skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple's decision to go with an in-house map app has been a long time coming. They've been acquiring mapping companies for the last few years and have been (attempting) to build that core competency so that these kind of issues were minimal when they made the switch.

As far as Google giving them turn-by-turn capabilities-- that's really the special sauce that sets Android apart. It was probably available, but at a price that Apple didn't want to pay. Plus, Apple probably didn't like that they weren't getting their 30% on the revenue from local search in the Google Maps app.

So, in the long run this will work out for Apple. Sure, the users will be affected in the short term and it may never actually be as good as Google Maps.... but hey look, shiny pictures of 3D buildings
Taking the Pulse of Optify’s SaaS Platform with Graylog2
Here's a peer review: http://michaelgrayer.posterous.com/in-which-i-blow-a-gasket-...

Since PRNewswire/Sustainable Food Trust didn't seem to employ a critical eye to examine the conclusions of the study.

edit Further criticism of the design of the experiment and the statistics: http://understandinguncertainty.org/rats-and-gm
"Programming perl", Wall & Schwartz, (C) 1990, p. 282ff. contains "infringing" code (AKA prior art).
Apple made this decision just to dump Google and try to gain more control.
Apple dind't want to use OpenStreetMap because its open source solution and Apple never uses open source solution. Yeah, its iOS and OS X is based on Linux (sort of) but they will never tell this to anyone.
iOS 6 Maps sucks just like the App Store on the New iPad. Maybe it is just me but I found it very, very slow. It's better on iPhone
Questions? Feedback? Comments? I'm all ears.
-Teemu, entrepeneur.
"Just think of us as your mom’s new husband."

Creepy.
Will I be able to run the diff against previous versions of the site? This is a huge pain point for us and I've been looking for a service that will let us automate testing for CSS breakage on deploys.
Ask HN: Any YC alumni who can give feedback on our W12 application?
Last year abstractbill kindly offered to give some honest feedback on YC applications [1] and we are hoping there are some YC alumni this time around who are willing to do the same for W12.

Our story: We're a funded startup and (we think) we have a great product. Our reason to apply for YC is not the money but the guidance, support and intros we need to grow further. We've got rejected for S12 and this time we're trying to do it right. We're not native speakers so we want to make sure we get the language right - and if our product actually makes any sense. E-mail me at unreadierwings@gmail.com if you're willing to help us with honest feedback (please state which YC startup you've founded).

If you're also applying for W12: feel free to leave the same request in the comments here.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515415

Note: using a throwaway account.
Every morning I wake up to dozens of articles in my Google Reader from Fars News, Mehr and IRIB that assure me that Iran's international trade is doing just fine without the West. Surely state media wouldn't lie...
Doesn't look closed source, there's a link to the github repo at the top of the page.
The whole thing only makes sense as giving a way for the public to more directly communicate with examiners. Keeping the bar very low for examiners is a key component of that.

It will be interesting to see how much of the activity ends up being useful.
There is little distinction between in my mind between the torrent, whose bencoded 'info' dict sha1 hahses to the 20 byte magnet link, and the magnet link.

The hash uniquely identifies a torrent. Either way, you are presenting a representation of the torrent.

You might as easily argue that a torrent file cannot infringe, since it only presents sha1 hashes of chunks of files contained within the torrent, not the actual files themselves.
Do you have any proof of licensing problems? Most people say it was Apple which wanted to have more control over one of fundamental features of a phone, which is perfectly reasonable from a business point of view.
Unstable pricing??

App Engine pricing stayed the same for years, then made a big shift as it officially came out of preview. Yes, it was a big change, but it's only happened once.

I'm a novice developer using App Engine and while there are things you can criticize about it (including the cost), "unstable pricing" isn't one.
Even a Joyent tech admits Ubuntu is a more pleasant experience. Thought this was interesting, but all his points are not isolated to the desktop experience. Pretty much all the reasons he switched to linux affect the building and maintenance of servers too. I think it just boils down to community support.
You'll have "Display English Names Only" enabled. If you go into the Settings app, select "Maps", and make sure "Always English" is set to Off you'll get non-English street names for non-English countries (Hong Kong, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, etc etc).
Which is why they do, it's also very trivial to hunt down those privileged people with BGAN dishes deployed.
If battery life if your thing, look at the Droid Razr Maxx HD.

Daft name, but high resolution screen, jelly bean (android 4.1) pre-installed, and fantastic battery life compared to most smart phones

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/05/motorola-droid-razr-hd-ma...
Disconnect Between Application Development and Security Getting Wider
Startups - What’s your contingency plan?
Nice.

