skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are literally millions of experiences out there that can't be done with HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. if you want proof, go to theFWA.com and have a look around.

I don't disagree with your general premise about flash offering more robust design control, and it's possible I didn't look around enough on the site, but I didn't see anything on thefwa.com that you couldn't handle with a HTML5, CSS, and JS (heck, I didn't even see much that you couldn't do without HTML5). Was there anything specific about that site you were thinking requires flash?

EDIT: Ah... I think I get your point, I assume you weren't referring to thefwa.com itself, but the sites linked from there.
Well that's sort of the part that John (and many other journalists, comedic or not) glossed over: the whole theft of property thing. It's not about recovering the phone, because this isn't Apple's civil suit. This is a criminal investigation. And while Apple may have been instrumental to getting it started so promptly, it's really out of their hands at this point.

I think that many journalists are sort of waltzing around the edge of this story because at least a few of them understand that there could be some serious repercussions on how shield laws are interpreted in America.

It's a very complex issue that doesn't really lend itself well to a comedy treatment. You have a very shady scenario with an Apple engineer that Gizmodo claims must have “left the phone there” (but is that true? probably we'll never know). You have a shady scenario with the finder who somehow knew or was simply a shitty enough person not to return a lost phone to the bar (that's what I'd do, and what I hope any decent human would do). You've got the embarrassing situation of Denton's gleeful love of checkbook journalism. And now you've got potential criminal activity. It's a total shit show of Silicon Valley fail, no matter what angle you look at it from.

Daily Show just chose the funniest angle to view it from, but definitely not the most accurate or comprehensive. That's fine; outside of political satire they really don't have any assumed duty or responsibility to their viewership.
copy url -> open mail -> paste -> sending to <undisclosed emails... lots of them>
Actually, I think the REST community is pretty clear on this now - there's no need need to accept incorrect definitions, omitting the hypertext constraint is not REST.
"While the true definition is interesting for academic purposes and certainly lies behind the technologies upon which we build every day, it simply doesn’t have a whole lot of use to web application developers" - this is missing the point a bit.. If you're developing web apps for humans the reason REST 'doesn't have a use' is because it's already been 'used' to produce HTTP and HTML. "Doing REST" is essentially the process of designing hypermedia types, and defining/extending a uniform interface. Examples of that would be writing the AtomPub spec or reintroducing Link headers.
Sachin Agarwal of Posterous explains reason#6 much better with a good example. Link here http://sachin.posterous.com/ie6-caused-the-web-to-mature-slo...
Which arguments are FUD?
On my 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, their "Site of the Day" can't even update the cursor regularly; it only updates once every second or two.
I see nothing new here because the German army used this in WW2 and possibly™ even sooner (they called it "Schanzspaten").
Sounds pretty reasonable, but common, if they needed to prohibit cross-compilers, did they really needed to do that just RIGHT BEFORE CS5 was going to ship? Any developer putting that much resources into something would be pissed. Adobe didn't make it secret, that they were devoloping an iPhone compiler, so Apple could've just told them right away it's a no-go.
Steve Jobs: Flash Is No Longer Necessary
The mash temperature needs to be pretty exact, and I (personally) find it hard to do fine temperature control with a burner. Even a few degrees variation during mash can favor different enzymes and result in inconsistent starch conversion or an alteration in flavor. I've never had much success trying to keep the temperature that steady for a full hour using a propane burner. That's not to say no-one else has success that way.

Besides that, I use a big 100 quart cooler as a mash tun to help keep the temp consistent which precludes using external heat.

A little background info on mashing for those interested:
http://www.byo.com/stories/techniques/article/indices/45-mas...
>I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts

I'm guessing a company that controls information as obsessively as Apple doesn't just "jot down" its official response to a major, ongoing controversy.

>We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.

It sounds like Apple doesn't trust the market. If apps compiled from a Flash development framework target the lowest common denominator and don't take advantage of iP*d innovations, they will lose to apps that do.
The fact that the repeats the rollover crap makes it sound as if they're really trying hard on rationalizing.

Just say it's a business decision, Apple. Stop pretending you have the consumer in mind.
I think you overestimate the degree to which non-technical users await, with bated breath, a pronouncement about programming languages from high officials at Apple.

I love non-technical users. I was trying to explain to one of them yesterday that they can still use my website even after their school wipes their hard disk, and separately, even though the email address (login) is their home email address and not their school email address. She was quite convinced that I didn't understand the situation, because she was going to lose "all of her memory except the Hotmail at Google", like the tech guy told her.
Rats! I stupidly finished college many years ago. Now I can never start a company!
This actually saddens me on Jon Stewart's part. I'm a huge fan of his with his ability to report the more truthful side of politics. This lessens his credibility to me since his facts are misrepresented or missing. He completely ignores the "finder's" role in this and his not-so-secret desire to make money on his discovery, and fails to address the moral obligation on Jason Chen's part as a professional journalist, all for the purposes of making Apple look like the only bad guy here. Ergo, all for the purposes of making a "funnier" bit for the purposes of entertainment.

