skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: if you were Google, will you release Maps app on iOS 6?
I believe most users will happily pay $2.99 or even $4.99 for Google Maps app, especially if they include turn-by-turn, voice based driving directions. Assuming 100s of millions of devices will be on iOS 6 in the next 2 years, that is Billions of dollars in revenue for Google. Why, even Billions of dollars in extra profits for Google, as they anyway continue to support and upgrade Maps on earlier versions of iOS as well as on other platforms like mobile web, Android, etc. So, potentially Maps on iOS can be a huge sweet spot for Google, as lucrative as any of their other mobile products including Ads and Android. But there are some cons too. For one, if they do not release Maps on iOS 6, at least for some users, an Android based device will be more attractive. And lastly Google may not want to share 30% of revenues from Maps on iOS with Apple! So, dear HN User, if you were in google's place, what would you do?
A 'properly tuned' JVM can run circles around many things. A default out of the box JVM with some compiled Java? No stinkin way. Configuring the JVM takes someone with deep intimate understanding of JVM theory.

Now,the default Go compiled program is going to fire right up and get going while the JVM is still warming up. (Yes, I know there are countless things one can do to make Hotspot do amazing things) But the average default user? No... they're still going to say "the JVM is slow" and from their perspective, they're not wrong... just not knowledgeable enough to configure a ton of settings.
Not meaning this snarkily, but: if you write a program in Java and it's 2x faster than a Go program written in the same style, why not just write in Java?
Presumably they're ratcheting up the pressure on Aaron to accept a plea bargain.
Third-Party Google Reps: A Cautionary Tale
I don't see how your two examples show leverage of the Intel PC monopoly.
RANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, publish the content and make money off of the subscription they sell, and sue the hell out of anyone who tries to wrestle it back out of their control.
(2011) Original HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3388290
If your point here is, "it doesn't", I agree. I don't think the extra charges were added to minimize embarrassment.
In response to question 1: yes, it often very much is, as the examples that I raise in the article show. It could well be the case that there are better technologies for this kind of thing according to certain metrics, but those technologies don't have anything even remotely approaching the Node community driving them. In open source anything, that is decisive. Erlang is more mature, yes, but the community is small and highly insular. Tornado, Netty, etc. also do non-blocking I/O and the like, but they simply don't have the same inertia behind them. That inertia could be precisely what makes Node stable and acceptable for ever-broader enterprise usage. But overall, my claim is more sociological than technological.
That is not how the law works.
Who cares? It's clean and it's readable, it already beat several other front page HN articles on those two alone.
Eh, I tried the new Maps and it seems usable. What's really wretched in this release is what they've done to the App Store. It's now HTML5-based, like the old (and despised) facebook app. It crawls compared to the old one.
> IMHO I think this all needs to be replaced with something sane.

It seems that we're in the process of replacing it with web tech, which may or may not meet your definition of "something sane"...
What's the minimum version of PHP your app supports? The company I work for insists on running the horrifically outdated 5.1.6, and that's been a limiting factor with some packages we've tried to use.
"Choosing a typeface is not typography"
I really appreciated this point.

Too often people confuse knowledge of fonts with typographic knowledge or skill. Understanding how to set type is far more important; correctly choosing a good measure (line length), margins, leading (line-spacing), and a meaningful hierarchy of font sizes (among other things) all have a huge effect on readability.

For anyone interested in learning more about typesetting, I recommend "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst.
Trojankitten is extraordinarily astute and her opinion is not to be dismissed as partisanship. She is correct in that Maps are a fundamental and incredibly important platform service that will only become moreso over time.

Doesn't change how much they suck today, though.
One datapoint is not meaningful here. Give it a go with the entire suite.
You don't even need Lori Drew to arrive at this conclusion. The CFAA doesn't create strict liability crimes. You have to know you're violating the ToS, and, more than that, you have to benefit (or materially harm someone).
I agree. Researchers should stop entering into contracts with organizations like Elsevier.
I prefer Dalton's quote from the movie Road House: "I want you to be nice, until it's time to not be nice."

Of course, "time to not be nice" is subject to interpretation, but I'm of the view that it should be a rare occurrence.
Talk Like a Pirate Day: Not Even Pirates Spoke Pirate
So you bought it and then returned? Best Buy allows you to do this?
I wrote a static code analysis tool for .net (c#/vb) www.nitriq.com
Working with limitations is what yields creativity. But unlike the limitations of computing's yesteryear, the limitations of the iPad seem artificial. OSX is built from BSD UNIX, and iOS is built from OSX. Why should it be so limited? Where is the "iPad Pro"? The uncrippled version with USB and SD card slots.
Of course it can. m4p files are right out but those should be nearly extinct by now.

