skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but how do you answer his thought experiment?

"What if Ben writes a Flash app, shows it to Amy, who codes it up in Objective-C, compiles it and submits it to Apple? Should it be rejected since it was not 'originally written' in Objective-C? If you think Apple’s answer would be 'no' — a good guess — then substitute Adobe’s iPhone Packager for Amy. Now should it be rejected according to the rules? What, at the end of the day, makes Amy different from a machine translation tool?"

Apple's rule creates all kinds of ambiguities. What if you mocked it up first in Ruby because that's where you're most comfortable? What if you used psuedocode? What if you just drew a diagram? What if you just thought about it? How do you determine what the app was "originally written" in?

More importantly, how does Apple determine it and why should they care?
Confirming that N900 multitasking is much more exciting than iPhone's. Maybe some people don't need it at all. Maybe some don't need more than suspended applications and a glorified notification framework. It's fine - they are not power users.

I value the true multitasking on my N900 though. In a moment I'm going to join a weekly phone conference over Skype, put it on loud speaker, join the conference's IRC in x-chat and will be checking the links posted in the channel in a browser (probably going to look at some emails I receive in the meantime too). Yes - all of that on my phone.

(of course battery will last ~1½ h as it's all over WiFi, but it does't matter that much - just going to start charging it at some point)
When I worked for Apple, we once had a discussion about how things might have been different if Apple and Microsoft's market positions were reversed. I said that's kind of like those historical fiction stories asking what would have happened had the Nazis won World War II.

I think now with the iPhone, we're getting to see what it might have been like if Apple had dominated the PC market.
Canada could also be an option, if you can stand the winter. Though the immigration process can take a long time unless you have a job offer from a Canadian company.

If you are still interested in improving "plan A" (i.e., staying in South Africa), we are hiring system software engineers (compilers, object persistence, concurrency, UNIX/Linux, C++, etc):

http://www.codesynthesis.com/jobs
Original comic: http://www.xkcd.com/724/
Yeah, well I'm tired of Descarte's proof of existence, too, but a lot of people still think it's important.
AMD announces Turbo CORE for upcoming desktop CPUs
Mass infection of Wordpress blogs at Network Solutions
Don't try and fight it. Ive discovered that the majority here likes unfunny things in the name of April Fools. There are just some geek rallying flags they will not back down from.

For example, you could get front page time with almost any xkcd post with a pithy title, even if its one of the least funny xkcds ever. It is a geek rallying flag and many people here will not concede it. April fools is Always Funny! xkcd is Always Funny!
I earned my BS in accounting, but now I'm a developer. Your story sounds a lot like mine. A few thoughts:

* Logistically, changing careers out of accounting/finance is relatively simple. Just explain it like you already did.

* A MBA is a ticket into the corporate machine, not a ticket out.

* You should start programming again. There is significant demand for accountants with developer skills. Your boss is also right.

After leaving my accounting/finance job, I took a year "off" to build a web app, then worked at a non-profit, now working at a great midsize interactive agency.
No, it's still as funny as it ever was.

Look, Apple has a well-known stance on how you can program the iP[od|hone|ad]. Nobody's forcing you to use it or code for it.

Best thing to do if you don't like it? Buy a different mobile device, and if you're of the developer persuasion, write the best software for it you can.
May I bring your attention to this :
http://comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/4/comSc...

Top Smartphone Platforms
3 Month Avg. Ending Feb. 2010 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Nov. 2009
Total U.S. Age 13+
Source: comScore MobiLens
Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers

Nov-09 Feb-10 Point Change
RIM	40.8%	42.1%	1.3
Apple	25.5%	25.4%	-0.1
Microsoft	19.1%	15.1%	-4.0
Google	3.8%	9.0%	5.2
Palm	7.2%	5.4%	-1.8
How can anyone now develop a business and future with Apple when it could all be taken away at a moments notice.
2008 was the first memristor; it was only theoretical before that. It says this in the first sentence of the article.

