skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Restraint of Trade? Please.

Restraint of trade is something you enforce after to stop people from doing something elsewhere

It's restraint of trade if they add to the Apple agreement "You will not port your app to android". That's why they have to do roundabout crap like this license change.
"The lack of proper multitasking is a high price to pay for 10 seconds of pristine behavior."

For some people that may be true but to keep things in perspective Apple has sold ~80 million iPhone OS devices with no third party multi-tasking at all. Obviously it's just not that important to a significant number of people buying mobile devices. If it doesn't meet your needs obviously you need to buy something else but why discount the motivations of other people? I like the iPhone specifically because it works really well 99.9% of the time with zero upkeep on my part.
My point about skype was not that it cannot be backgrounded, but as I said "skype will be integrated in a way that it takes your desktop space". Not sure what happens when you have more accounts - if you can do that at all and if it continues adding new bars... but I prefer it completely invisible like in N900 (especially when I have 2 voip accounts and 3 more voice-capable xmpp accounts online)
Enough!

If you don't like Apple's terms of service, DONT USE APPLE, and DON'T DEVELOP SOFTWARE FOR APPLE'S PRODUCTS.

It's not unfair. Whether or not he's insane is irrelevant. Stop bitching and solve the problem.

EDIT: downvote me for having an opinion? come on, HN.
So they measure the efficiency of air marshalls in the number of arrests? Hmm.
538: Generic Ballot Poll Predicts 50-Seat Loss for Democrats
Platform owners are the new land users and developers are share croppers.

If you develop for a platform, like Apple or Facebook or Twitter, you are basing your business on the whim of the platform owner.

Every change in development license for Facebook/Apple has killed off some company who got in their way.

Zynga is estimated to be worth $5 billion, but it is running on Facebook. At anytime, Facebook can kill Zynga or force it to pay a large tax to be on their platform. Otherwise, Zynga might have enough money to buy Facebook outright.

So the trick is to be a platform owner, instead of making one off applications.
No new docs or tutorials?
For mutual recursion, you need to use trampoline.

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/625...
> Parser and state machine generators?

This is an actual consideration.
I had a couple of job offers from companies in Glasgow in the past. I had a feeling that the local goverment must be subsidizing the tech companies in Scotland. The pay package was comparable to London. Cost of living looked a lot less compared to London. If you are looking into building cash reserves it might be ideal.
One time Guy Steele was speaking at my school, and a professor asked him about why Java did not have tail recursion, and Steele said it was something he'd lobbied for but wasn't able to make it in the final spec.
I'd rather just avoid the problem all together by building apps on an open system like Android.
What Apple Just Did: What if music had tools restrictions and a review process?
"Turbo" fell off PCs sometime in the mid-nineties when all the games which relied on a 4.77MHz clock were well and thoroughly obsolete.

I don't want to see it get back on again, in any form, especially since I do most of my computing mobilely these days and battery life/power consumption is more critical to me than pure raw unbridled performance.
I don't get this at all.

Why does everyone act like the iPhone should be as 'open' as an OS on your computer? Did everyone forget that when the iPhone shipped you couldn't write apps at all? You can't write apps in Erlang for your Zune, your PS3, your cable modem, your microwave, your car or your apartments alarm system... no one cares.

Yes, Apple wants (insists, even, if this ToS becomes final) you to use their tools, their stack, etc for making apps on their consumer electronics device - shocking? No. Annoying? Of course. Don't like it? Go somewhere else!
Paul Irish is a major contributor to a number of OS web projects and a leading evangelist for HTML5 and CSS3. Yeah, like you said, he's a nobody.
It's not just lines of code; Haskell's BDSM-oriented type system is often infuriating, but it's remarkably good at catching bugs at compile time. Haskell programs tend to have a surprisingly small bug rate once you can actually get the things to compile.
Yeah, I said "Fonts are stupid, who needs 'em anyway. Reading is for suckers." That sounds a lot like me, doesn't it?

