skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"But we're not saying Steve Jobs is neutral are we?"

I would argue that that's a reasonable point to make. Steve Jobs doesn't have a vested interest in seeing Flash die, he has a vested interest in seeing the iPhone platform succeed. If he saw any way Flash could help that, I'm sure he'd be all for it, but he's seen how Adobe's behaved in the past (late with PPC versions, late with OS X versions, late with Intel versions, late with 64-bit versions, crashy Flash, slow Flash, etc.), and he has no interest in subjecting the iPhone to the same issues that the Mac platform has had to endure at the hands of a slow-moving corporation who has little interest in being a good citizen.

I would argue that Jobs is 'neutral' in the sense that he's not supporting anyone else's agenda. He's made his choice based on the facts before him, and while you may not agree with how he got there, I would say that he got there from an initial position of neutrality.
Oh dear, I still have a server on 8.04 and a desktop with 9.04. I'm falling behind the times, it seems, but I'm too paranoid about doing something to kmail to upgrade. the server, well, I'm too paranoid about doing something to anything to upgrade that.
In other words, you like feeding the trolls?
My Iphone 3GS now syncs with Rhythmbox on Ubuntu 10.04 straight out of the box.
I would guess that they will in order to speed its adoption.

If they don't, it won't be long until there exists an open-source implementation. There already exist very high-quality open source implementations of H.264, like x264. Since VP8 won't be patent encumbered, there will probably be even more impetus to create one.
I sympathize with this view, but the problem is, all it takes is someone else willing to work longer hours in the same role to make you undesirable as an employee.
So Adobe gets tossed aside in favor of HTML5/canvas. Or an open version of the SWF format with no licensing issues emerges. I am fine with that. If Adobe wants to be stupid, they are more than welcome to.

Apple is calling the kettle black with the proprietary argument. We can drill down to specific layers but the effects are the same to the developer coding on that layer.
I don't know what it's like on 'standard' Ubuntu (i.e., Gnome) but I found the built in Chrome title bar to be really buggy in KDE. It would snap around and 'stick' to my cursor when resizing or moving, so I had to go with the system title bar.
What does that have to do with getting additional funding after you've launched?

I think I worded myself poorly. It's not initial funding I find odd. It's additional funding. You go out, get funding. Yay! Funding! Pays for starting the company and making it profitable. I just naturally ASSuMEd that your initial funding would cover startup costs, including marketing.

At least, that's the way my partners and I did it. Came up with an idea, setup initial work, got funding, launched on that funding. Maybe I'm just looking at it the wrong way (which I am sure is the reason).
I think the point is that one would not expect their status updates to be aggregated on a community page, even if the status update permission was set to non-private. Community pages are effectively doing this:

tail -f all_public_status_updates.log | grep PAGE_NAME
thank you :). I feel like Apple may release some HTML5 tools with xcode at WWDC after re-reading steve's letter. It might end up filling some of the gaps.

Identity is a huge problem. Not only for authentication, but for de-authentication as well. What if you fire someone and want to delete all their accounts you have for them on your SaaS apps? You have to deactivate each account manually: (basecamp, salesforce, wufoo, dropbox, and probably 5 others).

http://www.onelogin.com/ is doing something interesting in this space.
That is killer. To think of the hell I had to go through to get my iPod touch to sync a year ago.
weird. all is okay on my end. browser/os? thank you.
The latest from Fake Steve on this piece: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-....
Euro countries are supposed to do that too, it's part of the deal. Not everyone cares too much about that, though. It's easier to be yelled at by the ECB than your voters when the latter will vote you out of office.
You might be right about my vision being distorted, and I will think about that, but just so you understand me correctly: I did not say anything about selflessness. I have no doubt, that every move Apple makes is a business move; still, I don't think they only want to make money. They want to make money and deliver a great product. And the points Steve mentioned seemed reasonable to me...
I do think it is reasonably evil, but I'll be very surprised if, say, Apple enforces this against somebody writing software in a lisp, or all the games using Lua or Unity. But saying literally "You can't write software in Flash" makes for somewhat questionable legal language.
The iPad reduces everything to what the users currently understand: the sequence of steps they take.
…which is why they don't want another closed system as a layer between their products and their users.
Warning: special relativity hurts your brain.

First, there's no such thing as objective space. There is no objective Frame of Reference. You can pick a frame of reference, and it should probably be an inertial (non-accelerating) frame of reference, but it's just as valid as any other frame of reference. Inertial frames of references move with respect to each other at constant, less-than-C velocity.

Ok, so you picked a frame of reference, and in that frame of reference you have two objects A and B moving away from each other, each with a velocity of 0.5c, for a total relative velocity of c. What does this look like to either of the objects? Well, to answer that question, we have to jump into their frames of reference, which are moving at 0.5c with respect to ours.