I can't tell if bringing up your boss is satire, it does strike me that way. But if it's not, it's not relevant.
I'm kinda surprised that nobody here so far has noticed that the author is consistently confusing "written" with "imagined".

You might imagine code in your head in some way, but when you write it, you're probably doing so with a specific syntax and structure, in a particular language.
Discover how much power you have as a UK voter in your constituency
I was pretty sure lack of sleep was a leading contributor to depression. I know it affects the bipolar and there is the associated loss of vitamins which lead to depression.
RIM to buy QNX Software
If it's RAM that's nonvolatile and one order of magnitude slower than DRAM, shouldn't we just call it flash memory? A bit disappointing that a huge leap in applying theory to physical objects duplicated what we already have with NAND memory.
Thought experiment. Good choice of words, I think the post was intended to take it to the extreme just to provoke some interesting thoughts on the new language.

Legal agreements will be interpreted differently and its important for them to spell out these ambiguities. For instance, I don't think "originally written" is defined anywhere in the document. If it were a really thorough legal document they'd probably define that somewhere. Right now its completely up for interpretation.
Are you high? Android has a better ux??

Android can be more open, and faster and everything else, but they will never get the
upper hand on Apples UI design and UX.
Martin's arguments (summarized well by beilabs and stcredzero) are interesting and represent various real problems. But none are what killed Smalltalk.

As always, everything points to money...

1 - Smalltalk tech was owned by a small clutch of companies. All had revenue driven by developer licensing. None were able take seriously the thought of radical change to their revenue model.

2 - Lack of licensing costs for Javascript enabled it to be dropped into Netscape with Microsoft following suit. Lack of licensing costs for Java enabled Sun to give it away during a time when revenue for other Sun products was able to fuel the Java giveaway.

3 - Corporate decision makers took a wait and see approach to further engagement with traditional internal IT investment starting around 1996. This was mainly fueled by drive from within these companies to start focusing on internet strategy. Up to this point, most IT organizations were internal focused.

4 - All the major IT companies wanted to try their hand at capturing the internet technology stack.

It took about a year, maybe less, to kill Smalltalk's momentum. In my retrospective opinion, the only thing that would have saved Smalltalk is for the investors at any one of the major Smalltalk vendors to make a radical shift in their business model and give away the core technology and runtime. This would have enabled Smalltalk to be dropped into a browser instead of Javacsript and enabled Smalltalk to make meaningful progress as an "open" language. Even if this happened, IT companies would have attempted to co-opt this new free-er Smalltalk in much the same way they did with Java and Javascript.
"UX is subjective, they can't reject apps on that basis."

This is the Apple App Store. All apps require Apple approval before they can be sold. They can reject apps on whatever criteria they like. They have also demonstrated this is not a theoretical concern, either, by rejecting things for all sort of reasons that can't be said to be "objective". Apple graciously gives developers some guidelines on how they may make their arbitrary decisions, but, well, while I concede I have not read the developer agreement it is only because I'm about 98% confident without looking that Apple never actually agrees to do anything w.r.t. releasing your app.

Ultimately, "we don't want our vision compromised" is a smokescreen. It is absolutely true that if this is what they wanted, they could accomplish it simply by holding all apps to the same standard regardless of implementation techniques. This is all about lockin.

Now, if an open platform mandated certain libraries, but allowed you to distribute arbitrary executables, the UX argument would at least hold water, as lacking the strong enforcement mechanism of having absolute say over what you can run on your device means that falling back to the weaker enforcement mechanism of code would arguably mean something. (Something stupid, but something.) But Apple already has total control. Arguing about how their already-total control can only be augmented by this technical thingie over here is a smokeshow; taking control from "total" to "total" is a no-op, technically.
If you leave aside the moral/ethical issues (which are very real, and which we each need to deal with for ourselves.) the usual rules of marketing apply; do you expect word of mouth? do you expect repeat business? If so, a reputation for dishonesty is going to kill the rest of your marketing.

