skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The game was M.A.S.H (Mansion, Apartment, Street, House) where you do something randomish to predict the housing you'll live in as an adult.
Totally rational if:
- it doesn't undermine the market for Apple hardware
- it sets back competitors

The requirement to use Apple development tools, automatically means you must use Apple hardware to develop on. Ka-ching!

So, as an Apple shareholder, I'm happy about it.
Ask HN: Examples of (but no "get-rich") paid membership sites?
Hey, I'm considering making a paid membership site with deeply researched info about a niche topic. Not about how to make $ on the internets. Do you guys know of good examples that I could have a look at, again, that are not trying to teach you how to make money on the internet but instead provide some niche info and charge membership fees. Seo comes to mind, but let's leave that out too, it's also about making money on the internet :)
So in this case, I'd actually hire someone fulltime to answer question and research stuff members need to know.
You'd think their already very selective process would have taken care of it then.
My iPhone has completely supplanted my Nintendo DS for subway entertainment. Based on what I've seen on the subway, it's by far the most popular portable gaming platform, at least in NYC.
FYI the article is dated June 12, 2002.
At the individual developer level, you are correct. There are quite a number of people who prefer, to varying extents, to work on FOSS software and who will accept certain amounts of disincentives, inconveniences, and sacrifices to do so because they're outweighed by the personal incentive of working on such projects.

Joel is talking at the level of corporations, not of individuals. All of his examples are of the strategic move of a company, not the personal belief of an individual (or the collective action of a group that is united by their beliefs). And the major take-away is, you don't need a non-monetary incentive to support FOSS, because there are monetary incentives. Open-source and profit-motive are not inherently opposed.

So yes, the assumption he's making is that money is an incentive for promoting open source. For some, especially for companies, it is. For some, it is not. It's reasonable to expect that when companies are supporting it, they have something to gain by doing so, and Joel is spelling out how. That doesn't invalidate the personal motivations that some people may have, but neither do those motivations invalidate the more traditional monetary motivations that the companies (and some individuals) have either.
Content is not King: Publish and be damned
A good first step for Google would be to list web apps in the Android Market. I don't expect them to drop everything and focus on web apps but they could at least level the playing field. This should probably also include some way to offer paid web apps. No clue how that would work but it's going to be an issue that has to get resolved.
The contributions under $250 is where all the interesting stuff is though as was noted in the last presidential election.
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He's not making an assumption about cost == money at all. In fact, he says "...when an economist considers price, they consider the total price, including some intangible things like the time it takes to set up, reeducate everyone, and convert existing processes".

So when he's arguing against the "claim that it's OK for every Linux kernel revision to make all existing drivers obsolete, because the cost of rewriting all those existing drivers is zero", he's saying "there is a cost, it's just not monetary." The alternative to requiring people to rewrite device drivers is having some people make the kernel backwards-compatible with old drivers. Presumably that's simpler than rewriting every driver. What else could you add to Linux if that many developers could do something that wasn't rewrite working code?
No. Apple knows exactly how much developers will put up with.
They dont want anyone peeing in their pool. They purge the pornspam apps, they purge the rss-reader apps. I personally think this is a good thing, because developing a native iPhone app in C/C++/Objective-C means you will more likely have a vested interest in the iPhone/Mac platform other than to make a quick buck with a flatuence app. At the very least, you're a more dedicated developer.
Were you happy with the result?
I'm not sure if you're kidding :)

No, you still need all of the parent/child communication. if a child tab dies, who cleans up the mess? If the user changes rendering preferences, how do you update all the client process? At the very least there's some infrastructure to coordinate parent and children. It's likely they do clever things so each visible window can be rendered by multiple processes, without the ui getting fubared.
Well I thought a direct quote from Steve Jobs about them trying to buy Admob and google not wanting them to buy them before they do was of strong value as a reply on a comment about Admob. But hey, I'll move from your lawn.
question: I'm unclear from apple's website and this engadget article. It seems from apple's website that OS4 isn't available at all for first gen iphones. is that true? or just the multitasking... i love my first gen and wont upgrade unless I have to but I cant figure clearly. Engadget seems to say the upgrade works for first gen, just doesn't include multitasking.
Care to explain why this watch shows 4:14? ;)

