skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it not possible that all this fuss is over a typo?

> 3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

My thought on what they probably meant:

> 3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link only against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to UnDocumented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

I bet what they're trying to do is prevent intermediate tools from allowing people to "whitewash" private API access.

I say this because the interpretation everyone else is seeing in this clause is obviously a horrible position, and I just don't think that's the intent.

Time will tell!
We implemented hierarchical tags for our oil and gas search engine, having been inspired by delicious: http://www.resourceplay.com

Hierarchical tagging has tremendous practical utility for sifting through large volumes of data.
It's been less than 24 hours since the new agreement was released and I'm already tired of the "programs are initially written in the brain" argument.
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. I'm pointing out that it's simply not true that everybody lies, at least not in the "intentional misrepresentation of facts" sense. Anyone who has studied the life of Gandhi knows that he would've never materially misrepresented a fact to anyone.
I wonder how much of that is a result of European risk aversion and relative economic rigidity, focusing on credentials, legal barriers to competition (as opposed to building a better product), "connections and pedigree". It all sounds like big corporation CYA behaviour where the returns are low and predictable and you just need to scale, rather than an investment with big potential for upside and concomitant appetite for risk.

But like he says, it's only one data point.
That argument doesn't hold water. The web is a completely open platform with zillions of websites "with similar characteristics". And sure there are crappy ones, but there are tons of great ones too.
XKCD "Hell" implemented in flash
I often joke that I prefer having a virus than an antivirus, since very often the antivirus program behaves like a virus itself - symptoms: system slowdown, ocassional crashes and loss of data or antivirus-induced bugs, especially for the all-in-one apps with firewall, etc that make you lose a LOT of time.

I haven't had an antivirus on my home PC for years, I only make the occasional online scan, and carefully monitor the startup apps & services (windows pc)
Chinese ISP (AS23724 CHINANET-IDC-BJ-AP IDC) hijacked 10% of the Internet
Hmm. I changed the theme to classic mode and it seems to work like I expect it to.
> "My programs are originally written in the shower."

Mine too!
A pigeon beats South Africa's slow internet
As a result, by 1940 the Bell System effectively owned most telephone service in the United States, from local and long-distance service to the telephones themselves. This allowed Bell to prohibit their customers from connecting phones not made or sold by Bell to the system without paying fees. For example, if a customer desired a type of phone not leased by the local Bell monopoly, he or she had to purchase the phone at cost, give it to the phone company, then pay a 're-wiring' charge and a monthly lease fee in order to use it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#Government_sanction...
Wufoo is Hiring a Customer Support Specialist
Depends how many strings are attached to it.
Come on, it's easy to make a mess in any language except the straitjacket ones nobody uses. Smalltalk is not as well-integrated with Unix as other languages, and also the syntax and libraries are kind of anal, I think that's what killed it.
I'd like to know what you think about my desktop Java apps, fleitz. Do note that the apps are not fully functional, but that's my shortcomings, not Java's:

http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/jtuils
Ironically I'm sure he would be happy if somebody came out with a cross compiler that would let him build his iPhone applications and have them run natively on Android devices.

Come to think of it... why hasn't anyone done this yet?
This is the reason why Apple still have better quality freeware,shareware applications on Mac than Windows have commersial application.

It was more difficult to program for Mac than for DOS. Hell I can make a decent DOS application. But in my younger years doing the same on Mac was way more troublesum.

Ok I havn't programmed Cocoa just done som experiments, made de calculator and currency converter Apple has as tutorial. And yes it simplifies a lot.

But simple programming comes with a cost in quality. Takin the step from DOS programming to program for Apples System 1-MacOS9 was huge. Eventloops, memoryheaps etc etc. Those who know programming had little problems. Those who made hello word apps had huge problems, aka me.

The greater challange there is to programming the greater programs will de creators do.
It's not really a joke, but it might be a reference to an analogy in Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" (http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html) where he compares Windows, Mac, and Linux to car dealerships.

I haven't read it in a long while but I think the Windows dealership sells crappy and lame station wagons that everyone buys anyways, Linux sells battle tanks that you have to assemble yourself with the help of other battle tank enthusiasts, and Mac sells sleek European sports cars that are hermetically sealed end-to-end; you actually can't physically pop the hood, and you must return to the dealership if you have even minor problems.
Isn't this the troll we fed yesterday?
16 Beautiful Typography Designs
This feels wrong on so many levels...

