skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or The Artist Formally Known as Prince

My point here is good developers will have options - maybe not ones they like
It is interesting to revisit this thread based on Alex Payne moderate request for openness - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243445

Apple progression to restrictive hardline, is going against developers with a generally pragmatic approach.

Apple seems to give no quarter when it comes to their inane lock down practices, developers shouldn't give much benefit of the doubt to apple either.
I'm starting to see a pattern in startup strategy...

Build a minimum viable product without accounts, management interfaces, rich text editors, etc. Market that product based on its lack of such features ("It's so simple!"). Once you have traction, go build all those features. Market your new product based on having those features ("It's so powerful!").
Much of my occasional writing online illustrates the saying, "Easy writing makes vile hard reading." Thanks for posting the scores.

Yes, to make writing easy to read takes effort at editing.

Now for a rewrite:

You can believe what the blog post says if you think about what most people read FOR FUN. People who visit websites to get something done don't want that to be hard. So a website shouldn't be any harder to read than what people read for fun. Easy to use websites gain market share. Harder websites lose market share.

Most adults don't read hard books except for their jobs. Most best-selling books are written at a junior high reading level. The submissions to Hacker News that get the most upvotes are usually also at a simple reading level. An HN submission with the reading level of scholarly writing doesn't get many upvotes. Blog posts with a simple reading level get more upvotes, because voters can understand them.

Moral of the story: keep your writing simple if you want to sell anything online.

After submitting to a Gunning Fog website:

The Gunning Fog index is 6.705

The number of major punctuation marks, eg. [.], was 12
The number of words was 142.
The number of 3+ syllable words, highlighted in blue, was 7.
Graham's Law: As a HN discussion on community quality grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Reddit approaches 1.

(that said, I totally agree)
Is it just me, or is iAd only for companies with reasonably deep pockets? I mean, it looks neat and all, but you actually have to spend the time designing the flow, the artwork and programming the interactivity. How many small businesses can afford to spend several grand on design on top of their campaigns?
Excellent point. It's my strong hope that facts like this (major apps already on the store -- used in the announcement yesterday, in fact) will cause Apple to have to significantly rewrite this part of the agreement.
You forgot the part about "do those features better". :)
The analogy is broken. Humans don't interact with music in the same interactive way that they do with software. Music does not execute on your computer (except for DRM stuff, perhaps).

I don't think you'll ever hear someone say, "This music is full of bugs! It keeps crashing on me."
I've met a few people with "Evangelist" titles and I got the sense it meant "nice guy we don't really want to fire but have no real job for"
Google Maps Envelope
It's a good thing to think of problems as opportunities. I'm not so sure about thinking of opportunities as problems...
I did not downvote but The Deck is to traditional CPM advertising what a golf membership at Pine Valley is to a public course outing.

The Deck is premium. To be invited to The Deck, means that you are influential in the millions.
Objective-C is inefficient to develop in. I ported my app from Objective-C to Titanium, and there was no loss in speed or functionality, only wasted developer time. I am reasonably sure I can write comparable javascript ten times faster than Objective-C.

On top of that, Objective-C isn't a portable skill. It's pretty much only used with Apple products. They should really drop this old, crufty NeXT baggage and develop something that doesn't suck to work with.
This is Apple's strategy too, and they're not a startup. :)
See, that's because you're not affected.

My last name does happen to start with a Q, and I happen to like Barnes and Noble.

So WTF would I let them stop me? Yes, I would be very much PO'd about it, and make a hissy-fit.
Not Apple's iPhone team.

Clang is some crazy engineers at Apple. Apple's new policies are straight from the top.
I subscribed to his blog, and looking at the very low posting frequency, and the fact that the blog in recent times offered very little insights or new information, I thought he had quit a long time ago.
So what's your solution, "do nothing"? Typical lisp programmer...
One Platform to rule them all, One Language to bind them.one app store to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
And this is exactly how Android does it - you can spawn thread that will run in background, but it will be a "service" - UI-less part of your application.

In addition, there are events notifying application that it is going to be "hybernated"; basically it tells it to save whatever information it needs to restore into current state.
I'd also like to clarify that I don't think iAd is even a competitor to The Deck or Fusion. Those two services have their niche carved out and their partners are VERY happy with their relationships. I don't think either of them are going anywhere anytime soon.
Despite Apple's fancy demos, I wouldn't be surprised if most ads are just an image that links to a landing page. Especially since you need to write your fancy ads entirely in javascript (or maybe Objective-C?).
'Software that runs on the iPhone' is, in the end, too narrow a window to consider for antitrust. If the iPhone were the only smartphone game in town, then the situation would be different, but as things stand, it's not.
How to Find Crappy Programmers
Don't forget another possible explanation: Objective C, C and C++ are difficult languages, meaning there's a barrier to entry. Apple may also want to prevent application development from becoming a commodity: they don't want "widget shops" employing warm bodies to churn out low-value applications.

