skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless of the content of Jobs' response, and regardless of the merits or flaws of Section 3.3.1 for Apple, developers and consumers: It is interesting to see that Jobs is aware of the dissatisfaction with this clause. The man isn't stupid, and maybe he will pay attention as more developers look for other platforms with more open developer licenses.

I've always seen Jobs as being highly principled and opinionated about the technology he helps create, but not particularly greedy (it is perhaps fortuitous that his principles have contributed to Apple's financial success).

I get the impression that Section 3.3.1 was changed as-is because Jobs honestly believes that restricting use of cross-platform toolkits and compatibility layers will help keep the iPhone platform and AppStore true to his vision of what those platforms "should be" (whether or not this is actually the case). I also don't think Jobs is explicitly trying to lock developers into the Objective-C/Cocoa development platform (though this might be a welcome side-effect of this decision from Apple's POV).

Philosophically I don't agree with Section 3.3.1. However I can see, on the one hand, how it fits in with what I understand of Jobs' character and motivations about his technology. And on the other hand I can see how it makes good business sense for Apple in the short-term. In the long-term it may not work out as well if it induces a developer-exodus. But since Jobs is paying attention, we'll see what happens when that time comes.
Is it the law that allows the success of counterfeit drugs?
Very close to 100% of iPhone developers are using Apple's tools.

Does that mean that all of these developers are either fanboys or willing to "bow down" to Apple, or is there even a smidgeon of a chance that they actually think it's a pretty decent platform to work with?

I've heard a lot of complaints about developing for the iPhone, but none about the quality of the development environment.
From what I've seen of the CS5 packaging for iPhone, there are no native UI controls. Adobe claims to have a project to port Flex to iPhone, and I can't assume that it will use native UI controls. Since the iPhone is all about the rich user experience, perhaps by limiting access to the AppStore for prior-life Flash 2D games, Apple is protecting the dilution of the quality of the games.

As for the other build an iPhone app application frameworks, the quality of the finished product varies from lackluster to average. At the worst, the finished app looks like one of the RSS reader apps that Apple is now trying to filter out of its AppStore. At the best, it's something like Location Scout. I believe by limiting access to third-party application builders, Apple is going to continue to increase the quality of iPhone apps. Titanium, Adobe et al will never generate anything like Tweetie 2. And, I believe Apple wants more Tweetie 2-caliber applications. To increase the S/N ratio. I believe Apple wants less crap and cookie cutter applications, even though some of the top 25 Free and Paid lists may from time to time have those types of 'Fart' type apps.

Apple is a premium brand. Even for developers. There are barriers to developer entry. It is kind of a privilege to write iPhone apps as you need $99/yr and an Intel Mac. The Cocoa/UIKit framework and CoreData persistence are tools that Apple engineers have invested centuries of programmer years in developing. There aren't many private APIs in Apple land; almost all of the standard iPhone apps could be recreated by third-party developers. And now with OS 4.0, I believe only a small fraction could not be recreated. As another example, Titanium et al. are not using CoreData - CoreData is designed to make managing and persisting an object graph easier. Which is what you need for non-cookie cutter applications. I have yet to find one application built on RhoMobile, Titanium, Ascena etc that leverages CoreData.

And, I wouldn't be surprised if they start rejecting apps for quality (as in what does this app provide that is of value).

"He downloaded Titanium on a Saturday morning, and by Sunday night he had a functional prototype of his Location Scout app..."

http://www.appcelerator.com/partners/case-studies/locationsc...

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Applications_for_iPhone...
So is the FSF opposed to Chrome OS? Stallman's latest essay (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...) seems to suggest this.
It's pretty simple for Apple to get around. They can wait until someone does something like this, and then go update their agreement to say cross-platform ui toolkits are not allowed to be used.
No, if anything, Firefox is proof that you can write a bad 'native application' in C directly with the APIs provided by the OS. It's entirely possible to write something that is more native than Firefox but is based on another language, like Ruby, a Lisp, ML, etc.
Firefox may not have a Cocoa feel but he prefers it over Safari anyway since it serves him better. So apparently native look 'n feel isn't all that for some people in their choice of applications.

I feel the same way about Safari on my iPhone. I quickly ditched that for a better browser.
XUL+Javascript is the UI intermediary.
Entrepreneurship: What’s in a Name?
And if you want to make something that runs on airplanes, you're going to have to play by the FAA rules, which also severely limit what nifty computer science techniques (and, in practice, what languages) you can use.

Not every development environment is going to be a free-for-all. If a particular environment is too restrictive for our tastes, we don't have to develop there... though if our desire to support the users on the other side of the development environment is strong enough, then we might decide to put up with what may feel like are rather perplexing, pointless rules.
It's interesting but also very logical when you think about it. When people are hesitating to invest in products, bad idea's are more likely to not get past the initial funding rounds and die.

