skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're totally not similarly priced. A friend and I went to 5 Guys last year, and got pretty much the same order as we'd get at McDonald's or Wendy's (biggest burger, biggest fries, biggest drink meal), and not only was the food not better (though there was more of it), two orders of the largest size meal cost more than $20. It was insanely expensive.
Farmageddon makes me think of that scene in Monty Python's "Holy Grail" movie where the French invaders catapult lifestock on King Arthur's party ;-)
I don't think it necessarily matters how trivial the game is. If the game is more complex, then it is just a matter of requiring more time to do the port. Canabalt took just under two weeks to port. Something like Braid would likely take significantly longer.
Maybe you should join the SF Ruby meetup.com mailing list. Half the email traffic comes from recruiters posting and developers ridiculing them.
Doesn't it mean that you have to pay for imgur premium account so they wouldn't (possibly) delete your image after some period of time when they are not viewed? (Of course, maybe they are viewed all the time, and after all, it's not that much money and quite useful anyway.)
My point is that their agenda, while useful to know, mean nothing in the long run, because as long as that clause is active, Apple has the ability to enforce it capriciously.

Whether or not they "mean" things like PhoneGap are dead, etc., is irrelevant. The ability to kill any app because of its original source language is the important thing.
The appstore policy hasn't really changed
Nice, especially in view of Apple's new TOS for the iPhone SDK.

Want to avoid being am iPhone sharecopper? Stick with web apps and HTML(5)+Javascript clients that run on multiple small devices.
Interface Builder?
Contributing To Your Field
I think this person will regret writing this post tomorrow, if not sooner. This is akin to having an emotional reaction to someone's email and returning an immediate flame email, later feeling like a complete jerk. But this is on a much grander scale, writing a blog post as an official representative of an entire company. Very poor taste.

Though I'm enjoying the show quite a lot!!!
It's funny: I never really noticed this as a problem except in the past two weeks or so. April Fools' Day, the iPad release, and Apple changing it's TOS has created the perfect storm of "categorical dupes". Do you think this is a trend likely to continue, or merely a somewhat frustrating blip on the submission style radar?
That's like the difference between enterprise and small business sales. Apple could in no way afford to offer that level of handholding to all its tens of thousands of app store developers under the current arrangement.

I'm under the impression that the bigger name developers do have more contact, and if you have the budget to develop something big, you probably have access to them as well. If this is not the case, this is clearly something they should do, because otherwise it will stunt the development of big software projects on their hardware.
I clarified my comment -- there is a distinction between an official adobe blog, and a blog by an official representative of Adobe.
Don't feel bad. What really made it sink in for me was when someone referred to "the myth" that most startups fail!

pg immediately corrected him, but sometimes I still wonder how pervasive the idea is that most startups will make it big.
EA being the size they are will presumably have some negotiating power to be allowed to use Lua. More to the point, EA probably can check with Apple in advance if they'd allow a particular game, just as it's done on other game consoles. You don't have to worry about EA, you have to worry about the thousands of little developers who don't have the direct wire to Jobs's desk. Developing for the iPhone is becoming a liability, not an investment.
Working on a startup is probably not the most interesting way you could spend your time, but it will be at least as interesting as getting a job as a developer at an existing company in the same field. So if that is the alternative and you're young enough to bear the financial risk, it makes sense to try.
I wish we could all be as open as Adobe.

Please do not reply to this. Especially if you do not agree.
There is some debate about whether the Adobe/Macromedia Flash EULA can be considered binding, but Gnash developers prefer to avoid the issue by not installing Adobe/Macromedia tools, and thereby not accepting the EULA. We can use tools like Ming to generate Flash testcases, and we rely on the efforts of volunteers to run our testcases on commercial software and report the result.

http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula
http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/64

Other implementations do exist, but Adobe has taken action to hamper those efforts.

EDIT: Other people can argue for as long as they like about what is considered hampering, but Adobe isn't exactly free and open with flash.
$ wget -q -O - http://www.usdebtclock.org | grep "\<embed\>" | wc -l
92

Goodness.

edit: Check out their about page, too: http://www.usdebtclock.org/about.html
Right but I'm assuming that these 3rd party tools are actually converting code to Objective-C / C / C++ and then compiling...is that right?
If this were true, then there would be no problem with languages that compile to C or Obj-C or whatever, which were then properly compiled by Apple's tools. There would be no call for the "Original Language" wording, it could simply say "all apps must be compiled from X" and that would be that.
OMG. The stupid hurts.
An honest and justified gripe is fine with me; I even respect people for not being afraid to accuse in such a case, but I guess they should consider people who value decorum higher, as you do.
New iPhone Dev Agreement Bans the Use of Third-Party Analytics and Services
I was planning to get a developer account and an iPad, and then try to write apps using Scheme (or maybe other tools that use languages that are, shall we say, more flexible than Objective-C)... I am now glad that I didn't do that yet; these recent developments make iPhone/iPad development a lot less attractive to me.
its a symbiotic relationship though. If developers do not make any more apps, they will be forced to make changes.
I think what you mean is "productive" not "creative." If thats what you mean, I am with you. Obviously the more abstracted out low level details are, the more easier it is to churn out code, thus making you more productive.

