skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Java is very verbose, but also very strict and explicit. Besides all the obvious benefits to that, it means you can utilize auto-complete/intellisense/refactoring tools that let you pound out code at a rate on par with dynamic languages, even if you are producing 10x the amount of code. Fully learning these tools, e.g. in Eclipse, is a meta-skill that can take some time to get good at, but if you're working with Java for anything over a few weeks, it's definitely worth it.
I really like it....

I suppose coming from a art background as well as a computer science background gives me a different perspective.

Its a good way of keeping up with the new trend of flat design without losing the iOS look and feel, my biggest fear for Apple is that they would have made a rip off of windows mobile, but here they haven't, they have made a really good balance.
Putting fear into people is, of course, a worthy goal. But I'd prefer making situation better instead, and making one bureaucracy fear another... well, you can see how well it is working now. No way two layers of stupid, obtuse and possibly corrupt bureaucracy can be worse than one for the people having to deal with them, right?

>>> The only problem with the above is that it requires sane and non-corrupt legislators.

Yeah, there's a tiny-tiny problem with that... As soon as we solve it, everything else would be just peachy.
Congratulations Obama, Feinstein. You've got me throwing in with Rand Paul. Though I could trust you with our civil liberties and privacy, but now I have to get behind the Ayn Rand loving libertarian on this. So be it; policy over party.
Actually, Oracle have proved a LOT more committed than Sun to improving the language. They put one of the smartest guys in charge of Java 8, charged him with turning the ship around and have given him a lot of resources to work on it. Even Java 7, while including few language features, did include a lot of JVM improvements.

The timezone-update tool, on the other hand, really is a minor issue. So some people will have to use IBM's tool instead. Yeah, it's lame, but I don't think it's going to change anyone's mind.
What would a better solution look like?
Outside App (http://www.outsideapp.com/) came out two years ago and did this. Not as nice, no question, but I think the guy's paranoia about the rejection is way off base. Though I do agree that there doesn't seem to be a good reason to reject it.
I really truly love Clojure the language. To me the vector, map, etc syntax is a perfect amount of syntactic sugar--it institutionalizes idiomatic use of these structures.

But... sometimes the JVM feels awfully heavy-weight and far from the metal. I have to wonder what a Clojure on SBCL or Racket would look like. Ignoring for a moment the benefits of the epic number of JVM libraries, I can't help but think that the foundations of those languages would be a pretty low impedance mismatch for Clojure The Language. Hey, Clojure-on-CL or Clojure-on-Racket could even support real tail recursion.
Workstations are not gaming PCs or consumer desktop systems.

Gaming PCs and consumer level desktops may be "plastic pieces of shit," but the workstations I've used are always solid - both hardware and software.

The ones I have used have the build quality of a rack server, but in a desktop system. They typically use Xeon processors, ECC memory, etc.
Winner-take-all voting systems naturally tend to produce a two-party system. There's an aversion to vote third party due to the problem of throwing your vote away. So, before you can have viable third parties in this country, you have to revamp the voting system to something like instant runoff.
UPS vs. FEDEX: Ultimate Whiteboard Remix
Well thanks! :)

I'm not a legislator, of course, but in my mind it would run something like:

- if you have over x third-party selling participants (say, 50 or 500)

- and the marketplace provides services to the "general public" (e.g. the Apple Store, qualifies, an intranet market would not)

- and the marketplace has revenue over x per day (say, $10,000)

- then participation in the marketplace must be governed by a clear, unambiguous set of rules that gives no advantage to products made/sold by the owner/administrator of the marketplace, and all interpretation of the rules, or challenges to such interpretation, must be made by a neutral, third-party arbitrator without influence from or by the owner/administrator of the marketplace

- and additionally, rules of the marketplace must not be written in order to give any kind of explicit or "implicit" advantage to the owner/administrator of the marketplate (Apple can't always feature its own Maps application over Google's, for example)

These specific rules are totally off the top of my head, but it's just a kind of idea -- once any market reaches a certain size, it's in the general public interest to ensure a level playing field and due process -- I mean, that's what things like court-enforceable contracts, food regulation, stock exchange and public company regulation, etc. are all about.
> Developers are now forever beholden to the big corporates.

Not if FireFoxOS gets enough support

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/partners/
"I'm surprised he is not using the IRS scandal and tie it to the NSA's potential abuse of power."

Actually, he does mention the IRS scandal:

"The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents. Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department?"
This is the second most alarming thing, on a national discourse level, that I have seen in my adult life. The first being the lies and media complicity readily swallowed by the u.s. public preceding and during the invasion of Iraq.
"because HN is a gender-troll breeding ground unworthy of my time"

It's pretty impressive to discount the views of thousands of other people and pontify yourself in the same sentence - all while adding nothing to the conversation too!
Amount of dust blown across the Western U.S. is increasing
I dislike how the focus is on Snowden now, and not on fixing the problem.
> Booz Allen said he was an employee for less than three months.

