skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comparison is still shallow. It is regrettable that most programming languages don't support named parameters, but it's fairly trivial to imagine a language and api:

DrawEllipse(x=50, y=25, width=32, height=5)

No real-time rendering and tracing of values required (I hope!). Furthermore, a decent IDE will bring in the method doc blurb, so the programer has a richer context to make an informed decision.

I appreciate the work Brett put into the article and I'm half way pre-convinced myself. At the end I was somewhat disappointed because most of the stuff he talks about is already present in a decent IDE, perhaps in a less polished form, but present nonetheless.

The deeper put-off is that the article seems to advocate not thinking, instead performing random walks using shiny tools. If someone can't think about their code, no amount of visualizations is going to help. That being said, the potential of enhancing one's thinking abilities by properly chosen visualizations is tantalizing, but I don't think the article makes a good case for it and I haven't yet seen a better approach than old school pen and paper.
This post reminds me of a story we studied in the school called 'Pied Piper'- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin

What a horrible advice. This guy is basically asking you to make your employees sacrifice their whole lives to make your company successful. And then when you and your company actually make it big, mercilessly kick them out without their due deserved rewards.

This sort of thing creates the 'Zynga stories', where senior executives don't want the chef to get rich. Or that the hardworking programmer in his cubicle no matter how hardworking he is doesn't deserve to get rich. And no matter how lazy the senior executive is, by the virtue of his designation, big college degree status is automatically inclined to a better compensation.

This might work for a one of case. But on a longer is a disaster for the start up ecosystem. If these stories spread, no good guy will ever want to work for a start up.
20 p/e is awesome for a business which is growing "e" very fast, and in what appears to be a sustainable way. Look at AMZN's p/e...
They could, but Core Location in iOS 6 uses the backend data for things like getting your car route. If I recall correctly Google doesn't let you use their api for things like that.

Basically removing the Maps app is one thing, removing new OS features that use the same frameworks is another.
Nepal Startup CloudFactory Raises $700,000 Round of Funding
Some of them are. Code Chimps is just trying to build a name for ourselves so we keep the cost for our clients cheap and using themes from Themeforest helps us do so. When a client wants a custom design we are more than happy to supply one, but most of their needs have been pretty basic so far.
New Zealand PM apologises to Dotcom over 'basic errors'
What is Snapjoy?
CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI are actually really hard to do well. Think of all unusable and unstable CRUD apps you've used. I wouldn't drill someone on dynamic programming for that kind of job, but I would want them to be smart enough and dedicated enough to do it well. In my experience that's rare.
What's next for iOS?
My vote is for almost-certainly yes. At the very least, it's a conscious marketing move.

Even after all this time (it's been longer now since HL2:E2 than the gap between HL1 and HL2 itself), the hype is so strong that if they released HL3 for Linux so much as a few hours earlier than the Windows version, it would cause a significant spike in Ubuntu downloads.
Back before Best Buy had the "Geeksquad", we had the exact same type of form. And we framed it the same way, actually had to almost underplay that bad things could happen.
No they couldn't have. The "logs of iPhone users' positions" you refer to were stored on the device and never sent to Apple. It's highly unlikely they could have ever been sent to Apple anyway both from a legal perspective and a PR perspective (considering what a mess it was when they didn't send logs off users's phones).
"The Camel is not Pleased."
Last friday a co-worker managed to snag one of the new iPhone 5s from an AT&T store and wanted to transfer everything from his old iPhone 3GS to it. He had not been syncing his 3GS to any computer, so I thought it would be a simple matter to set it up to sync with iTunes on his work computer, have it make a backup, then restore that backup onto the iPhone 5.

Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it should be. The sync appeared to go fine, but there were no apps or anything when restored to his iPhone 5. Going into the sync settings in iTunes offers an option to turn on app syncing, music syncing, etc, but alarmingly doing so would have completely removed the existing apps, music, etc on his 3GS.

