skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If all you have is text, text, text, then people will be less likely to read it. Put a little effort into styling the content, and your post will become much more readable.

Pah. Text is good for people who can think about what they're reading rather than what they're seeing. They are my audience (such as it is).
Imagine if Microsoft had vetted every DOS and Windows app

Or, hold constant that Microsoft didn't vet DOS/Windows apps and imagine that every DOS/Windows machine had access to a cellular network owned by a some other company.

I agree that the review process is completely broken, but I don't think the solution is as easy as having no controls whatsoever.
American Express Acquiring Steve Case's Revolution Money For $300 Million
His blog has turned into a collection of cleverly worded links to his other blog entries.
I don't think it's a protection thing, and loss-leader isn't entirely fair. The App Store makes money, there's no question about that. It's just that the profits from the hardware make the App Store money irrelevant. Apple almost certainly makes more money from the Google Searches in Safari (maybe even just in MobileSafari) then they do from the App Store, figures in the hundreds of millions. Compare that to the iPhone profits which are in the billions already.
That's great progress. Can someone more versed in this stuff explain why they think this will help to make computers use less power ? The brain is very power-efficient, but that is because of its engineering, not the logic hookup and this simulation seems to concentrate mostly on how it works from a logical (soft) perspective, not on how the 'wetware' component works.

Running a brain a bit larger than that on a cat on something the size of bluegene seems to be rather less efficient than the cat. What am I missing?
I spend a lot of time staring at my iPhone's screen, and for Python/Ruby/bash? I'm sure the processor is powerful enough to write some useful things.

I think the real problem is input. Would it be enough to have a "hacking mode" software keyboard? Or would it require a physical keyboard at this point? Would the current iteration of physical keyboards even work? I've not used a Droid keyboard, but they have nice screens and I'm sure setting up a dev environment would be a lot easier in android than on the iPhone. That is to say, possible (sans jailbreak).

This is a cool idea.
Unlikely. 30% is already pretty high, probably more than any startup would have been able to credibly command. It's another instance of the lack of choice allowing Apple to dictate whatever terms they like, however unfavorable they may be.
There's a fundamental difference between BlackBerry and iPhone here, though: You don't have to use BlackBerry AppWorld if you don't want to, you can make your application available directly from your own website. Furthermore, AppWorld only takes a 20% cut: I think getting another 10% of the gross revenue (over what the App Store charges) should be worth a flat $20 administration fee to you.
I wish Amazon gets into the handheld device business.

They clearly understand consumers, software, infrastructure & user-experience. They missed the boat with the ipod, here's a fantastic opportunity to do something about it.
i must say i'm puzzled by the downvotes. coming to the main debate articles' points are signs of the "word" i used which i shouldnt. even if i wrote without that intention but i sounded rude. sorry for that. thanks for pohl and mechanical_fish for the comments.
Unicorns and projections
Most of Apple's policies handling the app store make me somewhat believe they wanted their original plan to succeed, namely, making developers write web applications and not opening up the iPhone to native development.
For what it's worth, all of us have programmed 68k assembly.
I wish I could upvote you twice!
In fact, browsers were that fast in 2006, when this was written. Not fast enough to do some things that we're doing today, but more than fast enough to parse a simple language like this.
I love this idea. Is there an existing handheld device that is capable of having an external keyboard and monitor plugged in to it? Or would anyone doing this need to figure out how to make a good virtual keyboard for programming and a dev environment that will work in something tiny like 480x320 pixels?
And submitted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950781
I keep seeing this notion of opening the platform brought up here. I'm having a hard time visualizing how this works out.

Does Apple continue the overhead/cost of the app store? Do they have a giant disclaimer that they do not support or condone the applications, take no responsibility for any damages, etc? Do they still act as the payment gateway? How does this impact Apple's brand and the consumer trust of the product?

Why is it that mobile phones with open app development have not taken off even with years and years of head start?

What is Apple's incentive to do this? Can they make money on a phone that allows this sort of development?

I really think there is a lot more to it than just "open it up the world deserves to be free" and we're not talking about it. Why is that?
> , hold constant that Microsoft didn't vet DOS/Windows apps and imagine that every DOS/Windows machine had access to a cellular network owned by a some other company.

Well most windows machines do have access to a network controlled by someone else. And with the proliferation of cellular usb accessories more and more windows machines do have access to a cellular network owned by some other company.
> Lots of diets tell you to reward yourself with one good meal or a really yummy snack after a week of successful dieting and exercise. Fuck that. You’re fat. Punish yourself until you lose the weight

Awesome. As my friend put it, there's a shortage of discipline in the world.
His advice is not bad, but it can be simplified: low carb diet. Avoid specially excess fructose, so yes, lose the sodas, and sweets and sugar. And cereals derivatives (like bread). Also starchy vegetables (like potatoes).

