skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm currently developing iPhone app code, at justin.tv.

I wouldn't say I'm upset exactly, I just think Apple is being needlessly controlling right now (by which I mean they're being controlling just because they can, not because they need to be) and that turns me away from wanting to develop code for their platform again.

It also makes me think twice about buying any more of their products in the future. Again, I'm not "in uproar" - I just think Apple is probably no longer a very good option for me as a hacker/consumer.
I speak objective-c. I like it's verbosity. I couldn't care less about the recent changes in the toc partly because I knew this was coming.
I've had one app in the App Store since its launch and admittedly only do hobbyist work now and it doesn't bother me at all. I bought a Mac and learned Objective-C just to make stuff for my iPhone and I learned to really like Xcode and Obj-C.

I can understand why developers want their work on as many platforms as possible but when each platform has distinct interaction and design paradigms they can't fulfill them as well as they should by targeting the least common denominator.
That's developed by a sony owned company right? So sony is not paying to keep it out of Xbox owner's hands. They're just not doing extra work to help out microsoft owners. There's a difference.

But that doesn't matter, I didn't say Sony is free from such tactics. I said I own a PS3, not that I'm a PS3 fanboy...
Rails has been "exploding" for years now, but it's still absolutely nowhere to be found in most job boards, so for all intents and purposes, it is a niche.

I'm glad to see it grow because it contains a lot of very interesting ideas, but at this point, it's pretty clear that it will never become as popular as other "web frameworks" (using the term loosely here) such as PHP, ASP.net or some of the many Java frameworks...
Being forced into 1 language (PHP) is not the answer. I find it also quite disingenuous to say "allow you to develop in ONE language for the web" when you really mean "develop in a PHP framework".

Consider me seriously unimpressed.
Good Term Paper is Critical for educational Succes
A Term paper is an important component in the academic curriculum. The student has to choose a subject within the scope of what has been covered during a term and complete a research paper on it for submission.
Who said I'm in a corporate camp? So am I supposed to go out and by both a 360 and a PS3 to remain neutral? That's ridiculous.

I bought a PS3 because I needed a blu-ray player for my 12 foot projection screen, and I also happen to play some games.

Now I find out microsoft is trying to f me up the ass by paying to withhold shit from me. I'm just saying why don't Microsoft go take that money and integrate a blu-ray player instead. Maybe then I would consider a 360.

I'd only avoid microsoft products which employ similar tactics. Tactics which are anti-competitive.
Definition of an object to hold some state in Objective-C vs Io: http://gist.github.com/361355

Think of how many more apps would be created if we could use a less verbose language to create them.
The links on http://www.nytimes.com/features/openings/index.html don't seem to be working for me.

Could you describe what a creative technologist is? And do you consider candidates who don't have degrees (yet)?
I'm an iPhone developer and I like the new rules.

The privacy thing was getting out of hands - according to survey of 600 people I ran on mturk about 1/3 of the users are concerned about privacy ("what do you mean my data is collected!?"), 1/3 are willing to give developers benefit of the doubt and 1/3 don't care one bit. Apple should get praise for addressing this thing before it blew up, not "after numerous warnings were ignored". We don't want scared users, we want users happy and safe.

I also like the ban on 3d-party analytics for purely selfish reasons - I have my own and this ban gives me an advantage. It also paves the way for me to sell my analytics package to people to use in-house later on. Apple has shown indifference to dev analytics (beyond daily sales numbers) so I hope they keep doing that.

I like the cross-language compiler ban as well, again for selfish reasons. I was not looking forward to a horde of flash developers joining the fray and flooding the app store with more apps. It also elevates value of my Obj-C skills, should I decide to market them instead of building products.

