skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree they don't seem to be innovating, but heck, neither is craigslist, and I don't see them going anywhere. I think that until someone else would need to come along with something significantly better /and/ have significant advertising dollars to compete with ebay. (either that or ebay would need to screw up it's reputation system and badly.) I don't think that facebook or any of the other social networks will compete in that arena... the social networks may help in advertising, e.g. driving people to a particular purchase, but I go to ebay to /find/ something, and I don't think facebook is a useful model for that sort of thing.

Sure, you can buy shit from your friends on facebook; I do that without an online social network, through mailing lists and other informal networks. But I don't think that really competes with ebay in any meaningful way.
Ask HN: What would life be like as an Android Developer?
I did some casual development on the iPhone about a year ago but got frustrated figuring out all of the certificate stuff to test my app, and then waiting 4 months to get my app denied.

I'm thinking about getting an android phone and making some apps mostly for fun, maybe someday for profit. Is the experience a lot better? What should I know before taking the plunge?
Does Steve Jobs know how to program, and if so, what languages does he know?
Come down now! Easy parking nearby, or if you're taking transit I can get you a ride home.
People asked this same thing for other cities and didn't get downvoted. What gives?
Microsoft should ban it from Windows then.
Mine is way worse: "Careful, blasdelf ineptness is one of their core competencies. Sounds like copyright infringement." -- http://cpedia.com/search?q=blasdelf
This is specific to the suburbs?

(Cycling sucks in the suburbs, anyway.)
I think there is also another dynamic at play: Apple makes high-end, high-margin 'lifestyle' computing devices. Every time Steve Jobs gets up and announces a new whiz-bang hardware or software capability in one of these devices, that whiz-bang capability needs to be deployed as widely and quickly as possible into the consumer ecosystem. This rapid deployment lets Apple keep ahead of the Joneses and continue to own the high-end space. If there is a lag while least-common-denominator, cross-platform tools incorporate the new whiz-bang features, Apple loses its temporal edge and gives time to competitors to catch up. The last decade has built up the "Apple == newest" identity in consumers' minds, and they don't want to lose that, it is one of the keys to their hold on the high end (another being incredible design and polish, at scale).

If everyone is writing in Cocoa on XCode, Apple's latest & greatest will be deployed that much more quickly.

I think this interpretation is consistent with Jobs' terse emails here, particularly the line, "intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform" (emphasis mine).
I'm talking specifically about Flash generated iPhone apps above, and there is no way Adobe would win that war. Even if they spend millions of dollars changing the generators in an arms race, it'll cost Apple orders of magnitude less to dissect their updates and write a program to flag the apps.

Don't forget that Apple has full access to the Flash IDE - they can generate as many Flash iPhone apps as they want, and test out their signature analysis programs until they fit - where as Adobe has absolutely no knowledge of what Apple is doing to detect their generator.

Apple has every advantage here. Adobe could put their best guys on it and Apple could defeat them with a single (smart) intern.

As for the long tail of code generators, which I wasn't talking about, I just don't think Apple will bother. They know they can't win there, but they don't need to. As soon as one of them gains any sort of popularity (like Unity), they'll cut them down, but until then, a few apps breaking the rules means nothing to them in the big picture.
Yelp may seem like it's pretty dominant, but it's still somewhat sparse even in its most popular metros like SF, NYC, LA. it's very sparse in other less-well known major metros, and smaller towns.

takes time to build a comprehensive, online local search presence... particular one with good social coverage and activity.
This guy must be new to open source. Most big open source projects have thousands of open bugs, many of which are outdated, wrong or not that serious.
California is not exactly known for it's low cost of living. Try comparing NYC and SF to Kansas or something.
I think that's how snapitto.me works.
It's fine here: OS X 10.5.8, Chrome 5.0.371.0 dev.
More proof that Gruber is a tool.
In Austin, I can affordably live in the middle of the city and bike to work, and the specter of having to move to the suburbs to afford hypothetical children isn't there since the public schools are decent. The far fewer walkable neighborhoods make me sad and the summers are probably trying for non-native Texans, but considering the things most people optimize for when choosing a city, it isn't surprising that so many people are moving here.
Which browser is that?
humanscale = amazing.

