skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Patents and copyrights are artificial government grants making the intangible tangible. It's the artificialness that bothers me.

Our culture has come to think ideas are real like real estate. But they are not. They are intangible, and so is information. This feels an awful lot like the meme "ideas are cheap; execution is everything".

As all media become more like raw information--as the cost of transmission and storage of media falls--it will act more like ideas. All that will be left is the government grant to exclusive rights. Thus IP holders lobby governments for larger and larger hammers to beat down infringement.

And anyway, the point of limited IP terms is to allow derivative works for the greater good. I don't hear this greater good argument often enough.

The system is flawed. Perhaps short copyright terms as the article suggests are more workable as the information will be fresh. It may also be the only realistic solution when the time comes that infringement is effectively free (as in beer).
How Mozilla's JavaScript team tracks its progress
Seaside is pretty slick. Cincom's WebVelocity even more so. I'd stay with open licensing, though.

If the new projects work out, we will be using Seaside.
"A person who is a creator will build and write things regardless of the copyright protections."

That's an interesting thought, but almost certainly not true. Some forms of creation require a large amount of time and effort. Some people will squeeze in time around their jobs and friends and families no matter what so that they can create. Other people will not.

But even if you're right, I want some creative people to be able to create full time. If I can get twice the output from Neal Stephenson or John Darnielle or Linus Torvalds because they don't have to work a separate day job, that is a world I want to promote. This doesn't mean that copyrights should be defined the way they are, or that copyrights are even the way to achieve this world, but don't act like economic compensation for creativity isn't useful.
Dear Apple: The iPhone deserves better SDK terms
Is Jobs taking these actions to prevent the commoditization of his platform? I refer the reader back to the Joel Article reposted a few days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250958

If apps are portable from iphone to droid the phones step closer to being just another commodity portable device.
The thing is, none of them at TechCrunch are even slightly technical themselves. They don't actually know what any of these companies do, names mean or products are. You could tell them RIM had bought Clarky Cat from the Boz-boz to compete with Apple's "Yellow Bentine" project and they'd print it.
The iPhone is POSIX, but not to you as the developer. Porting Torque to the iPhone will have to be done by GarageGames, not by you - even if you pull it off it will certainly be violating a laundry list of App Store rules.
Spotlight on Bank Failures in America (Infographic)
We are iPad. Resistance is (not) futile
I passionately dislike Java as your average C programmer, but this post is pure trolling.

Apple was always about the design first and technology second. And Google always had these in reverse. So their platforms appeal to different types of developers and it is quite natural that Android apps are produced (in a Hollywood sense of the word) by the tech people and IPhone apps are produced by the designers. Hence the obvious appearance and visual polish difference between two.
Even though it's insane all developers will suck it up as Apple has the power (boat load of users) and developers want to make money. They'll suck it up and keep developing what they are developing.

From Apple point of view this makes perfects sense, they are not loosing anything. They know as soon as they can keep the end-users happy developers will come. That what has been happening and it'll keep that until someone else comes up with a better marketing + product and take over a big chunk of the market. And Android is not ready for that kind of action yet.
If you keep rotating a piece while holding left or right, the piece escapes hell.
Nearly every major game engine out there uses scripting for actual game logic - it decouples the engine from game code, which is desirable (no rebuilds to alter basic game behavior, for example, enabling faster turnarounds and prototyping).

Hell, the most popular game engine of our day (Unreal) uses its own proprietary JavaScript-like language for nearly all game code. Other engines like Gamebryo leverage Lua extensively - to the benefit of both developers as well as consumers, who can modify the game (not an iPhone advantage, but still).
In my opinion, this is more of an attack piece disguised as a "review" than an actual review, for the reasons you cite. The typo doesn't even make sense! If you look at the iPad keyboard, there's no way to hit the equals sign, unless you do two separate mode-shifts. Very suspicious.

The key closest to equals is even two columns over and two rows up from the nearest letter in Lacking on the iPad keyboard. I can't easily imagine how that happened.
you're preaching to the choir already. I'm pretty sure we're all in agreement on how sucky the Flash runtime is already.
Microsoft, as all companies would, is going to use their successful product(s) to push other products that they create. They had 95%+ of the OS market and simply wanted to push the use of their browser to those individuals. That doesn't and never has seemed like a dirty tactic to me. Apple pushes its own products over its competitors on the iPhone. You won't see Opera on the default dock bar on the iPhone anytime soon...it may never even be approved to be in the app store. Microsoft may have made it tough for their competition (and I'm sure they crossed the line many times as you mention) but they certainly aren't telling the folks at Mozilla now that Firefox must be re-written in .Net or they aren't going to allow it to run on their platform!
Howso? They've spent the money and the time to create a great platform. It seems well within their rights to dictate a lot of the rules around what goes on the platform they created.

