skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lua parts of corona are compiled to bytecodes, but they still run on a lua vm on the iphone. As far as Apple changing their minds, the last 24 hours have proven you right.
Stop spreading FUD. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony allow you to use open-source, if BSD/MIT/public-domain or the likes of the licenses are used - that includes - SQLite, Lua, ZLib, and many others.
> The even better news is that support for this is already arriving - Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari have already rolled out HTML 5 support and other browsers won’t be far behind.

If we ignore Internet Explorer, will it disappear?
The article said that WebKit is adopting FireFox's gradient, not the opposite.
Android's notification system is one of the things that really rocks about the platform. It's quick to scan, never gets in your way, and works seamlessly.
> the question for me is more technical = who can bring such a legal challenge?

Presumably Adobe are the most likely candidates who also have serious legal firepower.
I thought this was going to be something interesting about Apple's own MacRuby project, which many people were keen to see on the iPhone, but it's just a weird rant.
Hardware with their software on top of it, and their experience all around. Remove the software on top of it, and you have hardware that is priced much higher than it should be.
Oh, it's not so much a problem of using a free variable by accident--where the compiler can help you out--but of not being able to use proper closures.

I agree that emacs lisp can still be used to productively write software. People put up with much worse things.
Hmm, scaling back on innovation in the desktop OS is a bit unsettling.

The end of the desktop may be here in 5-10 years, but surely there are still interesting things left to do there?

Perhaps the ultimate simplification of computing (iPad and derivatives) is the only thing on Jobs' agenda now, innovation-wise.
I would say that's the central message of my post.
Note that at this point there are disclaimers above and below the piece that were not initially there.
ok. I removed that feature.

This is actually the second version of the same idea -- "an oil and gas search engine".

The first version was called "Hydrocarbon Search": http://hydrocarbon.search.eser.org/

By including delicious-like hierarchical tags, the second version became much more useful.

Problem was, there was no business model.

So, I'm working on the third version now -- its designed to run on the yet-to-be-released GPS-enabled iPad.

So, you can take it out into the field and have it tell you about nearby oil wells, seismic surveys, leaseholds, remote sensing data, surface linears, offshore oil and gas blocks (if you are on a boat, for example), etc...

It's going to be pretty sweet. The business model is to charge for each region seperately: north texas, west texas, east texas, colorado, offshore shallow gulf of mexico, offshore deep-water gulf of mexico, north sea, australia, etc...

And since the data changes daily, it will be a subscription service.

Hopefully, third time is a charm
Clearly, I only write Ruby because I never learned C (or Modula-2 and Java for that matter) first. And I'd never write in a high-level language to deploy to multiple platforms with totally different APIs.

Is this article supposed to be ridiculous ad-hominem, or is it sarcasm?
Maybe Android is the real target:

"Minority platforms are always going to be the biggest beneficiaries of cross-platform development."
Actually, I think an Obj-C REPL may be one of the things that Apple unveils at WWDC.

At least that's the direction they're heading with LLVM, and the head (now gone) of their whole development tools group told me (privately at WWDC a few years back) that a REPL was their ultimate goal.

After all, Obj-C/Cocoa is just Smalltalk with C control structures...
i dunno...
"The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app."

is pretty darn funny.
“Quality should still be the first and foremost concern [for site owners],” Cutts says. “This change affects outliers; we estimate that fewer than 1% of queries will be impacted. If you’re the best resource, you’ll probably still come up.”
Lisp implementations like CLISP and ECL already run on various kinds of devices.

Sorry, that I don't care about running Clojure and/or Android.
Probably because that was the only thing possible at the time.
Is Epsilon Aurigae the first star with a Twitter account?
Fallout from Apple's iPhone OS 4.0 Announcement
Not to mention, you can't ignore a notification so you can look at it later... It's either view or dismiss.
What would be your estimate, how many out of 185 000 apps in App Store were developed using Scheme, Closure, etc.? Also it would be interesting how many are built using Unity3d and likes.