If you're only comfortable talking to people who agree with you, why are you even here?
Conceded completely: that sucks.
Thanks, that's one of my interests. Just the other day, I was looking at the table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate#Logic_gates (implication is #14 of 16 possible boolean functions).

Sometimes, going back to relay logic helps. For instance,
Clause Shannon's BSTJ Jan.1948 paper, "The Synthesis of Two-Terminal Switching Circuits". Or his 1940 master's thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits
(http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11173)
I for one would be happy with that scenario :)
"Build only the tools you need as the need arises."

This is certainly true, although some form of generic infrastructure is still universally needed: most importantly operations, build, test and deploy tools. These tools allow for ability to iterate much quicker. Much of the foundation for this infrastructure is now available as open source, which means it's not difficult to customize to a start-ups needs (no need to build from scratch): git SCM, puppet/chef/bcfg2 for configuration management, nagios for alerting, capistrano for deployment, hudson CI, etc...

There's also a corollary to this statement: when you need infrastructure, you shouldn't shy away from building it. First-class, productivity increasing tools and infrastructure distinguishes great software companies from average ones. It also requires strong engineering teams and is often indicative of such (great heuristic when deciding to go to a start-up or not: have they done anything beyond reading from a database and outputting to a screen?).

I've seen companies whose solution to infrastructure woes had been to shell for expensive solutions commercial (or very ill fitting open source ones) and then force development teams to use them ("you must build this using Oracle SOA, oh and convert the build system to maven while you're at it; we know it sucks, but we've made this choice"), even when these solutions reduced developer and operations productivity.

On the other hand, I've also seen companies develop own infrastructure when open source solutions met their needs very well, again reducing developer productivity and forcing these systems on engineering teams due to the sunken costs fallacy ("yes, we know there's Protocol Buffers and Thrift, but you must use our custom binary XML parser!").

The reason Google, Amazon and Yahoo succeeded with small teams and stayed alive during a major cash crunch (the dot com crash) is partly due to ability to make effective "build vs. buy" decisions when it came to infrastructure (e.g., using off the shelf RDBMS for "back office" applications like billing and order management, while building their own systems for low latency, high throughput, high scalability applications). Companies that were relying on shelling out for rows of expensive load balancers, Sun E450/E10k servers and Oracle RDBMS licenses went under.
RIM buys QNX (link to actual announcement, not what Techcruch made up)
Interesting story, but I think you misunderstood; The Chinese ISP(s) did not hijack 10% of the internet.

The story states, "Normally [the Chinese ISP] only originates about 40 prefixes, however today for about 15 minutes they originated about ~37,000 unique prefixes ... only about 10% of these prefixes propagated outside of the Chinese network" (Toonk para 1-2.)
Yeah, I got several configurations that sort of toppled to the left, which is a bit confusing.

Interestingly, whether or not the blocks have weight seems to matter in this game, and not in the original tetris.
I'm not suggesting that this is The Technological Achievement of Our Age (TM), only that it's impressive that two days after the posting of a webcomic, that the comic's theme has been actualized. Tetris isn't a hard problem, and this almost certainly used a physics library, but it's impressive and amusing nonetheless.

Maybe I'm easily impressed, but I think it's neat.
TechCrunch get it wrong again. After spectacularly misquoting Kevin Rose with 'one of us has to go' a week ago, can we please stop submitting whatever Arrington has made up today to HN?

Because Blackberry owning QNX for the sheer purposes or getting into automotive is insane.
Robots, Augmented Reality and More – Santander Bank's Building of the Future
I totally agree. It sounds everyone is thinking that just because you can put anything inside your store that's also a good idea. And it definitely is not. I am trying to underline this quite often: http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/507962068/the-role-of-data-m...
The answer is in the word - down/voted/. The existence of votes says nothing about their merit - just that they exist.

