skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting perspective because it equates devs with musicians, which while not an intuitive comparison might be increasingly accurate.

If it is, the future is not promising. Musicians have been getting screwed for years by record labels. They put up with it because their primary goal was to create, and find an audience. Being treated like a commodity by the record labels was aggravating and dehumanizing but didn't stop either music production or the practices of the labels.

Maybe all of us 'rockstar' developers should be careful what we wish for.
I remember the first time I tried OSX and saw Expose. I realized then and there that that feature alone was worth the $500-$1000 premium that I would pay for a Macbook.

That's right. IMHO, Expose is worth $1000.

(Of course, now everyone has copied Expose... but you get the idea.)
Apple is really hurting themselves with the developer community. I don't know if it will matter (as pclark points out, they have millions of users willing to part with cash) but it is really painful for me as a fan and a developer.

Glad I'm not invested in the iPhone platform...
Apple has revolutionized how we think about ads, you just don't know it yet.
Beer Policy Prompts Carlsberg Strike
While I understand his arguments, I fail to understand how not letting people use x or y language hinders innovation. If they were blocking people from using certain APIs (which they are btw, but its their platform -- they do what they want), I can understand that you wouldn't be able to make so and so products...but not letting people use .NET or actionscript, I dont see how it really affects people's creativity.
It's not enforceable in the same way that having all your apps removed from the app store isn't actionable. Anyone engaged in commercial development for the iPhone only does so at Apple's pleasure, which may be revoked at any time.

Of course, if this causes your users to seek refunds and you have already spent your earnings, that could get problematic.
You misread. The point is that compilers are fundamental to CS, and barring things like a Flash compiler is vile.
Paul is a jQuery core contributor and built a few particularly notable things like Modernizr which helps you test HTML5 features which are not yet fully supported in browsers.

He also does the yayquery podcast.
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens Retiring
I dislike posts like this because they foster a mindset that you have to "go all in" to start a business, when in fact that's just how financiers want you to do it.

You don't. Plenty of businesses start cautiously and grow organically.

What you have to be a fool to do is to bank 3-5 years of your life on a 1/20 shot at a 7 figure acquisition. Fortunately, only a tiny fraction of the people who try to do this get funded and shot out of that particular cannon, and they only lose ~1 year of their life to the idea.
Very good idea, and well done too.

It should provide links to nearby constituencies too, I hacked the url to see the north counterpart to my south area.
By the way, the sh source were written like that because the original author missed algol, iirc.
An absurd recommendation. Bandwidth/hardware costs are rapidly declining, and already low vs developer time. Unlike 5 years ago, there's very good, free software addressing common, high scale issues today.

Do you need to spend weeks writing your own NoSQL backend to succeed? I doubt it. Try MongoDB or something first, and don't be so cheap that it's running with no margin, pissing off early adopters who really wanted to love you.
The Value of a Trained Intuition
How much is facebook worth?
Why Is Las Vegas Endangered?
I can't speak for Grigsby, but many of us have been waiting to see whether Apple would eventually loosen restrictions as the platform matured, or tighten them further.

The new SDK agreement and other recent changes (like the removal of "adult" content except for select companies like Playboy) make it clear which direction Apple wants to move. Now we know their vision for the future is more centrally controlled than the present, not less.
If you're most creative in .NET or ActionScript, not being able to use them really affects your creativity.
(You did that on purpose, right?)

Gunning Fog Grade = 0.4 x [ words/sentences + 100 x (hard_words/words)]

Words = 157, sentences = 7, hard_words = 10 or so

G.F.Grade = 0.4 x (22.43 + 6.37) = 11.52

I award bonus points for the single paragraph wall of text ;-)(doesn't seem contemplated here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index , but it should be ...)

P.S.

The Wikipedia page lists this calculator site: http://simbon.madpage.com/Fog/ , which calculates 14.46.

It is thrown off by the en-dashes (counts 151 words), and counts 22 "3+ syllable words", including 'area' (true but amusing, given it's only five letters).
I'd argue that much embedded systems code on consumer electronics devices was probably compiled with gcc.