Exercise if you want muscle, but it's not necessary or sufficient.
That's amazing !
I wonder what is the legal side of it ( RIAA side).
For example now to get music video lyrics you need to search for them , on some sketchy or not so sketchy sites(that get their api shut down like LyricWiki).
So if I use the youtube api with captions for my project
is it going to be safer than relying on a lyrics websites ...?
This is actually pretty neat. I'd much prefer it to what jQuery source looks like today.

And I'd argue there's no reason not to want to optimize the syntax like this.
Nice! Glad you could clarify. Good that you keep an eye on the HN comments for stuff like that!
I agree with the primary point that Apple is making a mistake in not treating developers well.

However, I think that the essay misses a couple of points.

1. The essay rejects the notion of an "intermediary" or a "software publisher". However, it fails to appreciate the fact Apple has opened up the mobile app market to developers and eliminated far worse intermediaries (the walled gardens of carriers). This is a huge order-of-magnitude improvement.

2. A lot of developers do release badly-buggy apps out there and then end up "blaming" the Apple review process for their customers dissatusfaction. While I agree with the launch-fast-and-iterate approach, I don't think developers/companies should use that as a license to release poor-quality crashing apps. Cutting/postponing features to launch the app quickly can be a good thing, not testing the app and releasing an app with crashing bugs is not a good thing.
---

I don't expect Apple to throw out the review process, but I do hope that they improve the review process. A simple/easy improvement would be to show the latest queue ranking of apps that are waiting for review. That will go a long way towards reducing the "ongoing karma leak" that pg mentions.

Replying promptly to developer emails about app-store rejection will also help. Setting a limit of n apps for a $99 license may also help Apple cope with the incoming deluge of apps
What do you mean "turned into"? Its always been like that.
Google Chrome OS UI Concept Video
Twitter's New Tagline: "What's Happening?"
Very true. I burn 1000 kcals in an hour of running on an easy day, and closer to 1300 during a tempo workout.

Also, the health benefits of cardio are numerous, ranging from stress reduction to neurogenesis to longer telomeres. It's not just about how good looking your body is.
Since the "1984 incident" I trust Amazon even less than I trust Apple. At least Apple doesn't yank music/apps/whatever off their customers' devices.
I think touchscreens and development go together well, but perhaps not in the way you're imagining. The best thing about a touchscreen is that generating any symbol is equivalent in complexity to generating any other. Unlike real keyboards, which have fixed symbols in fixed positions, a virtual keyboard can be as large and complex as you want—if you run out of space on one "layer", you can just add another set. This would make a language like APL perefect for mobile development, especially if combined with some manipulable visualization of the resulting parse tree (I.e. What most visual PLs try to be.)
No, you don't. A lot of people think that this would be a great win for any JavaScript library, but I guarantee that every single library author would disagree.

The last thing we want to do is give browser vendors more control over any part of the process.
And it certainly seems to be easy to change the policy settings to disallow people installing packages :)

I guess I'm just looking at this from the POV of Fedora really trying to be an everyday desktop OS, where minimal pain in installing new software is a good thing and Fedora's policies for trusted repositories and signed packages help keep the risk minimal (yeah, somebody could sneak a backdoor into something in a Fedora repo, but if they can do that they're interested in more than owning your desktop machine).
Though I can't marshall any evidence to support this claim, it was specifically not my impression that Apple was a company pro developers loved working with before the iPhone.
IMO, one interesting thing is about the native support for SSDs and elimination of long known & trustworthy HDDs. Clearly the sign of things happening!!
Debut of the Chrome OS UI with a nod to Hacker News (tab 2)
This is a very developer-centric view, though. For users, the app store is great - tons of applications, and they're easy to find, buy, and to install. The approval process, for the user, makes a better overall experience, increasing the overall quality of available apps. For each bugfix waiting for approval there I'm certain there's lots of buggy apps being rejected, and for each anedocte of rejection due to using the wrong icon or such nonsense, there's lots of appropriate rejections due to unstable apps.

Obviously without good and satisfied developers those benefits are moot. I'm certain the approval process needs to be [improved/changed/redesigned/removed], and maybe some kind of sanctioned jailbreak should exist where more advanced users can manually install third party apps, but I do believe the App Store itself is a good thing when you you look at it from a user perpective.
This is obviously true, but it's not as simple as it may seem.

The body has a complex energy regulation system and hunger, energy consumption via metabolism and energy storage are interlaced. It's not as simple as "energy in" = independent variable.

It has a preference to store (instead of immediately use) calories from carbohydrates (due to insulin). So a diet low in total calories but still high in carbs is going to be painful, and very frequently fails.