Basically, they reserve the right to ban any sort of DSL/runtime/engine application architecture. Imagine you are building adventure games (like Money Island). You'd have a game engine and a domain language in which you describe the game. The beauty of this is, you don't have to rewrite the engine every time you finish a story for a game, you just write in your DSL. The same holds for a range of other applications such as travel guides, recipes for cooking... How can you be sure where they draw the line between data and code?

Well, it probably just depends on whether it comes from an Adobe tool or not. Let's see who's next.
But aren't there really three markets here?

First, we have the hardware, and as you say, Apple is certainly in a competitive market with its iPhone offering.

Then, for each type of hardware, we have the software that runs on it. Anyone could write software to run on Apple's hardware, but because Apple lock down the phone and run the only app store in town, they have a de facto monopoly on the supply of software to iPhone users.

Finally, we have software development tools. Again, anyone could write tools to help software developers using Apple's hardware. Indeed, according to recent reports connected to this story, many people have, from Adobe's Flash CS5 team to fans of Haskell.

Again, I'm no lawyer, but I would expect that Apple would be perfectly within its rights to lock down the software that can run on its device, but would not be allowed to use that power to unduly influence the secondary market of how that software can be made.
Rapid, powerful shell aliasing and completion with Lightning
This article misrepresents the facts a little. The basic findings of this article have been well-known to even medical students for at least a decade, if not longer. It's hardly some obscure finding that only a select few specialists know about.
Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252428

Could the same legal argument, in some way, be applied to the new section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement(iDPLA)? Someone with a legal expertise could say something about the matter? If I'm not wrong the iDPLA is a American contract, and also it's not an electronic device, so I'm confused.

This is a real question, I do not want to criticize or praise Apple or the iPhone or whatever else.
Yes, but they are read throughout the year.
Math gender gap uncorrelated with gender equality, parental expectations.
This is an exercise in futility. Apple really needs to give this a rest and relax. Let the market place determine which application experiences are better than others.

Yes that has worked so well for mobile phones so far...
In my experience when working with Java the old Borland JBuilder worked well and was reasonably responsive, Eclipse was a pig no matter how I tweaked it, Netbeans kept me happy.
Multitasking - iPhone OS 4 vs Nokia N900
The introduction of multitasking for iPhone OS was a huge disappointment. Apple has left out most of the functionality that makes multitasking useful on a small screen, and is spreading FUD about the alternatives.
"There are three supported invocations modes :
invokestatic, invokespecial, invokeinterface or
invokevirtual."

So ... Are there four, or is one very much like another?
We went to the moon at the same time that we were in Vietnam.

We stopped going to the moon at the same time that we withdrew from Vietnam.

The only thing that correlates with the end of any interesting manned space program is the growth of government entitlements.

Social Security and Medicaid suck up FAR more of the federal budget than the Department of Defense does.
> They might actually decrease the amount of bureaucracy.

Bureacracy grows, inexhorably.

Care to formulate some sort of bet on how much delta you see in bureaucracy over the next few years?
Thanks for the tip, I hadn't really looked into doing it in GMail. My 'back' was hurting from some archive digging in a classical desktop mail client this past weekend ;-) (though it's a pretty good one, KMail from KDE 3.x)

Some pretty GUI checkboxes would go down nicely - I like what some e-commerce sites have (I think newegg.com is a good example.)
Yup. Allowing Flash-written apps is just encouraging even more shovelware to get into the App Store. You can argue about the benefits of having an open market, but that is categorically not what the App Store is. If you want an open market, you can write for Android.

If you write a Cocoa Touch app, you're targeting the touchscreen-based iPhone OS.

If you build with Flash, you're targeting mouse-based windowed operating systems, and, what the hell, might as well build to iPhone while you're at it!

Banning Flash apps is smart, and I'm glad they're doing it. For C# apps, that's definitely non-ideal, but I can see where they're coming from.
What really scares me is that I completely bought the possibility of this being real.

EDIT: Out of curiosity, could someone explain why this was dead'd?
Research In Motion buys QNX
Though it didn't become 'standard', the cross-platform aspect of Java's AWT/Swing APIs definitely gave it an early boost in uptake. I would also agree with the inevitable disagreement, that Java truly found its niche server-side (cross-platform support probably helped there too).
This is a tech that was built a long time ago and still hasn't found a use. Also, my boss thinks they're the next computer revolution. This is a man who believes that the asteroid Apophis will probably hit the earth in 2036 and that the Sun is part of a binary system with another star within the Oort cloud. So, I'm pretty sure Memristors are not going anywhere.
Researchers Shed Light on Ancient Assyrian Tablets
Successful companies focus on Responsibilities instead of Rights
What you should know about Angel Investors and Convertible Notes
Apple lately has been reminding me of what they were supposedly railing about in that 1984 commercial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
Is Twitter going to pull a bait-and-switch on developers?
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. See Amazon's ec2-eu-west.

