skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We may be discussing different things, but I don't agree with your assertion that specialization comes later in educational systems outside the US.

I lived in france when I was 12-13 (and attended French schools), and at the end of 3eme, I filled out a form indicating whether I intended to focus further science/math or letters. My dad wanted science/math, I wanted letters, the whole thing was resolved when we went back to the US.

In college, I spent a year at trinity (in Ireland), and I found that "majors" focused almost exclusively on one subject. Medicine and Law were done at the undergrad level, starting at age 18 or so (though they lasted longer than a typical bachelor's degree in the US). Math students studied math almost exclusively - to the extent that they branched out, it might be physics or CS. The "general undergraduate requirements" were far more considerable in the US.

Lastly, as a grad student here in the US (at UC Berkeley in Industrial Engineering), I definitely noticed that much of the initial coursework appeared to be review for the international students. This may partly be due to strong math education overseas, but I also think that the earlier specialization had a lot to do with it - when you only focus on math as an undergrad, you can do a lot more of it. I actually think this may turn out to be a big problem for students who came up through the US - I see some merit to our more generalized system (I think Paul Graham referred to it as a "late binding" educational approach in an essay). But in grad programs with high attrition rates, the US educated students may be at a disadvantage the first couple of years even if they are very talented.

EDIT - It occurred to me what you might be saying here... students may specialize in a subject earlier overseas, but the curriculum for that subject is much more standardized than it would be in the US. I can see how that would be the case.
How far off is this with GPS? Is there a hack for it on Android?

Edit: just saw this post[0], looks like it's no longer the case.

0: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4549289
"General population"
Apple has been virtually printing money with the iOS products because they consistently, if incrementally, offered better and better products. Products that, for most users, offered a genuinely good to great experience and products that challenged the market to be better – far better – than they had before. This, as far as I can tell, is the first really big snafu in the user experience and that may be worrisome.

The thing is – and what the apple fans are all afraid of (but few may admit) is that this isn't just a stumble, but rather, the first major indicator of what a post-Steve Jobs Apple product experience is like.

Every good ride comes to an end – it's just a question of when and how.
But isn't this just thinly disguised advertising?
You're wrong and rude; They are contributing quite a lot, they are providing services to markets that US providers neglect.
Exactly. Every botch Apple makes now will be attributed to Jobs being gone/.
Somewhat off-topic, but does anyone in SF who rides public transportation agree that Google's Map directions in terms of time predictions don't work? Like they're almost always completely wrong. I wonder if they use scheduled bus times instead of actual ones.

Anyway, I was hoping to be able to plug in something like Routesy to iOS 6 maps, and then I'd be a happy camper.
What did you think about the wireless stuff they were talking about?
Jason
It's a shame the patent office cannot/will not crowdsource patent research before approval.

The PTO approached SE and asked them to do this as part of their efforts to reform the patent system without waiting for Congress to get around to it.

I bet if an examiner posted each patent application during review, within 24 hours prior art would be posted for each one, most especially software patents.

They already do this; indeed, they are required to do so by law, and indeed, public posting of each patent application is a fundamental part of the patent process. Not many people actually bother to post prior art.
Interesting yes, but a dubious claim:
"Actually, programming pioneers were mostly women"

Literally could not continue reading the post after that claim.
There's a lot of high minded stuff getting bandied about these days in regard to education. I agree so much with the idea that Americas public schools are no place for kids that my wife and I juggle our careers so that we can homeschool.

But here's the thing. None of this matters if we fail to teach basic literacy and numeracy. Spend a day at the DMV. People can't read. They can't add or round numbers. Simple statistics? Forget about it.

Public school should be a place where even the poorest, most disadvantaged kids can get these basic survival skills for the civilized world. To be blunt, to both public and private thinkers, if your plan doesn't address this as it's primary feature, sit down and shut up, we've got bigger problems to fix first.
There's some interesting ones on there already:

http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/197/prior-art-for...

http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/133/prior-art-for...
This is true, but art and business are not exact mirrors. Business has a lot more in common with sports and war than art. Sports teams copy each other like crazy when they see something working.

Facebook was a copycat.
Google was a copycat.

Every television network in existence would be considered a copycat of the DuMont Television Network.

NASDAQ is a copycat.

Best Buy is a copycat.

American Idol is a copycat.

Not sure where you draw the line on originality.
BlockAvenue Brings Transparency to Location Data
There will be "Applied Computer Science" and "Pure Computer Science". I could see the latter going this way.
Very cool that you were able to do it with the existing hardware!

I built one a while back for my HTPC with an Arduino for my Android phone. I configured a custom remote via Unified Remote to do the button layout (I was already using the app to control the PC). I smile every time I turn the TV on with my phone.
Steve Ballmer on when MSFT was a Startup
http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/191/can-we-not-in...
I hate it when this happens. As a startup guy, I appreciate the importance of design, press presentation, and marketing, but as an engineer, it kills me a bit inside every time I see a flashy, well-hyped, inferior product win out over an understated, modest, superior one.
Probably a business decision.