Of my consumer electronics devices, about half are based on open source (appletv, nexusone, roku, linksys access point)... I don't know about my toaster, microwave, etc.

My blackberry is not, and I doubt things like tvs and dvd players are, but every day there are more benefits to companies using open source. The main threat to this is the GPLv3 license, but fortunately that's not getting too much traction.
In my case: I did spot some suspicious activity to that file in the first case of infection, but based on subsequent activity from the same IPs, it didn't appear to be a successful attack. In the second case of infection, there is no suspicious activity on that file. (Just some crawlers.)

But, this isn't quite the same infection as is being reported on Network Solutions, so I dunno what those logs look like. I don't have any clients on NetSol.
Well, Windows Phone 7 only allows verified CLI bytecode apps, which practically speaking means Firefox won't be compiling for it anytime soon.

But MS doesn't care how you compile, just as long as the bytecode checks out safe.
This doesn't sound like anything boutique advertising networks like The DECK (http://decknetwork.net/) haven't already done.
"muchosmedia Just Letters

Application Description

So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!

Hi, My name is Just Letters and according to the mothership I'm no longer worthy to be part of your mobile experience. The powers that be have yesterday announced that only tools made by god himself shall be deemed worthy to build iPhone apps.

I'm sorry, but I was built using one such evil programming language which goes by the name of ActionScript. For this reason it is probable that I will soon be banished from the walled garden of Eden. How tragic.

Maybe this platform has not been the right place for me anyway since clearly the mothership believes games or my type provide no value whatsoever. And I agree - this platform adds no value to me either so I'll pack my bags and return to the wild wild web I came from. It was a lot cosier there anyway.

On that note, farewell mothership, and farewell to your products and services. May the walled garden of Eden take good care of you."

http://itunes.com/apps/justletters

http://www.muchosmedia.com/blog/?p=113
We will stop being outraged as soon as outrageous things stop happening.

In this case Apple is the music label, the music shop and the people that make the CD player. And that's the problem. If there were multiple app stores for the iPhone then nobody would care if Apple chose to filter the apps in their store.
Stuff like this is probably why they didn't. You only have to piss off a couple of the right developers and the next big thing ends up with your competition.
Further, Apple specifically constrains multitasking to keep the user experience smooth and fun. Allowing free multitasking is a path to madness. Only a power-user would care or want it. And even though eventually a power-user would need to rebuild from scratch to remove bad apps. (Which of my 2000 apps is sucking CPU cycles now? Can't tell.. better reinstall from scratch.)
Fwiw, Google Docs has Gunning Fog and many other measurements under tools (I believe?).
It's really not that risky if you're willing to fight to the death, so to speak. Many 'failures' are really just cases where people gave up.
Ask HN: Economies of Scale in Multi-Platorm Mobile Apps?
I'm interested to know if there are any economies of scale possible in mobile app development. I want an app developed for iPhone, Android and Symbian (or whatever that is morphing into), but should I expect that each will begin with a clean slate and be billed accordingly? Or are the lessons learned in a first iteration, of ie. an iPhone app going to save a developer time on subsequent platforms?
How many another companies' browsers are there for iPhone/iPad?

Exactly.
And Steve's response, I imagine would be: if you want to sell your app in my store, it's my business. If you don't like my rules, develop for a different platform.

Seriously: if Barnes and Noble decides it only wants to sell fiction by authors whose last names begin with "Q", wouldn't we just consider it a bone-headed move, and not the cause for moral outrage?

The iPhone is not the only smartphone on the market, and it's never pretended to be an open platform.

I really can't see why folks are getting their knickers in a twist.
I wouldn't call it a nightmare, its just not as good as firebug yet but made major improvements over the last year or so. If there was no firebug today than I Web Inspector would be the second best choice. Their CSS editing and tracing needs to be a bit more intuitive, not a fan of clicking check boxes to remove CSS element.
Right, none of them have the complete monopoly to insist on exclusive titles. Notice how big a deal they make it when they do get a studio to do an exclusive.