http://www.humanscale.com/products/liberty.cfm

i have that one at work and it's definitely added to my productivity. it adjusts in everyway i could want and definitely beats aerons that ive tried. the back support is perfect.
I doubt it would have come out in this state if it were still the CrunchPad, Arrington and co aren't stupid, they would have known they are onto a loser in this current state judging by the reviews.
Ask tocomment: try it and let us know!
Watch BJ PeBJ Penn Vs Frankie Edgar Live stream
I've only done basic experimentation, but it's not bad at all. You can even download the Android SDK and try developing apps and running them in an Android emulator before committing to a phone.
I think it's their way of getting the word out.
I'm not sure how valid this point is...there is already going to be a lag since all of the current app developers are going to have to update their apps to support the new APIs anyway.

At best you could say that there won't be an intermediary platform delaying the process...but I'm not sure if that really is a compelling reason to justify this decision.
Fine here too, 10.6.3 / 5.0.342.9
It eliminates the legitimate justification for a hedge.

The argument behind hedging is that it's like taking out insurance: it allows you to take a position that you'd like to be in (invest in a home, for instance) but that you would otherwise find too risky.

What they were doing, essentially, was buying a house and insisting that it be built on an unstable foundation, in a tornado zone, with substandard wiring and a garage piled with oily rags, in the hope that it'll get destroyed and they can collect the insurance.
> Canvas/WebGL/JavaScript Game

I made a bunch of small JS games/puzzles using Processing.js (which uses Canvas/VML). The exact rules are slightly cryptic by design. I definitely loved making them and intend to make a bunch more this year:

http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?nored

http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?gold

http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?piggy

http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?vanish

I hope you enjoy them.
I actually prefer that button (that launches an action) to be a verb. It does not add ambiguity, because the search provider is not customizable on the iPhone (AFAIK), so it might be for the better off that way. I remember being surprised that it wasn't, when I first got mine about a year ago.
Why circuits.web?
True enough, but that's what title matching and content scraping are for.

There would still be a percentage of misses (and false positives), but with the end decision to up-vote an existing, similar article or submit a new one left in the hands of the submitter, I think it's a reasonable feature.
"... but these are vague ideas overall. Those are the kind that are a dime a dozen. ;) ..."

Vague & dime a dozen maybe, but don't discount them all without trying or thinking about some. For example: Having a "timed-task" function could be applied to solve a lot of time wasting in many areas.
No, it's not bing yet, still yahoo for now.
Here's a marketplace for amateur photography:

http://www.snapitto.me/

You can host a photo search contest. Audio and video are just one more media type.
It is just as frustrating as most other frameworks. Find someone to commiserate with before you jump in.
If the spike happened in April it would undoubtedly have been attributed to the new iPhone SDK terms.
Sure!

Server/Client stuff:

- One 256MB instance on Rackspace Cloud (spare one I had laying around)
- Apache webserver
- PHP to render webpage (largely unnecessary, I don't think there's anything but straight HTML markup anyway)
- Orbited [1] for browser TCP socket emulation (runs using Python on top of Twisted). This piece handles the communication between browsers and the message broadcast server in the backend.
- Node.js to create the aforementioned message broadcast server. Each browser subscribes to "channels" and for each new message being sent to that channel the server broadcasts it to each subscriber (browser). I wrote this code for a previous project and just used it as a drop-in piece unmodified.
- Javascript in the client (browser) to interpret incoming messages from the backend server and render them on the screen and add markers on the map. I left the code unminified, so feel free to explore it.