Apple probably decided that having core phone functionality in the hands of a competitor wasn't such a good idea. Also Apple users were helping the competition with all the information they were uploading about geographic data.

When the original iphone shipped with google maps (and the Google CEO on hand), Apple and Google were partners, now not so much.
Problem is that it is the content that Apple have no control. Main reason of Apple's great user experience is full control over every aspect of hardware/application. Apple should have heavily tested TomTom's map data across various country before ditching Google map. Ironically Apple is getting same criticism as Microsoft got over the year for BSOD in Windows(most of the time it was for faulty driver/hardware which Microsoft didn't control).
I'd wager that the phone sends back "areas" rather than GPS coordinates. So rather than the phone reporting "My owner was at (lat,long) at 3:21PM!" it would instead report "My owner came within range of Starbucks' Wifi Hotspot at 3:19PM, and left at 3:23PM!"

In reality Apple has been doing exactly this type of thing since iOS 4 was deployed[1], so unfortunately the privacy problems are apparently very easy to sidestep.

[1] http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+is+Tracking+its+iPhone+iPad+U...
http://theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/post/31923428912/walkin...

http://www.techinasia.com/apple-ios-6-maps-china-japan/

Pretty common.
I don't want to claim to know what Steve would have done, but this does not seem at all unlike him. He was extremely focused on user experience, but he was also a huge believer in bringing technologies under Apple's control, and making hard decisions that would benefit Apple and Apple users in the long run.

I can think of plenty of things that Apple did that everybody hated on day 1 because they caused immediate pain, but in the long run were for the best. The decision to drop almost all existing connectors for USB. Mac OS X (which was just unusably bad for a year or two, if your apps even ran on it yet). The Intel transition.

The complaints continue today: the Macbook Retina display means half my apps look bad, and the Lightning connector is a slap in the face to everyone with 30-pin docks. And Maps version 1 is terrible (even though they look better than Google's first Maps release, to me).

No surprise at all that Apple wants to be in full control of every app they ship on iOS. The last time I remember them doing that on the Mac was perhaps Internet Explorer. Can you remember how bad Safari 1.0 was?
new relic (https://newrelic.com/) + load testing with funkload has been helpful for me so far, but we shall see...
I agree, there has to be a balance in any work atmosphere. I just think individuals with ideas for improving a company should not be resisted, but valued and encouraged to share their thoughts. In my opinion, a good business should be thought of as a team of professionals operating harmoniously, not a monarchial society where leadership makes the decisions for everyone and there is a constant 'climb the ladder to the top' philosophy. I suppose it's essentially a debate of forms of government.
Do you think Google will eventually release a 3rd party maps app?
>I'll be moving to Android.

Google's Android? As in Google, the inventor of the "perpetual beta"?
Did you not read about his divorce?
It seems like the quality level maintained by Steve Jobs is quickly deteriorating in favour of business moves designed to wrest more control off Google. They are operating in a very similar way to other companies now.

Google executives must be laughing very hard right now. If I was Google I'd avoid releasing a Google Maps application for at least a year and let the Android handset manufacturers ruthlessly exploit Android's superior maps.
Unless you're talking about a million concurrent users or something, Django actually scales pretty well for medium concurrency.

Here's some basic advice though
(1) Cache stuff. Django has a built-in cache framework, but sometimes I even cache stuff in the process (It's not best practice at all, mind you, and every pro will tell you to stay away from that)

(2) Use the ORM properly! For example, never do something like len(MyModel.objects.filter(arg='blah')) to do things like count entries or see if entries exist. Instead use .count() or .exists()

(3) Unless it's something complicated, I would just use something like Heroku. Easy to scale resources up and down as well as deploy. I typically use AWS S3 as my static host and Heroku as my Django host.
It's not limited to NFC (email or website can be used as attack vectors), but the researchers apparently decided to show off the NFC method as it's a relatively new medium for malware (though of course not a very practical one).
Tenderloin - Vagrant-like tool for VMWare Fusion
Microsoft to focus corporate philanthropy on youth
I'm not surprised that results in California are great. This seems like a great example of why having the majority of your testers in one geographical location is not always a good thing.
The lack of generics makes Go unsuitable to write typesafe,
reusable data structures for use in many popular
algorithms. That's a fact.

That is not a factual statement. It is subjective and it is disputable.
Every week I am becoming more and more impressed with Stack Exchange.

Last week it was "Cross Validated" - their version of stack overflow but entirely for stats.
I hate this vision. Tell every child they're the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, and then let fail over and over again (which is the fate of most startups in the valley), and watch them get discouraged and drop out when they figure out that, structurally, only a few can win big, and a few more win enough to make a living.

