skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you asking in the very general sense? Of course there are reasons, both "moral" and practical.

One important one is that when courts and politicians get involved, manoeuvring in the system is more important then manoeuvring in the market. This becomes the central focus of managers. Managers without talent or experience in this area give way to managers that are.

Remember, this is not just a matter of flipping a switch. The case against Microsoft took years. During that time, the beginning of the PC revolution, the most important thing the most important company could do was win a court case and preserve a public image.

This is damage that happens so long as the system stays clean. Another problem with this sort of action is that it creates terrible incentive for corruption. Fortunes can be won or lost depending on a political decision. The owners of those fortunes will try to influence the process.

On the flip side, it isn't obvious that there is much return to this sort of "intervention." Microsoft & IBM, the two great monopolies of the computer industry both failed to do much harm. The both were clearly affected by competition. The markets stayed competitive. New products appeared. Innovation happened. They made high profits (MS still has great profits), but no obvious damage happened.

To see this at work look at telcos and other infrastructure owning companies around the world, where government intervention is usually highest. Look at the CEOs of these companies. These are guys who know how to oil the system, not lay copper wire and certainly not how to answer a customer service call. It is not uncommon for corruption to be present. Many countries have telcos owned by members of a political elite.
Aren't a huge number of apps just like that. What does a twitter app do except communicate with a server outside their control? Even the Google maps application is just a viewer for some server-side data.
I think Dell or Lenovo are unlikely simply because neither has previously shown any interest in developing their own operating systems. Both are probably more comfortable selling Windows Mobile/Android handsets. HTC makes sense as a company with experience developing their own software but I wonder how WebOS fits into their crowded line-up of Android & Windows Mobile devices. I wouldn't be surprised to see RIM get involved. They seem to be struggling to modernize BBOS. Hasn't hurt their sales too much yet but you gotta figure eventually it will. They're probably one of the companies most capable of quickly absorbing Palm. Time is a major factor given the growth of Android, continued strong iPhone sales and WM7 lurking around the corner. I could see RIM getting squeezed if they don't make a move.
Whoever buys Palm is getting a real prize. First of all, they get the entire Palm patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon. Palm's been doing the smartphone thing longer than almost anybody, and they've built up quite a bit of IP along the way.

Palm also has sales channels with the three biggest US carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint), as well as carriers in Europe like SFR and O2. Bell (Canada) gets tossed in for flavor.

Finally, there's WebOS. While WebOS launched rather immature, it's been developing incredibly rapidly. The OS in its current state is incredibly capable, and a joy for both developers and users. It's more usable than Android, more capable than the iPhone (even after OS 4), and blows Blackberry out of the water in almost every respect.

What Palm's missing is solid hardware and enough runway to get developers online. They won't have all their developer tools up until this summer, and it's questionable whether they've got enough cash to get past fall.

I hope that whoever acquires them doesn't kill WebOS. I'm an extremely satisfied Pre owner, and I dread the prospect of having to jump to Android or the iPhone (shudder).
Why is it off tangent? It makes sense to me that systems like religion or government are easily subverted. I also read the "Indigo Children" part as being critical of the concept, ie. pandering to psychopaths.

Not that they're not crackpots - the conclusion of the article is pretty wacky - but your criticism is a little off.
It would not violate the spirit but it would violate the letter of the contract. Apple requires that "applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript" and CWEB is neither. Apple forbids literate programs -- only illiterate programs will be permitted in the App Store.
HTC is one of the obvious buyers, but they are so in bed with Google and Android, I wonder if HTC could pull the trigger on that one. On one hand, HTC is trying to position itself as a top tier manufacturer, independent of carrier branding. On the other, it has Android and WinMo handsets already... is it going to try to add WebOS to the mix?

I doubt it. If HTC goes for Palm, it will be a patent play.

However, what if Google bought Palm for WebOS interface? I've always seen Android's interface as a little clunky. And Palm has some great design people... so if you married Android and Palm, then you'd have a better chance of unseating the iPhone. If it was just HTC, then I fear you'd just get a jumbled mess of handsets.
I strongly recommend Roger's Passages series to those who enjoy his style and work here.

http://localroger.nfshost.com/revelation-passage/
The difference is that a huge portion of the smarts that goes into rendering the page happens off-device. Opera isn't a typical web browser. My understanding is that its more like webex or something that pushes most of the work to a server.
This was actually extremely thoughtful and brilliant. The shots are not cheap, they are dead-on. Bravo, Gamehaxe!
This is a good example of approaching the subject like a non-idealogue that people can take seriously. The Salem remark was probably a bit much but at least it's near the end. Ending with a jab is always very tempting.
Yeah, I think the main thing that's confusing about the particular example given in this thread is that the common case of looping over integers usually intends a foreach-style loop, but Java syntax doesn't make it easy to do something like for(final int i : Range(1,10)). So people end up using the C-style 3-part for loop when they don't have any real need for its power.
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...XYZ has no such monopoly...