Turns out that the only way to get iTunes to download the apps and other content from the 3GS was to right-click on the device in the sidebar and click "transfer purchases". I actually had to look up how to do this because that function is completely non-obvious.

Why is this the case? Why can't Apple be smarter and have iTunes download all information from the iPhone upon connection? My Palm m100 I had a decade ago managed this just fine - I could HotSync to a computer that I had never used before and it would dutifully sync contacts, calendar, etc, and make a full backup of the device. Also, shame on Apple for making it so easy to wipe the apps, music, etc off the phone during the process of trying to back them up. I hate to think that he might have lost everything, or been completely unsuccessful moving to his new iPhone just because of these stupid sync restrictions.
I'd add Stephen Elop to that list as well, he will be judged in due time
From the article: "The company takes an average of 10% on every transaction, according to sources familiar with the business"

Your numbers start to look a lot better at a 10% fee instead of a 3% fee.
Such a small set of testers especially considering how many of them will go to friends/industry probably means they are expecting to get buried under a shit storm of bugs.
How Columbia Made a Profit Giving Away 8 CDs for $0.01 [2011]
Dagger: A fast dependency injector for Android and Java
Do you have regular users, or is it just random traffic?
> Brett Victor is pointing out what he perceives to be valid flaws

Where are the numbers? Where's the testing? Where's the proof that his proposed changes are more effective in teaching a new programmer? Validity comes through numbers, proof, and evidence.
I don't know about you but I'm extremely excited about this printer. I currently have a RepRap Prusa but it really is hard to match the quality of these kinds of printers. The only problem I see is that it sounds like they are also selling the resin for it and somehow figured out a way to make it cheaper than most. I'd worry about how long they'd be able to keep up with selling enough resin for everyone.
My point is that loading, parsing and interpreting PHP is rarely the bottleneck in Wordpress.

In terms of microbenchmarks, opcode caches look spectacular. In terms of the larger stack, given the way Wordpress works? Meh, a few percent.

It might be worth it for a big site to shave a few dozen servers off the bill. But the overhead imposed by flakiness is not worth my time.
Sure. Let's start with an iPad.

iPads have physical state: shattered, powered, glitchiness, temperature, cover, location they're in, way in which they're being held, etc...

iPads have hardware state: processor, CPU, RAM, GPU, storage available, etc

iPads have software state: booted, OS version, OS mode, current app, volume, what the app is doing...

iPads have user-state state: songs, contacts, high scores, the way the apps are laid out, pictures, videos, other pictures, other videos, FACEBOOK, emails, signatures...

We know all of these things. An iPad is a small flat touchscreen PC with some prissy software and expensive accessories and most anyone in the tech involved world can distinguish between all of these layers and figure out what's wrong when something's wrong.

For the tech uninvolved, there's no real distinction between any these states. The iPad is. The iPad is, for lack of a better word, an appliance. It is a thing they bought to do iPad.

“Hey Marco, I had the iCloud put on my iPad. Now I can’t even do anything with it."

It is no longer an iPad. The user-state-state is gone because of a misunderstanding and there's nothing that can be done to retrieve it. The user doesn't care how, why, whatever. iPad is not working.

What Apple is doing with iCloud is removing maintenance and reducing the chances of catastrophic loss of user-state-state. They are further ahead than basically anyone at this point, and had iCloud been running on the iPad in the story, it would have been near impossible for that iPad to become a non-working iPad. It backs up all of these things:

( Purchased music, movies,
TV shows, apps, and books
Photos and video in the Camera Roll
Device settings
App data
Home screen and app organization
Messages (iMessage, SMS, and MMS)
Ringtones
)

and quite a few more datatypes they don't advertise in a strong legal construct that allows Apple unbelievable flexibility and ability to make products that do things as expected. It is egregiously hard to delete an iCloud, even if you try.

