skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
starting capital and risk tolerance, mostly. Getting a business to the 'ramen profitability' stage can be a long and difficult task.

Also, some people prefer to not deal with 'business stuff' at all.

Obviously there is a continuum between 'only does exactly what he is told' and 'runs the business without me' and most people are somewhere between that. I'm just saying; people who quickly return to idle after a task is done rather than seeking out more work are significantly less useful.

Also, people who can't tell me when they are ready for a new challenge (or that they are being shoved into water that is too deep) are significantly less useful than those who can.
I think Apple's got better things to do with their time than to police against the 3 Clojure iPhone/Pad developers out there using some kind of cross-language compiler.

Plus, if Apple did start enforcing against Clojure->Objective-C, it'd be sort of cool. Imagine Clojure in the big time... the HN headlines: "Functional programming keeps Steve Jobs up at night" or "Steve Jobs and Rich Hickey seen outside coffee shop in Cupertino -- Eric Schmidt feels lonely". Right, not gonna happen, keep cross-compiling away.

(There is a warm space in my <3 for all that is Clojure and I haven't touched another language in 2 weeks)
So Frameworks like Unity for game development are basically dead, making it so that indie developers who don't have the money/ability to write their entire engines from scratch are nearly banished and putting only the AAA title makers in the running. Great...
The key is where they say "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++."

Take a pause and think about what that "originally" really means.

Developers are not free to use any tools to help them. If there is some tool that converts some Pascal or, Ruby, or Java into Objective-C it is out of bounds, because then the code is not "originally" written in C.

Yes it is "originally" written in C - when the Objective-C compiler first sees it. There's nothing in the quoted clause from the Apple T&Cs that says "written == written by a human".

I really don't think this clause is aimed at code converters, but rather at e.g. run-times that execute byte code - see also "(e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)". You don't link to an API until either compile- or run-time. Making an API call from a piece of code that is then converted into C is not 'linking to APIs through an intermediary layer'.

OK, it still sucks, but it seems to me that both this article and the other similar one on here at the moment ("Apple takes stance on consciousness", http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252438) are based largely on a misinterpretation of the use of the word 'originally'.
Version 2.0 of the Ruby Camping framework is out
"Wow. After 199 commits, 11875 lines of diff and 1284 days, it's an honor to
present a new, freshly baked version of the microframework; now built upon
Rack and weighing only 3072 tiny bytes. (That's exactly 3k!)
" wrote Magnus Holm, the project scoutmaster

Microframeworks are still a trend as confirmed with on-going working around Rack, Sinatra, and Rails 3.

So check-out the new features and go Camping this week-end! :-)
According to apple, that's a NO NO. As in, there was an implied threat of pulling the dev account of someone who did that when I asked for a discount on iPodTouches.

The enterprise solution is only for internal. The only other distribution channel is the App store. You're not allowed to distribute an app any other way.

Sure, you can give them the iPad, but Apple's lawyers will be on your back the second they found out about your practice. And as soon as they sync it to their own account, the app will disappear.
To comment on that, Twitter has been promising a "version 2" of their API since around the time they went from 12 employees to 150 and took that $150M, and we haven't seen anything.

A glaring example of how little Twitter has done to support developers since their original API is this support ticket that has been open for about 15 months: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=214

Obviously, those 150 people have been working hard on something for the last year, and providing the best tools for developers (let alone filling huge holes in their API) doesn't seem to be the top priority.

I could be totally wrong on this and API V2 will be out in a few weeks and blow all of our socks off.
Arguably yes. Microsoft never tried to stop users from running whatever software they wanted on Windows, they just made it more inconvenient in some cases to get that software.
This post from a former QNX marketing VP appears to disagree with you: http://saunderslog.com/2010/04/09/rim-didnt-buy-qnx-for-its-...

"QNX has long been looking for a partner with whom to enter the mobile space. For example, almost 10 years ago I was the marketing VP at QNX for a short period of time. Even then, QNX CEO Dan Dodge thought that the real prize in the embedded OS market was the mobile handset."
Yes, it is. My in-house process is none of Apple's (or Microsoft's) business.
Copyright is essentially a law of physical objects. Information is only involved superficially, to modulate it. When information doesn't need objects anymore, copyright is basically dead. It exists only by vestiges of behavioural convention.

Debating the length of copyright term is pretty much useless. As are refinements of 'fair-use'. If there are no solid 'attachment points' for payment, and no discrete identifiable product, the machine is just spinning but going nowhere. We need entirely different ways to pay for abstract creative effort. It is an opportunity to make something better -- copyright was fundamentally economically suboptimal anyway.
My guess is they will clarify to include XML content generated by official Apple XCode tools like IB. I really only see IB content when I have Git merge conflicts, and I can't imagine anyone sane enough to generate that manually, without the tool.

