skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm noticing some developers come here to get some quiet work done.

If you're on HN and decide to do that, let me know if I can help. (I'll be here temporarily, but I'll do what I can even if I've moved to another country when you get here.)
I think there might have been a difference between Mac-only programmers who, it could be argued, were leaving a lot of potential money on the table by not developing for Windows and therefore must be doing it mainly for love of the platform or the company (remember all the Boo's Steve Jobs got when he announced the "investment" from MS in Apple?), and developers who's main product was on Windows and who, perhaps reluctantly, also had to support a Mac version.
I so envy that display. Wish there were monitors <24" with similar pixel density, or that the 13" MBP had a similar screen. That would mean 1500x950. Makes a big difference.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 112 - iRule Editor Easter Eggs
"If software publishing didn't work in 1980, it works even less now"

The App Store is an experiment for Apple. The publishing model has worked pretty well for Nintendo, Sony, and now Microsoft in the console games market. It should be pretty clear that's what Apple wants on the iPhone. They may lose developers to other platforms but from their perspective there's plenty of others waiting to take their place. I say it's an experiment because Apple can ditch the closed model at anytime in the future when/if it starts to negatively impact iPhone sales. If they had started open it would be impossible to go closed at a later time.
If the author can't stand Reddit's interface...

Which is why it’s shocking that Reddit has hung on to its similarly retro design, something that repeatedly stopped me from using it. It was only by overcoming the interface that I grasped Reddit’s great user base and functionality. (Huffman told me he found Web 2.0 trendiness to be “tacky,” which might explain why he didn’t embrace one good aspect of Web 2.0: usable, intuitive interfaces.)

...I wonder what he'd think of Hacker News. I guess some people just need clutter.
This makes delivering rich application experiences with tools like cappuccino more interesting to me.
I don't think it matters that Android is an orphan - it can't be implemented with more bugs/inconsistencies than javascript and yet there are free libraries to work around that today.

I see no reason to believe that geeks won't be able to work around any technical deficiency in Android - so long as no company has locked it down.
Opportunities really do come out of nowhere. It's risky to leave any unexplored.

But use a priority queue. In other words, feel free to turn people down while you're busy, but don't forget who you've said "no" to. Over time, a person's priority goes up, just like when you're fixing bugs. If you've said "no" 3 times to a lunch, eventually you should say "yes" even if you are still busy.
IMO, open source means a lot more than just dumping code.

Not to contradict what you say about github (which is nice - I'm using it for Hecl these days), but as people like to say at the Apache Software Foundation, community is more important than code.
The United States has more oil and natural gas than any other country in the entire world, including Saudi Arabia.

Incorrect. We have more fossil fuel in units equivalent to barrels of oil, if you include coal. Without, we have about 1/5th as much oil and gas in proven reserves, but about 50% more than Saudi Arabia in probably-but-so-far-undiscovered reserves. However, the cost of recovery for those estimated reserves is likely to be far, far lower in Saudi Arabia than it is here.

Of course Saudi Arabia has no coal and we have (literally) gigatons of the stuff. But it's also the dirtiest fossil fuel we have, containing more carbon than oil and about twice as much as natural gas, and that externality increases the cost. So yeah, regulations and bureaucracy are holding us back to some extent, but regulations and bureaucracy also go a considerable way to making sure you have clean air to breathe and your groundwater isn't toxic. The mineral exploitation industry has, shall we say, a decidedly mixed record on cleaning up after itself.
You could start a small business selling these.
You can't see the code inside Google's network so even though the client app is open you have no more proof that all your calls aren't being streamed to Langley or Beijing than you do with skype.

An you can't have pay for service like calls to 'real' phones because if the billing was done in the client you could simply remove it, forcing all the billing to be done at their servers - which makes it much more expensive.
Now I am confused. Isn't that a bit overdone? git is already for distributed files?
How are you supposed to know though, when your code is doing better then 'it works'?
So a machine the size and cost of a laptop but more limited in functionality than a phone while still requiring an always on network connection?

