skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, that part was a strategy to save themselves that didn't work so well because it was too little, too late. Not to mention that they did made a nice profit from that scheme.
Reading Between the iPhone OS 4.0 Lines
Freebie Friday – Premium Themes & Templates from MOJO Themes
Fancy showing off the latest & greatest template on the market? Er… for FREE? Well here’s the deal – we teamed up with the coolest newcomer in the template marketplace world in order to give away three amazingly fresh templates: Apollo HTML, Limon (Tumblr Theme) and Signal 8 (Wordpress themes).
Generally companies don't get $30 billion in cash by turning down opportunities to make money.
I guess convincing Rackable to relaunch SGI workstations running Ubuntu with the kind of incredible 3D they had back then would be out of the question...
did you read the linked article? i'm guessing not.

if all microsoft did was write a clone of stac's product and bundle it with the OS, then that would be questionable, but not too bad. But no, what Microsoft did was pretend they were interested in buying Stac, gained access to all their source code as part of their "due diligence," then "changed their minds" and created a nearly identical product "from scratch."

Stac was able to get the courts to agree that this was dirty pool, and it cost Microsoft over 80 million dollars.
I used to run that, too! Not only with a GUI, it also had a web browser and could use many modems. I was also amazed.
iframe ads.

Most popular sites use iframe to (either) asynchronously load javascript ads or load it on a separate page so that it doesn't effect your initial site speed. Most popular ad platforms also offer iframe specific codes you just have to ask for them (I know adify does). If they don't offer iframe codes, ask if it against their policy to load codes on iframe, they might make exceptions for high traffic sites (Arstechnica loads all ads on iframe).

For general optimization, yahoo has an excellent resource page: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html I was able to bring my site from ~8-9s loading time to ~2-3s running on a not too powerful server.

Three optimizations that worked great for me.

- CDN for static files (maxCDN has a great cheap introductory offer of 1tb for $9.99 and offers PULL)

- Minify and Gzip CSS and js files and then fetch them from CDN.

- PHP cache (APC, eaccelerator or xcache.)

I am trying to reach <2sec speed point now.
Sorry in advance for the meta comment.

I read the article, saved the text "...cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app." to my paste buffer, and came here to rip that argument to shreds.

Two comments, with a combined total of 85 points, already did this. Thank you, HN, for saving me some time :)
I have two concerns here.(well 3, but swombat covered that one)

1. If you are going to penalize sites for being "slow" then how about you tell us what slow is? Is a site loading in 10 seconds "slow"? is a site with a 5mb index page that loads in 15 seconds "slow"? How about some metrics so that we can optimize properly?

And what will that do to a lot of content rich sites? If you have a lot of images/flash/javascript it sounds like you are going to get screwed for trying to make a better looking user experience.

2. Of course Google search results experiment would affect user satisfaction. You are looking for results, and you want to do a lot of searches. BUT when you are clicking to see the result you like, I think most people would be willing to wait 2 seconds extra to load the more relevant information.

Sounds like this is yet another attempt at boosting big sites, where large sites like eHow and Mahalo get preference in results just because they can afford faster servers.
I'll believe it when the agreement instead says that developers must, ya know, "conform to the ABI" rather than hocus-pocus language.
Apple takes aim at Adobe... or Android?
7 out of the top 10 stories are Apple rage: can we please settle down?
I've never even considered making a meta-post complaining about the decline of civilization or whatever, but this is ridiculous.

Not everyone can care so passionately about every topic. To so utterly dominate the site with such a singular, narrow subject is unreasonable and unfair to the rest of us.