I'm only concerned about smooth transition from current regime to the next one - I wanted to release an ad-supported app next week and I hope these new rules don't put me in limbo (e.g. Apple's ads aren't there yet, other ads are banned).
Probably won't help you much, but this one, based on QtWebKit, runs on Linux: http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/rotapken/2008/12/03/creat...
For Firefox on Windows, try Fireshot, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5648 .
Downvoter(s): Please help me improve the quality of this post. What other information would you like to see?
wkhtmltopdf renders web pages to PDF using WebKit and works great on Windows, for what it's worth. It's just one more step to go from PDF to PNG. The results were great when I used it, but I'm not sure how it deals with e.g. Flash.

http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
Among my team within Google, the people with kids live in the South or East Bay. Those without live in San Francisco. The only ones I know living on the peninsula just moved to the area and haven't migrated to the extremes, yet.
Christ, what a brilliant startup idea. I think this is the sort of thing people are looking for in terms of home surveillance -- simplicity, cost, access. Neat!
I've had good experience with ChartDirector. It can create many different kinds of charts and graphs, is very customizable, and comes with support for several languages.

Their website isn't much to look at, but the software is solid.

http://www.advsofteng.com/
Good question. It is unlikely that many real iPhone devs are upset with the rules regarding 3rd party frameworks.

Here is a portion of my comments on mobileorchard

On the question of cross-platform tools, I think the old dev agreement did have some language against using 3rd party frameworks. The new dev agreement makes it much more explicit/clear.
If I wanted to develop Android apps, I wouldn’t expect to use Cocoa-Touch and Objective-C. Similarly, I don’t need .NET or Flash to write iPhone apps. I like the Apple platform and code to it.

It appears that Apple wants to limit their app-store to developers who want to work with their platform. I think this is a legitimate desire. From Apple’s perspective, it helps iPhone users by improving quality and reducing quantity in the app-store and it also helps developers who invested the time to learn Apple’s platform. Obviously, it also helps Apple if developers use their platform directly instead of going through middle-men. Overall, I don’t have a problem with Apple’s policy.
Many top charting 3D & 2D games by indie developers (like top ten world wide, and staying there) use the the Unity3D framework to develop their games. It saves a ton of time, and the engine is very efficient and well developed and probably would do a better job than you whipping something yourself with just OpenGL ES. (Not to mention you don't have to learn OpenGL). The main chunk of the engine is written in C/C++ with other C libraries, but developers don't see that part and instead interface with the engine through a C#/javascript with types/Boo scripting interface and a 3D modeling interface to build objects and assets. I used it to make a game that didn't go through and I know using anything else would taken many months more of my time. If I was one of the developers who made one of those top listing games, I'd be pretty worried now about the future of my business.

Also not to mention, almost every type of game engine/game development methodology use a very similar model of main engine in c/game logic in a scripting language, and to not to be able to do that significantly decreases productivity. Baldur's gate, unreal engine, EVE online, Unity3D and probably many others.
Readability is awesome. I use it even on Wikipedia.
The Graph Traversal Pattern
After I stopped laughing (which took quite a while), I noticed that this thing occasionally surfaces some interesting information that I didn't even realize was on the web. If they presented the results in a way that was a bit more coherent, and linked back to their sources, this thing might actually be useful for something other than comedy.
Why are you interested? Are you suggesting that I don't have the right to be outraged if it doesn't directly affect me?
Not a developer and don't object to it. When I bought my first iPhone 3 years ago I did so because all these other SmartPhone platforms were so unpleasant to use. I don't mind letting Apple do their thing and protect the sanctity of the platform. If it upset me I'd just use something else instead.
I am totally in love with airbnb and emailed about the community support position. Willing to shout my love from the rooftops (also, to relocate to SF). If there's anything I can do for a friendly nod in my direction, name your price.
Hire a project manager in US to go to China to make the stuff.
While impractical and reminiscent of 90s crypto-wankery (oh no clipper chip, et al), it's still far more worthwhile than what Stallman's been pushing lately about cloud services.

Stallman seems to think that users give a shit about software, as if everyone using the AGPL would somehow fix everything — except that thet's total bullshit — people only care about access to their data, the code serving it up is completely irrelevant. You wouldn't be able to run your own instance of Facebook on localhost anyway, even if that was somehow useful.