Yep - there's an Apple + MS destroyer right there!
Is that some kind of SEO thing? Like writing "George Bush rules" and collecting lots of inbound links?
First Co-Founders MeetUp: Lessons Learned
I agree with you entirely. My comment was in response to parents contention that lack of a vetting process put third party cellular networks at risk.
Paul, when you wrote this, did you mean by "programmer" anyone who started programming in the new century? Because Dave Winer -- and here I'm feeling like you did when you bought the iMac ;) -- wrote extensively on Apple's treatment of developers in the 90s. This is not news.
Some of us do - we had a Psion ten years ago!
It's too bad that it turned out that way for Alexis and Steve. I love reddit, and I think they did a great job building a great community. Sure, it's got it's quirks, but I think that's half the fun of the site.

Years after it was created, it still has most of the original feel that it used to - there's a little more 4chan these days, but proggit stays pretty decent; and there's some interesting communities like IamA.

Either way, it will be interesting to see what those guys get up to next.
I want to like Microsoft Azure
A lot more than one. The App Store is tied with US immigration as the biggest source of complaints I hear from founders.
One thing that hit me watching the webcast was that Linux is going to get first-priority treatment from the Chrome browser guys.
BitTorrent wins my vote as most influential and generally cool software of the decade, closely followed by BOINC.
It's efficient. It's concise. It's easy for you to understand and modify. It's easy for others to understand and modify. Over the long term, it proves to have a low defect rate. It's declarative, and lends itself to automatic optimization.
I know lots of people who bought in iPhone or or iPod touch because it could run some unique app. It was a different app in each case and in each case it was an app I personally saw no use for, but for them it was a killer app.

Any app that makes someone get an iPhone instead of something else is a "killer app" as far as Apple is concerned, even if it only sold a total of 27 copies and lost the developer a lot of money. So even if the iPhone doesn't have any one killer app, the sheer diversity of apps means there is probably a killer app out there for most people, and that is vital for Apple.
If somebody isn't buying your product because it doesn't do X because of something company Y supplies

- it's YOUR problem.
List of all clojars:

http://clojars.org/search?q=org
How about dropbox.news.ycombinator.com
Joel advocates consulting until the company can live off its products. Yes, it takes a while longer to get where you want to be, but the initial investment is only your own time (assuming you have a computer).
Mmm. For me, Python. It helped me break through the biggest programming walls by gently introducing a ton of great concepts.

There are practical applications I could point at, and I've moved on to shinier languages as well, but I think something so genuinely useful in educating me would have to go down as having the most cool factor of all.
For display, you can hook up video display glasses to an iPhone today, then use ScreenSplittr to mirror the display to the glasses. With some Windows Mobile phones, like the Touch Pro or Touch Pro 2, you get TV out "out of the box" with no extra software (do need a special cable). That gives you a 640x480 screen for ~$300 with the myvu crystal glasses (myvu.com). Does anyone know of an Android phone that supports this? There were reports that the G1 has the appropriate hardware but I haven't seen anyone get the tv out to work.

The sticking point is the rest of the interface. There's the BlueInput drivers for Windows Mobile, that lets you hook up a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. You could then use RDP to connect to a machine elsewhere and have it host your IDE and compiler. Almost certainly not the "right" way to do it but it's a start.

Multi-touch interfaces turn out to be hard with video glasses, at least on current phones -- you don't see where your finger is. Of course you could ignore the video glasses and just look at the phone screen, but then you have a small screen.

May be worth thinking through what kinds of development are best suited for a person walking around. Are you planning to camp out at a coffee shop and work for six hours straight, are you planning to make quick changes to an existing app "on the fly" as you think about them, or something else?
There wasn't any data. It did X with the external network.

The worst case was that it maxes out the connection and burns through bandwidth. But that's something that can be monitored.

The customer would have rather had something working with the network, than something broken with the network.

