skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OSM was not sufficient for Apple. Their maps are based on a number of providers, including OSM but most especially TomTom. You're thinking of the iphoto maps that got everyone speculating in the first place.

Most companies in this space have the capital to replace these apps, but not the will or the ability. You only have to look at the Android UIs they produce to see that you're really going to have to commit if you want to function as primary app provider for your phones. Most companies aren't willing to do this, or take forever and fail (poor meego...)
Show HN: I open sourced Mixture.fm a Backbone.js/Rails app for DJ Mixes
In addition to the responses from the Mozilla guys, I'll also point out that the limiting factor in speed for most web applications is not javascript runtime speed but dom manipulation, reflow, and repaint. The tricks for optimizing these tend to be somewhat browser dependent and not generally known by the web development community.
Telerik acquires Fiddler HTTP Proxy Tool
re: teledildonics, the vibration function on the iPhone would become more popular, and I'm not even joking.
No idea. If the Desire is a SGS2 device then it probably works. Actually, best way to find out is to see if Cyanogen supports the phone because B2G uses the Cyanogen code to pull drivers. Last time I tried (April), the T-Mobile SGS2 wasn't supported by Cyanogen (or B2G) because it significantly different internals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 is a far better way to visualize latency.
Does having a specification result in better code?
Ask HN: Is anyone else having problems with AppFog?
Hi - I've been playing with AppFog for a couple of weeks now - with Wordpress and a Python app - but I keep having some problems regarding the availability of the service!

Every 15-20 minutes the their systems seems to restart or something - because in all this time my apps are not availaible - a "Page not found" error is showed in my browser.

I wanted to ask you if you encountered this type of problems with AppFog?

Thanks!
No, I don't mean minify--I mean the SASS has to be run through a preprocessor before you have usable CSS. If I write the CSS, I instantly have usable CSS. I like using minimal tools for web design--browser and text editor. I don't want things I have to compile before I can see them in the browser.

I also think the mixins and nesting are overstated in terms of increasing the efficiency of designing sites with CSS. I am not typically declaring colors 20 times, or doing nesting so deep that it becomes confusing.

The benefits don't outweigh downsides of dealing with SASS files and preprocessors.
Got gold?
Same arguments apply. If you're not UK, why help the UK?
What is substantially different from GO besides performance. It just always seemed like another boring OO language that is fast. I've not really been impressed with the programming languages created at google. None of them seem to be very innovative or solve anything new. I guess it stems from google's affection towards java and misusing python (not using any of it's more powerful features, so it the code basically looks like a prettier version of java).
> Made in the past ~5 years.

I'm dubious unless they've made serious improvements to the emulator since I last used it. (I haven't updated my SDK in probably 3-6 months.)

I ran it on a fairly beefy laptop (although ~1.5-2 years at the time) and it was not an environment I'd consider "fun" to program in.

They have ways to image the emulator for faster load-times, but that's not that much of an improvement, and it only affects the emulator boot-up time, not the application speed.

I should try it again on my new desktop, complete with SSD and gobs of RAM.

But honestly I would not develop for Android [relying solely on the emulator] on a machine much older than a year or two.

I guess your mileage varied, but my experience developing for Android [w/o physical hardware] on fairly recent hardware was not pleasant.
Had it been a hobby, and not my career, I would've been entirely put off with the experience. I probably wouldn't have gotten a phone, and I would've moved on to developing for another platform.

Possibly WebOS, I remember it caught my eye back when the Pre launched; and I think it had the whole $0-up-front aspect in its favor.
Google Goggles used to be site previews, IIRC.
Just how much profit is there in a new drug?
How To Copy Apple
I think Lua is still the most simple and easiest in this regard. And Lua is embeddable.

Everyone is striving for concurrency as a language feature but sometimes it seems like a solution looking for a problem. What is it that you _cannot_ do now that you must have concurrency in order to do? What specific real world problem is it that you cannot solve? What are the cost-savings you will achieve with concurrency?