Stallman's refusal to use any cloud services leaves him woefully out of touch with the reality of their implications.
Quora is hiring programmers and designers. Located in Palo Alto.
http://www.quora.com/jobs

We're building a really high quality question and answer site designed to be continually improving.

The team is 4 people right now but are growing to 7 by the end of April. We recently raised a Series A from Benchmark.

One of the interesting things we've built is a system for automatically keeping webpages up to date (views are always in sync with the model) without writing any special application code to do that.

You can try out our beta by signing up at http://www.quora.com/hackernews
It's more accurate to say that Firefox 3.6 is written on top of the Mozilla 1.9.1 platform, which includes technologies such as NSPR or XPCOM for some low level system interaction. I don't think anything at the UI rendering level uses those technologies.
Can someone recommend a similar tool that runs on Linux and can render flash?
user ≠ grandma

Linux was written by someone who wanted to use a kernel that took advantage of the MMU in his new 386. One did not exist, and he couldn't practically fork Minix because of draconian licensing issues, so he wrote his own for himself to use. Linux was written by and for a user.

Hurd, on the other hand, was designed for several orthogonal ideological reasons, and never really written. There was never a user within sight of it, including its creators.
Yes. Off the top of my head, IBM invented hard disks, relational databases and RISC. They definitely aren't as innovative now as they were thirty years ago, but at least they have more to show than Oracle does.
The big change coming to Safari 5: Kernel-level multi-processing
I agree about Object-C being a pain, disagree about making Android apps look good.

Perhaps it's a trade off. The iPhone has Interface Builder, we get the shitty eclipse builder (plus the ability to use straight xml, or do it all programmatically).

We get to use Java, but we have to use eclipse. the iphone has to use objective c, but they get xcode.
One word: Virtualization.
Or alternatively, the reflexive need of some to transpose everything into NY terms to "understand" it.

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/02/07/72-the-world-as-...
> Who wants to go to the suburbs!?

People who like space between them and their sociopathic neighbors?

I had a passive-aggressive downstairs neighbor who would never tell me if I was disturbing her; she went straight to the apartment office every time. When I tried to ask what was disturbing her, she wouldn't answer the door. For the life of me, I never figured out what she was complaining about. I played my guitar amp with headphones and never turned the TV beyond a reasonable volume, but nobody ever listens to the person who is accused of being loud, especially when the person complaining is a single mom with baby in tow. After suffering the tyranny of my downstairs neighbor and threats of fines or eviction for noise violations, I decided to move into a house in west San Jose.

I've lived in large cities and generally enjoyed the convenience, but that apartment was my last. Here, I don't need to wear headphones to play my guitar. I can actually use my stereo speakers when watching movies. When friends come over to play board games on a Saturday afternoon, I don't have to quiet them down when something exciting happens. I can barbecue in my back yard during the summer, and if I feel like hanging picture frames at 2:30 AM, nobody else cares.

The suburbs obviously aren't for everybody, but they work for me.
I have used it on server and it works flawlessly. But you will need Xvfb on server and X11-fonts installed to make it work.
Any remote jobs for an immigrant from the collapsed and decaying empire of evil? =) (a wandering around person - today I'm in Kathmandu, Nepal)
was using the command line tools (plus vim, of course) and then installed eclipse and the plugins just to see 'what i was loosing'.

Compiled the Hello world example. 20kb.

Compiled then under the command line tools... 12Kb.

It was by no mean scientific as I used some different titles and app names. but that was it. http://meme.yahoo.com/gbarros/p/1hKEYg-/
More precision requires more data.
The SDK cames with a suite of command line tools that are far more easy to understand then the eclipse crud.

help > install. Really?
Just a reminder after some of the comments directly after the Beijing Olympics: Bolt is tested to death and is clean. As where those 100m female runners who swept away all the medals: Shelly-Ann Fraser, Sherone Simpson, and Kerron Stewart.