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/6a17/
Yeah, and it is funny that he has 'retired' from blogging yet his stuff still makes it to the frontpage. I personally think some of these old articles were the best.
Breast Cancer - A Major Health Issue
Dev-C++ is Dead, Long live wxDev-C++; Now with Dialog Editor
I know I've learned a fair number of things through this site that've significantly improved my marketable skills.
There are several reasons why US healthcare costs are higher than other countries, and there is certainly a lot of inefficiency that should be fixed. But one of the major reasons is that the US effectively subsidizes drug development for the rest of the world. US buyers generally have to pay full market rate, and then in other countries prices are fixed artificially low by government fiat. The US probably can't continue paying that subsidy forever, so eventually either other countries will have to pay more, or the US will also start fixing prices and thus research funds will dry up.
Why would he do that? Brawndo has what plants crave.
Apple only cares about their image. They make that "glow" effect on produvt to attract costumers, and developers go wwhere the people are.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were "unexpected" difficulties or delays of CS5 for OSX. Same stuff happened when Apple pulled a Final Cut on Adobe and Adobe pulled Premiere off of Mac back then - all accompanied with lots of sparks. I guess things never settled between those two companies ever since.
I hope you understand there is a reason that this can't be done: Developers cannot disclose the license. The first time I and many others saw one of them was when EFF FOMAd one from NASA.
Demographics is destiny. It's inevitable that retirement ages will have to increase further, and advanced medical care paid for by government and insurers will be rationed. Hopefully the rationing will be done based on QALY analysis backed by hard data.
Maybe someday but for now Mac sales are going up -- not down. I can't imagine they'd walk away from that market. I could see the two platforms merging in certain ways. For instance if you added a multi-touch screen to the current MacBook, retaining the keyboard/touchpad, you'd have an interesting platform. You'd have desktop multi-touch apps very similar to iPad apps but you'd also be able to use traditional OSX apps. There could be some system wide multi-touch features along the lines of what they're doing with the multi-touch trackpads already to enhance these applications.
No, but they do make up a fair number of apps that populate the top 100 lists for various categories (even if they're not runaway hits on the most profitable list).
Once webkit 2 released, they may add a feature that split lines at 80 characters in their MUA :)
I've never thought about posting one of the many brain dumps I put in txt files because I figured it would only make sense to me in such a rough draft... but after reading this I will have to start. Very helpful overview of all aspects of CouchDB / document based storage.
This post uses a terrible example. His hidden variable is programmer skill, and he assumes that high skill programmers prefer to work at agile companies over waterfall companies. Therefore, he claims, agile is not really more productive than waterfall.

But that's silly; if using an agile methodology is what attracted the high skill programmers, that's why you're more productive! Changes that attract high skill programmers - even if that's all they do - are the most productivity-enhancing changes you can make.
It's a good question and it turns out to be the most important issues for any anti-trust action. If you are really interested, I would encourage you to look up some famous cases and read the decisions in some of the cases.
I agree with you; but don't hurt your argument by saying that C, C++ and Obj-C are kiddie languages.
I always enjoy incorrect corrections.
They've posted an update, here: http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2010/04/iphone-os-4-0...

Ansca think their Corona is fine, but no formal announcement yet. This might have been posted before the SDK news hit though. http://twitter.com/ansca/status/11838677252

I also wrote a blog entry listing some more of the SDKs/apps affected, http://gen89.net/2010/04/09/collateral-damage-the-iphone-os-... (THQ's Star Wars Trench Run is Unity based! They're going to annoy a lot of big developers with this news.)
Damn, I guess I need to move to San Francisco.

I don't have heaps of experience (a few apps in the store) but folks out here have balked at the $50-60/hour I've been charging.
It isn't done yet, but they've been keeping me up to date and very professional. It should be done in the next 7-10 days.
Apple bans all middleware from the iPhone in new SDK Agreement
Apple does not allow third party apps to use multitouch so that is a known issue.

>Apps with the same codebase for Android/iPhone will automatically suck as far as the UI is concerned

Hardly. There is the graphics api called opengl that works on both iPhone and Android (and your ps3 and computer).
Evolutionary Fitness: what evolution tells us about how to stay fit and young
Climb out now. Android's only going to get bigger. Stuff like this is only going to accelerate its growth.
I really wish they would have added the other players freeze frame stride like the did the guy in the suit - that would have been really interesting to compare.
The university example is a good one. I wonder if they will be covered by wireless app distribution, which will bypass the app store. From Apple's iPhone Enterprise Developer page... "Deploy proprietary, in-house applications to authorized users in your company, the iPhone Developer Enterprise Program is available to companies with 500 or more employees and a Dun & Bradstreet number.
"Fourth, 15 hours to do a main screen and a new message form, really? I'm sure that we or the guys at Cappuccino & Sproutcore could throw a similarly functioning demo together quicker."

It's been seven hours. How's your functioning demo coming along?
ROFL, as if Apple is going to allow Qt apps.
Microsoft offers much-needed fix for Windows OSS development
I have found that the best grounding in aesthetics and design is learning to draw. This teaches you to truly 'see' and gives you basic techniques like appreciating white space and better ability to perceive color/tone values. From there it's much easier to learn and apply principles for creating satisfying compositions and color theory.