I don't really get this Snowden guy. From what I've read about him, I don't see why someone like him would be given access to the whole picture in the way he claims to have had access to. Unless someone was positioning him with the intention that he would become a whistleblower /conspiracy

I just have a hard time buying that of all the people that have worked for the NSA, of all the people who must have had access to what he did, only one would become a big whistleblower. Either somebody dropped the ball in psych profiling Snowden, or this must have been intentional, right?
Cool. But the flipping/rotating card with the info on it doesn't show very nicely in Chromium on Xubuntu 13.04.

It's transparent, so you can see the text sitting "behind" the front-facing text.
Is it possible that the app review teams were instructed to find a reason to reject all apps in a given category for a month or two leading up to the release of iOS7? Were other weather-related apps approved recently?
I like java as a language. It's consistent, has less warts than many languages and the jvm is pretty darn awesome.

What I don't like is the java ecosystem. Guice? I've nothing but bad experiences with it. Just about every framework out there that I've used in java has gotten in my way more frequently than it's been helpful. Java Api's (excluding much of the stdlib) almost all seem to be made to annoy me.

Java's great. If only it's ecosystem matched.
"So if you are frustrated with where your business is right now, look at your funnel." or, perhaps look at your MLM Business Model?
Programmers today do not have to handle memory management because of JVM. Programmers yesterday could not handle memory management that's why jvm came into existence.
Ever used genius playlists? They leave everything else I have tried in the dust. I'm listing to some random BS off spotify right now, and if there is a link between the song I hit radio on, and this one, damned if I know what it is. I tried making a playlist off a kids song for the toddler the other day, and came back 10 mins later to find her listening to German opera. In not sure who was more confused.
Could that mean that Clojure might one day support TCO/mutual recursion as F# does, if being used on the CLR?

I know it is cliche to complain about that, but it really does annoy me.

A Clojure targeting LLVM could be pretty interesting too...
Did you not notice that Oracle is still providing free TZ updates through regular JRE updates?

TZ updates aren't going to have much of an impact on Java relevance. If they start charging for JRE updates themselves, let's talk.
I find this kind of thing particularly interesting because I am the same age as Snowden.

For reference, 9/11 is one of the defining events of my adult life. It happened during freshman physics lecture on my second week of classes at MIT. I considered joining the military, I protested in the streets against the war in Iraq. I remember the Patriot act being passed very well, and remember wishing people could see how shortsighted it was at the time. There is a particularly clarity (cough naivete) that comes with being 18 years old.

I feel like people who are much older than me remember previous major government corruption issues like Iran-Contra which I was only three years old for.

I feel like people who are much younger than me don't have any frame of reference for a time when surveillance wasn't the assumed state of affairs.

So, this fellow is particularly interesting to me because it seems like he, like me, has had his perspective on what the USA is defined by 9/11, the Patriot Act, the Afghanistan and Iraq not-wars, and a financial collapse.

I don't know that I really have a point; these issues are so multifaceted that I can't really consider them without being overwhelmed.

I do hope that this combined with the IRS scandal and the phone taps on reporters will push the electorate in a more libertarian direction. But I'm not counting on it, people are incredibly selfish in practice and vote for their perceived short-term interests even when their interests violate the liberties of others. That seems to in this culture just be standard practice, and if that's part of the culture I don't think things are going to go anywhere good.
The collect-first and degree of oversight in FISA are issues, but generally you can't get a warrant to access protected communications (lawyer, doctor, priest) unless that professional is actually a co-conspirator, not just a professional service provider. There are exceptions (e.g. child abuse, imminent harm, etc.) to the privilege, though. And I think weaker spousal privilege (not being compelled to testify, but if wiretapped, that's fine). IANAL.
And what about resale? Will I need to specifically transfer my ownership via Apple?
> But there's also lots of Rails jobs too.

Depends where you are. Outside Silicon Valley and a handful of tech hubs in the world, Rails pretty much doesn't exist. Java, on the other hand, is used everywhere.
I'll clarify then: I believe Solaris has had the first part (ability to boot into a 32-bit or 64-bit kernel) since 1998. That's well before Apple even provided a 64-bit kernel or ever shipped an OS X release.

Solaris has long had a single, unified architecture for 32-bit and 64-bit and until recently delivered both a 32-bit and 64-bit kernel on a single disk. That's why on Solaris you'll generally find the 32-bit libraries installed in 'usr/lib' and the 64-bit under 'usr/lib/64'.

The only exception is for processor architectures (SPARC/x86) where it made less sense.

But even then, Solaris 11 has multi-variant packages, so a single package provides support for both x86 and SPARC.

It's true that (as far as I'm aware) Solaris never supported the 64-bit application on 32-bit kernel hack that OS X did (which comes with significant performance tradeoffs).

