skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of Paul's reasoning depends on Apps being central to the iPhone experience the same way software is central to the desktop experience. I'm not totally sure this is the case. While apps are certainly a major component to the iPhone, are they really the major factor in end-user adoption? With the exception of games, how many killer iPhone apps are there that don't already ship with the phone? The phone shipped for an entire year without an App Store at all. I even read something not that long ago that said the majority of apps sit unused on people's phones after they get them.

Now, this doesn't mean that developers won't want a developer friendly phone, or that Apple is hurting their reputation with developers. I'm certain it has been frustrating to deal with the whole process. However, if 3rd party software isn't essential for the iPhone as a platform, then developer satisfaction moves down a bit in terms of importance in Apple's eyes.

Now, it's clear that games are major for the app store. Games are also a special class of software application that benefits disproportionately from having access to the hardware at a low level. They also have properties more similar to music and movies (incidentally, things the iTunes store is good at selling). Except for the simplest games, they require a lot of up-front design work and investment. It's rare that a released game goes through a ton of rapid iterations to "get it right". Games may still have bugs after release, but in general the functionality they are going to have is there on day one. They also ship with the final sound effects, music, artwork, etc... Games are also probably very unlikely to "duplicate existing functinoality" or any of the other cases where "normal" apps hit barriers. Perhaps Apple has (intentionally or unintentionally) created an environment optimized for game approval?

I'm certainly not defending the app store process, but I just wonder if the software development community has a disproportionate view of its importance to the iPhone as a whole.
How to handle local configuration files per developer
Never even heard of viddler, is that bad?
I would tend to agree with you if you're only thinking about the US but 3rd world countries are a totally different ballgame.

There was a Nokia video out last week about the year 2015 and what mobile would look like at that point. While none of it was revolutionary what struck me the most was the thought that BILLIONS of people are going to begin making the kind of money necessary to get a smartphone in the next decade. Those 'phones' are going to be their only computer, their only access to the internet, and their only device that would allow application development.

If we, using the royal hacker we, could develop a mobile or web-based development environment that worked on mobile devices it could enable a new population of developers that dwarfs the number of devs we have in the world now. I would be surprised if the number of mobile applications developed on mobile devices was extremely high in the 3rd world in the next decade.
Chrome is open source yet seems to have a bunch of restrictions - no standard hard drives, no native apps, etc.

What's to keep a third party from changing those restrictions?
I learned assembly on the MC68000 in the TI-89
They have "magazine" right in their name.
Since I am walking down memory lane...I remember programming a computer by setting 4 switches in octal to load the instructions. As funny as that would be today, it shows how a simple input device can be used to produce complex results.
Reinventing And Legitimizing Swoopo’s Controversial Auction Bidding Model
I think it's reasonable to make such a charge if "their app store" is in effect "The App Store". This is like saying that it's not evil to remove freedom of speech in America. I mean, it's only stuffing up "their country".
Weird Error Messages
Thanks for your feedback.

I think the differentiating factor with other news aggregators is the argument feature. Lots of times an interesting discussion on reddit or hacker news will get lost somewhere at the bottom of the comment page. By breaking it out to an argument thread it can get more exposure, and be available for other users to read who might have otherwise missed it. I often find the comments sections of sites like this to be more interesting than the articles themselves, I'm hoping this makes comments more readable and usable.

Arguments are decided by votes. The argument is active for 7 days or until the participants decide to call a draw or one concedes. At the end of the 7 days, the argument is ended and the user with the most votes is the winner.

A leaderboard or ranking system is definitely in the works. Right now it would just show all users at 0 though. Scores at this point are just the total number of arguments won. I'm still evaluating if that's the best way to go, but I think it will work well enough to start. Something like the Elo rating system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system) used for chess ratings might be better, but time will tell.

UI design is definitely not my strong suit, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible. Your suggestion is appreciated, though.

I've been tweaking the copy at the top of the home page for a while to try to explain the site as succinctly as possible to leave more room for topics and arguments. A sidebar might be a better way to make it stand out.

Facebook integration is definitely on my long list of improvements to make. I think the site would really benefit from integration with a Facebook app. You're not the first person to ask for pics / avatars either. I'll have to see how I can fit that into the layout.

Thanks again!
Mozilla reveals 2008 revenue: $79 million
Wow. If this is what we're considering $8.5MM worth of success, I am in the wrong field.
In one of his talks [1], Alex Warth (the author of OMeta [2]) points out that JS might be the "assembly of the web" - in the sense that future languages will compile to it. OMeta makes this surprisingly easy:

1. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/video/2008/sts/ometa_keynote_...
2. http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/
Agreed. I think there's at least a 50% chance that the original plan was a console-like model where the only native apps would be from Apple and hand-picked partners. The popularity of jailbreaking forced their hand, because if unlocking became common it would ruin their cozy relationship with the carriers.
Yes, I went with Vimeo for the premium package
Imagine having a monitor/keyboard at work and a separate monitor/keyboard at home. What if you could simply plug in (wired or wireless) your phone into either setup and have your OS available? That's incredibly convenient.

