skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) As mentioned in the blog post, we have taken the time to actually build in ObjJ support into WebKit's debugger and profiler. I would classify this as one of the best debugging and profiling experiences for JS out there (not that there is much competition). More info here: http://www.alertdebugging.com/2009/04/29/building-a-better-j...

2/3) There is no need to ship .j's in production. We ship a compiler/obfuscator/compressor that will spit out the same illegible code that you would get if you were just using JavaScript with a compressor. It will also concat all the files together to dramatically improve load times.
While more profiling related than debugging - if you haven't seen it, check out this post on profiling by Francisco:

http://www.alertdebugging.com/2009/04/29/building-a-better-j...
Has anyone who also used SproutCore have any thoughts on how they stack up? SproutCore also stabilized into 1.0 recently it seems.
There's a reason that people pay 3-4x as much to live in Manhattan, but it isn't to get better houses. Just 43% of Germans own at all. Renting can be better than owning, especially in major metro areas, but owning comes with benefits too --- like being able to customize.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "standard of living".

Exactly! I, for example, wouldn't want to live in Germany as you describe it. I could care less about trams and nightclubs -- my idea of a great night out is lying in the grass in the dark with my wife, sharing a bottle of wine while listening to the howl of coyotes in the distance. But I prefer to live in a rural area; someone with more urban sensibilities would probably think I'm nuts!!
In general disparity in wealth is good

On what planet? Show me an example and I'll show you a thousand examples of how it's disastrous.
A lot of good points. About debugging, I would strongly strongly disagree.

The Safari 4 / WebKit debugger is actually getting quite good. Add on top of that the profiler and support for native method names we added to WebKit, and you've got what I consider the best debugging environment in any browser.

Break on exception works well, and even though you are seeing post-processed code, it looks nearly identical to the original.

(The parse error problem is just a generic Safari problem, and Firefox reports much better context for that particular class of error, just something that's useful to know)

About this statement:

Still has tons of stupid JS problems – implicit globals, type coercion everywhere (with JS primitives), slow as molasses.

There are plenty of globals, but they are intentional. If there are a few strays becoming global, they are bugs we'd be happy to fix. In user code, the global situation is actually slightly better than vanilla JS because we give any top level vars file level scope rather than global scope.

And finally:

About a 10% performance hit on tight loops if you use Obj-J message sending in them.

That sounds off to me. You can't blindly trust the WebKit or Firebug profilers, because they are not time based, but rather call based, which disproportionately affects short methods.

But even if its true, if a 5-10% performance hit on a critical loop is important, there's nothing stopping you from grabbing the method implementation and calling it directly, completely negating any potential performance hit.

One line of code will grab and store a method implementation, then you can just call it directly in your code:

var sel = @selector(aSelector:),
impl = class_getMethodImplementation([object class], sel);

for (var i=0; i<1000; i++)
impl(self, sel, arg1, etc);

In general, on the scale of an entire application, the overhead of message sends is much less than 10%.
> Mississipi is bound to have a much better road system

Which brings us to "increasing greenhouse gas emissions". Also, there's rather more to both infrastructure and living standard than the number, size and quality of roads.
Awesome! Our shop categories are evolving as we speak. Thanks for building a storefront. I hope you continue to add cool designs!
Thanks, this relieves my fear then (since I actually quite like what I see). I'll give it a spin! And happy anniversary!
Ask HN: Do you think this is a good business idea? Rent your luggage
I see. Because everyday activities have some effect on the ozone layer, a month of constant, pointless, unneccessary flying - an activity that is widely known to have a large impact on the ozone layer - is okay. Got it.
The first and most obvious problem is created by right-handed desks, forcing us lefties to reach across our bodies to write with no support for our arm. Now, granted, there are usually one or two desks in a classroom for left-handers, but with 8-10% of the population being lefties, that leaves a shortage of left-handed desks in every classroom in America.