And as mentioned above, they dont have a monopoly in the market so, from Apple's perspective, 'if you don't like it, there are other opportunities' ... developing for the bberry :)
Anyway, developers have an advantage that musicians don't

Musician: You know what? I'm done with you! I'm out! I'm going to pull my music out of your stinky store.

Apple: No, you won't. We have an agreement with your media overlords (cof, cof) I mean, your record label.
This should be unremarkable to college-educated adults who notice what most people read FOR FUN. A website people visit to meet a personal need shouldn't be any harder to read than what people read for fun. Otherwise, some easier to use website will gain market share at the expense of the harder website. Even most college-educated adults don't read outside their own area of specialization at any reading level higher than about a junior high level--as can be verified by the reading level of most best-selling books. (This can also be verified by the reading level of most highly upvoted submissions to HN. Anything that is the least bit scholarly doesn't get many upvotes. Amateurish blogs that misrepresent research but have a simple reading level--present submission excepted--tend to get a lot of upvotes, because voters can get through one or two paragraphs of those submissions to form an opinion on them.)

After checking a Gunning Fog online test:

The Gunning Fog index is 14.46

The number of major punctuation marks, eg. [.], was 7.
The number of words was 151.
The number of 3+ syllable words, highlighted in blue, was 22.
It's down for me! And "It's not just me!" =)

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
A look at Linux on mobile devices
Yesterday it was access to the filesystem,
things that run in the background, etc.

No, yesterday they did add the things that run in background.
Flash compiler being a fundamental technique in computer science? Please…
Good observations - I posted this overview because it includes an actual equation and outline of HOW to proof yourself and create an A/B experiemnt on the subject.
I'm a big MonoTouch fan. And even I can admit that MonoTouch apps have a lot more startup time than native apps. The MT team has done a lot to relieve this, but it's still there and still obvious. I think that alone makes Apple not like MT :-/
Safe, certainly. But potentially finding themselves moving significantly less product to significantly fewer users.

Consider the home console situation:
The PS2 had its run of the console business. But the PS3 is struggling to expand out of the core gamer niche. Sony's 'safe' in that the MGS, God of War and Final Fantasy fans aren't going anywhere. But the more-numerous, more-casual gamers, even the gamers who had PS2s and bought God of War, bought Wiis instead.

And the Wii does enough games well enough that it's harder to convince them to buy the PS3 and God of War 3, even though they know they'll never get a game quite like GoW3 on their Wii.
um, what does morality have to do with this? Apple's rules are not immoral. It's their platform and they're not a monopoly. If you don't like it, choose a different one.
Apple's agreement explicitly bans apps that were built with MonoTouch (or Titanium, or whatever). It really doesn't matter what Apple's intentions are, what matters is that they're willing to fuck over a whole bunch of existing developers for whatever reason.

You'd have to be extremely foolish to start an app with one of these toolkits. The onus is on the developers to comply with the SDK agreement, unfortunately.
The least disruptive way for them to begin to capitalize on the money that 3rd party developers are making off of them, in my opinion, is to introduce an amazon type model, where the first 3000 (for example) api calls are free, and then they're charged at 0.01 cents per call or something. Just layer on a small api tax, so anybody actually making money can continue to do so, but those who aren't will go away and unload the system. Giving away some free api calls lets innovation and experimentation continue as well.
it won't beat the "OOOOOH SO SHINY" effect.
now, all that's left is "sudo make me a sandwich"
Keep in mind tha the grand joke is that Adobe's Flash compiler is based on LLVM -a project that is heavily sponsored by Apple.
Return of the Blue Lego
e.g. run-times that execute byte code

I thought that was already forbidden. If so, why the change, if not to stymie thins like Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone converter?
How 5 Guys Burgers and Fries Got Started and Their Practices
Oh, so that's why that page was burning a hole through my CPU... I could do away with "features" like these, thank you very much.
This is an article about how it's risky to start a business and all those percentages and chances at success. again.

Personally, when I had a J.O.B. 8 years ago, I felt it was far more risky. At any point, of any day, with or without notice, my boss could walk in and lay me off.

Done. No more money. No more job.

Being at the mercy of someone else has never felt safe or less risky to me. I was constantly stressed.

Working for myself means that if I need to get paid, I go out and get paid. I make it happen. I don't see how being in control of your OWN destiny is MORE risky. I rely on MYSELF, the person I trust and believe in most.

Sometimes I have to rely on others for contracts, but I'm in control of that relationship too.

I think the problem is that there are entrepreneurs and employees. I don't understand the employee mind-set, but it takes all kinds to make the world go around.

Maybe I'll write the article, "Entrepreneurship is for control freaks. Because I said so."
You mean Apple has stopped looking out for the interest of it's developers... If anything, Apple listens to their users better than any of their competitors. Try convincing an average 17 year old girl to buy an android/zune over an ipod touch for her music.

