skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bret Victor used to work in R&D at Apple, so that probably isn't a coincidence
I just want to see start ups who frustrate and waste people's time get better. That's all.
Unicode variables, I love it:

let 🐶🐮 = "dogcow"

Moof!
Ugh, none of the links work. :( Can't get the ibook, can't view the "guides and reference", can't download xcode 6 beta.
It is when you have to maintain compatibility with it in your new shiny language that's based on it. C alone may not be particularly large or encumbered (though it does have that vexing parse), but as the foundation of other languages it can cause problems.
Maybe he can buy their shares. Just heard they want to go public with Rocket Internet.
Yeah, I kind of get it after some additional thought (and reading through the replies).
Maybe I missed out on some detail (not watching the live video, just a text stream) – now that I've taken a look at the syntax, the comparison seems more valid. Still, comparing this to Javascript would've been more interesting (webapps, all that stuff).
Well, the same issue presented itself with Passbook and airline tickets, for example. I regularly fly Southwest and Alaska, and Southwest still doesn't have Passbook integration. Passbook was fantastic when I was flying American and Delta, but it just isn't great enough to get me to switch airlines.

When (not if) this happens with HealthKit/Health, it'll be slightly disappointing to see these kinds of integrations from behind a glass window. At least some aspects of HealthKit are already being integrated with major fitness companies (namely, Nike), so not everyone will miss the boat entirely.
The biggest problem is many of the best tutorials are written in Python 2.7. Udacity's Intro to CS and Learn Python the Hard Way come to mind.
Is anyone getting the vibe that swift is golang for writing Cocoa apps, or is it just me?
It seems like the only way to view the programming language documentation is on iBooks on an iOS device? For a programming book, this is ridiculous.

Edit: The latest version of OS X does support iBooks. Lets hope you have that.
Perhaps because the syntax of Swift is so simple that it almost looks (and hopefully feels) like a scripting language? (type inference, no semicolons, automatically managed memory)
Feels like they looked at a bunch of programming languages, took all their favorite features, and then put them into one which still sits on top of the ObjC runtime. And then added some Apple syntactic craziness.

For example:

var apples = 3; // mutable

let oranges = 5; // immutable

let summary = "I have \(apples) apples and \(oranges) oranges";
In my experience it's hard work without a mac.
The Swift lang syntax looks like a mixture of JS 6, Go and Object-C/Smalltalk - at least from the first sight.
Book downloaded fine for me
You do realise that link is completely unrelated to what Apple is doing, right?

EDIT: Nevermind, my mistake. I thought the comment was about Apple was making their own language like Google did with Go, not Go! already existing as a language
I've been studying a handful of these bandit algorithms for a while now (with some technical expositions on my own blog [1, 2]), and my PhD advisor has done a lot of work on improving the theoretical guarantees for various settings.

But the more I read about bandit algorithms the more I think they're not enough. In particular, they don't take into account natural things we have in practice: similarities in the structure of the actions, correlations in rewards across rounds, and the ability to precompute without measuring your regret against the results.

There are some new research directions that do each of these, though. People are now starting to impose metrics on the actions so that "closer" actions have more correlated rewards. They have also been doing a lot of work on "contextual bandits" in which every round comes paired with a context (i.e. browser type, information about past searches, etc), and relationships among the contexts can be leveraged. And finally, there is a model of "pure exploration," in which you're given some fixed (but unknown) amount of time to prepare, and the recommender you come up with when that period ends is judged into the future of how it would perform.

I don't have a lot of intuition about which algorithms/settings are the best for which situations, but if you're interested in this kind of thing you check out the work of John Langford, Peter Auer, Sebastien Bubeck, and the many others in this field.

[1]: http://jeremykun.com/2013/10/28/optimism-in-the-face-of-unce...
[2]: http://jeremykun.com/2013/11/08/adversarial-bandits-and-the-...
This is a fascinating development. I wonder how Swift will impact the many cross-platform mobile frameworks. Objective-C was a big barrier for many beginners and small companies and a free and easier development language provided by Apple and supported with good docs and third-party tutorials will likely command a good amount of mind-share. It's going to be an interesting few months in the mobile development world.
https://itunes.apple.com/en/book/swift-programming-language/... (direct link to iBook store).

