skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has been my experience in life as well. Doing the right thing, which may cost you in short-term gain, usually leads to long-term gain.

You had the opportunity to find out about this man's character that he wanted to take advantage of you. Better to find this out sooner rather than later.
Isn't that point completely meaningless? You're not submitting the source code, but the binary to the store. They cannot know what language you used without doing some fuzzy binary-fingerprint matching to detect parts of runtime etc. If you're clever enough and think that "time to hide the fact I'm writing in C#" << "time needed to rewrite the software in obj-c", you can just scramble the binary and hope they won't ask why you did it. They cannot prove what compiler or language you used.
I like the bottled water analogy. :-) Thanks for that.

The app isn't a huge moneymaker, and was never meant to be. I built it out of frustration and only later decided to throw it up on the store. Building against an api-less site was a fun challenge and I learned a ton. It also uses the Three20 framework, which was an interesting experience. (absolutely no documentation at the time)

Think of it as buying me a cup of coffee to help fund a side-project. Next update should have an iPad version, too.
Wait, you couldn't set the wallpaper with previous iPhones?
Hand held computers capable of rendering standard web pages have not been around for very long, unless I'm overlooking something.
I sympathize with your economic plight. But the fact that you're having a hard time making a living using Flash doesn't give Apple the obligation to provide you with a development platform.

Since the iPhone has less than 20 percent of the smartphone market, it seems unlikely that the Monopolies Commission will be interested.
The Fifth Anniversary of Map Mashups on the Web
> "On the one side, this rule should be good for quality. Cross-platform software toolkits have never ever produced top-notch native apps for Apple platforms. Not for the classic Mac OS, not for Mac OS X, and not for iPhone OS."

This is a silly thing to say. From what I've seen of MonoTouch the UI looks like the same Apple chrome to me. Unity seems like a good choice for gaming and most of the games look great.
This is hilarious. People have gotten Scala, Ruby, Python, Lua, and a whole host of other languages running on Android. At least check your damn facts before posting bullshit.

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-an...
Ask HN: What should I do when I get laid off
My employer just laid me off. We're a startup and they've been nice to me and informed me I can stay on for a week till some of my stock vests. That's all good, but I've never been laid-off before and don't know how to proceed.

Should I clean up my desk and stop coming to work from tomorrow? What's the best way to do this without embarassing anyone. I think it would be weird to hang around office and send my resume to other people using my "former" company's resources.

How do I exit gracefully?

Thx.
Startup Sales Guy
Definitely an unfortunate choice of name, since the mechanic being used for OS 4 isn't based on the file system or the classic desktop metaphor. (It looks like a cross between the Dashboard widget selector and the Dock's grid views under Mac OS X.)

In a way, it's a return to how the original Mac handled folders while using the original MFS. (Folders were an illusion provided by the Finder; the file system didn't know about them.)
Those were my thoughts as well, how can they know if you cross-compiled?
Yeah, but you agreed to a contract, and their license, which says not to do it.
What does easing of delivering applications over the web have to with the fact that you have to separately design separate UX for different devices. You are talking about different two problems as they are one.
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31747_7-20001749-243.html

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/ipad-wifi-wi-fi-overheating-wire...
"I find it same time amusing and hard to believe that this kind of requirement (writing apps only in C++ & Obj-C) is legally possible."

Is this technically possible? If I write my app in language L and also write an L->Obj-C translator, how is Apple going to know? I don't think Apple looks through your source code before putting your app on the App Store(do they)?
This reads like an apology for posting his previous blog entry about Section 3.3.1.

He's wrong about MonoTouch; It lets you code in the .NET language, yes, but it still targets the iPhone APIs. By the same logic, they should ban C and C++ because you can write iPhone applications and Windows applications in it.

He says "Adobe’s goal isn’t to help developers write iPhone apps" which is just silly. Adobe's customers are developers and it's in their best interest to help their customers make iPhone apps. Their technology is Flash so that's how they do it. It's really Apple that doesn't want to help developers by restricting their choices.
You don't submit your source code to Apple as part of approval.
Everyone reading this, please don't think the ~150 an hour range is normal for an individual developer. This is generally the rate for a full service design/development agency where you get an account manager, secretaries, etc.

