skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
VCs can just talk to each other and figure out that you're a fraud

That's the danger: getting scumbagged behind your back.

How is that "fraud"? Claiming you have customers you do not is fraud. Promising to deliver a project that you cannot or will not is a fraud. Claiming that other VCs are interested in you is not fraud; it's just the kind of thing you have to do if you weren't born into connections.

The only people who have a problem with that are silver-spoon assholes who want to keep doors shut to people who didn't hang out with them in high school.
Some are dupes and some are spams. E.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=arif100
Is our universe inside a wormhole inside a black hole inside its own universe?
I think the point is, the title "Mail.app implemented on the web using ukijs" is wrong.

It's pretty easy to clone a UI so something looks like something else. It's easy enough to then add a bit of data so it sort of feels like it as well. But building a real world fully functioning app takes a bit more work.
Thanks for the question. I'll be monitoring this thread, because I'm entertaining the thought of outsourcing my iPad app. development as well.

Upvoted
That's a counterpart for Adobe Lightroom, not Photoshop.
Of course I can plug a wonderful http://pixelmator.com/ but as much as I love the work of fellow Lithuanians it ain't Photoshop yet :(
Everybody lies. But you have to be careful since your reputation is very important.
I wonder if apple loathes the idea of Appcelerator or others enabling developers to develop simultaneously for platforms outside of Apple. They probably like that it opens up development to more people - but they want total commitment to their devices.
I have been a Scout user for a while now. I primarily use it for its Rails monitoring. They also have a Passenger plugin that monitors a number of Passenger stats. My setup doesn't lend itself to Apache log monitoring (which is what the article refers to).

As a monitoring app, I have no complaints but also have little to compare it to. It's worth a look and hard to beat on price, in my opinion. I'm not someone who would roll his own monitoring system so it works well for me.
You raise an interesting question. Perhaps they'll require source-code to be submitted in the future?
You haven't used XCode's Build and Analyze have you?
Apparently Flash apps are statically linked to a massive Flash runtime library whether the app needs all of it or not.
I find it incredibly hard to form a coherent opinion on Wikileaks. Value judgments are important when publishing information which was not public before. Making sure that whistleblowers are actually whistleblowers (i.e. they actually raise valid concerns about wrongdoings) seems important to me. That seems like something Wikileaks doesn’t even want to be very good at.

Let’s make that less abstract: Wikileaks plans on publishing 37,000 e-mails from the German radical right wing (basically Nazi) party NPD. They won’t do any filtering, so there might be hundreds or thousands of perfectly harmless e-mails among those 37,000. I’m by no means a fan of the NPD but assholes have a right to privacy, too. I don’t have so much a problem with obtaining those e-mails but somebody should really sort through them – searching for stuff that is actually newsworthy – prior to making it all public. I know that’s something Wikileaks cannot possibly accomplish with their resources. That’s what journalists are supposed to do. I also see how again and again journalists failed to do that job and how Wikileaks has managed to be damn effective. Hence my dilemma.
People cooking for neighbors. Everyone chatting with everyone else on the street. 3 generations of family living under one roof. And an "egalitarian ethos".

With 3 generations living together and everyone taking turns cooking for each other on an egalitarian basis, I'd expect to see more people eating home-cooked meals and less fast food and processed food products.
If everybody's C starts to look like what Chicken Scheme generates then you've (Apple) just detected Chicken Scheme.
Most of your past transgressions will get you a free pass.

It depends. Transgressions that reflect immature judgment and make for funny stories you can tell, especially if they're more than a few years old. Failures that reflect on you as a person of low status you cannot. If you have a rocky past, you want to paint your past self as someone who hadn't settled down yet and decided what he wanted from life, not as a hapless loser who got rolled over by others.

In order to be taken seriously, you have to create a fiction of self that is congruent with the standing conception of a high-status person. This is not what anyone likes to hear; it's naked, bitter realism.

I am not such an asshole as I might sound in this thread. I hate deceiving people, and so I generally don't. It's not that I would consider it wrong-- some people can't be trusted with the truth, and it's necessary to lie to them. I just don't like mixing with people in the "can't be trusted with the truth" category at all and so I will avoid them even if they could benefit me... but I also realize that people who are more materially ambitious than I am will have to do so.
Yeah, then stop supporting their hardware. If you just bend over in front of them, of course they're going to fuck you.
Compared to the video game console industry, this is still pretty nice. Several of the companies require submission of the source code for review. And Nintendo in particular is renowned among my video game programming friends for having ridiculous, undocumented rules that change over time.

If you think of the iPhone as a PC-like platform, yes, it's worth being crazy. But I think of mine as more like a game console. That helps me minimize my own feather ruffling, even when Apple does snarky things to me during the review process.
> Unless you go live in the jungle, you will just be reminded everyone is on the Internet.