Read Gary Taubes' book, people.
I think Google realizes the future is still text search, even with the popularity of online video. What better way to bridge the gap between the two then invest time and money into things like this.

Not to mention it's also great for the hearing impaired.
Video- The Why and How of Chrome OS
I don't think the claim saying that "Apple doesn't understand software" is correct.

Apple do understand software.
You cannot release Mac OS X, iLife and other jewels without understanding software.
Also Mac developers jumping off the iPhone bandwagon are not jumping off the Mac plateform.

For the iPhone, Apple tried a different model that nobody really tried before.

They indeed have a broken store but the previous models on other platforms never worked. The most successful one before was for the PalmOS and it wasn't over the air.

However Apple always been an arrogant company. With their customers, their providers and their developers.

The climax of this arrogance has been reached with the iPhone eco system (certainly helped by the arrogance of the mobile phone operators).

And for many it is not sustainable.

But anyways, who really cares?

Apple can open the doors of the store overnight.
It wouldn’t have been the first time they do one thing making you beleive it was the only way and then suddenly change in the opposite direction.

That’s the strength of Apple: they can change.
Not only they can change but they usually know when, with what, for who and at which price.

I never realised the arrogance was a trade mark of this process though.
Note: I don't mean being evil by being arrogant.
Very sad. When I read the headline I thought they might be going after _real_ pirates like the ones off the coast of Somalia. Seems like that would be a more worthwhile use of taxpayer's money.
Katrina Damage Due to "Monumental" Neglect, Judge Rules
Why?

I mean in some contexts it made sense historically. There were the Lisp machines someone already mentioned. I've used the 8052AH-BASIC: an Intel 8052 microcontroller with a built in BASIC interpreter, and there were a few small chips that booted into a Forth interpreter. But those were controller-oriented microprocessors in a time when compilers (and silicon in general) were expensive, so it made sense to build a chip with its own language, especially when it would find application in a product with a lifetime measured in decades.

But in 2009? Besides raising a host of upgrade problems, why would you do this?
I think the local disk will probably just be used as a cache to support offline mode.
Schneier on Security: A Taxonomy of Social Networking Data
In high school, I thought that the CodeWarrior IDE (which was, as far as I knew, the dominant development environment) was absolutely terrible. I'm not sure how good my judgment at that time was.

That said, with OS X they really became a lot more developer friendly just because they adopted a UNIX base. At this point, I'd say they're the default platform for ruby/web development. Look at all the rails job postings for small startups promising 30" Mac Pros, etc.
Ask HN:  If I died tomorrow - who gets my Google Adsense account?
Any ideas? How does one put this in a 'Will' or how would one get this information from Google? Just curious...
[tictacdo] together the lesson shows
I like it, too. First time I got an easy explanation for the Monte Hall problem. Bookmarked.
Not that the indentation complaints are valid, but the fix should definitely go through QA while the users continue to suffer. While I'm sure it works on the developer machine, it is much better to have a program that takes a long time and works right than for it to give incorrect results to users, or make a different part of the application stop working.

If the feature was really critical and important, QA should find a way to expedite the verification, but it should never be skipped in order to ship the fix faster.
1) Sure, but the browser has to know your password for pop, etc, or you have to type it in, saving nothing. If it does know, then you're stuck at your own browser or you have to teach some new browser where your mail server is, and put in a password.

I was saying any automation benefit for email would also help openid (for example) because it's already browser-based. If you can automate POP, you can automate openid.
I think the App Store would do just fine if the platform were opened up. Look at the original App Store for music; people had the option to get music from other vendors (or public domain or pirated) as MP3's yet it's convenience and simplicity made it compelling for many users.

I would think the same thing would be true for apps. Many users would continue to use the App Store because of the convenience and the added trust that their verication process provides.
Apple has always treated third-party developers with suspicion. The developer website is only accessible by creating an account and agreeing to their license agreement. They churn through and deprecate APIs comparatively fast. They will quite happily steam-roller over third-party developers by adding competing features to the OS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_%28software%29#Compar...

None of this is new, the only difference is that there's now a release bottleneck that requires Apple's approval, and there's a lot of developers new to the platform.

The thing is, this is part of Apple's culture for a reason. Steve is an obsessive control-freak when it comes to a great user experience, and third party developers are seen as a threat to that. Microsoft has always been a great company to deal with as a third-party developer - they value their ecosystem, put effort into free documentation and solid IDEs, and rely on outside developers for key applications. The trouble with this comparative openness is that you end up with 800 pieces of software written by different companies fighting it out on your desktop, leading to crashes and inconsistent UIs all over the place.

