skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oddly enough, I just started a project that uses nodejs to access riak which is built on erlang. In addition to accessing data natively via erlang, riak speaks http and now protobuffers. Currently I have node.js speak to riak over http and I may change this in the future to use pb instead.

The one issue I have with nodejs at the moment is that since it is nonblocking, when you call riak and ask for data nodejs will move on and continue execution when what you really wanted is that the next execution use values returned by riak. The main way to do this is to chain your calls so you basically nest your next call inside your current call. This can get sloppy. Apparently there is no built in method to wait on results. There were promisses but they were removed. Now there are some add-on libs like Step which I'm still trying to grok cause my js/node-fu is not up to snuff.

Other than that, nodejs makes it ridiculously easy to start hacking away at all kinds of interesting stuff. anything that has to do with sockets or at a higher level, http interaction. Take a look at a post from yesterday to see just how easy, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1301272.
It's great that we can so easily share information between different hobbies, isn't it? :-)

Oh, I also ought to mention one thing regarding the heating element for those who might not be familiar. If I remember correctly the National Electric Code indicates that a constant load (such as a heating element) cannot be more than 80% of the peak load rating for the circuit - which (I think) ends up being 1440 watts on a 15 amp branch.

It's almost certainly safe to operate on a 15-amp circuit, but if one is particularly worried about the letter of the law or insurance coverage if anything unfortunate happens, be sure to run on a 20-amp circuit.
* "Objective+C++ is not open." Yeah? http://gcc.gnu.org/

* "Adobe only wants cross-platform apps, not good apps; generic subjective bullshit." Alright, so point to a single Adobe Air app, for example, that looks & behaves natively.

* "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." Did you read the article? "the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software" But hey, easy to prove wrong. Point to one mobile phone with Flash (not flash lite) support that has decent battery life. ... Oh, wait... Well, one mobile phone that has Flash support period? No?
John Gruber has been making these exact points. This could basically be ghost written by Gruber and we wouldn't know the difference.
Yes people have tended to miss out the hypermedia constraint and claim to be REST - partly because everyone's been too excited about using HTTP properly to think about anything else, but also just because there's been a lack of tooling and guidelines for designing media types properly. Most people in the REST community agree on that point and now there are useful approaches and technology emerging - restfulie is a great example of this.
I couldn't disagree more that Django's code is horrible. In my experience (which isn't much to be honest), Django's code is a pleasure to read.

That said, I do think that a case can be made that Django's architecture has some definite warts. Whether or not they are a huge deal is largely a matter of opinion. For instance, I do agree with the author that Django does have a bit of an overreliance on import-time side effects. I particularly don't like the fact that I can't even import some parts of Django without having a settings.py defined. On the other hand, I don't know how difficult it would be to change it.
Webkit?
I am speaking for myself, who else do you think I am speaking for?

Regarding making flash an opt in being a problem. It's a pure interaction problem. By no metrics is it harder than to turn push notification on and off or setting your time.
Database builder faces web-scraping lawsuit
I love the video player they're using. Instead of 'scrubbing' over the video when you drag the playhead during playback (like most online video), it has something like the Red Book Audio CD 'search' algorithm; it plays a short sample over and over. Hilarity ensues.
I agree, but it's really sad that we're at a place where we praise Apple for communicating... like normal human beings.
My message of "take responsibility, accountability, and ownership of your own destiny" gets voted down. When you're 40 and still a worker bee and wonder why it didn't work out for you come back to this post.
I completely agree. I could care less if the underlying code is messy as long as it is actively developed, and works.

The project maintainers on the other hand have an incentive to make the code easy to work on. Especially if they want outside contributers. Not to mention the fact that they themselves (the project maintainers) have to work on it.
These are all problems that could be solved, this isn't the argument. The argument here is solving them is not in everyone's best interest and is artificially keeping the platform in the past.

edit: why are you so angry? Apple are providing a beautiful product at a great price to the public. If it doesn't have a feature you want, buy another product that supports it. I never understood being angry at a company because of not putting effort into what you think they should be putting effort into.
The rationale that Apple doesn't want developers shackled by third party development tools of which they have no control suggests that if you have control (e.g. you embed a Lua interpreter in an otherwise native app) or you still have full access to all the goodies (e.g. You use some sort of game engine for the guts of your 3D game) then the clause is not intended for you.

