skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
app stores which are dictatorships

The 1990s called. They want their metaphor back.

Let's face it: The "dictatorship" metaphor was fun (Remember the cartoons with the X-wing fighter torpedoing the AT&T Death Star logo? Good times.) but it was probably overwrought even back in the old days when DOS software and Mac software and each of the 23 different Unices were binary incompatible and emulation was dog slow and virtualization was like science fiction and choosing a platform felt like proposing marriage. But now? It might even be a dangerous line of thinking. You need to learn to think like your customer, and they don't see this oh-so-crucial distinction between "native apps" and "web apps". Except to the extent that web apps are a trifle more difficult to find: Instead of finding the pretty icon and touching it, you have to touch Safari and then type the name of your desired app into the Googles.

(No, of course the average customer doesn't know how to bookmark a URL. They don't know what a URL is.)

A defining characteristic of the metaphorical "dictatorship" is that people can't vote. In particular: They can't vote with their feet, because the wall is too high or the ocean too wide or the border guards (on whichever side of the border) are too expensive to bribe. But there are only two kinds of native-app platforms today:

A) The platforms in which a full-featured HTML5-compliant browser is at most two clicks away at any time;

B) The platforms that are being crushed to death by iOS, Android, and the other platforms in Category A.

Where's the big barrier here? Half of my native apps embed entire HTML5 web pages. Or they link out to HTML5 web pages. Meanwhile, an increasing quantity of web pages prompt me to install native apps. The answer to "web apps or native apps" is "both", to the degree that they interpenetrate and are inseparable, and what reason is there to believe that this won't continue?

Developers obviously care about their release schedules and their profit share and the backend technology underlying each and every screen on the phone, but customers don't know and they don't much care.
why can't they do both?
Looks like it. Seems like it's a war where everybody wins.

EDIT: But yeah, I don't think they're giving up completely on Flash, considering we'll still need it for some things until pure HTML5 doesn't cover all corners.
HN TreeMap
What about non-competes? If you take the offer of one of these companies, if their employee contract is of the standard type outside of California, you'd better save away enough money to move back to where they are non-enforceable as a matter of long standing public policy.
Galaxy Tab 10.1 gets Netflix video streaming
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Decent try, but still, using the hashbang? Using the history API would seem appropriate if you're demoing HTML5.
I've been burned many, many times in python by the indentation.
I agree completely. The developing stuff in secret and play fast and loose with the definition of open source works fine with their own platform. The Web is everyone's platform. I find it a tad insulting to be blocked off of the process and then be told that the Elite Engineers of Google have solved this problem for us.

There doesn't have to be an exact parallel between this and ActiveX for this to be bad. Mozilla announced about a month ago that they would be developing a not-yet-cross-platform set of APIs called WebAPI. Except they invited any one to participate. I'm subscribed to their mailing list and actively participating. I can submit patches if I so choose. Dash sounds like an almost-finished product that the rest of the community has to either adopt or opt-out of.
I think you can have this kind of policy in a smaller company because you are assumingly in a closer relationship and also lack of funds , so that you must adapt to each others needs and work out in the interest of the company.You must trust each other more i think and that you must be closer and respect the other persons situation

On the contary....

Most bigger companies are impersonal and see you as mere statistic and will not be so felixble as they would say" many other guys would take your job". So thats why such actualy fair holiday conditions seems weird.
When you say "no one has ever taken advantage of this", do you mean that nobody has ever taken any time off at all, or that you feel nobody has abused the rules in your opinion? I certainly hope it isn't the first, because if so, that's a very very bad policy.
I really like this. They're an English company, of course, and must adhere to the European legal minimum of 28 days a year. I've never understood the American attitude towards vacation - unnecessarily macho, and geared towards burning people out (and, at the two-weeks-a-year end of the spectrum, effectively forcing people to never leave the country).
That's true—I wasn't thinking about the more hardware-focused apps at the time (rather the Apple-won't-allow-that kind).

Regarding "camera flash control XHTML extensions", Mozilla's WebAPI[1] is trying to provide a standard API to interact with (namely) phones' software and hardware.

[1] http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/08/introducing-webapi/
What would you change on The other Road Ahead? A more focus on mobile, more on the line of Fred Wilson's Mobile First Web Second[1]?

[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/09/mobile-first-web-second.html
Google Modifications In The Inscription Hunt: Thumbs Down For Some
Links to 'ask hn' posts are broken (link to 'Ask Pg about hackers and painters' leads to: http://www.hackrnews.com/comments/2982185) . Nice concept though!
Here are the bad news: it's also owned by another twilio employee and the single person behind it doesn't listen to the community, nor cares about it.
Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs
Deft is an Emacs mode for quickly browsing, filtering, and editing directories of plain text notes, inspired by Notational Velocity []. It was designed for increased productivity when writing and taking notes by making it fast and simple to find the right file at the right time and by automating many of the usual tasks such as creating new files and saving files.

