Stormbringer

"I've been a Google fanboi for years and defended them in the public square when they've been accused of nefariousness. But these revelations of intentionally ignoring users' privacy settings have shaken me. Maybe it's time to put them into the Facebook category, where I removed my account years ago."

Okay, wait. There's multiple problems here.

The first one is this: that you are only now objecting, and not upset at all about Google handing over dissidents to the Chinese govt to torture and/or kill.

Human fucking life fucking has no fucking value to you? Priorities???

Secondly, they haven't been accussed of nefariousness, they have been caught red-handed, bald faced lied about it in public, only back-pedalled when presented with irrefutable evidence, and then convicted in court. Now, you can try to spin that as "accused", but you're going to need to set the spin cycle longer than normal, because that doesn't wash (sic) with the rest of the world.

Lastly, the problem with replacing Google is finding a good replacement. Bing is useless. The only thing close to gmail for free email (and it's barely in the same ballpark) is yahoo.

Is "Google does evil shit and violates users privacy" even news-worthy anymore? Isn't that the default?

Yeah you heard me Google-tards. Down-vote me like you always do, I got karma to burn baby burn.

Waiting for the inevitable DuckDuckBro spin-off

Frankly I think that spending half the intro talking about how sexy they are and then essentially giving an update on what the person in question has been doing lately with their genitalia is just wrong.

Are they in the pr0n industry? No? Well then, sit down and shut the %%%% up.

It's okay, the risk of being massacred by the horrible Australian wildlife probably exceeds the reward anyway.

Well, the good news is that even if you're a big company, the Apple App approval process is just as annoying for you as for everyone else.

The bad news? That's where the herpes comes into the picture...

Quick! Alert the people selling software that it's just pixels! It's pixels all the way down!

I have a new favourite word

he suffers from Gruber-syndrome.

Which is to say, that he will argue till the cows come home that market share is udderly (sic) irrelevant...

...right up until Apple gets a market share lead in something, when he will whip out the megaphone and start screaming about how "we" are winning now.

He's almost as bad as the people who - in complete disregard of the facts, keep slamming Apple no matter what they do.

Man up, move to Australia, and sue the bastards.

If you think Google wouldn't spend some considerable time with a lawyer in preparation alone, then I have a contract to sell you..

Technically it mioght not be theft, but Google certainly has a clear fiduciary repsonsibility in this case, and violating that is generally a lot more serious than mere theft.

It seems like the equivalent would be to go to small claims court.

In any case, the likely legal fees involved in Google fighting it vastly outweigh the actual benefit of screwing him over.

Of course, if more people start taking Google to court in order to enforce their motto, it could get ugly fast.

You did read the bit about how Google was arbitrarily with-holding the advertising revenue his site had generated?

Sounds illegal to me.

If my bank decided they didn't want me as a customer anymore I'm pretty sure I'd want my deposits back (!!!). If I did some work for a customer and then they decided to keep the work, but not pay me, and wouldn't say why, I'm pretty sure they'd end up in court ASAP.

Yes, but they're much happier making budget hardware, handing over the majority of their profit to Microsoft and fighting tooth and nail over bread crumbs than they would be otherwise. Gotta pursue your dream dont'cha know. It's a freedom thing. Also, even if they make a loss, they will make it back in volume. (since that appears to be their actual business strategy, whether to place sarcasm tags around the preceeding sentence is left as an exercise for the reader)

Small nitpick: roughlydrafted was _always_ a pure fanboi site with little or nothing of interest to say.

Oh noes! I almost cared about the virtual thumbs up! Call me when I can spend karma on caffeine and maybe I'll start caring. ;-p

It's a quote about war - in a thread about war. The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.

Today I remembered what was the most tantalisingly interesting thing about XCode back then - the distributed compilation. The idea that you could have a team of people and my computer would steal spare cycles from yours (and vice versa) when mine was compiling and yours was sitting there waiting for you to hit the next key...

I never had anything large enough on XCode for it to actually matter enough to me to get it working though.

The Americans will always do the right thing - after they have exhausted all other options. - Churchill

Universities also teach philosophy, and it isn't science either.

Of course, as we can see from the Philosophy of Science courses, that philosophy is actually more important than science, because philosophy is more meta.

That is to say, without philosophy you wouldn't know which approaches to doing science were better than others.

To solve that, you'd need to invent a "science of science", or a "science of thinking about science", or a "science of knowing stuff"...

...at which point you're simply reinventing the epistemological wheel as it were.

Also, universities teach art, medicine and architecture, all of which (or so I've been told) have some marginal redeeming value.

A simple but sad explanation would be that it is dependent on the reviewer, or more likely reviewers, over at Apple. E.g. if Sandeep finishes reviewing faster than Nikolai, then those lectures will go up faster.

The Apple "new improved textbooks and courses" thing suffers from the same problem, I had a look at one (on geometry and trig) and things were out of sequence.

I believe there's a free (as in freedom) version of Objective-C out there, I think it runs on Windows and Linux.

Check out the book by Stephen G. Kochan

The caveat of course, is that Cocoa (an Objective-C API used for making interfaces) is very Mac/iOS specific.

So you may not be able to write Cocoa code on Windows/Linux even of you download... (it might be) OpenStep?

But your gcc should compile Objective-C sans Cocoa.

As for XCode, like most Apple side-projects it tends to gather dust in darkness, until one day they come in and change everything around, just because they can. In 2007 it was pretty good if you wanted a stripped down lean and mean coding IDE which still had access to a lot of features.

Contrast that to the Java IDEs of the time which seemed to be saying "FEATURES! WE HAVE FEATURES! GET YER FEATURES HERE! Never mind about that coding crap, have you seen our FEATURES!!!???".