Umm, given 20-30 people in a class, that comes out to 2-3 left handed desks...
IPv4 address space exhaustion estimates are about as accurate as Duke Nukem Forever release date estimates.
I think it's easy for Americans -- especially the educated and cosmopolitan-minded -- to idealize other countries.

Speaking as one, we're most likely to see their wealthy, urban, tourist-friendly areas. We're most likely to interact with foreign elites who travel here or work in international businesses.

We only pay their internal higher prices -- from their smaller and often more-oligopolistic domestic markets, and higher taxes -- on brief trips where we are price-insensitive, as tourists or corporate travelers.

That most people in admirable, 'rich', developed countries live simple, frugal lives -- by American standards -- can thus be surprising, even though it shouldn't be.
Moving the Needle
What could an American nightclub copy from Europe to give our continent its first 'good' nightclub?
Used it and it totally ignored Internet Explorer. Looks pretty shitty in IE6-8.
The Server Guys
You run into the exact same problem with almost all rolling-release systems -- FreeBSD ports, MacPorts, Gentoo Portage, etc. I think it's totally worth the compilation annoyance, even if it does attract ricers: http://funroll-loops.info

It looks like Arch Linux has solved it for most cases by having packages pre-built for the common options when they get checked into the rolling repo.
If you're not moving you're not agile
Slightly off-topic, but why isn't every major purchase not rentable? Like zipcar for everything from vacuum cleaners, video projectors, to lawn mowers and everything else you use very rarely.

I don't like owning stuff; I find it to be a burden. How come I can't rent things that are expensive and needed rarely? I don't see a reason why the world has N vacuum cleaners when only N/m for some large value of m are being used on any given day. I'm not saying we need a global pool of vacuum cleaners, but no reason a neighborhood can't have like half dozen that people rent/share.
I'm not sure what your point is. Mississipi has many, many problems, but smog isn't one of them.
...except, when I want to execute a command once per file. :-)

If I want this I have the choice between: '-exec sed -i s/a/b/g {} \;' in find or '| xargs -IX sed -i s/a/b/g X'
Contests. Yes, there will be contests, and of course we'll feature different designs and designers on the home page. It is absolutely crucial to our success that people be able to earn decent money from their storefronts. The more this happens, the more word spreads. We plan on featuring our users' designs in print ads in places like US Weekly, Martha Stewart Living, etc. Maybe we'll make it a design contest to see who is featured in these ads.

Thanks for the rotate feedback. It's always a balance between giving users too many features and not enough.

Moving objects with directional keys is a must. Good call.

Exporting art is an interesting idea. There's a lot more you can do with this art beyond stickers and banners. We could even offer to export your design as an Ecard. Lots to think about.
I always travel without checked luggage. My wife and I did 6 weeks in South Island New Zealand in winter having travelled hand luggage only.

The discipline is difficult, but worth cultivating. If you can't be bothered, perhaps this service is for you.
Most of my errors are syntax errors, not programming errors, and indeed they are annoying in WebKit/Safari/Chrome. Firefox will sometimes give me the line, sometimes it won't. The named methods and profiling do indeed work well (I wouldn't lump profiling under debugging though.)

There are plenty of globals, but they are intentional. If there are a few strays becoming global, they are bugs we'd be happy to fix. In user code, the global situation is actually slightly better than vanilla JS because we give any top level vars file level scope rather than global scope.

Yeah, I'm talking about my code, not yours :)

But even if its true, if a 5-10% performance hit on a critical loop is important, there's nothing stopping you from grabbing the method implementation and calling it directly, completely negating any potential performance hit.

Right, that's what I do, just like in Obj-C/C.

And I'm definitely not going to argue about the performance of Cappuccino as a whole. I find it to be the best performing browser GUI framework.

edit: I use the profiler in Chromium, if that matters. :]
I wasn't trying to imply that Italy's roads were bad, just pointing out that US roads are unusually excellent. I picked Italy instead of Germany to avoid a pointless message board argument comparing Germany's often-excellent roads to Mississipi's.
You can be the greatest web programmer in the world, but if you cannot develop and articulate the ideas that are in your head, you have nothing. Thats what I learned among other things when getting my MBA. I learned how to think in the terms of taking a new idea from idea to reality, and making it a success.