If i had a dollar for every time that had to be explained.
No, a game engine could be a collection of classes or functions that perform common game-related tasks; like a library. There's no reason it needs to include an interpreter, alhough using a scripting language for some parts like AI and level triggers is convenient.
While I appreciate his letter, I think he needs to realize that quality of apps is an incidental reason.

As John Gruber stated, the real reason behind the band is to prevent someone from establishing cross platform development tools that will trivialize the choice between getting an iphone and another phone/OS.
Interestingly, a google search for "This is the first in a four-part series on the author’s experiences as a consultant in Dubai." and "This is the second in a four-part series on the author’s experiences as a consultant in Dubai." (with or without the quotes) turns up the other two articles well enough.
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But what if you:

1) Create a list of pairs for the N nodes, N^2/2 elements: O(N^2). This point complexity could be ignored, as an initialization phase, as precomputed data for next step. In addition, many lists of hamiltonian subpaths could be added for trading memory for time complexity (not big deal, just linear speedup).

2) Dynamic-size (hamiltonian path subset) algebraic mergesort (avoiding evaluation, in order to avoid O(N!)): O(NlogN), or maybe O(N^2), or O(N^2logN)

That could give you time complexity between O(N^2) and O(N^2logN). I tried something for the point (2), but obviously I had no success on compensating the combinatorial explosion with simplification/remapping. Possible or not, it is neverending and cheap fun.
Odds that Steve Jobs will read or care one whit about this letter: 0% (with a margin of error of ±0%)
I saw now link between the video embedded and the supposed feature of flash and HTML5, just an animation FPS comparison.
I am glad the all important Library of Congress unit of measurement is still alive. I wonder though, do people using this unit of measurement take into account the growth of the LoC. I mean since the LoC should include most published materials in the US, it should be growing at a pretty brisk rate.

Thus, the LoC, like the dollar is one of those units of measurement that change their meaning over time.
Job's point may be correct, but it is fairly obvious to even a casual observer this is not the real motivation for Apple's actions. From the get-go, Apple has done whatever it can to prevent Flash from getting on the iPhone. The purpose, of course, is to keep development and apps locked into that platform, giving Apple a major competitive advantage.

I don't see much use in all this over-analytical second guessing.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. I found an explanation of "fractional medians" at http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2009-01/msg00662.html - that might be how they came up with the number. Not sure how relevant it is though because the explanation describes it as a way to get a more precise measurement when the data is artificially constrained to, for example, whole numbers...while still retaining some of the benefits of using the standard median.
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> Apple's OS and hardware is constantly in flux

Well, the writing was on the wall as soon as Cocoa was released. While Apple maintained both Carbon and Cocoa as first-class citizens as far as the UI was concerned, it was obvious that Cocoa was the future of the Mac's API. Adobe chose to not use Cocoa and stick to Carbon even after it was obvious that it would be deprecated.

This forced Adobe to rewrite all of their Carbon apps, which is what took all of the time. Had Adobe gone with the blessed Cocoa kit and XCode tool chain from the beginning, they could have just recompiled Photoshop and had a Universal binary immediately. They chose not to.

> every single Flash application can be quickly and easily recompiled to support it

Now, what are the chances of that happening? Not every developer will care to update their application.

If all native apps are running fast with the hypothetical new hardware and Flash based apps were slow as hell, Flash based apps would start to get deleted very fast...
Go Apple! Go take the revenge!!.
It's not so much the layers of abstraction -- our machines quite literally do more but the software, at least on the surface, looks the same. I remember when Office added the real-time squiggle line spellchecking -- now that's everywhere including this browser textbox. If you go back a few years, you'll find a lot of software that is best described now as primitive.

Abstraction layers are always slow -- PC's getting faster never makes them feel fast because our expectations of what software should do increases at the same rate.
Or simply "Cover my ass" jobs.

