skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally I'm of the opinion that it's a free market: Twitter, Apple, Adobe, etc, etc, are swearing allegiance not to the developers of third party apps for their product, but to the customer, which is how it should be. For instance, Apple's choice not to display Flash on the iPhone browser was not arbitrary and meant to hurt developers, it was focused on lowering CPU usage and maintaining battery life.
Companies stay in business by understanding the needs of their customer, and if other developers/companies are casualties of that, well, hey, welcome to the free market.
I am a huge Apple fan. This sucks. I am seriously considering moving off the platform because of it.
what will this mean for other twitter app developers? twitter will be competing head on with them and presumably be able to implement new features quicker and easier.
You can re-enable ads in preferences if you buy tweetie and want them back.
I copied it from the author

http://twitter.com/atoonk/status/11840096467
And C++ is not really the right language to try functional approaches. (You should at least at a garbage collector to vanilla C++ if you want to try.)
The Subtle Difference Between Finding Your Life’s Work and Loving Your Life
Any idea when Tweetie will be made free?
"... I'm curious why the reaction to the Apple Developer TOS change is making this community react so strongly ..."

In some ways message boards are to hackers what close knit provincial rural communities are Jane Austen novels. A place of petty intrigue and gallantry.
Colorize comments by votes (useful)
It isn't often I hear people complaining that Haskell isn't pure enough.
A. Build on one of these big sites and immediately gain potential audience of hundreds of millions of users. Risk the wrath of the big site.

B. Start from scratch. Spread by word of mouth. Try to get media coverage. Risk getting lost in the crowd.
Google Analytics, but since you don't control rubygems.org you might need to ask Nick Quaranto, the admin and creator of the site.
Wondering what this means for Tweetie on OS X.
Futurebox, lightbox without the javascript and target pseudo-class
FTA: "Twitter will offer it for free and rename it Twitter for iPhone."
Do you believe that Electronic Arts would use LUA if it produced an inferior result? Do you think it would harm their efficiency and portability if they weren't mystically "excepted" from the policy?
I think Steven's second point that the platforms can just build their own integrated versions should make people building trivial stuff that ends up popular shit themselves a little every morning while they scan techcrunch looking for their obituary.

URL shortening especially just amazes me... if twitter ordered some pizzas and stayed back late tonight they could kill that mini-industry.
RoR is hard to get running on a Mac? WTF? I just compiled Ruby and Rubygems last night with zero issues. A simple "gem install rails" and it was done.
You can't get very good wear leveling with a device that's on for days at a time.

Flash as a swap drive is still problematic.
Attack of the Platform Holders
Apple has overplayed its dictatorship, Twitter bought Tweetie, Facebook is pushing its own credit system. Is this the evolution or devolution of tech platforms? thoughts?
Since when does blatant flamebait get 64 points on Hacker News?

I miss this site.

EDIT: Oh, it's Zed Shaw again. I'll continue in my delusional belief that blatant flamebait not authored by Zed Shaw would be flag'd to death by now.
So you are planning to wait to download Tweetie until it becomes free? To save $2.99?
Well, this is something like the famous saying "if you can't beat them, join them!" In this case "lost the edge, offer a big pile of cash and acquire them".

I think its a logic business move for Twitter. There is no point for them to spend the time and energy into an app that might take a reasonable part of the iPhone market. This way their investment immediatly gives them a huge part of the market.
Nice hack, but the semantics are all wrong now. I wouldn't want to make that trade off.
Ask HN: Quick question about HN Toolkit regex
I'm currently using HN Toolkit (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039) to block Apple-related articles. Unfortunately the block fails to filter 50% of the articles.

My regex for filtration is:
Apple|Steve Jobs|iPhone|iPad

It should work fine, but it doesn't. If any one is using HN Toolkit and/or has a solution to this problem, please post it!
What you need is a Pensieve (like the one from Harry Potter where the characters can take out their memories to analyze). OK, Just Kidding!

But, do go for a walk by a quiet lake or body of water. Take a notebook with you. Spill your thoughts on the paper and don't actively think about it. It's hard to look at oneself "passively" and this helps immensely. There is no shortcut here. Keep doing this everyday, you will find that negation helps. This is the closest you will get to a pensieve :-)

This may help: http://www.selvesandothers.org/article16383.html
I don't disagree on any particular point but I wouldn't call XCode mediocre in comparison to Adobe Flash (which is the most impacted tool in this decision).

Also, I believe, they are at least partly doing this to improve the quality of the App Store ecosystem and do this to avoid the tens of thousands of shite autogenerated apps that litter the app store and this move is more of a cleanup instead of screwing over the few people who prefer a different toolset for development and generally care about the quality of their applications. Baby with the bathwater, so to speak.
You could probably do your thing with ad-hoc distribution on the first 100 iPads. (Actually I think that probably violates the agreement. Don't do that.)