That means losing the advantage of a weak dollar, since you'll be paying a lot of bills in the local currency.
The point is that having some kind of reason for the clock's time in advertisements elicited all kinds of oohs and ahhs from the Apple fanboy crowd, "wow, no wonder everything Apple puts out is made out of unicorn farts, if they are this careful about this kind of insignificant detail."

And yet typography, one of Apple's most important differentiators, the one that put them on the map, that sustained the company for years among the graphic artist and desktop publishing industry, and probably one of the most important reasons the company is around today and didn't die off in the 90's, is in shambles on theses platforms. In other words, Apple cares about the appearance of attention to detail without actually caring about the actual substance. And as the blog post notes, Microsoft of all companies has actually taken some time and effort to improve their typography. Sure, Microsoft's font efforts are not nearly up to Apple's old standards, but then again, neither is Apple (as we see).

So long as people like yourself continue to overlook these kinds of differentiators, Apple will continue to de-emphasize them in their development efforts and instead appeal to the people who care about things being shiny than actually well thought out.

They may as well just fire the entire development staff and release a block of pyrite and sell it for $1200 at Best Buy. It will be released at a keynote, with a list of bulleted features. The inability to do anything with it will be one of those bullets. Fanboy blogs will carry on slavishly for years about how Apple carefully designed their pyrite product to fit the lifestyles of real people like them. And that the missing features, like actually doing anything, are the result of careful design activities by Jonathan Ive. Breathless commercials touting the shape of the block, how it just "fits" in the palm of your hand and was polished to a perfect shine by teams of Iraqi orphans, and how Jonathan Ive had a revelation and realized that it "should just be all bezel" will air during the Superbowl and the Olympics, "iPyrite, think shiny."

It will be followed a year later with a 50% price reduction and a new version at $1400, in an ever so slightly differently shaped block, and have a dazzler light attachment you can buy at the Apple store for $39.99. It'll be called the iPyrite 2GS. Some people will try to "jailbreak" their iPyrites by just shooting themselves up directly with heroin and bleach. But Apple will spend %20-30 of their revenue funding police departments and counter drug authorities to lock those people up.

Fanboy blogs will carry on asking questions like why anybody would want to jailbreak their iPyrite. It's clearly the best product in the mineral class. Jailbreaking will just ruin Apple's carefully designed user experience ecosystem and make Jonathan Ive (yes you have to say his full name every time) cry.
I'm happy that the refund chain will go all the way back to Sony. If a lot of people start requesting the refund now, it might suddenly be a good business decision for them to reenable otheros.
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Does Randall realize the power he has? If he wants something to be made or done, all he has to do is post a drawing of his idea, and someone brings it to life.
One note on the Fred Wilson quote:

> Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.

Part of why the Twitter platform is so rich with services is that the company didn't insist on filling in all the holes itself. The more open model they followed is precisely what allowed such creativity in the services that run on top of the platform.
I wonder if they'd be able to get around that with some kind of legal promise.

Also, that's primarily going to affect European companies storing their data on US servers, right? US companies offering services where Europeans go and sign up for them is more of a caveat emptor situation, I think.
It's a pretty fun little toy. More amazing though, is just how quickly this was hacked together. The comic was what, two days ago?

Incredible.
While I'm really glad to see Java (the language) slowly evolving in a positive direction, and it might bring me some joy at work if/when we switch to 7, I can't imagine starting new projects in Java anymore if I had my way. Once you've been exposed to the much nicer languages thriving on the JVM now, it's hard to get excited about Java anymore.

I mean, I can't see this sort of thing as being very enjoyable to write all the time.

JComboBox combo = new JComboBox();

MethodHandle handle = MethodHandles.lookup().findVirtual(JComboBox.class, "setModel", MethodType.make(void.class, ComboBoxModel.class));

handle.invoke(combo, new CustomComboModel());
He should probably draw a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, then..