Edit : Changed the link to en.

Does anybody have a direct link to the Xcode 6 beta ? Or mirror download link ? Thanks.
I just skimmed the tour, and my impression is: Swift is a compiled, Objective-C compatible Javascript-alike with an ObjC-like object model, generics, and string interpolation. No exceptions. Based on LLVM and appears to inherit the same data structures as Cocoa apps (Dictionaries, Arrays, &c).

It feels very lightweight, sort of like an analog to what Javascript is in a browser.
What kind of benchmark produced 220 times something faster than Python?

Python and Ruby are resource profligate dynamic languages in comparison to other dynamics langs like Lua and Smalltalk. If you are surprised that someone could come up with a benchmark that disadvantages Python by a factor of 200, then you have a lot of neat reading to look forward to in language implementation and Python internals. For some reason speed is easy for our reptilian brains to grasp at. It's not the be-all end-all of a language.
I don't remember which book I used. It was probably a NOLO guide. You could do a search on amazon for "contract books" and get a selection that would work well, or browse the legal and/or business section of a library or bookstore to find something that works for you.
Yeah, I saw @Stammy's tweet too. https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/473536229531586562
Does this means that they're ditching Objective-C?
I'm super excited about this. I love Objective-C but I also enjoy all the nice features of a high-level language.
I'm guessing it's going to do all this stuff on the device, and not done in the cloud.
And if anyone else accidentally tried to get it in the UK store first follow these instructions to get the use store back:https://discussions.apple.com/message/22116986#22116986

basically you just need to scroll to the bottom of the bookstore front page and touch your username to logout and then log back in.
Yep, same here. It looks pretty JavaScript-y, which is familiar at least. I think this is a good move on Apple's part.
I wonder if this brings us one step closer to developing on iOS...
Dozens of people were tweeting this same joke.
On the Ars liveblog, I didn't see any mention of Swift support for other platforms. Are we going to see Swift on Linux and Windows as well?
By my count, approximately 1839 people have tweeted something similar so far. The first one was pretty funny.
Inferred types, first class functions, closures, great speed -- this looks very promising.
Yes, Android intends are great, and that's why I was surprised when I read "this extensibility stuff might be enough to tempt me back to Apple from Android".

What I meant to ask was, what do you mean by "enough"? Does this mean that:

1. iphone/ios/Apple suddenly provides better extendibility?

2. Would you be able to, say, open a link to any browser of your choice in iphone?

If any of the above answers is "no", then, yes, I am not sure if you were serious or not.
Hence my comment.

(Edited for clarity)
iBooks app is also available on the Mac. As the language is Mac and iOS specific it's not all that crazy.
They do include a link to the other swift at the bottom of the page:

> Looking for the Swift parallel scripting language? Please visit http://swift-lang.org
Yeah, that's the point. There's already a programming language called Swift but Apple is using the name anyway.
More info:
https://developer.apple.com/swift/

Download “The Swift Programming Language” from the iBooks Store
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-swift-programming-langu...
Denver, CO | Full Time

Stack: Ruby on Rails, Backbone.js, JavaScript, Git, jQuery

Resume/Blog: www.EricKenney.io

Contact: ekenney5@gmail.com

I'm a web developer specializing in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript development. I began playing with web development when I was in grad school. The more time I put into it, the more I realized how much I enjoyed it and eventually decided to make the leap from engineering to web development.

I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder where I received BS and MS degrees in Aerospace Engineering. Before transitioning to web development, I worked as a Software Test Engineer at Raytheon on the GPS program. Since the transition, I've been working on developing Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js sites.
I mostly develop using JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML, and Backbone.js, but I am always looking to add new tools.
Ruby doesn't have neither semicolons nor whitespace syntax
Thanks for the comment. The third blog post in this series will discuss linear contextual bandits, for which I used Langford's VW.