I greatly appreciate the value that programmers bring. As it is, I cannot use my MBA to program my ideas into a working and successful web startup. I do not think that an MBA is absolutely necesssary. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and many other successful tech moguls have proven that. But, MBAs could can definately help in lowering the failure rates of startups by using their experience in finance, management and accounting. The best formula of all is to have both on hand. The MBA and the programmer. With the two, you cant go wrong.

Why do you think Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar hired Harvard MBA Meg Whitman as CEO?
Yes, this would be a terrific feature. We'll add it to our list. Thanks!
priceline.com?

I got $120/night hotels for $40/night.
I think women are underrepresented in garbage collection, too (among other jobs).
Remastered Beatles Tracks: BitTorrent Today, iTunes Tomorrow?
Well looking at it more, it does seem some of the designs have in the editor "Material Area".. is that only if you have a background?

I would stick with the format the editor uses..

5 x 10 in
So, if that's true --- and I live in a major US metro, I'm not a Mississipi booster --- you should be able to provide some metric justifying it. What about Germany makes it better than Jackson?
Oh, I didn't mean that. I just meant that "how much stuff you can buy" is perhaps not the only possible measurement of quality of life. And I've long thought PPP to be almost irrelevant in developed countries. Every single thing I buy I buy on quality, not price or quantity. PPP utterly fails to account for that. It's useless.

Anyway. Cool, I like Zurich. Hm, this thread is making me remember all these cities and influencing my holiday plans!

update: you edited your post. I have never been to Jackson, nor any American city aside from NYC and the California sprawl (LA/SF/SD). Yes, your 44-yr-old schoolteacher might enjoy a happy, quiet life there. I am sure it is a fine city, but I have zero interest in ever visiting it. Again, you are right - we are not the right control group here.
You’ve Got Java in My Ruby
Wow, this is music to my ears. Thanks for the kind words. I've spent many hours sweating over the design center, trying to make it robust enough to offer a lot of options, but simple enough for the beginning user. This is a delicate balance, as you can imagine. Right now I'm worrying that it is not simple enough, so thanks so much for your compliment.
The front page does seem a bit busy. The amount of copy is a tad overwhelming, but once i slow down and start reading each one, it makes sense.

I would maybe have an easy start page (your "start designing" button could link to it tho I find that button rather small), with leading questions like:
1. What would you like to print? (give hints or a drop down)
2. Choose a design.

And so on.

A Preview page would be nice, preferably one that allows you to upload a picture of your own room or wall.
I don't think so, considering the machine had 48 KB (or 64 KB on the IIe).
That was in the BBC adaptation of "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand. Both the book and the miniseries (which is on Youtube in segments) are excellent.

I heard about Christopher Alexander from his renown in programming circles. I wonder how he is viewed in the architectural mainstream?
Not sure what you mean by lack of stable releases. Are you saying that the releases are not stable, or that the release schedule is not stable?

I believe our releases have been fairly solid, but I do admit they don't follow any predictable schedule. We'd like that to change, but there are higher priority problems for us at the moment.

We also do offer a clean installer. First, all of cappuccino works without installing anything. It's self contained in a single app folder. Second, the tools all come bundled in one installer, which puts files wherever you like, defaulting to /usr/local/share/objj. We ship the documentation with the same download.

And as for the type-checking compiler part, we actually have an experimental type-checking runtime available on github. Improvements are, as always welcome. But not having a type-checking compiler is certainly par for the course in the JavaScript world, so I don't quite see how it counts against Cappuccino.

All that being said, yes it is young, yes it is a moving target, and yes there's a lot of work left to be done.
For the first time in my life, I've wanted to save a comment. Bravo. I got a bit of a Tarantino vibe out of that comment which adds a whole other level of cool.
H+ Magazine Fall 2009 Issue
For info on Humanity+ and H+ Magazine, visit http://humanityplus.org/ and http://hplusmagazine.com/
Worth noting we aren't calling ourselves 1.0 yet. This is just our one year anniversary.