So at most, Apple can claim that achievement, but they can't claim to be the first to provide a single install image supporting 32-bit and 64-bit.
I think the argument I wanted to make was that the people NSA claim to be after aren't using your typical contractual phone plans, since OP was suggesting they should simply track call logs.

Sure they used pre-paid phones as well as pay phones, hotmail and were still using coded and hidden messages.

Today they'd be using that steganography over cryptography.

Few sources:
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-4985597.html

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/al_qaeda_secre...
The key phrase is "either of which could run 32-bit and 64-bit applications." OS X supported 64-bit apps on a 32-bit kernel. This enabled users to run 64 bit apps, and use >4 GB address space, without any device driver incompatibilities.

I think Solaris (and Windows and Linux) require a 64 bit kernel to run 64 bit apps. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A

"We suspect you may have a genetic predisposition to being a psychopath or traitor."
For a moment there, I thought "Hemorrhoids Herpes Depression" was a single, devastating disease.
I am glad to hear people start to admit that policy is more important then party. I believe that is a key step in us moving forward as we need to agree on shared principles that are universal and have a means to insure our elected officials follow through on them.
Because people don't know about it.
> Actually, he does mention the IRS scandal

I saw that. However, it's made in passing and the core of his argument and the title of his article is about "Big Brother". Which sounds heady and usually associated with the conspiracy types.
People still don't take a lesson from this. They have done exactly the same thing before. Apple is EVIL, understand that. May be one of the most evil tech company out there.
There's really two issues here. Firstly, I meant "killing innocent people" to refer to people who are innocent of anything that anyone routinely refers to as "terrorism," like children. Secondly, I have purposefully tried to leave out my own personal views on what constitutes "terrorism" and what constitutes a good response to it, because like you predicted, I'm probably not going to be convinced. But the first point still stands.
Look, man, I feel really bad for you. But there are lots of open platforms to develop apps for. You make a choice when you decide to specialize in iOS apps. The choice you make is to make yourself a bitch to the arbitrary whims of some goofball asshole sitting in Cupertino, who doesn't give a fuck about your aspirations or vision. You can complain all you want, but they made the garden, and they can do whatever the fuck they want with it.

It blows. But now you know why you need to support an open platform.
IOS7 takes the leap but misses the mark
Windows has had excellent multi-mon support since at least the XP era, (when I started using dual monitors at work and home in, I think Win98 wasn't that bad either), and to make you feel old, realize that WinXP has been out for 11 years.
How is iOS itself not a market? Just curious. I know its more complicated than the Wikipedia and again IANAL but it seems to fit to me.
Edward Snowden betray the country. If you don't do anything wrong, will you really care the government collect your information?
If you didn't trust the bank,why you still deposit your money there? If the bank collect some information to avoid hacking issues , do you think it is unacceptable?
> When the author made the claim that Java was as fast as Go, I was a bit surprised. I wasn't aware Go had caught up to Java.

As a Go "fan": it hasn't. It's close in some things, faster in a few, but the JVM has years (and years) of performance tuning in it, and Go won't unequivocally beat Java for some time (if ever).

(This WiFi connection is failing me right now, but there's a good number of Go vs. Java benchmarks out there, for whatever benchmarks are worth)
This exact response right here is why a perfectly good language like java is ranked just under php in the hated languages list.

The language is fine but the insistence by the vast majority of the developers using it to do things in a way that can only be described as "Enterprisey" gives it a bad name. And it really is a shame.
Funny, I thought "at last!" 1Password is fine, but I'd prefer a more integrated experience.
I hear this a lot, but I disagree.

1. Firstly, take startups where the founders had an original idea, but they pitch it as "X for Y". Is this a bad thing? Many people will say that they should pitch it on its own merits. The thing is human communication is all about reducing an idea to concepts the listener already understands. I used to work on a startup that was an online freelancer marketplace based around social connections. I could also describe it as "eLance meets Linkedin". The latter gets the idea across even though it's not a perfect description. Doesn't matter. If I'm dealing with someone who hears a lot of startup ideas, or has a low attention span (eg the typical investor), brevity trumps accuracy.

2. What about startups that use the "X for Y" template to generate business ideas? This might seem a bit more questionable. But if a certain model worked for one industry, why can't it be adapted for another? Uber's model of combining the best features of a marketplace and a high quality service firm worked well for taxis. Could it work for other markets? onefinestay is Uber meets AirBNB. Exec is Uber meets TaskRabbit. You get the idea. And it's clearly not true that Uber are the company best positioned to succeed in those markets, as they have no business selling hotels or personal services.
"everyone" might be an exaggeration but the adoption curve for iPad is ramping up a lot faster than for the iPhone. Apple has sold over 100 million iPads so far.
It's because of automatic compilation and the fact that programmers today can't handle register management.