I lived for six months at a very remote field station in the Amazon. We were more than a days travel from any village or town. We had electricity for only 4 hours a day. We bathed in the river. Dinner invariably involved spaghetti and a can of sardines. We had the internet. You can't get away, no matter where you go :)
Btw., what does this mean for SDL?
Yahoo Loses CTO Ari Balogh
Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
I don't think this matters with the new Apple iPhone dev agreement terms - these new terms are going to hurt quite a few apps when Apple is really just targetting Flash->iPhone converters... using a shotgun to kill a fly.
It doesn't even make sense because you can always just go on the internet to find porn.
The post should have mentioned selection bias, specifically self-selection bias:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection

which leads to some relevant literature:

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p362803_index.html
"If the cross-platform experience is subpar, Apple should just let these apps fail in the market"

Perhaps, like Nintendo, they learned the lessons from the collapse of the home video game market in 1983. When Nintendo was contemplating developing the NES, they took a deep look at what had caused the collapse. What they concluded was that the main cause of death was the market being flooded with too many crappy games.

Originally, if you wanted to write, say, an Intellivision game, you went and got a job with either Mattel or APh Technological Consulting (the company that did the hardware design, system software, and many of the early games for Mattel). If you wanted to do an Atari game, you went and got a job with Atari.

The games at this time were all pretty good. A consumer could go out, buy a game based just on the information printed on the box, and go home and be pretty sure they'd have a good experience.

As time went on, a few more companies joined the party. Activision and Imagic, for instance. These companies were started by people who had worked for Mattel or Atari or their contractors like APh, and generally produced quality games.

A consumer still could be confident that plunking down $40 or whatever for a new game, based just on the box description, would be a good move.

More time passed, and companies that had little or no connection to Atari and Mattel jumped in, using information gleaned by reverse engineering the consoles and system software. The information was not always complete, and they didn't know all the tricks and techniques we authorized developers knew to squeeze greatness out of the hardware. They produced a lot of crap games.

Consumers now found that spending $40 on a game was a big gamble. They had to work to get good games--be aware of brands, read reviews. They stopped buying--all games, not just the bad games.

Nintendo's conclusion was that their new console must be locked down. Only developers that Nintendo approved would be allowed to produce cartridges. This way, they could ensure that quality remained high, and get the now shy consumers to come back and give games another change.

It clearly worked--and consoles have been locked down ever since, and the console game market is huge.
Same here. I've even built prototypes that I was planning to turn into full-fledged apps. Titanium had the best chance of me building apps for the iPhone. If Apple doesn't allow it, well, tough beans. Sorry users, Apple screwed you. My apps, however, will be available on all Android platforms.
This is what I do for a living (in Atlanta though).

Depends a lot on the complexity.

For non-game apps: Some smaller, simple apps are 2-3k, more complex stuff runs in the 10-15k range. Past that you're doing something A> Really Hard, B> New, C> On the edge of what Apple allows or D> Heavily involved with a complicated server component.

I'd happily send you a fixed fee quote for your app if you'd like (see profile for an email address to contact me).

One thing to see: See if they'll set you up on your mac getting you compiling and signing for submission to the store. Lots of overseas shops don't get you through that last part, and it is pretty tricky to do right.
People that are in business and successful because they were in a high school clique?

Just how many people does Steve Jobs hire because he knew them from school? Zero, because his way of doing business is to hire the best. To the extent that people are like Jobs in this regard, their businesses are successful. People that hire friends, regardless of their ability will never rise to great heights in business (or any endeavor).

Do you want to work for someone mediocre, or someone great? Even if you were successful in your lie, lying would only get you the mediocre job. A great employer (someone of high caliber) would figure it out, or would be principled enough to fire you when they figured it out.
I wonder if the open source world can successfully fight back, by making compilers that generate code the app store police can't tell from hand written.

I think the answer is definitely yes. Apple's software engineering is not that great. There is always some hole in Safari that allows root access to the entire device. They can't get atomic syscalls working in OS X. Does anyone really think they can recruit and afford people that can tell computer-generated software from hand-written software?

My guess is that this is a scare tactic to keep anyone thinking of supporting two platforms at once to "not want to risk it" and go for the iPhone instead. More users, only so many hours that the developer can be awake, safer to just go with the iPhone. (Of course, you are already risking it anyway; use the wrong multi-touch gesture -- app denied. Use a Google service -- denied. Do something useful that Apple wishes they thought of first -- denied. And people wonder why there are so many fart apps...)

My next guess is that this tactic will be successful. People seem to adore doing whatever Apple tells them to do. It frightens me.

