skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"the iPhone, as a whole package, without just singling out a feature here and there, was a real innovation, a breath of fresh air"

Ah but then you admit, it's "the whole package" that is the real innovation, the individual pieces were really not that novel and a lot of them not even from Apple. Six months or a year later, as the technology became more available, most of these pieces would have crept in other smartphones. Apple didn't invent much except perhaps an internal process using exceptional attention do details and an execution speed that allowed them to iterate more and polish the final product better than their competitors.

They were more than well compensated for this since they dominated the high end smartphone market for 5 years and became the most valuable company ever. They do not, on top of this mountain-high pile of money, need nor deserve a progress halting, 20 year monopoly based on technology that would have appeared anyways on the market 6 months or a year later (albeit probably in a less polished way).

Proof that smartphone technology was getting cheap and the idea of making a smartphone with few buttons was the next obvious step in computing is that some guys in 2006 were even thinking about making it as an opensource project:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Cheap-hackable-Linux...

In fact, I remember thinking when the first iPhone was revealed that Apple seemed to have somewhat copied the openmoko project. I was glad that a company with large teams of engineers like Apple was having a go at this type of smartphone idea since I wanted an openmoko type phone and I wasn't sure a small team of volunteers would have enough resources to do a good job at it.
I've come to the same conclusions. I:

- never buy anything from a MAFIAA-affiliated company. If in doubt, I don't buy it.

- vote for the Pirate party at every occasion.

- encourage all my friends to do the same.
It's a common problem nowadays I guess. I honestly don't remember the last time I worked on a project with plainjane javascript.

There always is either underscore or backbone or require or dojo or prototype or yui or jquery...

Don't really know if this is good or bad!
Supply and demand. If a workplace has high pay and is good (the minority of workplaces), people will flood there from high pay and toxic workplace. As a result the majority of available high pay workplaces will be toxic.
For-Profit Colleges: Predators in the Ivory Tower
jQuery API is not pretty
> You're missing the point that some cells, essential to our survival, are never replaced, and when they decay, we die. One example is brain cells -- they're never replaced, and when they're done, so are we. This means that, unless we can get around apoptosis (programmed cell death), then we won't ever move beyond a certain age. We aren't close to understanding apoptosis.

These cells can be replaced via stem cell therapy, and the more we look into things, the more we find that certain types of cells that we thought weren't replaced actually are.

> Ah, someone who thinks he can outwit nature. When we try to outwit nature, we end up outwitting ourselves.

That sounds really good, but I believe it's BS. You are anthropomorphizing nature. And every day you are "outwitting it" I'm sure. I bet you are quite happy for yourself and your loved ones not to be living like humans were living 20,000 years ago. And who's to say that technological and scientific progress isn't part of nature anyway? Why is curing diseases "against" nature? Not that nature is an entity in the first place.. All there is are the laws of physics.

> Curing the "diseases of aging" is not your topic. Your topic is the disease of age. That's not the same thing at all.

"age" is not an abstract thing that kills you. There are specific diseases of aging - which are diseases that old people get that young people do not get - that are curable, and that includes all the things that make us frail but aren't usually categorized as diseases (loss of muscle mass, change in texture of skin, etc).

Are you saying that Alzheimer's disease and heart disease and going blind and getting fat and arthritis and losing your muscles and sex drive are good things? If so, you are welcome to refuse these therapies when they are developed, but I will gladly take them, just like I'm sure you are taking advantage of all the other modern ways of making human life easier and more enjoyable.

You seem to be under what Aubrey de Grey calls the "pro-death trance"; happy that we cured smallpox and you wish we could cure AIDS and whatever, but you don't think we can cure the diseases of aging, so you find excuses for why they are actually good.
I think of Apple like a great chef. Sure other cooks can use the same ingredients, but it all matters on the ratios, the temperature, the process etc. to come up with a stunning dish. And then Apple finds new ingredients that they integrate into their cuisine.
"a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them."

Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years.

So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.
Err, what?

Most bugs occur because the software has bugs, as in broken logic or edge-cases that aren't handled. To quote from "No Silver Bullet" [1] ...

I believe the hard part of building software to be the
specification, design, and testing of this conceptual
construct, not the labor of representing it and testing
the fidelity of the representation

Hardware has nothing to do with it.

[1] http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~cah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBulle...
> Why didn't they all have capacitive iPhone look-alikes ready in the lab then?

The Samsung evidence showed that they did. Not as good as the iPhone, certainly, but they were obviously all thinking about it.

> Apple ... should be credited with making the first usable, mass market touchscreen smartphone.

