skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And while, $5 is still well within the average teenagers reach, it's still a lot more friction than free.

Smalltalk companies did this to themselves, but with a smaller userbase and bigger fees. (Which is worse in both dimensions!) With $5000 seats, the friction was hella high. Then Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool, but which were frictionless and free.

It's kinda the playbook for being a superior technology with an earned reputation for coolness, then losing anyhow because your userbase doesn't grow as fast.
Apple seems to be adopting an attitude that "you stand to make more with us than without" towards developers and I suppose this makes them feel entitled to tax us. The amount of money they will make out of this will be peanuts, far less than they will need to spend in marketing to developers to keep them off new and rising platforms. As a professional developer, the price doesn't bother me, just the attitude. When I decided whether to try iOS or Android first, the decision was a close one. Things like how they treat the developer community actually mattered.

Apple: you stand to make more with us than without us. Your dollars spend the same as the ones from Android's marketplaces. Be careful when you tread on free. Free makes us friends, pals, maybe even lovers. When I have to pull out the wallet, I stop to ask myself "how much is this relationship worth to me?" Give me XCode and I'll come help you move a couch one day, sell me XCode and you go on a balance sheet where the most cost-effective option wins.
Min.us Chrome Extension [ Release ]
And gcc is free too. But gcc isn't all of Xcode and VS Express isn't all of Visual Studio.

But... yeah, I'm aware of VS Express Editions. I do some Windows development and I haven't actually owned a copy of a Microsoft's non-Express IDEs in years, there's really no point unless you have a must-use plugin or want deeply integrated source code control.

I was simply pointing out how unfree Xcode is by using another very similar situation where the non-freeness of the tool is made more obvious by the far-higher-than-impulse price of the associated developer registration fee.

FWIW, I think Xcode is easily worth $5 to Apple/iOS developers no matter how you look at it and I don't fault Apple for charging for it, but arguing it is "still free" because you don't have to pay for it on top of the usual $99 developer registration is absurd, IMO.
Then why not US$ 0.99?
> Also- given all the MBA hate on HN, I thought it was interesting that they asked all their "business" positions to have MBAs.

Companies founded by people who have graduate degrees tend to overvalue candidates with graduate degrees.
Completely agree Josh
>The Nook Color is great in all ways except one: video.

That, and the WiFi on mine was flaky; a couple of times per day, it would drop out, and not reliably come back until I rebooted. That was the main reason I returned it.
Firefox 4, Safari and Opera extensions to come next!
Watch out for a huge update next week :) http://blog.min.us

We'll be @ SXSW!!
Because Facebook would not profit from that.
They are not available for free because they come bundled with US$ 5 worth of IDE and cannot be separated.
Zencoder lowers the price for encoding to multiple output formats
It's packaging and bundling that's the problem. There is enough people out there that don't want to have to manually install compilers etc versus just installing Xcode.
I do wonder: for how long will Xcode 3 remain available on Apple's site? I also wonder what they may attempt to do to effectively break Xcode 3, or make it where Xcode 4 is necessary for future development? I wouldn't put it past them.
Certainly none in Brazil
Robert - not sure i understand the strong negative reaction?

Have you had any experience or interaction with these 3 brands? Is there any precedent that would lead you to think we would want names & emails, or have any intent of spamming anyone for that matter? The reason the 3 of us choose to join forces on this project is because we all try and engage with entrepreneurs, not market at them.

I am sorry if you have had a negative experience in the past with sponsors, but this offer my friend is a genuine one. Last year we attended multiple BarCamps and had an absolute blast, the feedback that we got from the communities was overwhelming appreciation and hope that we would come back again next year.

We are not asking for everything, in fact we only want to be involved with what you need help with. I think its so AMAZING that you have such overwhelming support from sponsors in your community, but in our experience there are still tons of barcamps struggling to solve a few pain points. Or in some cases (like BC Charlotte), they don't even want our monetary support but just wanted us to come participate and meet their community.