Of course, I disagree with this approach: there already are widget shops. It's possible to program in a language without knowing it, by writing it non-idiomatically resulting in buggier, slower code that takes longer to develop and is difficult to maintain. The fact that they write in languages that take longer to develop an app in would just mean they'll choose "low quality" while still maintaining the same quantity.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that people unwilling to learn 'Objective-C' are lazy people. Instead, my argument was that if someone is so keen on developing apps for the platform, learning Objective-c (or C, C++ for that matter) is a no-brainer. Plus, chances are, you could make far better quality apps using QuartCore or CoreAnimation than you would using any Flash API/feature.

However, I do acknowledge the fact that objective-c, given its verbosity, is far from ideal for someone who is looking to churn out multiple apps every other week.
I've heard they're confident they're in the clear, but I wonder if Apple will be forced to ban them to not lose some sort of legal dealings
If you want to implement this in your own tool set there's a python module known as Readability that has Gunning-Fog and other tests.

http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/view/Readability
Why 9:41 Is the Official Time of Apple Product Photos
I apologize for the off-topic - I actually mostly agree with you. I'll also confess that I'm partly using the comments as a sort of notebook on the interesting stuff that shows up here.
Who are you to say that a year spent working on a startup is a lost year? Why is it foolish spend 3 to 5 years on something that might just change the world, especially if you enjoy the ride?

I bet that 20 teams shooting for a 7 figure exit will be on average much more successful than 20 teams building a cautious/lifestyle business.

You could even argue that shooting for a 7 figure exit is the selfless thing to do, because you're less likely to make a good living that way compared to a lifestyle business, but you are more likely to make a significant contribution to the economy (+ job creation).
Maybe, maybe not. A common case I can think of is that it's easier for cross platform development requirements to not use Objective-C.

In any event, it's absurd to put in the user agreement. It seems like a rather transparent blow in the Apple vs. Adobe war in which developers and end users are caught up in the cross fire. It's obvious that Steve Jobs thinks very little of Adobe, but he's making his platform notably worse in the resulting ego war. Everyone loses.
Scheme is also dead on the iPhone
"Apple has revolutionized how we think about ads, you just don't know it yet."

Sounded like hyperbole.

I read the article, and came to the conclusion that it is hyperbole.
I smell an opportunity here.
“Our study indicates that a disturbingly high
proportion of parents, > 1 in 5, continue to believe
that some vaccines cause autism in otherwise healthy
children”

This is actually a big problem and a symptom of the difficulty of explaining science to the general public. There are dozens of papers that prove otherwise, the original paper that made this claim has been withdrawn after being proven erroneous:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8493753.stm

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/02/lancet_r...

The Lancet's editor, Richard Horton, tells the
Guardian that when he read the GMC ruling, it became
clear that statements in the paper were "utterly
false" and that he felt "deceived".

http://press.thelancet.com/wakefieldretraction.pdf

and yet this message doesn't seem to get through to people. The reduction in vaccination is (at least part) of what is behind several of the outbreaks mentioned in the article and the increased incidence of several diseases that had practically been eradicated.
Even more telling, he's willing to abandon the iPhone platform despite this.
Jimbo's Law: As a discussion thread grows longer, the probability that someone in the thread will define a new law approaches 1.
Which kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Why build the whole thing when you're not even sure that people will care.
The size of the called strike zone varies with the count
"(apps are the new website after all)"

Is this true, or hype?
What I mean is that it is much more than "you may only use Objective C to develop on this device". You also haven't thought this through. It has many more long term implications than the language choice.

And we have a disagreement about what viable mobile platform means.

For example, "Gameloft sells 400 times more games on iPhone than it does on Android."
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/29757/gameloft-cutting-andro...

There isn't much of a mobile games market outside the iPhone. Unless you want to develop children games for the DS. And then you would need to wear a suit to sign a contract with Nintendo. And guess what, they don't sign more than X contracts a year, where X is a very low number. So you could be out of luck.

The point is that if the iPhone is the most lucrative platform now, it is not in the best interest of the developer to put their eggs in only one basket. And markets change. So they should create demand in parallel in other devices too.