I do iPhone development and haven't met anyone getting even close to $150/hr individually. If someone made that, they'd be be making $6,000/week and $300,000/year.

yish, can you confirm that this is an agency rate, not an individual developer/designer rate? or is this the rate you're making personally?
It's always been a bad idea. The server should not be storing your password in plaintext, let alone transmitting it over email.
doesn't work in the ipad
It's trivially easy to tell. If it doesn't look like right, they can simply hold your app in the queue until you prove otherwise. Being sneaky in this scenario probably isn't a good idea -- Apple holds all the cards.
Journeymen, Mavericks & Superstars: Understanding Salespeople at Startups
Website Jump Lists
Hey, I commented earlier on this thread: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1251640

Although I do feel a bit spammish writing again (when you've already said you'd be monitoring), I just want to emphasize that if you willing to outsource to a group of moderately trained but dedicated high schoolers, we'd be very glad to accomodate - and would do so cheaply.
New Delhi.
And there's a possibility that you as a developer might be banned by Apple.
What type of sales? Shoot me an email: dru@druwynings.com and I'll pass on your resume to some friends if there's a fit.
6 inch YSL Yves Saint Laurent Pumps in black - Online Sale Discount YSL
Inside YouTube’s War Room
I just got my new laptop yesterday, and while some of this is surely due to the SSD or the New Laptop Smell, Windows 7 is EASILY the best experience I've ever had with a Microsoft product. The new taskbar looks wonderful, the design is up there with Apple, and everything is so freaking fast it is unbelievable.

I booted my other laptop to transfer some data over and waiting for Vista to load to the point where I could interact with Chrome was like pulling teeth.
> Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun's two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and WORA. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down?

Eight years later, we finally know the answer to Joel's question.
Five Qualities of Great Entrepreneurs
I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d eventually share my thoughts about what qualities I think make certain entrepreneurs more successful than others. For me, this isn’t just idle philosophizing. When I invest in companies as an angel, or when I entrust a university spin-off to the hands of an entrepreneur, character judgment has concrete, real world consequences.
Bringing this over to the issue of computer security, I wonder how the number of viruses quarantined by antivirus software compares to the number of system mishaps caused by antivirus software?
http://keepass.info/help/base/multiuser.html
iPhone developers: No change. If you’re a developer and you’ve been following Apple’s advice, you will never even notice this rule.

This is where he goes wrong. Using multiple layers of abstraction has always been a win for programmers, and not just for compatibility across platforms.

This move by Apple is equivalent to IBM saying in 1970 that programmers couldn't use high level languages-- that they had to write programs only in IBM 360 machine language. The loss would not have been only in portability.
Ask HN: So what happens to RIM/BlackBerry now?
The enterprise product that I work on requires compatibility with Black Berry Enterprise Server.

I'm sitting there for several minutes trying to activate my test BB unit and I started to wonder why we bother with it at all, other than the currently existing customers who use BB. I got up and talked to my VP of engineering and he shared similar doubts, namely when iPhone goes to Verizon.

With ActiveSync and the iPhone and possibly Android if they ever calendering to work, why does anyone bother?

What are your thoughts on RIM's options and future, HN? I'm just curious, as an exercise. :)
Is Gruber a programmer?

I don't see how the user experience would be different for an app written in Haskell versus an app written in Objective-C, except that the Haskell app will run faster and crash less (in general). "Platforms" have nothing to do with it; programming languages are just a way to convince the CPU to do stuff for you without telling it about every memory load.
I just read the Apple docs, and it's not multitasking in the sense that the world thinks of multitasking. It's more like suspended animation with selected background tasks or events (playing audio, voip, location events, "I need more time to finish my work"' and prescheduled events). This is from a first read of documentation and I haven't coded anything up yet to play.
Sir Humphrey Appleby on Australia's Internet filter
Surprised, no one have mentioned Russia yet. I've seen here a couple of people besides me.
I'm personally very excited about this. We use Webkit a bit and really really like it.
My main problem with your comment was that in your anger you seemed to be acting pretty immaturely about the situation. I'm sorry for being harsh.

Yes, I'm sure it sucks. Your project is collateral damage from Apple's efforts to thwart Adobe and other makeshift cross-platform efforts that generally create sub-par products.

I'm not saying Apple's development tools are perfect or that I like Objective-C, but Apple makes it pretty easy to write great apps their way.
Sometime successful entrepreneurs don't understand the fundamental of their business and what they're really selling.
I think this decision is also about preventing the virus and trojan hell like that on Windows platform and other "unauthorized" code to be spread on millions of devices. It is much easier and cheaper to examine and control such restricted binaries before releasing them on iTunes.

About Flash, Java and other outdated WM-based crap - they are pragmatic. They don't need any WM to run apps on their hardware. Modern CPU is the only necessary WM. So, there will be much less complains about crashes, bad performance and out-of-memory issues.

Together, these two major problems sank the reputation of Windows and Apple want to avoid them.

So, there is nothing special. Apple can dictate rules which helps them to make more profit, and of course they will.

Wanna freedom - there is Android. Google trying very hard to position it as Linux (community-driven open and free platform) for smartphones.
Tell HN: I made a ridiculous script to parse strings containing coffee drinks
> The loss would not have been only in portability.

I think their loss is about to be in the form of an exodus of developers.
The first thing I thought was, "could I disable it for specific calls?"