The bottom line is, this is something new and we are going to make mistakes & learn as we go. All i know is that we want to find a way to make barcamps even more awesome...and i hope people are willing to work with us to help make that possible.

Jonathan
That doesn't address the part about those of us who don't want to use the App Store on our macs... we like them how they are.

I love my mac, I have since OS X was mature enough to be useful, and I've converted tons of people, and I have lots of credit cards.. it's not about the money - Apple is seriously making me think about ditching them.
They're a lot more abundant than the Mac you need to run Xcode on, though.

iTMS cards are purchasable at every 7-Eleven and nearly every major supermarket, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Target or what-have-you in the USA. You can buy Xcode with $5 in nickles if you have access to a Coinstar machine.

Let's be realistic, the hardware demands are much more serious than $5 on an iTunes card. The problem here is the message Apple is sending.
I flagged this. Apparently 64 people disagree with me, but we would not accept articles behind any other payment/registration wall, and I see no reason to make an exception for Facebook.
I don't remember the exact year but I remember first reading about Google in a slashdot thread where someone was extolling its virtues. I was using either webcrawler or metacrawler at the time; it's difficult to remember. I also don't remember if Google became my homepage that day if it took a few days before it stuck, but it was a very fast transition.
The only reason I install Xcode is so I can compile macports. Now maybe it will be worthwhile to package a free standalone compiler so I won't even need to do that.

I'm so tired of Apple.
I would be interested in knowing the results of your findings. So, from my brief understanding of node.js, it's well suited for such stuff. There's special handling in node for binary data. The answer probably depends on whether you want to blindly shuffle data (piping) or do something smart like interpret it, etc...

A small experiment (profiled) which emulates your use-case would surely throw some light on the question.
Brilliant. Just signed up and told my friends on FB about it too. A few suggestions:

* Make it easy, Step 1: Connect netflix, Step 2: Connect Twitter/FB, and so on.

* You're telling me something I already know on my home screen, maybe show me highly rated movies from within the FoN network (not necessarily my friends) without telling me who rated them, etc?

* You can grab email using FB connect, and it is a great marketing tool once you get going to bring people back to the website.

Super excited!
Eclipse: $0

NetBeans: $0

DevShed C++: $0

Emacs: $0

The complete GNU compiler collection: $0

Xcode 3: $0
if someone can afford an apple pc, he for sure can also afford 5$ for a good software!
if anything, this should teach the teens that good software can also have a price.
Xcode every other day before now: Free with your OS
vim - $0.00
emacs - $0.00
Don't forget Vim at least!
If Xcode isn't worth $4.99, then how outrageous is Textmate's $56 license? I use neither, since free tools are available for what I do, and they get the job done quite well.
I agree: They are charging to set an expectation for consumers and app developers that quality mac apps should not be free.
Except that's not true anymore:

"Apple has for the first time made this full iOS upgrade free to all of its iPod touch customers, rather than charging the customary $10 fee that provoked groans in the past."

(http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/reviews/entry/apple-ios-4.0...)

This leads me to believe that the whole accounting rules canard was just a way to make more money. Why did they start charging for XCode? Because you'll pay it.
Techies Get to Work at Hacker Dojo
Possible theory: Cost of bandwidth for downloading 4.2GB is > .99? Honestly, I have no idea, though.
Thomas,

You're sorta not understanding what goes on in a verifone device. I would advise actually constructing and inserting a rogue verifone PED, it is non-trivial.

First, understand that when you swipe your card at mcdonalds, you're not trusting the guy behind the counter, the manager, the district or anyone else physically present or even mcdonalds. you're not trusting their malware laiden office computers, nor their network, et cetera. You're trusting the terminal. And the terminals, depending on model and service/etc, all have cryptographic MAC addresses "that are burned in" (lol), and they're externally by verifone. So first hurdle is that you can't just get a job at mcdonalds and ebay your way to a better life, when you switch out the device, it gets detected and blocked, and i imagine once the burger flippers figure out that its not broken and someone tried to own them, they pull the cameras, et cetera.