But to port to other devices takes time and money, two scarce resources, as you now.

One way they could be less dependent on the iPhone with minimum investment is to use a compatibility layer like Unity. Unity already works on the Wii, and will work on the Android and Xbox soon, with windows phone probably not far away. But with the new rules, that is not a solution anymore.

Also, it is ironic that Unity will work on Xbox but not on the iPhone. Don't you think?
Language nit: "Posterous is not a microblog. It's your place to post everything." I think defining oneself to an audience in terms of a negative -- 'we are not x, we are not y, we are z!' -- tends to leave a negative association. Just flip the sign, to something more like, "Posterous is way more than a microblog -- it's your place to post everything!"

Anyway, cool new features. Image crop, in addition to rotation, would probably satisfy 80% of what a casual user ever needs to do before posting. Rotation alone probably satisfies 50%. I'd be interested to hear the founders' thinking about which features they included vs. excluded in this release.

I'm using Posterous to share pictures of our new daughter with friends & family. It's great for family members to be able to share their pictures of her by email -- a few of my computer-naive relatives can't handle DropBox, but can handle sending a photo in an email attachment. I am nervous about giving my content to a startup that quite likely will get acquired & disappear, but I can archive the pages w/ Zotero, so that's something I guess.
While I'm no expert at Android architecture I own an Android phone and I think there are there are two ways an app can run in the background on Android: first, there are the "background services" (or whatever they are called) but my understanding is that there are also six slots of apps that aren't "hybernated" they're just not "focused" - they might not consume any CPU cycles but they're still in the memory. I would axe this second type of background tasks. Correct me if I'm wrong though, I always wondered how it works exactly.
It's pretty good. It has solved part of my biggest problem, which was the images. Previously, I had to upload images to imgur and then link then, but now I can upload them directly.

See sample: http://blog.cubeofm.com/private/HkgpEbuDGE

I'll still be using imgur though, because they only allow uploading images from your computer and they have no resize option. I usually search of flickr, right click, get the url, add by url to imgur and let it resize to 500. With posterous, I'd have to download it, resize with photoshop, reupload it, which is more work.

It also does not allow me save drafts, so I'll have to keep these in my text files still.

All the same, posterous is good enough for my needs. The reason I use posterous is really ONLY because of this:

- The pageview counter on the right

- The backtype widget at the bottom

- The fact that some people subscribe using posterous

- I don't seem to get much spam there

If those things were not there, I would have changed to wordpress a long time ago. Yes, I know I could add some wordpress plug-ins, but I really can't be bothered, you know.

And if I had a wordpress blog with a pageview counter, it would look pretentious, because everyone would know I added it, but a posterous blog looks normal because it's part of the default.

That's why I use posterous - not because I love it, but because it's easy, it works, and it has some minor things I prefer over the other alternatives.
OK, then explain the consequences to me.

A store-owner decides he wants to put an arbitrary restriction on the types of items he sells in his store. Let's say, perhaps, that a grocery store decides to stock only Organic produce.

What's the moral harm?
I think you're giving short shrift to the first Gruber Konfab post, which did not simply say "tough luck, Arlo", but also contained a credible argument that Dashboard didn't rib Konfabulator off in the first place.

I would not be surprised to find that you agree with me that it's Apple's prerogative to make whatever decisions it wants to optimize for end-user experience --- the point I think you're articulating with "especially if the orchard is better off under the care of the landlord" or however you put it. Dashboard is better than Konfabulator. iTunes is better than Audion.

I don't know whether the iPhone will be better off in an ObjC-only ecosystem, but it might be. Classic Mode, Java, and Java Cocoa were debacles on OS X.
From Network Solutions via the Wordpress forums (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/385477/page/2?replies=53#...):

> "From what we can determine at this time, the changes look like they were made by a user with admin credentials to your WordPress blog. This could be an issue with the WordPress installation or a WordPress plugins on the site. This is not an issue on our web hosting servers"

So, there's a possibility that it's a yet-unknown zero-day in the wild, and the attacker is just targeting blogs at NetworkSolutions at the moment.
If you are only able to make a profit by cutting corners on app development time, perhaps that means you aren't charging enough for your services.

At least one benefit of this change is that it levels the playing field for developers such as yourself - all of your competition is in the same position as you are, and you can't be undercut by someone who is building their apps using a Flash compiler or whatever.
You're right, it's an imperfect analogy.

Let's say, instead: Barnes and Noble decides they only want to sell non-fiction books.