In that particular circumstance, there's always an excuse to skip QA. IMHO.
Intel makes some very good software -- for example, their compilers.

Car companies that cannot produce good software are indeed dying. The next generation driving systems rely heavily on a software component (traction control, user interface feedback, gas management and hybrid drive, Tesla's power management, etc) and those which cannot make the leap to produce software in tandem with their car hardware are facing irrelevance.
I've been writing PHP for years, and have mixed feelings about it personally.

You're right that some of the largest websites are built primarily on PHP (Facebook comes to mind) and it works remarkably well. For one thing, PHP is fast. It blows Ruby out of the water and (for the time being) leaves Python in the dust. It also doesn't run into the infamous scalability issues that plagued Rails for some time (and in some ways continues to).

I rather like the syntax of the language - it's Perl but a bit more structured, and less ambiguous, which is pretty cool to have.

Put two and two together, and in the right hands PHP is a formidable tool that ought not be underestimated (though frequently is thanks to flavor-of-the-day coders).

What it is guilty of, though, is an unmitigated clusterfuck of a standard library... if it can even be really called a standard library. There's no concept of namespaces (none that is used anyway), and no consistency with API naming nor design. Accessing the various core functions within PHP is really just arcane tribal knowledge that you acquire from Google - there's no systematic elegance to anything. Remove the gigantic tomes of documentation surrounding PHP and the language is utterly incapable of standing on its own.

Oh, and it still can't parse XML worth a damn.
A lot of people post their projects under "Ask HN: Review my startup" type posts. See here: http://searchyc.com/review+my+startup
I had hangup-on-resume experience on powerbook too. Not very often, about once a month. It was quite annoying.
Google previews Chrome open source operating system
PHP is fast to deploy, comes installed on a lot of cheap web hosts, and has literally zero set up cost - in terms of framework requirements, dependency installation, daemons, etc etc.

To write a line of dynamic code and have it run, in PHP, is really as simple as typing out the code and saving the file. No build, no deploy, no frameworks to learn, just code that runs.

This encourages a lot of "well, I just need a little bit of dynamic stuff on my page" attitude, which as we all know eventually evolves into "wouldn't it be nice if I can also do this..."... and before you know it, 5 innocuous lines o PHP turns into 5000 lines of spaghetti code that has absolutely no design behind it.

PHP's reputation is also sullied by a number of high-profile projects surrounding it that have absolutely atrocious code quality - zero design effort and utter spaghetti. Guilty parties include: phpBB, osCommerce, WordPress, etc.
Sometimes I find it hard to weigh JFDIing vs the customer development methodology. I see the value in customer development, but coming from a development background, sometimes I don't get the sensation of "getting things done" if I'm not actively coding. I guess once I start seeing more sales, I'll feel better about customer development.
to build something great is most of the
times not possible because of API limitations. An alternative sms client can be something great if well coded. Opera for iphone can be great. A new home screen with events, and so forth. In a development environment where it is not even possible to access the webcam directly what you get is a lot of toy apps.
I had similar one line fix...

I have a simple "free" app in the iPhone App Store. It lets users browse "available" Web domains. One feature is a BUY button that forwards them to Godaddy.com, if they want to buy the domain.

I don't make any money from Godaddy.

The app has been approved for a while, but I wanted to patch one little bug, so I submitted a patch.

... And waited two weeks. Apple's testers found a bug that was in the original approved app, and asked me to re-submit.

... And I waited three weeks. This is classic: Apple rejects my app again because they want to test the domain "buying" feature on Godaddy.

It's a website! Not even my app! Not even a new feature.

Please kill me.
I've been writing mobile software for 6 years, and I find all the belly-aching terribly amusing. Despite all the complaints, inconsistencies, and contradictions, Apple treats their developers better than any other mobile marketplace. I'll say that again. Apple treats their phone developers better than any other mobile software marketplace. (Android market might be a little better, but no-one is using it)

Wanted to submit an app for Verizon on the Get-It-Now shop? You're looking at spending 10,000$ in testing fees. Fail testing? You pay again.