The player app on my phone plays just about every audio format available, including ogg and flac.
The "goal" is to not be a group of spectators in a gladiatorial arena in which one of our own has to do battle with the government's lions. That's all -- just a matter of regard for a fellow human being. It's exactly the same reason I don't rubberneck at the scenes of grisly accidents and why I think the paparazzi are scum.

I disagree that this case has a clear impact on our community, or that this article -- or most of the others about this case -- are newsworthy.
That sounds plausible; also, isn't this what happens after plea negotiations fail?
That doesn't sound good. The app store wasn't all that zippy to begin with on a new iPad, and became nearly unusable on an (admittedly aging) 3GS.
organizations that have not contributed financially to the research

charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published,

As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published.

You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want.

If the researchers don't want their research behind the paywall, they are not forced into the transaction. They must be finding the value-add of the "peer-review and publish" significant enough to give up publishing rights elsewhere.
I have no idea who this person is other than guessing she is a female from her profile picture. It's also not the first tweet I've found to be completely off-base and ironically, the second today. The tweet about intro/extrovertedness is just flatly wrong.

I have no reason to take her tweet as anything but what it is. In context with her other tweets, I feel pretty damn safe in calling it at least a bit partisan. A quick scan of the first above-the fold tweets shows another conversation that is blatantly intentionally down-playing the badness of the iOS6 maps.

edit: I mean, I haven no stake in this, as I've said I have no idea who this person is, but you can't read through that feed and tell me with an honest tone that it's not biased. It's blatantly pro-Apple tweet, anti-Google tweet, ambiguous tweet about Microsoft competing with Google. Repeat.

edit2: I've devolved into an off-topic rant about some random Twitter account. I apologize. I'll merely conclude that likening iOS6 Maps to Safari (and really WebKit) as a response to how bad Maps is... is pretty desperate in my opinion.
Have you looked at http://www.techcofounder.com/ ?
It's a lot quicker, and we've already done the work for you.
I use a fairly large font because readability is important to me, so I get something like 85 x 60 characters on the screen. Width-wise, that's fine (and I set Vim to wrap long lines anyway). I also would have thought I'd miss that wider overview, but somehow I don't. I've become quite proficient with vim's navigation and movement commands - perhaps that helps a lot. I sometimes code on a 1600x1080 monitor with at least 6 times as many characters on the screen, but I don't notice the difference any more.

Except: when merging changes. Then I really want the screen divided into 4 sections, and the iPad is too small to do that comfortably.

That said, I've noticed a trend in my coding style to prefer conciseness and locality. This may be a subconscious reaction to the smaller viewport I'm using.
Pushing from the JavaScript SDK and Cloud Code with Parse
Yeah, unfortunately we cut it off at 5.2. I suppose it's possible to get it to work if you install the json extension (I don't think there's anything that would actively preclude it from working), but I can't make any promises because I can't get an isolated PHP 5.1 install to build in my dev environment (believe me, I tried, but it wasn't worth it). Let us know if you give it a shot and can get it to work, though!
If I have it right, the self transactions wouldn't do much (because the transaction history of the bitcoin system is public).

A few other comments mention that Mt. Gox is treating certain coins within some distance of certain accounts as tainted and freezing those transactions.
Thanks for the quick response. I'll try setting it up and let you know.
Reminds me a little of Proteus (http://www.visitproteus.com) which I just came across a few days ago. There's something special about wandering around in a world where you don't know why you're there or when or where it will end.
He does not compare the tablet with a notebook for the use case of interest here, writing TeX documents (or something similar), and the disadvantes for notebooks that he gives would seem to prevent you from working with a tablet too (e.g., using a remote server for compilation will also help with the battery life of a netbook, and you may even be able to swap the battery).

The major problem in writing TeX on a tablet seems to be the keyboard: It takes away screen space (which is already hard to come by, since ideally you would have the source and the compiled output displayed side-by-side), is much less convenient to use than a physical keyboard, and (usually) makes it more difficult to get to special characters which are really important for TeX: \, {, }, [, ], and so on.

I can see how it could be usable for copy-editing, but for longer writing a notebook beats a tablet any day.
Exactly...we realized that people were even using Buddy Hack to mess with their friends by "hacking" their own Facebook's, so we pivoted to Hack My Facebook.
Moreover, taxpayers should be upset that they're paying for research for which the copyrights are readily handed over to private organizations.
I want to do a thoughtstream on thoughtstreams.

