skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience the appeal board are just as stupid as the reviewer cited in the post. It was like my app was evaluated by a random different reviewer.

Something is strange about the whole app review process. It's been problematic for years. Apple could fix it if they had the incentive. IMO they do have an incentive (more developers, more sales etc) but something else is preventing the process from improving. Lately it seems like the review process is becoming worse.

Perhaps it's company politics? The VP of whatever group is ultimately in charge of hiring reviewers, adjusting policies etc may be standing in the way. However given the explosion of the mobile ecosystem it seems unlikely that organizational politics would come first.

One side note: for my last app that was reviewed and rejected multiple times (once by the appeal board) it seemed like the reviewers were really trying hard to make the app crash. I log almost everything users do in the app. Since the only people with copies of the app were myself and Apple I could see the reviewer(s) activity. If you've tested iOS apps that use even basic tableViews populated with remote data you know that swiping vigorously, pushing and popping viewControllers quickly etc can wring out some funny corner cases. It seems like the reviewer was trying to find one as a pretense for rejecting the app when the real reason was something they didn't want to say. Apparently they didn't find anything and went with "app is just a re-packaged website without enough native iOS functionality" when the entire app uses native iOS features.
BlackBerry maker licenses Microsoft patent
Doesn't the Kindle Android app allow you to buy ebooks and subscriptions?

Also,while Microsoft does support in-app purchases in their store, they don't restrict other payment methods like Apple does. From Microsoft's Store guidelines:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/07/20/maki...

Using your own billing system

Your app and service may already depend on a particular transaction provider or benefit from ties to other lines of business. Your customers want the trust and efficiency of a familiar, trusted transaction experience. You can use your own transaction provider within your app to provide the experience your customers expect.

If you are not using the Windows Store as your transaction provider, you will want to make sure that your app meets all of the certification requirements such as:
Identifying the transaction provider to the user during purchase confirmation
Prompt the user for authentication before processing the transaction
Your payment processor must meet the current PCI Data Security Standard
I think what you're seeing is actually the ad. Basically the whole page turns into an animation, and then a big IE splash ad appears. It's quite horrifying.
I'd recommend that no one ever click on patents to read them. If you do your company, if found guilty in court of infringement, faces 3x higher damages (at least in the US). When I worked at SAP, the only sites blocked by our proxy were patent sites.
This process results in low bug counts. But, even then, NASA still programs the software to accept patches as they fly.

I don't know how applicable the NASA way is to commercial firms. They have different goals. National Mission Success vs. shareholder returns. The commercial firms are still making money and happy shareholders with a lot of bugs. While a single unit conversion bug on the Mars Climate Orbiter resulted in the loss of a multi-billion dollar spacecraft.
You Can’t Be Effective When You’re Too Smart for Your Own Good
Agreed. I constantly get confused when using the play store. If I navigate to an app detail view, do I press the back button or the top left navigation button to get back to the list? Shouldn't it be intuitive enough for me to know without having to memorize its behavior?
Came here to hate, left pleasantly surprised.

This is a fantastic idea. Ads, without having to put them in the actual application. Can't argue with that.
Well, I was only born one person. In the meantime, the world's most important new computing platform has some significant design issues that will probably require attention before we arrive at an era when "what's in your pocket" is your entire computing experience.
When encountering that acronym, I often suspect that an "s" has gone astray.
It is not ridiculous. But it does not solve the problem. It plays right into the problem. What you are describing is already done, and has been done for many years, in one form or another, between corporations e.g. in the semiconductor industry with patent pools and cross-licensing; but it is not a matter of discussion in web forums. The reason why this stuff is now discussed in web forums is because this sort of protectionist racket is now reaching beyond a circumspect group of companies and is touching the free software world.

The solution as any informed but objective observer can tell you lies in taking away the power to sue - the junk patents which give people the right to sue for frivolous i.e. overly broad patent claims - and taking away the financial incentives - high fees by patent offices, high fees by patent lawyers and even the court fees - one could imagine E.D. Texas must thankful for all the patent troll business all stemming from the issuance of junk software patents. Stop issuing these junk patents. We deliberately opened the door for these in the not too distant past and we can also close it.

Needless to say, there is a fair bit of capital moving through the business method patent racket. That's why it's difficult to shut it down. We need to have junk software patent trolling declared as a class of white collar crime and then get some Giuliani-style prosecutors to come in and clean this mess up. I'm joking but you get the idea. It's not easy to stop this machine.

Creating another protectionist "insurance" scheme is not the answer. The perceived need for something like that is a symptom of the problem itself. The risk should not exist to begin with.
I feel the same way about iPhones. I can never find a damn thing on them. Though, got a new GS3 recently and agree with all you've said.