The article is the worst sort of magical thinking, that because some people did X and became Y, we should all start doing X. Ironically, it decries the interchangeability of the current products of the education system while arguing for a different sort of interchangeability: A system where we're all entrepreneurs instead of factory workers. How does any idea where "we're all" something seem even remotely plausible?
>As a matter of fact, I am "a graphic designer or something".

I never would have guessed. Oh, wait...

>And yes, you're right, those sites all look great. In fact I might just print out screenshots of them and hang them on my wall.

It's not the "hang on my wall" looking great that matters, it's "I can find what I need with minimum fuss" looking great...
Sure, and others are certainly welcome to ping me collin@averysmallbird.com or @CDA.
Hi zbowling, great to hear you like our apps! Thank you for the suggestion. We'll keep that in mind for the future.
Trulia CEO: Mobile monetization is working
My best guess is there's a problem in serving the map data up to users.

Vector slippy maps run on bounding box searches - if I look at New York, my client says to the server "Tell me all the roads within this square" with the latitude and longitude of wherever I'm looking.

There's a lot of data - too much to store on one server - and the data doesn't all shard naturally. You can divide the world up into squares and store different squares on different servers, but long roads cross many squares, big objects like country borders belong in many squares, and when you're zoomed out your view covers many squares.

The server also has to be clever; I don't actually want every road in New York or the data would take forever to load. I only want the major roads when I'm zoomed out.

All these problems are solvable - spatial databases like PostGIS have been able to perform bounding box queries for years - but I don't know of anyone using PostGIS to support the millions of users Google have. It's well known that for regular data Google has things like BigTable, fancy NoSQL stuff that's supposed to scale well; I assume they have a geospatial database along similar lines. It's possible Apple decided to develop something similar.

My guess as to how [1] came about is that the user started zoomed out, so they only got sent major roads, then when they zoomed in some hiccup prevented loading the minor roads. This could have been as simple as the user's wifi going down, or it could that Apple's database servers are overloaded or have bugs.

[1] http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/63010000/jpg/_63010615...
BBC Video: A look at Apple's new map app
I'm not sure how the publication of books is a conflict of interest in the publication of papers on the same subject. If he's selling or being paid by someone who is selling a special line of non-GM cornstuffs, that would make sense.

A conflict of interest isn't simply doing more than one activity in a field, it's setting yourself up as someone who is only judging on the merits when you have a financial interest in the judgement going a particular way. He could have just as easily written 50 books on how GM food is wonderful, and then published studies on how GM food is wonderful. If he was on Monsanto's payroll, that's where the conflict would happen.
Maybe. Google in the short term seem to be encouraging people install links on the phone to map/youtube services (go to youtube or maps.google.com in mobile safari and you'll be instructed on making the link).

The web based google map app is decent.

Google+ is a native app however, so I think they'll head that way eventually.
Is it possible they are going to be setting your hours or requiring a certain schedule? They might have had a run in with the IRS with a past contractor who didn't pay appropriate taxes. If they pay you 1099 and you don't properly pay your taxes, the IRS can come after them and they are liable if you meet some of the criteria of an employee (time requirements, equipment provided, etc.).

But yeah, talk to your accountant.
The m.511.org site is serviceable if not beautiful and does what you're asking.
Thanks. Can you please explain 3rd point. How is EC2 complicated than Heroku?
Ask HN: Why the hell has Hacker News not been optimized yet?
I don't mean disrespect. I love Hacker News and read it dozens of times a day, but the 1 - 15 second load time is almost intolerable. I propose a community wide effort to optimize HN for the sake of we the readers.
Experiment: Does Googlebot index dynamic content from a JS app? – Shizzle
Have you heard of https://www.cloudflare.com? The provide a simple CDN for free.
Unless specifically indicated as live times, Google uses the scheduled times. I've seen live times in Google Maps in only one area, Portland, OR.

Scheduled times are coming from GTFS feeds that agencies register with Google. As far as I know, Google didn't create a unified live transit predictions/tracking API, which seems to me a rather surprising oversight.
Fair points but I wrote the response above saying that its not really about ability, its about taste. Neverthelesss I had to assert something about the Go language designer's ability in order to refute the top post about mediocrity. Now you are back to talking about ability and credentials. We could go back and forth all day. The point is that Go is the first mainstream systems language to focus on leaving stuff out. Think about lisp, its beautiful because its really just one thing but you can do everything with that one thing. Go is not the same but the aesthetic is similar. It's a question of taste. Do you like a powerful tool with loads of abstractions? Or do you like to strip everything down to the metal and see what is the minimum you can run with and still retain most of the fire? Some of those things that you leave out may turn out to be those things that have come out of "modern language design".