I like the idea. A lot. And yet I don't want to pay for it. Which is a reaction worth exploring a bit more.
I'm pretty sure sneaking into a server closet and patching your computer into their network was already against the law before this incident happened.
I'd say the 2005 open source release of WebKit was a necessary precondition for "Today its engine powers everything."

Is there any reason to expect a similar direction for Apple with maps?
I haven't had time to explore it very much yet, but I was a bit disappointed when I first launched it and found that the only overhead imagery available for my area is in black and white. It's hardly a remote location.

I suppose they will be making a lot of map-related deals over the coming months, but Google may have arranged exclusive contracts with some companies.
Thank you. I'm glad you understand. We weren't trying to downplay any of the other apps at all; our app just caught some traction, and we were happy about that.
Part of what I mean is that some of what Coverity and friends cover aren't just bugs bugs, but things that are bad style and contribute to bugs in the future. For instance, you can put too many things in IO when you should be separating the IO code from the pure code. This can be perfectly correct at a given moment inasmuch as the program works correctly, but it certainly might encourage bugs in the future as the code gets modified. It would be interesting to see how much of this could be automatically detected.

As another for instance, partial functions can already be caught by some static analysis tools and we tend to think they are at least bad style (I would rate them as a serious code smell; every time I thought I wanted one, it was trying to tell me I had a fundamental design flaw), but they are certainly syntactically valid Haskell.
The XOXO Internet
Honestly, I think this just showcases how difficult maps really are. No matter how bad people in the US are finding it, I guarantee that users outside the US are going to hate this change even more than you do.

It's a great example of something that doesn't scale easily.
It generally works by asking people how happy they are + statistics to work out causes or correlations. I gather psych people do this kind of thing all the time about
seemingly subjective things.

WP on measuring happiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness#Measures_of_happines...

More generally:
Measures of emotion: A review <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2756702/>;
Much awaited "feature".
Besides it not being open source, etc?

Also, it seems very misguided to use "Safari was released. [Safari] became successful."...

to imply that "AnythingElse was released. AnythingElse will become successful."

Literally pick any product that has ever not become a rousing success and you have plenty of counter-examples as to why that logic is faulty at best.

I still also find it be evidence of pandering to go out of the way to say "Safari is a success" rather than "WebKit". The sentiment of the tweet isn't even remotely accurate for "Safari".
Schema Design - Introduction to MongoBD Course - Part 4
I'd prefer not to go too much in specifics due to NDA's and all that; but one simple example that I've encountered:

I've seen simple cases where a function returned a signed integer value modulo x. Which of course means that this function can only return a value within 0..x-1.

This function was called in another function which then did some allocations based on it and the static analyzer complained about integer overflows which were obviously not possible in this case.

Dependency chains in preprocessors is a big pain in general too.

#ifdef A
#define B
#endif

#ifdef C
#ifdef B
blabla
#endif
#endif

This will yield a dependency chain for B of (A,C) -> B resulting in blabla being compiled. With complex code bases this already becomes quickly unmanageable. As far as I know no code analyzer is able to handle this.

And I haven't even started talking about supporting #if constructs (ex: #if X > 2). You would need to implement SAT solvers for that too.

Some more info on this at the clang mailing list here: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2012-July/022720.....

These are just other reasons why seperating the preprocessor from the rest of the language was such a bad idea; you lose all the static code analysis stuff you can do on C/C++ code because of it and preprocessor directives control a lot of things in modern and big code bases.
The Importance of Company Culture
Nokia slams HTC's Windows Phone 8 announcement, 'tactical re-branding'
Are you joking?

"I am very excited about this project as an example of the kind of creative approaches leveraging modern web infrastructure to tap into a newly emerged social behavior."

Please tell me you are joking... This is a fun useless app. Don't use weasel words to make it look like something it isn't.
Looks like Randall had a pretty good time playing Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.