Apple can get away with this for now, then when WinPhone7 comes out (or somehow they get some real competition), start backing off if they need to. In the meantime, they'll build up more developers that have developed skills in iPhone only tools.
I actually specifically mention The Deck in the article and that it's very similar. The difference? This is about to be in front of everyone who uses free apps on the app store (assuming iAd adoption is good). That's a lot of people.

Essentially it has the potential to be MUCH bigger then The Deck or Fusion Ads.
Sharecropping in the Orchard: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
If people are are that enthusiastic about developing for the iphone os, is learning objective-c that big of a deal. Really?
Is it that time already? I guess so, the server is the new client, which was the new server, which was the new client, which was the new server.....
I wonder, how feasible is it for MS/Google to create a toolkit to allow instant porting of iPhone apps to WinPhone7/Android?
"If Apple can convince its users that it’s safe to click anything with the iAd logo they will have single handedly changed the perception users have of ads, resulting in more clicks and more money made by both Apple and developers"

Makes sense.
No Technical Co-Founder? Do Not Pass Go
"Certainty is the mother of fools"
Hasn't anyone else realized that this rule is totally unenforceable? How is Apple going to find out if something was originally written with Unity3D or Clojure? Everything is submitted to them as a binary. You can't inspect a binary and figure out what language the code that generated it was originally written in.

So seriously, what's the problem here? Either there is none or I'm missing something.
There are developers who care and developers who are in it for money. If there's only money left and no joy in iPhone development (when people who blogged, taught and promoted leave), the quality of apps in general might fall down a lot.
How to measure and determine a market size for cheap
That must make this Paul Graham guy an idiot and this whole YCombinator thing must be idiocy in action.
Site is not appearing. I think, he is serious about goodbye!
Well, they can do what Van Morrison did when he wanted to get out of a bad contract.
I've been on HN for a long while now, so I believe I'm allowed to say this: I hate the idea of HN turning into Reddit. I hate 'news' stories about how we should all be outraged and boycot something. It's a ton of sheep following some ill advised, likely false rumor half the time. It's just kids in the playground trying to exercise mob rule.

There was a news story, saying how Apple have changed their wording to disallow non-approved languages for developing apps. Great. That's news. But 100+ follow up 'opinion pieces' on it? srsly? Do we need all that crap? 10 out of the top 22 stories on HN are about this one item!

The biggest mistake Apple has made IMHO has been opening the app store to all developers. They should have carefully selected chosen, quality partners, who would agree to play by Apples rules.

At the end of the day though, the general public doesn't care one bit how Apple "treat" developers, so it's all fairly moot.

If you take some principled stand by not making another worms game because you can't write it in clojure, you can be sure as hell someone else will just get on with it and write it in whatever Apple want.
Values of Tech Companies (Twitter, AAPL, FourSquare)
Spam a Judge, Go To Jail?
I did not know you could do that. Thank you.
This is very signficant because Dan Grigsby makes his living off of teaching iPhone development courses.

Mobile Orchard, "the number-one ranked iPhone developer news site and podcast", was one of the first resources that made me comfortable with iPhone development, and I am sad to see Dan take this 'crossing the Rubicon' stance, especially since it is such a shock (one of the leading podcasts for indie iPhone devs).
What apps are worth buying anyway? I spent the first day with my ipad looking for an app that reads pdf for christsake. The entire platform seems to be just big media & games.
This is a horrible analogy. When you produce music it doesn't have to hook into an external API. Can badly produced music crash a device (aside from the user's ears)? No.
You replaced your boss with a customer. No real change there; You're still at the mercy of someone. I'd say you're a dumbass for not realizing this, but I'll decline to as we're supposed to keep a higher standard here on HN.
Maybe I'm slow, but what's that Lckig=ng supposed to mean?

