skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Faustian bargain? Assholes? Evil? .. really, if this is the most serious accusation of "evil" one can level at Apple then it isn't really going to affect my buying decisions. It's not like they're dealing in small arms or manufacturing cluster bombs. If you step back and think about it all Apple is doing is stuffing up their own app store, which can be classified as monumentally stupid and short sighted but not really "evil".
Google's Android Scripting Environment is one interesting attempt at this: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

You can develop Python, Perl, JRuby, and Lua programs right on your handset, and they have access to the Android API through a bridge to a native (Dalvik) activity.
The keyboard model is tied to the use of source code, and source code to the keyboard.

This implies wholesale replacement of source code. Probably with an icon-based language and drag and drop development environment. This also implies a substantial library of icons be available for various common tasks; of very substantial task abstractions.

Classic development and debugging and tracing models are all tied to the screen space.

This implies having extra display space available that can be slid into view on demand whether for selecting tasks or for tracking, or a requirement for in-band debugging displays, or removing the need for debugging and tracing.

You will need to build a box of task blocks, an icon drag-n-drop IDE, and icon-based debug and trace. And you will want ancillary pieces, including dump and trace and update tools.

In Apple Xcode terms, a gonzo and finger-based and viewport-constrained IB.

Sounds fun.
Fully agree. I recall in particular reading John Carmack a few years back talking about how he was glad Apple wasn't as dominant as Microsoft, because they were far harder to work with.

I wish I could remember the quote well enough to search accurately for it.
10 people who changed the way we think (Slide Show)
Yep, which might also explain why the women are apparently so harsh on their ratings compared to men - they already get more messages than the guys, and don't want to be contacted even more.
I'm sorry but I don't buy it. I'm not obese, most people I know are not obese and they are all exposed to the same modern, engineered food that obese people are. I'm not claiming that hormonal disruption doesn't influences it nor am I saying the modern Western diet is any good for you, but I will claim that the majority of obesity, from my limited life experience, comes from lack of self control.

If one exercised discipline and consumed 1500 kcal of even modern, terrible, HFCS-infused food, they would not get fat. Period. They won't necessarily be healthy, but they will not be overweight.

Anyway, this argument is not novel nor is it in the scope of this thread. Just wanted to say congratulations to the OP.
Actually, they do have this capability, but they haven't used it.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950630
SSDs, HHDs: Could I get some clarification on those TLAs? :)
The relevant times under discussion are: the era of the Apple II which came with built-in Basic, and the era of post-OSX but pre-iPhone
It's a win-win, both for consumers and Google.

Many non-native English speakers will understand videos better (and there are more of them than the natives) and Google gets to make more money from more relevant ads.
This is a pretty hard one. Perhaps:

- it's a tool for making small web apps. The web apps can be run locally or pushed out to a public URL (so other people could run the app, or if they had the platform, could download it, run it locally, and make changes to it.

- the language would have to be really terse. Something like APL (per derefr) or K

- you'd want users to be able to do something interesting with the phone's data, like draw data from the calendar to tag photos.
Warning: The "What is Google Chrome OS?" video embedded there is astonishingly patronizing. I have difficulty believing that there is a single person in the world who both (1) will be interested in the a-year-before-it's-ready open-source release and (2) will not be infuriated by it.
Yeah Cocoa dev was never took off if only b/c Macs used to be much more niche than they are today.
Meebo works for IM. Only a matter of time before there is a Skype webapp, I'd assume.
1. A couple of years ago, I had a Windows Mobile phone and tonnes of applications. While it wasn't a great phone, it was a still a pretty good computing platform. A couple of years before that, I had an SE smartphone running Symbian which had fewer apps but was still open (I even developed a few). For smartphones, carriers were no more in charge of mobile applications then as they are now. In fact, in Apple's case, the carrier (AT&T) has more control than they do on blackberries or WinMo phones.

2. The review process is almost exponential, every week you have more apps and updates to all the existing apps. Maybe Apple is hiring more reviewers; they might have to just to keep up. Having a paid review tier just means that big developers get a 1 day turn around and indy developers get the left overs.
Not sure other than GChat.
Legally it probably goes along with any other assets.

Practically, since Google doesn't provide customer support they'll just lock the account, refuse to explain why, and respond to every inquiry with a FAQ about how to reset your password.
As someone pointed out to me on Reddit, apparently HTML5 has offline storage provisions, so it'll be used for that too.
Do you have any reason to believe they'll stop recommending your application after the name change?

Just make a big landing page 'iPodRip is now known as iRip'. That way you can keep all of the search engine juice you accumulated with the former name.