APIs:

- Twitter Streaming API [2] using the "filter" stream searching for "4sq" (each tweet contains a link to 4sq.com). I have two PHP processes running to handle this stream. One consumes the stream (using the Phirehose library [3]) and puts each tweet on a SysV message queue to be picked up by the second PHP script. The second script polls on the message queue and then parses and processes each tweet. After preparing the tweet data for the browser, it sends it over a local TCP socket to the Node.js message broadcast server on a "control" socket separate from the listener sockets.
- Foursquare Image "API" to serve the different badge and mayor images. I basically just reverse engineered the badge-to-image mapping.
- Google Maps API. I just copied and pasted some code from the v2 API that I had written a few years ago. It still works even though the current version is v3.

[1] http://orbited.org/

[2] http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation

[3] http://code.google.com/p/phirehose/
Well I never - there's a good man behind that personality, after all. =)

Alright, Dave, fair enough. I don't necessarily like the way you write, but I'm convinced enough to subscribe to you. Best of luck in your future writing.
Web apps, in my opinion and experience, don't compare to the native apps of the iPad/iPhone. Native apps look better, feel better, and perform better than web apps on the iPhone/iPad.

This idea that the browser will be the window to all apps is silly and unfortunate. If it does work out, people are forced to write applications with three parts:

* HTML

* CSS

* Javascript

* Any serverside language

Instead of a single language that they're very familiar with. While I don't agree with Apple's choice to choke the amount of languages I really dislike this idea that the future of applications is 4 languages, 3 of which you don't have a choice with.
I started writing android apps four months ago. My co-worker started developing iPhone apps two months ago. We have similar levels of "Arrrgh, this is so broken" conversations--but about entirely different things. The android emulator is way slower, but running on a real device is quick and easy. Android has way better support for libraries--you cut and paste far less code. The APIs are saner, in general. Error handling is simpler, and you don't have to allocate as much by hand. Also, the store is a dream. We went from zero to installed via the market in ten minutes.

On the other hand, Android is Java--and all the horror that entails. There are also fewer people developing for android. The source is open, though--you can git clone the official apps and refer to them, which is invaluable. The docs are okay, but a lot of android plumbing is really complicated. Rightly so, when you realize what the platform accomplishes, but it takes longer to spin up.

Overall, I like it.
Yahoo outsourced their search to Bing as of a while ago.
there is already going to be a lag

Without cross-compilers, the lag is as you say: developers update their apps. With cross-compilers, the lag balloons: the makers of the cross-compiler toolset need to incorporate the latest Apple features (if they choose to do so given the rest of their market), roll out their tools to developers, then developers have to use the new tools to update their apps. Slow!
> What should I know before taking the plunge?

Along with the SDK, use the Eclipse plugin.
The audio and video is a alot harder. The Layout issues without an interface builder type tool are rough.

It's possible, for sure, and you can get up on the store in minutes.

If you've never done eclipse, I don't recommend starting now. Develop without it. Learn how to use ADB from the command line.
Also, you can do Flash CS5 and Appcelerator Titanium on it now instead of pure java. Check those out too.
The only people to be upset at are the people that find a bug, have the capacity to fix it, but don't, and complain instead.

Other than that, please stop yelling at me ;) Welcome to OSS. In the time you took to write that rant, you could have probably resolved a bug or three.

Personally, the framework usually works fine for me. When it doesn't, and I find a bug, I'll fix it. Done. That's a nice and natural workflow of OSS.

When I'm not working, I'm spending time with my children and my family. I find a lot more happiness in that than I would fixing other peoples bugs.

I recommend finding happiness in the environment you're working with, and not chastising an OSS community because there are easily fixable open bugs in the system.

Maybe it's the wine talking, but man, that was a negative read to me. Back to dessert, and maybe I'll run into a bug and fix it later (on my free time even!). On a side note, I also love nerding ou on those bug smashing parties. It's social, fun, and not required :)
It has been done: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/police_raid...
"... Seriously. Is this normal for investors to be a major dick like Arrington? ..."