In this new frame of reference, one of the objects A is stationary. Object C that was stationary in the previous frame of reference is now moving at 0.5c. And the other object B, that in the previous frame of reference was moving away at c? In this frame of reference, it is moving away at less than c. Why? A combination of time dilation and space compression, which you probably know happens in special relativity.

In the original frame of reference, object A was moving at 0.5c because it took 1 year to travel from one point to another than are half a light year apart. In the new frame of reference, the object A is standing still and the two points are moving, and they're more than half a light-year apart, and it takes less than 1 year for the new one to get here. Similarly, time & distance separation between points that the other object B is passing have altered in the new frame of reference. There's some math which isn't that complicated but is a bit onerous, but the punchline is that it appears to be traveling less than the speed of light in the new frame of reference.

Why does space and time contort like this? So that a light particle traveling will appear to be moving at the speed of light in any inertial reference frame, regardless of the relative velocities of those reference frames.
Is this specific of Ubuntu or is upstream with Rhytmbox?
I might go this route, although I'm trying to avoid introducing another system to be maintained.

Would be good if Amazon S3 could do the pulls.
How is it that Apple can feel reasonable in criticizing flash for being closed and proprietary?

Did I miss the iPhone OS standards committee meetings or something?
I was expecting Microsoft to try to scapegoat flash for all of there crashing issues a while back. I would have made sense, and it would have been half true. The bottom line is flash is crappy software, it makes the OS look bad, but the OS gets all the blame.
Most states run balanced budgets most years, and some have been in surplus quite recently. Of course, they do that partly by shifting funding of state government functions to the federal budget, which is not constitutionally required to be balanced as most state budgets are.
Wrong, unless you mean on computers; Netflix released an iPad app that streams video on day 1, and Hulu is rumored to have one in the works as well.
Umm... First of all when I say no offense intended, I mean it. Nobody will waste there whole life on a book which is not worth much and those books can never be best sellers like these. And I would just like to clarify on a few things here

1) I wasn't giving specific advice on marriage, as mentioned in my post I am too young to give it. Go through the post again and see its a very general one. It works with any relationship be it with your girl/boyfriend, your mother, you son talking just works I think.

2) It wasn't exactly an advise per se, it was actually an observation (may be my post was wrongly worded).

3) I really don't get how can one be wacko in believing that by talking you can ease out a relationship.

4) In no way I disregarded the life experience of anyone. I just wanted to bring to the table what many of people holding life experience had brought to my attention.

I really didn't see why you had to rip my post apart. A more polite response was possible, and if this is the way you went about talking I can see why talking didn't work for you, some offense intended.
Angel Investing: “A Fly On The Elephant’s Ass” (Video)
>This is more about a debate for the web

That's a cheap, unsupported distraction.

The no-Flash in the browser on the iPhone/iPad/whatever is entirely and absolutely Apple's choice, and no one can make that choice for them. They can argue benefits/detriments, but no one can make Apple pollute their platform against their will.

That is debate number 1.

The debate now has NOTHING to do with the web (and it's honestly quite ludicrous to claim that it does), but instead is Apple deciding to rewrite the rules of the app market just to exclude certain manners of developing software.

Using the web to blanket that argument as well is, quite honestly, offensive propaganda.

If Steve said "We're implementing new quality rules to ascertain the quality of apps by a panel of testers, and we're demanding that all apps use features {X} {Y} and {Z}", that would be one thing. That isn't what they did. Instead they said "Due to the fact that a lot of very gullible, very silly people will accept out ridiculously inaccurate correlation, we're blanket eliminating a broad realm of technology choices just to thwart a competitor".

Unless you work for Apple you should not be embracing that. It is a grievous offense to intelligence.
Can you really build flash apps for free? Honest question — I thought you needed to have Flash.

If you do need Flash, you have things backwards. For one, he's talking about web apps, not iPhone OS apps. Web apps are entirely open and Apple is huge on pushing what you can do with the web.

Also, building iPhone OS apps is absolutely free. The entire SDK and documentation is free of charge, you just need a Mac to develop on. You need a $100 membership to sell iPhone apps, which is very different from needing it to try out development.

Flash on the other hand, costs $700.

Flash is entirely closed. Apple is mostly closed and is totally up front about it, but they completely support open web standards.
Retired? By Microsoft, perhaps, but not by a large chunk of users. Still large enough to matter, for most sites.
What happened to empiricism? Where's your evidence that dimensions other than the 3 we can see are expanding?

Waiting for the light bulb...
I'd argue that the real Steve Jobs is Bill Gates, lately. Maybe Monopolies (essentially) do that to people.
You are making stuff up.

Hardware acceleration for h.264 decoding was introduced in the Windows betas of Flash 10.1 in October 2009. It hasn't shipped yet, and probably won't for another 6 months.
So ... ~ 2700 employees have access to this underground facility?