This makes me skeptical. To type an equal, you need two separate mode-shifts of the keyboard to even make that possible. Even if that's done, the = key is two keys over and two keys up from the nearest letter in Lacking.
While there are a lot of hobbyists on the app store, there are a lot of people doing actual business -- and they make up for a majority of the noteworthy apps (apps like Things, Tap Tap Revenge, games from EA come to mind). I doubt their quality would go down, as you suggest.
just from a 5-second glance, reminds me of jQuery idiomatic style
You know, it just occurred to me that if Apple specifies the tools that may be used to develop applications for the iPhone, then all iPhone developers may legally be their employees for tax purposes....
interesting site.

the "see who else viewed this well" thing seems creepy though.
Objective-C is a just a tool, and most of the time it is overkill for creating apps. If you are just creating a single app, you are right, it is not a big deal. But if you do iPhone contracting for a living, and the money you make correlates to how quick you can create an app, Objective-C isn't always the best tool for the job.

Also Dan isn't saying "I'm too lazy to learn Objective-C", he is saying "I don't want to be forced to use Objective-C"
Unity is probably the most broadly used tool that's impacted by this change; many popular games are made with Unity.

Apple is aware of this - they briefly rejected all Unity games in November of last year for unpublished APIs before an update brought Unity back into compliance.
http://toucharcade.com/2009/11/12/ravensword-and-many-other-...
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=35744

I'll be very surprised if this language isn't modified to give Unity a pass, or to relax this rule for games.
Posterous (YC 08) unveils Post Editor 2.0
My observations of the game mechanics.

0. Once a piece touches another piece, you lose control of it.

1. The weight of one piece can affect the balance of others.

2. If you hold a piece against the side walls, it will stop descending.

3. If you move a piece into the wall and then immediately away from it, you can put it into a slow spin while still being able to flip the piece.

4. You can control the descent speed by tapping the down arrow. After each acceleration, the downward velocity resets when you stop accelerating. If you reduce the speed with which the pieces collide, the already stable pieces will not bounce as much.

5. Getting something really close to a complete horizontal row does not cause the row to disappear. I have not yet achieved an arguably perfect horizontal row.
Telling: Grigsby can support himself independently by working in the iPhone ecosystem, but to work in Android he may need a job at Google.
My retired physician dad is getting a 3G model. He can turn on the 3G just for the months he's staying at his house in Florida. I look forward to this, as it will reduce my family sysadmin duties.
.. but you get the source & build tools. Why can't I do it?
You're missing the point. This bans everything that isn't direct Objective-C, C, or C++. Not just ActionScript or C# or whatever. Everything.
I thoughtfully offered response to your question here in my original comment above, before you'd posted your comment.
The way I primarily think about ads is through the filter of an adblocker, apple didn't convince me yet.
Unless, of course, you were a developer at Stac Electronics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

... or one of the many other companies that produced something that Microsoft decided would be better if it was bundled with the OS.

I'm not defending Apple here, but come on, be realistic.
Excellent point. As much as I would want to ban auto-tune, it just isn't the right thing to do.

Apple: Stop banning auto-tune.
While Clojure is currently targeting the JVM and CLR as compilation targets, there are longer-term plans to target LLVM and other platforms as well. There's no reason a compiler couldn't produce native code.
Set up recurring billing, don't chase checks every month. Send invoices if it makes you and/or the client happy, but collect the payment automatically. I use Authorize.net for billing and Blinksale for invoicing.

This will save major headaches and improve long-term advertiser retention. (And if your advertisers aren't long-term, I suspect you'll have a tough time continually generating the new accounts necessary to make this worthwhile.)
Exactly so. This is why Delicious's "tag bundles" exist. (Bundles are tags for tags, but tagtags or whatever sounded stupid and confusing.)
Some apps have interpreters, yes, but they are in violation of the agreement.
Wow. Shameless linkjacking. That's straight-up plagiarism. There's 0% original content. Seriously, where's my pitchfork?
Applications must be originally written in
Objective-C, C, C++.

Interesting: this excludes lex, bison and similar generators.
Idiocy is the new ingeniousness.
> An absurd recommendation.