I implore the Apple developers among us: please temper your rage and stop hogging the site.

p.s. The "new" stories are even worse
Well played. This is the funniest code I've ever seen.
I've never experimented with that boundary. Publicly criticizing your employer is unwise and unprofessional no matter who you work for. I don't imagine there are many Fortune 500 companies where you would last very long doing that.
Even though I couldn't find out if they do in the Webmaster Tools Report; the Page Speed Analyzer (Firefox Add-on from Google) does take it into account (as does YSlow, another Speed Testing Add-on from Yahoo).
I would think that Google would take it into account because checking if something is cachable is easy; and I don't think Google is stupid enough to not check that.
It's misleading because you have to take the integral to get the actual debt, right? (Which is always increasing, just apparently less quickly with democratic presidents. OTOH, a democratic president and a republican Congress is a great way to get nothing passed, which is free... and the image doesn't show anything about that.)
"You think you're going to buy AdMob, eh? Well, I've got good news and bad news."
So, now tell me what debt is.
Interpreters that run on the iphone have always been banned.
its a derivative being presented as its absolute function
Actually, there is only one way the application can run in background: the "service".

The "background slots" are implementation details. Applications do not receive the event "you are going to be killed, please serialize" the same moment they lose focus; they receive it at the system's discretion. The system decides based on memory available (mostly), whether it will leave some processes running or whether they will be "backgrounded" (basically, what is more economical - backgrounding processes all the time, when the user is switching between two apps, or just keep them both in memory?).

To some extent, this is tunable by the power users - if they download "Dev Tools", they can set the limit to 1 - 4 processes (or unlimited). It is basically trade off between memory consumption and responsiveness.

I repeat - this is not supposed to be setting for common users; it is just exposed for developers to experiment, what happens when they push the decision threshold in one direction or another. The system is supposed to have good default out of the box and manage the processes automatically (which is also reason, why there is no task manager).
Ask HN: What happened to rational discourse?
I'm curious why the reaction to the Apple Developer TOS change is making this community react so strongly. One of the main reasons I left Reddit for Hacker News was the level of discourse was elevated and the polemics and hysterics in the stories were almost non-existent. I don't disagree that the Apple dispute with Adobe is big news and calls for discussion. What concerns me is the freewheeling hysteria that seems to be driving the topic. As is almost always the case, I suspect this TOS change will either be modified, re-interpreted, or Apple will suffer community backlash. As for my personal opinion, I would feel a far keener loss by losing the valuable insight and discussion that has so far been present in this community than I would feel over a change in the Apple developer TOS.
You do need faster server to serve more people, but you don't (necessarily) need faster server to make faster sites. There are some exceptions. If you have a site that takes 10 seconds to load even with low traffic, something is wrong with your configuration.
Most people aren't really angry about flash, they are angry about all the languages that apple has banned to get rid of flash.
Well stated. I am of a similar opinion and just submitted a similar meta discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1254135. I would really like to see this calm down so we can get some interesting news and rational discourse going again.
http://my.opera.com/community/countup/

In other words: no, you can not use it. It is verboten.

Imagine what would happen, if Microsoft had veto over Lotus 123, Ami Pro, Netscape, Apache, Mozilla, etc.
It's OK for vegans to eat oysters
Expected. There's a three tier system- Tier A partners like EA, Tier B developers that are preferred by Apple, like Cultured Code, Omni, and TapTapTap, and Tier C developers, who Apple doesn't do anything special for. Kick ass for a sustained period of time and you can get into Tier B, be a multi-billion dollar company and you're Tier A.

Awesome thing is, though, that you can reasonably compete as a Tier C developer with Tier B and Tier A developers, it's just that they get a head start with being featured. That's surmountable, so it's not a big deal.
Though I somewhat agree with you, you are suggesting that the voting system is broken, as that is what defines the order of the homepage, and decides what you view (outside of the new).

However, the algorithms for this on HN have served the community very well over time.

Rest assured, in a few days, this won't be as big an issue, we'll just have to live with it until then.
There is something about the rich text editor in the web interface that makes it uneditable on iphones/ipads. This is a shame because I wanted to write a long post on the train and format it the way I like. Yes, the straight HTML editor works, but coding on an iP* is tedious and horrible. You may also get a lot more mobile and "couch bloggers" if you can do rich text editing this way as well. My $0.02.
First of all "amazing" is subjective, and all current mainstream tools are amazing in some way.