There is one thing that was shoddy though, with a bit more effort the ladies could have got equal times and picked up three golds in the race instead of one gold and two silvers :-)

- Paddy.
As a software developer I am annoyed that Apple is exerting so much control over their platform instead of being more open with it.

But as an iPhone developer I don't really care that much. It doesn't really affect me since I'm already doing my work in Objective-C.

I'm not exactly surprised by the recent changes and can understand the logic behind their choices.

I think most of the outrage is coming from Flash developers and others who were hoping to be able to leverage their existing skillsets on the iPhone platform.
My sarcasm detector is off the scale!!!
I blogged about this here:
http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/04/09/section-...

I think Apple did native iphone developers a favor. Just think about the army of Flash developers jumping into the app store.
But Apple is NOT the dominate OS.

1) Symbian
2) RIM
3) Apple
4) MS
5) Android

Android and MS might have swapped in the last month or so. They are close. As for choice, consumes don't seem to mind. You have tons of "choice" on Symbian, Android and WM for app selection. The AppStore is beating them all.

Developers will go where the money is. It is a job. You play by the rules or move on. Simple really.
Amazon's AWS team is hiring for development positions in Seattle, Japan, and Northern Virginia. See http://aws.amazon.com/jobs and http://d2wtekeazriu0r.cloudfront.net/index.html for more info.
The experiment is over, 200 Nipples goes to flat pricing.
Learn Objective-C and OpenGL :) Im not being an arse when I say that because if you truly want to dive into the iPhone space you have to play by Apple's rules. If your games are awesome then I will buy it, and you can go and make it now and in a few weeks time it could be on the store. Think about it, mid May I could buy your app.

Why wait for a miracle to happen?

I find it interesting that so many people believed that Apple would allow this to happen and are now bummed that its been blocked. A sign of laziness or of one-eyed devotion to Adobe? I say, stop suckling the Adobe teet and enrich your coding knowledge and portfolio. Learn Objective-C today! propaganda poster :P
Ask HN: What's the best way to setup an always on video conference?
My parents are overseas, and my son is growing way too fast. I want to setup a dedicated, always-on video portal between their living room, and my son's play room.

What's the best way to do this?

Bandwidth is a constraint (ADSL connection for them). Cost isn't (willing to spend up to $5k)

Thanks for your help!
If anyone's interested, I ported this into a Ruby Gem a couple of years back. I haven't given it too much love lately, but it should still be good/useful: http://github.com/jurisgalang/snapurl
I thought of doing the same thing with my Pl/M experience. Decided to learn new tool sets/languages instead:-)

You will find your self in serious trouble moving forward if you tie yourself to only knowing a single company's toolset and tying your future to the well being of that companies tool set. Especially Adobe's; a company as fickle as Apple.
it's still absolutely nowhere to be found in most job boards

Strange, considering there are always Rails jobs on craigslist in every major city and on all startup boards. Hell, I don't even actively seek out contract work and have offers on a weekly basis (in person, not even counting online) from people looking for Ruby/Python web development.

PHP, ASP.net or some of the many Java frameworks...

So? You put stock in argumentum ad populum? Hell, why not rip on Django while you're at it, considering there are far fewer Django jobs than Rails jobs? Nevermind the fact that despite Python and Ruby web frameworks being less widely used than PHP overall they are still very strongly represented among the most successful and innovative web projects of the past decade.
He used to do all the coding demos at NeXT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A (his little database app starts at 23:10)
I like good writing. I can enjoy a good story and get ideas for how to write my own.