That being said, just by asking someone to agree doesn't mean they will enforce it against small players (RhoMobile, Titanium).
Yeah, and that's why your console spends 90% of its life powered off.
Who is Paul Irish, and why is it interesting that Google hired him?
> European risk aversion and relative economic rigidity, focusing on credentials, legal barriers to competition

This is racism.

> It all sounds like big corporation CYA behaviour

And this is illogical. I mean, if Europe is the risk averse one, why is the acronym "cover your ass"? It should be "couvrir ton derriere", or at least "arse!"
Of course, we know who this new rule is aimed at, but nevertheless, several interesting projects will go down as collateral damage. Even if the App Store doesn't enforce this at first, would you spend time and money developing your app in an unsanctioned tool, knowing that it can be pulled off the store at any moment?
I would be specially angry if I were one of the Appcelerator guys. They rewrote Titanium for iPhone so instead of using JavaScript on top of WebKit, it used the SDK to create snappy, fully native apps. ( http://techzinglive.com/?p=177 ) Now they will have to go back to the original plan, with an inferior product, or give up on the iPhone entirely.
Yes, and none of them have ever included a rule against cross-compiled code, to the best of my knowledge.
Emailing Adobe Ideas to Posterous (automatic PDF-PNG conversion)
Is MonoTouch now dead in the water?
Some guy. Just switched jobs. I should start a blog so I can get front-page time on HN too.
I can confirm this, my dad's wordpress blog, hosted on network solutions, as also been compromised.
While I usually have negative things to say about the iPad (sometimes good things), I have been able to touch type decently well on my Nexus One while in landscape (and sometimes portrait), and its screen is significantly smaller. With that in mind, I don't see the iPad keyboard being bad enough to end up typing "Lckig=ng" all that often.

That being said, I wouldn't want to touch type anything lengthy on either the Nexus or the iPad. I mostly did it to see how well it worked out.
Lessig had a simpler idea.

The first n years of copyright protection are free, for a modest n (say 10). After that, the copyright owner can get extended protection by paying minimal fee every so often, say $1 every 5 years.

Lessig's numbers were almost certainly different.
"I will use my operating system monopoly to put you out of business if you don't assist me in putting an unrelated competitor of ours out of business" is worse to you than "you may only use Objective C to develop on this device"?

I don't like Objective C either, but I don't take it that far.
They don't have to selectively target the few Clojure developers, they just need to lump them in with the group "not-our-compiler".
I make a prediction that the iPad will be popular for a while with the uber geeks but that ultimately it will be a damp squib.

The market will get taken over by a cheaper, more open product that runs flash.

That is my Nostrodamus bit done then.
> One of my yardsticks is that when the Economist supports something, it's clear that those that claim that it would be "bad for business/bad for the market" are no longer to be believed.

What's the basis for that belief?

Surely it's not "biz survived" because biz can survive things that are bad for them.

Also, the flourishing of other biz doesn't imply that some biz wasn't hurt.

For example, criminalization of morphine (early last century in the US) hurt legal drug retailers.
What about MacRuby ? It still isn't working for iPhone eventually, but does it mean "forbidden" now ?
As you have just found out, it in fact is. Maybe I'm wrong, but my guess is: they win this issue, and they still keep the overwhelming lead in app development.
Even if they do you can still write your own languages that compile down. Ala: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp
I'd love to have a device I could take around in meetings, draw pictures on it, run demos, show slides, some sort of collaborative work device.

My collaborators would have similar devices and we could easily "drag n drop" between our devices.

The iPad could become that device with one or two improvements.
First) A tech-savvy Android user knows about leaving things running in the background. An iPhone user may not.

Second) How is this relevant? If you want roaming on, it doesn't imply you want apps to use it without your explicit request. Concrete example: leave Google Maps running logged into Latitude and it will merrily talk on the network by itself.
Apple Blink Vulnerability
HA!

I actually do submission for some people as well and the whole rigmarole. All depends on what the client is interested in paying for.

I've helped several people who hired out of country developers then got left with a pile of source code and no way to get it on the store.

One of them, amusingly, wouldn't let me VNC in to their computer, so I had to do it all by phone (that was fun). Most of the rest of them I use copilot/webex or something to help train them on the process and get their computer setup for distribution.
It's not really an issue of if you can get away with it. It just betrays the fundamental attitude that Jobs has shown since first introducing the Macintosh. He appears to firmly believe in a closed, tightly controlled platform. I wonder how the world would be different if Woz had taken over and Jobs had wandered off to do something else. And stayed there I mean. Who am I kidding. People would probably be fighting each other for NeXT machines instead of Apple boxes.
2 tips: Learn to do fixed fee. Learn to do fixed fee and not get screwed.
There is a significant difference between actually zero and merely very close to zero.