The reason Apple has been successful isn't just that they
have nice hardware, its because of you.

True, but let's not forget: there were no "you" when iPhone was released, but there were the reasons why it was a success. That success brought users, and users made platform interesting for developers when SDK came out. Users are here to stay, and most of the devs too. Heck, iPhone OS 4 and iPad will bring them in droves. Then we have another opportunity opening up: development of HTML5 ads for iAd.

My (maybe incorrect) assumption is, that all this noise on HN is not really representative of the thinking among iPhone developers—I will even go as far as assume that the most vocal ones never did anything for iPhone and were not going to–and will have a little if any effect on general public and their opinion about iPhone/iPad and Apple.
> "If you're in a hurry, there are a lot of really good hamburger places within a short distance from here."

This kind of thing separates different kinds of entrepreneurs very sharply. I'm not necessarily sure one is better than the other, but I know which kind I am. I like opinionated people, companies, and products.
>We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause...

...one iDevice.
Guys, you're all missing the point. Clearly what Apple wants is a virtual machine, implemented in Javascript, capable of running Scheme bytecodes. ;-)
Screenshot from my webmasters tool performance page:

http://skitch.com/swombat/n6fwb/webmaster-tools-site-perform...

I hope that's not the metric they're using for search, because it misrepresents the page loading time massively.
Doctors Remove Explosive From Soldier's Head
Some of the very worst offenders are big sites, eg. cnn.com takes about 2.5 seconds to load close to 100 external resources. Mahalo takes about 2 seconds for about 40 external resources.

As for metrics - as a user, I can say that 10 seconds is too slow. So is a 5M index page that loads in 15 seconds (what the hell do you need 5 megs of data on your index page for? That's like a 5 minute YouTube video). I want to see results within 1-2 seconds of clicking on a page; otherwise, you've broken my train of thought and I need to mentally context-switch each time I visit a page.
http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/11909132752

"Now, work with me people, I want to get "Fuck" on HN front page again: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1254189 .

Touching how he cares about us...
It'd be funny to port this to the Android Market, label it as just another tetris clone, and wait for the reviews to start coming in...
Way to go Zed!
I learned this firsthand when a Facebook app I developed was killed by Facebook eliminating the profile box: http://skitch.com/kadavy/bru5t/facebook-insights-through-a-f...
And best use the Magic 8pad before you build the app, so it'll save you the trouble if your app will be rejected anyway.
Being anticompetitive is not against the law.

Acting anticompetitively to support a monopoly is what is against the law.

If the DOJ is up on Apple in 10 years, it'll be because their policies from today are so successful that they come to absolutely dominate the market.
Being anticompetitive is not against the law.

Acting anticompetitively to support a monopoly is what is against the law.

If the DOJ is up on Apple in 10 years, it'll be because their policies from today are so successful that they come to absolutely dominate the market. In which case, it would have been practically actionable for them not to have served their shareholders by pursuing those policies.
I don't get it. If apps can be paused in the background while remaining in RAM, why not swap them to the SSD when memory runs low? Why quit the app completely and expect the app to manage restore etc.? When the app restarts, it is obviously going to read from the SSD. So why not load the state too automatically? If paused apps still have open threads that called every now and then, I can understand. But it doesn't make sense for apps that don't. I would appreciate if anyone could explain this better.
That's true, however since the original HN thread title was "Adobe Reacts...", which combined with your comment gacw the impression that the post was an Adobe response by an Adobe representative. Of course now the title has been changed (at my suggestion...) which makes this all look a bit silly :).
What We're Doing in Memcached
NSF hides data on scientific literacy re evolution and cosmology
"getting up and running with Ruby on Rails on a Mac takes a metric fuck ton of ass raping"

If by that colorful phrase you mean, "gem install rails". I'm pretty sure we ship a Rails product, and I'm pretty sure that we only issue people Macbooks running OSX, and I'm pretty sure he's wrong about that.
can i code in c? yes.

do i want to? no.
Music Hack Day - San Fransico (May 15-16)
There's nothing obviuos about how "law and legal agreements work".
Possible business opportunity: Objective-C to Java/Android cross-compiler?
Hey John, sorry I missed this comment when you first posted it. @mentions are not counted if they are @replies for the reason you suggest. The repetition of table headers is a good idea, though, thanks!
I'm a big Zed Shaw fan, and I plan on sending a rant to this site, but I have to disagree with him here.