Maybe concurrency is a matter of smart programming, not dummy-proof languages with concurrency "built-in"?

Concurrency seems to be Go's main selling point (along with fast compilation). But Go is not small, it's not embeddable and it can't leverage C functions with the same ease as Lua. With Lua you can extend apps written in C. With Go you are writing the same old C apps again in Go. All the Go libraries I've see so far are just libraries that exist in other languages to do the same old things we've been doing for years, rewritten in Go.

At least with Lua, creativity and expression is encouraged by letting people write their own libraries. All the existing C libraries don't have to be rewritten as Lua libraries. What a boring exercise that would be. All you need to do is understand how to interface with C functions and there's little you cannot do vis-a-vis existing C libraries to do the "usual things".

Just my opinion. Lua is an arbitrary example. It's the general concepts of simplicity, small size, extending applications, and leveraging existing C code of which I am a "fanboy". It just happens that Lua meets some of these criteria. Sorry if it offends anyone.
People hate scrolling or parallax scrolling pages would be much more wide spread, they're easy to make and awesome looking.

Relying on the user scrolling I don't believe is a good idea, but the rest of it I definitely agree with.
Well, I guess this makes the Oracle of Bacon obsolete. Wonder how those guys feel about this.
Well, scipy/numpy is quite relevant in the Python ecosystem; it's not something you can ignore when talking about the language. Like Rails to Ruby, numpy is quite a big feature of Python.
> Any developer version that we could buy?

Like all Mozilla projects, this is developed completely in the open. You can get an original Galaxy Nexus and flash it over to the latest nightly relatively easily. It probably works on other phones, but the nexus is what they gave out at JSConf so that's what I use. ;)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...
Classes in Java - Introduction and Practical Examples
It's got to be hard to get there if all of the connections are mapped -- I'm a 3. (I worked briefly with Giancarlo Giannini to prep him for his role in the awful Mimic, since I was shining shoes for a living at the time and the producers were willing to give me $200/hr to show him how to hold a brush; Giannini was in Hannibal with Julianne Moore; Moore was in Crazy, Stupid Love with Bacon.)
Cool, well done Mozilla! Is this similar to WebOS?
Question that may seem obvious (sorry if it is). Is this intended for existing startups that have already gotten their feet wet, or is it intended for people with ideas & elevator pitches?
> So you're asking for proof that a device that is made of solid glass and metal is more fragile when dropped than the same device surrounded by rubber, plastic, leather or another soft material?

That is distinctly not what I'm asking for. I specifically said "I don't doubt that cases reinforce phones" to address this. What I'm saying is that at any point no person could possible know whether their case has just saved their phone, or whether the phone would have been just as fine without the case.

> I know it won't protect the device in every situation, but the $10 case protects the device in some situations (maybe only 10% or 20% of drops), so it has a very high ROI.

My point is that I think most people don't actually get that ROI. I've had an iPhone for three years. I've dropped my phone. No case. The phone is fine. If you use a case and never drop your phone in such a way that you would have broken it (which is impossible to know, but I'm arguing is an overstated risk), then the price you've paid is a bulkier, heavier, uglier phone. The case comes with a cost other than just $10. If I could pay $10 to have my phone magically become invincible, I would do it. If I could pay $10 for a case, I would not.

I'm sorry to hear your iPad broke. I should say that I'm specifically talking about phones, mostly because the cost of having a case on my iPad all the time would be lower for me than with a phone, which you have to stick in a pocket all the time and thus suffers more from added bulkiness.
Erm Microsoft added a lot of good stuff over the years and provide a hell of a lot of test cases for HTML5. They are also conservative about adding features and when they do, they work.

Chrome is far more worrying, especially with things like NaCl, store front and various far future standards being implemented without proper consultation and ratification with othe vendors.
..carrier ui layers are the only thing holding them back is silly

There's also market fragmentation, but I'd say carrier dumbassery is almost a worse problem.

This "differentiation" or "branding" or "experience" or whatever buzzword-compliant term chosen to describe it almost always makes the device less useful and less functional.