Does Bayesian reasoning strike a difference between zero and asymptotically zero? It's my understanding that probability density functions are a method to dodge the problem in the frequentist approach, so I'm assuming the Bayesian approach also claims anything with probability limes 0 is impossible and just makes sure not to consider such cases.
Some of us have already invested over a grand buying Macbooks and Unity licenses and test iPod Touches specifically so that we can develop games for the iPhone, though... Would have been nice to have known in advance that this would be ruled out!
Dave The Angel | Kellblog
I think that as long as Mario and Zelda will require buttons, Nintendo will be safe.
I'm not the parent poster, but I also love mine as a phone and a computer and would totally buy it again given the choice.
Look, either they are hyper focused on an attention to detail or they are not.

The time stamp on the ads was held up as evidence that they are, with breathless replies agreeing to that effect.

And yet when somebody points out area where that attention to detail is slipping, tptacek and friends comes along and dismisses an entire sustaining legacy of the company. "Fonts are stupid, who needs 'em anyway. Reading is for suckers."

Wonderful, so attention to detail is only important if it's what they are currently bothering to focus on. But if they aren't focusing on it, then it's not important?

I ask that you read and understand the principles of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning
Yes, denying filesystem access (well, raw filesystem access--Apple gives you access to the "Documents" directory, etc), may be offensive to some, but for me this falls under the category of "sure, it'd be nice if it did more, but I'm not gonna be mad about it." The TI-82 programmable calculator didn't allow me to reprogram my keys or to redefine the built-in math operations, but that didn't make me love that device any less.

The "originally written" requirement is different because it's not something that Apple could restrict by means other than by telling us, "you can't do that." It's kind of like saying, "Don't program in a functional style", or "Use a model view controller architecture." Uhm, excuse me? I'll decide that for myself, thank you very much!
Of course, now you're begging the question: if there are already zillions of apps in the store and you're not providing anything they don't, does the world need you to develop it?

On the other hand, if the market does get flooded with low-quality apps, it should be pretty easy for developers to make money by simply making good apps.
Interesting:

"...these cross-country data are consistent with the
hypothesis that mixed-gender classrooms are a necessary component for gender inequality to translate into poor female math performance"
I heard from at least 50 different people hosting there that got hacked. All the same stuff... All running wordpress 2.9 and updated.
So use an android?

If apple really wants to drive developers away from their platform, so be it.

Luckily there is no monopoly on smartphones.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is a stupid policy even for Nintendo, Sony et al. My point is that stupid != insane.
There's also discounts and warrant coverage that can be used to make a convertible note a better option for angels, but it seems like most of good angels don't like convertible notes for the reasons outlined in the post...

More here:
http://venturehacks.com/articles/debt-or-equity
The web = open

Native apps that run directly on their hardware = closed - you play by their rules or not at all.

shrug pretty clear difference IMHO.
Is there a corresponding US law, at least CA might have something since it's a fairly consumer friendly state.
It might be worthwhile, even for me since I own an original Fat PS3, to check with the state govt.

Anyone knows how to go about it, i.e. who/which office to ping in Sacramento?
Can you write an alarm clock app? I don't see any way to make that work. There is no system-level service to tie into. It seems to me that the iPhone 'multitasking' model prevents a great many use cases.
Opera -> View -> Fit to Width
People complained about typing on the iPhone for the first few months it was out. I'm sure if I had an iPad I'd be doing close to regular keyboarding speed in a few weeks.

The Flash thing has gone parody. Buy the scrabble app.

The camera complaint is dumb too. They were trying to hit a $500 price point, so no camera for you this go-around. Having it be a paid add-on would have pissed more people off than not having it at all.
Hey,

Thanks for the update. I had access to the logs and we didn't see any suspicious GET or POST at all. In fact, on the first one I looked I saw a post to simple forums, so I thought that would be the problem.

But after that, we saw a bunch of blogs without simple forums and even without any GET request at the time of the hack.

So my assumption is that it can only be though a problem with those shared hosts...
For me, Apple's UI advantage comes from two things:

1. It's way the hell better than Windows. No competition here. Windows is horribly clunky, and if you disagree with me, try using both for a while.

2. It has less of a tendency to plunge you into pesky little technical details than Linux. I personally don't mind fiddling with a config file every now and then, and the more recent Ubuntu versions are getting surprisingly good about this, but Linux still demands more effort to get a good, productive environment going. And Flash support still sucks.

Of the two, I prefer Linux in terms of usability. I doubt most non-technical users would agree. (Chrome, though, is just unambiguously better than Safari in every way. I use both regularly and don't want to dislike either of them.)
I've had a couple of close friends and relatives have health issues that almost killed them. Afterwords their personality changed. They became much more negative and harder to be around. The things I have read about Jobs is that he is a health nut. To have the problems he has had might have been a big emotional blow for him.