I could harp on with Cyanogenmod, Cyanogenmod, Cyanogenmod... but really the issue is that they try to sell high-end phones to non-technical people, which you can't really blame them for.

The big phone manufacturers really need to figure out a way to have two versions of their products: one marketed to technical people and one marketed to non-technical people.

Hell, make the contract on the technical one come without a warranty for software so that people can flash whatever ROM on there with impunity. I've never given a crap about warranty's because I know that my intended use of pretty much every electronic device I've ever owned will break the warranty but not the device...
Handling Database Failover at Craigslist
Google's Play Store ecosystem disallows you to use any other provider but the Android in-app billing via ToS. Likewise, Kindle disallows you from using any other in-app payment mechanism besides their custom in-app SDK. FYI, Kindle apps need approval, unlike apps in the Google Play store.
So this is no different (in fact worse, because you now have to maintain two code bases and accounting systems).

Good to know about Microsoft - thanks.

Edit: Ah, the Kindle app for Android. I misunderstood. It's possible that Google might deem those violations (see links to the relevant section I posted in parent). Their DOJ mess with eBooks might prevent them from taking such measures though.
An Adverb That Defies Certainty
A Robot With a Reassuring Touch
No, I'm just that bad of a writer. It wasn't edited, but was a complete mess to begin with.
But I can do the former for a whole block of code but have to do the later for each significant line of code.

They are are not the same.
Chrome gets Windows 8 Metro mode launch option, Web Audio API support
I am not filled with regret that I missed out on things. I regret treating people unfairly, making careless mistakes that hurt other people, lies I've told, and bad information I've passed on without vetting enough. People that I didn't help out of selfishness.

The fact that I won't get to go to all of life's amusement parks? Don't give a shit. If one of my ideas of an amusement park was measured in revenues and profits? Says a lot about late capitalism; interesting in an anthropological sense, I guess.
Obama wins right to indefinitely detain Americans under NDAA
That couldn't have been more phony.
My single biggest annoyance is the last of support for calendar invites. Android just doesn't know what to do with them. I have to save them, open a file manager, view them in a text editor, manually create calendar events. Things like that are why I still reach for the nearest iOS device whenever possible. I'm still not thrilled at the speed and smoothness of web browsing on Android either. On a Galaxy Nexus with either 4.0 or 4.1 zooming and scrolling often lags. Finally will they ever update the IMAP/POP client? No message threading? Not everyone uses GMail.
Think internal combustion engine. Lot's of detonations fast enough + Flywheel (or in this case large heat sink) = steady power. As to cost 1GW of electricity is worth ~50,000$ an hour so there is room for a fair amount of consumables.
I'm the Facebooker maintaining this tool. We use it internally and externally and it represents a "platform application". It runs on a separate domain (www.fbrell.com) and is iframed on the linked page on facebook.com.

It's all open source actually: https://github.com/daaku/rell.

Even better, it's written in Go :)
Do you have a link to or a quote of that section of the TOS? I just looked through it and couldn't find anything like that.
So one of the patents in question is about:

"Data Processing System Using Substantially Unique Identifiers to Identify Data Items, Whereby Data Items Have the Same Identifiers"

So they have a patent on a primary key?
Ask HN: What is common practice for Shipping and Billing addresses?
What is common practice for e-commerce websites, concerning a difference in Shipping and Billing addresses? Pretty straight forward question.<p>Is there any laws to consider?<p>To make a long back story relatively short, I had placed an order wirth an online retailer for some collectables. I noticed about a week after having received the confirmation e-mail, I recieved another e-mail notifying me that there was an issue with the order. I login and see that the order status has been changed from "processing" to "contact us," so I e-mail and ask about the status change. They e-mailed me asking to provide full first and last name for the shipping address (I typically only use initials for the name field or give no name at all, out of privacy concerns) and confirm that it is the same address as the billing address. Further the e-mail stated that the company needed to know the reason for the differing addresses. Then, not 3 hours later, another e-mailed arrived from the company stating that the order had been canceled, because they could not contact me via phone or e-mail.<p>I have ordered countless items from other online retailers in similar fashion and never encountered this problem (btw, my billing address is almost always different from shipping address, because I use my parents address as my permanent address (i e billing address), while I am away at school ~9 months out of the year). I am just generally bewildered by the whole ordeal and I am frankly unsure what the normal procedure for online retailers is.<p>Please leave a comment if you can offer any insight into this.<p>Thank you,
> This trend of running straight to social news sites (e.g. HN) whenever something goes wrong is very strange

This seems more general than just when things go wrong. I've noticed a lot of posts on Reddit in /r/math and /r/physics from college students asking for advice on what order to take classes, for example. A student might state he is a math major, and want to know if he should take linear algebra or real analysis first. Typically, he omits to state what school he attends, or what kind of math he is interested in.