If I had to guess its because my comment was short and offered little in the way of justification.
And they call that a launch? What a horrible abuse of the English language.
I half agree. The filesystem is just a device. No running in the background is kinda icky, but that doesn't seem like a computer science kinda thing. (not that multitasking isn't hard, it's just not the first thing that jumps to mind when thinking of simulating things on a turing machine)

Language to language translation, that's core. that's fundamental to CS.

The most popular virtual machine ever is the regular expression interpreter. It's such a, fundamental thing. Nothing to do with a particular set of hardware or instructions, just the concept of interpreting match, split, jmp, and char.

I'm having a real hard time understanding how to write C without unions of tagged structs... Maybe that's allowed? I just don't get where one language ends and another begins. how much can i abuse the macro preprocessor? have you ever seen the bash source with BEGIN END blocks? it's sick.

Of course #define is nothing compared to c++ templates. If i just write scheme as partially applied templates, am i cheating?

it's pretty nucking futz.
No, that's exactly what the terms are saying you _can't_ do. If you used something like GOAL, you wouldn't be starting out in Objective C, and thus you'd be in violation of the new terms.
No recur won't help you: it's only for self tail recursion, not for mutual tail-recursive calls. You can use a trampoline or refactor your code.
This is another gem: “10.4 Press Releases and Other Publicity. You may not issue any press releases or make any other public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple’s express prior written approval, which may be withheld at Apple’s discretion.”
Here's one technique I've had success with on MTurk. I needed 500 descriptions written (250-350 words each) so I created a test hit with just 25 assignments. The reward was $2 with a $1 bonus for excellent work. I got about 10 really good results, the rest were average to terrible. I feel bad about not paying people unless they just didn't follow the instructions or they plagiarized, so I ended up paying everyone. For the 10 excellent results, I paid them the $1 bonus, and in the bonus message, I told them to contact me for more assignments. For the 3 that contacted me, I worked out a flat rate to write 50 at a time.

You can also use Elance to find writers, but these tend to be more expensive.
Also an evangelist on the jQuery Team and co-host of yayquery podcast.
That is precisely the point. They don't need more apps, they need more AAA apps.
Doesn't the microphone pick up the sound of your fingers tapping?
Yeah, cause no one ever agrees to a job unless they get a 90 year guarantee of employment.

And contractors never take on gigs unless there is a we'll keep paying you for 90 years after you finished.

My argument is based on reality. Yours and the Copyright Lobby is based on "magical IP land".
That mouse-tracking canvas stuff in the background of his blog is pretty cool. I didn't notice it until it tracked my mouse pointer from the text to the tab bar.
"Obviously it's just not that important to a significant number of people buying mobile devices."

Probably better to say that multitasking is not important enough to affect people's decision on whether or not to buy an iPhone. I'd be willing to bet it's still quite important to a large number of people. I suspect many will upgrade their 2g/3g just for multitasking.
Legally, Apple can do pretty much what it likes on its own platform and there is nothing anybody can do about it except accept their restrictions or decline to deal with them and hope for the best with commercially viable alternatives.

Someday, though, as Apple's strategy continues to unfold, and as it continues to tighten restrictions on others' ability to develop for each device, to use its dominance of one device (e.g., iPhone) to leverage market share in others (e.g., iPad), and to exert significant control over a range of devices that are nominally independent but actually inter-connected, the idea of "platform" will blur and Apple will likely have to own up to the antitrust police, just as Microsoft did with respect to the desktop OS market.

I am not an antitrust lawyer and the above may in fact be naive. Instinctively, though, the apparent arrogance behind Apple's methods of throwing sharp elbows toward competitors has all the feel of what Microsoft did in the 1990s as it used its desktop OS leverage to favor MS Office/Internet Explorer, etc. and to harm independent software vendors trying to market their apps for the PC market. Ditto for IBM before that. And, while we are at it, though no two people could possibly be so different in so many ways, it would appear that Steve Jobs has drawn his competitive (or anti-competitive) inspiration right from John D. Rockefeller, who was a control freak over his markets and who often used such control in even ruthless ways to stifle competition.