State is a service. SIAS. State As A Service. Make whatever acronym you want.
Any 18-25 year old coders in the Bay Area?
Distracted driving: Change a font, save a life
Please do join us next meetup that you happen to be in town. We are very welcoming of newcomers.
I was about to have a conniption, but then I saw this:

> Learn to Program

> We created the absolute best Platform for learning web development. Harp removes all the complexity, and gives you the environment you are already comfortable with.

This is a really awesome idea for getting beginners into mobile app development. PHP did a lot to reduce the barrier to entry for traditional web application development and I think this could have the potential to do the same for mobile.

Looking forward to seeing how this pans out.
Japanese Team Claims Discovery of Elusive Element 113
It may not be brilliant, but when using Facebook, every time I want to have a friend's picture in my own albums (a "personal copy") I have to download the picture and upload it back to FB.
Nice, but you're 4 years late, sir! Everything can be viewed in a bad light if it's wanted to and we both know it. So how about actually talking about the bigger picture, and problems with programming languages and the actual art of creating large-scale software rather than trying to be smart?
Good point. So, in the end, a user just expects all to stay the same?
There are already environments that allow to implement something similar to what Bret is showing. 4 months ago after watching Bret's Inventing on Principle I put together a quick demo of live coding in Lua (http://notebook.kulchenko.com/zerobrane/live-coding-in-lua-b...). The demo is executed in ZeroBrane Studio IDE (http://studio.zerobrane.com/) and it works with any Lua application (although with some limitations); for example, another screencast shows live coding with Love2d (http://studio.zerobrane.com/tutorials.html) using the same IDE.
Out of the opcode caches I've tried, XCache was the most stable. APC was an utter bomb, I wouldn't trust it with burnt hair.
I don't mind the single card bit, its the search that is horrid. Example from today, I searched for "Jasmine", which is a youtube client app. It is #5 on the list, the first "match" is "My Princess Diary". However they are ranking apps is making things as painful for users as developers. Almost doubly so for the latter.
I agree, I've tried a bunch of different "Learn to Code" sites out there and think the Udacity's "Intro to Computer Science" course to be the best, IMO...
What Is ‘Native Advertising’? Depends Who You Ask
Why not simply be more aware of those things?

His blog post made sweeping generalizations about what programming was like twenty years ago that are clearly inaccurate at their worst or at least misleading at best.

He doesn't need to cite anything. He could just make fewer generalizations of the sort in his post. Many programmers from twenty years ago were working on the very kinds of projects he is today. His might be better for many reasons than those early attempts but he does himself and his audience a disservice by not being aware of them.
Buddhist "Iron Man" Found by Nazis Is from Space
How is it, that this is not marked for deletion as non-notable?
I had to use Bing Maps on the Palm Pre for a few months this year after they updated the app (and partially blocked the Google Maps mobile site). Bing couldn't find anything without an exact address.
I find the double-standards that people have quite interesting; what was really striking to me was seeing that it was often the exact same individuals who would argue against technologies like DRM and laws like SOPA while at the same time lamenting widespread piracy and demanding effort be put into stopping it (with explicit descriptions of possible schemes that involve either DRM or centralized filters very similar to those we would see under SOPA). When you point out the hypocrisy directly, these people get quite defensive. :(
Yes, Marco's figuring was wrong (or at least incomplete).

However, doesn't his expectation sound reasonable (especially for the "it just works" company)? And isn't the mismatch between expectations and reality one of his points?
Google has far more data to enhance its maps. Does Apple have the internet lying around to analyze?
http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/alzheimers_statins.html
Rep. Lofgren Gives USTR A Simple 3-Point Plan For Real TPP Transparency
Like most others with iOS6 maps I've had my share of troubles and was excited to try this out when I saw the post. My wife gave birth a few days ago and so the first thing that came to my mind was the name of the hospital - a major hospital in LA. Unfortunately, bing failed utterly. "No results found. Pan to a different area and try again". At this point I'm zoomed to all of LA. I tried again, no dice. Apple maps not only found it without a problem, but I only needed to type the first word of hospital name and the rest was suggested as I typed.