I completely agree with this. But they don't deserve a monopoly on it.

> Isn't it more reasonable to assume that the mobile market would have stayed roughly as it had the previous 10 years, with incremental improvements in screens, displays etc?

No. Not at all. The technology had been rapidly improving, and we would have seen phones with large capacitive touch screens, and features such as "pinch to zoom on a phone" anyway. Sure the implementation may have been different, but the idea that the market would not have moved on in 10 years is absurd.
I made an app for this on Palm OS back in the day. I was advised to have a non-disclaimer basically saying "no one should use this app" for liability reasons. I originally wrote it cause my wife was having trouble remembering anti-biotic schedules for the babies.

People were using it and loved it but the emails that I would get for questions, support or just saying "thanks" were so full of TMI I eventually gave it up and took it down.
I tried it and it seems to work well enough. It supports various authenticators (I used the Google Authenticator app on my iPhone, since I'm already using it for Gmail).
Hi! Thanks for your comment! In the TOS all liability is covered, but thanks for your suggestion. I'd appreciate any other feedback you have!
Also see openmoko (2006):

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Cheap-hackable-Linux...

"The Neo1973 is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application processor, powered by an ARM9 core. It will have 128MB of RAM, and 64MB of flash, along with an upgradable 64MB MicroSD card.

Typical of Chinese phone designs, the Neo1973 sports a touchscreen, rather than a keypad -- in this case, an ultra-high resolution 2.8-inch VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen. "Maps look stunning on this screen," Moss-Pultz said.

The phone features an A-GPS (assisted GPS) receiver module connected to the application processor via a pair of UARTs. The commercial module has a closed design, but the API is apparently open.

Similarly, the phone's quad-band GSM/GPRS module, built by FIC, runs the proprietary Nucleus OS on a Texas Instruments baseband powered by an ARM7 core. It communicates with Linux over a serial port, using standard "AT" modem commands.

The Neo1973 will charge when connected to a PC via USB. It will also support USB network emulation, and will be capable of routing a connected PC to the Internet, via its GPRS data connection.
[...]

Moss-Pultz adds, "Applications are the ringtones of the future."
[...]

As for additional software components, Moss-Pultz admits, "Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot is not there. We're hoping to change this." In addition to a dialer, phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely include the Minimo browser
[...]

He adds, "Mobile phones are the PCs of the 21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access.
"

Looks familiar?

I personally have always thought the iPhone was Apple taking the openmoko idea and running with it.

EDIT: added details
I don't think that's fair. These 2 companies have done more for music and promotion of music than anyone in the modern age - from an industry renown for collusion between the four majors (one falls into line and they all do etc). They have basically rescued a dying industry that essentially built its modern day business model on litigating everyone through RIAA and so on. That's not innovative - that's stupid and idiotic.

Instead, what you have now is two companies who are trying to save a dying industry through subscription and the music industry trying to milk every single penny out of them. The dichotomy that creates is that these companies aren't sustainable long term - they are hemorrhaging cash re-the article:

Spotify’s accounts for the last year, recently filed in Luxembourg, show that it lost $57 million in 2011, despite a big increase in revenue, to $236 million ... On top of that it had more than $30 million in salaries, and more than $30 million for various other expenses. That is how you lose $57 million on $236 million in revenue.

That's just sad. The only incentive these companies have is to be ultimately purchased by the recording industry who can then dictate pricing on their own terms - and that's bad for everyone because then they are going to push prices up insanely. In fact, if these were purchased by the recording industry - it might be the worst thing to happen to music because we are all again at the mercy of the industry. They will want to maximise pricing and I believe, given their history, they will maximize anti-competitive behavior by essentially price fixing competing services out the market. By staying out the USA for 2 years, it was evident Spotify pushed (to some degree) the music studios to capitulate on their pricing - they both gave a little because the industry was desperate for cash. It's obvious to anyone that's the only reason Spotify weren't in the USA sooner - it wasn't economically feasible because the model was already proven to be a hit in Europe.

I don't, for one second, believe that the Music studio's are paying this out to the artists. They are dumping this straight into the bank - the industry in that regard is now basically running on live shows and tshirts for artists to survive. So don't be so quick to judge "giving away for free" - because thats not what they are doing. They have produced amazing services in my mind - and there should be some reward for that by the industry in recognizing and enabling them to create sustainable businesses.
Like non-sexy problems? Well-funded start-up is hiring engineers. (SF)
About us:

+ We're building the future of payroll. If you love un-sexy, core, foundational problems, we'd love to speak with you. Current payroll products haven't changed in decades and customers deserve better.