These questions puzzle me, because the answer to this kind of question depends on details of the school's math curriculum, and vary from school to school. For instance, at some schools linear algebra is the first "proofs" course, and typically should be taken after freshman calculus as a transition to higher math.

At other schools there is a separate course specifically on proofs and mathematical reason designed to prepare students to transition from the practical oriented calculus courses to the theory oriented "real" math classes. At such a school, the order of linear algebra and real analysis is probably best determined by what courses have which as prerequisites and what the student is interested in.

I would expect the obvious thing to do when wondering what order to take courses in would be to (1) check the requirements for your degree--there should be specific courses you have to take so you need to make sure you don't do anything to screw taking those, (2) work out from that and from the prerequisites from those courses any constraints on when you must take specific courses, (3) look at examples your school gives of typical schedules for students pursuing that degree, and (4) TALK TO YOUR ADVISOR--I assume schools still assign to each student an advisor in their major to give them guidance on course selection and such.

Similarly, people will post saying they are taking a course in X next term, and would like to get a head start--what book should they read? Again, the often don't tell us the school so we can go look up the course and try to figure out what level it is at. They don't tell us what the textbook is so we can pick something that fits in well with that.

It apparently never occurs to them to ask their professor what would be a good book, or to ask older students who have already taken the class, or to go to the library and spend an afternoon looking at a few books on the subject to find one on their own.
Because for Apple and it's customers the app review process is not broken. It's only frustrating for of app developers.

Looking over the App store, if anything there is an over abundance of app developers.
Race is a protected class, as is gender. I don't believe Texanism (Texanity?) is. :-)

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
It's not even ego, it's external validation. You're not sure you're doing it right and then someone says you are. Powerful.
Duarte replied at the end of the article.
I was referring to the Kindle app for Android phones and tablets, not to the apps on Kindle hardware.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_k...
"why hasn't Apple fixed this fucking stupid review process?"

Are you asking why it's not perfect? That's an impossible standard. In general app approval seems significantly ahead of where it was in past years.

"They have the resources to pay cheap reviewers who are probably better than this guy."

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most large businesses have the resources to hire people better than their worst employees. Again if you're asking why their staff is not all 5 star employees who never make mistakes I don't even know where to start.

"Why not allow all apps into the store as long as they pass some security checks done by Apple (no downloading executables etc)?"

Because they don't want spam, porn, hate apps, whatever. It's easy to make sweeping judgements about what's best when you aren't actually managing a 200 billion dollar brand.
Get reminded using text / email / call
This was asked in one of the Google IO 2012 videos that was recorded, and their response is that it originally looked like an like a triangle to the left of the icon in Honeycomb, but nobody noticed it was there.
Exceptions make it easier to modularise your code. Exceptions make it easier to treat a group of risky actions as a single transaction that either all work in result in one path on failure as opposed to checking absolutely everything that could fail.

One of the few things I really hate about C is having to check return value after return value. It's tedious and makes for ugly code.

You misunderstand Josh Bloch. He does not say to not use exceptions or that exceptions are bad, he says that you shouldn't use exceptions for expected occurances, hence "for exceptional circumstances". This is a code design criticism, not a language feature criticism.
Shocked That VC’s Are “Shocked” Entrepreneurs Are Ignoring Enterprise Tech
He probably exaggerated the responses when he made that transcription. Unless he had an audio recording, it would be an easy thing to do, especially if he was mad.
I'm not an e-commerce expert, but if you are paying with a credit card, merchants usually require that the billing address be the same address as the one on file with the creditor.
That's how I feel using an iOS device - death by a thousand papercuts. All the apps are on the home screens, no dedicated back button...I can only use it for a few minutes before getting frustrated.

And apparently iOS doesn't have any public transit directions in the maps app? In 2012?! Are you fucking shitting me?
HN Tees, Exclusive YC t-shirt of the month club
http://www.android.com/us/developer-distribution-agreement.h...

Sections 3.3 and 4.5
I'm not sure if this is a slam or a support, but sure, let's talk about iOS.

There is no affordance for switching homepages, summoning notifications, deleting an application, moving an application, creating a folder, destroying a folder, or moving folders between pages. All homepage editing is hinted by a talkative modal popup that happens at first launch, the worst imaginable time for educating users on a relatively insignificant feature.

The blue (Done) button rules your world until black (Edit) is required. (Trashcan) icons get overloaded with filing tasks, (Send To) prints except when (Print) prints except when "Print" prints.