[] http://notational.net
Because you can't automatically re-indent code. In a language like C or Javascript, I can just copy, paste and move chunks of code around and have pristine re-indentation with a keypress. In Haskell, Python, or Coffeescript I have to be very careful and have to manually re-indent if I want to move code or change scopes.

Whitespace is much better left as a purely aesthetic feature, IMO.
why nobody has managed to create digital cartography as beautiful as this yet?

I mean, ability to pinch zoom into satellite photo of my neighborhood is awesome and such, but I'd change it any day for beautiful (and correct!) offline cartography like Times Atlas.
Forgot to post my comment here last time:

http://caterina.net/wp-archives/98#comment-7988

I can only comment from my experiences in Berlin,Germany but what I ve found here that many people here read books / watch movies of “How to…. ” or someone’ story to sucess and use it as a carbon copy of how to suceed.

I think people like to hide behind big names, like if you criticse them ” well Bill Gates did that” so like trying to use someone else mask to make you immune from critique. I think also this whole speech using figures and big names as well is a form of name dropping, its like ” im in their league / I m part of their crowd / take me serious” . To me it only shows who they want to be but who they are not at this very moment.

The shame is the “doing / creating ” aspect gets them to the state that they present themselves. So in this creatlve period, with no current exiting model template to follow, you need to strike out with something new, so if you are actually a new guy acting like you made it, well not much will happen.
What happened to the upper half of the iPhone home button? And what's with the W ("We blog...") floating around between the white piece of paper and the beige background? Pay more attention to detail, otherwise users will notice that.
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Phantom Menace Bullies Alien World
Google's PNaCl is trying to promote this. I've talked about this a few weeks ago[1]. But until it gets widely deployed and accepted, it is just yet another standard[2] that will unify everything.

[1] http://bit.ly/phxe16

[2] http://xkcd.com/927/
I think it's more practical for browser vendors to develop ideas (in the open, not like Dash) and use vendor prefixes (-o, -moz, etc.) and then bring those ideas to the standards bodies. We've seen this a lot recently, particularly with mobile. meta viewport tag was not brought to standards bodies first, Apple developed it and everyone else adopted it. To my knowledge it's still not part of WHATWG, although I'm sure it eventually will be.
If you want to fuck off for the next month and you're not on anyone's critical path, that's fine, too.

But if you can do this, maybe they and you will think about whether they need you the month after that, too.
Great all-around reasoning and counter arguments. Now this is HN.
Adobe, at its roots, has always been a company that builds toolsets that allow people to create content. What they haven't built, they've bought, e.g. Macromedia.

Internally Flash has been their flagship media platform product. Consider that one of the reasons Flash gained such massive popularity and install base was that for the longest time, the Flash runtime in browsers was really the only way to do advanced graphics and interactions on the web.

Fast forward to the last couple of years and we've seen the advantages of Flash being eroded by advances and standardizations of HTML5 technologies. This has been boosted by the marginalization of Internet Explorer by Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Only since IE9 has Microsoft made a serious attempt to play catchup. Flash was almost always needed to get earlier versions of IE to do anything approaching advanced.

I would propose that what we're seeing now is simply Adobe adapting to the marketplace. While they will continue to try and push Flash, it seems that at least some groups inside of Adobe feel the wind shifting and are working on the next generation of content creation toolsets for modern CSS3, javascript, and HTML5. Whether people will actually use their authoring tools will depend on how good they are and how easy to use. Notice I didn't mention price. People will pay big money for superior tools. If their new tools aren't doing the job developers need, they won't buy.

So no, I don't believe Adobe is giving up on Flash. As for open standards, I think its more a matter of them following where the market is heading rather than taking a stance.
The main problem with common VMs for multiple existing languages is that often the semantics of the language are heavily coded into the VM. For example, Parrot's core opcodes mimic Perl's behavior of "Type coercion for everyone, the string "0" is false!" There are a lot of other issues as well, and while they are certainly solvable, the resulting VM would be very heavyweight. If you want to design a VM that runs multiple languages, often you have to design the languages around the VM.
More than anything I meant the allusion to a dictatorship as to the fact that Apple can decide whether they want your app or not, and can decline it for any reason. (And I agee, it's a worn metaphor but I couldn't come up with a more succinct description.)

> Web apps are a trifle more difficult to find

That's pretty much my point—Apple want to control what you put on their devices. Remember when they were touting web apps[1]? Look at the page now. Most recent: 12/03/2010. iPhone 3Gs. They dropped that as soon as they realised they were harming their profits with the App Store.