Android has Dalvik, which is a register-based virtual machine (as compared to the stack-based JVM) that's optimized for solid-state memory (which has slower access times) and with bytecode optimized for interpreting on ARM processors. I's questionable if it was the right thing to do, but it's still amazing.

Having a VM on a mobile device is debatable, but it's higher level and that's one way to achieve portability and to reduce accidental errors (memory leaks, buffer overflows).

And what language would you propose they should use? Their own? C#? And keep in mind that it has to be a language that doesn't need lots of magic to make it run efficiently, like a tracing JIT (a pragmatic choice based on current real-world constraints).

Your analogy to cars doesn't hold water. You can't build an F1 without proper knowledge, and all the tools in the world won't help you with that.
The Manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra
There are often days when things get bad here in one way or another, but I don't worry unless they stay that way.

At least when HN readers get hysterical it's about something (a) related to hacking and (b) really bad.
Apparently that ad is apocryphal: http://www.antarctic-circle.org/advert.htm
Tail-call optimization is part of the Da Vinci project. I have no idea if it's on track for Java 7.

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/subprojects.html#TailC...
Well then, rephrasing the first comment for those who didn't get it, I see no reason to think developers are being forced one way or the other.

As a developer, you choose the platform you intend to use to deliver your application. Nobody is being forced anything. There is a huge potential market outside the App Store.

If you bet the company on Apple's good mood, it's only your fault they pull your app, change the rules of the game and drive you out of business. They own the clients. If you want to sell to their clients, you better be ready do jump when they tell you to. Actually, it's no different than selling to a telco on a platform like Brew.

As a dominant player, Apple not only has to foster the development of killer apps for their platform, they cannot afford killer apps evolving on other platforms. Unless they change course, that's what will happen.
Umm, did you bother reading Apple's financials before tossing out that piece of FUD? The vast bulk of Apple's financials, and that $30 billion in cash, comes from hardware sales. Call me crazy, but i think it makes sense to protect a profit source from unsavory types building who-knows-what from data collected in the background.
A link to the large HN thread on the original blog post
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253490

The actual blog post:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888
As a developer, you are well within your right to understand the rules. I think Apple is doing a good job of protecting its users from money-hungry developers -- Facebook is a good example of what can go wrong.
This really pisses me off. The author specifically stated that the statement was unofficial and outside of his position as official representative, and Techcrunch ignores it and pretends it's Adobe doing all this, with two lines or so halfway through to indicate otherwise. It's not a very friendly way to leech off the blog posts made by others.
Where would be all these projects without Apple's involvement?

Why should I care, who started what?

In that case Adobe should be forever grateful to Jobs and Apple, because they helped them at the start, by suggesting business models and investing heavily while working on the project for LaserWriter and then creating the whole desktop publishing thing.
Adobe's Illustrator has its root in the work on Postscript, which was initially developed for Apple's LaserWriter.
Photoshop started as exclusively Mac product.
Adobe's (originally Aldus') Pagemaker at the start also was developed with Postscript and Apple's Laserwriter in mind.
By the same logic how is Flash a Adobe's product? Because they bought Macromedia?

And I highly doubt people are going to get all the way down to clang.

What do you mean? It's open source: http://clang.llvm.org/

They write bad software in general for other platforms.

Just like Flash player performs wonders on OS X and Linux, and Photoshop for OS X has very consistent UI with native controls.

Did you read Webkit's last release?