Next, the device has a myriad of tamper-detection qualities which make it non-trivial to get into and still have the damned thing still function. This is again, dependent on which device is in play and so on-- getting in successfully obviously can be done, but you're getting sorta specialized. Next, the card details/pin/etc all get encrypted at the device never to see plain-text again until it's "safely in the cloud".

That's the theory anyways, there's some problems but it's not that joe bubblegum is gonna download an 'app' and extract my credit card details from his employers iphone. If pressed for an opinion, I'd say the entire idea of getting people used to paying by swiping their cards through some guys phone is maligned and going to be horribly problematic. This is sorta like SSL, there's another maligned trust heirarchy that exists and makes sense sorta.

So, basically my point is, verifone is not entirely incorrect here. It's not that "a little white card skimmer dongle is trivial to construct" or any other hyperbole. A PED or other input device that I can dump my card info from is a problem.

There's another entire trust relationship going on here which everyone seems to skip: the most common use-case of dealing with a representative of a third-party who is less trustworthy than the third-party itself ('Alice meet George, embassary of Bob, don't mind the collasped veins, he's legit!').
free as in beer, not your rights
And your OS is either $30, or free with your $700+ Mac purchase
The Lure of the Startup
I wonder if Xcode will still be part of the OS X install disk, I hope so.
I'm surprised the article doesn't actually tell you the meta http-equiv to disable DNS prefetching. It mentions that it helped out tremendously, though. Here it is:

<meta http-equiv="x-dns-prefetch-control" content="off" />

or, if you're more into HTML5:

<meta http-equiv="x-dns-prefetch-control" content="off">
I bet they will, just like they're shipping Facetime with Lion.
I have heard of sales being done on the back of screenshots on Powerpoint, and a few front screens spruced up. What is the worst thing that can happen if the software isn't as polished as you imagined? Do you think they'll invite you back to show them progress?

The worst (and the best) thing that can happen is that they tell you it is not what they had in mind. I've got myself out of a lot of strife by showing photoshop prototypes first. You don't have to lie about it, but explain that the brains behind the software is done, but the front is being configured for their industry, and this is an early prototype.

It also gives you an opportunity to find out about their purchasing process, how the item is going to get budgeted etc.
I was suffering from insomnia for almost 6 days last December, it was an experience, but not one I would ever like to happen again.
Agreed, I had the feeling reading this article that these devs just discovered the idea of indexes on a database. This should be common knowledge to a developer.
I haven't seen any indication that they won't continue to include XCode in the install DVD that comes with every Mac.
Visual Studio Express (Fine for a lot of development tasks): $0.00
A translation of VeriFone's original Square 'exploit' video
I have a request.

Please add another alias, like ddg or duck. You're showing up as "im" in my buddies list, and frankly, that's not very informative to me.

EDIT: Never mind, I guess I can rename you on my end.
And? Apple never said (as far as I know) that "Xcode will be forever free" and really, are people bitching about $5?
> Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool

That's one hell of an understatement...
> iTMS cards are purchasable at every (...) or what-have-you in the USA.

Outside the USA, what do you do?
I develop iOS apps on a hackintosh. It's of equivalent spec of a recent Mac Pro, apart from it's an i7 instead of a Xeon.
Ah. A hibernate-to-EBS feature would be nice, so that an idle EC2 instance could be concerted from $/day to $/month when idle, for use cases (like mine) where I have installed a bunch of scripts and data on a single host that I would like to scale up to one big machine for burst jobs,
hibernate over the weekend or when I am not running jobs,
but otherwise be available for interactive access for script editing.
The app store can detect I'd apps are installed (through their bundle identifiers) to prevent you from accidentally buying them twice, but it will not update apps that haven't been downloaded through the store.
Is it bubble yet?
I love how half the comments here run along the lines of "Apple is evil because they're charging $5 for this piece of software" and the other half are "Apple is evil because they're giving this away for $5 to suck people into the iOS/OSX ecosystem."

Gotta pick, guys.

How about: $5 is essentially free for something that is a major piece of software. It's a venti latte at SBUX. It's not going to represent a real obstacle to anyone actually interested in learning to code for the OS (any more than a $25 O'Reilly book would probably be, or $10 used one) and it's also not going to keep anyone locked in because they spent a bunch on the tool.

(If $5 is not an inconsequential amount of money for someone, then yes, they should go use Linux and gcc / java / whatever. Or maybe they should concentrate one making a few bucks mowing lawns or something, assuming they're in the developed world.)
If we're arguing about imaginary teenage hackers to fit whatever argument we need...nobody, they're running a hackintosh on a $200 netbook and they're pirating XCode anyways.
Seems the conditioning they put you through worked well. In fact seen in that light, the new fee makes sense. They just want to dull your resistance against paying through the nose.
I prefer HTTP headers instead of meta tags where possible.

An example solution at the load balancer level, assuming the use of Varnish:

In vcl_fetch:

if (req.url ~ "\.(htm|html|php)" || req.url ~ "\/(\?.*)?$") {
set beresp.http.disable-dns-prefetch = "1";
}

In vcl_deliver:

if (resp.http.disable-dns-prefetch) {
remove resp.http.disable-dns-prefetch;
set resp.http.X-DNS-Prefetch-Control = "off";
}
it was a tough decision, but every time we thought about it, we had nightmares of this image: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwmmcouLYR1qz9v9y.jpg
But, if you pay for the Mac Developer Program, you can download it from the website. So either $5 or $99/year. But you need to pay $99/year to submit apps to the app store—at least iOS app store, I assume the same for Mac App Store. So developers don't have to experience the app store.

I think it is to deter everyone from installing XCode just because they can. That 4+ GB download isn't free on their side. It is just enough of a pain point to make sure the user is sure they want it, but not so bad that people have to save up for it.
What countries have you been to?
Definitely marketing and finding an audience plays a part in it, but I don't think that you can find that market without some degree of credibility. In looking at your posts it's clear that you have a high degree of experience in this field just from the first couple paragraphs of your post. You don't necessarily have to build credibility by name recognition - demonstrating an expansive knowledgebase works too.
And this is an "iApp" because...?
It's certainly a lot cheaper than ~$3000 /year (MSDN?), or ~$4000 /year (IBM?) or ~$3600 /year (Lispworks?).

In the grand scheme of things, Apple's tools and developer membership schemes are fairly generous. It's still making a big step from free to non-free as others have already said. I'm not going to rush to upgrade.
because you want to support the developer?
As a fellow Mountain biker, I was surprised and glad that I saw pinkbike on HN.
That's because GCC has changed licensing to GPLv3, and Apple didn't like that. So they left with last GPLv2 version.
I've got one of the new Macbook Airs, and they definitely didn't ship any sort of developer tools on the little installer USB that came with it - all I got was an OS X installer. If that's any indication, it sounds like Xcode won't be getting bundled with installation media anymore.
Built on open source... an important part of which they invested in (LLVM). One can as well easily install LLVM/clang via MacPorts, or wait until Lion (under the assumption that XCode will still be included on the download media).

Getting the proprietary parts for five dollars is certainly not a bad deal. But one has to wonder... why? Is it to cover download costs?
Not closing the tag is nothing specific to HTML5, it just means you aren't strict on XHTML. HTML4 and others would be the same.
Google Funds Preservation of Apartheid History
Xcode 3 was included with a $129 dollar OS and only would run on that one or later. Xcode 3.2 was included with a $29 OS and ditto.
Read a boring book, or listen to familiar music. Works well for me.
The real issue is that the cost per query is negligible here and DNS providers shouldn't charge by the query yet almost all of them do. They have to have some metric to separate the big guys from the little guys and charge the big guys more, but this is a crude way to do it.

Consider that publishers often have little control of how many DNS requests they get, so to charge for something out of your control seems utterly bizarre to me. Nice to see in this instance, publisher was able to make a meaningful improvement.

