skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly disagree with the author, but I grasp his point of view. Let me try to explain it.

There exists an ideology of "open is always better than closed": open source is better than closed source, open formats are better than proprietary formats, etc. When Jobs talks about WebKit/SquirrelFish being open source implementations of open standards, he is, intentionally or not, appealing to that audience.

But obviously, Steve doesn't believe that open is always better than closed: for example, in the iPhone OS, in the AppStore, and in the H.264 video formats, he's relying on closed and proprietary systems for practical benefit. To those, like RMS, who want the open/closed heuristic used globally and without considering any other variables, this is hypocritical - you say you support openness in one area, but not another. To the people that care about end-user experience more than open/closed systems, such hypocrisy is just common sense.

Personally, I think we should strive for cooperation between the "pure morality" point of view of Stallman, and from the "practical morality" point of view of industry. I've been both a paying member of the FSF and a big fan of the Apple's ecosystem of products since high school: the two are free to pursue their own goals independently, and work together to the fullest extent that shareholder interests align with open-source morality.

A great example such a beautifully aligned interest is Google's rumored opening of the VP8 codec - it will both save Google oodles of bandwidth and storage in the long-run, and be great step for the open ecosystem. It's also important to remember, however, that the reason On2 was able to get investors to pay for the development of VP8 is because of the IP protections they received. Without those, Google would have had to fund/organize/oversee such development in-house instead of letting a free market of startups and investors do a lot of the managing/evaluating/choosing for them.
Improve your jQuery
Doing some research for a new project and found this excellent jquery tip article.
I am very glad to know that Apple assure us once again that they want a standards compliant flash-less web. This will definitely make the web a better place. As I've said before flash is only and option if you use Windows, Linux or Mac OS X if you use a *BSD based system or any alternative system you're pretty much fscked.

P.S. I am very tankful to Apple for taking this fight (whatever their reasons maybe).
3.3.1 is an issue for developers. No Flash is actually a super huge deal for users.

I think one of the main reasons they published this was so they could respond to “iPhone doesn’t even have Flash.”
I don't mean it crashes. I just hate how unresponsive it is.

It gives me the beachball anytime I do anything involving I/O (syncing, adding songs, retrieving album art, calculating gapless bullshit). That's bad UI programming. Do your I/O in a background thread.

I know it's doing it on the GUI thread because I'll command-tab to it and it won't redraw, which of course prevents me from cancelling out of whatever task-I-didn't-ask-for it's doing.

This, btw, is the same behaviour I hated on windows.
Isn't that what friend lists do in Facebook? http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=768
Oh, for fuck's sake. We're not hurting for a lack of angels because of the accredited investor rules. We're hurting for a lack of angels because there aren't a lot of people who are willing to cut checks to young companies without revenue after other people they know said no. Jacking up the minimum threshold to $2.3 million from $1 million (assuming this passes in current form, which it won't) is a complete non-event for almost every founder.
The Gizmodo iPhone Saga Flowchart
There goes my hero

Watch him as he goes

Seriously, how much does this letter need a soundtrack? Flash anyone? Music with the text scrolling. Different text effects...
You may need to brush up on the history of currency. So called "gold and silver" standards did not eliminate fluctuating exchange rates and valuation/devaluation cycles.

For example:

"In 1663, a new gold coinage was introduced based on the 22 carat fine guinea. Fixed in weight at 44½ to the troy pound from 1670, this coin's value varied considerably until 1717, when it was fixed at 21 shillings (21/-, 1.05 pounds). However, despite the efforts of Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint, to reduce the guinea's value, this valuation overvalued gold relative to silver when compared to the valuations in other European countries"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling#Gold_standard

So even in physical coin form, this only worsened with introduction of paper notes, individual currencies fluctuated in valuation from country to country.

Thus, European currencies historically were not "the same".
I don't understand the big deal. Do people really love developing in flash that much? Is the flash development community really this big? I have a feeling that a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon because it gets attention.

It is really weird, before this everyone hated flash. It was pretty well accepted as a necessary evil that we all wished we could do without (at least that is the vibe I got). We are now almost able to do without it, and 1 OS maker is trying to push that trend.

The truth is that flash kinda sucks, and it makes the OS look bad, and that is bad for Apple.
Why does the OP compare the web to the iPad? The iPad is really just another standalone computer running a native OS like the Mac or the PC. In this context, he's really just comparing web applications to desktop applications, which is a comparison that has been made for years. Nothing new here.

Locally installed applications are slicker and more responsive than web applications. They always have been, yet developers have moved to the web in droves despite that. Why? Because the web offers other advantages, like being accessible from anywhere, for one. It's the closest thing we have so far to the dream of write once, run anywhere.

"People use web search today because they don't know how else to find high quality information."

That's what search is. No point in searching for something if you already know where it is.