What I've learned from iPhone vs. Android (among other things) is that people will pick pretty and mean over average and nice.
Yet Rovio Mobile's Angry Birds (#1 paid app...) clearly (there are lots of .lua files) embeds a lua interpreter.
And at the bottom of the article: "Become a fan of Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter."

<laughs>
I think you're forgetting that it's also really fun to make an app that has the best "look and feel". I can make things that make people say "Wow." A lot easier on the iPhone than on Android.

Developers will make apps where it is fun to make apps. I haven't had any horror stories with the app store, so it's still just more fun to make iPhone software than anything else.
I think Joel's missing a very basic assumption in the Linux comparison. Economics is about incentives. The basic assumption he's making is that money (or lack thereof) is an incentive for producing open source software.

I seem to recall Mother Teresa being told by a reporter that they couldn't be paid enough money to do what she did. Mother Teresa's response was something along the lines of "You couldn't pay me enough money to do it either". For me the loss of time and money is negligible compared to what I gain in learning, which is immeasurable.
Makes more sense if you note that Apple is among the voices framing Google as the new Microsoft -- a 900-pound octopus with a tentacle in every market.
If Apple's strategy of toolkit lockdown (to improve app quality, performance, and differentiation) is overly draconian, their platform will fail in the market.
"most people can't be trusted with the truth, and it's necessary to lie to them"

This is disgusting. You need to learn to respect yourself; this in turn will help you respect others.
Both. He's saying that models (in general) handle data, but Uki (in specific) doesn't specify how you should go about doing that.
Going to wager it'll be in the form of a lawsuit, and that the FCC will get involved.

On what basis?
Tumult's point is not about writing a single script-based solution but rather about developing an enabling technology for a whole raft of solutions. A platform-on-platform.
I'm no Clojure fan, but if you want to write Lisp-like for a phone, why not Android? Your Clojure app can run on everything from the G1 to the Nexus One to the Archos 5" and 7" tablets, not to mention the wide variety of no-name Chinese tablets that run Android.

I've heard you can even get a SLIME/Swank REPL from the emulator or actual hardware. Seems like this beats the iPhone any day; better development cycle, and nobody can ever stop you from selling your app.
Lowers risk of heart disease or stroke instead. Sounds good to me!

Not dying from X or Y increases your risk of dying from Z!
If I have to pick one platform, it's going to be Android. I already know Java, but even more simply than that, I know Javascript, and Appcelerator's Titanium lets me basically write an app as though it was a web app. I don't have to invest 2 months of intensive study at the cost of my other work; I'm going to go with what I know.

Companies that have existing resources in Objective C, sure, they may choose to go with the iPhone. Developers who already know Objective C will go with the iPhone. Developers who, like me, don't yet know Objective C, and have been interested in development on the iPhone through PhoneGap or Titanium? We're not going to bother with the iPhone.
1) They may not be able to detect all frameworks, but they will easily be able to detect the top N frameworks, where N scales with how serious they are about enforcing this.

2) The app approval process is so opaque that it might be hard to tell if they were banning you due to this reason (note I hear things have improved, so this point may be out of date).
Too many variables to be able to suggest a total rate (depends on how much work there is, in addition to the other factors listed).

You are probably looking at the equivalent of $100-200/hr for good development, with the higher end for people located in SF.

If you are going to out-source development, and you have a design/product background, I would build out a product spec and even a draft list of stories into Pivotal Tracker. It will help you define with your contractor what you want but also help to estimate total job time -- and that will help you arrive at a budget, based on the above hourly rate.

[If you don't have a design/product background (or are not a developer yourself) then the success of outsourced is probably going to be mixed]

I also tend to shy away from fixed bid because it doesn't work with an agile approach. You may not know completely what you want and as you get building and can get a better picture, being able to add extra components into the mix will cause friction with a fixed bid contract.

Better to agree a budget so that everyone is clear what the limits and goal posts are.
That's often asserted, but what evidence I've read about leans the other way. E.g.:

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-among-i...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality-and-...
Well it looks like it doesn't matter anyhow.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flas...

But hey, thanks adobe for making a great android dev env.
Or I'm just ultra-productive and very helpful to The World At Large.
Nahh perfect would have been if they hat stopped at: Technically, any database could support SQL as a language

Or even added: , but what we are really talking about is half finished databases with limited capabilities that happen to suite a specific need. The reality is SQL is in no way a limitation on a database design, however by lowering the bar you can build a useful prototype which at some point might become a database. And then gone on to describe an actual problem with an interesting solution.
Apple pulling an A-Move straight out their jacket again. Haha anyone surprised? God, I lost my faith in this company a long time ago.
All of those "nonsense" arguments you listed make sense to me except perhaps for "nobody uses multitasking", by which I suppose you mean "nobody want multitasking" which, obviously, many people did.