Eclipse was a particular offender, cramming your interface so full of buttons and tabs and tabs of tabs and templates of tabs of tabs and views of tabs, and buttons that the actual coding area on a normal monitor was like unto a postage stamp. (It got better, but vestiges of the feature-mindset-disease remain)

Anyway, I'm less impressed with the current version of XCode than I was with the one from 5 years ago.

Primary attractions of Objective-C

Memory management Message passing (which is what all those square braces are about) Long method names which increase readability at the expense of not being able to remember what the heck the function you wanted to call is named so you have to keep referring back to the documentation Did I mention the squirrelly syntax?

From a pattern point of view they use the delegate pattern a lot, e.g. The Window handles the Windowy stuff, but for those things you are most likely to want to customise it passes them to its delegate.

That way you 'never' need to actually subclass anything, you just plug delegates in everywhere.

Focus on gameplay rather than graphics.

Which is to say; make a game with compelling and interesting rules that doesn't rely on performance

The claim has been made that it is easier to move from a formal education in maths to functional programs.

E.g. if you've been dealing with things like f(x)->g(x) in math class for a couple of years, then a functional language is a more natural fit.

This is why the iconic learning lisp examples are calculating numbers from something like the fibonacci sequence or factorials, rather than something that is actually useful in the real world. (Which is not to say that fibonacci numbers and factorials aren't useful, but rather that those problems are well and truly thoroughly solved already)

Of course it makes sense, Baseball and Football are both sports, why not compare them? Because as different sports it isn't really relevant. Are you going to say that cricket is better than tennis because they can hit the ball further? It's a stupid argument. Just because two things belong in the same broad category doesn't mean that you can meaningfully compare them.

It is especially specious to bash Java for not being a functional language, because it doesn't try to do that. Java is heavily OO, not functional. So let's say that functional languages are 'better'. Let's just take that as a given. Why then would you single out Java and not mention any of the other languages that are also not functional? Why not bash Smalltalk, or Objective-C?

To single out Java simply underscores the irrelevance of the comparison.

Hence, rather than compare teams from two different sports, you should compare teams from the same sport. Likewise, if you want to make the claim that Common Lisp is the ultimate functional programming language, you should compare it to another functional programming language, not an OO language, or something like Prolog or COBOL.

No, the better way to rebut this claim of ineffectiveness in the market would have been to say "which Lisp?"

The fact is that Lisp has spawned a great number of descendants. So to compare modern Java to some ancient version of Lisp from the 70s would be no more relevant than comparing modern Java to C++98.

But even that has it's problems for the Lisp fans, because if you aggregate all the work being done in various dialects of Lisp, it is still no more than a pimple on the ass of the donkey that is Java.

----

Your rebuttal fails specifically because the claim is not that work cannot be done in Lisp, but rather that for various reasons hardly any work is actually being done in Lisp. You're trying to disprove the strawman that no work is being in Lisp, congratulations your tilting at windmills was successful, but that was not the claim that was being made.

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The question of why Lisp is not more popular is actually really interesting. Let me advance one theory - that Lisp programs devolve too easily into domain specific languages, and that impedes the transmission of ideas to other programmers. E.g. if I write some awesome Lisp code to solve problem X, it is hard for you to figure out what is going on until you understand what is going on - a chicken and egg type problem.

Whereas languages which remain mired in the foul stench of their own syntax and keywords are easier to understand because if I know the language (Java or COBOL or VB or C++ or whatever) then I am already halfway towards understanding the solution because the language it is expressed in is relatively static.

E.g. worse is better

I do not think you understand what an infographic is. An infographic is not the same as a chart, they are orthogonal, they have different purposes.

I get modded downwards by the Google fanboys everytime I say that Google is just an advertising company.

Now I admit I was wrong all along. Google is only 96% an advertising company!!!

Yeah yeah, hit me with your downvotes, because karma is so important. Lol.

I think before you read too much into this:

"I first became interested in what adult ADD treatments do after seeing a testimonial from an HN participant, a programmer, who said that his productivity increased dramatically after beginning ADD medication as an adult."

You should note that (according to the article) those drugs for ADD contain amphetamines.

Is it really surprising that someone self-reports increased productivity after beginning a course of amphetamines?

Anyway, the take-home from the article is that in the long term the body adapts and there are no benefits to taking the drugs in the long term, and possible negative effects to be dealt with (not sure what symptoms of withdrawl from amphetamines is, but not likely to be pleasant).

You could probably experience just as much short-term benefit from taking up smoking or becoming an alcoholic.

Douglas Hofstadter (sp?) in Godel Escher Bach postulates a link between music and maths (and hence programming - though perhaps that should be 'certain kinds of programming')

I regularly give up caffeine for extended periods (months) and then get back on the wagon again for similar long periods of time.

Recently during one of the transitional periods I found that caffeine negatively impacts my ability to play chess. Which is to say that I have relatively well developed (for an amateur) intuition about what moves superficially look good, but at the level I play at, extended periods of concentration are required to actually play better.

Caffeine doesn't help me concentrate, it makes me more impatient, bored faster. So I'm more likely to jump at a move which at first blush looks good. Caffeine actually makes it harder to concentrate for extended periods of time. I know that isn't the conventional wisdom, but I am convinced that the conventional wisdom is pretty much exactly wrong in this regard.

In addition, I have read that caffeine take a long time to get out of the bloodstream (a 'half-life' of ~6 hours) so the effects of large amounts of caffeine during the day translate directly into poorer quality sleep or reduced quantities of sleep at night, which creates a vicious cycle, hence when I get back on the caffeine it quickly ramps up to the multiple cups per day levels.