Once you have the fundamentals in place, the next step is to learn about more specific graphic design topics like typography and grid layouts.
I can't stand the Mac UI. In every way that it's better than Windows, there's some way that it's worse. The dock is a terrible interface element and having a menu at top the of screen may have made sense when screens where 512×342 pixels but makes little sense with giant resolution screens and multiple monitors.

I'd say the all user interfaces from all vendors suck, including Apple.
Or, the mailing list archive software could just render it reasonably like good MUAs do.
Actually, no. The interesting stuff that you really can't see well is the relationships between contributors... The sub $250 stuff doesn't really tell any stories-- it's the bundlers-- those that give a lot and hold lavish fundraisers to get their friends to give that are buying access.

Give $250 or less, you get a thank you email
Give $2500, you get a nice dinner
Bundle 250,000 and you get a cellphone number.
What are the pros and cons for allowing other clients to use it as opposed to what Google Chrome offers?
I'm sorry but that is a terrible excuse for what they've done. As a flash developer hit hard by the recession, having another (strong) string in my bow was essential for survival. Like others in my industry, I don't have time to completely re-train every time a new product comes onto the market. Being able to produce for a different device using my current skills is a blessing. Apple should be thoroughly ashamed with themselves and I for one will be approaching the Monopolies Commission regarding this.
Thank you, I agree completely and you've said it much better than I could have.
This can only be a good thing for the web.

In a twisted way, I'm kind of disappointed, though; it'll make the choice between Chrome and Safari a lot harder. Right now I'm using Chrome 95% of the time, but if Safari becomes much better, I might end up sitting between two chairs.

Anyone knows what the implications of this are for Chrome? They use Webkit. Will they stay on Webkit1 while Apple splits with V2?
Apple's going to annoy a lot of big developers with this. Who's going to use Game Center, when a lot of big games are written with the help of Unity, etc.? There are so many top-10 games affected by this.

Even THQ's Star Wars: Trench Run is affected. You can't really get more high profile than that. I wrote a blog post (http://bit.ly/disQ2C) with some links to various SDKs and their app showcases to give people a bit of an idea of just how many existing apps this SDK change will effect.
Yep. The stride of the guy in the suit is way too long. When you're sprinting, you want to be taking short, fast strides that propel you forward and not rely on your momentum to carry you there.

The general idea is that you raise your knee with your lower leg pointing downwards, and then rip backwards, extending your leg as you do so. You don't want to go up at all, just forward.

The other thing to do that he's not is move your arms more efficiently. Your elbows should be locked at about a 90 degree angle, and your hands should be relaxed. Your arms drive your legs, not the other way around.

(I ran indoor track when I was in high school. My main event was the 55m dash.)
Ask HN: What's the best way to manage passwords in a small company?
I am trying to share the many passwords, with multiple people on the team. Some are not TOO tech-savvy, but savvy enough to know to check our shared folder in dropbox.

I was thinking about creating a txt file in a shared folder in dropbox and just updating that. That's nice and easy to manage if everyone should have access to the same file. But once we reach a point where some people get some axs and not all, it could get hairy.

Are there any simple ways to accomplish this, while providing a good amount of security?

Possibly encrypting the txt file in dropbox, but then given that some users use OS X and others use windows, I suspect there might be issues there?
I had looked at your hackernews app a while back and it seemed pretty nice and well built... but I have to question charging for an app that delivers the content of a free 3rd party site like HN.
Tiger masterful in return; Couples holds lead | Breaking News
He also made a similar statement with the release of iTunes 1.0 back in '01, as Apple took far longer to embrace digital music than other companies.
Agree, from my experience any good software for a platform should take as much advantage of the platform as possible. And then work around platform limitations. Any cross-platform apps look non-native, missing subtle platform conventions, and ultimately feeling awkward on such a distinctive platform as iPhone OS. This seems to be a consistent line of Apple's, ultimately aiming to project the "quality" image of the platform, and not diluting the valued brand. This is the same line as John Gruber suggested pondering the purge of overly explicit apps. It did not come down to purging crapware developed natively with Xcode yet, but with thousands of apps in each category, the purgatory moment in one form or the other (e.g. if not purging outright, but subjectively separating into premium and "others" stores) probably is not too far ahead.
ADA seems to think Triclosan is just fine in toothpaste:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071024144101/http://www.ada.org...
"This is the truth for any ambitious person, but you'd be absolutely nuts to say that sort of thing on an interview."

I said almost exactly that when interviewing for my first job out of college. They hired me anyway. They appreciated my honesty and believed they had enough great people and interesting assignments to keep me engaged.

(As it turned out, they were wrong, and I left about two years later. But I did two products for them in the meantime, and learned a bunch for myself, so it wasn't exactly a loss for either party.)

