monkeyfacebag

FYI, this is not true for Windows RT (the ARM version). That version will only support applications purchased through MS's store. Given that MS is clearly pushing for Metro to be the future of Windows, I think this is somewhat concerning.

Looks like Facebook is down almost 8% as well.

> despite the documentation mentioning immutability and proper concatenation method

What-do-you-know, Scala has documentation too[1]! And it mentions that appending to a List is O(n).

[1] http://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/scala/collection/immut...

I agree in principle that one shouldn't have to understand the implementation of collections to use them effectively, but these limitations are by no means exclusive to Scala. Haskell's lists, difference lists and seqs work exactly the same way as Scala's list collections. Iteratively concatenating strings in Python will murder your performance. Most (all?) sufficiently complex systems involve tradeoffs.

OK, I stand corrected. I suppose there are some edge cases where this wouldn't hold (limited availability, implications of packaging size etc.), but you're right. If there's no other difference between the two, the discount is always better.

"a 50% increase in quantity is the same as a 33% discount in price"

Even when the per unit price is equivalent, the quantity purchased is important. In the case of perishables, I'd probably err on the side of a small quantity at a reduced price. I can't drink a whole gallon of milk before it goes bad, so what good would 50% more be? In the case of nearly every other consumable, I'd prefer 50% more because it means a longer period before I have to restock, if I'm careful.

I think the real reason Monads haven't been widely adopted is that there isn't a compelling need for them. Laziness, purity and referential transparency are nice-to-haves in most languages, whereas in Haskell, they're need-to-haves.

Computers are imperative by nature. They have state. That Haskell has the capability to shield us from that is really, really cool, but that doesn't mean it's necessary to write good software.

I will freely admit to thinking I knew something about functional programming after learning about lambdas, map, filter and reduce in Python (and lamenting the language's lack of tail call optimization). Three days with Haskell set me straight.

"she is known for pulling 130-hour work weeks and trading sleep for a few more hours in front of a laptop"

Is this even humanly possible? What does that leave, 5 hours a day for sleeping, even on weekends?

This site appears to be focused on the design aspects of visualizations, which is a shame. While I agree that design is an important consideration in info visualization, it's clearly less important than accurately representing the underlying data. I've seen far too many "infographics" which either misrepresented or presented false interpretations of data.

"I found that, while the architecture is changing, it wasn’t as dramatically as I had initially hoped."

What, specifically, did you hope MS would change? Say what you will about the product, but the Windows platform has been a cool piece of engineering for a while now.

"Design is about making choices and Metro makes none."

This assertion seems to be the central point of your post, but I don't think you provided the evidence to back it up. How is simplicity not a design choice? What about "be authentically digital" as a design mantra? I'm not refuting your assertion, I just wasn't swayed by your arguments. Maybe you could point to some specific examples to illustrate what you mean.

It seems like Microsoft has really tied Valve's hands here. Unless something has changed recently, all apps installed on Windows RT will have to come from MS's app store (marketplace? bazaar?), which doesn't bode well for the future of Steam on the platform. I'm hoping they end up doing a lot more than porting Steam to Linux, because outside of Valve's efforts, most of the games on there are not (and will likely never be) Linux compatible.

"I guess I could still do that in Japan without long vacations but I guess I would need to do that on time of company."

So in other words, you'd need more than 10 days of vacation.

I don't think expectations are important at all here. When vacation time is established at national, cultural levels, the expectations of the population will reflect that.

I don't recall if this was mentioned in the other threads on this project, but I would highly recommend the section in Chapter 3 of the really fantastic "Clojure Programming" where the authors step through the processes of converting various programs from an imperative to a functional style. This was really my aha! moment with Clojure.

Thanks for the reply. By "prop up the screen" I actually meant angling the device itself like a laptop. I understand the iPad's case allows this and the upcoming Surface provides a kickstand.

With regard to IDEs, I'm not really familiar with Android and I naively assumed that one would readily be able to install native Linux apps like vim, but Googling around I discovered this is not trivial. That's a shame.

"Paired with a keyboard, the Nexus 7 could easily serve as a mobile work solution just as the iPad can."

I'd really like to believe this (and thus justify getting one), but I can't picture it. How would one prop up the screen? What keyboards are available and are they any good?

I feel like Apple has reached a local maximum with the iPad as a consumption-oriented device and I'm just waiting to see who delivers the first tablet geared towards getting things done. MS appears to be promising this with Surface, but it remains to be seen how successful they are.

To anyone on HN who has used an Android tablet for productivity purposes (writing, coding, etc), how has it gone?

This is a good rebuttal, but it remains to be seen whether Apple can actually prevent "nearly every piece of malware" from getting through. To be quite honest, I'm not even the slightest bit familiar with their review and approval process, but I have difficulty believing it can continue to scale without introducing security holes.

"What prevents the same enumerating attack against the sign up form. Are you going to give them a generic message that the username is invalid when it in fact has been taken?"

This is a good point, but I suppose that, all other things being equal, it's better to put the key under the mat than it is to put it on top it. IOW, the more sophistication your attacker needs, the better.

Well, it's hosted on the JVM, so, no, it probably would not be a good language to write an operating system in.

That said, Clojure is quite fast compared to Python, Ruby et al, but this is primarily a side effect of running on the JVM. FWIW, Java is even faster.

I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. What is the value of a curated app ecosystem like Apple's to the consumer if they cannot prevent malware from winding up on consumers' devices?

Great work, although looking at them all together like that, Microsoft's 1985 logo appears to be the best of the bunch. I suppose design is cyclical.

I really like the "slate" concept, I'm just not sure it works as a button. Buttons should have roughly equal height and width. The slate looks very out of place on the physical devices themselves. Otherwise, it's great.

Yes, this is the point I was trying to make.

Tell that to Java.

I have a feeling that parent's comment was intended as a joke.

They're attempting to use geolocation to identify your location. Safari must be blocking it automatically (er... automagically?). FWIW, I couldn't get past that screen either, even after allowing location tracking.

"As a proponent of what is now called the old school of UI design"

Doesn't sound like a very old school to me. vi, emacs and a large portion of popular command line tools came about in an era where devising one's own interface and interface conventions was the only route to actually providing an interface. Desktop environments ameliorated this somewhat, but only for common, generic tasks (copying, pasting, etc.). For any specialized or application-specific tasks it's always been roll-your-own, except that now people are actually thinking about the problem before creating the UI.

Consistency is important, but it's not the only factor.

Trivially, the difference is that neither SASS nor LESS is actually CSS and therefore must be transformed into valid CSS prior to being parsed by the browser. This would eliminate that step.

EDIT: parent originally asked about the difference between this and SASS/LESS.

I don't think he's saying that at all. I interpreted it as, given unlimited resources, Eve can determine that Alice and Bob are communicating over encrypted channels which, for Alice and Bob, is almost as bad as having their encryption broken.

Would it not be an aid to users in cases where they are reusing the same password on multiple sites?

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "oomph"? I ask because I'm not familiar with rvms but am familiar with (and love using) virtualenv.