skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, I see now... I didn't realize that this was end-user data via Google Toolbar opt-in. I've got "medium accuracy" 100-1000 data points, and I'm assuming that means total over the full 5 months. In that case, it doesn't surprise me that some combinations of visitors and connections might have long load times. But yes, the fact that non-visible elements seem to make a difference is not great.
I find it slightly amusing that these two statements are in adjoining paragraphs:

The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted

[Sentence regarding Apple's intentions redacted at request from Adobe].
What come's up in developers mind first?

If you say Apple, even developers are going to talk about the iPhone, iPad or Macbook Pro before they get to any of that stuff.

If you say compilers and they somehow get to LLVM, how is it an Apple project? Because they hired some devs? That started years before Apple got involved. Is RoR an EngineYard project because some guys at EY worked on it? Is linux a google project because they hired some guys to work on it? And I highly doubt people are going to get all the way down to clang.

If people mention Webkit, few forget it is a fork of KHTML first.

If developers talk about the Mac OS X kernel they're going to at some point bring up BSD.

Apple is for open development only when it benefits them. And they are bad partners in it. They write bad software in general for other platforms.

We're not losing the forest because of the tree. It is a forest of trees that piss people off, and this just lit a match to the whole thing. If you found a couple flowers in there you like, it doesn't exonerate the forest. And frankly most of your examples are reasons to DISLIKE apple. Did you read Webkit's last release?
Think of the company store in a little West Virginia mining town in the pre Union days.

But the analogy actually supports your position: it's clear that there are other app stores out there.
Those are both less restrictive than telling you how to think and how to behave. Nintendo's is dumb, Apple's is evil.
[~]# Course 4 Sale $#[~]
Nope, you're getting downvoted because your comment doesn't actually add anything to the discussion. Snarky replies aren't (generally) considered valuable here.
You still haven't grasped that you are comparing commodities to non-commodities. If you just invested a bunch of time into a source to source translator for the iPhone, you can't just take that somewhere else. It is entirely useless elsewhere. Of course Apple doesn't HAVE to accommodate these people, but it is an egregious move for both developers and the users. I don't actually see what the gain is for Apple from this other than slighting Adobe.
Unless they're running adsense, I presume.
What if the page you're looking for just happens to contain a lot of content / images / etc?

Adding speed to Google's ranking algorithms is only useful for searches where there are several equally good search results (in which case the fastest would be the one you would want). But in the event that you're actually searching for a lot of information, having fast (but less informative) sites propagate to the top would be detrimental.
sheesh... while one half of Adobe's brain (the flash-obsessed Macromedia one) is still screaming and flinging mud, the other half already used some of the perfectly Apple-endorsed C/C++ code they've got lying around and build a useful iPad App: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-ideas-1-0-for-ipad/id36... - It's not like they're all about Flash; although it's obviously this guy's job to make it look like it - hence the title of evangelist.
IPhone SDK: Second Class Citizens
Apple's prohibition of Flash-built apps in iPhone 4.0 related to multitasking

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/09/apples_prohibi...

from the article:

"if Apple were simply trying to block Adobe from cross-compiling Flash to create iPhone apps, it could have added the changed text to its existing license agreement and spoiled Adobe's CS5 party immediately, rather than just threatening change that appears fated to kick in when Apple delivers iPhone 4.0 in June.

The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple's plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app.

"[The operating system] can't swap out resources, it can't pause some threads while allowing others to run, it can't selectively notify, etc. Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS," wrote one reader under the name Ktappe."
Was just about to post the same. Out of 26 items, he highlighted 10 but there were actually 14 on this topic.
No, Apply will just selectively turn a blind eye when it's convenient for them, and arbitrarily apply the restriction in other cases. Evil.
I know they shouldn't treat their users as pawns to screw other companies, but i would love if they focus photoshop back to unix, like it used to be with SGI.

Maybe this time with ubuntu.
Using CPython extension modules with PyPy natively
I think that's true for some tools and not others. csc converts Scheme in to C and then compiles it with the local C compiler. There are specific markers that will exist in every binary compiled with Chicken. Some of them are ASCII and easy to spot by hand by running strings on the binary, but I suspect there are also binary sequences that appear in every program compiled this way.

It would also be possible to look at data structures in memory and detect patterns of access common to specific cross-compilation tools or abstraction libraries.

These techniques don't produce proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but no such proof is required; Apple can and will reject applications that don't meet its standards.
Tour of the Glashütte Watch Factory
I bought a Mac Mini with my iPod touch solely so that I could potentially write applications for it.

I never did get around to it - my girlfriend went farther than I did - and so it sits, gathering dust, under my desk.