The real issue isn't that they're forcing developers to use C. The real issue is that they're forcing developers to conform to an arbitrary standard.

If people can write apps in Lua or C# that build and run on the phone, and that meet Apple's quality standards to get into the App Store, why should they care? What business is it of Apple's to tell independent iPhone developers how to do their jobs?

So, if I were going to write a rant about this, I'd write one about assholes who are too nosy about how I use the stuff they sold me. That might just be me though.
If nothing else this whole Apple-vs-Flash mess illustrates just HOW much power Apple has at this point due to their closed platform.

It's no wonder that MSFT got hammered so badly by anti-trust - Apple has their own mini-monopoly in full bloom by owning the browser, and core applications on their platform.
The absolute best thing you can do to reduce page loading time is to cut the number of requests the browser has to make. Each request requires a round-trip to the server, with all the latency of a cross-country or cross-continent trip. It requires overhead for TCP/IP and HTTP headers. And most browsers limit concurrent open connections to 2-6, so the bulk of these requests are serialized and block further loading of the page.

Sprite all your images, so that it takes one request to get the whole chrome rather than one per image. If you have multiple JavaScript files, concatenate them together. Same with your CSS. Obviously, gzip them and push them to a CDN if possible, and cache them aggressively. And consider using data: urls to inline images directly into the page: the time saved on requests more than makes up for the added bytes from b64ing the data.
Why would I want to use qwerty?
If you don't want it, I am open to donations...
The GoogleBot's aware of your cruft-filled javascript and stylesheet...
I am most creative in my head, and there is no .NET, AS or Obj-C there.
The Flex SDK is free, you can develop and compile Flash apps and web apps without buying any of their software. And they don't require a $99 fee just to have the opportunity to sell your work, or take 30% of the cut.
From Staying Strong to Fearing the Spiky Button
Rails itself is actually installed by default on Leopard - I am not sure about Snow Leopard though ...
These are also the guys who love Apple. Mostly because DHH loves Apple.

Well today, I am in love with Steve Jobs. He apparently agrees with me that these guys shouldn't be coding.

Flamebait, mostly. Sarcastic ? Not really, sarcasm implies some degree of subtlety.
Internet Explorer has announced HTML5 video support for version 9.
If you're using Cocoatron for your UI, your development time is as long as it takes for you to reimplement the necessary bits of UIKit, plus however long it takes you to make the rest of your application.

The same goes for GNUStep / the GNU ObjC runtime. Both of these projects have been focused on the Mac environment, not iPhone; they have AppKit, not UIKit.

Of course, you could write the core part of your program in ObjC and build against GNUStep/Cocoatron and use that elsewhere. But, at that point, why not just use C/C++ instead and libc/libstdc++ instead? It would be easier and save you a lot of headaches.
If Apple can convince its users that it’s safe to click anything with the iAd logo they will have single handedly changed the perception users have of ads, resulting in more clicks and more money made by both Apple and developers.

Apple could go one better and steal a play from reddit.com:

Let the users vote up/down the ads! Not only would this feedback into pressure to maintain quality, relevance, and ethical practices in the ads, it would be a goldmine of realtime information usable by marketers. In addition, it would reduce the amount of effort and expense it would take for Apple to police the ads to maintain quality.
Amazon patents security camera system with facial recognition
It gives me nothing but S-pieces. I've had one 4-line bar. Hardly fun. Hardly interesting.