But, given that you are using the same APIs (or using wrappers that utilize the same API, which is the same thing), I fail to see how you can do things differently in Scheme or some other language that you couldn't do in objective-c.
How does Apple get away with such monopolistic behaviour, if Microsoft had an app store would antitrust lawsuits prevail?
Would you recommend, based on your experience, that foreign founders follow this post written by startuplawyer to register a company - http://thestartuplawyer.com/startup-issues/if-i-launched-a-s... ?

Do you have links to the forms that your founders fill out, online? It sometimes can be difficult to wade through all the third-party service providers that want you to use their service instead of going directly to the state.

Forgive me if I am asking so many questions, but I know it might seem trivial to you guys, because you do it so much, but when I was investigating it for myself I was confronted with the question of having an agent based in Delaware. Do I want a local agent? If so, who do I use? Why do I want an agent? Does everybody that registers in Delaware require an agent? Am I better off contacting an attorney in Delaware that can act like an agent for me? What will an agent do? Do I need them to do anything specific, like file yearly returns for me (or is that just an 'upsell')?

I know it might be asking much, but perhaps if you could just spell it out (as dumb as it may sound to you) exactly how your founders setup their companies (and the reasoning behind it), it would help clear up a lot of questions I (and am sure many others) have.

I understand about the merchant account and anything you don't handle. Just curious about what you guys do handle.

Thanks for even responding.
"It is a system in which the top 10% of earners -- households making an average of $366,400 in 2006 -- paid about 73% of the income taxes collected by the federal government."

And yet we keep hearing about how the rich get out of paying taxes.
But if you don't want to jailbreak your phone there aren't many other stores to choose from for the iPhone, are there?
I hope the Google bot doesn't come along and measure my site's speed by hitting one page when cache is empty.
I played for a couple of minutes, and I already want to punch someone.

Really cool though!
I didn't want to imply these are the only groups, or that there's no overlap...
There probably isn't anything Apple can do to prevent people implementing cross compilers from i{pad,phone}-legal code to other platforms.

So this is merely offensive and insulting to programmers, and can't create any lasting competitive advantage.
I love 5 Guys fries but reading about Thrashers reminds me of the true best fries in the world.. if only it wasn't a six hour drive from here.
If it's the only store in the town, there's plenty of harm.
I wonder if the restrictions on language used in development will also apply to their new ad program?
Or you could say the China Study is vegetarian FUD backed by other lobbies (soy, grains, corn, etc).

By the way, nothing wrong with fat in our diets, unless is tran-fats or excess omega 6 PUFAs (typically seed oils). Please read Gary Taubes also.
This post encouraged me to take a look at Google Webmaster Tools -> Labs -> Site Performance for my site. It says 4.3 seconds average load time, "slower than 63% of all sites", and the graph since November shows tremendous variability, varying between 2-6 seconds. I don't understand where 4.3 seconds comes from (even with an empty cache, it's maybe 1.6 seconds to onLoad), unless they're using some old ISDN line or something. And I don't know where the variability over time is coming from, with a lightly loaded server that hasn't changed much in that time.

Is anyone else having similar weirdness with their Site Performance graphs?
You're right.

But you can't look at each bite at the apple independently, either.

A failed startup might very well be a better experience than three years at a great company.

But two consecutive failed startups is probably not better than six years at a great company, if you take the company job as seriously as startup founders supposedly do. After a couple years at a great company, an A-player is going to get much more interesting work.

I'm also not trying to argue against starting companies. Starting a company is a great idea. I just think you should be making money from day one, get yourself to a place where you can live comfortably with your startup, and not bank your time on a tiny chance of getting acquired. Time is precious, and 20-year-olds suck at accounting for it.
Maybe we don't, but clearly Apple does.
Adobe: “Go Screw Yourself Apple”
That part was about allowing Mac clones and having too long line of the products. Exactly the things Jobs abolished.
You are right. There's really no way they can reliably detect where the code came from. In fact, it should be pretty difficult to generally, but unfortunately, this clause will scare off business built around this.

There's also PreScheme, which is one of my favorites. It's subset of Scheme which simply generates a few C functions that use a bunch of stack variables and gotos without any runtime.
My "I-also-think-Apple-is-sauced" post
People always approach this problem from the seller's side, presumably because the seller is more aware of how much money goes to the agent. But the real issue is that people use an agent to buy their home, and agents won't show private sales. The MLS only matters because realtors exclusively show homes in the MLS. If private sellers had access to the MLS, realtors would probably find another way to avoid showing those homes and preserve their monopoly.