I usually do this with a dummy controller rigged up to show them in the browser and fire them at whitelisted test inboxes, but always nice to see more ways people handle these challenges.
We've been using letter_opener (https://github.com/ryanb/letter_opener), which handles the "preview" case very well (opens the rich text and plain emails in separate browser tabs on send). Doesn't do the other stuff that mails_viewer does, but a good lightweight alternative.
I don’t see the problem here as long as we really are talking about computer science. The University of Cambridge has two departments within the mathematics faculty already, one studying pure maths and statistics, the other applied maths and theoretical physics. Separating computer science research and teaching into a third element doesn’t seem inconsistent with that approach to me (though that’s not how the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge actually became what it is today).

Now, if we’re talking about teaching people to program simple software tools, as a useful practical skill like modelling something using calculus or writing a clear report, that’s a different question. There is room in the world both for specialists who are experts in a field and study the hard problems and for practitioners who aren’t experts but know enough to get useful things done. A full computer science course in a dedicated department is not a good fit for the latter group, who really need solid basic programming skills and perhaps a little software engineering knowledge.
Only if there is an explicit guarantee of work. They are asking you to give up something, you should be compensated for that. I would get them to sign an intent before I would sign an NDA. This way they are bound to contract you if they move forward with the NDA. You still have a right to say no to the work, but they are protected from you saying no and then implementing their idea. I think it is a fair middle ground if they have a problem with the intent they are just wasting your time anyways.
I might imagine one day C.S. departments might merge back into the Maths department, where (IMHO) C.S. most properly belongs.
Noticed this today. I wanted to get the cross-street of an address on Broadway.

First, I get an address on Broadway in Bayonne. Okay, almost plausible, since I was in Hoboken. I append 'New York, NY' to the address. Now I get an address in Brooklyn. Completely ridiculous. I append 'Manhattan, NY' to the address. Still Brooklyn.

At that point I added Google Maps to my home screen. If someone posts a clear guide to jailbreaking iOS 6 and re-adding the native Google Maps app, I'll probably do it.
"Being able to paint copies of a Picasso does not make you a great artist." That is true. I don't think the Samwers (or anyone for that matter) think of themselves as visionaries with great ideas. They are businessmen who know how to a run a business. I think many would say that the Samwers do not operate in the artistic community at all. They run businesses and a business is not a piece of art. Are the ideas copied? Yes. Does it lack class? Perhaps. Are the ideas well executed. Absolutely. If it was so easy that it didn't deserve any respect at all then everyone would do it. The Samwers are good at what they do and it deserves respect even if part of what they do is copying existing ideas.
Being able to paint copies of a Picasso does not make you a great artist.

It makes you a great reproductionist and it's probably a marketable skill.

Nor does it deserve respect from the artistic community.

"Respect" is a highly subjective thing that is often achieved at a net negative cost. Historically, many respected artists were under-appreciated by their contemporaries, dying broke and alone.

All it says is that I have enough skill to operate a paint brush when given an exact template.

The skill of an artisan is not necessarily measured by originality. And unlike a quality such as "great artist", skill is largely quantifiable, the rarer the ability, (typically) the greater the demand for it.
Directions being ok most for most people, most of the time, is hardly acceptable.

Google Maps had a tendency to drop pins for locations on the wrong spot. That meant I always had to confirm the location with street view, 100% of the time.

Going to the wrong spot can be catastrophic in some instances (wrong or non existent hospital.) In others it can be really bad (missing a critical meeting, walking in during a wedding.) I don't need to give more examples.

Google giving not so great search results is one thing. I can look at the page and quickly tell that its wrong. When maps are wrong, it can add another 30 minutes between figuring out you went to the wrong spot and getting to the right one.

If Apple's management thinks its acceptable to roll out beta products on all of their users, I'll be moving to Android.
I'm clueless about mapping/geocoding/etc (it's amazing I make it to the grocery store and back) but I keep hearing that Apple needed to get this out there so that they could start getting data feeding back from the millions of iOS users, and thus (presumably rapidly) improving the quality of the maps. Is there any truth at all to that? I don't quite understand where they'd be getting that data back from - e.g. if I search for the hospital and I eventually find it 3 miles down the road from where the map took me, how would Apple/their mapping partners ever know that the POI should be moved?
A Way to Think About Career Choice
No, the switch was from Solaris on his workstation - not OS X.
Jobs in Chicagoland Region
Yeah, as a Lean Startup advocate from before the term was coined, I think the LS angle here is purest bullshit.