(Of course, if you expect to encounter each customer once and only once, and if you don't expect your customers to talk to potential customers, the rules are clearly different, and you are mostly back to the ethical question I glossed over.)
Yeah, apple is really dead. They just released a huge product that the average consumer is crazy about. They will make even more billions than they usually do, and they are "dead".
Face it, the hacker crowd will always have a soft spot for android and some of us will be die hard android fans, but as far as apple vs android goes, apple is winning and is head and shoulders above this competition.

At least for now
It's a cute story, but the title doesn't really make sense. It's about a guy's positive computer gaming experience as a child.
And BeOS was the batmobile.
> UX is subjective, they can't reject apps on that basis.

Yes they can, they can reject any app they don't want and have rejected any app they don't want.

In fact, I think the whole damn thing would be better if there was just a standard disclaimer, "Yeah, we'll reject anything we don't like."
If the iPhone was going to threaten Nintendo, it would have done it already. Game Center-like backends are hardly uncommon on it. OpenFeint has been around for a long time, and it's pretty prevalent.
It only take 48 hours to hack some flash together, might take longer for a liquid fluoride reactor...
Google Infrastructure
Maybe I'm slow, but what's that Lckig=ng supposed to mean ? And yes, I did read TFA. Is it just the nonsense one types while resting his fingers against the virtual keyboard ?

OTOH, excellent point about the iPad being a non-essential : a niche product. It could still be highly successful, but as I think Apple is looking for big hits, it would get dropped eventually if it stays a niche product. Which would be a shame IMHO. Was it the same with the Newton ?
Although not going to happen, an interesting situation will be Adobe not releasing mac version of its upcoming CS5. This will force Adobe technology developers and almost all mac using designers to migrate to PC.This will have a huge impact on Apple's revenue within months!

A lot of comments in Adobe vs Apple stories seem to overestimate Apple's say over internet. India is #2 in total wireless mobile connections and #4 in internet usage .Still,Apple has sold less than 4000 iphone 3G in the country.3GS was released just a week or so back in the country.

Iphone ,ipad and ipodtouch still constitute a very small percentage of global internet accessing devices. Although Apple is The-Autonomous-Authority that runs the appstore/itunes econosphere, their say over internet users/developers worldwide is infact , negligible . Local internet portals in developing economies wont have any reason to port their existing content to an iAccessible format(particularly, existing flash games).I personally dont think Apple policies can kill Flash any time soon. Apart from this, HTML5 implementation is far from cross-browser compatible as of now( File API implementation ). Flash is going to be around for a long time.
Do you have any examples? And we're not talking about apps which replicate core functionality, call private APIs, or do a bunch of stuff that is forbidden by the developer agreement ...
It's not ridiculous. If the finished app meets Apple's standards, why should they care how it's made? Whether something is written in Objective-C or compiled to it is irrelevant if the finished product is indistinguishable.

It's like saying "I need the original copy of that file." What, you want me to ship you the hard drive? All you really need are identical bits of information.

Oh, crap, I defragged my hard drive. Guess I don't have the "original copy" anymore after all.
Notes on iPhone 4.0 KB
Since 2007, I've usually carried two phones- A Blackberry for getting work done, and an iPhone for music and applications.

I've been both to administer servers since the iPhone first came out in 2007; The iPhone's soft keyboard is klunky, but generally works in a pinch.

I'm thrilled that with the iPhone 4.0 beta, I can finally get work done, by using one of my spare Apple Bluetooth Keyboards

The part that has always caused me real difficulty is trying to type special characters.

For instance, running:
ps aux | grep apache > /tmp/file.txt
would require multiple trips to the third-level deep special characters field.

What's been far worse more difficult is anything requiring a meta-key of any sort-For instance, using control-c to end a process, or ESC to quit vim.