Before middle management makes a big decision, they need to prepare the ground work of excuses they will use if the project fails.

Expert report is an excellent tool to show your boss and shift the blame. (And hey, the company is paying for it).
Clicking on the author's name will also bring them up.
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Firstly, 'The free market' can never be 'a moral system'. The first term refers to a system of trading, where goods and services are interchanged and relative monetary values are established. The second refers to sets of principles, reasons and motives for doing certain things. The first is at most a subset of the second, but that is only the case if you amend it with a philosophy that equates monetary value to moral value.

Secondly, your view of free markets is naive. Lack of transparency and the problem of monopolies are only a few of the many problems that completely free markets suffer from. We have an FTC, because markets need to be regulated. Leaving them completely free leads to morally unacceptable results.
Dear Apple fans, a plea for reason and civility.
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That's absolutely true, I just wonder where Apple would draw the line. How much server-side processing is too much?
Steve Jobs is not the next Bill Gates. He is the next King George III.
A Google/Palm marriage makes to much sense to actually happen:)
He never goes into how he uses Lua, but if he's still targeting Apple's libraries (rather than some cross-platform transition layer), they might not even be able to tell he is using Lua in the first place.
I've yet to set try out Gizzard. Wasn't expecting FlockDB to be released so soon.

Wondering if FlockDB is truly abstracted from MySQL/Cassandra.
And also wondering how performance compares Neo4j
> the writing was on the wall as soon as Cocoa was released.

Cocoa came first but Apple couldn't convince anyone to port their applications from Mac classic to a completely new OS with no marketshare. So they had to develop the Carbon API to get developer support.

> Adobe chose to not use Cocoa and stick to Carbon even after it was obvious that it would be deprecated.

Which was a smart move for Adobe. They have a lot of Mac code and converting it all to Cocoa is essentially a complete rewrite. You expect Adobe to have perfect knowledge of the future or a time machine.

> They chose not to.

It wasn't much a choice. OS X was in no way a sure thing. In fact, the only thing that actually allowed OS X to survive was Adobe's support of the platform.

> Now, what are the chances of that happening? Not every developer will care to update their application.

Did you read what I said? Isn't the possibility of Flash developers hitting "recompile" a lot more likely than Objective-C developers actually having to make code changes to support this new feature?

> If all native apps are running fast with the hypothetical new hardware and Flash based apps were slow as hell, Flash based apps would start to get deleted very fast...

Adobe's Flash compiler is exactly that, a compiler, which converts Flash apps into native code. If Adobe has done their job right, it's unlikely you'd notice the difference. And if you did, you would just delete them. Just like you would delete a crappy Objective-C app -- those already exist in droves.
Leave it to the suits to create artificial barriers.
How is that? In 2001/2002, the way to move your code base from Classic to OSX was Carbon, not Cocoa.

The switch to Intel was another big porting project. Now, if they want to switch to x64, they will be also forced to switch from Carbon to Cocoa.

So in few years, Adobe had to port their codebase several times to meet the OSX moving target. Actually, I'm suriprised they did it at all, considering the lack of transparency on Apple side.

If you are asking Adobe to throw away any frameworks used, that were later duplicated by Apple in OSX, and port to Apple provided frameworks, you have no idea how the project of the Creative Suite size is managed and developed. You may port your little OSX-only utility fast, but not CS.

Other big projects had similar problems - Microsoft Office? Alias|Wavefront (today Autodesk) Maya? They have similar pain points for the exactly same reason.
I dont think so. All the big sites are converting to HTML5 now since the highest paying audience is on the iPad. New features will be targeted to that market first as well.

The flash audience will be second class citizens. But with users needing only to change their browsers for a better experience, I think they will do so surprisingly quickly.
Oddly, they don't get the remnants of Be and BeOS (whatever those might be by now). Be was owned by the other half of Palm that spun off to sell the Palm OS.
I thought I will get a zero. But this site doesn't work in Lynx.

http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php
Note that it's in the process of being released: it's as yet unusable by outsiders. Honestly, I did not expect this to make Hacker News so soon. :(

I have not used Neo4J first hand. It has really cool features, but it is not a distributed database and has expensive memory usage. FlockDB is distributed, uses little memory, and has a very limited feature-set that is highly highly optimized for OLTP. It's not really an apples/apples comparison. Theoretically, Neo4J could be used as a back-end data-store in FlockDB.
It's all well and good to say such and such is the reason, but that's not what the license actually says.

