pswenson

sprawl doesn't scale and isn't healthy.

it's bad for everyone: takes the wealth out of the cities - which means bad schools in the cities.

it leads to segregation.

It wastes massive amounts of time/energy commuting.

It makes you fat if the only exercise you get is the walk from a parking lot to your destination. why do you think the US is the fattest country in the world? sprawl.

I've noticed every country I visit thinks walking down the street in the US is a dangerous activity, getting assaulted is routine, murders are common, etc.

fact is, violent crime is way down since the 1990s. Not saying current levels are acceptable, but it sure isn't as bad as it is perceived.

the answer to applet security problems is HTML5

I agree with you. yeah, there are some new APIs in nio Files that you weren't aware of. But now you have to know go to Files for the "Good API" instead of the old "File" API. Bow to the Gods of backwards compatibility!

The JDBC API is still beyond horrible (is there a decent 3rd party SQL API?). Checked Exceptions still survive. String still lacks many basic features.... and sadly as others have pointed out to get usable APIs you need Apache Commons.

I agree, Oracle needs to do some house cleaning. Some times it's ok to break things. Don't do it too often, but once every 10 years seems ok to me!

IMO jira is quite clunky actually. It's interesting to contrast Atlassian's new product (Stash) with its excellent UI to the older products (confluence/jira) which feel slow, awkward, and clunky in comparison.

Youtrack destroys Jira btw. Way lower friction to use, much more intuitive.

appl had ~$160B in cash as of their earning report last week: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-28/apple-s-160-billion...

I think there is some truth to the article, but not that much.

Yeah, 5" devices are a nice size and make people somewhat less likely to reach for their tablet when reading. But is a 5" screen going to replace a textbook? or a magazine? or a kiosk? are people going to want to watch a movie on their phone?

It's all of the above - phones, tablets, laptops. Depends on what you are doing.

But fact is, many are now using tablets instead of laptops. Tablets are simply a more pleasant experience for causal use. And a lot of computer use is casual - reading, surfing the web, games, email, facebook.

So IMO tablets trend up in the long term, laptops trend down. But neither die.

Not sure I follow this comment. But anything non-trivial needs some sort of scripting. Take ant for example, it started out as a pure declarative build system that worked ok for simple things. Then complexity reared its ugly head - needed loops and conditionals and the tool mutated into the awful beast it is today. So I think you have it backwards.

Awfully late to displace iOS/Android

which ideas are dumb and why?

btw being a jerk doesn't help your case.

lesson in civil discourse by example: "I don't think that a ||= operator is a good idea because XXX"

look at Rust btw. Statically typed, but heavily influenced by the scripting languages. You should set them straight!

This attitude is why java is stuck in the stone ages. Any ideas coming from the dynamically typed world are "dumb".

kotlin looks cool. But it's missing some minor things that would make it much more friendly:

* no regex literals

* a little verbose(instead of [] for arrays, it's "Arrays")

* hashes IMO should be JSON

* why doesn't null evaluate to false? God I hate writing if (a != null). I'm much happier in javascript/ruby/groovy land where if can type "if (!a)" or "unless a" or even cooler "raise Exception("a should not be null") unless a"

* why did the world standardize on camelCase instead of snake_case ? the world was wrong about this!

basically a little more javascript and ruby influence would have been good. make the language more "fun" and expressive. There is no equiv of the ||= operator or | for joining arrays, etc

But the big things it's missing are more ecosystem features: * REPL

* an alternative build system (please don't make anyone use maven!) should be an interpreted scripting language. I'd look at Rake or Gradle for inspiration

* rails like web framework

Mirah has almost zero usage, and it seems very little development is going on there. I'm on the Mirah google group and there have been 5 posts since October.

I love the idea, but it seems few are interested....

"C# - C# is replacing Java as the OO language of choice for big enterprise systems."

C# is held back by windows. I know there is mono, but enterprises aren't going to bet on mono. So I have to disagree with that.

I think pairing is useful some of the time (esp for debugging, code reviews)

in a world trending more and more to flexible hours and remote work, I don't see any way doing it all the time will work.

Yep, this is true. But the trend is in the right direction.

Judging by the media though, you'd think you'd be at significant danger of getting shot every time you leave the house.

just a few facts: Canada has more public debt than the US by percentage of GDP:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_deb... And Canada has a lower GDP growth rate. Unemployment rate is about the same (6.9% vs 7.0%)

US inflation rates are very low right now (~1% for 2013): http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infla...

Crime rates in the US are at historic lows: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/11/12170947-fbi-viol...

you are defending this insanity? did you read the link?

insanity. I don't understand how many of these cases aren't cruel and unusual punishment

what is the data format FB stores? (xml/json/?)

ever try windows with hi-dpi? I did about a year ago, surprisingly flakey. has the situation improved?

I love it when people throw in "clearly" to their claim. Despite your claim - it isn't "clearly irrelevant".

if their market share is so tiny, why is anyone reading this story on HN?

in the US, iOS isn't irrelevant, Apple has 40% smartphone market share and rising.

read again, it wasn't Jobs' birthday party.

"One of the people who was building Microsoft's tablet was friendly with Jobs' wife, Laurene Powell. He asked Jobs and Powell to come to his fiftieth birthday party."

IJ's mac settings are absurd. But you can change the settings to whatever you like. I've synched up my keystrokes from IntelliJ/RubyMine/AppCode and Sublime Text 2.

Cost - yes. Windows laptops cost much less. But they suck much more. I guess if you don't value the touchpad, mag safe, retina, display, thin-ness, long lasting battery, and the aesthetics that much... I mean I use my computer a lot, it's my career. Easily worth an extra grand every 3 years to have the best.

Bizarre. He used a mac for 6 years and didn't know about cmd-` to switch windows within the same app?

Finder does suck compared to Windows Explorer (use Pathfinder). No snap behavior for windows (use BetterTouch). Can't think of anything else to like about windows really.

The command line is terrible on Windows. Even with cygwin, the terminal is awful. Copy/Paste is awkward. Resize the window and the text doesn't follow. No clear terminal keyboard shortcut. No searching in the console.

Locked files everywhere, makes dev difficult.

Installing apps is much more painful on windows. The apps spread throughout the system, I love on a mac how you can just drag in an app and run it. No 5 mins to install. Uninstalling is just deleting the app, no horrible uninstall process.

rm -rf type functionality must take 10x as long on windows.

No virus issues on mac.

Once again, java could stand to learn from Ruby. Maven is terrible for automation (XML is a lousy scripting language).

Gradle? It's better than Maven, but they picked the wrong scripting language. Builds should be interpreted, not compiled. It's painful to leverage code that you need to build as you are in a catch 22 situation - can't reference a class in a gradle file that hasn't been built yet.

My proposed security fix: kill the Java Browser Plugin.

java's main principle: preserving backwards compatibility. this is why the iterations are so small and take so long. java tip: don't look at other languages or you'll get depressed at how easy things could be or even should be