For the iPad in particular, there has to be a way for such apps to get on, or you're never going to see anything resembling enterprise adoption, so i'd expect this to change.

For the good of the discussion, you can only get an iPhone enterprise developer certificate if you have 500+ people in your company and a Dunn & Bradstreet number. Then getting a certificate is fairly easy. This allows you to, as others have said, distribute iPhone apps over a tether.

Yesterday in iPhone 4.0, Apple announced they were now enabling over-the-air install of in-house apps. My current understanding is that this relates to opening specific APIs relating to OTA apps.
(full disclosure: I work for a company called Ondeego that delivers in-house iPhone app distribution as a service.)
It's their sandbox, they can do what they want. Just like you can choose whether to play in it or not.
>The raw truth is that algorithms are nowhere near as good as real people at recognizing human faces and emotions.

While this is true, it fallaciously implies that the performance he describes from iPhoto is the best that computer vision can do. I'm the first to rag on the shortcomings of vision, but implemented properly, it can certainly do better than:

>people with completely different facial features and even gender are easily confused by the program.
Firstly, that's a call to authority argument, so automatically suspect. Secondly you don't present any evidence that EA uses Lua on the iPhone or that it receives an exemption from Apple to do so.
Whoa. Probably a smart move by Twitter. Tweetie is one of the best and most polished apps on the iPhone.
Funny how an hour after I post this, Twitter acquiring Tweetie is the top story on Hacker News. Good for them, too bad for the other iPhone Twitter clients that weren't chosen.
It could go either way: because Twitter are now eating their own dogfood (i.e. the Twitter API) perhaps that API will improve. Alternately they may instead be tempted to start creating internal-only APIs.
To put it succinctly: All of us are royally screwed.
> I know i will get downmodded for saying this

I hate when people say this. It's like saying "my point is valid, but people on HN are too stupid to get it".
Apt-Pinning for Beginners
Haha sorry I forgot to add it. Pretty crazy though
Is it? I always wondered about that. My free first line cost me quite a few subsequent lines...
I'd say there is a third option:

C. Start off building on top of one of those platforms to get a jumpstart on gaining audience. But plan your strategy so you aren't dependent on them, and have a stable future even if they disappear completely tomorrow.

Some services (like url shorteners or photo uploaders) that are entirely dependent on the platform to be useful probably can't work in that model. To them I would probably say: get big and hope to cash out before it's too late.
"The force causes the pitch angle to be less than ideal so that when the force is relaxed the rope 'relaxes' into the zero twist configuration, which cannot be further stretched under tension."

On behalf of mechanical engineering, I am sorry to report that this is not a description of any actual rope.
Inside Apple's iPad: Adobe Flash
Strings in the resulting binary, library names in the app package, and other such things. It's very much possible to make it difficult to detect, but with current tools it's trivial.
Objective C is smalltalk and C's lovechild.
I recently made the switch to Nambu. It's not as pretty, but it's way more functional and useful to me, particularly with the combined view.
How Twitter can kill the Twitter-killers
The article's reasoning is obviously nonsense. But...

I wonder if there are technical concerns? If AI got this from a real source and just botched his explanation, there could be something there. I'm trying to imagine would it could be...

Perhaps there is a compiler you will be required to use because it structures code in a specific way?
Problem is with the app store is that a number of developers could reject these changes and decide to develop elsewhere, but instead of improving the situation on other platforms it would probably just be that the remaining app store developers would be now getting a bigger piece of the pie.

I think there is an incentive for developers to turn a blind eye to some of the more crazy apple app store policies because if people leave it benefits them and there is no viable alternative at the moment for someone wanting to make a living selling mobile applications.
Yahoo up, Google down in comScore search numbers
what happens if my site is targeted in one country only, and the speed from rest of country is slow?
The problem is that these platforms have gotten so big that it's hard to directly compete against them.

Instead, developers have decided to join them, knowing full well that the platform owners hold all the marbles and can yank the rug out from under you at any time.

What's interesting to me is that Apple is getting lambasted over their 'closed platform', but we can clearly see with Twitter and Facebook that the 'open web' suffers similar problems when you build to someone else's platform.
Congratulations! Well deserved.
All of these apps will contain identical portions of code that are either included as a result of, or generated by, those tools. They're effectively like inadvertent watermarks. Once you identify these it's trivial to automatically scan executables and look for those signs.

For something like a flash framework it may not even be necessary to look at the code. Just look at the data files for something that either has a flash header, or a header that's common to that framework.
I meant in the sense that I have to look at the ads, and if one ad network is particularly obnoxious, I'd like developers to have alternatives to put in their apps.

