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My best guess would be object-oriented in the Smalltalk/Self/etc. sense as other posters have alluded to. It's a hard distinction to understand/qualify. Jim Copelien gave a keynote at SPLASH this year about this distinction that left many people confused, but the big takeaway seemed to be that people limit the expressiveness of real object-orientation by instead focusing on classes and prototypes and whatnot. What he sees as a potential embodiment of real object-orientation (together with Trygve Reenskaug, inventor of MVC) is a paradigm they are calling DCI (Data, context, integeration).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data,_Context,_and_Interaction

It's interesting that are actually a processor licensee, as the article notes, and not an architecture licensee - in other words, they aren't designing their own core around the architecture, but instead using an ARM design. With Bulldozer AMD really started utilizing the many fab facilities that they have around the world, and this should continue that.

Amen - the launches of both Surface and iPad mini are to me terribly exciting events, and I am impressed with both Microsoft and Apple. One of my favorite parts of being a technologist is that I get to observe how people adapt the myriad of available technologies and software/hardware systems to their own unique needs, and this extends to even myself. I've been through Macs, Windows machines, and more Linux distributions than I can count, as well as handhelds from both the Android and iOS camps, and I've been happy each time I have switched setups.

As hackers, I believe we all subscribe to the old mantra that one should use what is best for the job at hand, and arguments about whether Microsoft Surface or iPad Mini or so on and so forth are the "right way" detract from the quest for knowledge in which all of us participate.

I think all of the keynotes at OOPSLA this year were surprisingly engaging.

I've seen a lot of Go talks from various Googlers, and I have to say that this was the best-motivated, most humble, and most honest of them that I have seen. Rob knew he was speaking to an extremely PL-oriented audience, and structured his talk accordingly, and the result was fantastic. Go comes from a very different standpoint than almost all academic PL work, and in that respect, for those of us in academia, it's an interesting breath of fresh air and a reminder of the uniquely fine line between industry and academia in computer science.

That quote in particular is a huge WTF, since it disregards how the free market model works to advance the state of the art. A similar sentence is "Google needs to focus on what it is good at, and stop chasing Apple just because it wants to be good at what Apple is good at."

The Nexus 7 and other 7-inch tablets that run Android, presumably originally developed to compete with iPad, are selling so well that it has prompted Apple to launch a competitive variant of iPad (not officially, but wait 24 hours). This is competition working the way it should, to the benefit of consumers and the general state of technology.

Any claim that any company should not pursue a market in which it has the potential to be competitive simply because another company is currently more successful is a lie. When such statements involve companies with a large fanboy culture, their wrongheadedness is somewhat hidden, but I for one am excited to see where Windows 8 will take us, and take the Mac.

I missed the hoax and found out about it only through this post, but I can't lie, I want one of those. Even the Xperia TL, the phone that James Bond uses, looks plasticky and cheap in comparison to the mockup: http://www.sonymobile.com/us/products/phones/xperia-tl/

The supposedly leaked photos of the LG Nexus have it looking like an iPhone clone, albeit a very good one: http://bostinno.com/2012/10/19/lg-nexus-4-release-date-lg-ne...

To my eye, the "Nexus X" is one of the freshest designs in the phone space in recent memory.

No, it doesn't. Spectrum analyzers can detect WiFi signals regardless of whether or not they are broadcasting an SSID, which includes discerning what channel they are on. By extension, most software built-in to WAPs that automatically chooses the channel to reduce conflicts will do similar spectrum analysis. You can read GP's article from TechNet for more information on this.

This was wonderful. Pico Iyer is an amazing writer from a family of intellectuals. The University of California obit for his father, Raghavan, notes that Raghavan was "an inspired and inspiring scholar and teacher on the Santa Barbara campus from 1965 to 1986". I have personally had teachers inspired by the works of both Raghavan and his son.

His point, too, is one that I have found increasingly important for myself. Joel Gascoigne's post "6 things I do to be consistently happy" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4405127) in some sense echoes similar thoughts. Like Joel, I exercise most mornings, and like Joel, I stop all electronics at 11 most nights and read (fiction) for an hour. While it is often difficult to step away from computers and smartphones and the Internet, I find that exercise and books satisfy me deeply in a way the Internet is frequently unable to.

A friend pointed out to me that books possess a pretty much optimal SNR, which may have something to do with this.