By all means, lets keep up with the griping. The more Apple is forced to bow to the teeming masses, the better the other marketplaces have to treat us to keep up.
A Taxonomy of Social Networking Data
That comparison should be worrying to Apple in itself. You should have put it in the essay.
There is more than one definition of "evil" - in one case it means "harmful or injurious" and this is what I think most people mean when they say Apple is "evil", not that they really think there are people inside of Apple thinking about how they can deliberately screw developers over in some amoral way. Apple is definitely acting by this form of "evil" towards developers by harming their ability to serve the customer, and because developers feel unjustly harmed, developers feel they are justified in using this strong language.
I'm with Joshua on that point. In Silicon Valley experience and contacts are in abundance. Why would someone want to bring you on board vs. other well connected people in the valley? How do you differentiate from the other great angels and early stage VCs out here?
Linus Torvalds' Micro-emacs
I guess some people just need clutter.

I guess some people just need gradients and column-stacking horizontal UIs.

Oh, and REALLY LARGE FONTS.
Umm yes. But nobody seems to be arguing that. The original commenter implied that without vetting the applications, the carriers networks would be in danger. But that reality already exists on plenty of other platforms (even one by Microsoft) without any troubles. The success or failure of the platform is not in question.
This may be it:

http://kotaku.com/5397908/carmack-working-with-apple-is-a-ro...
Also see here for a follow-up article:

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/more-on-mathematica...
Speaking from personal experience, their approval process is not lengthy at all. On their site they say 8-10 business days and sure enough I got approved on day 8.

I was at the BB Dev Con last week and their tech lead explained the approval process: "they load it, make sure it doesn't crash the phone, then sign off on it."
Why would it be technically difficult for Apple to remove apps from your phone? Implementing a backdoor in your own software is fairly trivial.
The Pyramids and the Bazaar
Genuine question about the RFS:

Why so specific? If the idea is get iphone-replacements into developers hands, why not just say that. 'Development on handhelds' sounds like a reasonable idea, but maybe it's impossible. Maybe it's just one of several possibilities.

'Get developers using something other then an iphone' seems like something that could at least yield some good ideas. Is there any reason the RFS is so granular?
Mods: thanks for changing the title... I made a submission specifically in reply to an existing submission, but used a non-contextual blog title for the non-HN visitors. Are the submission guidelines to pretend that HN doesn't exist? Do I have to pretend that everyone who reads my blog comes from HN to have a HN-aware submission title?

Thanks okay, I can always change my blog title. You can change it back now.
[Google: We believe the web platform is a much simpler way, where the machines are essentially stateless, more cache-like, but can still be performant. And yet much easier and simpler for individuals to use.]

My experience is, that for certain tasks, native client application is still much more convenient. Evernote is a classic example - although online version of this note-taking software is available, I still enter a note quicker in native app, which then synchronize the data on the cloud.

It's the same with photo editor, word processor, etc. So, what is really needed are good native applications, which are able to synchronize their data with the cloud. But maybe Google will convince me that web-only platform is better, we will see...
The iPhone is heaven for mobile developers, hell for everyone else.

If you're coming from a web software background -- or even a desktop software background -- the App store will increase the length your development cycle by one or two orders of magnitude.

The iPhone brought new developers to the mobile field and they have higher expectations than people who have been working with carriers for the last five years.

