skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well what we're getting is developers having to make iPhone specific version of their app, and with the release of Adobe Flash CS5 that's going to become more prominent. But this still isn't HTML5, where we really want to go right? As far as Objective-c iphone specific apps, this isn't necessarily better. In fact it's probably worse because these apps are less open than flash apps. They're locked into the iPhone and you have to pay $99 to deploy them on a real one.

You're right, people who want flash don't want flash. They want rich applications. But Flash is the only thing that can deliver that right now on desktop (and cover a reasonable audience). HTML 5 is still catching up. On the iPhone you may not need flash, but the alternative is Apple's closed iPhone platform. I don't think that's necessarily better than another system which is already a de facto standard.
Profiting from friendship
Can you just post the text here? I'm Australian and the changes are probably very minor.
We're hiring at Mixpanel (YC S09) - web analytics startup located in Mountain View, CA. You'd get to work on cool user-facing stuff that helps lots of other startups.

Email us at jobs@mixpanel.com, further details: http://mixpanel.com/jobs
I realise this, it just seemed odd in the context of it being Apple and the exact same references given.
Often it seems like the Web business world suffers economic autism.
Awesome, Thank you. I'll have to look into it. I heard that piece once before but I wasn't particularly enamored with it (though it's probably been 12 years since I first and last heard it). I'll have to give it another shot, I'm a big fan of many of Saint-Saens' other big works.
I like how the joke is explained below the caption.

"The chicken is no longer on the same side of the road as before."
all the iPhone apps, not to mention the ones that will be built for the bigger screen and more capable hardware.
How would you approach this problem? No need to be technical.. I'm curious as I'm working on something similar past 2 years or so.. Thanks
I’m tired of elitism having a negative connotation.
All the iPhone apps in a closed enviroment compared to all the Windows apps?
I run OS X.

On the web development side of things, I use Django for my job and some of my more complicated personal projects and Hyde to generate a couple of smaller ones.

## Basic Stuff

- Terminal for a command line

- zsh and oh-my-zsh for a shell, with a whole lot of
personal customizations (especially the prompt)

- Quicksilver to save my sanity

- homebrew to install various things

- pianobar and iTunes to play music (I'm also looking at dhun now though)

- Visor to keep pianobar out of the way but easy to reach

- Dropbox to sync some stuff between machines

- Time Machine for backing up

## Writing Code

- TextMate for editing anything but CSS

- CSSEdit for wrangling CSS

- Fluid instances for previewing

- Firefox to check how stuff works with Gecko

- Pixelmator to make/edit some very basic graphics (I'm not a designer)

## Handling Code

- Mercurial (just the CLI) with BitBucket and/or Codebasehq for version control

- Git and GitHub to create git mirrors of some things

- t and/or BitBucket/Codebasehq's issue tracker to keep track of quick tasks

- Transmit for the rare, rare occasion where I need to SFTP something somewhere

- Fabric for automating deployments and other small tasks

## Communicating

- Fever to manage my heaping pile of RSS feeds

- Tweetie, Adium, Mail.app to stay in touch with people

- Colloquy for IRC

- Skype for voice/video calls and screen sharing
Think is hiring in Palo Alto.

http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/jobs/

We're working on mobile payments.
PHP is dirt slow. When you look at the implementations of Lua or Python (which have approximately the same design as PHP), its about 4-5 times slower. Note this is only in the interpreter -- lots of the library code is written in C, which makes the difference somewhat less relevant.

The implication is that writing code that uses PHP's built-in libraries is pretty fast, but the more you write in PHP itself, the slower it gets. For example, my impression is that Yahoo isnt really written in PHP - its written in C patched together using PHP.

The Zend engine was "rewritten" for PHP 4, PHP 5, and to a certain extent for PHP 5.1. I guess it wasn't a complete rewrite because the legacy code from about 10 years ago is still in there. Anyway, its still dirty, badly written, slow, and very very badly commented. Hacks abound (and not the good kind).
I think it's a great idea. Kudos for putting it together. Good luck!
Here's something that came to mind reading this: When the iPhone was announced (and once again when the SDK was announced) there was a fair amount of teeth gnashing and whining about Java not being supported.