"The web is a mess of content with no organization. On an iPhone, I launch the appropriate app"

Great idea, if you can organize every bit of info on the net into its own app. I wonder how many screens that would be on an iPhone?

I agree that browsers are constrained in how they can innovate, and it is a problem. But the web is not going away. Search is not going away. And iPads are never, ever going to replace the web.
He's insulting hands now? Or are his hands just really small?
Hypocrisy is not reserved for moral claims. Jobs could be making a virtue out of openness (I'm not sure he is) or saying one thing in public and acting differently in private. Both of which, without moral claims, could cause him to be a hypocrite. Jobs could be called a hypocrite in two different senses depending on how cynical you are.
Actually the recently announced austerity plan has been the hardest ever for the people here, at least since democracy was restored in 1974. And the soon-to-be-announced revised austerity plan mandated by the IMF is rumored to be the hardest thing since WW II. It's not certain that the plan's goals will be met of course, but you can be sure that this time the politicians are not only caring about their re-election.
I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't.

Indeed, "tu quoque" fail abounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
I don't see Jobs addressing the performance of CS5-exported apps in point 5 ("Fifth, there’s Touch.") or elsewhere. The only place he says anything that could refer to Flash native apps is point 6, in which he argues against cross-platform development systems.

I think this is a red herring, though. Apple doesn't reject apps for not taking full advantage of the system. People can and will make Objective C apps that don't use GameCenter (or iAds, or the accelerometer/camera). If Apple was most concerned about GameCenter adoption, why not leave out the 3.3.1 change and instead mandate that all games must use GameCenter? That would guarantee Adobe would include it in Flash and then nobody -- not even the native developers -- could produce a "substandard" app.

But even if Adobe made a version of Flash that could target every aspect of the iPhone platform perfectly (maybe by open-sourcing the compiler and allowing Objective C extensions), Apple would find a way to reject it. It's not just a matter of making it easy to port things to the iPhone... it's also a matter of making it hard to port away from the iPhone. Apple currently has the majority platform, and they want to make the choice between platforms expensive, so that developers choose the iPhone first and -- as much as possible -- exclusively.
Unless you actually refute EVERY SINGLE OBJECTION, apps still win, at least in the user-experience sense. Something as small as not getting an hourglass when the app is "thinking" is a bug, which every web app has right now.
What set of books or resources would you recommend as a good introduction to this trifecta of technologies? (HTML5/CSS/Javascript)
Perhaps he wants to play around with Linux and play new games from time to time?
Tell HN: Google.com down (at least in MA)
Seems to include apps and search front page.
Are you implying that Israel has an interest in a radicalized Gaza? I would think that Israel wants moderate Gazans. Fatah, which is only moderate when compared to Hamas, was swept out of Gaza.
The web is the closest we've ever come to a standards compliant universal platform that is write once - works everywhere, period.

Last time I checked you have to be a paid member and go through an oft-criticized approval process to develop for Apple's proprietary app store platform on all iDevices.

Besides, Chrome OS and webkit are supposed to usher in a new era of enhanced HTML5/Canvas support including better access to the GPU. Google is betting on Web apps and I'm pretty sure Apple is not ignoring them with a standards compliant Safari browser on all of its devices.

So the web doesn't suck.. It rocks - and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I would say yes. From experiences with Adobe AIR and Java apps on Mac OS, Jobs knows that cross-platform toolkits are lowest denominator apps that don't work the way people expect them to. They're sometimes tolerable out of necessity, but they're never best-in-class, and they're often completely intolerable, unreliable, slow, and buggy.

As an example, I refuse to use Tweetdeck on the Mac, because even though it does exactly what I want from a Twitter client, it doesn't behave at all like a Mac app should. It uses too much memory, it's slow, it's crashy, and the keyboard shortcuts for moving around text fields, that I use in every other app, don't work. Instead I use Tweetie, which does almost none of what I want (except showing and making tweets), but behaves the way an app should, so it's less jarring to use.
The article is behind a paywall, but I'd be curious how big this population is. How much actual funding derives from investors in that range? My guess is not much, and of that I suspect a lot of it is of the "rich uncle" form, where you can just make the trusted relative or friend a "founder" and get around the rule.
I was just counting seconds the other day (iTunes, modern x86 mac, 40k songs or so)

Managing iPhone, changing tabs, 5 seconds of beachball.
Go to iTunes store, 23 seconds of frozen app.
Trying to see if I have new podcasts while downloading music: 12 seconds of beachball.

If you EVER see a beachball on a Mac then either your hardware is failing or your application's programmer has failed. Your programmer should NEVER do an operation that can block and make the user interface unresponsive in the user interface thread. Ever.