In the long run, developers will go where the expected payout is the highest. For now that's the iPhone, but the App Store is a big weakness.
I think I'll wait until a VirtualBox pre-built image is available. I did recently go to the trouble of building the open source edition of the IntelliJ IDEA IDE, but since I have no interest in hacking on Chromium OS, this looks like a major time sink.
There were already tons of quality open source projects before github and there'll be after it.
Aha! Nintendo and Apple are competitors..

http://bit.ly/4oXDX2
Thanks pg, this one was great. I was just ranting about software here in HN comments the last couple of days, so it feels even more timely.
I haven't tried out a netbook, but the reason I don't turn off my Macbook is because I can simply close the lid, and I'll immediately get a login screen when I open the lid. Boot time is the least of my worries.
So you can't develop Chrome OS on Chrome OS ?
Not True. Windows CE/PocketPC/Mobile has always allowed you to get Apps from anywhere.
Starlight and the XML engineering environment.
Gene change in cannibals reveals evolution in action
> to communicate clearly and concisely with an intended audience.

how's that working out for you?
The US also allows implementation patents so you can take any existing patent and add "using a computer" to the end.

For instance, placing a small dot to mark the end of a sentance - on a computer, is a new patent.
Better-looking sportsmen more likely to win
Fair point, but they can do that anyway. Also, it would give them an incentive to actually review things in a timely manner.

The other thing is they could keep the existing process for everyone's first app, but once you are a trusted developer things should be smoother. That would eliminate most of the pain.
Keep in mind that an adversarial opponent is a game-theoretic abstraction. The useful thought-experiment of an adversary is often used even when there is not a literal 'opponent,' eg in natural-disaster-proof design. In essence, imagining an adversary is a useful thought experiment for reasoning about worst-case situations. In the situation of a natural disaster, an adversarial opponent is not the literal truth, but you won't go far wrong by designing against one.

I would say that any form of persuasion benefits from imagining an adversarial opponent (in face, they're usually called a Devil's Advocate!). In this case, your judge you are persuading can be modeled as an adversarial opponent, characterized as being Maximally Skeptical of your position, within the constraints of still being Perfectly Rational.

You may also be confusing "adversarial" with "confrontational." An adversary can still be very dry. In fact, in game theory, they probably are very dry because they're assumed to be perfectly rational. Adversarialism defines the other participant's goals, not their approach.
Actually as acquisitions go this was a pretty good one. Much better than Yahoo's acquisition of Delicious, which basically destroyed it. Reddit continued to grow after the acquisition. Steve and Alexis worked for CN for several years, and as far as I know there was no bad blood when they left. Maybe CN could be making more money from it (I have no idea how much they do make), but I think they've learned a lot about how "social media" works, and it always seemed that was their main goal.

If you boil this article down to the actual facts reported in it, it's nothing more than: The founders of a startup bought by a big company eventually quit. But that's the norm with acquisitions. It's ridiculous (or more precisely, linkbait) to call it a "divorce."
Macbook off to the side for skype, videoconferencing; use it for development when on train or at library.

But main system is 8 gig dual core ubuntu with 20" monitor, and second desktop with 20" monitor. Main desktop (athalon 64) has nice zip to it.

As someone else said, the main thing is the keyboard. I have the kenesis to reduce serious fatigue. I can't type long on anything else.
No, but they said developing in a virtual machine environment works well.
JavaScript compilers (in the sense of Java->JavaScript, not V8/TraceMonkey) already do this. Surprisingly inlining can help quite a bit in JS; due to how JS is "specified", there is extremely little room for interpreters to perform optimizations. Inlining code can save browsers from having to do lots of lookups and dereferences to functions in tight loops.

Scheme2JS, ocamljs, haxe, and others all do inlining. The code size gets a little bit larger, but if you have actual performance problems in loops, it can be worth it. Minify-ing and zip usually make JS code sizes trivial anyway.
They said that they're going to make sure that web apps have full access to video (camera), audio, etc.
Passing of RBCP Brad Carter of phonelosers.org
Unfortunately I bring news of the passing of RBCP of phonelosers.org suddenly just hours ago... RIP Brad

:(
Yes, but those native client apps run in a sandbox like every other web app, so they can't access the file system, etc.
"Do they have a giant disclaimer that they do not support or condone the applications, take no responsibility for any damages, etc?"

Read your iTunes agreement. I think you will find that they already have this.