Still, it would be better for them to spell it out more clearly or have a mechanism for you to get a preliminary ruling before you embark on development.
JavaScript (in mobile webkits) also implements touch events, while Flash doesn't.
Unfortunately in legal situations, it's often the letter of the law not the spirit of the law that carries weight. It's been pretty obvious from the beginning that Apple wanted to block Flash, but not, say, Unity. I think they'll find it hard to only enforce it against certain infringers though.

Imagine if a government introduced a law that said no-one was allowed out on the streets after dark, but then only actually enforced it against Hispanics.
Facebook OpenGraph API has a discoverability feature like the one from the article; add "metadata=1" to the query string of a resource and you get a list of connections included in the information. For example, look at http://graph.facebook.com/btaylor then http://graph.facebook.com/btaylor?metadata=1
There's a distinct irony that they're talking about openness, while at the same time explaining why they're preventing their own users from running software on their purchased devices.

If their arguments are correct, let Adobe port Flash and let users decide rather than telling them what they can and can't do with their own devices.
I am also in the process of canceling my Facebook account. But I am doing so in a way which will (hopefully) educate my Facebook friends on the "Why?" part (i.e., posting links to relevant web-pages).

We are not going to achieve critical mass simply by walking away ourselves.
And here we can find the real locus of the dispute:

"...although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5."

If Adobe didn't drag their feet for so long on the CS products, I think the other reasons wouldn't have mattered as much.
Apple is a corporation, not a human being.
Patrick, you should totally write a book of quotes from your encounters with users. It will be really insightful and such a good laugh.
Corporations typically don't appeal to reason on complex issues. In fact, most humans don't (though maybe "normal" ones do?).

What's sad is that it's a simple but important standard that isn't ordinarily upheld. It isn't sad to praise anyone for meeting that standard.
I don't think he means the site itself, rather the sites linked from there under the awards section.
> For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5.

right. And the Finder - a piece of Software central to OSX was using Carbon until... when exactly? At most 6 months prior to when CS5 came out.

iTunes - a corner stone of the iPhone software world? Still on Carbon.

If I hate one thing, it's hypocrisy.

Aside of that, nice arguments and well-written. Also, from this perspective, MonoTouch and Unity might be in the clear too as they are not cross-platform toolkits reducing themselves to the least common denominator.
There's absolutely no need to specify languages for the purpose Apple is claiming they have in mind. They could simply say that you must not use an intermediate layer between your code and their API. There's no reason for them to not want you to write the application in Scheme (as an example).
Lower it on a string and measure the string.
That's really a terrible analogy.
Canada link to video: http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon-ste...
Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5

If I remember correctly, iTunes isn't Cocoa based yet either.
This is one reason I'm not particularly fond of Mozilla. They care too much about ideology, PR and all that stuff. They have had the code but won't release it because it could make them look bad or annoy some web devs or doesn't fit their ideology. Why can't they just release stuff and see how it fares, and improve it based on public's response.
> H264 is not open.

There are multiple implementations and Apple can tweak how it runs. It is open enough for their purposes.

> Objective+C++ is not open.

He never said it was. He said Apple has several proprietary products but believed the web should be 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.

Yet Adobe has the only full implementation of Flash and if someone else were to try and implement it, it would always be behind the official release (just like Moonlight). And Adobe got lawyer-happy when open source guys reversed the streaming protocol in Flash so nobody is eager to try this anyways.

> Saying Adobe postponed the release dates of Flash 10.1 for smartphones: bullshit.

The fact is Adobe has been boasting about Flash on smartphones since Android first came out and there have been no working devices out except Maemo which totally sucked in every way Jobs described.

There was spin in this article just like his DRM article but I wouldn't qualify anything as FUD.
All these facts also apply for desktop/latop PC's.

Remove Flash and notice you wont miss it. More and more websites are using HTML there day's. Removing Flash also improves browser speed and stability (just as removing Adobe Reader does).

I did a lot of Flex developing, but I think it's time to move on.
excuse my ignorance, but would that list of vendors possibly include Mozilla? I would imagine that having both Firefox and Chrome support VP8 day one would be a major shot against H264 becoming the standard.
Objective+C++?
Following the conventions of a project in order to take advantage of its strengths is not 'drinking the kool-aid'. If you need custom components and find it hard to integrate them, use something else. Nobody's forcing you to use Django.