Haven't heard one peep about Java on iPad this time around. Will Flash suffer the same fate?
Could you elaborate on Windows 7 finger-friendliness? What kind of a media-device does not accept memory cards or doesn't have a camera or a USB slot?
Why I Should be Apple's Next CEO
Yum... it's only $195 for that image to be printed on a delicious, velvet paper.
PS - I didn't even know there are so many services out there!
Twitter's frontend is still definitely Ruby (on Rails). Based on what I've heard from people who have consulted there, it's a gigantic ball of crap. They've so heavily patched Rails 2.0 that they can't realistically migrate to a more modern version of Rails.
NASA to Boost Speed of Deep Space Communications
I would be happy to borrow you some of my python code (API wrappers if you like). http://twitpic.com/10mpmg
Did anybody else think of this when they saw the pictures?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zoTKXXNQIU
Apple's iPad Versus Stone Tablet
"have an old guitar push button wired up to your reset switch until you get it booting properly"

Pro-tip: use a virtual machine.
Hmmmm. There's no way you can name ten. I'd wager you can't name five, and I'd be surprised if you could name two.
Women in Open Source
A quick stumble through the Language Shootout suggests using PHP instead of C might make you need, oh say 10 to 100 times as many servers. So there is room for improvement.

Of course if your workload is not dominated by script running CPU time then it doesn't really matter. Even then, until the cost for extra servers and their management exceeds the engineering cost to recode, add servers.

I get execution times of >0.01 seconds – hope you aren't planning to handle more than 50 transactions per second.

It all depends what kind of world you live in. I know people that use their hard disks for booting and loading caches and that's it. If one query in a hundred requires a seek they will not keep up. Most of the rest of us could happily fork a CGI PHP for each request and not notice.
My favourite bit, regarding the infamous blue-boxes poster:

Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264.
The Hulu developers didn't pick Flash because it was "easy." They picked it because it allowed them to retain a high degree of control over their streaming video content -- control they would lose if they exposed an h.264 stream to an iPhone or iPad client.

I think it could be five years or more before anyone watches Hulu or Netflix on any of these devices.
I'm a 4th-year Cognitive Science student in Vancouver who can handle average computing projects, including experience in python, pylab, and django. I'd like to stay in the Vancouver area as I have classes as well. I have an understanding of writing, human factors, and user-interface design. I also have focused knowledge in the fields of psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and biology. (I like being a generalist).
I think that most outside poopers are severely mentally ill and untreated or severely drugged out.

I think the notion that these people are like characters in the Sims where they tried super hard to get to the nearest city-provided restroom or various public restrooms like the ubiquitous McDonalds in SF -- yet they could not make it in time so they reluctantly pooped on the sidewalk is very naive.

Granted, it could be long lines -- I don't have the data either.
Hi I'm a Junior at Stanford in Biogeochemistry and Economics. I'm looking for a do-anything, put-on-different-hats ('cept coding as I've only taken intro CS) internship anywhere in the world (Bay Area, NYC, Mongolia, etc) for the summer- paid, unpaid, plastic tchotkes is all good.

Thanks!
elee89 _at_ stanford dot edu
Once I took a mini vacation up to a natural hot spring resort. I'd heard it was a relaxed, hippie-ish, communal living place. When we arrived there were just signs absolutely everywhere, in big letters at face level on all doors. Where to take your shoes off, where to be quiet, where to put your food in the kitchen, how to use the communal food shelves, where you had to wear clothes, where to line up for dinner.

None of the things were unreasonable. Some seemed a little unnecessarily precise, but if it had been a more crowded weekend could have been more critical. Most were intuitive. But it made me uncomfortable. I'd expected to be able to settle in and find my own place there, but I just felt in the way due to all the signs. And anything that wasn't explicitly allowed by a sign I wasn't sure about.