Wealth breeds losers, tough times make winners.
Unsigned right shift bitwise operator versus OR logical operator
Apple removes Google branding from iPhone OS 4 search
The FaceBook group is called "I tried to ford the river and my fucking oxen died" for a reason.
> So it seems, at least from his comment and the context it was in, the intention of the clause is to remove layers that are other people's products.

Exactly. It's not about forbidding other languages, they just don't want to be beholden to things like CS5. Gruber was right.
The quality argument is bunk, in a very obvious way. Apple reviews each individual app anyway before it can enter the App Store. In other words, given a review of an individual app, the original platform and the app's quality are d-separated (in the Bayes Net sense).
Panjiva (http://www.panjiva.com), a Boston/NYC startup is hiring summer interns and full-time hackers. They use Ruby on Rails and have a global supply chain service. Looking for web app and information retrieval engineers.
It's not good on Windows either. It still better than IE though, but way behind Google Chrome. Chrome is fast and when I browse, I want to quickly scan pages and run JavaScript.

FireFox exists in my desk only because it has FireBug and a couple of other web dev. tools.
I would be interested to hear more about how you plan to monetize this. Assuming you are using Twilio or something similar, there is some outlay on your part. Will people who want to advertise have their own account or will it just be a 1 dollar charge to their number or some such?

Cool idea, look forward to hearing more.
Dude, I'm not complaining or saying it's a bad platform. Just that if you're going to develop on it you're going to be guided by Apple's choices and platform. As opposed to being able to hack something that in the end runs on the iPhone. That's no longer the case as you're not even allowed to choose the language or tools.
TomTom is hiring in Amsterdam.
> I appreciate and respect that developers don't want to be told how to develop, but if the end result is that the few development shops out there capable of putting out a AAA title like Microsoft Excel, have to pony up a few more developer resources and put out a world class app directly for the iPhone OS, rather than just creating some half-baked x-platform experience, I'm in favor of 3.3.1.

Well, OK, but the other possibility is that the executives at the few development shops out there capable of putting out a AAA title take one look at Apple's terms, observe that their entire investment could be arbitrarily yanked by another commercial organisation without compensation, kill the iPhone/iPad development before it starts, and target more open platforms that don't come with the same absurd levels of risk instead.

In the long run, the developers will always win, because someone will always make a platform where good developers can write good software, and then people will buy that platform to get that software. On the other hand, no-one cares about the platform, even if it's Apple, once the initial "Oh, shiny!" moment wears off and you actually have to get stuff done.
Agreed, Apple doesn't need any reasons to kill an app. Conversely, they have the ability to "save" an app that doesn't respect TOS.

Yet the TOS are useful, as a good set of guidelines: TOS compliance is very strongly correlated with chances of having your app accepted.
TripAdvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com) is currently looking for smart folks who like working on social and mobile apps that leverage terabytes of data with billions of social data points. I'm really enjoying it so far, hit me up if you have any questions: lbutterman@tripadvisor.com
Are salaries actually commensurately higher? As far as I can tell, typical engineering pay in NYC is about the same as typical engineering pay in California.
Magic, Puzzles and Recreational Math. Specifically, the Gathering 4 Gardner.
This was my take/biased-C++ guess on it a couple of days ago, fwiw.

http://tmsh.posterous.com/section-331
Ask HN: What are the best free and pay web charting libraries?
What are the best free and pay web charting libraries?
Because it was an official response to another MP. Getting it right is the most basic thing any public official has to do. If we can't trust them to proofread things that go out with their name underneath on even the most cursory level, how can we trust that the consideration they have given to the wording in Acts of Parliament is careful and reasoned?
For people who think that this will increase quality in the app store:

No, you are completely wrong! There will be always sh!t games and apps, because sh!t developers exist either on Mac or Pc or Linux. So the solution is either to tighten the app store approval process or make a user voting system that select the best.

I do believe that Flash will bring loads of crappy game to the iPhone, however the couple exciting games it will bring are worth it.
Ask HN: Review my app: dmbox.in
Short: this app emails you your twitter direct messages (noise-free mails!) and allows you to answer them right from your email client (just reply).

Long:

I'm a smartphone power user (I roam between a BB, an iPhone and some other gadgets) and also a twitter power user. I use twitter direct messages as an evolution of the traditional SMS (love push mail). It's awesome to have the same messaging platform available from almost everywhere.

This service (http://dmbox.in) requires you to link your twitter account (OAuth) and to fill your email, then mails to you your direct messages to you in a timely fashion. You can send an answer to that DM by just replying to the email.