The fact that Apple now has an implementation does not invalidate them.
And Microsoft just announced they silverlight can work on iPhone/iPad using IIS Media Services

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/08/silverlight_media_se...
Actually, it's Dalvik bytcodes, but other than that you're correct.
This affects anything that isn't C, C++, or Objective-C. Pay attention.
I don't think that's what he means. I think he's complaining that others are making that mistake.
Mentioning one gaping hole in the logic of that statement seemed to be enough to completely dismantle it :)

(The web part you mentioned is actually the frightening part of the whole thing. If they really wanted to carry their stance here to the logical conclusion they would have to filter the web or shut it out completely. I don’t think that’s what they plan or even want to do, it’s just a crappy and illogical statement Jobs formulated there. Why did Jobs say it? It seems just dumb.)
I think they just don't want to be associated with selling porn.
Or just don't let "bad" apps in the store -- regardless of how they were developed. I mean, duh. I'm having a hard time seeing how it is anything but an attack on Flash.
Even granted that, the reason Apple doesn't want that is still because of the UX. Apps with the same codebase for Android/iPhone will automatically suck as far as the UI is concerned. Things like the lack of multitouch gestures on android, different screen sizes, &c. Certainly has never worked well on desktop platforms... see: Java UI toolkits, QT (which looks fairly native but tends to feel very wrong), Adobe Air, &c.
I, for one, welcome our new android-porn overlords.
I took out "most". That was far too strong a statement.

I respect myself. However, I'm aware of human nature as it actually is. Most people don't even like the truth. They despise the reality around them and need to be fed a fiction in order to function. The facts-- that good people often fail for varying reasons, that life is inherently unfair and often dark-- are so disquieting to them that they shut them out. This is why people tend to personalize past success and failure beyond what is reasonable; they want to believe they live in a just world.

Imagine interviewing a candidate who says this: "I'm interested in working for you because you have great people and I want to learn from them. As long as you have interesting assignments for me to do, and my superiors make my advancement and education a top priority, I'll do an excellent job of them. If I feel that this is not the case, or become isolated, I'll jump ship on a dime. Also, if I'm ever passed over for a plum assignment that is within my capability, I'll launch my resumes that afternoon.

This is the truth for any ambitious person, but you'd be absolutely nuts to say that sort of thing on an interview. You might be thrown out the door immediately for that kind of renegade honesty. You're expected to maintain a fiction of self that is otherwise.
Google did release Closure, a cross-browser javascript kit. http://code.google.com/closure/library/

Also, GWT.

Probably doesn't go far enough for "easily make user interfaces" though.
>I also tend to shy away from fixed bid because it doesn't work with an agile approach. You may not know completely what you want and as you get building and can get a better picture, being able to add extra components into the mix will cause friction with a fixed bid contract.

Fixed bid works just fine with an agile approach. You just start with a very small core project, then iterate upwards with follow on projects.

This is especially important for the Apple App Store because there is no other way to know if your app will be approved.

Fixed bid is sometimes more expensive due to the "risk eating" the developers are taking off your hands, but agility isn't usually the issue with developers who are otherwise good.

We counsel clients to start with a small fixed bid project then use hourly or follow on projects to change the program to a particular place they want to go.
tomalsky has a retort about time below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250479. I meant us and other frameworks developing as an individual, not a team. Sorry for the confusion.

Cappuccino & Sproutcore are in fact free & Open Source. If your edit is in reference to NOLOH not being open source and free, it is in fact free for developers to develop, Open Source Projects, Educational institutions and Non-Profits as you can see here http://www.noloh.com/#/products/.

We also offer completely free hosted sandboxes to develop in. This includes free storage, bandwidth and hosting.

However, if you're a business that plans to make money with your work and NOLOH can aid you in that then we believe that we too should be paid for our work. We and many others believe that NOLOH easily pays for itself in a short period of time. Furthermore, paid licenses also come with a significant amount of support.
I remember having read this story about a girl who outsourced her app to canada for 800$ and earned upwards of 8000$ selling it. The app was about a popular game played by girls. I know I'm being too vague but I specifically remember this -
1) Canadian developer
2) Was developed for 800$
3) It was a popular game app for girls
I hope that provide some useful data points to consider.
It was published in one of hacker/entrepreneurship related websites/blogs which probably many of you frequent and might have seen the story. Anyone got a link?
The computer frees you to spend your time cycling to the lake instead of to the store, which is even better.

Nobody said, "never leave your house and always use your computer for everything." I just said that you can take care of necessary tasks so quickly that you have a lot more free time to spend as you wish; you don't need to combine recreation and chores anymore.
I'd say the FTC will get involved. This is clearly anticompetitive behavior, though maybe it's allowed since Apple isn't a monopoly.