Additionally, his jab at Gray Powell joking that he was using the iphone to pick up chicks takes the cake. Completely false and misleading! I think Jon Stewart needs to take a look in the mirror on this one.
I think understanding "true REST" is an excellent starting point and guideline for any API designer. But also trying to follow it too rigidly, at the cost of performance and complexity, is unwise. I believe the article came to the same conclusion.
There are so many things wrong with Jobs explanation I don't know where to begin.

But two claims really pisses me off.

Battery Life

If I activate push notification it sure isn't nice to my battery. So I switch it off.

The same thing could be done with flash. Or even better, make flash an opt in. What's the problem.

Yes I know apple can claim that it will affect peoples impression of their products, but so do not having flash.

Touch

This really is a strawman of enormous proportions.

First. There are plenty of html pages out there that have roll-over. Plenty of menus that expand as you roll over them.

Second. Rollover states is not a problem for most flash websites that users use. In fact Apple could simply allow for rollovers to be activated on push down and click on release.

I love apples products, but they are simply in the wrong here. I love my iPad but not being able to see flash sites is really getting quite annoying.
Forgive me the simple question, but which part of theFWA.com couldn't be replicated in HTML5?
Does Javascript not use rollovers?
Writing Research Papers Students Develop their Technical Writing talents
Writing research papers may seam easy for some students and difficult for the others. It all depends on different factors:
Here’s how to create your own reality distortion field
The Entrepreneur's Wound
The other armies' entrenching tools don't have a patriotic soundtrack.
That quote comes in the context of rollovers. Modifying a flash app so that it doesn't require rollovers is an order of magnitude less difficult than rewriting the entire program from scratch.

Analogy: "Instead of replacing the car's steering wheel with a joystick, why not just rebuild it as a boat?"

There are lots of good points in the article, but I found that line flippant and misleading.
Book Review: Mastering the VC game.
What’s wrong about this argument? Would all Flash content that uses rollover just work on mobile touch devices or would some kind of modification be necessary? I’m really curious about that.
Dell (another company founded by a dropout) has divisions that wont promote a non-college-grad. We were bought by Dell, my friend had to leave because VP Mike Lambert told him he could never be promoted.
>Even simple things like setting up and tearing down the database is awkward. You have to actually make an outside call to a command-line script to do it.

... Because I want to be able to do that WITHIN my webapp?

As a side note, I wish this guy would of pointed to some specific examples instead of speaking in generalities.
Does a hammer use stairs?
You can do rollovers with Javascript - many sites do.
Bit you don't have to.
Yes the sites that it is referring to is what I am talking about. You will be hard pressed to do anything like most of them in HTML5.

Or what about http://www.audiotool.com/
I don't care if iAnything supports flash or not. They can ignore Flash, Silverlight, any other third party component other than the pure HTML. Steve might be right and has all the moral rights not to support them.

But banning anything originally written in Flash, MonoTouch or any other rapid or not rapid external "to Object-C compiler platform" should be out of reach of Mr. Jobs' jurisdiction. As long as it runs on the platform, it's none of his business.
Rapportive turns the inbox into a platform
Not the site itself but the sites it's referring to.
LivingSocial Raises $14M Series C One Month after $25M Series B
I'm a little tired of the "IE6 is holding back the web" meme. Lots of hand-waving, no examples.
Interview with indy 8-bit musicmaker, Magnus Pålsson
I would argue that dropping in gordon for a site like theFWA.com would easily solve the problem... seeing how everything they're donig with flash can easily be done with plain javascript
Read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Mssrs Dell, Gates and Jobs are all the same guy, largely social forces put them where they are.
I don't buy this at all, although some of the reasoning is sound there's some jaw-dropping rubbish in this statement. esp. around 'openess'. This is one big red herring - Adobe pissed Jobs off, this is his revenge, end of story.
* Flash websites will have to be rewritten because it relies on 'rollovers', which is not part of Apple's 'revolutionary' touch interface: overblown for two reasons - a) few stuff will have to be rewritten (many videos show desktop Flash content working on mobile phones without a problem); and b) this is not a problem with Flash, as any JS/HTML-based interface that relies on rollovers has the same issues.

* Flash is 'closed and proprietary': Flash is as 'closed and proprietary' as many of the technologies he's trying to portray as open, if not less. H264 is not open. Objective+C++ is not open. Flash (SWF) has a fully published spec and anyone can write tools to create, or play, SWF content, without royalties, or without having to respond to any entity.

