic supply and demand models don't apply to digital goods because the supply of the goods can be infinite and the classic model suggests prices would go to zero in that scenario.
As an individual Canadian entrepreneur, really your only course of action is to ignore the talk of doom and gloom and just get shit done.

It does seem to be the reality, though, that beyond a certain stage the only way to get a good valuation is to work with American VCs.
Use PayPal.
Having a safety net can boost your confidence..
RIM Redesigns BBM Display on Blackberry 10
I'm using Github Pages to host my site, so web space is not a problem.

Regarding the online payment, a card from a bank in Nepal would not be able to purchase anything online. Of course a credit card from a bank in another country would work in Nepal, but I don't possess one.