Also, I got a massage there. And when it was over the guy just stormed out without saying anything. I found out later that it's a style for ending massages, not saying anything to ruin the buzz of the massage experience. But I was very startled by it and thought I'd done something wrong. They should have had a sign about that.
Google News: Eric Schmidt Talks About Phones and Disses Tablets
I think I found your design inspiration for that website! http://www.discoapp.com/
Given the choice, I'd probably take the Rosetta Stone.
If I'm actually supposed to use it (instead of say, becoming independently wealthy by selling it), I think I'd prefer the iPad despite the convincing implication that it has equal utility to a stone tablet.

Actually wait, I'll have to think about it. Who needs a touch screen if you have multitasking?
This is a point I always have trouble impressing on people. They do a simple benchmarks on a tiny code base that pulls some data from the database, spits out some data, and they compare and PHP seems to be lightning fast.

The problem is that because it's interpreted at some point PHP slows down in proportion to the size of your code base. A small app runs really fast, a big app with 100,000 lines of code will kill your server unless you modularize it really really well - which harder than it seems, because the more modularized you make it the more separate "includes" you end up with in different files and then you come to realize that including a lot of files itself is a problem. And the nature of PHP's very loose coupling tends to lead to code that is nearly impossible to do large scale refactoring on once you have gone too far down the path.

I work on an application that has a very thin PHP layer that performs some simple web services that are the back end for a pure Java web app. Amazingly, when we load test it, the PHP part is the bottleneck, burning CPU like crazy just parsing all our files ... over ... and over ... and over. The java code meanwhile, while theoretically doing far more "work", is completely bored. We will probably look at using an accelerator of some kind or maybe just rewriting all the PHP in another language.
I'm interested in the implications of this talk. It appears that women have to be practically coddled into joining the open source crowd. Are the barriers really that significant? Are women really that sensitive?
He writes in raw HTML? Hm.
Why Microsoft Can’t Grow– And Why Its Shareholders Deserve More Cash
I'm taking a networking class in my CS program and one of the (at least, I think) interesting topics we covered was the distance issue when linking two nodes together on a network. We got around to talking about really big networks (like the Internet) or a hypothetical Earth+Moon Future Internet. Another student and I had our dreams of low-grav YouTube broken when the teacher showed us the more gritty parts of how two nodes talk on a network, namely the round trip delay. This article sounded really neat and made me remember that NASA usually comes up with some very interesting workarounds/solutions.

(This is my first contribution to HN after about a year of lurking so I thought I'd make my post a bit more meaningful and explain why I thought this was neat.)
It was very, very difficult to read what the site did because of the noisy background. The tool is great, and the background would make a good wallpaper, but it was very distracting.

It seems that the image adjusts to the size of the screen, so when I had FF maxed out on my monitor (1680 x 1050) it blew up the image and made it much louder.
A screenshot showing aviary working because they made a quicktime video alternate? Aviary's whole platform is a stunning example of how awesome Flash really can be, it's a suite of cutting edge design tools done in Flash and they haven't ported those to the iPhone - check them out if you want, their apps are just amazing:
http://www.aviary.com

The 'games' they mention are not what TFB is showing either. Addicting Games (owned by MTV) is a casual game site with somewhere around a million daily visitors and 1000s of games you can just click to play, not apps you need to find, maybe buy, download and install.

Even if that process is streamlined it doesn't scale to the extent Flash game sites do where at any time your investment in any game is just a click and countless other games are also just a click away.
Steve Jobs calls Google's "Don't be evil" mantra "Bullshit" and Adobe "Lazy"
If your problem is parsing time, just use an accelerator. APC is the standard and best integrated.

On the other hand, if you have an opportunity to switch out PHP for something better (read: nearly anything), you should. Otherwise it might grow to a point that you can't remove it.
Should the current internal developers object to the idea even when implemented, well, "a new set of PHP internals developers" would not be the worst thing that ever happened to PHP....
Huh? The article uses "elitism" in the correct, unbiased sense. Here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitism:

"Elitism is the belief or attitude that those individuals who are considered members of the elite — a select group of people with outstanding personal abilities, intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most weight.."