But in the sense you're talking about - if you care about someone buying your "mined personality profile", wouldn't you rather have 10 incomplete profiles out there than 1 really accurate one?
Obama administration's guidelines for government's use of social-media [pdf]
The paper "How to Lose at Tetris" (http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/java/tetris/tetris.ps) says that you don't even need to know what the player is doing. And that even almost all [1] random tetris games are bound to be lost, even with perfect play.

[1] "Almost all" is a technical term in probability theory and means "with probability 1" (which is not the same as "all games".)
Three Reminders about Platform Businesses (Apple, Twitter, and Facebook)
I'm going to leave this thought here, because I don't know where else to leave it without a blog.

Apple doesn't like Flash (or Adobe, depending on preference).

Adobe develops Flash to iPhone compiler.

Apple bans anything-to-AppStore apps that aren't "originally written in C/Obj. C"

...

* Adobe writes Flash to Canvas/HTML5 Apps ?

Apple has nothing to lose from that cornered last step to get onto the iPhone... The internet as a whole doesn't have anything to lose...

For once in my life I feel like an Apple fan. It's a shame it only happened under the influence of alcohol.

Edit: I feel very dirty all of a sudden.
Serious New Java Flaw Affects All Current Versions of Windows
I wonder whether multiple-dispatch would solve that problem?
And that's a shame. Jobs is brilliant, but he needs adult supervision.
OK, I think we get the point here.

Is it time for a flood of stories about how Erlang is no longer permitted on the iPhone, hint hint?
How about if Barnes and Noble decides it only wants to sell fiction by authors whose skin is of a certain shade?
As usual, John Gruber lacks some awareness of the history of the industry and the technical details. The multitasking in iPhone OS 4 is not just similar to Android but also to Symbian and perhaps even the Blackberry. It's a very standard technique that has been used in handheld devices for over a decade.

I suppose some jailbreaked iPhone users can comment on whether older iPhone's really can handle multitasking on 128MB of RAM. Considering that most devices have handled "true" multitasking with much less RAM than that over the years I'm not convinced it's truly a problem. They might not be able to hold as many apps in memory at once but that's what you get for having an older device. It'll be slower. But it should still be slightly faster than launching and closing every app all the time.
--- hatetris.html	2010-04-10 03:37:17.491337444 +0100
+++ Downloads/hatetris.html	2010-04-10 03:32:08.264902582 +0100
@@ -65,6 +65,8 @@
var replayOut;
var replayIn;
var replayTimeoutId;
+	var gravityTimeoutId;
+	var gravityInterval = 500;

// draw the current scenery
function drawWell(thisWell) {
@@ -415,6 +417,8 @@

// take user input
document.onkeydown = keyhandler;
+
+	gravityTimeoutId = setTimeout("gravityHandler();", gravityInterval);
}

function showReplay() {
@@ -554,6 +558,14 @@
}
}

+	function gravityHandler() {
+	var down = 2;
+	var gameContinues = transformHandler(down);
+	if(gameContinues) {
+	gravityTimeoutId = setTimeout("gravityHandler();", gravityInterval);
+	}
+	}
+
function keyhandler(event) {

// only handle one key at a time.
@@ -626,4 +638,4 @@
/></p>
</noscript>
</body>
-</html>
\ No newline at end of file
+</html>
Fred Brooks: No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accident in Software Engineering
Clearly, they are evil.
When an app is swapped to disk, all it's code and data pages are stored. When it's resumed, the code and data pages are loaded back. This isn't so terribly different from relaunching the application (loading the code) and having the app restore it's state (loading the data). In fact, the app can even be more efficient in saving it's own state because it can discard anything it knows it doesn't need.

This sort of system doesn't work on a desktop because you can view/use more than one app at a time. However, it's more than reasonable on a system where you interact with apps one at a time.

This is pretty much how all mobile platforms have done it since forever.
Agreed, Nambu is way better. Tweetie on OSX is pretty feature poor, all flash and little substance.
I once worked for a company which specified that developers must always be on-call for support issues and be willing to travel. In reality, developers were never even 2nd tier support, and travel was rarely even offered as an option. Management couldn't understand why including such language might have dissuaded applications.
> None of these will be able to update their games to the new SDK.

The ban on interpreters significantly predates the new SDK.
Instead of leaving Apple for a more open platform, the author says, "lets pray they start doing a better job."

Hm... I think this is exactly the kind of customer Apple wants.
Emails to Steve Jobs get replies
The Way We Work - Week 1 at Gameplan (a bootstrapped startup in Singapore)
When talking about Supreme Court nominees it is often repeated that the person has to be a lawyer.
Every possible nominee that is being mentioned is a lawyer.