Also worth noting that SproutCore 1.0 is still in beta, and almost a complete rewrite, rather than a stabilization of what was already there.
Personally, it distresses me to see millions being poured into yet another courseware aggregation site. Ugh. Peapod.

There are over 750MM computers plugged into this 'internet tubes' thing and billions of humans striving for a better education.

I don't have VC money, if I did I'd invest in real accreditation alternatives instead that possess integrity, rigor, and worldwide recognition, available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, at an affordable price.

I could then build a curricula-vitae of certifications, professional development and real accomplishments -- similiar to board certification in medicine -- from all over the world because I brought the world to my laptop / phone / desktop.

Spend $6MM (can it actually cost that much?) so that 1B* people per year can attain 'recognition' for the work they've done on their own @ $25 each -- non-refundable.

*a guess
Not sure I totally buy this argument. Housing, food, and transportation are three things that vary wildly in price around the world, and which you can't buy strictly on quality. For instance, whatever else you might want to say about Jackson, you can get a better house there than you can get in NYC metro.

(edits: look me up if you ever make it to Chicago, which is a cooler place to visit than LA, and also note that SF is not in the same sprawl as LA and SD. =P)
Gaming Guru Jordan Weisman's Recap of Penny Arcade Expo
Regarding delegation, I feel both closures and delegation have their place. We have been adding closure-based API in the areas we feel make sense (things that have a single expected callback return for example). However, I feel that things like TableView delegates and data sources still benefit much more from the delegate model than the closure model, and yes its because its more restrictive. If you look at NSTableView, it has many many datasource and delegate methods that are intricately related, and forcing you to group them in an object leads to better code in my opinion.

Perhaps more importantly, delegates and data sources allow you to do the Interface Builder-style visual development that we are aiming for. There really is no way to do this sort of thing with closures, unless you consider "double click on an object and type some code" to be visual development, which I do not. This is why I think closures make a lot of sense for things like network connections, callbacks for panels, etc. but less sense for things that in the common case really do represent connections and interactions between objects.

Interestingly though, we have recently been thinking of ways of "allowing both" easily. In other words, either making everything closure based behind the scenes and providing additional APIs for delegate, or making everything delegate based and transparently creating anonymous delegate objects for closures.
"Most people don't need to know why 2 + 2 = 4, they just need to know that it's true."

While most people don't need a rigorous proof that would take Russell and Whitehead hundreds of dense pages to reach that point, even a small child has to have enough of an intuitive understanding of how addition works for 2 + 2 = 4 to be meaningful to them. That's why we do exercises with pennies and talk about "if you have 2 cookies and I give you two more cookies" to drive the point home.

"Really, if indoctrinating them would be the point of cursive writing there'd be much more effective ways to do it."

You argue as if cursive writing is the sole means by which schools teach children to accept arbitrary, irrational authority. I don't think it's a "conspiracy" per se, just part of how the system works: when the system is characterized by regimentation and submission to arbitrary authority, it's a lot easier for useless things like cursive to be taught.
You're right to point out that this activity has a reasonably high environmental cost, but the value of this idea is in its RELATIVE merits. Will they do something interesting/worthy/influential/etc enough to merit the cost.

As a practical example of this trade-off, imagine the cost of creating a documentary film. The environment might be hurt by driving all over, or flying a film crew around. But was it worth it? Depends on the film.

Let them make their "film" before you're a critic. :)
Also, it might be helpful to have an easier way to enlarge/resize an image.

For example.. the Pirate Surfer image is really cool, but by default opens to a 9.8x5.3in size for $10. What if I want this a good sized to put on my kids wall and I'm willing to pay ~$100. To get to my $100 limit I had to drag the resize and zoom alternately a few times to make it large enough. Perhaps some size defaults under the image that are clickable..