Not just by being ugly, slapdash-looking "let's slap our identity all over this" abominations, but by harming performance. The canonical example was MOTOBlur on the Droid 2. The hardware was decent, it was an incremental upgrade over the original Droid, but it's made almost unusable by the preloaded Moto garbage. Compare a Droid 2 stock vs a Droid 2 running the AOSP version of the same Android release and try to say they're even remotely comparable. Worse battery life, sluggish performance..

Jellybean all on its own is a beautiful system. A fantasy of mine is that, for the next major release, Google enforces the kind of UI requirements being imposed by Microsoft - how much carrier dickery do you think will appear on Windows phones?
> If Firefox OS says we are not as good as iOS then thay are squarely putting themselves in the middle of the market.

That's only if people actually perceive feature phones as the same "market" as smartphones. I very much doubt this is true. 2nd hand smartphones are already widespread in 3rd world markets. Having a "real smartphone" will have considerable cachet, functionality notwithstanding.

tl;dr - "mobile phone" isn't a market. "Mobile phone" is one market and "smartphone" is another people aspire to.
Tracker.el - A music sequencer in emacs
Turns out that Kevin Bacon is only the 444th best candidate for being the center of a six degrees search of Hollywood.

http://oracleofbacon.org/center.php
Reminds me of war dialling UK 0800 numbers back in the 90's. There were some interesting ones out there (allegedly). I seem to remember, "Welcome to the NASA Employee hotline. Please enter your access code". Other ones that just gave cryptic greetings similar to this. Some that just repeated numbers over and over in a loop.
>> 4S camera rivals dedicated point-and-shoot cameras for quality

Good enough to replace vs. rivalling for quality aren't the same thing. I'm not sure what you said (i.e. "rivals") is true, given how much larger the sensor is in a dedicated point and shoot.

And keep in mind, that in good light, even a camera phone produces really nice images. Once you get into adverse conditions, things start to get dicey.
HTML5 vs Native: Technical details behind our native iOS app.
For quite a long our dev team discussed about creating a native app versus an HTML5. Here are some technical details behind our native iOS app.
webOS 1.x shipped with a Java runtime that was used to run basic system services like the email engine. This didn't show up directly in applications, but all the PIM apps made use of the Java code over the Luna Service Bus. 2.0 shipped with all the Java code removed, reimplemented either as native code or node.js-based services, but still communicating over the LSB.
Ask HN: What's the pinout on the Lightning connector?
Does anyone know the success rate of sole founders making it into these Accelerator programs vs a team of founders?
The top five best centers for six degrees of hollywood separation are:

Dennis Hopper (2.802166)
Harvey Keitel (2.812642)
Donald Sutherland (I) (2.819748)
David Carradine (I) (2.819993)
Udo Kier (2.826828)
Show HN: Vendly, a mobile marketplace for you and your friends
I started reading this with my usual skepticism. (It isn't hard to believe that some of this could come from the likes of zdnet, or cnet.) I started to crack a smile at the exponential growth graph, then with the picture of iPhone 7, I absolutely lost it! too funny
'Needed' might be the wrong word.

Three times in 2 3/4 years I had a weapon drawn, round in the chamber.

Twice I did not have a target. Once, I did but he obligingly put his hands up when ordered.

how far away was your nearest armed support? Sixty seconds? Less?

Depended on the sentry post, other factors. Sometimes right behind me. Other times minutes away, at best.

If your point is that police are more likely to encounter bad guys than a Marine guarding strategic assets .. maybe.

How does the police department owning a armored personnel carrier help a patrol officer at a traffic stop? How often does your average Mayberry police department encounter bad guys who can only be overcome by a SWAT team?
re: Manhattan project, I think one difference is that in those days you couldn't use investigate it yourself, you needed the supply and equipment that only TBF government could provide.