What's to stop a tool developer producing an Objective C library and compiler that can target both iPhone and Android? The original source would still be in Objective C. If it was developed specifically for the iPhone, and only later for Android, it wouldn't be a compatibility layer - only the Android port would count as the compatibility layer, with the iPhone original being the native one.
The moral system I'm referring to is the moral system called "free market" - which is what the article actually says.
great! thats martin sonneborn at his finest. he's a german satirist and is notoriously know for pulling of stuff like this.

additional info: this is taken out of the german equivalent of "the daily show".
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> you don't have to develop each application alone and use a specific machine/os for each phone.

Of course you do, developing with Flash on OS X is infeasible, the performance is laughable and the stability is worse (like the article says, Adobe's been neglecting Flash on OS X since forever).

You have to use Windows to get any work done, and that is just as "specific" as having to use OS X.
Why would a government protect human life with physical force? Remember, the justification must be from a free market, not with reference to some other moral system.

What, in a free market moral system, prevents slavery? The justification must come from the free market, if free market is to be the moral system.
There are plenty of apps that are just a bunch of web views on tabs. Thats pretty much %100 server side processing ;)
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Precaching didn't seem the main selling point of these apps to me; but if it is: perhaps HTML5 manifests/local-storage is a better way to preserve webbiness and allow offline operation.
I dug up the statistical abstract he's referencing, which does indeed have a median of 3.3 listed: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0094.p... [PDF]

There's a footnote that says: For definition of median, see Guide to Tabular Presentation, which appears to be this (from a previous year): http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/08abstract/guide.pdf [PDF]

And that guide defines "median" in the normal way you would expect: arrange values in order, and choose the middle value, or average the middle two values if there is an even number.

A guess, given the other data in the table, is that they first aggregate by number of sexual partners (shown in the columns), then look for a point where the number on the left and right would be equal. I believe for non-continuous data like this you can compute a "fractional median" that takes into account how far into one of the cohorts the midpoint is. The intuition is that you'd want the median to be higher if the midpoint was "just past 2" (i.e. barely including any 3s) vs. "just below 4" (i.e. including almost all the 3s), even if the midpoint itself is a 3 in both cases.
The author of the open letter is behind iPhone Wax: http://github.com/probablycorey/wax

It may also be worth nothing that the particular case of Lua was already prohibited under the iPhone DPLA section 3.3.2 which states that no interpreted code may be included unless it's run by Apple's interpreter(s). Wax embeds a third-party Lua runtime that does just that.
Has anyone considered that Apple is also a potential buyer, if just for the patent portfolio?
Disclaimer -- I am not an iPhone developer, why? Two reasons: 1.) I don't own a Mac and 2.) I don't know objective-c.

Even though I can't build iPhone applications, to me this ban makes sense for the following reasons:

1.) Limits the total number of applications. Apple knows that the "100,000+ apps" is just marketing. How many unit conversion applications do you need or does Apple want clogging up their approval process.

2.) Reduces the velocity of the application submissions. Having a more controlled ecosystem means that everything isn't done at once. This is core to Apples strategy. Roll things out in phases; build features that people want over time. Cut&Paste, Multi-tasking...

3.) Forces people develop iPhone applications on Mac hardware.

4.) The more layers between you and the developers building the applications increases compatibility issues, which are out of your control.

5.) The more layers between you and the developers building the applications decreases the speed at which applications can take advantage of new features. Apple releases a new api now any developer using a 3rd party framework needs to wait for that framework to support the new API. This impacts the significance of the new feature.
I wish they would use the term "African American". The internet is global, and the 500 million other black people in the world are not affected by sentences like "Some 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock".

The problems the article speaks about are relevant only to U.S-American-Born blacks or African Americans, and not black people in general.
True, it seems like now and then the kernel dev mailing lists get a bit out of hand!

Zed Shaw and DHH both have a style of being very direct, and there's something good to be said about that.
Two key points here:

firstly there is pretty much nothing you can do to stop a determined attacker. All the trust based security in the world will break down at some point because, ultimately, computers are complex things.

Secondly the rant about law enforcement is partially bull. The major problem is catching and prosecuting hackers is involved, expensive, usually cross border and difficult to convict. How do we solve those problems? I really don't know.
Unfortunately it's not such a crappy thing to do that it affects sales... hence it makes good business sense
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