Not pandering has it's drawbacks ~ http://paulgraham.com/discover.html
I think Arrington confuses being a dick with being a hard-hitting journalist.
While an amazing find, reading this reminds me how twisted we - as a people - are and have always been.
Round #3: I've dropped the Feynman quote, cleaned up the explanation, moved things out to other pages, and got rid of the redundant headlines. The sizing of the headline/drop caps is an issue on other pages that I'll be addressing shortly.

Thank you for your comments, I really appreciate them.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى والاتحاد السكندرى
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى والاتحاد السكندرى
The experiences are comparable.

First, I'll address your concerns about code signing:

Android doesn't require you to go through quite the same certificate/provisioning profile insanity, but you will have to sign your applications before distributing them in the Android Market.

See here: http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/app-signing.ht...

To develop on a device, it's brain-dead simple. Just plug in the device, install the driver (or config udev on Linux), and go!

Details here: http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html

The one case where you need to get anything 'approved' is if you're going to use Google Maps. There's a quick automated process where you submit your development key in return for a maps API key.

See here: http://code.google.com/android/maps-api-signup.html

Regarding development itself:

In terms of learning the development APIs and how everything fits together, I contend that Android is going to be tougher to learn at first, because you'll have to figure out fundamentals like Activity lifecycle, Intents, etc.

However, after you've gotten past the initial hurdles, I find that Android development (at least for the most part) feels more predictable and logically-designed than iPhone development.

In my experience, Android also has some better libraries out of the box. For example, doing basic REST calls, JSON, and SQLite are all in the standard library. On iPhone, you're best off using 3rd party libraries for each of those.

But there's always two sides to the coin. I find that iPhone is less structured, which can be good, depending on your tastes. I also feel that iPhone gives you a better-looking, better-feeling application with less effort (prettier default buttons, colors, animations, and there's always Interface Builder if you need it). If you're a game dev, also, iPhone tends to run faster and can utilize C libraries more readily than Android, whose ability to run C code relies on NDK/JNI, which can be a PITA.

To wrap things up, don't expect an entirely new process when you switch over to Android. If you didn't have the patience to stick it out on iPhone, don't think that Android will be the magic bullet that makes things easy. However, you'll be able to develop applications using the tools you like (not wedded to XCode), under the OS you like (Win/Linux/OS X), and best of all: no approval process to publish your applications. I've found that it takes minutes, as opposed to the App Store's days/weeks, for Android applications to arrive in the market.

I hope that helped.

P.S. I recommend The Busy Coder's Guide to Android. There's plenty of examples to get you started.
Thanks, I'll have to check it out on Windows... Just let me boot it up here.
It's not perfect, but if you're learning Android UI, check out http://droiddraw.org/. It's a WYSIWYG interface editor, like Interface Builder. It's not pretty, but I found it to be a good way to understand the fundamentals.
Think, in Palo Alto

http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/jobs/index.html

JavaScript and iPhone experts especially!
I've found the Android API itself to be about on par with Cocoa Touch; some things are easier and some things are harder, but it seems to balance out. A major advantage for Android is that it uses Java instead of Objective C, giving you real memory management, no header files, and generally better built-in libraries. Also you don't have to muck with certificates nearly as much; apps can deploy to your phone immediately, and you just pay Google $25 (one time, as opposed to $99/year for Apple) and use a self-signed certificate to put it on the Android Market. And your app shows up on the market a few minutes after you upload it, and won't get pulled unless it's malicious.

For fun, Android easily wins IMO. For profit it's less clear; there are certainly more iPhone users, but it may be easier for a quality Android app to stand out. My paid Android app is earning around $10/day (before Google's cut), which from what I hear is on par with typical iPhone apps.
It eliminates the legitimate justification for a hedge.

Not as described by the parent. His problem was that they were creating the financial instruments and the hedges. This is exceedingly common.