Pidgin (formerly gaim) survived a very similar situation to yours and the Pidgin homepage is still the top google result for 'gaim'.
Amen, it ends with the word anyways. Terrible.
I am about to show my ignorance of developing for the iPhone, so please forgive any incorrect assumptions and mistaken conclusions.

It is my understanding that apps can also be installed directly from third party websites... If so, is there a way to create an app for the App Store that is a shell to a website where a conglomerate of listings can be offered? It seems this would give the value of having everything fairly easy to find (one extra click) and yet get out from the management of the App Store for all but the original shell app...
"All the data in the cloud" - I wonder how the Sidekick episode will color perceptions of this.
So you've never heard of Windows Mobile then?
Where do you draw the line? I'd love text editors and RescueTime as well. My hope is that Google will succeed in driving innovation on the Web and these types of apps will become first-class citizens.
Solid-state drives and hard-disk drives. HDDs are mechanical devices with spinning platters. SSDs have no moving parts; it's all silicon. (HHD is not what he mentioned, but it's a hybrid hard drive; solid state cache with normal disk drives.)
My anecdotal evidence is that women go for alpha-ness, not wealth. There's a strong correlation between the two, but it's quite possible to have one without the other. A pick-up artist with no money will attract women, while a well-paid but socially inept geek won't.
Anyone working on this idea and submitting it to YC will need to have a solid answer to the following question.

Apple can change their policies towards iPhone applications instantly (see footnote 4 in PG's essay, relevant quote:
"The problem is not Apple's products but their policies. Fortunately policies are software; Apple can change them instantly if they want to.") What will be so special about your development platform that you will still stay alive even if/when Apple does so?
You're absolutely right, the article above is referencing a different phenomenon. My mistake.
You're right, they probably will continue to recommend it.

The issue is the lawyers. They don't want us to have the domain at all, which is clearly where most of the value lies.

And as Jobs doesn't care either way... there just seems to be a large disconnect between the decision makers at Apple (who don't care at all) and the law firm that represents them (the law firm is the 2nd largest in the world, with 2 billion in annual revenue).
SSD = Solid State Device (Drive)
HDD = Hard Disk Drive
So, silly question here (and feel free to point me to a URL where I can learn the answer): at one time there was some buzz about being able to install Chrome OS on an old-ish laptop, and use it for web browsing. The implication was that it would perform better than, say, Windows XP with Firefox.

Is this still a goal, anyone know? (I have a few old laptops laying around, and that sounds pretty neat to me...)
laptops displaced desktops, but it's because they offer essentially the same benefits and experience, but with portability and convenience

But they didn't originally, and not for a long time, even though it was inevitable it would happen one day. I carried various laptops around for years before finally being able to buy one that was powerful enough to be my only development machine.

phones present huge barriers in terms of input, display, and ergonomics

Keyboards are available that are full-size, yet which take up no physical space - a laser projects an image of a keyboard onto any flat surface, and a camera figures out where you're typing.

Mini projectors are starting to come out, meaning you don't need any physical space for a good monitor either.

Combining these two, with a good handheld platform and two flat surfaces (e.g. a desk and a wall), I don't see any real barrier to making this happen.
I disagree with the blanket statement that it doesn't work: for every 10 programmers who cant be bothered to create FOO app because of all the fuss there will be one who does because he can take some market share.

I agree in spirit the system is screwed - but Apple do have a hell of a lot of sway. They have the leading product and the huge customer base (and the cool factor). To a point they can dictate things (and I agree this is bad and we should stop them)
Cat-size brain simulation
Good overview of the issues you'll need to deal with: (read the paper, not so much the class notes)

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.893/2009/schedule.html
1. Carriers never had walled gardens around smartphones. Apple didn't invent smartphones, they've been around for years before the iPhone was released. In fact, the carrier (AT&T) has more control than they do on blackberries or WinMo phones.

2. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The review process exists so developers are already doing their best to not be rejected and Apple is rejecting anything badly-buggy. Bugs still escape that process, it's inevitable. Fixing them should be easy and quick, but it's not, and Apple is entirely to blame for that.
I'm guessing the Apple employees who were recommending your product were neither executives nor part of the legal department. I wouldn't expect Joe Smith in customer service to be aware of Apple's trademark policies.

Steve could have been more tactful, I suppose, but he at least took the time to respond, and gave you an honest, direct answer at that.
Price of a 15 year old supercomputer: $45K. Shipping not included. I wonder how much Cray paid him for it and whether it was a good investment.
Paul Graham, what are you smoking buddy?
Are There No Women in Web Design?
I would view this as a technical challenge to survive a domain name change because as you pointed out, the trademark aspect is pretty clear cut and Jobs isn't going to intercede.