Since he has come back, things have gotten much worse for partner relations and there is almost a continual barrage of news about Apple jerking someone around. I really think they could do better with a new CEO.
While we now believe that Apophis will miss in 2036, it is the large asteroid that has had the largest computed probability of hitting the Earth. So your boss is not far wrong there, and quite possibly right if you're misquoting him in line with your misreading of the article at hand.

And about the binary star system, have you actually read up on the Nemesis theory? While Nemesis has never been found, there is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence for something causing periodic asteroid impacts. So on this issue it looks like your boss is better informed than you are.

Therefore from what you've said I'd be more inclined to take another look at memristors.
I think there's an idea where copyright extension fee grows exponentially, so free for first N, $1 for the next N, $10 for the next N..

And after a few N's, it'll either be economically infeasible, or you can still keep them, but it'll be worth it for you (Mickey is worth quite a bit after all these years).

I think Lessig's idea was basically get the "dead" copyright properties into the public domain, where you can't get permission because you don't know who owns things.
You are right, I meant to write Tier 1.
I just read it by scrolling sideways. Holding down shift whilst using the mouse wheel.
"Using a cross-compiler is like having a hammer and using it for nails, screws, thumbtacks etc."

Fair enough. But Apple didn't just forbid cross compilers. They essentially forbade anything that wasn't originally written in C, C++, Objective-C, or javascript.

"There is this myth that any programmer can learn lots of new languages. That just is not true. Most programmers are good in just a few languages - the rest they are not good in."

I don't really see the relevance. Most programmers are good at a few languages, but those few languages are very different from developer to developer. Forcing every developer to choose from a limited subset of languages (especially the ones given) is just artificially limiting the developers who are willing to program on the iPhone. How many more developers would program on the iPhone if they could use C# or Python? I'd bet the number would be higher. And this is a good thing for the consumer.
I have not played with Clojure since it was introduced, but I have a question about recur or tail recursion. Here is a trivial CL example (nontrivial might be approaches to parsing):

(defun find-nth-match (test from n)
(if (= n 0)
from
(martial-n test (1+ from) n)))

(defun martial-n (test from n)
(find-nth-match test
from
(if (funcall test from) (1- n) n)))

(find-nth-match #'evenp 1 5) => 10

The idea is that tail recursion is not just recursing into the exact same function you appear to be in. Is this available with current clojure? Can recur help me somehow?
A lot of good people in niche areas have their own projects and goals and don't mind picking up part-time work if it fits in with their goals. This might not describe the guy you want running your server, but its the way a LOT of creative freelancers work.

Just anecdotally, two of my best hires started working for me in some part-time capacity before coming on full-time. In these cases, hiring part-time ended up being a kind of courtship. Especially since people instinctively judge most jobs by the salary, if you've got a small but growing company, hiring part-time can be a useful way of ramping up help while controlling costs.
Roasted Vegetable Quinoa Salad
My Notifo (YC W10) app - Notifications for conversions
Sometimes I feel the whole world misses the point about multitasking on mobile devices. Here's what I think:

* Existing iPhones offer an infrastructure to quickly save and restore the state of your application so that it can be "hibernated", therefore reducing the need for real multitasking.

* Obviously, due to the limited display size of mobile devices, you can't have two apps running on the same screen at the same time, it just doesn't make sense, so an "inactive" app is off the screen, hence most of the time it doesn't matter if is actually running or hibernated. Just like on the iPhone.

* Sometimes, you still want your app running even when it's off-screen. Things like music players (Spotify for instance), mail tools (gmail fetching email in the background) or social tools (a twitter client fetching the latest tweets that you can read later even if you don't have signal).

* Notice that generally, for things that you want to run in the background, you don't need an active UI. There's no need for UI for an audio player in the background, a mail reader syncing in the background, etc.

* Solution: disallowing code that is eligible for running in the background to have access to the screen. This will make he background tasks a lot leaner as it would force developers to separate "service-like" code from "application code" and enforcing strict memory/CPU limits on "background services".
I guess the trick here is to complain about the new agreement before you've accepted it (while you're still only prohibited from complaining about the old agreement). Then once you accept the new one to get work done, you stop complaining.

The really annoying thing is the NDA for beta SDKs. The only place you can communicate with other developers about new features until an OS is released is the Apple developer forum.
Can a web design be timeless? Hell if I know.
> QNX makes a very well regarded embedded OS, people I know who've worked with it rave about it.

Seconded. In fact I don't know anyone who's used QNX that has anything but great things to say about it. QNX makes modern Linux systems look as old and stale as a proprietary Unix. It's tiny, really fast, and keeps the good stuff while fixing packaging, scheduling and graphics.

I wonder what this means for Cisco: QNX is the OS used in their high end routers (rebranded as 'IOS' because it has the same command shell and routing algos as their old shitty IOS).