Yeah, I only tested one search but it was hardly some tiny dive restaurant or other obscure landmark. App deleted.
Yes! :) While it's delightful if iPad suddenly does new things, it's not expected.
> We don't want to encourage the conflation of errors and exceptions that occur in languages such as Java.

I'm not getting this argument:

checked exception == error
runtime exception == panic
Toyota shows off all solid state lithium superionic conductor battery
congrat
If you want to really learn to code as a beginner, you should check out CodeHS (http://codehs.com). You get tutoring and help from real people, and the programs you write are actually really fun and interesting.

The focus isn't really on syntax but more on problem solving with a computer and helping motivate why you should write good quality code.

The idea is that you become a good programmer by having people read your code and give you good quality help and feedback.
A simple phone with voice, text and a camera.

I have the internet at home, I haven't missed it in my pocket in the two years since I've ditched my Galaxy.
You seem to be using a definition of "declarative" that I'm unfamiliar with. The functional languages you target in the second to last paragraph are very different from the more imperative languages in the final paragraph, and I wouldn't consider either group to be "declarative". I'm left wondering what concepts you're attempting to criticize.

Having said all that, yes, I believe major commercial projects are started in those languages, though I have no idea if anybody plans them into the 2030s.
Adobe Introduces Edge Tools For HTML5 Development
In case you're wondering whatever happened to this bug, it's still happening! I installed the latest release of Lighttpd a few weeks ago and it happened on one of our sites. So amazing to see the same bug still kicking after 3-4 years..
That graph is extremely misleading. If the range of responses is 1-10, those should be the bounds of the graph.
Some tasks - such as implementing kernels - are poorly suited for garbage collection. And while there do exist garbage collectors that can be used in hard real-time scenarios (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1217268), that's not the norm.

I think there will always be a place, at the lowest levels, for manual memory management. Providing abstractions to make that as safe and manageable as possible is a Good Thing.
That happens if I copy text with a link in it, too: the destination gets lost. We're pretty used to that phenomenon here on the internet.

I'm just guessing here, but if mentions are in the metadata, then it would actually be incorrect to copy and paste the mention text (a representation of metadata) into the actual content of a new message anyways. I expect a mature tent microblogging app would have a mechanism for inserting mentions as well as transferring content in and out from other servers in a way that preserves metadata.

Metadata should be displayed in an easy to read format, but still be accessible in full.
> http://binged.it/TDK322
The map is not shown when accessing it from India!!!
I don't know about that. Google has done a fantastic job at a lot of details such as colors and readability of street names that really improve usability. In the Bing version, the color palette is much closer together and less visually distinguishable. And Google Maps is the only map service I've ever encountered that does zooming in and out in a non-jarring way.
Indeed, letting teachers decide what to do on the basis of what's rasiest and most convenient for them is bound to have a 1:1 correspondence with the best way for people to learn.
An optical drive is not necessarily a burner. A burner is capable of writing as well as reading. However, this is borderline irrelevant. Users still know what a CD-ROM drive is. They know what a thumb drive is. Knowing one term (usb stick) doesn't mean they don't know the other (thumb drive). People didn't forget the term "automobile" just because "car" became more popular.

As for laptops, the loss of the optical drive on thin ones is very recent, dating basically to the MacBook Air. iPads are utterly irrelevant. Have people also forgotten what keyboards and mice are since iPads started selling?

You might be right that people will eventually stop using the term drive as its currently used, but right now it's a term with plenty of recognition. And over a longer period of time, rather than the term disappearing, I see no reason why the definition wouldn't simply adapt to refer to online "drives" if physical drives truly died out.
Gruber is trying to make it out to be this chess game of when to release the new map app, but never addresses the main issue: Was it ready?