Talk to some SEO gurus because I'm certain there's a best practice for doing something like this.

To go back to the Pidgin/Gaim example, it doesn't appear that they own any gaim related domain beside a way out of date sourceforge one and they still own all of the top spots for 'gaim'.

edit: another idea, post an "ask HN" about it, I'd be curious to see what this crowd would come up with.
I find when this stuff happens with QA teams, it's almost always a case of protecting turf.

When no one is looking (the first, buggy, submission is made), they will do the minimum necessary and approve it, often quickly.

Then, when everything goes to hell, all eyes are on them. The developers submit a fix with the note "this needs to be approved ASAP to put out fires"... the QA person resents being told what to do, and suddenly feels compelled to justify his job by finding anything and everything that could possibly be considered 'wrong'. There is also the issue that things like indentation are more visibly 'wrong' than obscure bugs that only show up in production environments due to the way database replication is set up.

Now, I'm not saying all QA people are like this. I've worked with some downright awesome QA people before. But awesome QA people don't reject things for spite, and usually don't stay in QA long before moving up.
The process of induction would argue otherwise.
ASK HN Poll: Youtube or Viddler
I want to put some screen casts on my blog, and also embed them in my application help.
Which service should I use?

In the comments: What are the pros and cons
Also relevant: "Hello, open source developers. Would you like to help build an operating system for web users?" http://blog.chromium.org/2009/11/hello-open-source-developer...
Don't forget tweet offsets. I think they should be priced proportional to the number of followers whose time you're wasting.
Probably you can choose your own cloud, though - if the OS is open source, nothing is stopping that?
vimeo is also nice.
Which was pretty much my point. I figured my statement was absurd enough that the sarcasm would be obvious...
Tactile Sensors Expand Ability of Prosthetic Technology
Probably not at all. The people who would be influenced by that were probably already paranoid about relying on "the cloud".
Ask HN: How old are you?
I'm 17, how old are you?
Alas Heroku, you could have served us well here...

Instead I had to build my own ugly browser ide/code publisher to post code to an App Engine data store and make a class/controller to render it back as XML or HTML.

Since I am doing Opensocial development on GFC and Google Sites, my code is loaded from a published url by those containers (after the cache expires, that is). This means, when I am on the road and I have a thought, I can pull out my web-enabled phone and publish some small change to my code and its live.

This tool I am describing allows me to develop Javascript client code easily enough, but I could see adding a module to my ide app that would load up dynamic python too (using exec). This would allow me to "edit" backend code. It would probably be good enough.

Anyway, couple this functionality with PhoneGap and I think you might have a workable solution... for the Android platform anyway.

This will work even better once Android reliably supports bluetooth keyboards. Typing on those small buttons really wears out my thumbs. :)

EDIT: I have also thought of setting up a deploy server for the backend piece. I could edit my backend code in the web ide, click a Save button and have it kick off a deploy command on the remote server. The process would pull down the code I scratched out in the browser-ide, save to SVN, then run the app engine deployment.

You know, I thought this was what Heroku was going to do for me. But, they stripped out the web ide which was the part that I really needed.
Yep. BSD license. You could roll your own and do whatever you want.
Do you think Apple should look at Microsoft's mobile strategy with envy?
Any builds out there yet for me to throw into Virtual Box?
UCLA Math Seeks Exceptional Student for Undergraduate Merit Scholarship
I looked at making a site similar to this about 15 months ago. I found the market to be saturated and hard to differentiate in. There are currently sites that allow both users and experts to post video responses to each other, I find this much more interested then reading a threaded response.

That said, it looks like the threads could be improved with some added functionality such as integration with facebook--a picture or two would make the debate seem a little more interesting. Also, how does one "win" and argument, I did not see a ranking system.

Final take aways:
-How do you differentiate the site from a news aggregater with comments?
-UI needs a little more color?
-Maybe a a sidebar that explains the premise of the site.
SpaCapsule on The Doctor Show
Stagnating Temperatures: Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out
If I was Jobs and this is all I had to say, I probably wouldn't have replied to this email. It makes him come across as kinda noncaring especially with all of Apple's troubles with app developers.

If he really had to reply, he could've gone with "Not that big of a deal. Check your mail" and sent a cool Apple product for being a great developer. Lacking this, his reply comes across as cold to a genuine concerned developer.
Sensational headline, righteous tone and an anonymous source. It has all the markings of a ... cough ... reliable article.
General Electric, now there's a company that's "evil".
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22general+electric%22+%2Bevi...