+ Our founders are second time entrepreneurs from Stanford who have had two prior exits. We're hungry to build something truly great and we're in this for the long haul.

Things we're looking for:

+ Experience with Rails | Backbone.js | MySQL is a plus but not a pre-requisite.

+ Interest in using a test driven development process. We also pair part of the time.

+ Desire to understand the customer perspective. All members of our team are builders and it's important everyone understands the pain point we're solving.

Perks:

+ You'll be a core member of our team as we grow the company. As a result, you'll receive a competitive salary + significant equity stake.

+ Housing stipend if you live near the office, three meals a day, company retreats, gym/sports club stipend, dream work set-up, and more -- including copious espressos brewed by one of our co-founders. People are the foundation of our company and we make sure they know they're valued.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Above all, we're looking for individuals who are yearning to do the best work of their lives. You'll be amply rewarded for the work you do.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If solving a real pain point for millions of people gets you excited (plus the chance to build a significant, meaningful company), we'd love to speak with you.

To apply, send a note to jobs [at] zenpayroll [dot] com and include your LinkedIn, GitHub, and/or any project pages.

This job is located in San Francisco, CA. You must be local or willing to relocate (we'll cover the cost).
No, it's not reasonable from an end-user perspective. Certainly not. But attributing this restriction to malice aforethought is just ridiculous.
nano-critic: provide a small TOC of the tutorial (some people leverage org-mode/org-babel for this). I find it easier to follow if I know in advance what's in there.
Revisionist, much? The G1 came out a few months after the iPhone 3G, the first iPhone to support third-party apps.
A Startup Education
I agree. If people changed the way they looked at what housing traditionally is I think it would allow for some new and innovative ideas.
And because you're already rich, it is okay for people to rob you?
It does differ from publication to publication, but it depends on how much of a stickler for rules and ethics they are.

I'm also alright with it, they had to do what they had to do to make it work and make it clear.
People are clearly interested in the topic of pricing. Since we're here, can you give us a source of better advice or explain what's wrong with this article?
> "My account was automatically censored by the HN algorithm"

We call it "downvoting". It's something we do when people are wrong. Stop being wrong and we'll stop downvoting you.
Owe is a strong word (if I felt like he owe me, I'd contact him), but as a former developer of a Firefox addon and other free stuff, yes, I felt like I owed them at least not purposely taking it away when I stopped developing it.

I feel it's a matter of having respect for the people who rated, promoted and even just used your addons.

Monetary transactions aren't everything in life, and it's not like it costs him anything just leaving the addons alone hosted on AMO.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm pretty sure he didn't pay Mozilla anything, but he still felt like they owed him for, among other things, promoting Firefox. You know, like people did for his own addons.
"Obvious" and "first" aren't identical, but they're not as separable as you're making them out to be. It's a stretch to say that a sliding door latch counts as prior art against a "slide to unlock" patent; that's essentially asserting that if there's any previous analogy to a claimed invention, the claim should be denied.

Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.

That's kind of the point of patents. Apple got market share by doing stuff that nobody else in the phone market was doing. There were a lot of similar (but not identical) things that other companies did in bits and pieces, but there simply wasn't anything else like the iPhone before the iPhone. (I'd argue that the most revolutionary thing the iPhone brought to the market had nothing to do with the patents, ironically; it had a web browser that just blew the doors off anything available in a device that size in 2007. The biggest sign that Apple got that right is how dominant WebKit-based browsers are on mobile devices now.)

A lot of the hatred directed against Apple over their "patent wars" seems to me to be misplaced: Apple is not abusing the patent system. They're not an Intellectual Ventures style patent troll. They're actually using the patents that they're fighting over. And it's very hard to make a successful argument that Samsung wasn't intentionally copying a lot of things about the iPhone, if only because they thought Apple got things right that previous Samsung models didn't. (In fact, it's hard to argue that it didn't work: the more Samsung made their phones like iPhones the more successful they got.)

There are very good arguments to be made against software patents, maybe even against trade dress patents, and maybe even against patents, period, as John Siracusa has suggested. Maybe patents just don't do what they were intended to do anymore. But it's not realistic to expect any technology company to take a bold stand against the patent system by refusing to sue over perceived patent violations. And it's not even very honest to keep portraying Apple as uniquely litigious in this area; Nokia and Motorola both initiated suits against Apple, and while Microsoft hasn't been going around suing everyone, they've just been collecting license fees on Android from manufacturers. By some estimates they've made more money on Android than Google has.

If there's a problem here--and I think there is--it's with the patent system. The Apple-Samsung battle is a symptom of the problem. Let's not mistake it for the disease.
> Other than the transparency of what’s going on behind the scenes, what makes for an eloquent argument for making it open-source?