[1] http://apple.com/webapps
Politicians still don't use slides. It would be more interesting to retrieve an actual business presentation from the 1940s.
> but I'd change it any day for beautiful (and correct!) offline cartography like Times Atlas.

Are you implying that offline cartography like Time Atlas do not come with errors? Both online and offline come with tons of errors, the difference is that online maps get corrected faster.
Where do you get the 20 times as much silicon number? For example, SRAM typically uses 6 transistors per bit, as opposed to 1 transistor for DRAM. What are the other 14 transistors doing?
The pre-XHR methods were super-clunky though. The technical contribution of XHR was to provide a standard and clean way of programatically sending HTTP requests in the background without refreshing the page. Without XHR or something like it, I don't think browser-side applications would have taken off the way they have.

It's a shame the Microsoft engineers hadn't thought of making websockets instead. Bi-directional communication would have been useful for the web-based version of Outlook they were supporting, and it would have become available to the rest of us much earlier.
Facebook Fail: Posting via Other Apps Can Cut Likes & Comments by 88% [STUDY]
Interesting. Not only is this guy getting downvoted, but I have showdead on, so I can see that another person commented with this link and the comment got nuked.

This is not a troll, and it is not inflammatory. It is reasonable discourse and an opposing view. These kinds of things are required for intellectual honesty.

It's especially ironic because the post starts out with a quote from pg:

I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really* like to avoid it*

Whichever moderator killed that link, and anyone downvoting this guy - high quality discussion allows reasonable minds to disagree. Censoring it because it is about pg is perpetuating the very problem pg describes.
You're just conflating utility with pleasure. Whether or not such behavior increases with age is a different debate, but I will pose the question: is that a good thing? For your happiness, quite possibly. For everyone's...?
Hmm. In my experience this is not true. Everyone in northern europe is having apps made because it's something you need to do, but they are gambling on web apps. Repackaging via Phonegap works there if written correctly, but I don't see any native app feelings.
From what is known, it seems as if Google plans to move all their Javascript app building efforts to Dart. Given that GWT/Closure are already pretty successful in large organizations and internally, that seems like a big bet on Dart's future.

Whether the Dart VM gets adopted by other browsers seems relatively inconsequential provided they have a decent cross-compilation story.

Assume Dart is objectively better except for lacking browser support. Even Brendan Eich seems to admit that Dart will be "better". Then developing using Dart will give you an adult tooling story (through Chrome/Dash VM/Brightly), a server-side front-end language (capable of Google-scale applications), optimized compilation to Javascript (presumably better than GWT), and major corporate backing (in contrast to coffeescript).

This seems to be like the makings for a major win provided that Google commits to adopting it internally.
"I managed to come back down from the ledge"

That you would consider it a ledge, means you made the right choice, for yourself. On the other hand, many people see the chance to create or work at a start-up a positive opportunity that they can benefit from regardless of the outcome.
There are correct answers to questions like "will redistributing income from group X to group Y improve overall productivity?" but they're neither necessary nor sufficient criterion for policy formulation. (Keynesians, like their neoclassical economist critics tend to be favourably disposed towards assessing policy impact based on empirical evidence; Austrians on the fringe Right argue the economy is too complex to act as a testing ground)

Questions like "is better aggregate economic growth a justification for disproportionate tax increases for these people?" or "if the bottom percentile are hungry, should feeding them take precedence over growth objectives?" are inherently moral
I agree with you, it's ridiculous the need to activate javascript to read a freaking webpage.
Facebook used to have a distinctively irreverent voice ("I don't even know what a quail looks like"). It's slowly been whittled away as they've gotten huge.

Google, on the other hand, maintains their voice but keeps it out of the main flow - think doodles or bidding Pi billion dollars. So it's not just a function of size.
Show HN: MicroMIDI, a Ruby DSL for MIDI
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The kind of information packing that you see in a good map (like the Times Atlas) is nontrivial. Deciding which features to show, how to label them, and how to arrange the labels is a knapsack problem. Plus, it often involves hard-to-quantify local constraints about what’s most important in a given area. (As a trivial example, a pond is a lot more important in the middle of the Sahara than it would be in Bangladesh. There are many more subtle versions of this.)

While it’s certainly possible to come up with good algorithms, and outfits like Google Maps and Bing Maps have, maps are judged by esthetics and practical usability as well as quantitative criteria[0], so the best results are likely to be hand-tuned.