Sure, it's arbitrary, and it's probably bad business, but: it's their store.

Now, suppose you are a fiction writer.

Still going to throw that hissy fit?
So they rewrite it? so what? the restriction they impose stem from their business model.

So you will write a Obj-C app, and then apple will deny it app store access, you cant sell it anywhere else, your effort and investment are worthless.

Developers shouldn't cozy up to this new restriction nor should they accept the app store arbitrary model. you accept one its no surprise that the other one comes down.

Bottom line, developers bending over for apple should not be surprised when they get reamed.
Wrong analogy. It's more like a distributer (not label) telling its affiliates that for their CDs to be shipped, the songs on them must now have been originally written only in Mixolydian mode in the key of G with a 4/4 time signature. Anything else is not allowed, especially something that doesn't even use western musical scales or tuning.
And then there are developers who aren’t ideologues—that simultaneously care and are in it for money. You’re implying a false dichotomy.
I'm sorry to hear about Dan, but I personally disagree about this crying about Apple decisions. Nobody complains about Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo restrictions as far as consolle games.

Also if you are a really creative person, you should be creative enough to deal with restrictions. Good developers will pickup the obj-c (I know good AC3 developers who now develop just in obj-c).

It's against Apple's interest lower the entry bar to create their application, because that would mean make life easier of those people who focus on develop low quality apps. That doesn't mean that Flash developers are bad. But the good ones won't have problems learning a new language.
I suspect someone will build an Objective-C/iPhone API to Java/Android translator.

If you stick to the basics, as most applications tend to do, it's not even hard.
The parent talked about Apple. So did I.
By the way, what are your sources? You look so damn well informed about what's going on at Apple.
If you really push bulk collection / vector oriented programming, you end up with something like J, K, or Joy. There's a ton of resources at no stinking loops (http://www.nsl.com/), if you're interested. (It's too bad J and K are closed source.)

FWIW, Joy (http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy.html) is quite simple, like Forth. I wrote an interpreter in Prolog in about an hour last weekend.
I like Dan (we worked together, him as a contractor, a long time ago). He's first rate. But all that tells me is that "Dan Grigsby feels very strongly about something".
my vote is "hype."
Apple's decision was undoubtedly not arbitrarily made. It was not an accidental combination of rules that produced something developers find distasteful; it was very intentional and deliberate.

I agree with axod: the "general public" doesn't care about the development environment for their Apple products. They just want things to work. If this rule results in a worse experience for consumers, Apple might have to repeal it; if not, it will probably stand.

If you really want a better situation for developers, stop with the boycots and "mob rule," as axod called it. Spend your time helping to increase the quality of an alternative platform that seems more developer friendly.

(P.S. 9 out of thirty stories on HN's main page are Apple related -- wtf.)
I don't have any evidence of this, but if people start shipping Cocotron apps on Android Apple will probably find some way to stop it.
I think you are largely right, but don't forget that this pragmatic business view of the world does not dominate every phase in every hacker's life.

Apple would be well advised to take note of the emotional sea change that helped sweep IBM and later Microsoft from their all powerful positions.

Being hated is not a good position to be in for anyone, regardless of how powerful they may be at one point in time.
HN Suggestion: Give editors the ability to turn Posts into Comments
Let's say someone posts a new bit of news "Sun won't let you write JVM apps in Closure any more." That's fine - it's a new bit of news that nobody has heard before. There's space for that on HN.

However, some people then get really frustrated because there are thirty follow-up posts because Joel Spolsky has a post on that subject, and Daring Fireball has a post on that subject, and so do 28 people you've never heard of, but other people think that their posts are interesting enough to submit, and some people are so incensed about this that they're voting them all up.

So - here's a suggest solution. Let editors move these new posts so that they're comment threads under the original article. So far as I can tell comments are basically posts that have no parent - so there's no reason why they couldn't have one assigned. Doing this could bump the original article back up the charts - but at least there'd only be one article for people to ignore.

The only problem I can think of there is that some over-zealous mods might move things that didn't actually need to be moved. But that'd be an argument for the comments :->
Most of PG's writing on the subject implies the same 'all in' mindset. He himself said that he's hesitant to start another company because he doesn't want to schlep away another 5 years.

I'm a fan of the slow organic approach myself. But I also realize that there is a LOT of work that has to be done over the live of an idea, and the slower you work now the longer the whole thing will take.
Regardless of the exact implications of the clause in question it is still an insightful look into what Apple's mentality is.