Obviously not everyone has access to every part, but it kind of takes the shine off the underground super-secure bunker marketing.
A reference implementation is a good test suite but a poor substitute for a standard. It's huge and you can't just sit down and read it, you have to simulate it in your head to really understand what it would allow or demand. (This is also an awful problem with the HTML5 spec.)
Some of the other themes in System -> Preferences -> Appearance have the buttons on the right side. For example, select "Clearlooks" as your theme and the buttons will go to the right. Ambiance, Dust, and Radiance have the buttons on the left. New Wave, Clearlooks, Dust Sand, and the high-contrast options are on the right.

This was a change from earlier betas where changing the theme would not change the location of the controls (and, for me, is much appreciated even if I know how to use gconf-editor).
I get what you mean, but it shouldn't be that surprising. He started out technical, and most people with that mindset don't just stop thinking that way.
Or, more cynically,

Point 1 is in reference to a non-Apple product

Point 5 is in reference to an Apple product
I flew through BWI airport a few weeks ago, and saw signs posted in the security line indicating they're piloting the new full-body imagers.

I wasn't thrilled, to say the least.

I was far less thrilled when I reached into my backpack at the end of a very long series of flights and realized my swiss army knife had made it through security, in the mesh side pocket of my carry-on backpack the whole time.

How 'bout the TSA focus on mastering the basics (like, um, finding knives when they go through the x-ray conveyor belt) before they add new tech with questionable benefit and high potential for abuse?
Great to see major investments in moving programming languages forward.
OMG Ubuntu 10.04 released
This is by far my favorite blog to learn all the new hype about Ubuntu! And such a cool name!
My biggest gripe with the new theme is the taskbar. I confuse which window has the focus. It seems to me that the colors should be inversed.
Picwing (YC S08) Reboots With An iPhone App That Prints Photos For Your Mom
"I don't understand why people are OK with electronic strip searches."

They're not just OK with them, they actually want them. Read The Naked Crowd by Jeffrey Rosen.
In what sense? This only addressed 3.3.1 indirectly. It made it clear that Flash was a target, but said absolutely nothing about other targets. Assuming everyone is in the clear from this would be a mistake, I think.
Download Mp3 Waka Waka, World Cup 2010
I have a few friends who program largely in C++ or in interpreted languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl. They've scoffed at my love of Haskell, claiming it's too academic and overly complex and that they'd rather just get things done.

Just last week I asked them what piece of software was missing from their lives in an attempt to get ideas for a new project to start. One of the first things on all their lists was software that would automatically parallelize an algorithm for them. Inwardly I wanted to put palm to face because the easy parallelization in Haskell is one of the killer features I'd been trying to convince them of.

I think the major barrier to adoption is lack of real-world results to show people that's viable. All the benchmarks in the world won't convince these people to change their ways, but if they see other people using it to good effect, they will seriously consider it.
Scaling NSClient++ with Nagios
I think it's almost entirely bullshit and misdirection. 3.3.1 doesn't apply to specifically to Flash.

"Open" is irrelevant. Apple is certainly no more open than Adobe.

The Full Web - whatever. Don't support it in the browser, don't support browser plugins, fine. Safari on iPhone still crashes all the time.

Reliability, security, performance - these are all things that apply to native apps built for the App Store, so why are apps built with Flash excluded in particular?

Battery life - more irrelevance. I'm pretty sure that there are games on the App Store right now that will suck away your battery's life faster than most cross-compiled Flash games. Game loops are intrinsically always busy - they don't necessarily have a natural idle point like GUI event loops do, especially if they are running at less than their desired framerate.

Touch - this is an application quality issue. I don't see any difficulty in simply not approving apps that have awkward non-touch interfaces.

The last reason, it being another layer, is the most insidious. UI difference, performance, etc. are all irrelevant - games have weird UIs, drain battery, and poor performance is a quality issue. The truth is Apple doesn't want to be disintermediated. Apple wants developers to be strictly dependent on its tools and APIs, and not use anything between the app and the platform. This is particularly offensive to me as a software developer, and it's far worse than anything Microsoft has ever tried to pull. It's the reason why 3.3.1 is phrased the way it is, and it has nothing to do with Flash and everything to do with locking developers in.

As I see it, Flash on the web is used for three things: (1) video, (2) casual games and (3) ill-advised corporate intro screens.

I'd love to see video not needing flash, but it isn't, yet. Having a sand-boxed third-party FLV player, so that it didn't need to infect the Safari process, would be nice to have. I don't really see that approving such a process would be necessarily harder than approving any other native application on the App Store.

I'd love for (3) to disappear. I can't bear those things.