First argument: people will be willing to use it. Consider what you're offering -- a closed-source library that manages people's financial transactions. You may or may not be surprised to hear that people are reluctant to trust closed-source libraries that process financial transactions, account details, and patterns of economic behavior.

Second argument: open-source libraries are more likely to be successfully scrutinized for security flaws, and repaired in advance of exploitation. An irony of open-source is that over time it becomes more secure, not less, indeed one often-heard explanation for Windows' notorious insecurity is that it is closed-source, so the first revelation of a vulnerability is, not when errors are noticed by routine scans of source code, but when they're exploited in the wild.

Third argument: people will be able to see how your code works. This isn't a license to steal, it's a way for people to find out if your code meets their needs and behaves as they expect (or as accounting standards require).

I once debugged an accounting package that had a weird error -- two runs on the same transaction database never produced the same outcome. After a lot of back and forth, I got the developer to open the source, and discovered that his way of rounding off to the nearest penny was to generate a random binary number -- if 0, round down, if 1, round up. It was breathtakingly stupid, and we would never have solved it without seeing the source.

Fourth argument -- you can't arbitrarily shut down users of your library. An open-source library survives the extinction of its source or a change in policy. A closed-source library can't do that in any meaningful sense.

That should do. :)
I like the idea.
Random suggestion:
Check out the papers by BJ Fogg. He did some interesting (applied) research on texting and supporting positive health related behavior. For example:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1541997 and http://www.texting4health.org/
I think it is actually that these folks are unusually accomplished for their age. (disclaimer: I was awarded TR35 a while ago. )
Show HN: Tinygram - 8-bit art dedication app & guessing game
I'll take

$('p').text('Hello.')

over

for (var p in document.getElementsByTagName('p')) { p.innerHTML = 'Hello.'; }

any day!
It's a hobby project, that's all it is. Not a real business to be taken seriously. Give them a few years, and they will be looking for a corporate day job. Nobody can live off venture capital for the rest of their lives.
Ben doesn't work for Joyent but thanks :)
Compared to the dom api, it is very pretty.
As someone who was entrenched in the music startup world for a while, I've concluded that the only way to save the music industry is for the major labels to die or become obsolete and for new, innovation-friendly content producers to emerge in their place. We need for music what Netflix is trying to do for movies/tv (see Lillyhammer, new Arrested Development season).

It's that broken.
innerHTML is an easy one, try setting an attribute -- you have to create a new attribute node, set its value and then add that to the element..
That's funny, because I had a couple of "pda phones" before I bought my iPhone.
None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a single pixel you intended to touch (so not the center) and ignore other things like knuckles on the screen, etc.

This is a major invention and a major difference, and that is just one part of what made the iOS touch UI.

This is the fundamental problem- you and others say nonsense like this, and I don't know if you're simply not well informed about the nature of these technologies, or you don't care and are making arguments because of ideology that you think will work propagandistically. I mean, I guess ofr many people they don't care that they aren't the same thing, they can just pretend like they are in debates like this, right?

I really don't know which. I keep hearing people claim that Apple stole from Xerox[1] and here you imply that the palm might have come before the newton and that it is up for debate.

What's next? The Mac stole from windows?

Seriously, what level of basic understanding of the history and nature of these technologies can I expect here on Hacker News? And do you get off the hook for repeating this nonsense simply because it fits your anti-apple ideology?

[1] I shouldn't need this footnote, but due to the aforementioned ignorance or dishonesty, I do. Apple licensed Xerox's early research into what later became the GUI by selling them pre-IPO Apple stock which made Xerox a pretty penny and would be worth over a billion now if they had never sold it.
Thanks for your positive feedback and the suggestion. I'll check out the links you mentioned as well as the research.
"people are reluctant to trust closed-source libraries that process financial transactions, account details, and patterns of economic behavior."

Lots of people trust closed source applications though. QuickBooks, Turbotax ..

Your point is still valid, though I don't know what the exact differences between Iron Money and (say QuickBooks) are.
The latch is only obvious in retrospect; it involves the emulation of physical constraints that most non-engineers couldn't even describe succesfully (springy handle, locking at the end) and great resilience to unintended input.

If another manufacturer had made the iPhone, you would probably unlock it by pressing a sequence of keys. That's the most obvious design.
did you ever try to debug your pretty jquery karate?

ps. second example is not valid, in Vanilla JS you do it like this:

document.getElementsByTagName('p').filter(function(el) {
el.innerHTML = 'Hello.';
});