It does a huge amount better.
Location: Switzerland - Remote

Stack: Golang, Scala, Java, Netty, Akka, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Redis, Reactive

Resume: https://github.com/silenteh/cv/blob/master/silenteh_resume.p...

Contact: HN_USERNAME@gmail.com

Looking for a company where code simplicity and performance matter! I do not like to waste CPUs cycles, memory and I/O in general.

I have more than 13 years experience as a developer and I have been designing and implementing scalable, distributed and resilient systems and software, to handle over 40 million unique users per month, for the last 7 years. I am proficient with Scala, Java, Netty and Akka and I really enjoy coding in Golang. I have a strong passion for cryptography and IT security in general.
On my free time, I am working on a Golang Elasticsearch client which uses the tcp transport.
I am an open minded, friendly and business driven person who loves technology. So for any questions drop me an email !
Yes, you need a Mac, especially if you want to be able to use Xcode and Swift.

If you are short on money, you can try to buy a second hand iMac or a MacMini (just be sure it will support the next OS X version 10.10).
This is completely unrelated to Swift, the Jabber IM app (and lib): https://swift.im/

Edit: I pointed this out as I'm curious about trademark/logo clash.
They have enough money to not care because they can cover the cost of the worst case scenario.
That's precisely his point. There was already a pre-existing (but little-known) language called Go when Google announced theirs.
No. Swift works along side Objective-C. You can use both in the same project.
Is this related to Bret Victor's stuff? My mind was blown when I saw this video 2 years ago, and I can't help but see similarities here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&t=10m42s
It's been slow, but it's promised for the next release (after the current one we're working on, which should release in the next few weeks). I will admit we've not handled it very well, as far as timing, as we talked about it way too early.

But it's at the top of the list following this release, so nothing else will get updated without the Bells shop being implemented, however long it takes us.
that seems fine to me
First thing I thought of. "Look at how the background beautifully interacts with the translucent menu bar." Didn't we all turn that feature off back in 2007?!

Though in fairness that was partly because it was such a hog on Vista. I've left translucency on in Win 7, though it sure isn't a productivity boost and it ain't 'beautiful' either.
I just started learning Objective-C a week ago. Was almost finishing the Stanford iOS 7 course.

Coming from a Ruby background I couldn't be more surprised and excited!
Heh, I have a Casio EL-5813 that I got in 1980 that still is still running on its original batteries!
50 GB of additional temporary iCloud storage for developers
Main discussion going on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835217
www.mcs.anl.gov/papers/P1818.pdf

Swift: a language for parallel scripting, 2011, mostly from University of Chicago

Anyone knows if it's related?
Complete history of variable state over execution time of a program is AWESOME!
Feels like dynamic languages coupled with some smalltalk resemblance, plus the playground which is kind like Mathematica? Looks pretty awesome! I'd itchy to try it out...
You can read it on a Mac too.
Because third party iOS developers are still second class citizens compared to Apple in-house developers.

Google doesn't make third party developers second class citizens: it makes apps using the same tools and apis as available to everyone, and distributes them the same way that everyone else distributes their apps.

This is a step forward for Apple, but for example: Safari will remain the only browser available on iOS, and Apple's version of Safari will remain versions ahead of UIWebView meaning that any non-Safari browser will remain inferior by intentional design. True competition is prevented by design, and it takes 5 years to open up something as basic as the keyboard. How many more years until browser is opened up? 5 more?

It's an interesting move as far as platforms go, but I know that it's no where near what I want from a platform. It's still locked down, under featured and heavily controlled. For a non-tech user or someone who wants a dead simple phone, it seems great. But for those of us who love our devices, love customizing them in and out, and love trying to create the best experiences, Apple still is not a choice: we can't compete with Apple apps, we can't use their in-house APIs, and they still offer us inferior versions of the software/APIs that they use inhouse.
Low-level GPU access on iOS, Apple announces Metal
Apple's Swift free iBook
Apple has a mixed history with the openness of their tech. It could be that the only place you'll be able to run the language is on an iOS device. We'll see.