I think Apple is in danger of screwing up a great opportunity with the app store, but this way of operating is in their DNA and it won't be easy to change. Despite what the geek consensus might be, the record shows they've made a lot of money in the past whilst ignoring third-party developers.
Four ways to feed the world
Since when was Apple's reputation with developers great? They've always been capricious, flighty and controlling - not what you need in a solid platform.
Seems like the keyboard/mouse part of this would be trivial with Android.

A little searching, and it looks like doing it over USB was discussed here:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=738

And someone appears to have gotten it working with Bluetooth here:

http://groups.google.com/group/android-platform/browse_threa...

Display... a little harder.
I've heard that before (cough - iPhone - cough)
Opening the platform doesn't necessarily imply opening the app store. Just let other people run stores (or simply host apps for download).

Re: the impact on Apple's brand, see the original article for reasons why the current model doesn't ensure quality.

Apple's incentive is long term viability of the platform. Can they make money indefinitely while alienating developers?
If you can't run Skype and other instant messangers, interenet experience is going to be incomplete. I wonder of they are going to do something about it.
> As my friend put it, there's a shortage of discipline in the world.

This is very wrong. Obesity is not a shortage of discipline, is a hormonal disruption. We play havoc with insulin eating too much of things we didn't evolved to eat.
Foursquare to be the hot startup of 2010?
A take on Google Chrome OS
Another person who wants this (and quite possibly would provide funding):

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/02/25/will-mobile-pdas-phones-r...
True, and about ten million of them are estimated to be in the Conficker botnet, another half a million in the Kraken botnet, etc, etc... I'm definitely not saying that Microsoft should have been vetting programs. I'm saying that cellular platforms may not yet be to the point where unfettered access is safe. The software on cell phones tends to favor being small at the expense of all else - probably including safety.
Hewlett Packard HP-41C series?
I suspect because it's difficult for them to technically do so. They would have pulled the GV Mobile app in an instant, if they could have, but the iPhone OS doesn't have this capability. The Kindle does.
Thought of a few more:

- I was a bridesmaid! Try and find me in this group of 8 well-dressed women! This says nothing about my craving to be married at all!

- I could only get my coworkers to shoot this photo of me at the office. Can you see I hate my job?

- Here's some cleavage to distract you.

- This is me & my dad. I'm not a daddy's girl at all, but get ready for the interrogation when you pick me up.
This seems really...unlikely. Yes, laptops displaced desktops, but it's because they offer essentially the same benefits and experience, but with portability and convenience. No, they're not as powerful for the money, and they're not as expandable, but as computing power has grown, both of those have begun to matter less to most people.

But with a handheld device, you're giving up a tremendous set of features and benefits for very little additional benefits. Yeah, I can stick a phone in my pocket, so it's marginally more portable than a Macbook Air, but it's pretty rare that I'm out somewhere and wish I could develop something but haven't brought my laptop. Maybe super-developers just run around with their phones and long for the means to develop software 24/7, fingers and eyes glued to their 2.5 inch screen :)

The point is, I don't know that's reasonable to assume that because laptops displaced desktops, handheld devices will displace laptops for development purposes. Writing code is still very much about handling text, and phones present huge barriers in terms of input, display, and ergonomics. Think about all the articles that show huge boosts in productivity as size and number of displays increase. And now we're going to go back to a 2.5 inch screen? Highly doubt it.

I really like most of what PG writes because it seems like he writes to explore topics, but I think he headed down the wrong rabbit trail with this one.

EDIT: To be clear, I definitely agree that handhelds will continue to replace more and more of people's laptop use for everyday tasks, but I sincerely doubt they'll replace developers' use of laptops and desktops for writing software.
Google Chrome OS: Ditch Your Hard Drives, the Future Is the Web
We never debated Apple's right to defend their trademark, and it's pretty obvious they have the high ground on that one.

What was frustrating to us was the sheer number of Apple employees who recommended our product time and time again, with Apple management well aware of our product and its name. With millions of downloads (many from Apple employees), we're frustrated because Apple recommended and encouraged us and then--six years later--decided it was time to litigate.

Again, I'm not saying we're right. Apple is completely in the right to defend their mark, but I really don't think it it's in their best interest at all, and if we posed any serious threat, they would have taken action a long time ago.

* Edit: Sorry if this post is sloppy. I haven't slept in a while.
their insentive is that they are purveying a platform. What made dos and windows great was anyone could write for it so everyone did and they had all the apps. Windows and dos suck, but if you wanted to work or play games, you bought the platform anyway because all the app were for it. Customers are like sheep and go where the best apps are, not the best platform. Apple sells a platform. We create the apps. They want the best apps they must open it up so we create the best apps for them. If its easier to develop my app for another platform, I will.

They make money off selling the phone. That apps sells the phone, not the other way around.
>They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user;

Makes sense. I think it is not by chance that OSX is the least customizable OS around (and that's why my mac runs linux).