Unfortunately, this is something that has to occur as a systematic change. Individual researchers are not to blame, necessarily. When you are told by your university that you must publish or face not getting tenure, what they mean is that you must publish in a peer-reviewed journal (or conference, since most of what we talk about here is CS and CS is still a conference field mostly). We could realign the review process so that it was something taken on by universities, for example, but this will require a major systematic change.

Peer review is important. It will not stop being important, but unfortunately the service of peer review is currently only being offered by mostly for-profit organizations, which is the primary problem.

Trying, certainly, but Gruber's criticisms always seem to be of the "if I don't put at least one critical thing in this review, they'll know for certain that I'm a fanboy!" flavor. He spends paragraphs spinning "the device has a bigger screen" into something negative, for example.

An NFC chip. Apple already has Passbook - imagine if that were NFC-enabled. I want to be able to use my phone to enter my home and workplace, to board transportation systems, and to pay for everything. And it isn't as if I would have purchased an iPhone if they had included NFC, but more that Apple has such a widespread and mainstream user base and such collaborations with Passbook-supporting businesses that "NFC everywhere" might stop being a dream.

This is from Santiago Ortiz, who has several other excellent projects on his website. My favorite is "Views of the sky" http://moebio.com/exomap/viewsofthesky/2/ which allows you to either view the stars in scaled positions with their size indicating their absolute magnitude, or on a sphere with the stars scaled by relative magnitude (as on Earth). Part #1 (don't miss it!) is located at a link on the bottom of the page, and also cool.

As well as the usual "that's not how statistics works"

You and I appear to have posted similar sentiments at the exact same time. I think you hit the nail on the head - having not to pursue a PhD would be simply awful. When research is something that you daydream about in the shower, breaking away from it early seems foolhardy.

This article spends a ton of time talking about the bottom line and then a scant few lines at the end discussing the idea that there may be something more than just money to all this, and even then the treatment is rather surface-level.

Perhaps it's foolish, but at least some part of my desire to pursue a PhD is that I believe deeply in the academy and in what it is capable of with regards to solving problems of great worth to humanity. Even at this time, the academy has done so much to further my development intellectually and otherwise, and to me, pursuing a PhD is simply the next step in this cycle of development. Doing research feels very good, even when it's "unsuccessful".

Nowadays, that actually isn't very true for end-users - rpm is catching up really fast in all the areas that dpkg was formerly better in.

A good StackExchange thread: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/634/what-are-the-pro...

I'm somewhat glad to see a mainstream news piece covering HN material like this getting slammed by the community - I know people who still subscribe to real newspapers (of the local variety) and am amazed at how terrible and slow their coverage of most things is. This is especially apparent in instances like this one, where we've been having a much more coherent discussion about this for days now.

edit: Just to add another anecdote about the failings of mainstream news, last July there was an article in the business section of the paper about that blog post about the fake Apple stores in China, which appeared at least a week after the link appeared on HN and with unintelligent, spun commentary attached.

This is dumb, because he's taking the price per gigabyte for some low tier where Glacier's pricing is tiered. In fact, for an amount of storage as large as his thought experiment assumes, Amazon asks the user to "contact us" for pricing information.

Interesting that she notes that it seems harder for her as a woman to participate in rejection therapy -- indeed, gender roles are still so ingrained for many people. You could probably experience success as a male by simply asking women for their phone numbers every day until one refused you, but this approach would likely be more difficult for a woman to pull off.

I used to be an Emacs user and felt rather mediocre about it, and then I tried Vim at the recommendation of a colleague and after some discomfort (like maybe an hour's worth), I was absolutely enamored with Vim in a way I had never been with Emacs.

Based on similar reasoning, I've been trying to get into trying BSD lately, as a current and avid user of Linux. I wish that this article would have addressed a bit more about the author's subjective experience of using BSD, as this is currently the sort of thing that would be helpful for me in considering FreeBSD as a desktop OS. The main thing that I have to reconcile currently is the fact that BSD isn't on the bleeding edge like, say, Arch Linux. To give a specific example, until recently, mesa lacked full support for the Sandy Bridge mobile GPUs, and so I couldn't play Minecraft on Linux. Pretty much as soon as a version of mesa with support for Sandy Bridge was released, Arch had it in the repositories where other distros would have lagged weeks behind. Of course, I could alter my lifestyle so that I wasn't always using such new hardware or didn't care so much about being able to play Minecraft without using Windows, but that would require FreeBSD being worth it in some other big way.