But if I had a toolkit that let me develop iPhone apps without having to buy a Mac Mini, then I'd be much more likely to develop an iPhone app.

So take me as a data point: the existing practical restrictions forced me to buy a Mac.
They get paid to try and convince a judge or jury that their client's interpretation of the document is the correct one. You think it's a mistake the text is a bit vague and not everything properly defined ?

Legal texts aren't software; it's actually in the best interest of Apple to define things as broad and vaguely as possible so they cover a large spectrum.

I think Gruber's interpretation is one that any person reading the document will have.
Your first statement can't be judged yet. If all Microsoft had ever done was the IE thing, they wouldn't have sued. They had a pattern of anti-competitive behavior and that was the most egregious and well documented example so the DOJ went with it. Apple over the last few years has been fairly anti-competitive, this won't push it over the edge but it is another straw on the camel's back. So lets look back in 10 years and see what happened.

And the 2nd statement could be applied to the whole Opera sueing MS over browsers in the EU recently, or even the IE/Netscape thing back in the day.

Honestly I think it is more people don't like being told they have to waste time and money giving up projects/products they started and learning the tools Apple is arbitrarily forcing them to use. That is money out of people's pocket and you will find that pisses people off a lot more than anything else.
But, somehow, as a consumer, I don't get any protection against Apple.

Hmm.
"Was it Microsofts business practices that brought it down a few notches? or was it their lack of quality products?"

Their business practices gave us a reason to hate them; their low quality products gave us a reason to not buy them (many people hated them before that as a company; the lowering of quality and the rise of competitors gave them the impetus to switch away losing MS market share).

I'm not sure if the former was causative of the latter, but the likelihood of that being true is high.
Thanks but, ¿why it also hides Google and Gmail related news?
I like this move. I hate it when I click a link and it ends up taking 20+ seconds to load.
I think Gruber's interpretation is one that any person reading the document will have.

Not necessarily. See: http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/508678742/stop-interpreting-l...
Yeah I cheer for the open things as well, but people got to get over this notion that people like Apple because it's cool and trendy. The UI seriously is a cut above, and they're driving the market. There's a reason why attack of the iPad clones is coming this summer.
One of the things I most respect about Apple is that recognize the purpose of a business is to turn a profit - preferably by selling products people want - not obsessing about market share. The iPhone doesn't have a huge market share and likely never will - but it is ridiculously profitable.

Market share mattered in the 80s and 90s because computers were $3000 boxes that did one thing - run third-party applications. It made sense to spend your cash on the model with the largest market share. No one cares about market share when buying a phone.
It's funny - I tried using an ipad and it really is uncomfortable to use after 15 or so minutes. Holding 1.5 lbs is definitely a pain for a long time -- a paperback book is typically less than a quarter of that weight.
I own a N1. I thought I was finally up there with the big boys, but I used an iPhone for a few seconds and I could already tell the difference.
You run a popular site, with little cash.

How can you afford to keep your access time down?

Host advertising, perhaps?
I was (if not sympathetic, at least) understanding until this.

At what point do all these restrictions start becoming truly anti-competitive? Locking out 3rd party tools and services in favor of in-house products, and this one now including the actual revenue-generating ones.

If you start to view the App Store as a collection of markets (e.g. for development tools, application niches, ancillary services like ads, analytics, web services, etc), rather than just a vendor-specific platform, where Apple's own products compete with other vendors', the analogies to Microsoft are becoming clearer:

- iPhone OS/App Store => Windows

Markets analogous to Internet Explorer vs. Opera/Firefox:

- iAd vs AdMob

- iBooks vs Kindle (an example where they're actually allowing competition!)

- Phone.app vs Google Voice

- MobileSafari vs Opera/FF

- ObjC runtime vs Flash runtime (this one stretches it a bit, but not that far)

Whereas MS's anti-competitive actions involved threatening OEMs, Apple is exercising actual contractual control over what Apps/services can participate in the market, Period. That should certainly qualify as anti-competitive behavior.
Companies tend to go for openness insofar as it's in their interests.

I've been developing this metaphor while reading and posting to other threads:

- Companies are like states.
- Ownership is like sovereignty
- Open Source licenses are like constitutions and the rule of law
- Community processes are like democracy

Totalitarian states can also discover that being open to commerce can be in their interest, but still act coercively when doing so suits them more. Constitutional democracies can be considered safer for business, since it disallows arbitrary actions and ensures due process. By analogy, Open Source platforms can be considered safer for business.