I can create a tetris clone that only gives one piece as well.
Well, a lot of people have staked their livelihoods on iPhone/iPad development. Apple's recent moves have indicated that they're not to be trusted, and that they'll do what's right for Apple whether or not that destroys the livelihood of those that build upon the platform. The rational response to that is to diversify so that one company can't arbitrarily shut you down with a ToS change.
It is in their interest to prevent the annoyance of their customers. If the ads are obnoxious, then this significantly degrades the UX. I've stopped using the Keeper app for precisely this reason. It was "free," but I paid in startup wait time and annoyance by the ads.
People should program in C because it is more difficult ? Then people should use punching card for the same reason.

People should program in C because some people programing in ruby are morons ? Great argument ...

I really don't see any valid argument why knowing C is such an enlightening experience (I would argue it is not).
It's not that simple. You have to prepend that command with "sudo" and then, immediately after pressing enter, you have to type your password.
It's great under the hood stuff. I love it :)
I'm sure there are enough morons coding in C also...
update: I changed the Apple script to handle Apple exclusively and added a few more similar greasemonkey scripts here:

http://userscripts.org/users/148096/scripts

(it seems we can't pass arbitrary params to greasemonkey, boo)
That seems an awfully libelous thing to presume.
To carry the philosophy of functional programming to its logical extreme is to deny the existence of time. Some physicists have seriously suggested models that don't include time, but in the milieu of common human existence things happen and stuff has state.

State and time are always going to rear their ugly heads for functional programmers (often in the form of "the i/o problem"). There's just no way around it. This isn't to discount functional programming as a tool in the toolbox, but "philosophically pure" functional programming is an ideal as platonic and unreachable as the math it is derived from.
Alan Kay's biography by Scott Gasch
Copy of http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD
The phrase "straw that broke the camel's back" springs to mind. The anger and fear that you're witnessing has been building for years - since the launch of the App Store, maybe even back to the iPod with its proprietary connector and its proprietary software. For many people, their worst fears about the iPad platform have been confirmed by this TOS change. It might seem irrational, but as a loyal Mac user I'm genuinely worried about what little bombs might be in the TOS for OS 10.7.

The most influential and powerful man in technology has a vision that many of us find appalling. He is imposing that vision as we speak and is being very successful in doing so. After years of rational debate, many of us have come to a conclusion about Jobs's intentions for the computer industry - a conclusion I see as perfectly reasonable and rational. It is no good closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. The developer community needs to air its grievances now, while there is still something to play for.
There's a deeper socio-philosophical aspect to this rant. When you elevate a group of people to the level of Gods and give them totalitarian power, it certainly is funny when they use this newfound power to oppress you. Totalitarianism is possible only when the people behind a dictator allow it to exist. When it comes back to bite you in the backside, it's funny to observe how you react.

Is Apple a totalitarian government with Steve Jobs as it's dictator that was made possible by a decade of Ruby-like fanboyism? I don't know. Maybe, or maybe not. But is it funny to observe how all the Ruby fanboys squirm with this new Apple development? It sure is.
If the Webmaster Tools site performance chart is any indication, that's exactly what they'll do. Let's just hope they'll ensure a large enough sample before using this as a factor in search ranking.

In my experience the Webmaster Tools performance indicator is terribly inaccurate for small sample sizes (relatively unpopular sites).

For one site I have intimate details of, Googlebot visits roughly one page every three minutes. I have every indication (knowledge of what the site is doing, local and distributed load testing, analysis of server logs, etc.) that the site performs consistently and well, but the Site Performance chart on Google's Webmaster Tools is all over the place: anywhere from 0.4 seconds to load (99th percentile) (which is where it happens to be now and is probably slightly overestimating the site performance) to more than 9 seconds to load, oscillating pretty wildly. I'm fairly confident this isn't accurate (unless GA, the only external component on the site, is itself to blame).