It seems that we have a partial victory. All of the normal keys function, including punctuation and other useful unixy commands {}|<>, but it looks like all meta-keys are still being ignored. ESC works, but control-c still does nothing.

This seems to be an artifact of the 3.0 era applications such as iSSH, rather than anything inherent in the OS-For example, the arrow keys work in Notes, but so far iSSH and others do not recognize them.

One thing I was surprised to see working was shift-arrowkey for highlighting. I can select arbitrary blocks of text or other context to then delete, copy or paste. Quite a nifty trick, and I'd love to see other KB commands ported over. cmd-c and cmd-v do not yet work; You must select the text with the KB, and then copy/paste with the touch-screen.

As with the iPad, the volume, brightness, and music-function keys work as you would expect.
"Social Security and Medicaid suck up FAR more of the federal budget than the Department of Defense does."

This is false. Actually, it's the other way around. See here:

http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
Maybe in Purgatory.
I loved Lego as a kid too, but I was disappointed to see that it progressed from general purpose to more and more "made to fit" parts for the specific kit it was sold for. It seemed to be going away from encouraging kids free creativity towards a "here, build fancy thing that adult designed and made special pieces for". Maybe my fear was overblown?
I obviously don't know if you are correct or not; I didn't go far enough down the investment path to find out.

However, if you are bootstrapping, this is definitely not correct. Your customers don't care that you don't have a 'high status' background or how 'alpha' you are.
No, it's just slow motion. To make eternity seem longer.
Doesn't wseem to work for me. Entered a couple of different postcodes and constituency names but kept coming back with

Sorry, we didn't find any results for this search.

Postcodes resolve to a constituency fine on theyworkforyou.com
> not releasing mac version of its upcoming CS5.

Almost every designer I know has pre-ordered CS5. It's not just the iPhone compilation, it's a major major suite.

> stories seem to overestimate Apple's say over internet. India is #2 in total wireless mobile connections and #4 in internet usage

What is the state of Flash usage in India like? And do you feel honestly that Indian consumers don't want devices as fancy and sophisticated as mini computers (iPhones).

India is fascinating culturally to me. The fact that beer is such a small part of the alcohol culture there - almost everyone prefers liquor. The fact that India is so diverse geographically that English is the common tongue.
The article does not address the central problem with copyright protection: that it is founded on industrial-age assumptions which no longer apply. As long as copying was capital- and labor-intensive, copyright was enforceable with reasonable measures. But it's now so easy to privately copy a work that copyright protection has become similar to the war on drugs in that it can only be enforced with draconian measures.
Sadly, even if you can arrange for some blocks to line up in an approximate row, they don't disappear! Satan, you do not play fair, sir!
Ask HN: Is Mechanical Turk good for getting recommendations?
I am building up a database of recommendations for interesting and off the beaten path activities people can do in various cities around the world...Europe, US, Asia, etc.

To speed up the process, as well as get content from places I have no friends in, I am thinking of posting a job on Amazon Mechanical Turk but I don't know about the quality I will get.

Do you guys think it will work? Or maybe there are some other better alternatives?
Simple, Effective Web-Based White Noise Generator
Maybe the heat causes an upward convection current that slows the descent of the blocks?
Wrong.

Apple's C is C99 (as implemented by both gcc and clang). If you wish to take advantage of something like Grand Central Dispatch, they recommend that you do so with their completely optional syntax for blocks (which, aside from being closures AFAIK, are essentially anonymous functions in situ instead of defining a function externally).

You can still use GCD without the new block syntax by using function pointers, leaving you with bog standard C99.