What's about it?
Painful to read something easily solved by free software, even in 1993
Uh, why? Competition generally works out well for the consumer.
The big omission for me was not addressing the notification system. Its never scaled well past the original intent of missed calls / voicemails. A common problem I encounter is a screen full of notifications and the need to unlock the phone to do something. Once I do that they vanish. A Notifications app would be a quick and dirty fix. Just let me go back to them instead of hunting through different applications to figure out what I missed.
If you have $30 billion in cash, chances are that you have somewhat of a reputation. Apple definitely does. That repuation is worth far more to the company than a couple hundred thousand or a few million that an agency could offer.

However, if you're a small firm that might be struggling to survive and is somewhat lacking in the morals department ("Is it illegal? No? Then why not? We need the money."), that same money looks far more attractive.
Three Alternative Inputs for Video Games
Yet another standard of measurement that is not directly related to the number one reason anyone uses Google: finding the most appropriate content.
you are partially correct - this site is not about start ups in Canada... it is ABOOT startups in Canada, hehe
the keyboard looks thicker than the Apple bluetooth keyboard.
Go back and watch the first iPhone keynote. It was all about web apps.
I think the issue really is only Flash. Adobe's CS software is still important for Apple, and Apple approved Adobe's Ideas app on the iPhone. There's a lot of friction because of Flash, but I find it hard to believe there's a total divorce.

I wonder if Flash will ship by default on OS X 10.7
The Humble Hound
As the article mentions in the last paragraph, vanilla cell phones were luxuries until quite recently, even in the west. I wouldn't be surprised if smartphones are ubiquitous in the third world within the next decade.
When you do a startup you have to learn about building a product, finding customers, managing a team efficiently, hiring the right people, building a brand for your company, determine a revenue model, basic bookkeeping, and so on. I'm just listing a couple of the many things you have to learn when doing a startup. None of these things you have to do when you're a software engineer in an established company. You can only spend a few hours a day on software, if you're lucky. The rest of the time you're building different skills. So that's why I can't take the claim "you don't learn anything" seriously.

If you're in meetings all day you're either not delegating enough or you like being in meetings all day. Either way nobody is forcing you to have meetings all day every day.
Many blog engines, even WordPress with the right plugin, serve your pages as static files. Plenty of speed that way.
You are not a consumer in this case. The buyer of your mined personality profile is.
IAAL. Contracts only matter to the extent and in the manner that they are ENFORCED by the parties to the contract. Everything else is pure speculation and intellectual masturbation...or, in this case, pursuit of an agenda.
Especially surprising considering Android has a robust notification system. It's laughably simple on the iPhone.
Daniel Eran Dilger always seems to be reaching quite a bit with his Apple conclusions...
This assumes that a non-apple compiler will yield an inferior result. Unity3D is one example to the contrary. ActionScript may or may not be another, but efficiency is our secret sauce as developers. It is our inherent value.
Adobe vs Apple: Divorce is never easy
I think the idea is that once you've unlocked the phone the app icons tell you what items need attention.
That's just me scratching my own itch. I find that "my-opinion-about-whatever-Google-happens-to-be-doing-at-the-time" type of news tend to flood the front page every once in a while. Perhaps Google|Schmidt would be a better filter?
You're free to edit the regexp to suit your tastes, if you want different keywords to be filtered.
Very funny!
the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited

I guess this is the Admob killer clause? Goes along nicely with the Adobe Flash killer clause...
Not the interesting ones. There's a reason people so many want to work for Microsoft / Google / Apple / Sun, etc. Small companies have the hardest time attracting really talented and ambitious people. And they usually can't afford them either.

A startup often works on interesting problems from day one, and if (!) it becomes profitable the jobs become permanent.

Since larger companies mostly grow by buying startups, a large part of all "interesting" jobs are created by startups/spinoffs.
That's great if you have one screen of apps, but really pathetic when you have to swipe through 5-10 screens so you can see your AP news app has an update. Even worse when you have to then hunt for the update once you get in the app (AP again, or Facebook).
>As is almost always the case, I suspect this TOS change will either be modified, re-interpreted, or Apple will suffer community backlash.

Are you sure the TOS would change, if there was no backlash, like the one you're seeing on HN right now?