Your thoughts about the templating engine vs Mako, and the ORM vs SQLAlchemy are subjective. You should recognize this. I don't mean that one is not better than the other. I just mean that 'better' is really 'better for you and what you want to do'. For me, Django is perfectly sufficient. Similarly subjective is the value you put on 'clean code'. I happen to value a community that tests and makes sure it all works. That is also subjective. Don't confuse your preferences with actual problems with something you are evaluating.

Django works for me, very well. I didn't drink any kool-aid. If it doesn't work for you, that's fine. But if you think the fact that it doesn't work for you, or meet your standards, means that the project is in a mess, then I think you are the one missing the point.
This is where he loses me:

"Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open."

Adobe can just as easily say:
"Though Flash products are proprietary, we strongly believe that standards pertaining to what software is allowed to run on your computer should be open."

It's doublespeak either way, and it's crazy to think that either of those two viewpoints is good for the industry.

edit:
Also: "If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?"

Flash can handle touch events just fine. Rewriting all that flash code in H/C/J is a monumental task compared to just updating a few flash events.

Basically, this is a lot of corporate spin and not a lot of sound arguments.
There is Flash content, that uses onmouseover.

There is also HTML+JS content, that uses onmouseover.

So what was the argument again? In both, Flash and HTML+JS, you can use onmouseover. You don't have to, it is option. So what makes the difference?
If they're going to pitch HTML5 as an alternative to Flash (and, implicitly, the iPhoneOS API), then why not let them compete directly with Cocoa Touch apps? Why not offer HTML5 developers a way to take advantage of the App Store's monetization and discoverability?

Apple already provides some amazing documentation and tutorials for making offline-capable mobile web apps, but they're still treated by Apple as the bastard cousins of "real" iPhone apps. They should buy or provide an officially-supported analogue to a tool like PhoneGap[1] or Titanium[2], allowing HTML5 apps to appear in the App Store, and perhaps provide an Apple-supported framework such as their mysterious PastryKit[3] or contribute to SproutCore[4], giving HTML5 developers better tools to conform to Apple's HIG.

HTML5 apps built on open standards should be on an equal footing with apps built in Cocoa Touch. That would be walking the walk.

[1] http://phonegap.com/

[2] http://www.appcelerator.com/

[3] http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/pastrykit

[4] http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/531215199/introducing-sprout...

EDIT: "officially-supported analogue"

EDIT: footnotes
Yes, it's stupid. But with Apple, I feel I only need to fear their intention, not their wording. The intent here, it seems to me, is to stop Adobe from making crappy commercial middleware for Apple's platforms. The wording is overly broad and stupid, but I'm no longer as afraid of it.

If they were intent on getting rid of everything under the sun that isn't straight C, Obj-C or C++, there would already be an App-ocalypse underway.

(I was going to say "App Holocaust" first, but that seemed even less tasteful.)
* If the compiler being open means Objective-C is open, then Flash is open as well: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK

* We're talking about mobile applications like games being good enough, not desktop applications using native components. Please don't stray the conversation. Otherwise it's as dumb as me coming and saying iTunes should not be running on Windows.

* "Comparing video decompression" - The article (wishfully) ignores the fact that 'older' (flv) video formats are transcoded on the fly to a format that can be played by hardware. This technology has been present in the player for a while - ever since Flash Lite. Requires more CPU, but it is not the same as full software playback. Also, asking for mobile phones with battery life benchmarks is bogus, since it's still not officially released, so no proof can exist. It's like saying the next OS X is inherently shit just because you haven't seen it yet.
That graph is a little misleading. For example, Japan is right up there but the majority of their government's debt is internal; not good by any means but not as volatile as the Greek situation. Worst comes to worst, the Japs can just print money on demand - in fact I think there has come to pass a tacit understanding that that is exactly what will happen, as there is no chance of the money ever being paid off by any other means. The Greeks have no such luxury.

I'd like to see a ranking of countries by external public debt.
It's blogspam... the original article is here:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

and the HN submission is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310
We techies are guilty of always wanting everything. I see projects a lot of time, that won't move forward because the developers will not have the balls to stand up and draw the line between things the software will to, and the software will not do. It's just more comfortable to avoid confrontation. When I read this, I felt that Steve really knows what he wants, and in order to get it, he is willing to eliminate things that are less important (even if that means he has to hurt some of our feelings). We all can disagree with some of the points made, but in the end the iPhone is unique (and successful), because it has a clear definition of what it's not.
Wooing cool, talented young people is no guarantee of a city’s economic success
The article/memo says that Apple are waiting for Adobe to present a ported version of flash that works. It says that they promised early 09, late 09, early 2010, late this year...

in other words: it's vaporware, still.
Actually, he owns the platform (the App Store) and therefore it is very much his business. If you have beef with his policy for his platform, then you can jailbreak — otherwise, feel free to dislike his policies all you want, but you cannot disregard the fact that he's well within his right to enforce them.