To attack the realtors, you need to do two things. First, sellers have to be willing to share the savings with unagented buyers. There's no incentive for buyers to tackle the process alone if they're stuck paying market price. Second, there needs to be a fixed price service for home buyers. There are plenty of fixed price agencies for sellers, but nothing for buyers.
Interestingly, they appear to count loading times of third party stuff (which doesn't affect the display of the main body of content, e.g. the blog post body) as part of the site load time.

This means that if you use Disqus and a few badges from Reddit and the like, even if you set them up so that they don't slow down your main content, Google will hold it against you. That's a little... not great.
I'm not so sure. They were content to let the whole iPhone NDA thing fester for months.
Be that as it may, I said nothing about the blog being Adobes official blog, only that I was surprised by license and freedom they give to their rep.
No, that's like Sony telling you that you have to use their development garden, which, the last time I looked into console development, they did...

I'm pretty sure the agreement says nothing about what kind of keyboard you should use :) But if Apple wanted to specify that in their license, that's entirely within their rights.
Interview with Jon Yongfook Cockle, Creator of Peashoot and Seashell
Not in the short run. There is obviously no shortage of developers (who are willing the use the mandated languages) or apps. But I do think they may regret this eventually.

By excluding languages like Scheme, and many others, they are excluding developers who prefer these languages. One could argue that these developers are among the smarter and more creative ones. So, when competitors get their act together, and come out with a similar device that doesn't suck, and an app store alternative that does not have these restrictions, then this is where such developers will go.

Essentially, they're providing the competition with a sizable pool of (often disgruntled) developers. There is no real competition right now, but they're making it more likely that there will be, in a year or two.

Anyway, just my $0.99... :-)
> Jobs wanted web apps. Developers balked. Web apps would have been cross-platform (at least with Android and webOS). Apple responded to developers and now they've seen their chance to lock users and developers to their system.

Jobs didn't want web apps, he wanted no apps. Web apps would have been more than useful given the right js APIs. It wouldn't have done a thing for games, but there's a great deal of stuff you could technically build in html + js if it were a true first class development environment.
Why is C better for the UI then clojure?
I was tempted to upvote this one just because it wasn't about the changes to the iPhone SDK agreement.
Perhaps a nitpick, but

>So, firstly, the quality of games won't change at all, and secondly, it's relatively easy to port a game from the iPhone to a different platform. The only thing they are restricting is using better, more productive tools to create games.

He kind of contradicts himself there. He points out that cross-compiling makes it relatively easy to port the iPhone game to a different platform, and then says all Apple is doing is preventing people from using more powerful tools. But they are also preventing people from doing the aforementioned porting. It seems to me that when people shout, "Hey, now we won't be able to easily port our apps and games to another platform!" Apple will just say, "Exactly."
I don't think people care about the technical difference. In practical terms, if you are an "official representative", you should keep your personal views to yourself, as people will assume your "view" is influenced by the company that pays your salary.
Quite possibly the lamest blog post ever from an Adobe employee - and there have been a good deal already.

I personally reason entirely with Apple's choice. I understand every bit of it (and it's not just my fervent zeal of dislike for the obese, sluggish behemoth that Flash has become.)
Mandatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/724/
I'm not a developer but I have some casual interest in the topic. Aren't iPhone apps compiled to LLVM? Doesn't LLVM include some of these things you mention? or am I way off base?
Revenge of the Nerds: How Barbie Got Her Geek On
"Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions of Americans, but for nearly half of U.S. households, it's simply somebody else's problem."

And that, my friends, is the crux of the problem. Simply too many Americans are no longer stakeholders in the financial well being of this country because they aren't paying. If you are pulling in a paycheck you simply need to pay something, anything, in income taxes as long as others do. If income taxes are repealed in favor of another system then that's another story.

What will happen when the Atlas shrugs?
As I understood, the developers will access the iAd network via APIs. Is the APIs available for different ad networks or only iAd.

This is interesting because the thing where this is not clear, it's the fact that Jobs said you can use any ad serving network. Bur if the APIs are available only for the iAd, and since you are stack with Apple approval process (and the language restrictions) you can't use 3rd party technology (eg. embedding Flash ads), and as a result you can't use any other network.
> And yet we keep hearing about how the rich get out of paying taxes.

They'll say that you're not counting payroll taxes, notably SS. They'll complain about the cap.

Then I'll point out that benefits are capped too. The reason is that SS advocates used to think that SS shouldn't be paying $500k/year to Ross Perot. They set up SS with a contributions cap because they wanted rich people to ignore it, which they won't if they're paying 15% and not getting anything in return.