* Adobe only wants cross-platform apps, not good apps; generic subjective bullshit.

* Comparing video decompression versus hardware decompression battery gains and claiming that's an advantage over Flash: bullshit, since Flash uses video decompression in most cases.

* Saying Adobe postponed the release dates of Flash 10.1 for smartphones: bullshit. He's repeating a story that has already been corrected on a number of places (that Flash's release was pushed to 2nd half of 2010) as fact. That he's ignoring the fact that the story was misinterpreted by one source, and simply repeating the wrong news, is staggering. FP is still bound for a release in the 1st half of 2010.

* Saying "Adobe has recently added support for h264 playback": gee, I guess 2.5 years is "recently"? h264 support was added with FP 9.0.115, released in December 2007.

There's a lot more, but it tends to get tiring to constantly dispel the most obvious FUD written for the general public and full of misinformation. Mactards will believe whatever they want to believe, so hey... I'll just let the platform speak for itself. In 5 years, let's see how well Apple narrow mindedness business decisions work out for them.
Cub Scouts can now earn Video Games awards
"We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash."

I can attest to the veracity of this statement. My MBP's processor spikes whenever I get on YouTube or any other Flash-based site. I've had a couple of major crashes on both Firefox and Chrome while using Flash. I've also heard other users express similar views with these and other browsers on Ubuntu.
Well 3.3.1 is worded poorly then, you'd think their legal team could do better if they just wanted to stop Adobe. Its pretty explicit about banning other languages.
Did that, working on my 5th startup, 3 were bought out (by Unisys, Screaming Media, Dell). Works pretty good.
Or use it as a payment for the janitor if he tells you how high the building is!
I don't understand why you reacted so strongly to the roll over argument. Jobs didn't state roll overs as the raison d'etre for not including Flash, he simply used it as yet another example why the tools and, more importantly, thinking of the previous generation of web developers will not advance the platform forward. (As an example, I have been frustrated at some sites reliance of roll overs when using my iPhone).

The battery life argument is also stronger than you make it seem. When users turn on push notifications, the phone warns you of a reduced battery life (also, when enabling 3G) and is usually not toggled by the majority of the population. Flash is much more insidious; it will live in the browser and to the average user, will just be a part of normal browsing. Ditto for watching movies over flash.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying I think it's unwise to do both at the same time.
With regards to video, if the lack of Flash support on Apple devices means faster uptake of the HTML5 video tag, then that's no bad thing.
"Battle bots"? I was massively disappointed to learn no explosives, flammables, projectiles are permitted. If they want this sport to go mainstream they need to completely change their direction.
I just put a LiveHelp thing in, so if you want to talk to me about Invoice Bubble you can on the site. I also disabled Forced SSL, so it should be faster now - thanks for your feedback everyone.
If Jobs had provided this type of specific detail before releasing 3.3.1, we could have saved ourselves lots of blogspam.
Ummm, doesn't he have something to say in this one, e.g. he's the new editor of the blog? And the usual things that go with such an announcement (what it is, where it's been and where it's going)?
Hmm... Very interesting idea, thanks!
Making flash opt-in wouldn't solve the problem. The VAST majority of non-technical users will not know about or use that setting and will blame Apple for the poor battery life, not Adobe. It's a lot about saving face here. Apple wants to be in control of their own success, which becomes hard to do when you're allowing proprietary technologies to run on their hardware. Jobs points out his frustration with Adobe taking so long to adopt Cocoa - this is just him trying to avoid a similar situation on the iPhone.

Speak for yourself about the lack of flash on the iPad, I consider it a feature on mine. 90% of the videos I run across on the web on my iPad are youtube or vimeo videos and work perfectly.
That's the point, the same applies to Flash.
It's somehow interesting that their previous acquisition was 3com. It's as if Palm returned to a previous home but in a different city.
Last words of flight crew during airline crashes
That's a great point about async libs. Look no farther than MySQL to see how much pain it can be to get a good one in your language of choice.
Please note that this is a voluntary recall notice; you may choose to not have your car serviced and retain your stereo.

However, in this case you will be unable to use any new roads or use the car to visit your friends.
"Those of us with custom toolkits and compilers (and games developers) can probably relax."

Which part of the submitted article supports this? (genuine question not snark). I see a lot of flash bashing but nothing indicating you don't have to " write in C, Objective-C or C++"
"Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world."
Clearly nonsense.