Looks like the end of the line for this particular bit of history: http://www.tikirobot.net/wp/2008/11/22/why-gcc-has-a-free-ob...
Think of it this way: you could design your logos etc. using Swift, in interactive mode!
Well, they said that data will reside on your device only (no default internet access for custom keyboards, too).
A quick glance through the book - looks like a nice language, certainly better than some of the stuff we use day to day.
hah, it seems iBooks is only available on Mavericks. Rather frustrating when I just want to read the documentation.
Swift doesn't seem to have anything to do with the parallel language at swift-lang.org.

Whoops. Should've corrected that when I copied the comment over.

In any case, reference counting is disastrous for the parallelism story. GC thread coming along and causing an additional cache miss is way better than having to do atomic operations on reference counts all the time.

Why are atomic reference counts necessary? You wouldn't generally need them with an Erlang-like Actor model or for special concurrency primitives like Go channels. (That is to say, you'd only need them in the special mechanisms.)
This will also be incredible for ease-of-setup. Install Xcode, and you're ready to go. No other dependencies.

Setting up a dev environment can be one of the big reasons people fail to learn to program.
> language website: http://swift-lang.org/

Nope, completely different. Really scummy of Apple to just nick the name of an existing language for their new one, it's been five minutes and people are already confused.
After read some documents I think swift is a little like coffeescript but still contains some Go syntax.

It's like a scripting language very much. Quite amazing isn't it?
And I don't understand why they can't cram the punctation marks (at least full stop and comma) on it. And I have an iPhone...
Wat_kun_je_zelf_doen_tegen_de_vervelende_symptomen_van_de_overgang
This is exciting. I can see myself getting into this. Dabbled with Objective-C but it just didn't excite me.

If Apple's intent is to boost their developer base, this is one tremendous boost. It seems to have the best of both dynamic and static languages.
iBooks – The Swift Programming Language
I hope he sued the company and got a $10 million settlement. Companies respond really well to getting sued even once.
Somebody leak this manual please for the love of everything that is holy

... well I meant put it somewhere I could download from my Debian
Ah, that is dumb. They're bound to put a PDF on the dev centre when it's back online.
Agreed. I would go so far as to say that this was "one more thing" worthy.

It's definitely more exciting than something like an incremental update to the Apple TV.
About time! Objective-C is increasingly becoming inadequate for Apple software development. Apple knew that. They finally decided to do something about it. If it goes popular the same as Microsoft C#, that would be a huge win for both Apple and developers.
I, for one, welcome our new robot-raptor overlords.
I guess I didn't explain my popularity contest arguments from earlier very well because since this is where all Plan 9 discussions end up, I took it for granted, but this winning friends and evangelizing stuff is what I was talking about.

Among programmers, Plan 9 is not so obscure. Anyone with an interest in programming something besides a commodity system has stumbled across it or seen it mentioned somewhere. Plan 9 was built to be practical and its authors wrote about its practical advantages at length, so anyone who cares can just go to the web site and read about it. Anyone who wants or has an interest in what Plan 9 offers already has everything they need.

Instead of telling people what they either don't care about or already know, I'd rather spend my own time writing my own programs. Unless someone is waving dollar bills in front of my face, I have no interest in convincing people that they should use a research operating system that doesn't fit their needs so they can write programs for it to fit their needs. Unless I'm getting paid or feeling uncharacteristically generous with my time, I'm not going to take too close an interest with what other people do with their computers.
Gotcha, my mistake. I thought the point was Apple was making their own language like Google did with Go and he was just linking the wrong language.
I think they just don't care. Swift-lang looks to be completely different when you look at the examples[1]. Its syntax is more java-y then Apple's iteration.

Also Swift-lang is Apache 2.0 licensed, which I have a feeling Apple wouldn't use as a base for a new language.