And it would be great if HTML5 was universally usable and performant enough to work for (2), but it isn't, yet. I know of many casual Flash games, though, that would work really nicely as apps, and Apple is hurting me personally by increasing the barriers preventing those apps on the web from being available on my device. This policy is both anti-consumer and anti-developer. Only in the short-term is it pro-Apple, but I hope and expect Apple will fade in the longer term in competition with Android.
Is python really a 'standard'? Python's had trouble lately with non-mainline implementations because the grammar keeps changing. There's no standards document laying out how the language should behave, in the sense of 'Jython is compatible with the Python language 2.5'; rather, third-party implementations duplicate features and functionality from CPython based off the PEP they're defined in.

Does it pertain to the web? It doesn't. Python isn't used 'on the web', it's used on the backend to generate web pages, as is C#, Erlang, and pretty much every other language ever. Are you suggesting that Apple should include a Python interpreter in WebKit? It sounds like that's what you're suggesting.

The simple answer would be 'because Python is not a language that is used in client-side scripting anywhere on the web'. No other browser supports it, and even if they did it wouldn't be widely used.

Your argument seems not only spurious but nonsensical. Python is used to send or receive documents over HTTP, so therefore I should be able to write a web app in Python to run on the iPhone? It doesn't make sense.

My home cable internet 'pertains to the web' too, and it uses documented standards like DOCSIS, so why doesn't my iPhone support DOCSIS? It's a ridiculous argument, as is yours.
The sad thing is Steve, along with many others, totally, entirely believes that selling sugar-coated digital handcuffs is changing the world for the better.
About Job's remark of hardware vs software decoding of video:

In both cases, he's talking about H.264. An end user might not even realize there's a difference. But some encoders produce H.264 that can hardware decode, and some encoders do not. Not all H.264 is created equal, and this is one area that really matters.

You want an H.264 encoder that produces hardware decoder compatible video.
Cross-platform standards are a good thing for Apple. Getting people to use Apple's platform specific features is a good thing for Apple. Apple does what is good for Apple. There is no contradiction.

Remember, this is not an essay about why everyone else should support Apple's actions. It is an essay about why Apple thinks its actions are good for it.
In this respect, I am not arguing for or against Flash on any device. Just that the argument against it is just as flawed as the argument for it.
To present an alternative viewpoint on this matter, I would say for people looking to start data-driven startups to first think about your application. What do you want to make? Then think about how you can glean information from the normal usage of that product.

For example, I think its much more risky to think "hmm, what datasets are out there and how can I build a business off of them?" than "hmm, what business do I want to create, and can I monetize through data acquisition?"

In the first case, you are going to be held to the availability of someone else's data. You don't know how it was collected, and you have no idea how it could have been doctored. In the second case, you create your business with a data-driven mindset, and you control all those parameters yourself. Then you are just at the mercy of how well your data reporting tools are working.
It is a very good example of putting spin on history. They don't lie, they just put the "right" emphasis. Depending on how much you know, you understand the text differently.

But failing to mention KHTML by name is an act, indeed.

Reminds me another masterpiece by Microsoft: "Java is a programming language proposed by the JavaSoft company", or something like that.
One of the regulatory tests for abusing market position is unevenly applying rules to lock-out certain competitors. If Apple does allow things that are technically forbidden, but ban flash, they may open themselves up to an anti-trust lawsuit.
> No, because you can't add language invariants (guarantees that thing X will never happen)

That's true. Macros aren't a perfect solution.

> without invariants such as pervasive immutability, certain features are impossible to add.

As are certain optimisations.

> While it's possible to add features to Lisp that are at odds with its fundamental model of evaluation, it's usually done by adding an interpreter (or, occasionally, compiler) for a nested sublanguage.

Indeed, which is in a certain sense cheating.

If one is designing a language, and one hopes that one's language will become popular, then it's likely (in fact inevitable) that the language will be used for tasks that the designer hasn't anticipated. So how can a designer cater to this? Macros are one way, and IMO a powerful one.

Another is to make the language so that it is easy to mix-and-match it with other languages, so that it can call code in other languages, be called by other languages, use common data structures and serialisation formats, etc. Implementing in the JVM goes some way to meeting this goal.
If Congress wants to help the economy they should go in the opposite direction: don't increase the accredited investor threshold, remove it.
I think the outrage needs to be there to put pressure on fb; but does anyone here publish truly private content on fb, or anywhere non-anonymously?
> Ok great, so Flash is also "open enough"

This is clearly not true, though. The only implementation is closed and fully controlled by Adobe. Maybe it is more open in spirit but that doesn't mean crap in practical terms. In fact Silverlight is more open (in practical terms) than flash since at least there is a usable open source project. There exists right now a full featured and heavily developed open source h.264 decoder. You can't say the same for Flash. It is either Adobe Flash or spend a bazillion dollars trying to re-implement open flash that doesn't exist yet Flash. That's a non-starter.
i'm not sure how anyone can recommend PGP WDE for the mac with pgp's horrible customer service and long delays getting support out for snow leopard.