Now, a €500 laptop (which people have for sending email) can provide most of what you need to be world class. If you have the brains, you don't need the government.
Edit Room inspired? Be honest... http://www.edit-room.com Also template-free blank canvas web design, a little more professional maybe?
My solution: I bought a factory unlocked iPhone 4 from Canada on ebay. I run it with a Straight Talk SIM for $45 a month, no contract, unlimited everything.
I'm assuming that "Android product cooperation and related technical authorization" means early access to source code for unreleased Android versions and ability to package and market Google products on the phone.
That said, if Acer was making plans to work on a competing platform, which happened to be able to run android apps, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable move.
There is one already - it's called ngen.exe and it shipped with v1.0 of the framework.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6t9t5wcf%28v=vs.80%2...
That is certainly...some text.
My point is that that attitude is useless. Great, you feel better for seeing something you don't like and calling it out.

You know what you aren't doing? HELPING the victims?

You REALLY care? Then step up, and engage. Swallow your pride and try and find ways to engage so that one day maybe things can be better.

Because I'm pretty damn sure just sitting on our side of the fence and ignoring them or calling them names is not going to change anything.
Coming up with new app ideas
https://github.com/spastorino/rails-api

Problem solved.
So what? Really. His opinion isn't any more or any less valuable that anybody else.
I needed to get another phone weeks before yesterday's iPhone announcement, so I went with the Galaxy Nexus, since it is contract-free and affordable.

Attempting to select multiple emails, one-handed across the screen with my thumb, has lead me to drop the phone several times.

Fortunately it is built like a cheap plastic tank. Dropping it is part of how I introduce it to people. "Remember when you used to drop your phone and the back and battery would go flying off, but the phone would be fine?" CLUNK
3 Year Digital Subscription to Hacker Monthly - 57% Off
The proportional argument doesn't really make sense, you'd obviously suffer diminishing returns at some point.

However I doubt that much research has been done on code review per se simply because it's self-evident that it works (i.e. bugs are caught prior to code being released into production).
> Well, yes, but it's not an interesting piece of trivia. Like the Erdös numbers.

Yes, true, but by not being actually interesting as the Erdös numbers are, this makes it ... interesting. Sort of like the least interesting number, which ... oh, I'm sure you follow. :)
Video Resynthesis of Simpsons (Banksy) Intro using Family Guy
Can someone with knowledge of economy explain what's going on here and how does this affect me as an individual or as a company?
I'd also add that I don't think it necessarily violates "DRY".

I think "doing it wrong" would be _porting_ the same code to 3 platforms. A blind port to three different mobile platforms is going to look out of place on at least 2/3 of them.

Unless you're talking game development (where you pretty much invent the UI and UX from scratch), each OS has very well established human interface guidelines.

I largely agree with you, but I think GP is incorrect in assuming it's 3 parallel branches of the same code.

The three ports should all be different, in some cases _drastically_ different, or they're bad ports. The business logic may be the same, but the presentation should not.

Also you point out a very good way to separate the business logic without rewriting it three times. Though I wonder if you could write the business logic in C as well?

I know it could be used as a lowest common denominator between iOS and Android. Android does provide the NDK and JNI so you could bind to C libraries, and Objective-C (IIRC) would allow you to link C libraries as well. Not sure what the Windows Phone toolkit looks like these days, though, so I can't comment on that.
I have a feeling that pg should include an algorithm that penalizes submissions whose titles end in a question mark. (For the articles that aren't sarcastic, at least.)
Some very good stuff shows up in the NetDNA blog. Useful stuff. Stuff that you might not put to use right away, but you bookmark the post so you'll remember to come back for another read.
I'm afraid users would be angry, but they would be angry at me. Blame is assigned to the last thing to move.

I'm not claiming that this is good, but it is the reality of writing browsers.
Don't worry, I had the same question.
From what I can tell, 500 Startups prefers if you've already been incorporated, (unlike YC) but I'd be surprised if they won't help you incorporate if they like you.
Interesting that it was a failed kickstarter but they did it anyway. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ishky/pi-in-the-sky?ref=...
> But the relative proportion of those two cases is the matter of scientific studies

I guess my point is that I'd like to see a study like this, and I'd like people to stop saying "My case has saved my phone so many times," because nobody really knows that.