0. Maps as opposed to the underlying GIS data, which is easier to judge solely by whether it’s complete, precise, and accurate.
Modern rock music is blandly conservative, which in and of itself appears to me to reflect the timidity of modern youth and young adults

I can't really agree with this at all. Maybe the big-label top 40 stuff is at an all-time low, but I'm hearing more innovative and daring music coming from young people today than I have in a long, long time. You have to be willing to do a little work to find it though.
I'm not sure that comparing networking vendors to arms dealers to repressive regimes is the best way to defend them/yourself.
The other comment wasn't killed by a moderator. It got autokilled because the account is banned.
I also disagree with the downvoting as it goes against all the rules and very spirit of HN, but this whole area is kinda touchy. It's probably the biggest amount of beef ever in HN history. It spilled out into outright brawls in the comments more than once between pg and idlewords:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982832

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048849

Kindof hilarious actually. idlewords finishes by calling pg a "weenis".
2 Years of Programming in 4 months
Depends on the company. In my home country in Austria I've got 25 paid days off + public holidays per year. Here in the US I get 15 paid days off (+ public holidays). While it's lot less it is not that bad.
It would be useful because it would provide a standard way of expressing a hyperlink. URLs are a standard way of expressing the location of a resource, HTTP is a standard mechanism for interacting with resources, but there are no widely-used standards for expressing "here's a URL". XLink and RDF tried to become standards for that, but they haven't caught on. The text/html content type (and its close relatives) are widely understood and include a couple of syntaxes for different types of links, and that's why I like xhtml as my API content type. If JSON had a standard widely understood syntax for links I'd happily switch over since JSON is certainly more popular as a RESTful API content type.

Imagine where we would be if every website expressed links using a different syntax, and browsers had to be explicitly programmed to understand a given website's syntax in order to use its links. The web couldn't exist that way.
> Silicon Valley is like working in a big company with multiple divisions

buzzkill
Hey. Kudos on shipping!

My honest feedback would be that your main point is lost in the story. Even though I read the whole article, the thing I was left thinking when I finished was that the root cause of your problem was 1) the failure of your contract developer to deliver and 2) you rushed an early version of the app out in 6 weeks without sufficient testing.

For what it's worth, leading with a clear apology to those affected by the problem would do no harm.

It would also help if you explained more clearly what _exactly_ you wanted to learn from the release that justified the impact of this bug on users. Eg, some key hypothesis or assumption in your business model or product roadmap etc.

Good luck with the next iteration :)
It's pretty hard to screw up copying a string from one place to another without modification, at least when it comes to encodings without null bytes.

Some programs manage it somehow, though.
I think what fixed this to me, was to set the browser settings to English too. Google stopped trying to force the language change after changing the browser settings in this way or in some similar way (maybe locale).
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Please don't editorialize titles like this. Even Adobe themselves didn't call this "awesome," but if they had, it would have been preferable to remove that kind of fluff.
This is the guy that California needed. They really were starting to make laws for everything. If you make laws for the smallest thing, you have to waste money enforcing those laws. It's no wonder why California's budget is deep in the red.
A) "So it's UDP vs TCP" <- no... you should read up on "QoS"

B) "why can't" <- I did not claim they cannot... I stated that they don't (they don't even use the same frequencies in the air), and that even if they did, you wouldn't charge the same due to the QoS differences.
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The model I had of server-based software then was not merely pre-tablet but pre-Ajax. I was talking about a world where all the computation happened on the server.
If we're going to increase processing power by stacking instead of shrinking, then we will double the volume every 18 months. We'll be back at room-sized computers in 40 years :-)
FWIW, if you want a direct flight there weren't any today from SFO to HKG leaving later than 1:35pm on any airline. All the flights that were available as of this afternoon that had stops took at least 4 hours longer than a nonstop - there weren't any quick connections.

You left off SJC and OAK. Not to mention Seattle, Beijing, and Tokyo... :-)
> No, there's no need for it, you can just define it in your own media type

I don't want to define my own media type, because if I define my own media type only clients that are designed to understand my media type can use my API. I want to use a media type that clients can already interact with in standard ways. I want my clients to be able to do something like this:

var url = hyperlink(resourceData, linkRel).href;

That way they need to know the value of linkRel they're interested in (semantic knowledge of my API) but nothing about the structure of my resourceData object.

When I use xhtml, this works (with jQuery):

var url = $(resourceData).find("a[rel=" + linkRel + "]").attr("href");
You do realize you're referring to outdated benchmarks, right?

On my Mid-2009 15-inch MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.7.1 and Safari 5.1, I get 180–190 frames per second at 1000 particles using canvas.

On Chrome, using its embedded Flash player on the same machine at 1000 particles, I get 30-40 frames per second--big difference.

Like all of major browsers, most graphics on Safari 5.x are hardware accelerated via the GPU.

To sum things up: Flash is significantly slower than HTML5's canvas running the same benchmarks on current browsers.
Sorry, I apologize if my question is banal, but what is the purpose? I don't see the use of displaying data in this way.

On a side note, the animations between views are nice.
Can I ask you for a reason?