Might be very possible with the next USB-like installment:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/26/exclusive-apple-dictated-...
I don't buy your argument about the current system. Of course the air traffic controllers and their union want better equipment! You really think they're intentionally making their jobs harder so that the government will have to hire more of them? (And if so, it isn't working)

I also can't help but notice that "safety" is not mentioned in your argument at all. If your goal is safe flights, then letting a for-profit run them is a terrible idea.
judging by the amount of code? What kind of metric is that?

The vision of the browser as the OS is huge.
I doubt this would be unilateral action, perhaps this is the UK's part of ACTA? http://www.eff.org/issues/acta
Dog Shit is the new Dog Food (and that's a good thing)
Sorry but I believe in a religious way that an hardware vendor should not have the power to enforce what software can run into a device. Like a bike vendor can't force you to only use your bike in a limited number of streets.
Prolly not a lot.
Trying to Find Coder's Heaven
Ask HN: Please review my startup: Affiliate Script
you could put your password in your will
The Pandora should be shipping soon, though it may be a bit bigger than what most people would want in a phone. It has (will have?) a usable but small screen and keyboard, but it also has USB and composite and s-video out.

http://openpandora.org/

As far as screen size, a readable 80x25 screen and a regular keyboard so vim works normally is sufficient for on-the-go development. I can get 80x34 tiny, tiny characters on my blackberry now, or half that (or quarter that, depending on how you're counting) with characters that more suit my eyesight. And while developing on it's a non-starter, it's sure come in handy when I've been out and about and needed to fix something (using ssh for access).
I for one thought it was cheeky and funny, and think it would be a nice video to show my non-programmer friends. Perhaps you shouldn't take everything you see on the internet personally?
This is my first web startup, and the culmination of years of "recreational" programming. I've been working on Affiliate Script for a month or so now and feel that I am finally ready for some criticism from the more experienced members of HN.

My goals were to make the design simple to reflect the goal of the system: to make Amazon product ads simple.

Please critique my design, my message, how easy the site is to understand, and anything else that you think of.

Thank you,

Nathan
Health Insurer Loses 1.5 Million Patient Records
The point is, in the world of transparency, when people are complaining, that's when you know it is successful. People have a hard time not shooting the messenger in this space.
I found drupal's architecture to be pretty good. Core, not contributed modules!
> in the same way that laptops displaced desktops.

Whoa there buddy, that's quit a leap/assertion to make with zero evidence.

I'm sure that's true for certain small niches such as young entrepreneurs working from coffee shops and coworking offices. But I and most developers I know work on one (or more) beefy desktops connected to real keyboards, real trackballs/mice, and 2+ very large displays. Many of us have a laptop for home/road work but we only use it if we have to.
Without knowing what they consider a password, it is hard to tell.

Even though the Cell processors and GPUs are similar, they both do have different strengths still. There exist password systems that would get miserable performance on either or both.
Does anyone have a real link? i.e. not flash
And women rated about 8.3/10 (rather than perfect 10/10) got the most messages.

This is a misleading statement. As a total number of messages, they did indeed get the most, since there are more of them, but the ones rated 10/10 still got a lot more messages per individual than those rated lower. And overall, the messages versus attractiveness curve is much steeper for men messaging women than the other way around.
Mac developers mostly did (and still do). If you're developing anything other than Mac applications, you probably don't know a lot about what it's like either.
Seeking recommendation for Java Servlet hosting
We are a startup trying to choose a reputable, solid Java host. We are currently developing locally. Anyone have any recommendations? We are happy to pay a little bit more for great service and reliability. Thanks
Did you believe it when you heard it back then? I didn't.

Apple offered "web apps" to placate would-be developers and buy time to refine the real SDK and work on the App Store model of delivery. (I know that jailbreakers love to give themselves credit for the SDK, but I think that fails the Principle of Parsimony in the case of Apple, who tends not to disclose things until they're ready, and who holds user experience - which web apps do not provide - above all else.) A lot of people didn't believe an SDK was coming until it was announced, but I don't think any of them really thought it through.

I do believe Google's plan is to make the browser the centerpiece, on the other hand. Their model is to ensure a good web experience, to drive ad revenue, isn't it? Why would they add a native app API?
As far as I know, women date by "how you make them feel?" not how a guy looks :)
Even more practically, as long as your (estate's) bank account keeps accepting money, Google will keep putting money in to it.
Early peek at Google's Chrome OS (includes screenshot) - Linux Critic
Poll: Do you develop primarily on a desktop, or a laptop machine?
Something else (please leave a comment)
Less-known than it deserves to be: http://www.azulsystems.com/ has been selling Java computers (with almost 1000 cores) for several years now.
Many of the hackers I know only use a laptop these days, ssh'ing into a server if they want more horsepower for something.