This is why I subscribe to real periodicals and try to read those in favor of blogs. For technical stuff, you can't go wrong with a blog. For general-interest topics, I've never found a blog worth reading.
Thank you for your response. Actually advertisers would not need an account, once they browse to any website that is on the ad network, they simply text their ad to a short code, since most people in my country here are prepaid mobile users, their account is debited and the revenue is shared between the mobile operator, the ad platform and the website owner.
ppl around here don't like well funded start ups :)
How many people upset over Apple's rules might have develped on the iPhone?
It would be interesting to know how many programmers in languages and tools barred by Apple might have otherwise considered creating an Ipad/pod application?
Or just use Opera's accessibility layout.
McDonald's Happy Meal survives one year, doesn't decompose
I prefer CutyCapt.

http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/
Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival: Part 2: Environmental Scanning
<shrug>

Feel free to use whatever metric makes you feel good, all I'm saying is that the number of jobs for Java, PHP, Javascript and ASP.net (yes, even Basic) absolutely dwarfs those for Ruby on Rails.
Hell yes.
Hi matthodan, I'm building Pretty Graph (http://prettygraph.com), which is more of a complete web-based data visualisation app, not just a charting library. But we are also building an API, which might be of use to you. We also offer PDF downloads of graphs. Drop me an email (see profile) if you're interested.
Skype is probably your best bet here.

Install skype on a computer in the play room, create a new account, and add your parent's skype account as the only contact on this fresh account.

Set skype to auto-login, auto-answer but reject calls from non-contacts - thus only your parents can call but when you they do the cam/mic will immediately turn on.

You could install a big monitor, better speakers, etc if you think that would help your son interact better with them.

I would consider the privacy issues, however, of having a dedicated always-on setup (rather than 'call in when you like'). Even from your parents, it would be like they are always listening in to what is going on in the house.

I considered setting this up for a similar project but I was concerned about doing 'always on'.

The best thing about this set up is that it probably will come in well below $5k if you already have a spare computer, etc.
Even this 'gotcha' is ultimately a favor to LeMeur/Seesmic -- helping them stand out from the crowd.
Webshot is an alternative.
http://www.websitescreenshots.com/
Yeah, obj-c language is crazy. About the only thing more archiac is cobol. I don't care how innovative it was in the 80s. It's a damn fossil nowadays.

When going through tutorials and examples I just couldn't stop myself from saying: this would be so much simpler if I could write it in c# (my prefered language, but a bunch of others would come ahead of it if I had to make a list).
Graphs of money made by Microsoft, Apple, and Google from 1985 till today
I don't think he explains the issues very well even though he mentions some of the symptoms.

A common characteristic of NoSQL systems is that they don't use a normalised schema. That has certain scalability benefits and in a few cases it may be easier to understand. But it also means that there are going to be redundancies and that the database itself does not check consistency.

So not being able to use a generic tool to change some piece of data is not down to immature tools or lack of knowledge, it's a fundamental characteristic of denormalised data structures.
Submit your startups launch to post@web2nation.posterous.com
Simple as that, I noticed that Techcrunch's hasn't been writing about startup launches for who knows when, so I created a posterous for anyone who had just launched a webapp, mobile app or anything interesting to send over your own review of what it's all about.
So dry (and fried) food doesn't dissolve into a slimy mold. If only our ancestors had known...
Oh, this poor company. I don't think this is going to work out.
Dried foods will decompose over time (look at dried fruit vs canned fruit in terms of how our ancestors would preserve fruit for long term storage).

The concerning issue is the amount of artificial preservatives in fast food. And do all of those artificial preservatives leave our body or do some get absorbed?
Wish I could find pictures on that site somewhere.
Rackspace is hiring distributed systems devs in Austin: https://rackspace.hua.hrsmart.com/ats/js_job_details.php?req...
>No matter what, deep-fried food is unhealthy.

This is a commonly repeated notion that I cannot stand. Deep fried food is not synonymous with fast food/junk food.
As if I need another reason to like McDonald's. That stuff has so many amazing properties.
I am in your exact same situations (me living in the US, parents in Europe). I wanted to create a window to each other living rooms when I noticed one of the things I missed most is was seeing them on their daily routine.

I have got my best results on vlc both sides (stream from one machine to the other), videoconference is not 100% realtime (there is a slight delay of about 1 second) but the image quality beats skype on linux. I use different processes for sending and display video. I use a couple of cheap low power computers and microsoft 720p usb webcams. It is not perfect, the image quality could be improved, but it is filling an emational void.