[1] https://trac.ci.uchicago.edu/swift/browser/branches/release-...
Swift Language Guide (ePub download, no iBooks needed)
I really hope this language is going to become an open standard quickly. Here's hoping the language design is not too tightly coupled to the OS APIs.
With third-party keyboards now available I imagine that it will be doable
Swift on the Server with some modern CSP flavored concurrency mechanisms would Rock! Then combine that with a Swift-like language that compiles to Javascript, and that language could take over the web.
Apple pushed the speed of Javascript in the newest version of Safari, earlier in the keynote. They probably try not to complete with themselves.
So it looks like the language isn't open source and won't target non-Apple runtimes?

I'm not trying to troll, I just think that it's a pity that Apple tends to limit the ecosystem and applications of its otherwise-great languages. Building against LLVM ought to make it fairly trivial to make this cross-platform.
I suspect they were referring more to the syntactic baggage in Objective-C – which is at least partially a result of the fact that ObjC was originally implemented as a simple C preprocessor. To avoid syntactic conflicts with C, ObjC uses lots of weird syntactic constructs that contribute to the language's characterization as ugly.

A good example is the liberal use of the @ character to denote ObjC literals – even in front of strings and numbers, because raw C strings/numbers have different semantics and won't play well with the standard ObjC APIs.
Seems fine for a book intended to teach OSX/iOS dev.
They kind of already have something like it with the roaming storage on 8.1, there's just not enough crazy interested developers on the platform trying to push the limits of the sdk, and MS hasn't really advertised all the neat stuff well.
I'm impressed that it looks like they're turning Bret Victor's demo into a reality with playground. Check out his demo if you haven't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

Really, really interested and excited about learning Swift.
Apple (2011)
Do you need the semicolons?
How do you see it as revolutionizing programming education? I'm pretty ignorant in this area, but it seems like a very high level language that abstracts a ton of stuff - and very platform specific too if I'm not mistaken. Is that really where we want people to start? I would have thought either a highly graphical language with buttons and widgets for early education, then moving onto platform-agnostic stuff like java and obj c would be the thing to do. Maybe you're talking about later stuff, college and beyond, which makes sense - at that point specialization to this extent seems like a good idea. But as I said, I'm pretty out of touch.
I agree. There are two paths for the hotelier.

1 - Pay employees a lot better, disallow tips, and make everything "All in" for the customers.

2 - Pay employees slightly better, and take all the discretion out of their jobs.
Oh. I was rather hoping it would be!

But still, there's not a lot to hate. It looks like a cleaner javascript at first glance. Not quite as pretty as Python but then, what is. :)
Yeah, the new Spotlight seems to be almost inspired by Alfred
serious question: why?
Was my very first thought, too. The next thought was Bret Victor. Yeah.
This is not new though. See http://debug.elm-lang.org/
I didn't either, but if not, my bet is that outside programmers will make an open source version (like Mono to C#).
Anyone feel like converting the epub from iBooks to a PDF/HTML page we can read more easily?
Does anyone know when the new (beta) Xcode will come out?
We selected MQTT because our mobile apps are sending frequent data packets over cell-phone data tariffs. Our thinking was that a light messaging protocol such as MQTT could mean the difference between an £100,000+ monthly data bill, or £10,000.

I'm no expert, but I'm finding MQTT pretty bare bones, I can see the appeal of STOMP or messaging protocols that have more support for patterns such as RPC.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but Swift has static typing (with type inference, but still with a strict type on every variable), whereas Objective C has dynamic typing with optional type annotations. Having ubiquitous strong type information available should make it much easier to generate fast code.
Elm has had a "time traveler" debugger for a while http://debug.elm-lang.org/
Was it inspired by Braid or the work of Bret Victor at http://worrydream.com?
This is crazy, I can't believe this insanity. If not for John Oliver I wouldn't even know about net neutrality. Who thought this up anyway!!!
Using the backslash+parens for interpolation is really clever! No more ambiguity like when using % or {}. Is that a Swift original syntax?
Exactly - same issue as airplanes. They are forced to chase the bottom by external websites, so they nickel and dime you for everything along the way.