I think the situation will only improve when Google actually cares about their users and less about the cool tech that comes with every phone.
My first thought. Has anyone been tracking stuff that started as xkcd comics? I only recall a couple: self referential chart, Facebook group of million users, MBR love note, people playing chess on roller-coasters, sudo make me a sandwitch robot…
Looks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xkcd#Inspired_activities is missing some.
File sharing illegal as UK Government passes Digital Economy Bill
You can leave now, thanks.
"For Apple, they are following the Microsoft Mantra: focus on the developers."

Seems comically false to me...
Also good for pegging one CPU, in the quad-core Linux machine I'm using (Firefox 3.5). At least it skips around the cores.

I think I'll miss Flash in the near future (especially the part of not having a Flash plug-in). I'm afraid the 'blink' tag is back, and packing some heat ...
They've also built tornado, which is the sort of infrastructure that most companies would shy away from building. Tornado gave them ability to quickly build "real-time" web applications, which is what Friendfeed was about. It's not a good example of "not building generic infrastructure" (Friendfeed is far from the only place doing "Comet"). The rule should be to build infrastructure when it's advantageous to do so (not earlier or later) and when it does more (or does something specific better) than an existing open source project.

A corollary should be: generic infrastructure, when built by start-ups, should be open source unless it brings a distinct competitive advantage.
They'll come around. Outlook users already (try to) use search, because sorting alone never works. So they'll use Gmail search and over time come to see that it's so good, they'll just stop explicitly organizing.

I know I did. I was tagging everything when I started using Gmail. Now, I don't even bother.

This is one of those features you only add to make converts feel at-home.
Syntax Highlighting a la StackOverflow with Google Prettify (and jQuery)
Still in private beta (which does not help) but isocket.com would provide ease in billing, reporting, and adjusting rates. Worth signing up for notifications as a future solution :)

Have never used this http://www.openx.org/ - but removes the rate adjustment problem since you are dealing with a marketplace. Might be worth investigating as well.
That's because you said an "approximate" row. If you get them exactly right it works out. All you have to do is get them jumbled together to fill in the round hole at the bottom and put the long straight piece horizontally across it. If you get if just right, then you can start balancing other pieces on top an come out with a perfect row. Then it disappears just like regular tetris. AWESOME!

Have fun!
And all this time everyone thought Microsoft was the big threat to Mono.
I completely agree; too many underestimate the importance of UI. In fact I once did too, and used to scorn Apple products as just being 'the same as everyone elses with a nice UI'. I was completely right, but I missed the point - UI is such a big deal that the majority of what users want is 'the same as what I've already got, but with a better UI'.

I haven't used Android (or Chrome OS) yet, but Google seem to have a pretty good grip on UI too, so I'm hoping it's similarly good. If not, it's an open system, we can build a better one.
For as long as the iPhone has millions of users willing to part with their cash, there'll never be a shortage of developers.
Ahh, you just reminded me to ask about marketplaces. Thanks.
Navy nixes smoking on submarines
> With that new bytecode keyword, we can call method only known at runtime.

I don't know much about Java, but it sounds like they're extending the bytecode to better support those alternate languages which currently are sort of hack-ish.
If this goes against his principles, then why did he start the site in the first place? It's hard for me to believe that the "only native apps" reason is what pushed it passed the line of being principle. I smell something else...
Estimated reading time in web design
Ok, correction: yesterday they introduced iPhone OS 4 with background services.
How Flash is fundamental in CS is still a mystery to me.
You know, I have to say, that given what we know now, even without clarification, it is clearly risky in the short term and dangerous in the long term to be using tools like Unity. That is, if you plan to base a business on the iPad, iPod, iPhone platform.

It's also a somewhat stunning to see people pondering whether or not Apple can be sued. Clearly most people here are unfamiliar with the licensing terms of other mobile gaming platforms. The terms for Nintendo, for example, are far more egregious. And if the mobile gaming terms scare you, then you should refrain from even looking at the terms for big three console development.

My point is that if this is to change, it will not be in court that the change happens. Running to the government should, in general, be avoided in all entrepreneurial activities. It invites 'help', of the kind that may be unintended.

Vote with your IP on this issue. If you think these terms are bad, don't develop for Apple's platform. If enough developers stop developing for it, things will change.

If you try to get around it by using something like Unity that compiles to C, Apple is just going to gain access to Unity, ascertain the 'fingerprints' if you will, and ban you on that basis. Software forensics has been around a good deal longer than Unity, so I would not bet against it. The only question is whether or not Apple cares to be strident about these rules. And if I am investing my money, I wouldn't bet against that either.

And really, why play cat and mouse, when you can develop elsewhere? For web, or for Android, if Google ever figures out how to deliver a package attractive to consumers.