It seems like he's using the term "third-hand" to refer to languages that merely undergo syntactic expansion in the process of translation to their target language. In the programming languages community, we often refer to this as a "desguaring" transformation, since when CoffeeScript is "compiled" to JS, the syntactic sugar is removed and replaced with JS that exactly replicates the semantics.

This is in contrast to Haskell, which undergoes a fair amount of static analysis and optimization before code generation ever happens. Also, GHC doesn't only output C, and doesn't even translate Haskell directly to C. Instead, Haskell is transformed into C-- code, and GHC can be made to target C to be compiled by GCC, as you say, or the LLVM intermediate representation, or, most commonly, machine code directly.

I am currently receiving an education in computer science with the intent to pursue a Ph.D. following graduation. I grow somewhat tired of all this anti-college talk - at the bike shop a while back, the worker asked what I was majoring in, I told him CS, and he asked if getting a college degree was really worth it, as if he thought it wasn't. Yes, it's worth it if what you plan to do is go to grad school or enter academia. It's worth it because it's the only feasible way to do this. It's worth it because my current presence on a university campus gives me opportunities for research and for invaluable interactions with faculty and fellow students.

I understand that the backlash is mostly driven by the observation that increasingly, people are pursuing expensive college degrees only to end up working at Starbucks, simply because they have been made to believe that it is in some way "the thing to do". But college is still worth it and a good idea for a great many types of people, not the least of which are programmers (as distinct from computer scientists). An education in CS is almost certainly one of the best things someone who hopes to be a programmer can obtain.

Sure, AmazonBasics has a capacitive stylus that several iPad owners I know use, and my point was that this is a much less elegant solution than, say, this device or the ThinkPad tablet, which are designed for use with actual pens. I also know a number of ThinkPad tablet users all of whom love the pen and bought the device specifically for this purpose.

Good on Samsung for continuing the trend Lenovo seems to have started of bringing the digitizer pen back. The fact that people are buying aftermarket styli for devices that don't have pens is an indicator that there should be more devices with them, since nothing really beats an actual digitizer pen. To me it seemed like a step backward when Steve Jobs first asked "Who wants a stylus?" at the iPhone keynote.

In academic research, it's often even more difficult to draw the line between simple "activity" as Vivek puts it and actual progress. The unfortunate fact about research is that there really is no certainty, so it's hard to measure concrete progress. Most research is done in retrospect, so a lot of grind work that may initially seem not worthwhile is an important step in the research process.

This is somewhat of a nitpick, but for one thing, writing code that is as obviously correct as possible is important in every language, not just in Haskell. Compositionality is one of the most valuable things we can exploit when programming.

For another thing , the assertion that enumerating all the cases for a given function instead of using a lookup makes the code more obviously correct is somewhat flawed - it violates DRY, which is, like exploitation of compositionality, important in programming in general. Suppose the showPiece function had twice the number of cases. Would enumerating the cases individually or making the assertion that the code is more obviously correct as a result be reasonable?

In my view, you are solving the same problem whether you use a lookup or enumerate the cases individually, and it's not even a very big problem - just put your tokens in the right order.

Sensationalism alert. This is a soundbyte; here's more context and less shitty journalism: http://www.muktware.com/4042/richard-m-stallman-steam-good-g...

Wikipedia has what it claims is a partial list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenote#.22One_more_thing.......

There are a lot of excellent MVNOs worth considering, that don't try to screw over customers and still allow you the benefits of access to a large cell network. Red Pocket, for example, is an AT&T MVNO oriented towards Asian-American customers, and they have a bunch of plans that are very inexpensive while still providing reasonable amounts of service.

If I had not received a Galaxy Nexus for free at Google I/O, I would have likely purchased a device for $350 from Google and then activated it on Red Pocket or some other GSM MVNO.

It's important to realize that often, prices like $600 for a smartphone are deliberately inflated for the sake of encouraging people to sign their money away on cell phone contracts. This is illustrated by the fact that the Galaxy Nexus, a relatively high-end device, is available absolutely unsubsidized, for $350.

This is some FUD. See WikiProject Wikipedians against censorship for why most of what this guy says is nonsense, and for information on how Wikipedia already allows institutions like public schools that may require filtering of explicit content to configure it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia...