skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know its a contrary opinion to what most commenters will have, but I'm glad this app didn't get approved. Apple is apparently responding to the very frequent complaints of useless apps filling up the App Store. What we are seeing is a pendulum, where they swing back and forth with the policies for app acceptance until they settle somewhere in the middle that works best for everyone.

Like many other people, I kept my 1st gen iPhone jailbroken from the day I bought it. I absolutely loved Installer.app and the huge community of developers and their applications that I had access to. A lot of the apps in Installer.app were pretty worthless though, or had little utility. They frequently cluttered up the categories of things that I really wanted to review.

However, it was much harder for developers to create jailbroken apps than it is now with the official SDK. This caused the overall number of available apps to be much smaller than what we have available through the official channel. If Apple were to not attempt to manage all of the apps that people are submitting, it would quickly become nearly impossible to find anything useful. That would also open up the possibility of nefarious apps that are trying to get your personal info, etc.

However, so that I don't sound like a complete Apple flunky, I also admit the App Store on iTunes and on the iPhone itself has a lot to be desired. There are interface issues which annoy me (like navigating into an app description, going back to the category but being at the freaking top of the list instead of where the app appears in the list). They need to improve the App Store application itself. It would be really great if someone could write a new App Store as a 3rd party app that would interface and manage all of the apps you have access to. This most certainly could be done on the old jailbroken systems using something like Summerboard.
Former CSAIL director and iRobot CTO launches new robotics startup
Because you would need to bootstrap it every time you want to run it, since Javascript is interpreted. This means you'd need a 3rd party Javascript interpreter to run your Javascript interpreter.
Except the article was intimating that the primary source was Grant, and not Tory.
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So, in order to layout an interface you programmatically create it? And so a designer has to learn yet another language for layout?

We made the mistake of adopting GWT a while back and it's been nothing but headaches.

Now instead of the designers being able to directly design in HTML (which they all have a familiarity of), they're required to download our entire project, edit the layout classes, recompile, just to see their work.

We've tried to have the developers take the designers mockups and translate them into working code, but the app seems to lose that designer "touch" in the process.

Designers need to be able to work with a familiar canvas.
Honestly I need to dig more but I'm not sold on this route. Creating a new abstraction layer (Objective-J) on top of Javascript seems like some Architecture Astronautics to me. Why not just write this on top of JS (maybe with something like jquery?) Sites down right now or I'd try to make a more reasoned statement but sproutcore seems a better alternative.

I also wouldn't rule out Google rolling out something similar as well as they unify the widgets and windowing type stuff they've got from docs and spreadsheets (and Zenter for that matter).
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So our society isn't less corrupt than it used to be. It's just that the overlords have realized that they can be a little subtler and not have to hack/burn/behead/hang/shoot people to subjugate and control them.

Yes, there's progress, but I think we can still complain.
Corruption has always had the upper hand...
try topcoder.com
COBOL was a familiar canvas at one point.
I haven't read it, but it sits on my bookshelf as a reference.
I've not used Cappuccino and have only tooled around with SproutCore, but I tend to agree with the SproutCore philosophy.

http://www.sproutcore.com/2008/05/01/another-reason-not-to-c...

http://www.sproutcore.com/2008/04/22/emulating-cocoa-in-java...

While Cappuccino gives me the ability to dip into JavaScript if needed, it means I have to be proficient in Obj-J, JS, CSS, HTML, DOM, ...

That said, it is very impressive and I think competition for the "cocoa of the web" will improve both projects.
Anyone know what a "from-scratch" learning path would look like, to build a simple web app in Cappuccino? (ie. what are the 'knowledge prerequisites'?)

I'm wondering whether only desktop developers will use this, or if it will be reasonable for web developers more familiar with PHP/Python/Ruby & HTML/CSS to pick it up and run as well.
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Sorry, that was unclear. I was thinking more that few people would have >100 browsers/tabs/applications open at one time.

It isn't an argument about the technology, rather about what humans will be able to manage.
But a lot of the problems you mention, like "cluttering" and "impossible to find anything" are really problems with the App Store, not the apps. iTunes, after all, has millions of songs, and there doesn't seem to be a clutter problem there. Apple doesn't tell musicians, "don't make crappy music," or "you song is of limited musical appeal."

The nefarious apps argument is not really valid, because the number of apps on the Apps Store has, or will very soon, exceed the number of things humans can keep track of anyways, so even if crap apps are eliminated, there will still be too many apps to keep track of.

This is really a problem of taste, and Apple has messed up here. Some people like silly apps, just like some people like really bad music. The solution is not to insert yourself into the middle and become an arbiter of taste, the solution is to make it easier for the crowd to sort the good from the bad and let each app appeal to its niche while not eliminating innovation or silliness.
I trust Schneier's take on this type of calculation more than I trust the people inside NatSec/InfoSec.
Agreed.

But don't undervalue the difference in mindset. At least for me, threading makes me think "what can I peel off of my main task to run in threads" versus share-nothing which makes me think "here are the 3 shared resources that I anticipate will be bottlenecks".
It doesn't really mean that, no. You don't need to know any CSS, HTML or DOM to get started in Cappuccino. If we've done our jobs right, you'll never need those things unless you're doing seriously advanced hacking (and even then, only in rare circumstances).

Sproutcore, on the other hand, really does need you to be an expert in all of those technologies, plus its own, plus ruby helpers to actually put anything on the screen.
I think the second browser war started when Firefox was released.
Designers were writing COBOL?
If you have a tab in the background that has flash elements (i.e. most sites with animated ads these days) they will continue to run, even if the tab is hidden. This will have a knock on performance hit.
"We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store."

That's like Amazon saying "we won't sell your book, because it isn't of interest to the broad Amazon.com customer community."

They need to do something with the App Store so that it feeds off the "long tail" instead of fighting against it. (UI improvements? try-before-you-buy? some other browsing/search/tryout enhancements?)
and do you really refer it once a month?
yeah thats the big boss of programming rush!
I agree with your Prof (for strong values of "CS".)

It's not a work of Software Engineering, and it's certainly not "must-read" for programmers who stick to writing simple apps in existing frameworks or high level languages.

However, if you are interested in the discipline of Computer Science, it's essential.

(And don't limit yourself to the first 3 volumes-- there's about 500 pages of Volume 4 out now, which contains some great stuff.)

If you're on the fence, I'd strongly recommend watching some of Knuth's "Computer Musings" videos (which are available on iTunes, or via the Stanford web site.) I especially liked the one on "Sideways Heaps"...
Making a MOD and good read for all developers.
If you excuse the analogy, Firefox was like the Vietnam war, started very small/gorilla style and has now escalated into a larger conflict.

Chrome is more of a full frontal assault on both MS and Mozilla (not to mention Opera/Safari), some one else probably come come up with a fitting historical conflict.
This guy is wrong. In GTA, gas stations serve a purpose. They may not pump gas, but they make fabulous explosions.
"A commodity is basically saying that every unit (e.g. a programmer) is the same, in the same way that every piece of rice is the same or every steel worker is the same."

So what about, say a car. Some cars are affordable, some extremely expensive. They are all still commodities. Why then is there such a price disparity? Some cars are more complex, and thus require a greater degree of skill during construction. Others may be composed of exotic or rare materials, which take more manpower and a larger amount of capital to produce than a cheaper material.

The same applies to IT. Some jobs in IT are relatively simple, such as a Help desk attendant, while others are more demanding in terms of knowledge and application. Each worker, though is paid in proportion to the degree of skill he/she exhibits.

Your skill and ability to work for a wage, although unique to living individuals, is still a commodity, regardless of whether you want to consider it as such.
I'm looking forward to spending my weekend with Cappuccino. My main desktop product is developed in Cocoa, but I'd like to expand it onto the web and the iPhone. Cappuccino looks like it might handle the web side of that quite well.

I tried Sproutcore, and while I'm impressed with what's been done so far it takes me several days of working on it to shift into Javascript/HTML/CSS mode from Obj-C. Hopefully with Cappuccino it'll be more like porting the app than rewriting the app.

[Edit to clarify]
Dude. Lets give them a little break already!

git clone git://github.com/280north/cappuccino.git
Old news. It's all out there now: http://www.thenewfreedom.net/mbta_defcon.pdf.
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I don't really see how this is much different than the promise of ASP.Net (outside of the Mac vs PC argument) - Allowing programmers to create web pages the same way they create applications.

It's a tremendous pain in the ass and a failure for Microsoft as far as I see it.
Rothenburg, Siena, and San Gimignano are all worth visiting. There are many nice hotels outside the walls of Rothenburg.

Make sure you visit the museums of criminology (aka torture museums) in these towns/
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Except that it would be illegal. There are a lot more profitable illegal "startups" out there.
Damn. Now I have "The Order of Death" playing in my head.
I agree with @swombat that the video is mostly a repeat of Guy's usual points (and jokes). But I am seeing a shift. He is now front and center in convincing entrepreneurs that they should forgo (the pursuance) of VC money in the beginning and should concentrate instead on bootstrapping their companies until they have a revenue stream and a viable business model. It has taken him a while but I think his experience with Trumor and Alltop has helped him with the transition.
As Arnaud Weber, a Google engineer and one of the characters in the comic book, says in a speech bubble: "We're applying the same kind of process isolation you find in modern operating systems." It is a geek's way of saying that developers and consumers may soon stop caring about the operating system on their own hard drive altogether.

Maybe they will stop caring, but I don't think that's what Weber was saying. (I'm not even sure it was a subtext.) I understood Weber's line in a totally literal sense.
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Well, there can really only be "betamax" problems when you have a winner-take-all economy. Since these frameworks are just code that outputs (JS|HTML|JSON|etc), there isn't really a way that any framework could become a betamax.

That said, for myself, the Django 1.0 isn't that exciting. What will be exciting is the development from now on. I mean, I've been tracking SVN and so 1.0 doesn't offer me cool new things. It's also just a different community. DHH is great at getting the word out and getting the hype up there. Django is more subdued.

You can't go too wrong with either Rails or Django. Don't worry. Be happy. Be productive.
The KDE project evaluated CMake and Scons (actually ported everything to Scons first), but ended up going for CMake. There's an article on it here:

http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/

I find QMake, even for projects that don't use Qt, really nice for projects that don't need to be packaged up or have complex dependancies. The format is trivial and it does well with generating makefiles, XCode projects or Visual Studio projects.
How to accept voicemail on your blog?
Does anyone know of a simple way to let people leave voicemail for you online from your website/blog (using their computer microphone)?

Looks like GrandCentral will do this when it fully launches (http://buzz.blogger.com/2008/01/grandcentral-receive-calls-and-post.html), and Odeo used to do this but the link is now broken (http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/let-site-visitors-leave-voicemail-for.html).

Evoca (http://www.evoca.com/) does this, but its offering seems too complicated and it always scares me when a service so simple doesn't publish its prices publicly.

GetABuz.com is down right now -- I don't know if it's permanent or just a tech snafu.

SnapVine.com is being acquired by WhitePages and makes you use an ugly, SnapVine-branded widget.
Your claim is true only if you assume that there will be no penalty for sharing memory across cores. This is sort of true now with 2-4 core machines, but will probably not be the case as the number of cores increases.
Well, at the very least, ASP.NET is a server side solution, while Cappuccino is entirely client side -- it has no server side component.
Now I can feel much more dignified every time I have to use identity comparison!
See below definitions of commodity from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/commodity

None of them correspond with turkishrevenge's idea of what the word means.

- Anything movable (a good) that is bought and sold.
- Something useful or valuable.
Example: "It really makes me sad that football club chairmen and boards seem to have lost that most precious commodity - patience. "Sam's sacking at Newcastle had, I suppose, been on the cards for a while, but it is really ridiculous to fire a manager after such a short time. Somerset County Gazette on Jan. 14th, 2008.

(economics) Raw materials, agricultural products and other primary products as objects of large scale trading in specialized exchanges.

(marketing) Undifferentiated goods characterized by a low profit margin, as distinguished from branded products.
This is a good place to start:

http://cappuccino.org/learn/tutorials/starter-tutorial.php
"Apple doesn't tell musicians, "don't make crappy music," or "you song is of limited musical appeal."

You're right - Apple relies on music publishers to do that for them. The analogy between music store and appstore is not exact.
For a more diverse view:
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/spore?q=spore
Thanks.. (the link was down earlier)
Can you explain? How is sharing memory any slower than each process having its own address space? I'll admit: I don't know a lot about the system bus and how a multi-processor machine accesses the memory.
Unfortunately Chrome can only grow at the expense of Mozilla loosing its market share. The IE userbase won't move, because it's comprised of those who for various reasons are loyal to Microsoft, and those who are ignorant about browsers in general. Both groups don't care about Chrome same way as they don't care about Firefox.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/11/labor_and_commo.html
I don't know that it's intended to be advertising, per se. If anything, maybe a web-design tip. That said, it's cool, but it's not uber-cool. The main idea seems to be that the live map is really awesome, but to me, it just looks like a fun gimmick.
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exactly. there is little point trying to avoid javascript. just man up and deal. jquery etc make things more palatable...but putting another abstraction on top to me is pointless
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This raises an interesting alternative feature request: allow users to set their own weights on filetypes or domain patterns - but they would only apply to themselves. They could be > 1.