I realize I am proposing that we engage in a massive game of the Prisoner's Dilemma, but talking to Apple won't work. They may be willing to accept something now, but not in a year. So you're still screwed.

Best to vote with your IP.
You could start off with some automation i.e. make a crawler. Start with seeds from top rated places from Yelp, Gowalla, etc. Then, blast your queries across some travel site APIs and freebase.com to see what kinds of interesting places you get. Then, you can perhaps do model based collaborative filtering and do the recommendations automatically.

Or for inspiration... http://www.tripbase.com
erm, you know that battery tech hasn't changed much in the last 20 something years right? With USB 3.0 supporting 1 amp devices, I think we'll be seeing more power hungry usb devices than ones that can run on a battery pack. Bluetooth was engineered for the "USB" of mobile devices... I don't think there's a single battery powered platform that makes heavy use of usb for these obvious reasons.
Looks really handy!
There are companies like appsavvy.com who do it for fb games.

I always use agreements. Main things to cover are payment terms and collecting 1/2 of the payment upfront if they are a new advertiser.

Ideally on request is what I send advertisers, otherwise a dashboard is always fun if you have the time to make one.

Raising rates is more about creating competition and value for the advertising available. At the end of the day most advertisers just do the math on the ROI. If they want to stay you can raise rates. More important imo is about retention and having advertisers over the long haul.

Freshbooks.com and other invoices. I just use a google doc template I have and email that to them.
I'm not going to read this. Music is more easily compatible than software.
Mono does not have a place/platform they can comfortably call home. Marginalized by the Microsoft/Windows community, marginalized by the Linux & Mac communities, and now banished from the IPhone/IPad platform.
really? I own neither an iPhone nor an Android phone, but I've used both in passing, and the iPhone was neither particularly intuitive nor particularly snappy.

To honest, I think the goodness of their UI is often overstated.
I'm not sure who has been submitting the archaeology/anthropology articles lately but thank you, I appreciate them.
I'm normally muted during the lecture part so it doesn't matter. During the discussion I'm unmuting myself only when I'm actively talking... So in case you were interested in the microphone property - I have no idea :)
Node.js, YUI 3 & Dom Manipulation… Oh My
You might also be interested in this -> http://github.com/hraberg/enumerable
I think most people read the web very different than they read scholarly papers. When I'm coming to hacker news I'm often in the mood to browse. I'm not looking for another dense paper to read.

This article could also be interpreted as advocating writing for what your user is actually doing.

If they are just checking in to a social site after a long work day they probably don't want to have to think very hard about what they're reading. If you're building a tool to help someone work, then they're probably already focused on working and you could get away with more complicated language.
Young people in Britain will call a tasty sandwich genius. That word will lose its meaning if we aren't careful!
Thanks. Sorry, I misread. And that's an interesting point too, because until now, an argument I commonly heard in support of Apple was, "At least the App Store is better than the console game environment."
Neil Roseman(former VP Tech@Amazon) on hiring, culture and product development
Sorry to be so presumptious but I don't think you've thought this through. Microsoft threatened to drive companies out of the computer industry. There are still plenty of other viable mobile platforms to develop for if the iPhone doesn't work out for you.
I agree. Nucking futz. This is much crazier than anything Microsoft has done in recent memory.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I have been saying this for a long time, a tech publisher that has very rudimentary understanding of technology is sad at best. But people who actually understands technology, going gaga over everything TC publishing is very troubling to me.

The only thing TC has going that has anything to do with technology is that they also invest on tech startups. As for actual publication, its tabloid material at best.
Find a niche community that has a big pain that no one seems to care about. Learn about their pain and get building. And yes, patio11's Bingo Cards example is a nice one.

It may even be a fruitful exercise to think of what pains you have and then see if there's a small community with similar problems. It's ok to be wild at first. e.g: "What if you solved the problem of helping senior citizens' find dancing lessons?"
Drunks, A Wall, Entrepreneurs and Jobs
I will keep repeating this until people get it:

User interfaces matter! A lot!
I used to love building lego gearboxes as a kid.

The best I ever did was three speeds plus reverse, but then I was only eight ;).
Boring. It's actually a pretty good analogy though.

Musician: hai! I play bongo music. Can I be signed to your label?

Label: uh no, we're a rock label. You must use much guitars.

Musician: This is outrageous! I must get the online world
to feel outrage and boycot you.

Can we stop all the whining and reactionary moral outrage on hackernews yet? Please? :(

If you don't like it, go make your own iPhone/iPad instead of incessantly whining like some teenager that isn't allowed out.
The best handheld device I ever had was a Palm. It did not multitask; instead, it required that every piece of software can save its state so it can be closed in a way that is rather transparent to the user.
It's not necessarily Flash that's fundamental in computer science. It's compiler technology that's the computer science part.