Having specialist and extraordinary designers instead of letting programmers or "the crowd" design the product has arguably been the key to Apple's success.
No, I think the hulu developers picked flash because that's where the users are. They could have chosen java, or silverlight, but they chose flash for the same reason most sites choose flash. I'm sure if Hulu wanted to, they could develop a native app, just like the YouTube native app, for the iPhone, but my guess is that it wasn't part of their strategy initially.

If netflix wants the iPad users, they would develop their own native app and ship it just like the other dozens of apps out there. In fact, it would give Hulu & Netflix greater control over their users with a native app. Hulu has already developed a desktop app, why wouldn't they develop a native app for the iPhone?

Remember back in the IE4 & IE5 days? Lots of companies developed native ActiveX components that could be embedded into webpages because most users used IE4. I'm actually quite happy that Apple is forcing web companies out there to rethink open platforms. There's quite a few demos that show how powerful javascript & canvas can be already. It would be nice if we could replace the majority of flash apps with javascript, canvas, and webgl.
The Java-on-the-iPhone critics were less numerous from the start (or at least were not as vocal). But you're right, though; I think it's easier now to wonder if Java would offer anything compelling to the iPhone platform anyway (other than offering another way to run your own code, which is a different discussion entirely).

As to your second question: Java is a fundamentally important language in its own right (the enterprise angle); its success was never really tied to the availability of client-side runtimes. Flash doesn't quite have that same luxury.
View Source for Safari on iPhone
There was a company called AltaVista that once domminated web search.

There was also a company called Novell that pretty much invented the business of networking PC's, but where are they now?
That's what I did, initially. I don't know how long ago he's talking though.
The thing I remember most about the Apple ][ was the sound of the disk drive
In just ten years, there won't be any more PCs or MP3 players, there won't even be any "smart phones" or televisions as we know them today. There won't be any operating systems for consumers, no downloadable music, no DVDs, and 100% of today's software will be retired. We're on the brink of the Semantic Web, a transformation as significant and different as everything we've built over the last forty years. The Semantic Web will slowly but surely accelerate us from the old flat innovation curve to a new, disruptive, hyperconnected future. Companies like Apple and Microsoft are sitting like cows on the railroad tracks waiting for the train.

You lost me right about here. I think you are overestimating how fast we change.
I'm a graduating Economics student in Canada, looking to move to the bay area. Entrepreneurship experience, getting involved in coding more currently taking my 2nd coding class (with plans to take more in the future). Lots of extracurricular experience, including putting a TEDx event together in February. Looking for entry level in marketing, QA or project management.
I'm liking John Gruber's posts more and more. Besides Paul Graham he might be favorite essayist right now.
The white background to the black text is only 5% transparent. Does it look more transparent to you? Maybe it's a bug. I know I have some bugs on IE, but only 3% of the visitors have used IE so I let those go for the first day.
It's the wrong distinction to make. PHP is slow because the runtime is slow, not because it's a "scripting language".

SBCL and V8 and TraceMonkey are all very fast "scripting languages" because they have a good codegen in the runtime. PHP does not do any codegen.

If I were explaining this to a non-technical person, I would say: A computer works by executing instructions, one at a time. When PHP is executed, it is compiled to a list of instructions, but not ones the processor can directly understand. It uses a "virtual machine" to read each instruction and then execute the corresponding instructions on the real computer. This is slow, because what could be one instruction actually becomes many, sometimes hundreds, of actual instructions. The goal of this project is to skip the virtual machine and run our code directly on the real machine, meaning that we won't have to do as much unnecessary work. This will make our application run faster!

Now, this still might make CS folks mad, because there is bookkeeping overhead other than deciding which instructions to run (you can't store "scalars" in registers, after all), and of course modern CPUs don't execute one instruction at a time. But now we're wandering off into esoterica -- at least the basic idea is right, and I don't use meaningless expressions like "scripting language".
Thank you, thank you!