Scala has many modern language features yet Martin Odersky said, of Go "I like a lot of the design decisions they made in the language. Basically, I like all of them." He can appreciate it because there is also an aesthetic in Scala that focuses on a minimal, simple, consistent core. But Scala has a shell with a bigger surface area. Depending on the context and the kind of person you are you might want one or the other but there is no point in criticising Go by saying "Its missing feature X". That's like criticising a race car because it doesn't have a sat nav. It still does 80% of what a normal car does but it does the core things that a car does really well and its not just that you have less weight its also that you can focus on driving it because there is less to distract you. (Where driving == building cool stuff faster because I'm not constantly getting distracted by thinking about how to make the code more clever ('Hmm maybe I could metaprogram that and save another three lines')). In general the simpler car is also easier to fix and easier to understand (these attributes are more important in programming languages than in cars, no matter what the ability of the programmers (cognitive load)). Of course there is an argument for having a sat nav in other contexts.
I'm curious how the author managed to learn the pygments library without learning it already provided a command. This script can be replaced by

alias pjson='pygmentize -l json'

If you're passing it the file name, pygmentize will figure out the lexer to use, e.g.

pygmentize foo.json

pygmentize bar.rb

It's only when you have it read from stdin that you need to specify, e.g.

pygmentize -l json < foo.json
embark for chicago only seems to include the 'L', not the CTA bus routes?
Note that you can still go to maps.google.com in Safari. Give Safari location permission and it works similarly to the old maps app, but a bit slower.
Ricky Gervais's new app, "Just Sayin"
A world wide web of ideas
You can make machines listen to music by abusing technology you stole from the future, and that's a fact you can't hide.

How about making dogs listen to music then?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bqZFp7dWbg

Not to mention the deaf, dumb and blind who just keep on pretending .. ♩♬♬
It was widely reported last year that Google started charging money for high-volume usage of the maps API. For the amount of maps API usage iOS would have, this would be a lot of money. Paying a lot of money to your competitor is generally not considered a good business move.
The EyeFi? Yes, I saw it. Cheapest one is 39.99, let's take $5 for the 'SD' part, so it's $35

"Heck, I could dissect a router and glue on a relay in a smaller package for under fifty"

Cheapest WeMo is $50 so you're almost there already

You can try to have a homemade solution for less, sure
but you'll have a small price advantage and maybe not follow
all standards relating to switches (isolation, etc, it will work, though). Not counting the software work.

Now, for their lamp they would need 3 power channels, instead of one 'on-off' control, which is certainly more expensive and complex.
Something doesn't make sense here. If they're profitable and making millions, why are they raising more bridge funding at the last round's valuation and taking on more dilution?
I just hope a patent troll doesn't sue Stack Exchange for patent infringement in order to bring this service offline...
> so many US companies deal with at least Spanish that you'd think more companies would be prepared to deal with this

Actually it's the opposite - inside the US, Spanish-speaking markets are mostly served by companies that only serve those markets and not the English speaking ones.
http://pygments.org/docs/cmdline/
I can't agree, I think mythmaking is unnecessary. Steve Jobs put his fair share of cold garbage onto the market.

Apple's bigger than anyone ever dreamed they'd be and they're the global standard bearer in smartphones. Any platform regression anywhere now affects millions of customers. The Mac is a piffle compared to iOS.

Edit: I will definitely agree that the fallout from this problem will be greater than any they've ever faced.
The fault isn;t tomtom's map data, it's all the layers on top that Apple have to add to it. Tom Tom's data (they acquired Teleatlas) is one of the two best resources (the other being Navteq) for map data. How you use the map data is the problem and Apple haven't got it right this time, I would guess most of the testing was completed in the USA, so I would expect most major cities to be fairly fine. It's once you go internationally it gets bad.

I used to work on these types of issue half a decade ago (2007), and one way of testing the accuracy is to stream GPS data in and test that it worked ok. We did this by -
a)Test programme that could load and play GPS commutes. Connect to the phone as a bluetooth GPS device. PLay the commute (from multiple countries.
b) on the phone - intercept the screen signal, using another programme, check the screen automatically to make sure the map was on the road (reading for road names and POI for more robust testing) We could run mapping/navi tests around the world without having to leave our desks.
(This testing was done for the Nokia N95/N82.. I left in 2008)
Boost, a new startup incubator
Sounds cool, can you provide some pointers to that work? 10x

BTW, I wonder if they allow the programmer to better control when and how much memory is allocated, that seems to me like the biggest obstacle for using Haskell for low-level stuff.
> the US always ranks at the bottom of standardized test scores

We don't, we rank about in the middle when compared to other Western countries.

> Once in a while you see a report where someone filters the test results for only honors or AP students in the United States before comparison, and in these comparisons US scores are pretty much the same as other industrialized countries.

Or when you filter by race: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...