I've watched normal, bright human beings slam into every one of them. I've met people who literally never realized there was a lock button on their phone and simply throw it in their bag when they're done.

These problems are no more excusable and no less vexing to novice iOS users. The thing is that iOS has such an incredibly clean core interaction model of "Everything Is An App" and "Press Home When You Are Done" that it goes a long way to forgiving all the crippy crap nonsense added on after the fact. And most every question you have can reliably answered by another iOS user of the same technical skill and comfort because they're using, substantially, the same thing. iPod, iPad, 3.x, 6.x, whatever.

When Android can mean any of 20 different skins, layers, versions, and loadouts, even fundamental questions like "is there even a back button" have to be asked. Is it on the phone? Is it a soft key? Is it hiding due to context? IDK. Unless you know someone who has a substantially similar device, good luck with network learning.

All computers suck. Android sucks in some key areas, starting with "Where are the apps"? The answer "depends" isn't good enough.
You could argue that most book titles fall under this as well, at least conceptually. And the Dewey decimal system.

In fact, before the growth of the internet, Identifying and Requesting Data in Network Using Identifiers Which Are Based On Contents of Data would sound almost exactly like a long winded academic description of finding a book through the public library inter-lending network.
And Perl's JSON::XS

echo '{"hello":"there"}' | json_xs
Didn't notice any bugs, but haven't tested for bugs. Used it and it works great - favicon.ico is much small than that other thing I used in http://nashape.com/blog/2012/09/12/big-favicons/. Great work! (especially because you did it in PHP which, after 10 years, I don't think I can face again...)
Dishwashers aren't that expensive in NL: http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/cat/900/vaatwassers.html?orde... (and since tweakers.net pricewatch mainly covers computer hardware, I expect there's better deals out there, too).

I forget how much mine cost, but I don't think it was more than $300.
Stripe CTF Post Mortem: A Would-Be Hacker's Tale
I had this problem. Then we cleaned out ducts from the dryer to the exhaust vent on the outside of the house.

The duct was jammed full of lint. So, no air was flowing out. The dryer had a safety interlock that disabled the heater. This is why the clothes took so long to dry. It is also why we didn't start a fire and burn down the house.

Now we clean the ducts every 18 months and the dryer works great.
How to Beat a Bully
Apple's review process is unreasonably strict because it hurts them more to approve a bad app than to disapprove a good app. Apple takes responsibility for every user's iOS experience; people will blame them if an app ruins it.
There are exceptions, and as you might guess they tend to be interpreted quite broadly. ;)
This is what's interesting to me. The concept of advertising for other companies is something the majority of people do on a daily basis. There's not many name brands that hide their logo or name on clothing. Not sure why this is getting the response it is. Are people really serious that they think they should be paid to wear these, like they are doing some great service, but a company like american eagle is for some reason entitled to peoples $30 to have you advertise their line. Or do the majority of HN readers wear completely plain shirts day in and day out. I like the idea, i'm only having trouble pulling the trigger as I don't think I'd wear a shirt for a service i've heard little about or don't even like using.
Spent a lot of time nitpicking small issues, but he does pick it up with better points after the back button rant and latitude.

The horrendous lack of support for landscape views, G+ photos being stuck in my gallery (with a Picasa icon on top of it), soft button rotation, crappy contact pictures, and the 4 separate text messaging systems from Google.

Good list overall, I hope the next update (Kringle?) tries to enforce more uniformity in the UI and in Google Apps particularly.
I agree there's an over abundance of app developers. I wonder if the costs to Apple in terms of hosting all the free apps, paying reviewers, dealing with refunds and dealing with rejection appeals just isn't worth it?

However in a way the review process is broken for customers. Say I have a free app with 100 reviews and a 5-star average. The app has been downloaded on average 90 times per day for a year and the monthly average has been slowly growing (except for the initial release spike). Also the analytics show retention and daily usage going up. IMO it's safe to say that users like this app. Therefore users suffer when an update to the app is rejected or the app is pulled for superfluous reasons.
Yep. If you go for public transit instructions, the Maps app will geolocate and prompt you to download a third party transit direction app that "might" be most appropriate.

It's going to go over like a lead balloon next week - I find Google's transit maps invaluable.
Yep, I especially get this feeling when using a Mac, from the mouse acceleration curve. It just feels wrong, and I can only use a Mac for a few minutes before my hand starts hurting.
> Is there a reason why I can write this irrefutable fact a dozen times and people continue to ignore it like it was never stated?

Because the tone of your replies are condescending.
My advice is to not regret having regrets. It's natural to have regrets so jumping to acceptance is the best method to avoid the self-help dependency cycle that leads to a lot of wasted time and money. At least it works for me.