Here's the code if you can't/won't sync from computer:

javascript:var%20sourceWindow%20%3D%20window.open%28%27about%3Ablank%27%29%3B%20%0Avar%20newDoc%20%3D%20sourceWindow.document%3B%20%0AnewDoc.open%28%29%3B%20%0AnewDoc.write%28%27%3Chtml%3E%3Chead%3E%3Ctitle%3ESource%20of%20%27%20%2B%20document.location.href%20%2B%20%27%3C/title%3E%3C/head%3E%3Cbody%3E%3C/body%3E%3C/html%3E%27%29%3B%20%0AnewDoc.close%28%29%3B%20%0Avar%20pre%20%3D%20newDoc.body.appendChild%28newDoc.createElement%28%22pre%22%29%29%3B%20%0Apre.appendChild%28newDoc.createTextNode%28document.documentElement.innerHTML%29%29%3B

btw: anyone know how I can copy text from the source window that opens up? I can't seem to get a highlight box (iPhone OS 3.0)
It's the description of PHP that isn't quite right. It's not read perfectly top-down like a script, nor is it interpreted at the same time as it's read. You can declare a function at the end of a file and use it in the first line.
Where in Canada are you?
In the midst of the iPad Flash controversy I think people are overlooking that Adobe has failed to deliver a major mobile Flash upgrade since early 2007. They missed their promise to deliver a beta for the Android and WebOS platforms in 2009. Android support is now projected for mid-2010. Since 2007 Apple has released 3 major versions of their iPhone OS, Google has announced, developed, and released a SmartPhone OS with 2 major revisions. Apple developed, announced, and will release the iPad before Adobe ships a modern mobile Flash for a large variety of devices. Linux & OSX support for Flash on the desktop is still subpar. If you think Flash is good or bad there are serious questions here about Adobe's ability to simply support this platform that is so widely relied on by developers.
Are you saying that because Apple has some products already approved, that they don't need to get specific approval for the iPad? Isn't the approval on a per-device basis?
We are looking for interns in nyc to help develop/market our alternative to affiliate programs
I, for one, welcome our new Facebook overlords.
Precisely. Not to mention the wonderful little easter egg that is flash-cookies which the user has no control over or visibility into. Adobe has let most of it's constituencies down.
Nothing needs to be changed for the following translations:

* Australian English

* Canadian English

* UK English
This is potentially the most adorable thing I've ever seen on this site.
I ported a well-known Perl library to Ruby. It looked terrible and didn't work at all.

Turns out the problem is that I don't know Ruby.
Crazy but I'll give it a shot: We're looking for someone..... in Jordan

If you're around, drop me an email :) We want you!
I disagree with you there, I expect youtube to be profitable at some point. I don't think Google spent that much money on mindshare alone.
It might be nice for the search to default to a (random?) one of those 5 search engines. Then, depending on where you plan on taking this, it might also be nice to see the names of all 5 in the brown strip running across the top of the page so I can immediately choose which one I want results from.

In this way, I would get my results immediately (basically a necessity due to user expectation), but I would still be able to quickly choose among the other options after seeing the initial search results.
A fair question: I am writing a utility in Java, but I wanted to supply idiomatic wrappers for JRuby, Scala, and Clojure.
Ask HN: Advice for young and ambitious
Hi HN. I'm a regular here. I am young, live in Australia and doing my own startup now. Never travel to US at all.

I have been thinking about startups a lot and willing to learn from the best.

Will I learn anything new by moving to Silicon Valley even though I am doing my own startup now in Australia?

PS. Any other advices that can advance my career are welcomed.

Thank you.
Wow I'd love to do this but currently engrossed in my own project at the moment.
Axiotron - Modbook (the iPad we actually wanted)
We're looking for full time paid summer interns in the Cleveland area. Looking mostly for programmers, but if you're a marketing person with a hacker-oriented outlook, shoot me an email (included on my profile). We can fly you out here and help you find summer housing. We're looking for folks with backgrounds (or willingness to learn) python, actionscript, or general web dev prowess.
Church numerals, recursion, and Scheme