On other, more heavily trafficked sites the Web Performance chart seems much closer to reality--in line with our load test results and anecdotal experience, so whatever the issue is it seems to pan out when they take a large enough sample size.

Edit: I see in other comments here that Google is using end-user data from the Toolbar to track this. That's helpful information and may explain the variability I and apparently others have seen. Again, this is a good reason to hope they'll only take this into account for large sample sizes. Otherwise, hope that your customers aren't using dialup connections.
Reddit Page /r/circlejerk Clones 4Chan's Design
The problem with flash memory is that it has a finite number of write cycles, typically around 100,000 though there are techniques that extend that. This is also why the iPhone doesn't utilize a swap file.
Startup At Work
All languages have morons. Remember OSCommerce?
> I'm not sure that's really true.

The majority either voted for it or abstained. If they thought it was a bad law, they should have voted against; that is after all the job they are paid to do.
Really? One problem was the lack of diverse fonts with an ə in it. How does free software solve that? Another was the different programs used different ways to input the ə character. Free software doesn't help there - why would they all use the same entry sequence? A third was that no keyboard supported that common character in the home row. While key remappers exist, what should the new standard layout be?

Had they chosen æ instead then they could have just used Latin-1 and the large number of existing fonts, keyboards, etc. for languages like Danish which already solved the problem.
Is he saying that Apple is doing this because of quality control? As in, programmers who program in C, C++ or OC are better programmers so you get better software?
(When I wrote "solve" I meant "easily solve." Obviously you can use free software to write new fonts. The author clearly stated that a limiting factor was the lack of experience in how to design new fonts, pointing out that the font they developed was meant for 12pt and didn't scale correctly.)
You can be both insane AND within your rights. Nobody is disputing the legality of what Apple is doing. What they are disputing is how stupid/insane/ridiculous Apple is by doing it.

Please feel free to cite some examples of people saying it's illegal for Apple to do this. You won't find any, because that's not the argument at hand. There's a difference between complaining about something and saying that it's illegal.
If it is the same data they use for the ranking factor, doesn't this give me a way to tank my competitor's rankings? All you'd need to do is install the toolbar on browsers using some low bandwidth or throttled internet connection and browse the sites who rank above you.
6! This is a cool game.

"55AA AAB6 AAAA F6AA AA9A AAA2 AAAA AAAA 009A AAAA AAAA A977 0AAA AAAA A755 AAAA AA40 02AA AAAA AAC0 6AAF AAAA AAC2 6D54 30AA AAAA A805 400A AAAA AAB2 9AAA AA9D AAAA AAAB 0000 2AAA AAA5 AAAA AAA0 AAAA AAA3 0FD5 575A AAAA A94A AAAA AB55 6AAA AAAA AAAA 0756 AAAA 9D56 AAAA 752A AA9D 5AAA 9DAA A756 AB5A A0C3 5EA6 AAAA 0D6A AAAB 2AAA A000 03DC AAAA AA0D 555A 80EA BF4A AAA0 02AA AA83 AAAA 81AB DAA0 05D5 6A80 A9AA 36AA 002A AAD5 5AAB 1A80 AAA0 02AA B5A8 0DAA A8"
What's funny here is that in many respects, Apple is treating App Developers as if they are full on Apple employees, and yet without any of the actual benefits of employment.
Congratulations Augusto, best of luck on your next step.
"Infographic"
We're toolmakers, so this just hits too close to home. We can't be completely objective about the idea that any platform vendor wants to ban our favorite tools and demand we use something mediocre (so much so that hardly anyone has willingly chosen it for decades). It just makes it worse that this one might have actually amassed enough power to get away with it.
It's trolling, but it's spot-on trolling.
Yeah of course that's obvious, but is there or is there not a company rule that prohibits employees publicly commenting on company matters like the Adobe guy says?

Edit: I just realized that you're not allowed to comment on it if there is one :)