I'm willing to bet that there are many, many more games and entertainment apps written in Flash alone than there are on the app store.
Yeah, a few folks have mentioned it already. And I remember seeing some good features in the video I watched about it several weeks ago...
The proposed deals allow Symantec to offer full-disk, email and mobile encryption products alongside its traditional line of security suites. ... Symantec plans to standardise on the PGP key management platform in order to deliver centralised policy and key management

I'd really love to see a user-friendly way of offering email encryption. The rising tide of privacy encroachment worries me, and the technology to (mostly) evade this exists -- but can't be effective unless a critical mass of people use it.
The Historical essay
Writing about historical facts could be a challenge as well as an interesting prospect. Every issue or phenomenon that we study about has a historical angle that we need to know about in order to understand it in its entirety.
thanks for the recommendations, HN. I actually agree that 'talking' is key, but my relationship get's stuck when talking doesn't prove to be enough ;)
Why I Blog
How To Remove An Extra Operating System From Boot Menu
Straw man. The rollover isn't the most compelling argument, but it's a good point.
re: battery life, if you want a phone that is infinitely tweakable get a Nexus One. Apple devices are unapologetic about restricting you in ways that Apple thinks provide for a better user experience.
> As a side note, I wish this guy would of pointed to some specific examples instead of speaking in generalities.

It is very hard to give specific examples, most this kind of blog posts are mostly rants without anything concrete to grasp on. I guess it's mostly about what kind of coding/architectural style are you used to.

For example, I have done rails several years ago. I liked it, but just couple of small projects. Then I started my next site with django, which I liked very much. I found the django's modular system much better than rails, and it was very easy to add functionality through open-source packages and customize them for my needs.

Now I have started contracting project where I fix existing rails project, and it is kind of pain in the ass, because I'm used to django's way of thinking. But I can't give any specific reasons why it sucks, it is just my viewpoint.
I wouldn't be surprised to discover their models of corporate and government debt contain the same systemic blindness to domino effects. They haven't been fully tested yet, because there's always public money to save companies that are Too Big To Fail.
It doesn't work. Time & space - all the dimensions that exist - exist inside the universe. There is no "space" out there to expand into.
If they're based on rollovers only, no. But again -- the argument is bogus because it makes it sound as if EVERY Flash content relies on rollovers alone (they don't - click or dragging is the norm) and that it's a Flash only problem (it's not, as I know plenty of websites that rely on rollovers for menus and as such just don't work on a mobile, touch-based browser).
The touch argument just isn't valid. What exactly is it that can't be done with flash just because it's a touch environment. Flash don't care about what the input is. It will listen for what you ask it to listen to.

Regarding battery life

And why couldn't the phone warn you off reduced battery life if you turn on flash?

You simply make it an opt in, the first time someone is running flash you overlay a warning saying that flash reduces battery life and you can turn that warning off.

Its simple interaction design, apple are masters at that.

None of the problems stated can't be solved or are not already there with regular html (rollovers on plenty of normal html sites)
You have to drink the kool-aid. Django has managed to develop all of its own components. It's not impossible to switch out one of those components for a better one, but you'll be fighting the framework to do it. That's because the Django framework likes to use the Django components. If you don't drink the kool-aid, you're missing the point.

It's a decent framework for what it is and has a large community behind it. Some of the best marketing in a Python project I know about.

Just from memory, the last time I looked at the ORM code it was pretty bad. There were functions that ran on for hundreds of lines without comments or docstrings. Plenty of introspection being used to bypass encapsulation. It wasn't impossible to follow, but it did look a little haphazard and "thrown together" (as opposed to thoughtfully planned out and designed).

SQLAlchemy otoh, is a really good example of well designed and clean code. As far as ORMs and database interfaces go, they have some very clear ideas and concepts they've built up from.

The "mess" I think Django may find itself in is that there are frameworks built on third-party libraries that are easier to use and better to use than Django. Its ORM isn't as great as SQLAlchemy. Its templating engine isn't as great as Mako. For a framework as large as Django I think they will find it harder and harder to keep up with what everyone else is doing as long as they continue to believe that they can "code it all."
Great article -- there's nothing groundbreaking here, but it's a good exploration of a topic that is often non-intuitive to engineers.

High sales complexity isn't necessarily the kiss of death for a startup; it just means that you need strong sales talent early on (preferably in one or more of the founders). Sure, you do everything you can to shift your product as far toward self-service sales as possible, but at the end of the day, if you can't sell it without being out in the field, that means most other companies can't do it, either. Presto, barrier to entry.

My startup is definitely on the high complexity end of the spectrum; our sales cycle is anywhere from 3 months to 3 years. Right now, we have no direct competitors; this is probably at least partly due to the complexity of the sales process.
As a developer who has many times decided not to implement a killer feature that works in a modern browser because I will have to come up with some graceful degradation or alternative implementation in IE6, I can say that it isn't hand waving.