It's quite simple, but also fast. Polling is done asynchronously using node.js, the whole thing is mostly PHP-backed (okay, not the best language out there, but I'm pretty good at it). The point is to be non-invasive and be used from any mobile phone or desktop client (and in this case doesn't requires you to change your twitter email address, while staying almost real-time).

Any suggestions? Insults? :-)
Clickable: http://dmbox.in/
This reads like yet another post demonstrating the NYC tech crowd's massive inferiority complex.
It is possible for Indeed and SimplyHired to have job listings that link directly to the company's website, the company just has to provide the feeds that those two aggregators then index. (Us, for example: http://www.indeed.com/jobs?as_cmp=ReminderMedia) Your solution puts the trouble of formatting the data on your shoulders while they're offloading it to the companies themselves. I dig it.
Mixpanel (http://mixpanel.com) is a YC & angel funded web analytics startup based in Mountain View, CA.

We build analytics for startups, and we're looking for employee number 1. If you're a great engineer and you want to work with tech like python, git, memcached, nginx, thrift, erlang, nosql, etc - please get in touch.

jobs@mixpanel.com http://mixpanel.com/jobs
Neither GNU Hurd nor Linux have focused on the user component very much.
Right, but since everybody (close to 100%) is already using Apple's platform by choice that means there's no difference from how they were developing apps before.

That doesn't suddenly make them "fanboys", or "willing to bow", it just means they like the platform.
You may be right that Chrome OS is a more attractive target for devs. But for the consumer, an iPad (which includes Safari) seems strictly better than a ChromePad. No?
I would be surprised if they did go back on 3.3.1. They're hurting themselves with the backlash, yes, but they're hurting other mobile platforms far more, further securing their position as the #1 mobile platform to develop for.

That said, I'd be surprised if Apple spends too much effort policing the rule. The fact that it exists in the first place will probably be enough FUD to prevent third party toolkits from taking off at all. They'll probably do some kind of automated signature testing for Flash, Unity etc and leave it at that. The upside of that is you'd probably be able to sneak a Clojure or whatever app in and nobody would probably care too much.
It is what markets are willing to pay. Rent is outrageous, but there are also people in college or just out of college who doesn't mind having a few roommates.

My friend's old studio was 1600, and was replaced by two college guys paying 1800.

Not that I'm happy about it, but it is what it is.

Additionally, it depends on how you track "rent" going down. Prior to the dip, the rents also required an agent's fee, which is easily a month or two's rent. I think more places nowadays are without these fees, so it is a little bit cheaper.
There are a great number of application that does not have a native look and feel, does not use built-in resources from the operating systems that I use and yet I think they are great (Firefox, Vim, Apache Directory Studio), even WebKit (and WebKit2) is a cross platform layer on top of WebCore[1][2].

[1]: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/HighLevelOverview

[2]: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2
Whether throwing mud at cross-compiled apps is valid or not (personally I'd say its validity fades in light of the voluminous bad apps already available... although i do remember Apple already taking some measures against those), I think it's merely a footnote to a sensible business decision. Apple need to preserve their lead, build a wall of incompatibility (now that it's necessary), and avoid this 'de facto cross-platform standard' which would greatly benefit Adobe and others but greatly hinder iPhone. If the iPhone ever loses its strong position you can bet Apple will embrace Flash, Java and cross-compilers in a heartbeat.
Fluther is now hiring a software engineer and an operations engineer: http://fluther.theresumator.com/apply/

We'll give a free iPad to anyone who refers someone to us that we hire.
Depends on what you do. Finance jobs (they hire people with engineering degrees) will typically pay better than an engineering job.
Can you guess where the ball is?
Does Android support flash or AIR apps? If so, are there a lot of developers using this to build applications?
Check-Ins are Coupons. Game Mechanics are Bullshit.
Isn't the "generative" approach a bit more limited? It works if all you want to do is iterate through the result once, but if you want to do anything more than that with it you'll need a list. No?
I think people forget that the iPhone was originally supposed to be an app-free environment (at least for 3rd parties) and instead rely on web apps.
Los Angeles (Hollywood) - CA
Well-funded stealth startup building software for the music biz. Networked OSX app with web backend (Rails + MongoDB, plus NodeJS / Redis / etc). Eventual growth to other platforms (PC/iPhone/iPad).
Tiny team of 3 very kick-ass developers (our last startup got acquired for 20+mm, before that all of us were leads in the video game space), working with extremely well-connected founder in the music industry.