Just for kicks, I made a poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951057
It is my understanding that apps can also be installed directly from third party websites...

This is not true, and that's the essence of the problem.

You can install software that you've written yourself on your own phone. And there's some sort of deal that lets you give your software to beta testers and let them install it. A year or so ago some clever fellow tried to use this beta loophole as a way of selling an app that was banned from the App Store. I believe they threw the book at him and he had to stop. I haven't heard of that happening again.

You can distribute apps for jailbroken phones, but that is not really a solution.
They don't? I don't know about how you connect to the internet, but my ISPs owns the networks I tend to connect to.
Is the display on a handheld large enough to be useful for programming? Studies show that larger monitors increase programmer productivity. It seems reasonable to conclude that a smaller monitor would decrease it even more significantly.

An iPhone screen (320x480) is similar to what the Mac Plus had (512x342), but it subtends a much smaller angle of your field of view.

Perhaps the appropriate measure is in square "characters". The VT100 is probably the bare minimum -- 80x40 characters, or 3200 characters square. There's no way the iPhone can display that legibly.

Not saying the idea is impossible, but this is definitely a problem to overcome, either through hardware (HUDs in special wearable glasses? Big lenses to enlarge monitor size, like the movie Brazil?) or software (some other method of input?)
Minor note: I think "inoculate" is misspelled.
You're sort of right, but that's true for all other platforms as well, so it doesn't really tell us anything about the state of app use on the iPhone platform.

The OS bundled ones are the ones people use the most. Across the board.

If I had to guess, I'd say third party apps are just as often or more used on iPhone than on, say, Windows and Mac OS X. Simply because, on iPhone, a lot of web apps out there are used via a special-purpose iPhone app rather than the web interface.
Uneven split between a desktop and an Android phone (using a browser-based ide)
Laptops displaced desktops?! You are deluded.

We develop on 8GB i7s with dual 24" screens. We have one at home and one at work, Remote Desktop-ing from each other.

Gigabit ethernet and optical fiber internet. No molasses wifi here.

We work FAST, we work HARD. But we use Windows 7 too, so we're not limited to Apple's crappy hardware either...
I think the "can't marshall any evidence to support this claim" is pretty critical here, because the vast majority of developers who actually write software for the Mac have loved it since OS X came out. They've loved Cocoa and they loved that the IDE and development tools were made free.

And while there was a dead period due to the technically deficient underpinnings of the late Classic MacOS, before that, the Inside Macintosh days, I hear folks loved programming Apple too.

After having been deeply involved in the Mac dev community for the last 10 years, the implicit claim that Apple is a company pro developers do not love working with sounds, frankly, a little bizarre.
This is why Apple's rumored touch-screen media pad would come in useful - multitouch and voice could serve as good channels for innovative input.
Meh. Apple does understand software. A bounch of peope hired to do reviews for thousands of apps flooding into App Store daily may not.
Don't forget leiningen (it's mentioned on the page), technomancy's sweet looking Clojure build tool. The two really do go hand in hand.
You'll get more views if you put them on Youtube. Also Viddler's buffering has always seemed unreliable to me.
PHP 5.3.1 Release Announcement "Fatal error"
Individualism, Identity and Bicycles in Northern California
Ask HN: How early should you launch your startup?
We have been building an startup for a few months now and the app is functional. However there are some mayor UI bugs in IE and none heavy QA sessions have been done. Will you recommend on getting the app out there, or at least wait a few more days and get the IE things fixed and maybe a round or two of QA?
That's generally a bad idea. Think about the different versions of jQuery that come out right after a browser version does. On top of this, what if you want to use a different library. How would we choose to use jQuery as opposed to Dojo or Prototype, etc.

I think the way things are right now, it works just fine with one small exception: I got spoiled by jQuery. I do everything in it. I don't mean just web projects, I mean I do command line stuff with it. I have Firebug installed and so every time I end up on a website where I need to extract some information out of it, I fire up Firebug and do something along the lines of this:

(function(){ var x = document.createElement( 'script' ); x.src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min...; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild( x ) } )();

// Wait for jQuery to load...

jQuery('span.comhead').each(function(){ console.log( jQuery(this).text() ) });

It would really be ideal if Firebug shipped with jQuery built in, or at least have an option. This way I wouldn't have to do this every time I want to do some DOM-fu. Come to think of it, I should make this I should publish this bookmarklet.
Darwinian Theory of Legal Obfuscation
UK government wants to make copyright law by decree, bypassing parliament
Please explain:)
If you modify it then it's not Chrome OS™ any more; it's merely Chromium OS.
OpenId loves foaf+ssl
If there was a version half the size I'd prefer it.

http://i.gizmodo.com/5185837/a-hackintoshed-dell-mini-9-auto...
I don't think that's right. They've made the app-store a central part of all iphone advertising campaigns.
Laptop is docked and everything is set up as if it were a desktop though.
I just saw another post on HN with a related article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951034
The high pixel density screen and physical keyboard actually make a Droid very possible for this. Mine is very comfortable for reading, but for creating documents it will take some practice--almost every element is part of the UI so it's easy to tap the wrong thing.