Protests usually precede revolutions.
Many posters are missing the point here. Apple is heading Adobe off at the pass, so that Flash is not a viable development platform. The fact that the agreement term can be interpreted to prevent umpteen different other cross-platform development environments is only relevant to the extent Apple's agenda includes enforcing the terms against the makers of those environments.

Now, assuming Apple is using this language to defeat the expectation that Flash is viable on the iPhone OS, who really loses? I would argue that elimination of Flash is win for everyone but Adobe, but that's my opinion. Even if you like Flash a lot, you can't fault Apple for not accommodating Adobe given the belligerent history between them.

I guess I just have a hard time mustering sympathy for Flash developers after years of frustrating, shoddy, inconsistent web experiences with Flash. There are a few exceptions (artists like http://yugop.com/ come to mind, as well as the acceleration of online video) but, overall, Flash has been a nightmare for opinionated web users like myself. Good riddance.
How would googlebot measure page-load speed accurately?
Wouldn't it be ignoring a slow site's cruft filled javascript and stylesheets?
The Google toolbar
Twitter, Apple, Facebook: The perils of building on someone else’s platform.
Steve Jobs Says, "Fuck You Ruby Fanbois"
Not sure how that's misleading actually. The derivative in this case is "spending - revenue", which is the thing that governments can actually control. A zero-borrowing budget (which would be a huge improvement at least according to the "spending is bad" metric that seems to be en vogue) would show a debt graph that looks almost exactly like your mortgage -- flat and uninformative.

Plotting the deficit shows which policies are likely to lead to sustainable government spending and which ones don't.
They reportedly said that they would use both the time to get HTML from Googlebot (presumably what Webmaster Tools shows) as well as the time to load the whole page, as measured by people with the Google toolbar. http://searchengineland.com/google-now-counts-site-speed-as-...
Don't worry about it.

Unless your site is taking 10 seconds to respond, it probably won't affect you. Google has said this change will affect only 1% of queries, so there's a 99% chance you're fine.
"I can't wait to lose my virginity so I can tell all those other girls what a bunch of teases they are."
That's called exercising discretion. It happens under the real laws too. I don't think you know what "evil" means.
NYC's pneumatic tube trash removal system
who uses google toolbar besides old IE users that need popup blockers? Seems like super high variance data depending on the end users connection, perhaps they get info from chrome usage statistics?
Not disagreeing, but I think it's often a matter of setting up or tweaking your caching strategy, not throwing hardware at the solution.
It's not your platform. You don't get to decide. How can I make this more clear to you? Why do I even need to explain this?
I'm pretty certain that ActionScript is not an example to the contrary, and I'm fairly fond of it as a programming language.

I'd go so far as to suggest that the majority of the non-Apple tools that people are proposing to use instead of Objective-C will produce an inferior result, and that's why Apple is clamping down on them.

(BTW, love the kneejerk downvoting in this subthread, keep em coming.)
Dunno, but according to this article that's what they're doing: http://searchengineland.com/google-now-counts-site-speed-as-...

If every site is being judged by the same pool of toolbar users then it's fair, right? It's only the relative speed that matter.
Rule #1 of the Internet: Never announce that you are leaving. Just go.
I propose a new app. Its like the magic 8 ball. You shake your ipad and it tells you if your app is likely to be rejected.

You think its random, but its actually quantum-entangled with the Steve's brain.

I'd name it "The Magic 8pad" but then...
In some ways, I think the recent obsession over iphone ToS is a community backlash, though it seems overblown. I am surprised that four developers I know are dropping their iPhones at the end of contract and switching to Android. We must feel strongly about it.
A Thinking Ape is hiring Software Engineers (Vancouver, BC, Canada)
Then go ahead and fork Flash. LOL.

And forking is obviously less-than-ideal in terms of maintaining against future core updates. It's a kind of "freedom" that comes with plenty of new burdens.