(If you don't know about the LFTR, check out this talk by Kirk Sorensen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8)
I'm guessing invokeinterface is a synonym for invokevirtual.
What I wonder is how much abuse can Adobe take from Apple. First they developed a version of Flash for the iPhone. I'm sure that cost them a pretty penny. Next they developed the CS5 iPhone packager thing and I'm sure that cost even more. Each time they do this and Apple rejects their product, they simply lose money. Google did the same thing with Latitude and Google Voice. Anybody else developed something for the iPhone that got completely rejected?
Isn't the App Store already the definition of shovelware? There are some great apps but the vast majority are awful.
Perhaps the right way to protest here would be to write a killer app which everybody has to have, and release it with a EULA requiring that it be installed via a third-party vector involving rooting the machine.
Neko -> Haxe -> Cool flash stuff

Related: http://ncannasse.fr/blog/physaxe

[edit: oops, I think Haxe doesn't need Neko if you're targetting Flash]
This investor was an American (and a red-meat eating, cigar smoking, boot wearing Republican too, for what it's worth).
how is neko compared to lua today?
Until an iPhone can provide the tactile satisfaction of pressing buttons or the current generation of gamers prefers a touch interface, IMO, no. Pardon the pun, but iPhone vs. Nintendo gaming is like comparing Apples to Oranges.
I'll probably buy it because I already use IntelliJ for Java, Clojure, Scala, and some JRuby. I also use Rubymine for about 20% of my Ruby development. My Python skills are weak, so a really good Python IDE with auto-completion, turn-key appengine development, etc. would be helpful to me.
Totally different?
IIRC, Neko is based on Ocaml, which is on the other side of the spectrum from dynamic languages like Lua...

So... what do you mean?
In US law, I'd think the more relevant precedent would be US vs. Microsoft. Judge Jackson wrote a lengthy decision procedure for when a platform is a monopoly.

Microsoft's position was that Windows is not a monopoly, because customers had the option of buying a Macintosh instead of a PC. Jackson threw that argument out (and Posner let that opinion stand in appeal, IIRC).

I think this is the relevant bit.
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm#ii

IANAL.
Gravity needs to be just a little stronger.
Sorry about that, I misread. Anyway, given the recent technological breakthroughs in terms of sense of humour, I absolutely trust the brainy researchers who will read this article in 15 years to understand that it's an April Fools.
I have no professional insights, just empirical observations:

Everyone of us who pulled an all nighter knows that you feel really good at some point in the morning.

But also every one of us who ever was around a person with sleep deprivation knows that this other one was very likely grumpy and miserable for the rest of the day.

As far as I understand it, the euphoria is induced by an increase in the dopamine levels, leading to an inhibition of the ACC. But for all I know depression is related to serotonin imbalance which would kick in as soon as the dopamine rush is gone.

Again, I am no professional, just tell me if I am mistaken.
Only if its good and relatively easy to do.
Then reject apps with crappy user experiences. If this takes out all Flash derived apps, why the superfluous language specifically banning apps written in anything other than Objective C?
Just a cutesy way I tried of saying Adobe might not cannabalize Flash for HTML5.
http://nekovm.org/lua
Irony: TODAY's woot is a digital picture frame with a photograph of someone looking absolutely miserable.
The first one is free, that's the point!
http://nekovm.org/lua

> Lua is maybe the Virtual Machine that is the most similar to Neko in terms of goals, architecture and performances, it is interesting to compare the choices that the two VM are doing.
A Non-Early Adopter Tests the iPad, Pronounces It Lckig=ng (Typed on an iPad)
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Only in the sense that it draws attention to the utter nonsense and foolishness of the "Objective C only" clause in the iPhone developers agreement.
UX is subjective, they can't reject apps on that basis. Whether it's written using Objective-C or another language, however, is not.

And I'm not defending Apple, here. I don't like where they're headed. But I find this whole 'the program was written in my brain' thing ridiculous.
Add in a M-21 (predecessor, nearly the same but built to launch an unmanned drone) plus the cockpit of an SR-71 at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, WA. I enjoyed seeing this last year, remembering the narrative. I could almost see the fuel dripping from the plane!
Someone want to recap, so I don't have to pay 39.95 to read my morning news?
thanks but I already knew that wiki. I wonder what the situation is TODAY, especially after LuaJIT2 came out.
I see Hell is located in a low-g environment
I think the blocks need to be sticky, it might actually be playable if the blocks would stop bouncing around.
Agreed. In this case, a more "inflammatory" headline to this article might have conveyed the more interesting aspect of the story that you noted: "Amazon agrees PS3 no longer fit for purpose; will bill Sony for chargebacks" or something along those lines.
I think these dynamic features are actually intended for alternative JVM languages.

If they're exposed via the Java reflection API at all, it's incidental to their actual purpose.
Which is part of the reason that it is great Amazon is doing this. They can afford the rebates and more importantly, they can afford to put pressure on Sony.
How is it ridiculous?

'Compilers' back before automatic compilation, were humans. Technological progress lead us to swap a computer for the human compiler pretty early on.

Maybe we'll see people getting jobs as flash 'compilers' in the near future due to this.