IANAL, but there is nothing that I can find in the constitution to support this.
Article 2. Section 2.
[the president] "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint... Judges of the supreme Court".
This is the only qualification I can find in the constitution for a member of the Supreme Court.

It would be a good idea to have someone with other knowledge and experience on the court.
How about a governor or a legislator?
What would be good qualifications for a justice who is not a lawyer?
Although I dislike a lot of what he said, this was part of his point. I was 'raised', so to speak, on C. I work with a lot of people who have only worked with mainstream high-level languages. What I find very often is that a lot of people spend a huge amount of time trying to understand the cause of some 'bug', and it essentially comes down to them not understanding what is actually going on when it comes to references, memory management, etc... I hate coding real-worlds apps in C, but as a language it's still one of my favorites because of what it forces you to truly understand. Convenience is nice, but not at the cost of misunderstanding.
The CSS Sticky Footer
They won't have to learn C or much of memory management or anything about pointers because of that other Smalltalk influenced language full of fancy abstractions.

That dragging things around in Interface Builder and copy/pasting TableCell code off the web is more hardcore than a typical Ruby on Rails website is unfortunately not a realistic argument. That's why we have so many "haha, I farted" type apps.
This is nauseating. Not to say arithmetic is a useless skill, but we should not be focusing on teaching kids things that computers can easily do.

At a certain point, "higher math" becomes about coming up with original arguments and explaining them clearly, not about performing computations. Consider a typical higher math problem, like: "Let C denote the unit circle in the complex plane. Suppose f:C->C is a map which is not homotopic to the identity. Prove that f(x)=-x for some point x of C."

I fail to see how years spent on tedious factorization and fraction manipulation would help anyone solve that type of problem.

Look up the essay "Lockhart's Lament" for a real mathematician's perspective.
The disconnect between the developer and customer is huge in the app store. Everything is skewed towards the customer having no relationship except with Apple. The deployment model, the communication channel, updates, everything goes through Apple. There have been a lot of blog posts (not sure of other sources) written about how to bridge this gap and connect with customers. I think in a lot of ways this is the same battle the TV networks are having with Hulu. Just like Hulu wants to be The Channel, Apple wants to be your one stop media and entertainment stop, and content producers are just anonymous and a dime a dozen.
To be honest I don't see what is wrong with saving $2.99. In fact I think it would be silly to go spend $2.99 on Tweetie when you know it is going to be free soon.
Squeezing the life out of your free Google Appengine Quota
Maybe they don't care, maybe they just like to complain loudly?
It sounds like someone should create a self-hosted iPhone analytics software package. Perhaps one of the existing companies will release their software as open source.
I'm perfectly fine with future updates more along the Snow Leopard line than more normal updates with major features and UI changes. Add new goodies under the hood, make it faster and more secure, and charge me $29. Couldn't be happier.
Shameless plug: I spent way too much time working on CSS3 buttons for Cadmus. It doesn't use gradient property but it uses a bunch of others that people might find interesting - http://blog.anomalyinnovations.com/2010/03/creating-a-realis...
Gallery: NASA's X-48B Hybrid-Wing Drone
The developer probably doesn't need $2.99 from you but I don't mind giving somebody a small amount for a good piece for software.
Unless you are a scientist.
How about the British government?
I think there is enough room for everyone, I agree with what Marco tweeted about it:

"I think the health of the Twitter-client market, for apps that all do pretty much the same things, shows that they'll all be fine."

http://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/11914060592
Disagree. Tweetie is better simply because it has separate windows for each tweet. That feature alone has kept me using it.
Except for the whole classification of apps (Free) that are going to be squeezed by this. By eliminating competition, Apple gets to decide just how profitable (if at all) app companies are going to be.

This isn't good for anyone but Apple.
Did Eric Schmidt leave Apple's Board of Directors because of iAds?
Does anyone know if Apple's Board of Directors is given advance information about new products? If so, that might be the "last straw" that forced Schmidt to resign.
Reading through this article, I thought to myself: When did Apple become such an angry, aggressive, and negative company?

I remember an Apple where I felt a certain pride in owning their products because they were superior options for me. A company that was gaining marketshare and mindshare through excellent products that just blew away the competition.

This new Apple is spiteful and highly defensive. I'm embarrassed to be typing this on a Mac and to have had an iPhone (switched to a Nexus One recently). If Google's moral motto is "Don't be evil", it seems like Apple's is now "Fuck you. punch".

What the hell happened?
That's exactly what the author is advocating.
[Why [Not [ThingsThatAreLikeOtherThings RubyTheProgrammingLanguage] ObjectiveCTheProgrammingLanguage] BecauseItsFuckingWordy]