I don't see any reason that with the proper UI mapping, a program couldn't let me bang out some writing on this thing.

You wouldn't want to write your entire app (or novel) on it, but for quashing a bug or tweaking some CSS? Absolutely.
Decrypting Bit.ly Links on Twitter and Not Only
They still said it will come with native client (chromium does) so it will be able to run native client apps at least.
The other huge irony about the app store approval process is the massive advantage that it ends up giving Apple's competition.

The app store is already far ahead of the competition but it could be factors further ahead with shorter cycle time.

Progress is a non linear function of cycle time. Apple are holding themselves back by many factors by artificially extending cycle time and making it far far easier for the other platforms to catch them up.
That mobile platform has already arrived. It's called Windows Mobile.

I was surprised too: my wife has a 3GS and I was planning to get one for myself too.

Instead I got a HTC Diamond2 which I plan to upgrade to a HTC HD2. I'm a developer, not a essay-writing millionaire. I like platforms that are Powerful, flexible and CUSTOMIZABLE to my taste. I like pretty too, but form has to follow function, not the other way around.

On WinMo, thanks to xda-developers I belong to an AMAZING (real, not wannabe) hacker culture and environment. The latest HTC ROMs are sleeker and better than the iPhone. More useful and immensely customizable.

My wife still has to click an "App" to get to her favorites... mine are on the first page. Which first page is GORGEOUS, not an old matrix of icons.

But the most important part... my phone is HACKABLE. My wife's is like my ps3: untouchable.
Chrome OS doesn't support native apps but the drivers are regular Linux drivers. Of course, you probably can't install drivers, so whatever drivers come with the computer are what you get. I don't see this as a problem since netbooks don't have slots and most USB devices use class drivers.
> Why would they add a native app API?

They already do, chromium comes with native client.
Why did they decide to have it use the modal window? I can't see a full two rows of photos.
I have now two published apps in the App Store. Both business apps - one in finance and the other in business.

The biggest change they have made that took me off their platform was their recent policy to not show updated applications along with new releases.

Let me explain. For the longest time, if you looked under released applications you could see applications that were recently updated. This was a great incentive for developers of existing applications to keep updating their applications and getting it easily noticed by users.

Apple no longer allows updated applications to be displayed in the released applications list.

There is now no way for users to discover your application except for about one or two days when it is first released.
They also spell maintenance "maitenance".
Welp, at least you can deploy it fast...
People have tried to make general-purpose visual programming languages for decades and as far as I know they've failed every time.

I believe that real hacking is linguistic, and that's just not isomorphic to anything in two dimensions.

There are many specialized tasks which sort of work, like dataflow programming or music sequencing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_%28software%29
Paul Graham should pull a Kevin Smith and put his writings into a book.

I would buy it.

If it already exists, someone link me!
> They don't?

I don't think you correctly read my post:) No worries
Not satisfied with the powers he'll get against filesharers in the new Digital Economy Bill -- a £50,000 fine and banning from the internet -- Lord Mandelson has decided that to stop illegal copying, he needs the power to make new laws by decree.
Why Google’s Chrome OS Will Look Hopelessly Antiquated Next Year
I once read some of the code that runs PHP.net and it is frighteningly bad. Like hacked-together homegrown feed readers and HTML being parsed with regular expressions.
And establishing that is is, in fact, prior-art would require significant legal work which would be expensive.
Really?

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp...

From 2004, but comprised mostly of essays that are on his site.
Oh, and we write web apps and desktop apps, in php, java and c++.

We test on iMacs and we serve from Ubuntu.

But we develop on Windows Desktops. Our Mac Airs are for browsing. And reading Hacker News.
Or, more likely, prices would get so low every foreign corporation would buy huge amounts of mineral to stock, thus plummeting your country's economy to the ground. Demand wouldn't increase significantly, so most companies would have a hard time surviving until their stocks could give profits, likely plummeting the rest of the world's economy, and all the related miners' rage and stuff.

As capitalism self-regulates only when economical actors seek profit, you can't expect an instantaneous recovery.
Furthermore, as it is the standard of value, gold's regulation is at least reasonable. If you didn't regulate it, inflation would artificially rise worldwide.