We are nowhere near the stage where Apple can seriously be declared a monopolist in any relevant market but Apple certainly seems bent on pushing the limit as it goes along its path on its quest for hegemony.
I don't agree with the conclusion here. If you're using MonoTouch you should panic. You should be looking at backup plans and asking yourself whether you can use web apps.

Because even if Apple decides not to drop the bomb today they might tomorrow or the next day. You're living on borrowed time if you use MonoTouch. It's not fair but it's true.
> Data sovereignty is a huge deal in Europe. There is no way a US hosting provider can gain a meaningful market share without using local facilities.

That's not obviously true. The US' Safe Harbor scheme is acceptable in the EU for some things.

Google "safe harbor eu data" for general information and "appengine safe harbor eu data" for a specific case.
I don't really understand the level of concern. I'm expecting a kick-ass slate based on a more open platform like Android or Ubuntu to come out in the next year.
I'd say he most interesting thing in neko is the idea of using a full featured simple language as the base for multi-language-same-vm interoperability. Contrast to, for example, parrot, clr.
Ex Reverse engineer (and current iPhone Developer)

Nope, you can tell. Especially if you have the tool itself on your desk when you try to develop a test (as Apple will surely be buyers of). If it doesn't look like Objective C, C++ or C in its call parameters, flow, etc, they'll "know" well enough to hold you up in their queue process until you "send screenshots of the source"

The boilerplate code technique (where C code is generated) can even be detected (although has more false positives).

The Adobe sourced Flash binaries are supposedly trivial to tell, and I'd expect MonoTouch etc to also have that issue.
Awesome meetup and execution, there were so many smart people in the room, I forgot how smart I was :)

Many thanks to Jason_tko for setting this up, great food and drinks and prime location near Shibuya Station. I'm looking forward to the next one!
Linkjacked: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/03/what-...
And, if there is any forum that Apple monitors, it is that developer forum.
It's not going to be a problem until the new agreement comes into effect (which I've read that you have to agree to by the 22nd).
You don't change CEOs because you want a nicer guy.
Firefox Lorentz Emulates Chrome's Stability Features
But Apple's products aren't marketed towards uber-geeks. Sure, they're the ones that initially buy the products, but I guarantee you that my parents will see this shiny new iPad and want one. Then they'll buy one. And they'll use it for recreation.
How about we let the consumer decide which apps are worthy of their cash. It's been going on for many years and this model works pretty good.
Couldn't another motivation be that they don't want to hire app reviewers with fluency in every language under the sun? They have no way of enforcing the Swahili/Milli Vanilli/mud -> C via Oompa Loompa exception, provided that the C is readable and appears to be 'orginally written'.

I see it as a natural outgrowth of the chaperone model that a good number of users have tolerated/embraced.
OK. So it's even easier for Apple.
Unsecured Loan &#8211; a short film by Juliane Block
Apple could drop the bomb on any language at any time (including Objective-C). You're presuming that Apple wants to kill MonoTouch, which I don't think is a foregone conclusion. I personally think that this is all about Flash and MonoTouch has very little to do with it from Apple's standpoint.
The FriendFeed team all came from Google, however, so who knows what infrastructure they built up right away. I think an example company a little further from Google would serve this post better.
Man can anyone have any fun these days without people coming in and saying the gravity is wrong, the arrow keys are broken, the lines don't disappear if you manage to get them all lined up, that its not that impressive this was put together because it's a mere physics simulation, and so on.

Does the high quality of posts on HN tilt us towards criticism instead of praise, even when it's not warranted? Clearly this was not posted for a code review.
> I can understand why they want to do this

I can't. Except as a land- and power grab in the "all your toil are belong to us" category.

I can understand that Apple attempts a strategic move to avoid becoming just another platform for Flash.