I'll leave the moral outrage portion of your post alone with hopes that you already know how you vastly oversimplified simply by ignoring counterparties.
For white noise you might try: brainwavelab.blogspot.com
It's not in English but that should be no problem. Dig up the tropical storm stuff.
Apple would probably like that. They don't have to spend money on support and can point their finger at Microsoft when customers come to complain.

Also, a small fraction of complaining customers might actually purchase a Mac. Cha ching!
> an experience Apple users have had with the couple decades of various levels of cross-platform development that Microsoft has done.

I'm not sure that proves your point here. Microsoft has had a Mac development team since the very first Macintosh. They write native software that is not a port of the Windows versions. In the past, IE for the Mac actually had more features (and was more standards compliant) than the Windows version. All this proves is that, yes, native apps can be crap. Which is exactly why this rule is entirely pointless. It's the not the development tool that matters, it's the developer.

> single handedly make me appreciate the fact that Apple is dictating that people write dedicated, high quality applications, directly for the iPhoneOS, rather than trying to do some crufty translation to that platform.

They're also eliminating any other tool or language which can also be written directly for the iPhone OS. Something like MonoTouch uses the iPhone API directly, it just happens to allow developers to use C# instead of Objective-C. No translation necessary.

Even Adobe Flash apps being recompiled for the iPhone isn't a big deal. A high quality Flash game like Bejeweled, for example, is going work great on the iPhone if Adobe did their job right. That is an opportunity for you to have apps you wouldn't otherwise have and it's not wasting programmer resources rewriting it to achieve the same result for nothing.

Rule 3.3.1 does not mandate high quality applications. If you want that, make Apple use their approval process for that instead of their own selfish interests. This rule does nothing to give you want you want.
Disagree C has classes. No "class" and no inheritance or polymorphism

C has perfectly good inheritance:

struct child {
struct parent p;
// new variables go here
}
struct child foo;
struct parent * bar = &foo; // perfectly valid C
why do people keep re-submitting the same story over and over again, while most of the content are well discussed on the other thread?
I doubt the experience is better than iPhone development from a tools perspective. I often feel like I'm participating in a Google Labs experiment. If you can deal with some rough edges and lack of direct developer support, you will be okay.

Developing games seems to be relatively difficult. Java has GC issues and the NDK APIs don't support most application UI features.
I'm not a big fan of Loic but I agree with you here, Arrington is being a jerk on that one.
I've never got what the business model of twitter clients was (except the paid ones on the appstore, although even those must not be doing that much) and Arrington was pretty stupid to invest in one, now he must be pissed at himself and decided to take it all on Loic.
I've strongly considered dropping an application at Bioware for a while now (been doing the business world development for a while, looking to move to games). Any idea on server side developer positions or "I have development experience but not game development experience" client positions (C, C++, .NET, Java aren't an issue)?

On another note, how are they on the game release crunch? Normal 1-2 month crunch if behind schedule and normal otherwise, or is it a constant state of emergency that ramps up to a worse emergency?
no, it is to the valley (relative to nyc at least)
"I wouldn't want to program on it (as things stand). It's acceptable for writing short texts, that's about it for now."

There seems to be an presupposition there that programming must involve lots of typing. If so, it is a false one.
Lucid Lynx Excellent black wallpaper
A very nice wallpaper indeed
If Apple wants to write 200,000 applications and post them to it's app store it does so... no wait.
I'm sorry that this may sound like me being an ass but I have an almost obsessive horrible nerd trait associated with correcting people. I never said there were 900 bugs in Rails, quoting from my post: "At current writing it has over 900 open tickets". Tickets, not bugs.

Thank you for taking the time to read the post and offer feedback.
I didn't say they were wrong opinions, just that they were strong.

You made some good points. My one counter-argument is that folks would have likely argued similar things about twitter back when it first launched. Tiwtter was basically Facebook status updates -- only different.