Small (9x5): $10
Medium (24x15): $25
Large (48x36): $80

And clicking those would auto resize the image in the editor?
Perhaps the distribution of wealth right now are more consituted by forces of harm by such as mininum wages law, unionism, corporate subsidy rather than forces of benefit.

Good forces may affect the outcome in several ways.

1. More uniform distribution of wealth as freedom to exchange and contract are unencumbered by politics.

2. More extreme variation as productivity are given higher improtance, and thus different level of prosperity among individuals.

3. Uber specialization leading to the rise of higher, real wages for everyone as it become more difficult to just throw poorly educated people at it.
Great, glad to clear these things up. I definitely agree about the syntax error thing. We'll try to make it a priority to commit a fix to WebKit.
The best thing that ever happened to my handwriting was learning to keep up with my real analysis professor, who filled one blackboard after another. It forced the kinds of efficiencies described in the article.

Their book is available from the publisher, Allport Editions, at half the best price on Amazon.
I have an idea of how hard it is to share something like this, because I've been through something similar.

Thank you.
Well, where in Germany have you spent serious time?
FreeBSD runs well under KVM or MS Virtual Whatever-Its-Name-Today. Just install a copy and build packages you want.

btw, /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portupgrade is your friend.
That's missplaced idealism. You should very much use the soapboxes you created to tell people about news. This is "industry" news for people who are interested in capp. I go to capp.org regularly and see no changes and assume that progress has stalled.
The typical argument is that wealth is a good motivator. If a person's work improves the total lot of the world by quantity X, and it's distributed pseudorandomly, that's good. If the extra motivation helps them improve the total lot of the world by 2X, they keep 25% of that, and the rest is distributed pseudorandomly, that would seem to be better.

There are a lot of assumptions in there that some people don't like to talk about. Fairness of the pseudorandom function and other forms of motivation are obvious ones, but there are many more. It's still a credible argument for why disparity in wealth could possibly be a necessary consequence of something good. It's just not a credible argument that this is necessarily the case.
On the economics of charities and their inferiority to markets, see Robin Hanson's post on OB a few days ago, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/lost-charity.html
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.

Of course, I would bet that median per capita income, or median household income, is substantially lower in Mississippi than in most of the EU15 (The first 15 members).
Median household income in Mississippi is ~$29K.

see http://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/03/its-the-median-stupid/ for some discussion of this topic

Also, I would bet that the deprivation index for Mississippi [1] would be higher than for most of the countries he cites, especially for the lowest quartiles.

[1] Deprivation index: add up the number of these you can't afford.
Adequate home heating, an annual holiday, new furniture to replace worn-out items, a meal with meat every second day, new clothes, the
wherewithal to entertain guests at home.

The worst off of the countries he cites, Italy[2], has a top quartile deprivation index of 0.5, median quartiles of ~0.6-0.7 (estimating from chart0 and bottom quartile of 2.0. I doubt that Mississippians are better off than that.

[2] See http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/pubdocs/2008/52/en/1/EF0852EN...
But people don't just buy houses, they buy lifestyles and locations in which they live. The actual physical house might be better but who cares?

Your average NYC dweller probably wouldn't even live in Jackson if the rent was totally free. The physical quality of the house's construction, etc, is almost totally irrelevant.
Measurably less than "less than 10kg"? Yes, I understand that air at 30psi weighs more. Let's assume that the tires hold 3 liters of air (standard for a mt. bike, the yike looks like it holds a lot less actually). The 30psi will add 3.75 grams. Less than two pennies.
Some of us Americans live in foreign countries and are well past idealizing them, but take them for what they are; both things that are, in our opinions, way better than the US, or much worse.

It's a complicated enough matter that I could talk about it all night over a bottle of wine. Suffice it to say, however, that "Mississippi is richer than Europe" is stupid flame-bait. It's more or less on the level of snotty Europeans who think Americans are dumb. Couldn't we leave silly pissing matches like that to other sites? Pretty please?