I guess if you're crowdsourcing map data the only way to start improving it is to get it out there. But don't act like it's all mind games and strategery and say that Google knew that Apple knew that Google knew that Apple was going to drop Google for maps. Reading the past couple of posts was exhausting and doesn't comfort me at all when my phone tells me to drive into a lake.
Consumers and Creators
A Sneak Peek At The New Yahoo Home Page Redesign?
The important part of the quote is "for jailbroken devices." I haven't seen any solid numbers on how many people jailbreak, but the various quotes for the US at least seem to hover around 10%. That is pretty low.
> sticky audience

xkcd has sticky content, too.
Free Speech, the Internet, and a Very Big Lie
These all make me think my monitor is dirty. Why is this a feature?

Also, why are they called "patterns" and not "textures"?
Tips and Tricks for iOS 6
So you're suggesting users shouldn't have control over "songs, contacts, high scores, the way the apps are laid out, pictures, videos, other pictures, other videos, FACEBOOK, emails, signatures" ?
This pops up in front of me every couple years and I always get something new out of it each time.
Last line really got me. Totally lost it. And yes I agree, that sounds crazy.

I love the app more. I loaded it up the first time and saw how it highlights parks with very vivid colors instead of a light gray outline. My first thought was "I live next to a park???" Low and behold... I live next to a park that I never knew about.
AMD attempts to exert editorial control over tech press
Today, AMD lifts the embargo on "limited previews" of its desktop Trinity processors. There are very specific rules about what can be discussed: specifications, power consumption, and gaming performance data are OK, but pricing, overclocking, and non-gaming performance data can't be published until a later date--after AMD's carefully orchestrated previews grab all the headlines. This behavior could be considered unethical, and it certainly indicates that the previews out today don't tell the whole story.
What he doesn't answer is why they chose to ship a half-backed map implementation rather than continue to pay licensing fees until they got it right. It's not like Apple's starving for cash.
I'm interested to hear what versions of PHP and APC you used.

In my experience, stable APC releases have been very stable, but beta APC can poop out pretty bad, even if the changelog doesn't indicate anything that might affect your application.

I've used stable APC + PHP + Apache releases to do some large things, so not sure why APC is an utter bomb in 2012.
Hi Ben,

I know I would get to beta 1 or a prototype faster on app engine but I did not know the limitations you mention would cause such headaches. I thought we had more room.

What I like of app engine is the search service but I think it could become costly - there is no price right now but the api call limits seem rather low. And I see that you can do full text search in Postgres at no additional cost than the monthly database plan.
Hey everyone, I'm one of the creators of the Harp Platform. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to address them.
Simplicity is absolutely the most crucial aspect of a language used for successful commercial application in my space (15-30 mil annual). That's what I like about Go. Don't know much about Rust, but if it's being designed by a small group of engineers who think oop is still awesome, then successful commercial software developed in Rust will be just as costly to maintain as the 500k to 5 mil line codebases I run across today, written in currently available languages.

Speaking in general:

You get all this wonderful language functionality, and I promise you that you will write some shitty code at some point just to keep up with the daily pressures presented by a successful software package (clients screaming, salespeople breathing down your neck, etc), I don't care how good of an engineer you think you are. What's really funny is that, because everything has gotten so much more complicated (dev tools, business, cost of bugs going up, how to make money with software, whatever), the successful software I work on today is not making any more money than the successful software I worked on back in the late 80's running under DOS. Back then, the oop free tools and the target os were simple enough that we really could become SME's on our domains as well as on the dev tools we used to write code for those domains.

C# and java are definitely not the solution for new applications which are expected to generate revenue for the next 10 years. If Rust is just trying to be smarter at what these languages already do, I'm not interested. Something has got to come along which simplifies development, especially concurrency, and allows programmers of varying skill levels to write productive code in. Then after 5 mil loc, programmers coming and going on a project, an app doesn't end up looking like a fragile mess.
APC is also the most likely by 1000x to be merged into PHP core, so I would rather use/support/fix that.
Compared to 1,352 stories and 18,269 comments for wikipedia, for the record.