Actually, a bunch of people at my current employer - my boss, my tech leads - know that if there comes a time where I believe I can accomplish more within a startup than in my job, I'll jump ship in a heartbeat and found another company. That simply keeps the bar high for ensuring that I can accomplish significant things within my job.
"location based app for web, iPhone and Android for approximately $370,000"

Note the "AND"'s. I suspect this isn't some simple thing - it's probably a 300K web app + 2 35K mobile apps.
WebKit is used by many different applications and browsers (eg. Epiphany, Arora, Omniweb, Shiira, etc) -- by incorporating multiprocess support directly in webkit all of those applications can make use of it.
My prediction: in n years, there will be another article talking about how the XYZ design community is dying slowly. Replace n and XYZ as you see fit.

There will always be a market for high-quality designers; there will always be a market for cheap, low-skill designers. Accept that idea and get back to work on being one of the former.

I call it my "the world is not going to shit" theory. It's pretty handy whenever the doomsayers come out of the woodworks.
If you're not kidding about that...

fork() is a long-standing thorn when porting code onto some platforms; it's seldom used for what it was originally intended for, and (when it is) the copy-on-write memory semantics and the file descriptors and network contexts and such aren't widely adopted.

About 95% of the cases reviewed during the ports were using fork() as a way to start a process; as a way to do a vfork()/exec() and to create a separate process. The remaining 5% of those applications were using the memory address spaces and the I/O channels and the rest of the process context. Which makes those really difficult to port to a platform that lacked a full-on fork().
Sound Bullets Generated by Metamaterials for Killing Cancer Tumors or Submarines
It's amazing to me how fiercely the doomed will blindly build their Maginot Line, doomed only because they refuse change. Change is the blood of life on Earth. No one's business model is sacrosanct, no matter what The Congress or the Treasury Department fantasizes.
Unvealing prettyLoader, a solution aimed to unify ajax loaders
> Did I mentioned that I don't live in Silicon Valley nor in Cambridge, but in an Eastern European country? So training is off.

Maybe you should have a look at this again... I've been on a trip to Romania for training (about architecture of some specific piece of OSS) at some point. As long as you can provide good training, it could work for you too.
Safari has bigger issues than rendering engine. (at least for me)

I don't even have to open a website, just open a new tab and its starts beachballing just to load the new tab. Also extensions are a big part of my browsing experience. Safari doesn't have large extension community like firefox and Chrome.

Simply put, for me, chrome is more than its rendering engine. Overall its just a well rounded piece of software with very frequent updates, which is very unique among browsers.
Why? The iPhone has mobile Safari, and the HN clientele are certainly smart enough to know how to use it.

Clearly the app has to deliver some value outside of the content. Think bottled water.
"Britain faces a decade of pain, social unrest and unemployment"
Sorry, I forgot to double-check the specific links I posted. There is another step which they left out. I'll just describe the whole thing:

1. Hide your hand from yourself.

2. Have a friend tap/stroke your hidden hand and some other object that you can see. Use a synchronized, but arrhythmic pattern. Any object will do, even the surface of a table.

3. After 30 seconds to 1 minute, your brain will "connect" the object to the neural impulses. Now the friend should hit the object (but not your hand!) really hard. Your hand will feel tingly! There is a paper I can't find right now which documents that skin conductance actually changes, as if responding to being hit.
I was talking with one investor late last year. Things were going pretty well in one direction with my company and I decided that it would be a good time to fund additional growth. Just before I closed the deal, however, some key relationships that I had been counting on fell through. Ever the optimist, it didn't cause me personally to doubt what I was doing and didn't think it was a big deal in the long term.

One thing that I think is true of technical people is that we are comfortable disclosing difficult things. We tend to view them as just bugs to work out and expect that everyone involved will have enough belief in the end goal to find workarounds to any challenges. So, perhaps naively, I told the investor what was going on and how I planned to proceed.

He (being a certain type of investor) took this as an opportunity to try to completely change the terms of the deal we had agreed upon. So, I ended the talks without taking any money.

I wondered for a few months afterwards if I had made the right decision in being so honest and came to the realization that some investors do expect you to only paint a rosy picture.

At the end of the day though, I realized that I don't to work with that kind of investor and, as things turned out, it was a very good thing to not take money from him. Since then, some unbelievably good things have happened and couldn't have taken place if I was tied to some investor in Japan who didn't believe in me.

So, the lesson for me was, be honest and be yourself. The people who believe in you as an entrepreneur will be there through the ups and downs. And the truth is a great way to weed out those of little faith.
Google is spending upwards of a billion US dollars to make Street View, in the process creating a top-notch street map of the World. And now they provide that data free, I doubt Google maps is so easily replaced, even with Bing Maps.
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