Do you see my point? To anybody outside the app development community it's going to look a little bit "self important" for developers to be using such strong language and talking of boycotts over something most folks would agree is not evil.
I agree what Apple is doing is stupid, in the long term the app store is going to be polluted with crappy apps and they're approval backlog is going to be rather daunting. I think strong lobbying from the development community is in order, but it takes conscious and deliberate inhumanity for me to label someone "evil".
What I liked about this video is that it was so simple I feel like I could show my mother and she would mostly understand in a big picture way what they're trying to do with Chrome OS.
If you want a developer environment that fits in your pocket, look no further than the TI-83 graphing calculator.

Much of my free time in highschool was spent creating games on it. It's extremely easy to develop for (it uses a variant of BASIC), and the menu system is designed to minimize keystrokes, which means you can bang out your code very quickly.

Of course, the platform is very dated: 6 MHz CPU, and a 96×64 monochrome LCD screen! I'd love to see something in the same format, built with modern technology. Maybe the default language could be Python.
There are quite a few smartphones and PDA's which are programmable. I own an old (circa 2000) Palm Pilot and have a C compiler and a Lisp(Scheme) interpreter there. (Also there exists Forth compiler). Nokia 770/N800/N810/N900 series is as powerful as the development platform as your Linux machine. There exist on-board development environments for Windows CE/Pocket PC/Windows Mobile (even Common Lisp and Emacs) and Symbian (including Python).
So in this respect the iPhone/Android platforms are a step back from truly open mobile development environments. This step back is the result of the backwardness of operator-controlled American mobile market.
The main problem of the onboard development is the lack of convenient input. So I think the main task is to improve projector technology and ergonomics of projection keyboards (use more natural hand movements?).
Meta HN: Silly time-lapse video of HN drawing
Same here, and I used to be a huge Linn-fan (still proud owner of an LP12). I've even met Mr. Linn himself, Ivor Tiefenbrun. He had that peculiar combination of ego, craziness, genius, and "how-hard-can-it-be" that makes a great old-school inventor.

I found this story about the Rekursiv (note the typical Linn "k") chip:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch/msg/991720740417ec4...
They said it works under virtualization already, so you could just go to chromium.org and download it yourself. The build process isn't too bad.

http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/build...
...and the list http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html (which needs to be updated to add RFS 5).
They've said they're only targetting netbooks for now, specifically ones with SSDs.
Am I the only one who looks at this and instantly thinks, "But HBS takes less than one-third a decade, therefore, go to HBS rather than Africa"?
Online Betting Guide
The United States has tens of trillions of dollars of mineral wealth (oil, natural gas, tungsten, gold, silver, copper, molly, palladium, rhodium, scandium, yttrium, bastnaesite, etc...) trapped in the ground by a gordion knot of government regulations and bureaucracy.

By fully exploiting this mineral wealth, the US could not only pay off its entire national debt, but also generate trillions of dollars of surplus tax revenue, pay for universal health care, cut taxes, eliminate the federal income tax, and create tens of millions of American jobs.

Interesting Fact: The United States has more oil and natural gas than any other country in the entire world, including Saudi Arabia. These are the official findings of the United States Senate, page 23: http://j.mp/3HIfQi

We could more than offset our trade deficit with China by feeding their voracious appetite for natural resources.

Another interesting fact: if Nevada were a country, it would be the world's 4th largest producer of Gold.

On a per-capita basis, the United States is sitting on a mind numbingly huge resource of untapped mineral wealth.

We could literally dig out way out of debt.
Yeah and to think at one point in time, they were literally begging programmers to write software for their Mac platform...
My first computer, a Timex-Sinclair ZX-81, had BASIC commands tied to each key which made typing easier on that membrane keyboard. Perhaps it could employ a similar input device where the user could configure a keyboard with shortcuts for a given language.
Great idea! I'll make that post either tonight or tomorrow.

We are speaking to some "SEO guys", but I'd like to get some opinions from some startup folk.
Yes, HTML5 (and more importantly, webkit) supports offline storage: http://webkit.org/blog/126/webkit-does-html5-client-side-dat...
Recovery.gov a $8.5MM success story
Time for a world of warcraft web app.
Chrome OS will presumably include Google Native Client support so that native code can run (with some limitations) (long but good video on Google Native Client: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgng4C18nNk).

I'd much rather have an OS with the capabilities to sandbox applications, but that can still run an arbitrary binary. For example, I cannot imagine hardware device manufacturers writing drivers that are "cloud apps".
Going rate for acquisitions at Intuit: $170 million
This might be a controversial opinion, but does anyone else think that if the QA team is reading your source code then you are doing QA wrong?

Or do you really mean "held up by code review" when you say "get through QA"?