This might be more computationally intensive, and would likely increase page load times. The people using the feature probably wouldn't mind.
Uh, this isn't an update to the story ("Published Saturday 9th August"). It's been on the front page like 2 other times a month ago.
Prediction: With Chrome + tools like Cappuccino, web apps are going to look completely different within a year. They'll be at least indistinguishable from desktop apps, and probably better (since desktop apps haven't had a lot of evolutionary pressure lately).
I agree about Google Web Toolkit. GWT is, at best, a way for hidebound Java programmers to feel comfortable making interfaces for the web. I have not looked at Obj-J very closely, but it seems like the same thing: a way to give Mac programmers a way to express themselves comfortably on the web. Encouragingly it looks a lot more fluid than a Java mudball.

It may also be a better and more compact way to build "rich" web apps, but that remains to be seen.
cool. scons has been around for a while...but never seemed to take off
After my (university) freshman physics class, we were all presented with a copy of Einstein's original papers on Brownian Motion. It's incredible how much he says things to the effect of, "well, I think this effect is the same thing that people are talking about, but I haven't actually seen it first hand, so I could be wrong".
Ask HN: Will you be switching to Chrome?
I think I'll be switching to Chrome. I always thought IE and Firefox could be slimmed down. What are your thoughts?
Unions in the US appear to be pretty screwed up.

I see a union as a way of obtaining a balance of power between powerful corporations and individual employees.

The reason US unions are bad are
- you can't generally choose between competing unions
- unions monopolize industries and/or professions

In other first world countries you generally have a choice about which union you join and there aren't any jobs which require union membership.

Unions can be useful to
- have qualified people on your side in case of a problem with your employer
- influence political decisions to protect and improve employees rights

I'm pretty sure the lack of functioning unions is the reason the US is the only 1st world country that doesn't guarantee health care for it's workers, and that wages have stagnated over the last 35 years or so.

Of course the system is so entrenched it seems very unlikely anything will change in the foreseeable future.
Hey thats very enlightening... thanks
I didn't notice anything changed about my web when I turned it on this morning. :(
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New York Times agrees: Windows is toast
You guys are awesome.
Not necessarily true. Imagine the likes of the Eee PC with a thin client that basically just has Chrome, plus a locally hosted web server with some basic productivity apps? You can run the apps standalone or hosted in the cloud. You could even migrate your local standalone data to the cloud, or sync it so you can work in both modes.

You don't have to move the IE userbase on PCs. It's not even certain that everyone will be using PCs in the future. (Maybe just content creators, designers, and programmers will be using them?)
How is being the #1 or #2 enterprise application framework a failure for Microsoft?
Except, Apple doesn't restrict itself to only music from formal publishers. I've got a couple of albums on the iTunes store, and I don't have a contract with anyone...
Sorry, it was just an exaggeration. It was a snarky comment, mostly. I like the iPhone and the app store despite all these controls.
I will second his recommendation to read original works.

Be aware, though, that this recommendation does have a flip side. I haven't tried to read Maxwell's original Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, but I've heard it said that it's really, really difficult to get through. The fact that Maxwell's equations, the marvel of their era, are now a subject for second-year undergraduates is due to Oliver Heaviside's later work. From Wikipedia:

In 1884 [Heaviside] recast Maxwell's mathematical analysis from its original cumbersome form (they had already been recast as quaternions) to its modern vector terminology, thereby reducing the original twenty equations in twenty unknowns down to the four differential equations in two unknowns we now know as Maxwell's equations.

Just imagine Maxwell's equations as a system of 20 simultaneous equations. Now marvel at the fact that Maxwell was able to conclude anything at all while operating under such a heavy handicap.

Similarly, one of the reasons that intelligent nonphysicists today find quantum mechanics terribly confusing is that the original formulators of quantum theory -- guys like Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, and Einstein -- were so influential and so well-spoken that their writings and ideas have refused to go quietly into the dustbin of history, where many of them arguably belong. The mental models used by these folks -- the cat in the box, the atom as a miniature solar system, the notion of "god playing dice" -- are largely obsolete. They reflect the viewpoint of classically-trained physicists desperately scrambling for a grip on quantum theory. Now that quantum theory is much better understood, there are probably better ways to approach the subject than the analogies and metaphors used by its original pioneers.

Another example: While Darwin's Origin of Species is a great work, guys like Dennett and Dawkins and Gould have noted that one of Darwin's awesome literary talents is his ability to distract you from the fact that he didn't know about genetics. Without the notion of a gene it's rather hard to explain why the individual members of a species exhibit variation in the first place. Darwin, whose theory was already very difficult to sell, understood this problem but was careful not to call too much attention to it; it remained as a real hole in his theory until later work cemented it shut.
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Perhaps when there is a stable linux client.
I'm a UVAer. I wouldn't mind a meetup night.