Beachball aside, why does it take 100 billion cpu clock cycles to switch from one tab to another?
Well, different strokes for different folks. I'd take the increased freedom along with increased risk of disease, given the choice.
I am very grateful and supportive to Ubuntu but this thing of the six months release has always been a pain in the neck. I switched to Arch a year ago and never looked back. Now I have the latest version of all softwares, always.
There definitely are other uses. We've had customers using Picwing to automatically send prints to soldiers deployed in Iraq, convicts in prison, and other interesting use cases.

With that said, 95% of our customers sending prints through us are parents sending photos of their babies.
I guess the Germans are hoping the rest of Europe follows them with the third option.
I think the minimum NW change is the most minor of the issues here (especially in SV). Imposing more of a regulatory burden isn't going to make anyone more likely to cut checks, and increasing the barrier and latency to initial funding is going to make plenty of potential entrepreneurs decline to make the leap.

I think it's quite dangerous to assume such provisions aren't going to make it past whatever partisan wrangling goes on; I doubt either the dems or the GOP are going to give much of a damn about the startup ecosystem unless a lot of noise gets made about it.
I think this is a point of confusion because "data-driven businesses" is used elsewhere to mean a business in any industry which uses analytics to optimize operations. In this article it's referring to a company for which the product is the data itself. For the latter type of company, you need external data sources, and their availability is crucial for the viability of the company.
The first key point about 'let it crash' is that you drive towards zero-defect programming. Every time the system walks away from the happy path you crash write a log.

Every day with our production systems we check the live production logs to identify defects that we try and remove.

The second key point about 'let it crash' is that with OTP your system is always macro stable. Even if every function is only a stub and every stub contains exit(bleh) and always fails at a micro level, your system is always macro stable - the gift that keeps on giving!
If we assume, for the moment, that your thesis is correct (and ignore the friends and family type of angels), the other regulations are arguably worse than the new threshold requirements. Which the WSJ implied by the editorial board's placement of this issue at the end of the editorial.

How many startups will still be alive after they've waited as many as 120 days for the SEC to bless their fund raising effort? How many will be able to run the gauntlet of state regulators? If the Massachusetts regulator is as conservative as it was in the '80s, there will be no angel financing in that state, full stop. How bad will nanny state California be???
On the iPhone I don't think its that big a deal, but the iPad is a bit different. The closer a device gets to replacing a computer, the more important it starts to be.
Warm up your editor/IDE.
I mostly agree with the author of the article: ever try to modify the User object to accept an email instead of username for login purposes? It's a complete hack.

The thing is, it didn't need to be a hack, but some of the core components are really tightly coupled together when they don't need to be, so it ends up being a hack. This tends to happen a lot when you 'go outside the box' of Django's codebase.

For example, everyone says you can 'use SQLAlchemy' in Django. On paper this is true. But then you lose the admin, the user auth system, the messages system, model forms, and all of the other batteries that make Django useful.

That said, the alternatives to Django are so incredibly lacking that (for the moment), I'd rather stick with Django than roll my own everything else. Pylons and Turbogears are an ugly mish-mash of third party libraries that don't work well together. In some cases there are good third party libraries (SQLAlchemy is indeed quite an amazing piece of software), but many other pieces are lacking:

- Authentication/authorization libraries are terrible.
(You want to bury that in the middleware layer and use
query string parameters to indicate login failure? What?)
- Nothing out there is as good as Django's model forms.
- There is no equivalent to sorl-thumbnail, for basic image processing.
- The boatload of third party Django apps. Yes, most
of these are poorly written and not modular enough either
but there are some really useful ones out there like django-pagination
and django-compress.

Django is far from perfect but unfortunately, taken as a whole, it's still better than the current alternatives.
It's a little ridiculous that we can now get a microcontroller with a 50 MHz ARM Cortex-M0 core for $0.85 in bulk. Imagine how things will be in a few years (and a few more process nodes).
Super-extreme fasting with Prahlad Jani (70+ years without water or food)
Fake Steve Jobs: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-...
Right, but I don't think you would have the same reactive 'developer' lock-in if 3.3.1 was contextualized toward cross-platform right from the beginning.

For example, EA who uses Lua for scripting wouldn't be worried as they likely were due to this two weeks late press release.
You might find this interesting: http://lists.scidb.org/archive/scidb-news/2010-January/msg00... - about the corporate sponsor who will make an enterprise version.

Anyways, I went to the site hoping to find a nice lead, but they've got the developers list private, and it seems that access to a real system is locked down.

I'd say it seems less like vaporware to me, but I'd have to say that while they say the codebase is GPL (or course, where is the proof for that?), the development process is extremely closed. It doesn't have the feel of any open source project I've ever seen.
That is the claim the subject is making.

Right now, he is being observed and has been without any water nor food for 6 days in a row. Would be interesting and maybe life changing to see what comes out of this.
Did you try editing your xorg.conf to turn the trackpad off? Or maybe you were talking about a gui solution.