Sometimes, you may not want a loader by the mouse, especially if the request doesn't need a response. (Think setting a checkbox, or something that makes a short call and it's distracting to have a loading symbol)

Looks really cool and I hate having to work in the loading notifier on each call where it makes sense. I suppose the other issue is 'covered' by the delay?

Still, gimme a flag and we're set.
"I seriously doubt that there will be any sort of exodus away from iPhone development because of this. "

You are right, though there maybe an impact on more developers coming into IPhone Dev. That said I would be surprised if at least some developers have had enough of Apple's high handedness and move away from it, like they did from Windows long ago because of Microsoft doing evil things.

Just an anecdotal datapoint, but I for one was toying with the idea of buying a MacBookPro (though not yet an IPhone or IPad) and learning Objective C, but not any more.

Objective C on Apple is now the programming language for Orcs, working for the fulfilment of Steveron the Dark Lord's World domination plans. What does developer unfriendliness matter if you get "teh new shiny" to play with every year?

Ash Objective C durbatulûk, ash Objective C gimbatul,
Ash Objective C thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
Yet! Wait for it serfs, wait for it!
FF on Mac is terrible for me too. I switched to Chrome recently and the difference is shocking.
Undo/Redo ?
"The games at this time were all pretty good. A consumer could go out, buy a game based just on the information printed on the box, and go home and be pretty sure they'd have a good experience."

Rose tinted glasses. They still managed to release buggy, downright broken software. It wasn't about quality, it was about control.
Even if they can tell the difference, C code is C code. It shouldn't matter if it was generated so long as it uses kosher API calls. Doing so would be no different than enforcing which editor I can use to write code in.
There are many good applications written in something other than C, Objective-C, C++ or JavaScript available for iPhone.

Any examples? I'm genuinely curious since I've heard that a few times already today but haven't heard of any specific examples.
Clash of the titans: Apple, Google battle for the mobile Web
Not to mention stupid - has a cross platform framework ever become a de facto standard?

And the point about the quality of apps generated is complete bullshit and he should be ashamed of saying it. The quality of Unity3D and other frameworks is probably above the average for the App Store. In fact the whole point of these frameworks is making generating higher quality programs easier.

What really pisses me off with Gruber's post is in defending the indefensible he's making it harder for Apple to realise that this is a mistake and correct it.

Apple should really just have said what they really want - you can't put anything in the App Store if its available for another platform. The problem being they don't want to exclude the big players, so they just make it hard and unpleasant for the little developers, yet again.

Edit: I mean cross platform application frameworks. Of course there are cross platform things have become de facto standards.
My original reaction to this was "WTF. There should be a class action suit against Apple by developers along the lines of hindering freedom of speech".

... but then, any compiler that can generate the processor's instructions can obviously also be modified to generate Objective-C code. So I guess this will result in all the cross-compilers just changing their target language from llvm or assembly to ... Objective-C.

I can live with that ... and watch Apple slap themselves on their pretty foreheads ... whatever it is they hoped to accomplish in terms of lock-in :)
Is that true? I sure hope it is, but I wouldn't count on it. The vast majority of developers have been working in straight Objective-C anyway.

Plus, they have so many apps, even if they lose a lot of their high-quality developers, that'll probably just be a tiny blip when it comes to total apps being submitted. It might take a long time to notice that the quality of apps has gone down, since it's so hard to quantify, and there no doubt will still be some quality apps. And them noticing quickly is what we need so that they'll reverse this rule.
+1 singapore
Yes, he wrote Markdown. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
Apple shows developers the money
If Microsoft said "No Windows 7 Mobile apps that aren't C++ or C#" we'd just shrug, and say, "well, that's Microsoft for you."

Microsoft would never do this. They are the "developers, developers, developers" company, after all. They even invest money in programming language research and actually make the academic stuff production capable.

Apple just adds half-baked features to dead languages. "Yay."
Sure there is. If a cheap framework is produced and it's allowing thousands of junk apps to be turned out by spammers or whoever it in Apple's best interest to reserve the right to ban the framework itself. Rather than dedicate a fairly highly paid technical person to reviewing each junk app.
I'd definitely look at Mongo first. Couch is ridiculously simple, too much so. It doesn't do locking because it versions every single record, so if you do updates very frequently you are going to have to clean your DB really often. Their queries are less flexible than Mongo's as well.

Couch is interesting in a way, but I feel like the set of problems that fit it well is far smaller than Mongo's. (and that that set is far smaller than SQL still, but that's another matter)

Mongo is also way way faster, though the API isn't as 'cute' by far. I feel like the great web UI for couch, along with their heavy javascript/json usage is the main reason it gets so much traction.
But why "Apple want to commoditize applications and lock developers into their APIs."? Because of "especially if it means having apps that don't take advantage of the iPhone's strengths." Apple wants unique killer-apps for iPhone OS, not the Mac version of that Windows program.
People - relax. The cross-compiler vendors will simply change their target language from machine instructions to .... Objective-C. It's probably a much easier target anyway.
I'm not sure that the "quality" of the majority of the apps in the app store is very high anyway. There are certainly high quality apps, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that they are written in one of the approved languages.