(This doesn't mean that I won't publish on the App Store. But it does mean that I'm going to look at platform diversification as a safety measure! I guess this move by Apple has had the opposite from desired effect in my case.)
A friend of mine maintains Thoth, a lightweight blog engine written with Ruby. It's a quality piece of work.

http://wiki.github.com/rgrove/thoth/

If you're interested in photoblogging or a heftier multi-contributor model, I've written Cortex Reaver for that. UMMV, though. :)

http://github.com/aphyr/cortex-reaver
The Author here, sorry my post wasn't clear. I threw that together in about 15 minutes not thinking much about it.
Some code had to change given that the recompile was done in c#, that was my understanding. I've done some follow up and yes, some core PHP code was rewritten.
AOL was perfectly positioned then they blew it, big time, but the TW acquisition was certain to do that.
Google, AOL, Facebook are all trying to be our primary portal. They want us to consume as much of the internet through their services as possible, obviously. You could argue that Google has replaced AOL in that regard.
I thought I was clear that the cost benefit and the decrease in server costs would be a big benefit to them doing this.
I never said or thought that had all their developers working on this, but as daily FB user its clear they are not working on new features or extending their framework.
I didn't realize that speed problems were that substantial, I've never heard anyone complain about FB page load times. I think they did this as way to control costs primarily by reducing servers.
I see FB as being just another stepping stone like MySpace anf Friendster and others. Apple is perfectly positioned to walk into the social space by simply extending their current properties like iTunes and the AppStore. How will FB compete with that? I don't know but they'll sure have a really fast version of PHP.
There's an asynchronous GA script available:

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTra...
Amazing Pixels Video for Old School Geeks
Good for the first one: I don't want joe's random app sending tracking data on me to ned's random service provider to sell to anyone with 50 cents.

The second one doesn't prevent analytics. Device Data is a keyword in the contract…

"Device Data" means data or information regarding the characteristics or usage of a particular device, including but not limited to UDID, crash logs, OS version, carrier name, hardware model, installed applications and application usage data.

… so you can't provide a vector for a third party, not bound by your agreement to respect the user's privacy, to loot the device of useful information. Good! You are allowed to collect and use this data, you just have to respect applicable privacy laws and handle notice and consent according to the contract.

The key is, you can't bind some random analytics firm. If you include code that dumps that out to a third party firm they are free to do whatever they want.

So create a UUID the first time you run, send only that to the analytics firm. Leave the Device Data alone. I suspect this would pass, though it is possible it would fail under the "application usage data" section.

One could imagine some extreme interpretation where Apple is trying to prevent any information about which apps are installed being divulged to anyone, but there are so many unaddressed vectors (e.g. loading an ad from an ad server) that it seems unlikely.
With something like $30 billion in cash in the bank, Apple's one of the companies that I'm not worried about selling information in order to make a quick buck. After all, aren't people always saying that Microsoft should use the privacy angle against Google? Why not Apple as well?
Of course programming isn't just about using APIs. But, writing apps for the iPhone is.
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!

I have some more examples, it is also like saying:

The easiest thing to do, is to simply refuse to
open any documents created with Microsoft Office
and Apple iWork, and then to send a short, friendly
email to whoever sent you the document, asking them
to send it again in OpenDocument format

Source: http://www.fsf.org/news/campaigns/opendocument/reject
I want a tee shirt that says, "Agile is for hippies"
As mentioned relevance is still king:

“Google also cautions web site owners not to sacrifice relevance in the name of faster web pages, and even says this new ranking factor will impact very few queries.”

It will only factor in less that 1% of querys.
IMVU’s Approach to Integrating Quality Assurance with Continuous Deployment
>> In all likelihood, Apple would argue—successfully—that the market should not be defined as the "iPhone software" market but as the "smartphone software" market, at which point they no longer have a monopoly and are no longer subject to anti-trust scrutiny.

"Apple responsible for 99.4% of mobile app sales in 2009"

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-...

... it doesn't take a Phd to acknowledge that the AppStore IS the mobile SW market - thus - i would rather disagree that Apple argument SHOULD be successful in case somebody (or some agency) should bring a legal challenge to the new draconian policies - which are obviously abusing Apple dominance ...

the question for me is more technical = who can bring such a legal challenge? can developers do that? can users do that? or only a govt. agency can ... in which case - considering the influence and connections Apple has with Washington - that might not happen ...

would it be possible for developers to team up in class-action suit based which could then trigger a govt. investigation?
It looks like he's choosing the worst piece by looking one step ahead. In general, choosing strategies this way can back you into corners. I'd be interested to know whether in this case, looking ahead 1 move is enough to get a global win as well (for the AI).
Can you point to the misleading part? I couldn't find it.

Are you referring to policies that was taken during one administration that might have lead to deficit or surplus in the next administration?
If they can't afford Android+iPhone portability, most of them will choose iPhone-only over Android-only.