I'm about to install 10.04 on my new thinkpad t500. Can't wait!
Only in a not-yet-shipping version.
The Gazans voted in Hamas democratically and Israel pulled out of their occupation, if that's the name for it, and now the place is worse than ever.
Dropping PS3 Linux Support Lands Sony in Court
Just so anybody wanting to try this browser knows: this browser is similar to Opera in that all requests are proxied, then processed and compressed by their servers prior to hitting your phone. This includes all interactions with Flash, as well as all forms (even encrypted). If this sort of thing is no issue to you, Skyfire works, and works well (when I tried it on Windows Mobile 6 a year ago).
Well, that's pretty subjective. I prefer GMail's user-experience than any competitive desktop app, same for Google Calendar, Google Reader, Basecamp and FreshBooks. I guess I'm biased as I am a firm believer that the open web is the platform of the future. That being said, I totally agree that there is still a lot of room for improvement, but we're on the right track :)
To clarify: I mean Opera Mini, not the desktop version.
I don't know what most of those things are, and I'm guessing most of the world doesn't either.
Sweet: I got my wireless working even before updating: Realtek had a new Linux driver available on their site :-)
I am so glad you used that metaphor.
Point 1 states that ubiquitous Flash co-opts the rate of advancement of the web.
E.g. You can't effectively differentiate, compete and move everything forward by supporting, say, h264 because Flash is already everywhere.

Point 5 states that ubiquitous Flash co-opts the rate of advancement of the mobile platforms it runs on.
E.g. you can't effectively differentiate your device by adding a new sensor, API or capability, because Flash won't bother to support it until the hardware is standard.

It's the same basic argument: Flash becomes the platform, it's not a particularly good one and it's not a particularly good situation for developers.

Would you rather Apple compete with Google, RIM, Microsoft and HP/Palm for developers, or have them compete with interchangeable Flash-playing-boxes, leaving developers to Adobe's whims?
It was a very good decision. My wife will become a customer about 12 seconds after I tell her about it tonight.
It will take a while for it to completely go away. It may never fully go away.

Livestreaming is certainly one of those use cases that will be using flash for a while. It's beyond my area of expertise, but I think someone mentioned websockets in HTML5 might make it doable. That right there is a really big potential idea. Would love to see it built.
My prior for this claim being true is ~0. (IE - the evidence that he can go years without food or water should have to be extremely compelling to come close to convincing you.)
"[...] increasing the ... latency to initial funding is going to make plenty of potential entrepreneurs decline to make the leap."

That's a very good insight. Up to 120 days is a long time to develop second thoughts, have something else come up that changes things for the investor, etc.

I suppose you could include a CD or DVD of porn as a bribe to overall speed up the SEC's processing of your request ^_^.
Twitter States
The options are the same as the OS using the same UI. Identical to right-click menu in browser inputs/address bar. It is using the OS clipboard. CTRL/OPTION+C/V works the same as well.
ImageOptim – a PNG/JPEG/GIF optimizer for Mac OS X
google.com not down here (Germany) and here too: http://twitpic.com/1jfxey , check from http://www.websitecheck.org
What is bizarre/stupid of Mitsubishi that they did not own the database in the first place. When you hire/contract a developer, it would reasonable that their fruits of labor transfer to the one paying the bills.

Whoever wrote up the original contract at Mitsubishi screwed up, or alternatively Snap-on was smart/devious.

Reminds a little bit of the Skype fiasco, with eBay not buying exactly everything...
I'm pretty sure I am not that smart. I always thought some persistently-connected, Display Postscript like thing would do it, but it would have to be designed for the interactive from the ground up.
>Why do all browsers have to support the same standards?

Written like someone who wasn't around for the mid-to-late 199s.
I'll concede that the claim does not need to be moral, but it should, at least, be a claim about what ought to be or what one ought to do.

It's not enough, for example, for me to wax eloquent about how much I love the color green while I'm wearing a purple shirt. It is possible, after all, to love both open models and closed models in different contexts.
When has Flash ever been "native-looking" (never mind, say, behaving exactly natively) on any platform?
The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest

And Mac apps. iTunes and Final Cut Pro are still 32-bit Carbon, with no indication of that changing anytime soon.
> We do other things on the iPhone. I don't want to make the choice between watching a video and then restricting my own usage just so my phone has enough juice to make a call. I'd rather watch videos and use my phone, and the more power efficient everything is, the more the user can do this.
To put it in perspective, if Apple's numbers are to be believed, running Flash alone doubles the power consumption of the device. That's insane.

What's your battery life playing an intensive game or using a processor intensive app?
REST was new for me a month ago. Then I read lots of books, even more articles and played with every REST(ful) API I could get my hands on.

And I came to the exactly same conclusions. Couldn't you have written this 4 weeks earlier?