I'd like to know how much and in what situations a case actually is likely to save your phone from meaningful damage. Because, to use the analogy, my phone's been in a bunch of car accidents without its seatbelts -- non-trivial ones -- and is completely fine.

It would be one thing if a case didn't come with the added cost of a bulkier phone (as you mentioned, rubber cases make the phone fatter). But they do, so it's a cost-benefit analysis, and I think we're all mostly guessing. My assertion is just that I think most people are guessing too much on the side in favor of having a case, because iPhones are not as fragile as they seem as long as you treat them with a reasonable amount of care.
Blame the move toward blogging systems that separated content from presentation. Blame advertising which has to be front-and-center at all times.

I wonder how advertising would work on the web if you didn't have omni-present ads but instead sometimes the viewport contained no ads, sometimes it contains big huge ads that take up the entire viewport (like a full-page ad in a magazine). Would that make up for them not being visible at all times? Anyone tried this?
Yes, GP's closing paragraphs were absolutely baffling to me:

>To sum up, I am willing to do a mental test (memory, or IQ, as the smart drug promoter chooses) duel with anyone who claims that smart drugs have helped him become smarter.

Wait, what? He spent 1000 words explaining to us all of the ways in which research around nootropics is lacking and then closes by proposing a ridiculous test fraught with a glaringly obvious confounding factor (the test subject's baseline intelligences). Baffling.
Dropbox dives into CoffeeScript
Wow, this is kind of wonderful. It somehow does "vibrant yet professional" really well, in contrast with the "genuine amateur" feel of scrollkit. They have one hell of a designer, that's for sure. Seems like they're proposing a Photoshop/Flash-like rich-app design interface for webpages?

I'd like to play around with the app but the Team slide is causing my browser to hang.
As usual xkcd provides just as much insight, http://xkcd.com/605/

And for something a bit cruder, but even more phone related http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/the-day-smartphones-stop-g...
I'm sure they work on many prototypes years in advance but if they wanted more features for the iphone 5 release occam's razor says they would just add more features.

People act like Apple's engineers can't figure out how to solder an NFC chip or use removable batteries or expandable storage or micro USB or support Flash or make a much larger phone. No, they decided to not include these things on purpose.
Robson Green has 3.
This is pretty awesome. I know I can't wait.
Passbook works a) with existing scanners deployed to b) millions of POS systems around the world. Neither A nor B is true for NFC.
They have this, it is called a Mophie Juice Pack[1]. They have two sizes with different battery extensions.

I miss the thinness of my phone without the case but greatly prefer being able to get through a day in the data center or traveling without constantly charging my phone.

1: http://www.mophie.com/mophie-juice-pack-air-iPhone-4-4s-batt...
Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regexes
If anything, we're just glancing over the dumbness of the point you were making, because when you get past the Bush thing, what's left is a jab at MBA's and a weird equivalence being drawn between MBA's and advertising business models.

What do MBA's even have to do with this situation? Dick Costolo isn't an MBA; he's a UMich CS grad. He's been running tech startups since I was in high school.
Please, change the music of the video describing the product.. I had to shut down the volume after 30 seconds of listening to it.
Sums up this article perfectly. Hilarious, thanks for sharing! :)
Obama's Justice Department seeks expansion of surveillance
Groove Mixer - android beat maker
The 3 Worst Design Details From Apple’s iPhone 5 Event
I used to do all my home work (consulting ~10 hours a week) on a recliner in a similar but less exaggerated position using a laptop. After replacing the couch (a hand-me-down) with one that has a flat chaise instead of a recliner, I find I really miss it. If I have to do anything work related for more than a short duration on the couch, I now find that I end up using pillows to simulate the exact positioning of the chaise you linked.

I should probably build myself a better work area here, and that recliner plus laptop combo worked out really well...