I can understand that Apple may want to cut down on the number of submissions, and are assuming that those that go to the trouble of learning Objective-C/C/C++ are the "real professionals", as opposed to those who once spent a weekend learning Flash.

I can understand that Apple wants a minimum quality to their apps and are not happy when the exact same code is cross-compiled to a dozen devices: The code would probably be developed to the smallest common multiple, would look and feel bad and would not play to the iPhone's strength. In short, it would make the iPhone look bad, and users would blame the iPhone and Apple.

I can understand that Apple doesn't want a 10kB app to ship with a 1 GB translation library. (From comments I've seen elsewhere, it appears that this is how the Adobe tool does it.)

Maybe I can even understand that they might want to strengthen their nuclear law arsenal with a poison pill in case someone falls out of favor.

But: Which tools I use and how I use them is not Apple's f...ing business - I don't work for Apple, I'm an independent developer.

From my point of view, Apple has every right to be as anal retentive as they wish regarding what they accept - it is their store and their party.

But Apple has no right to any opinion whatsoever regarding how I create those deliverables - that is my business, and remains so until I submit it.

Whatever Apple is trying to achieve here, outlawing pretty much anything a developer can do to increase productivity is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I can't see this as anything else than a pure power trip ("see how we can make them jump") and a big F... Y.. from Apple to their developers.

Now whether Apple actually intended it to come across that way is another discussion.

But we have no way of knowing either way unless Apple deigns to clarify. And Apple is hardly known for being talkative on controversial issues...

[update: minor spelling, phrasing]
The iPhone's native API is a mix of C and ObjC. Some libraries are written in C++ but have C bindings for the most part.

All of these languages can relatively easily call one another (even on the iPhone). As C++ is a huge deal in the game world, lots of shops just went pretty much straight C++.

XCode is just using clang to analyze/gcc to compile then signing it with Apple signing programs.

If I'm not mistaken, the entire app toolchain was inspired by the "open toolchain" created by the original jailbreakers before there was a native app api.
It seems that it can be summed up as "Neko is pissed that the niche it targeted is totally taken by Lua". The Neko/Lua comparison is mostly about implementation details and unsubstantiated efficiency claims (even before LuaJIT, the proper way to optimize Lua was to write critical stuff in C).

Generally speaking, Lua totally steals the show for all conceptually simple and efficient languages with a mainstream syntax. It makes several hobbyists' projects, including Neko, definitely obsolete.
You're right, it's not, and this is what happens when one company thinks they have a monopoly (whether they do or not ... Apple doesn't, and iPhone's marketshare will continually diminish in favor of Android devices).

Apple did jump on this bandwagon pretty quickly. They're drunk with power already and only have significant share in the mobile market. It usually takes years of domination before companies do something so corrupt and evil.

Anyway, it's certain to come back and bite them. I hope it's a signal to all developers that iPhone isn't worth the trouble -- Android is on the uptake with much more openness, availability and options for consumers, and iPhones will be back down to < 10% of smart phones in a few short years.
More exciting than this: they've figure out how to use a separate layer of memristors grown on top of conventional silicon logic as a reconfigurable routing layer for FPGAs. This can improve their density, power consumption, and speed.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/memristor-cmos-hybrid-using...
That might be true, but the implicit assumption here is that only EA can make AAA games and indie developers just produce crap. That assumption has been demonstrated to be false on both points.
it seems silly for a company like Apple to take a definite position on exactly what “originally written” and “intermediary translation” means

irregardless of one's opinion about section 3.3.1, there's actually nothing silly at all about apple taking a stance on the interpretation of a legal term. definitions are what makes law and legal agreements work, and you can define things however you please---the important thing is making yourself understood. obviously apple does not intend to outlaw thinking before coding. therefore they have implicitly defined their terms accordingly.
Honestly, I could see a judge striking down that clause due to the lack of definition on "originally". This seemingly prevents ports to the iPhone of stuff originally developed on other platforms in say, Java.