Also keep in mind, I used to run the largest free DNS service in the world so I'm well aware of what I'm talking about and am totally biased on these matters. :-)
Early stage startup valuations are a guessing game at the best of times, but if you haven't even got as far as a knowing your product, then you'll have a particularly difficult job in justifying a valuation of any amount.

So I would say, however much you think you can get away with.

Can you give us any more context? For what purpose do you need a valuation?
I Think, Therefore I Pivot: The Lean Startup Philosophy At Work
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/08/02/simson.ht...

Using Translucent Databases
Don’t Believe The FUD: Square Is Only As Insecure As You Let It Be
Remember there are places in the world where you can get a Mac but can't get an Apple store account.
Life of a CS major
Startup tours! Love it.
On the other hand, I begged and pleaded with my parents for weeks to get a copy of Microsoft BASIC, and later on a modem.

So not only did that lead to me being a programmer for a living, I got some negotiation skills out of it too.
Cracked software is pre-patched. Otherwise, they just distribute keys, and use the software unmodified. Xcode and gdb aren't a factor in piracy.
This guy has done exactly that, even automating the authoring of the books http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker
buying Xcode to actually raise the market value of a iOS device (more software offerings): $4.99
having to own a mac to do that: priceless

...or actually, $1,999.99

i think i will pass.
I'm surprised this made it to the number 1 spot on the front page. From the Hacker News Guidelines:

You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put
gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it.

Xcode 4 is available as a free download for Mac and iOS developers with a paid membership [1], just like the versions before it. Those who aren't paying members of ADC can get Xcode 4 via the Mac App Store, paying $5 to offset the bandwidth costs for the 4.24 GB download -- an option that didn't exist before. I'm also willing to bet that the new version of Xcode will be included on new Mac OS X install/restore disks, as Apple has always done.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/xcode/index.php

(The comment was edited, as others have noted that they can't download from the ADC site with a free ADC account.)
I wouldn't be so quick to call it an accounting rules canard, there was a ton of analysis of the rule when the iPod Touch upgrade fee was first announced and there was very little doubt this was the case. And while I can be critical of Apple policies, I stop well short of suggesting that they would lie about an accounting rule. That's the kind of thing that gets people sent to jail, and certainly Microsoft would have held a press conference the next day explaining that Apple was lying.

That being said, they haven't said that the XCode charge is a subscription accounting thing, so there's certainly no logical reason why you may not be correct in saying that they are charging for XCode because they can. I'm guessing otherwise, but this is armchair speculation.

UPDATE: I was wrong about subscription-based accounting affecting how Apple accounts for expenses. Here's a link I found:

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/09/23/standards-board-approves...
Is the iOS 4.3 upgrade not going to come out for the iPod Touch 3rd gen? Isn't this the same hardware generation as the iPhone 3GS that is supported by 4.3? Does anyone know?
Fund To Help Indie Devs Port From iOS To Android
Support for this theory can be seen in the pattern of past Xcode major releases: to date, they've been released included w/ a new version of OS X and have not run on any previous version of OS X, while minor updates have been available for free.

ETA: Also does anyone seriously think that the $4.99 is going to remotely even slightly come anywhere within a few orders of magnitude of paying for the development costs? I mean, really?
For what it's worth, I scraped J-Archive.com and wrote a couple of articles for Slate Magazine about what I found. More for the purpose of learning about Jeopardy than learning how to win.

- The first piece: http://www.slate.com/id/2284678/

- The follow-up, in which I answer reader questions: http://www.slate.com/id/2287705/
Visual Studio Professional (for students/educators): $0.00
Maybe nobody. Maybe it belongs to Mom or Dad.
Interesting. I don't use the offline feature, so it had never come up as a problem here.
I believe that was considered a bug in the App store.
I understand the sentiment, but it's just a method of distribution for the SDK. XCode 4 doesn't keep you from distributing your apps any way you'd like.

Isn't this like saying that you'd really like the new version of the dev environment on CD because you don't like DVDs? I doubt anyone would be complaining if it was 2003 and Apple was charging a $5 shipping and handling charge to ship you a DVD.
Next version should add logic to add "ly" to the end of most names.