What did you see as his recommendation? I think he suggested not building generic infrastructure unless needed.

That being said, I definitely agree with you that you should run with margin and some fault tolerance. Not because you need four-nines availability, but because you're wasting operations' time otherwise. I've fallen into that trap with my first attempt at "start-up": running application hosting (before it was called cloud computing) on minimal hardware that I'd build and physically host myself. As a result I was spending more time on operations than on writing code (including code to automate operations). Shelling at least for additional machines and IPKVM (not to mention for "remote hands" service at a colo or for a managed hosting provider) would have made this much less time consuming.
apparently you have not been listening to todays autotuned pop music :P
Is it possible to turn things around and compile an iPhone app to run on Android/Flash/etc.? I'm sure it would be a monumental task, but could the headers in the Apple SDK be wrapped in a cross platform library? Or is there a rule against that too?
Tap Tap Revenge is written with Lua, which is now apparently forbidden by Apple. So, people doing actually business, making noteworthy apps are going to be hurt by Apple's policys as well.

It isn't a fringe group that uses languages other than Objective-C on the iPhone, it is a large group of people.
You may change CEOs if their behavior habits change significantly, including them turning from narcissistic jerk to narcissistic jackass. Instability at the helm isn't a good thing, even if you are currently still heading in a good direction.

I seriously doubt the legality of this part of the contract, which only sets them up for more legal battles with Adobe (with MSFT and GOOG as supporters) which will bleed cash, create ill-will among developers and take the focus off of doing what Apple does that creates its value. If you are thinking of developing a good tablet app, are you doing to want to deal with Apple OR will you try doing it on the new HP slate?
I really can't see why folks are getting their knickers in a twist.

Your use of demeaning language doesn't make your opponents wrong.

wouldn't we just consider it a bone-headed move, and not the cause for moral outrage?

It's both. Legality != morality. A business practice can be perfectly legal but immoral. Of course you can say anything Apple does is moral because it's within their rights, but there are also other ways of assessing the morality of actions, e.g. weighing their consequences.
The problem is that Apple doesn't filter apps on quality. They filter on TOS that are designed to protect their own interests.
"I should start a blog ..."

But you haven't, and you won't, and that's the difference.
An Open Letter to the UK Musician's Union
"The writer also neglects to consider the real world difficulty"

FTFY
Sounds to me like he was on the verge of looking elsewhere, anyway.

So he gets to exit in a blaze of glory and also make his move.

Hmm.
I've written an Objective-C compiler and runtime myself, so I think I am familiar with its limitations. Monkey patching is a terrible idea and you should avoid ever seeing that stuff in production. Objective-C is 'flexible' but dangerous in that it does not offer much in the way of type safety, and relies on handling unrecognized messages at runtime to deal with both unexpected conditions (exceptions) and also errors made by the programmer (type errors, undefined behavior, null objects, etc).

Objective-C has only a small fraction of the potential performance of C++ so should not even be compared with it. They are in completely separate categories. Objective-C is used primarily as a higher-level glue for routines written in C. You cannot write all of your routines in Objective-C all the way down, because the performance is dynamic and often worse than languages with smart VMs. LuaJIT, MacRuby, and several others all have better performance (in terms of function dispatch, calling, etc) than Objective-C. If you want Objective-C code to perform well, you just start using C stuff instead of Objective-C classes and methods.
Ok, compilers are fundamental to CS. Have you heard about Clang and LLVM? Do you know who is behind that project?
Can the downvoters please explain why?
IIRC fight club had the same rules, and that stopped noone from joining it :D ( infact, now that I have rechecked, they have 2 rules to that effect ! )

Maybe apple dev club will be the next fight club !
Afaik, Android has a Native SDK which means you can incorporate C code: http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html -- I'd imagine, if you can get some cross compilation done with Obj-C it would work, as long as your output was a JNI library.

You could use a JVM-based "close substitute" (e.g., Objective J->JS->Rhino) for the UI portion, which makes JNI calls to an Obj-C backend.