I'd agree with you, except for one thing. I developed an enhanced version of my app for Titanium with many new features. The idea was that I would be able to quickly upgrade my iPhone app, and as a bonus might build an Android app. Now that this has happened, I've already invested all the time and money to make the conversion, and I'm not back-porting to Objective-C. I'll release the new, significantly better version of my app on the droid. If Apple comes to their senses, I'll release it there too.
I actually prefer the "broken" buttons in Firefox. The gradient is much smoother.
Techcrunch says Adobe: “Go Screw Yourself Apple”, but the post was by an individual employee on a personal blog. Please stop posting Techcrunch articles.
> It is true that I'd prefer to write an iPhone app in Ruby than in Objective-C. I just don't think that my preference is Apple's problem.

I think we've touched on another disconnect. I don't think it's Apple's problem either -- it's our problem. We're still working out just how big of a problem this is for us. For you, the problem is no Ruby.

> This could come back to bite them, but then again it might not.

I don't really care if it bites them or not. I'm not trying to give them a friendly suggestion. I don't think they care. I just think it's a crappy thing to do.
Nick Denton's rules for blog headlines
Speed is only one factor in their ranking. If a site is notably better than other sites for a query, they said in the article that it will still rank first for that query.
Finally something amusing out of Hacker News being turned into Apple News.
Of course the question everyone is interested in is are you allowed to publicly comment on / criticize issues like Apple strategy, policies and technologies. So are you?
The Upside-Down "e" - an Editor's Nightmare (1993)
Face it Steve, you need help
Debt per citizen : 41392. Debt per taxpayer: 116490.

41392 / 116490 = 35.5%; can it really be that so few are taxpayers?
I get the impression you have to be a lot larger to be in Apple's special club than you need to be to be a Nintendo developer - I know studios with <5 permanent staff who are doing DS & Wii dev. With Apple it doesn't seem to be a matter of "pay us $X and we'll help you get your title published", it's more of a "you have to be big enough that we can even see you from our ivory tower, and only if you bend over". Don't forget Google Voice on iPhone isn't happening, and neither is Opera. Does Nintendo let you publish a game that competes directly with Mario? Yes.
I'm sure this comment will be downvoted too.

Your response is very odd to me. You value tlrobinson's contribution Cappuccino even though from your statements your perfectly happy writing your own HTML. So Cappuccino doesn't benefit you in the same way that NOLOH doesn't benefit you.

This may be that you too are in California and clearly me being an infrequent visitor to that community I'm an outsider and should be punished!

We too contribute to various open source projects. We even open source all our modules. As you can see from my profile I've been a member of this community a very long time. I'm simply frustrated by the excessive downvoting I received. tomalsky posted a comment suggesting they too could emulate the mail.app, he listed a time of 10 minutes, but noooo, don't downvote him, he's tomalsky.

The 2+ years was trying to emphasize that this was old news, and not a recent occurrence. We decided a long time ago to not move forward with that project.
Apple rejecting apps with "pad" in title
Stepwise linear regression is how they do it. All statistical packages marketed since the late 1970's include the procedures. It's what the AI craze of the early 1990's used in their black box apps.

Basically you associate a narrow set of outcomes (Filing for divorce, filing for bankruptcy, reporting a stolen credit card) and a mountain of possible predictors (store type, store name, store location, number of purchases from store in the billing cycle, ranges of purchases from a given store within the cycle). The stat program builds a regression equation out of the raw data by literally predicting trying to predict the past from data in the further past.

The cool thing is that you can't put in too many variables (as in you don't have to know if something may be related or not) since the uncorrelated variables will simply vanish in the final equation.
I'm not sure which is more depressing: the experience of reading this article, or the fact that it's dead-on correct.

I, for one, can't wait until the shoe's back on the other foot where it belongs. (You know, like when developers have to put notices like "I am not accepting job offers at this time" on their blogs.)
This is a site about startups in Canada and also world wide. This site was founded by a Canadian company.
weebmaster tools reports 10-20x grater response time than it actually is for one of the pages I maintain (haven't checked the others). So I would also conclude that it measures the time until every last CSS,JS and iframe is loaded. And that is just not right. Ok, I understand that they take CSS into account. But my pages work without JS, and I only use iframe-s to display ads. The point is that my page is readable long before JS files and ads are loaded.

I'd also like to know if they take caching of CSS,JS and image files into account.
NoVA and the DC metro area is huge, we have lots of restaurants. Yes, some are chains, but there are a ton of awesome local places as well. I cringe when you suggest there are no good, local places to eat here. Yelp is decent for finding some of them.

I actually like Five Guys, their Cajun-seasoned fries are amazing. There's also Ray's Hell-Burger, Foster's Grille, Tuskie's (amazing lamb burger), and others in Alexandria, Arlington, and DC.