We're looking for a fourth to focus on tons of backend stuff. We just started about 8 weeks ago and plan to launch the beta in another 10-12 weeks - so there's a lot to do and a lot of opportunities. We're well-funded, so we can afford someone world-class.
Shoot me an email at my HN username @ gmail.com
It's similar, but with a finite set it wouldn't show up unless you had some outcomes have probability 0 (in which case, why not just delete them from the outcome space?).

Where you need the idea is in continuous spaces - like a uniform [0,1] random variable. With probability 1 it's not a rational number, etc.
Steamboat Willie is still not in the public domain.

I'm just stating an interesting plan, not that it is realistic. Please do not make unnecessary assumptions.
Software is routinely released with dozens, hundreds or thousands of known bugs. That said, although I'm sympathetic to Ryan's request, the '900 bugs' figure is pretty seriously off.

Lots of these bugs aren't assigned to any milestone. Many of the bugs that are are assigned to 2.x. In fact: if you go look at the 3.0 milestone, there are only 61 active tickets in there (https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/...)

Should some of the 2.x milestone bugs be fixed for 3.0? Probably. I dunno. I have no idea what the Rails team's triage process is like.

A bunch of the bugs in Ryan's query are marked 'incomplete'. Here's one that Ryan even said should be closed: https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/1160-s...

It'd be great to see a call to arms like this also include links to relevant information on contributing to Rails, in order to focus the inevitable nerd outcry in a positive direction ;)
I wouldn't be utterly surprised if Apple took Titanium Mobile:

http://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile

or bought Appcelerator and made a play for it to be the environment to develop mobile apps in.

If the future says we'll be able to cross-compile our apps for the 2 or 3 most popular mobile platforms, why not do have people do it on Macs, in Apple's environment, and have the paid apps end up appearing in an Apple controlled app store?

(side note: i've mentioned Appcelerator a few times in previous comments. I have no connection to them other than thinking it's a pretty neat product and have been looking forward to diving in to it properly. I'll be annoyed if Apple removes that as an option from me. FWIW, Appcelerator is the reason i've already paid $99 to register as an iPhone developer.)
It's remarkable that the article claims reasons for copyright originally were not for the protection of authors, but for the control of descent spread by printing. At the risk of sounding like a nut, could history be repeating itself? Rules cutting web connections without trial sound like they will be enacted in law in the UK. ISPs are obliged to monitor subscriber's traffic. Are these powers open to abuse?
Why not? If it can attract 20% of it plus the millions of atheists worldwide.
With the Mac everybody got a copy of HyperCard

Here we go again.
I got a free copy of Xcode, IB and Dashcode with every release of OS X I had. I can
code in C, C++, Objective-C (with a choice of compilers gcc or clang), PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby (including RoR), Java right out of the box. SQLite is also there and maybe some stuff I don't even know I have.

Existence of iPad (and iPhone) does not hinder innovation — it fosters it. Three years ago
there was no iPhone, no iPhone OS, no App Store. Now we have a new platform with not far from 200 000 (just think about it) applications written for it. iPad gives an opportunity
truly explore what's possible on multitouch device with dedicated UI.

I am a web developer, but I do not complain that I cannot easily write my code in the browser itself. Nor do I want to.

Just think about it: if there were no iPad you could not code for it even in Obj-C.
Don't you think the fact that iPad SDKs and programming tutorials are readily available from Apple, plus the fact that Apple still sell Macs which interface with the iPad (but which they obviously don't want the iPad to render obsolete), contradicts your vision of the present trend? I mean the iPhone surely spurned a HUGE number of people to become (in your terms) 'creators' - and that was before non-Apple developer tools were even on the table.
Whats wrong with the existing array of tablet PCs with superior features? Not enough marketing hype to make them "good" enough?
Everyone fears The Ignorant Boss

For developers, this is the person who knows nothing about programming yet insists that you use X tool and write it in Y language.

The author seems to imply that either Steve Jobs or Apple itself "knows nothing about programming". That seems wholly unfair, especially for Apple, and even for Steve. Obviously Apple employs some very talented programmers, or else we wouldn't be here talking about the iPhone. But surely Steve has a working understanding of the issue? Compared to Wozniak, he may have been the less technical of the two, but reviewing his history at Apple, Pixar, and NeXT, I think we can agree that he has a much better understanding of his products than many CEOs.

Apple knows what they're doing. As usual, they are just very conservative and arrogant, which I'm personally OK with (in general) because they make great products.
Dave's writing usually rubs me the wrong way, but this piece makes a ton of sense. Facebook has shown that they can execute well as the market changes so I suspect they will try to buy something, but will not pay the valuations most VCs expect.
Nice post! But if you want to play the startup city commute game, Cambridge, MA wins. I'm working on-site with two clients right now, both in my neighborhood (I walk).

(Note: Boston, MA loses, though. Commuting from the 'burbs sucks.)