It's because of integrated circuits and the fact that programmers today can't handle voltage management.
A mountain lion (10.8) and a puma (10.1) are the same animal. A panther (10.3) is a subtype of leopard (10.5).

But even with these redundancies, they are running out of large cat names to use and would have to go with the likes of "jaguarundi", "serval", and "manul" to keep the theme going. These are cool animals, but have nowhere near the emotive power that "Jaguar" or "Lion" had.
Just a note:

If they’re going to reinvent the whole thing, I’d just go for three dots. One dot for low service, two dots for ok, three dots for none, and no dots for none.

I think you meant "...three dots for excellent" or something along those lines.

Great idea though!
On the other hand, he was apparently a system administrator of some sort so perhaps he had ways of getting data out of their system that other employees would not have had available to them.
Chicago politics? Nope, just politics.
The NSA, CALEA, and the hardware backdoors built into routers (required by law)
Everyone should read this paper in full "CALEA, Carnivore, and Countermeasures" (2000):

http://www.dis.org/gessel/IS2K/CALEA_Carnivore.pdf

...but not everyone will, so here's an excerpt that relates to what I'm put in the title. The law the excerpt refers to is CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act), which was passed in the 1990s:

"The law, as interpreted by the FBI, requires all companies providing telecommunications services in
the United States to install remote control ports on their routers which allow law enforcement, acting
autonomously and remotely (though theoretically only on a warrant) to easily extract any conversation in it’s entirety, up to 1% of the hub’s total traffic simultaneously. This capability must have been
implemented by 1998, unless a waver until 10/24/2000 was granted.
Given a large installed base of equipment, there was a controversial element of cost involved. The FBI
played down the cost, asking congress to allocate $500 million. The FBI admits now that the cost
may be 4-8 times that high. Industry estimates the cost at $10 Billion.
Congress was convinced to allocate the original FBI estimate out of tax revenues, meaning the cost of
implementation is borne by taxpayers. The difference in implementation cost is borne by customers
of communication services."

Imagine how far things have come in the past 15 or so years.

To imagine that the US has anything less than the full capability to record and data-mine practically every electronically mediated communication is naive.
I expect other browsers could greatly improve JSBench performance if they focused on it. But I would be quite surprised if they matched Safari's current results in a month. It took a lot more than a month and significant architectural work to get those results in the first place.
I would be curious what PG thinks about this. Relating in opinions described in his book. And is it just me or "banking startup" sounds like oxymoron.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your opinion. Still think learning GO could be a better idea, at least for me.
Microsoft OSes don't have any restrictions on what software to run.

Apple does make money, but Android and Microsoft are eating their market share like mad. Apple was smart enough to invent a new market, but isn't smart enough to keep it.
First of all, there have been several NSA whistleblowers that have spoken on this issue. William Binney even gave the CCC a copy of some code that was a similar model to what his team initially designed for the NSA. Second, his current job at a contractor is relatively new, but before joining Booz Allen he worked directly under an intelligence agency.
Senator McCain Thanks Apple For Auto Updating His iPhone
I like machines like I like my women, able to touch them all over.

Mac pro - still proprietary, no thanks
Google decides what goes and what does not in Google Play.

It's not the only way to install things in Android. But technically, neither is the AppStore in iOS.
There should be a way to vote for an ongoing event to remain at the top of the frontpage of HN for some days or weeks in form of a link to all related stories/links. I'm sure this could be done in a very automated way, showing milestone articles on a timeline, best comments etc.
All the press and comments assume his ultimate goal is to avoid extradition, which has not been requested so far. I think he know the consequence of his action very well. He wants to expose the government surveillance program and draw public outrage. If US government do request for extradition, this will go through the court system in Hong Kong. Hopefully it will be a fairly transparent system and give him another chance to raise the awareness of this program. He might end up in jail, but this would fulfill his goal, that is to expose the surveillance program to the greatest extend possible.
FireFox already interfaces with the normal KeyChain. Why must it be Safari only?
Fair enough.

With that said, OS X's hack support for 64-bit applications on a 32-bit kernel certainly wasn't at the same performance level as a 64-bit kernel as they claim. It's a dubious achievement at best given the performance tradeoffs.
They've collapsed the IDE / SCSI / PCI / AGP / etc buses with Thunderbolt.

That custom PC swappable component issue mattered when the only game in town for hermetically sealed boxes was USB (or Firewire).

And even then, this chassis looks like it'd be quite easy to upgrade the internals[0].

[0] http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2013/06/newmacpro.jpg
I have no problem with this. China has shown it is willing and able to attack the us and its government is an extant threat to human freedom. The u.s. isn't perfect but China is far more repressive comparably.
I'm deliberately not challenging any perspective you might have on the "global war on terror" and instead trying to sidestep it for the sake of discussion with an isomorphic but distinct alternative issue.