(for those curious - http://michelgagne.blogspot.com/)
Facebook's origins: the lost chapter
Yes it's biased, she's deeply opinionated, yes she's an opinioneer, etc... But she's still got a piece of the truth in hand: Maps are important, they're only becoming moreso, and Apple is extremely unlikely to sit on their ass now that they've launched their own stack. (especially once their customer satisfaction numbers start plopping, which they will)
I've been wanting something like this for Ruby for some time now. Since it's dynamically typed and ridiculously easy to monkey-patch, Ruby is a much harder challenge than C++. The two best efforts I
have found are Diamondback Ruby (http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/PL/druby/) and Laser (http://carboni.ca/projects/p/laser)...but they mostly try to add static type-checking to Ruby code. After
looking at these I implemented a contracts library for Ruby (https://github.com/egonSchiele/contracts.ruby) to get myself some better dynamic checking. The next step is to use the annotations
for the contracts library to do better static code analysis. One thing I'm working on is generating tests automatically based on the contract annotations. But I've got a long way to go : ( If anyone
knows about other projects that are working on static analysis for Ruby I'd be very interested in hearing about them!
On the opposite end of this, no amount of organizing for the impending content by creating fake but ideal character counts (something I've done on nearly every site I've worked on) has led to those constraints actually being followed by the internal staff or external clients I've worked with. This is easily one of the biggest after-the-fact issues/time consumers I deal with in dev because often times, the content isn't finalized even after launch. At the end of the day my experience has been that the content provider would rather the layout be changed to accomodate their copy rather than them going back in and removing a few words they feel are vital/more appropriate for the messaging. Obviously YMMV, but be sure to calculate the effort vs. your understanding of how the business makes decisions or you may be in for some heartbreak.
I agree in general, but it isn’t all bad. (Recounting my experience on the Retina iPad:) At least on that device, performance now appears to be on par with the old app, much improved from earlier betas (but the new iPad is a pretty beefy device, other devices may struggle more). On bad connections, maps seem to load much better (because they are now vector based) and I do like their style – if it weren’t for the atrocious map data, I think the default view would be on par with the old app (I also have seen the styling of the maps and the placement algorithms for labels improve by leaps and bounds during beta testing). Turn-by-turn is really great and works very well. I have no complaints about the UI on the iPad, it’s more or less the same (though the changes they made might not works so well on smaller screens).

(I’m in Germany, living in a small city with 50,000 inhabitants:) However, map data is atrocious and riddled with embarrassing mistakes (when zooming in, the label of my city is not visible for the longest time – while much smaller villages around my city appear much earlier – and when it finally becomes visible it’s about three kilometers east of my city, in some forest). Satellite images are embarrassingly bad. POIs are practically non-existent and useless in Germany. If they exist at all they are out of date (when I search for italian restaurants, it shows me a pizzeria that closed half a decade ago, not a single italian restaurant that is open now). Google’s POIs are current and (more or less) comprehensive, Apple’s are anything but. Plus: No one uses Yelp in Germany, Qype is pretty popular around here, though – consequently there is just no useful data on Yelp about German restaurants.

I really hope that Google will soon come out with their maps app for iOS. And I hope that Apple will improve. I believe they can (hey, it took Google some time, too), and I don’t object to the existence of a second good maps service.
Safari in iOS 6 supports input type="file"
The research is peer-reviewed and published.

IME, those organizations generally don't provide the peer-reviewers and the peer-reviewers aren't paid.
Kickstarter's Accountability Problem
I didn't read the article, but I imagine the parent poster's logic is like this: if your Paypal account is suspended, you must have done something to violate the terms of service. If you violate the terms of service, you must be a hacker. If you are a hacker, you are at risk for federal criminal charges. Therefore, if your Paypal account is suspended, you are at risk for federal criminal charges.
> As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published.

How is that a valuable service? Millions of people do that for free on the web every day. Hell, I'm doing it right now.
This thread has grown somewhat stale but I never replied initially and I think I can probably address some of the differences in our experience. I don't run a company, so I almost certainly have a different viewpoint, but senior engineers are often great at displacing blame/CYA, so it may not always be apparent to management what is really going on in an organization. I've never worked at a place that had particularly well-engineered software to begin with, and there were those who were either capable (and willing) to do a little bit of ad-hoc coding with an eye towards refactoring on a larger scale, or those who weren't. I've had really bad experiences with 'senior engineers' being left to build something semi-autonomously, thinking they know the best solutions a priori, etc., and seeing nothing functional at the end of months of effort. I've seen it happen way more than with junior engineers who are at least a little unsure of themselves. I'd probably take a good senior engineer over a good junior one for many of the hand-holding reasons you point out, but I really have worked with several young folks who did not have the problems you've encountered.
I've seen that response several times now, and it's incredibly bizarre. Why should a guess at the potential future impact evaluation of how the thing is right now?
I suspect Google will release an IOS app putting back their functionality soon enough. I hope so because while the apple maps looks pretty, the utility comes from the search by point of interest, and that's considerably weakened by this release.

There are a few improvements though, I like the new app store better because I don't need my password to update apps, or buy free ones, and the icon has a little 'new' badge to remind me to try the app.
I'd do a survey... talk to a bunch of iPhone owners and find out if they would pay for the app and try to get a handle on what percent would buy a paid map app.

Another angle: Release it for free and integrate with Google+ Places and Zagat.