But the reason the iPhone became popular is not because there was a very high quality app version of wolfram alpha or a gold game, but because there were reasonably good quality apps (at a good price) that scratched relatively small, (dare I say it?) long tail, itches.

You can be relatively sure as a new iPhone owner that you'll be able to find your fishing lure guide app, or your app to order emergency socks or whatever. I'm willing to bet that lots of those apps were not written in one of the approved national languages of the Union of Soviet Apple Orchards.
"Plus, they have so many apps, even if they lose a lot of their high-quality developers, that'll probably just be a tiny blip when it comes to total apps being submitted. "

This was true when an exodus from Windows started. Windows still has a lot of committed talented developers, but it is also true that a lot of developers moved away from Windows and it hurt them long term.

"It might take a long time to notice that the quality of apps has gone down, since it's so hard to quantify, and there no doubt will still be some quality apps. And them noticing quickly is what we need so that they'll reverse this rule."

I personally would hope that Apple does not change this rule for years (and add more dickhead rules) till a more open/dev friendly competitor has sucked up all the devs who move away and achieves critical mass.

Don't distract your opponents (and evil people in general) when they are doing something stupid.
The email address you put in on registering is only visible to pg, so you need to add your email to your profile if you want others to contact you.
Anything with a parser. Anything that uses Quartz 2D (a drawing library that uses the C preprocessor, in Cocoa/UIKit.) Anything with C preprocessor macros above a certain unknown threshold (hey, Objective-C was originally just a bunch of macros!) Anything that implements its own memory management scheme. Probably 90% of non-trivial games, and 100% of the good ones. (Almost all good games utilize their own runtime implemented in either C++ or other fast language, abstracted into a higher level set of primitives for the game designers to work with.)
I have seen 150/hr corp to corp or 1099 for single-person developers.

Time spent getting contracts, doing administration, etc. means you can't bill for 100% of your time, but you can definitely make 200-300k/yr pre-tax pre-expense if you work like a dog. Taxes in CA will cut that down to 100-150k net, so it is more like a 100-200k/yr job.
You're right, but I had already removed that paragraph before you commented.
Oh yeah. Good choice of programming language, too :)

Anyway, it's scary to watch the Reality Distortion Field affect otherwise rational people, like Gruber. Perhaps I just misread.
> Economics is about incentives. The basic assumption he's making is that money (or lack thereof) is an incentive for producing open source software.

Not at all. Economics is about "how to best allocate scarce resources". "Resources" for an open source project translate to manpower or developer hours.

Given that you develop primarily for fun and learning: Would you rather spend this week making the 17th version of the same hardware driver (because the latest Linux core version broke it), or would you rather spend that time on attacking a new problem?

The economic argument is simply that if
a) making Linux backwards compatible takes x developer hours
b) updating every Linux driver in existence takes 1000x developer hours (summed over all developers)

then choosing b) is a net loss for Linux, since all those extra developer hours could be spent on something more interesting.
I don't buy this. First, the precedent will be set fairly quickly. If Apple does start banning all Unity or MonoTouch apps I GUARANTEE we'll hear about it days after it starts to happen (as we have with every other app). So unless Apple is actually going to kill of these frameworks it's not an issue.

Second, if you're a hobbyist you aren't going to buy a $2,000 framework and if you're a business $2,000 isn't that much for a software lic. I don't see the cost being prohibitive here unless, as I said above, Apple makes it clear they will ban these frameworks (at which point it's all moot anyway)
They already did it with their Android. It's gaining momentum with each new device available.
1. notify all of your clients and contacts on your last day. this network is your best shot at landing a new gig. "its all who you know" - mantra.

2. be humble and thank the company for the opportunity. be shockingly nice and helpful. they wont forget that. This is how kevin ollie rode the bench in the NBA for 14 years with 14 teams --> everyone loved the guy because he had an awesome attitude.

3. Do that 'crazy idea' you had that the mgmt told you would never work. It's a great time to try a new sales strategy that you couldnt get approved before and see if it really would have worked.

4. Sleep with the bosses daughter.
Trivia time, the Windows kernel actually does implement fork, it just doesn't expose it to the Win32 subsystem. I keep trying to convince the kernel devs to expose it, because it'd be extremely handy for UAC if you had a ForkAndElevate() function that would create a forked child with elevated Admin privileges.
New Species of (6' Long) Monitor Lizard Discovered in Forest Canopy