Honestly, it's like telling a convenience store owner that he has no business refusing to sell M&M's in his establishment and that it furthermore makes him a big, old, bad guy(TM).
Goldman’s ‘silent giant’ is world’s largest PE firm
One more online invoicing system.

It was released to solve a problem we had in Portugal, due to complicated fiscal law none of the existing services (like freshbooks or invoicemachine) work here.

Now we are releasing internationally, can you give us some feedback? Does it have a chance outside Portugal?
Makes sense. Out with the old (Flash) and in with the new (HTML5). Adobe failed to deliver, plain and simple.
Dear AIGA Philadelphia Print Design Is Not Web Design
Clever. The only thing more disturbing than Apple's behavior is how many developers seem to be suffering from stockholm syndrome.
Regardless of how you feel about Apple or the Flash situation, you have to appreciate a CEO that can write and explain a company's motivations clearly. Would that we had more of that kind of frankness and less corporate-speak gobbledygook.
SQLAlchemy is a great ORM, but I don't think I would say that it's phenomenally better than Django's (at least from a code perspective). Making an ORM have good code is really hard, especially when you support as many databases as SQLAlchemy does. Not only does each database have its own quirks, but their drivers also have their own quirks, and so do the drivers' Python interfaces. And I haven't even gotten into the mess that is dealing with Unicode in Python 2.

Long story short, show me a Python ORM that has clean code, and I'll show you an ORM that either supports just one database or is so buggy as to be unusable.
Cyberdissidence: The medium is not the message
All Apple's stubbornness does is leave more doors open for Android et all to get more penetration. Each thing you refuse to do becomes a selling point for your competitors.

For example, Flash support upcoming for android.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/full-adobe-flash-support-for...

It doesn't matter if you do not like flash Steve, it is used on a significant portion of the internet. Either you work with them and find a way to make it work, or someone else will.
Well Firefox, Opera, and Chrome all support Ogg and nobody cares. Safari and IE are all that matters since they are what ships with their respective OSes. H.264 is already the defacto standard. If Google somehow convinced Apple/WebKit to include VP8 out of the box then that might put pressure on Microsoft. That also puts most of the weight of the smartphone market behind VP8. But they also still support H.264 and hardware decoding is much more mature for H.264 now, too.
"If Jobs and Apple are actually committed to creativity, freedom, and individuality, they should prove it by eliminating the restrictions that make creativity and freedom illegal."

http://www.fsf.org/news/ibad_launch
I really hope that Flash and every major browser, including the iPad one, is on that support list, then you'd only have to encode videos once for the web.
On the other extreme, there are cameras that take 70 thousand frames per second. Yikes.
I'm guessing this is mostly a mortgage?
Yeah, you're correct. It's gotten to the point that if you're a Facebook user you either have to not care if your data is shared or remove anything you may have added and care about.
Fight Image Spam With FuzzyOCR And SpamAssassin On Debian Lenny
Whether Objective-C is open is a weird discussion.

The Objective-C compiler is fully GPL'd, so that's definitely open.

Objective-C, though, depends on a runtime, and Apple's runtime is proprietary. While the GNU project has their Objective-C runtime, it performs markedly worse, and misses a lot of features that are available in Apple's version, including blocks, GCD-style multithreading, garbage collection, fast iterators, and more.
"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."

This is why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Not the parent but the article says: "The most important reason... We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features." Suggesting that the primary reason for the clause is that it will prevent third party apps effectively blocking enhancements made the the development environment; if you are using your own tools this isn't an issue. Not sure I agree that this means apple will be happy with developers using tools outside Objective C, but it certainly could suggest it.
The Supreme Court would like a word with you.
Had a friend who was certain he could make a million dollars selling subscriptions to Google.
ha, ha, of course, since by making the claim that one is great means you don't really have a problem acknowledging that you're great.

Maybe the best answer is that one's greatest weakness is being OCD about fixing one's weaknesses :-)

And for a serious answer: I spend too much time worrying about weaknesses when I should be delegating affected tasks to others while I focus on tasks that play to my strengths.

Or: If I don't do something well, I delegate it to someone who can and get back to doing what I do best.