I'll close by noting that the folks who hit the cap get much lower return on their "investment" than do folks who make (and contribute) less.
I don't know. I've just seen people complaining about this a lot recently, so when I thought of a possible solution I thought I'd throw it out there.
It doesn't look silly when taken in context with the rest of their strategy of controlling the entire toolchain to maintain consistency across apps. That strategy becomes harder when everyone goes off and uses different tools.

It's the same strategy that they've always used with their software/hardware combination, which has worked beautifully in the case of the mac.
You appear to be arguing that we shouldn't complain that Apple's closed platform is obnoxious, or hate Steve Jobs for being an anti-programmer jerk, or encourage people to avoid Apple. Nobody said that some existing legal or moral authority should force Apple to treat us nice.
Especially compared to the restrictive, 1984-style Apple employees. Apple has become big brother.
> They are simply trying to tie their developer community to their platform.

No, they are trying to tie the _consumer_ to their platform. They couldn't care less about developers outside them providing consumers a reason to buy their product. (and as a source of revenue.)

Apple _does_ want to control what _media_ can be played on their platform. And they way to control that is to control what developers can do. Notice there is no VLC on the iPhone? No Mplayer? No open codecs what-so-ever. (and certainly no FLASH...) At some point expect there to be a (surprise!!!) clamp down on h264 encoding, enforced by patents and licenses.
Good work, a4agarwal & Co. I just used the new editor to post http://siculars.posterous.com/my-i-also-think-apple-is-sauce.... One suggestion I would make would be to update the "Post" button to read "Update Post" or something like that when you are updating a post.
Why does that really matter? If I sold chocolate covered bagels, and I was the only chocolate covered bagel store in town, do I have to serve you?

Or, if you wanted to open your own chocolate covered bagel store in the only mall within 30 miles, does the mall operator have to lease you space?

As a developer, I find the situation painful, but I think Apple views the appstore as their mall, and they want to control the image of their mall by holding the store keepers to a certain standard in order to promote a certain customer experience.
Aren't iPhone apps compiled to LLVM?

No, they're compiled to ARM Mach-O binaries.
I was really disappointed to find this isn't a site about start ups in Canada.
"Disclaimer -- This is my personal blog. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. "
Haha that's one way to deal with browser differences...
Is it OK for them to be using the Great Seal as a logo?
One possible partial solution would be for HN to check submitted URLs for "majority matches" (say, 90% similar) and a check against submission titles over the last 48 hours, then offer the submitter an option to simply up-vote an existing story instead of submitting a brand new duplicate. If submitted pages were also scraped for headings and keywords, that could be used to provide similar matches as well.
Javocalypse
Very true. They are good as a tool to make a persuasive argument to a neutral audience, but they don't hold up very well to an antagonistic audience.
Wow... It's actually really nice to see how well the Five Guys franchise is doing. I remember going to one often senior year of high school in Northern VA. That would be like... 8-9 years ago.

It's really crazy because I drove around my old high school the other day and a Five Guys opened in a shopping center right next to it.
They still teach realtime systems with this version of QNX at my old university (University of New Brunswick). We also use it to drive a National Instruments DAC/ADC board.

Funny I was just telling a friend about QNX today.
Compared to Job's statements, or Apple's "God screw yourself developers." I think it's toned down. And after what Apple has pulled, yes.
I'm sure they've learnt their lesson from last time. We all know how that went. lol..
This is a very user-friendly policy.

P.S. There is something to think about in that the first time I tried to post this comment, there was a problem loading the page. HN is actually one of the slowest sites I put up with--great quality is worth the wait, but not the quality of most websites.
Stonebraker on CAP Theorem and Databases
While I agree that Apple isn't forcing developers onto the Mac from a financial perspective, I think it's in their best interest to promote it from a holistic one.

Indie Mac developers think a little differently than any other, and it's a direct result of the influence from Apple's UX aesthetic. There is immense respect for the conventions that have been established, and any feature that breaks away from them better have a damn good reason. I just can't see a developer that chooses Windows XP as their main operating system completely understanding the platform and putting the same amount of care into their work.
I know i will get downmodded for saying this, but the blog entry is from 2008 and and the faq you linked to speaks only of a debatable possibility of possible restrictions in Adobe's then EULA.

See http://www.openscreenproject.org/about/faq.html to see how much Adobe has opened up since.

Also, it is worth noting that Adobe has never gone after these open source swf player projects.While i agree that Adobe is not as open as it should be, i dont see any reason not to appreciate a good gesture from a powerful company.
l-tris has a hardmode which is a similar idea... although it plays like tetris rather than a logic puzzle.
He Conquered the Conjecture
You're missing the point. Just because it's legally within Apple's rights to do this, doesn't mean that we have to be happy about it.