Frankly, gcc implements a lot more non-standard stuff on its own than Apple's blocks have introduced.
Where do they say that again? I think Tennessee, also in Texas but probably in Tennessee...
Apple iPhone & iPad to soon get long sought multitasking
There's an implicit Platonism to the author's model of programming. He's an object-oriented programmer, no doubt.
GUPC — A parallel C implementation for GCC
I hate to repeat it, but it's really true. Firebug makes it so easy to debug CSS due to the saneness of the CSS UI. WebKit's inspector UI is a nightmare for tracing a CSS calculation.
Fun stuff. Has a fair number of bugs especially when the blocks are around the edges of the pit. And I think the edge of the bottom half circle always applies its reaction force upwards and not radially so it feels a bit unnatural (also the blocks cannot slide because of that). Still cool stuff though.
I never got any of those, always just tons of plain blocks, axels, gears. The most 'dedicated' parts that I ever had were the windows and the small wheel bits.

The marketeers at lego seem to be relatively under control, it didn't get out of hand as much as with other toy companies. The 'themed' lego is another thing to stay away from I think.
Crowdsourcing the oil shock
Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad
I'm sorry, I still can't quite understand what you're saying. However, I now know that you're not a native speaker, so I can't really hold it against you.

But your blog still can't be popular among people who can't understand it. Do you know any native speakers you could converse with to try to improve your knowledge of the language?
Colour e-reader with video in development
Don't know why this is downvoted. The turnaround time for a functioning tetris game is very quick, within a day (even if you don't know the tools yet). This one isn't even a functioning tetris game, it's basically just a physics simulation (probably using an existing library) with very simple rules that are activated upon collision.
Pretty cool but it seems this isn't new research (there are many references online older than April for memristors and NAND gates).

Can anyone who has access to the actual article explain in a little more layman terms how the ciruit works? I get we have 3 memristors (one of which is always false) and 1 resistor but I don't know enough electronics to understand how they come together and produce a NAND gate that also maintains state.
It's like Apple are just coming up with yet another reason for more technically-literate people to either jailbreak (or not buy) the iPad.
Anyone else note the parting observation that if you have accepted the developer agreement you are forbidden from even discussing it in public without Apple's written permission?

“10.4 Press Releases and Other Publicity. You may not issue any press releases or make any other public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple’s express prior written approval, which may be withheld at Apple’s discretion.”

As I said yesterday, Apple appears to be pursuing policies that will create a chilling effect on developers. No talk about what tools you used for your app development - anything other than C, C++ or objective C might kill your app. And also, no talk about the license conditions...presumably to include talk about the app store approval process, insofar as it is described in the license agreement. Sure, they won't sue you; but there goes your app store presence if they feel offended by your remarks.

That's not a very attractive deal if you ask me.
You're beholden to whatever platform you develop on. That's simply the way it always is.

The web isn't appropriate for the apps I want to write yet, so I can't develop on a perfectly open platform and expect to find customers. And I can't reasonably create my own platform and create the software I want to create.

So I have to pick a platform that can reasonably support the apps I want to write and that gives me a reasonable chance to make a living at it. I'm going to be somebody's sharecropper.

When I have more resources, I can consider supporting multiple platforms to mitigate my risk. But until then, pointing out that we develop at the pleasure of the platform holder is redundant and the differences between more- and less-restrictive platforms is splitting hairs.
Ok so it's a reasonable conclusion; compared to the iPod (and iPhone I guess) the iPad isn't going to sell as many units.

But Im not sure that counts as unsuccessful; the iPod is naturally a portable and popular device. Everyone has portable music players now.
if you keep the right / left key pressed then the bricks dont move down! lol..

good job!
OK, but it's not that Apple doesn't know how to do it, and it's not that the OS doesn't support it. It's that the user experience Apple wants to create is that whatever your device is doing, you press it's single button and it takes you back to the home screen in a known state. It's an aesthetic/usability choice, not a technical one. If you want to, I dunno, run SETI@Home on your phone in the background, sure why not, get Android, but most people don't want a) their batteries to run down unexpectedly because they left something running without thinking about it and b) apps to be using the network while they're roaming, incurring charges. Apple's single-tasking is about making the user feel in control of what is a complex device.