The Lean Startup methods are not a magic potion that you can pour all over everything that you think sucks. It's a very specific toolkit for a very specific problem space.

In particular it requires a reasonably short feedback loop and the ability to minimize consequences of mistakes. Neither is true for education, which is a 10- to 20-year process, and in which failure can harm a person for life.

And as long as I'm on the topic of Lean Startup bullshit, everybody please keep an eye out for the oxymoronic "Lean Startup for the Enterprise". Consultants have discovered there's no money in selling to startups, so they're packaging the new hotness for their best clients: people with more money than sense.
(1) I can't wait for people to stop using the phrase "internet for things." That is similar to saying "p2p" or "horseless carriage".

(2) Social, being a known quantity, is easy to invest in and so commoditized. Where the internet interfaces with things -- computer vision, makerbots, etc. are all where personal computers were back when the Apple I came into play.

(3) Hacker spaces are the new incubators :-)

(4) "Things" might be harder to solve, but there are a lot of problems solvable only by software people. Take any of the tools you take for granted while developing software and look for it in the world of arduinos and makerbots.
haha I clicked the article because of the hyped title... I was expecting something like "Why Solaris sucks"
The EC2 cost premium over competitors is a factor, and so
are the other AWS services. It's a meaningful comparison.
> Banks and all government organisations are soon going to require people to use a 'national email'. If your emails is @gmail.com they'll simply refuse it and will ask you to open an account on this new email site.

True, that was a policy statement from Taghipour, however my impression is that the resistance from the banking industry and Majles led to the mandate being scrapped. However, the overall point that Iran has a civil society around the Internet is valid and the reason I am pushing out the paper quickly.

Here is a link on banking: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...
Filling a Leaky Funnel
It's interesting that the headline, and the article, seem to focus on the fact that the crops were genetically modified, rather than that they were treated with roundup. This seems questionable; I would guess (although I'm no biologist), that the Roundup was likely very relevant (the article indicated that water with Roundup in it also caused tumors).
Experience indicates that the S3 may not get Key Lime Pie. Even if it does, the S3's version of Key Lime Pie will probably be a hybrid bastard that looks and feels more like Ice Cream Sandwhich than Key Lime Pie.

Also, the next Nexus (or nexuses, as rumored) is likely to arrive in October. Anybody with a GNex already has a good phone and can afford to wait a month or two.
Another alternative is Mail Catcher which we've been using with much success. http://mailcatcher.me/
This is especially galling for the Japanese. Not only are they valuable customers due to their frequent cell phone purchases and rabid desire for brand-name products (including Apple, of course), but a quarter of the Japanese population (and the main target market) lives in Tokyo, where people are almost entirely dependent on public transit to get around. With iOS 6, there are no built in directions!

Of course, Apple apologists will jump to say that you can just get a 3rd party app, but that simply doesn't cut it. Google Maps provided a door-to-door solution for directions, which makes a big difference when you don't know what the closest train station to an address is. Moreover, the ability to see the total door-to-door time and compare it to the cost of the trip made it easy to select the optimal route (based on a combination of price and time).

And here are some of the amusing mistakes in the database[0]:

* "McDonalds" and "Pachinko Gundam" train stations

* A station not attached to any railway lines

* No Osaka station (this is a really big station)

* Place names in Chinese and Korean

* Haneda Airport (busiest airport in Japan) is mislabeled as 「大王製紙」 ― "Great King Paper Manufacturer" (this one has gotten a lot of laughs)

* Narita Airport (2nd busiest airport) completely missing

For those who can read Japanese, there's a good 2chan thread archive[1] of Japanese netizens taking the piss out of Apple Maps.

0: http://www.japanmobiletech.com/2012/09/ios-6-maps-fail-in-ja...

1: http://gahalog.2chblog.jp/archives/52132765.html
Google spend much time organizing the name of the cities and road in a particular way. Now Apple has another way of doing it, the maps at higher level show less information.
Some city name are picked and some are not, but at a closer level, the cities are there. Their algo to find what to show on the map is just different from Google.
I'm not saying it is better, but different. I am pretty sure the same comparison can be made between google maps and let's say bing maps.
"It was the perfect opportunity to leapfrog Google and help the open source community"

The only time Apple helps open source is when they hire the most important people in really important projects, and then they graciously allow them to continue contributing. CUPS, LLVM, it's happened a couple times. They take good care of these guys, but I always feel like their contributions to the projects after Apple are being written with one eye watching over their shoulder to make sure they dont get sued for talking to the public about some super secret project.
Yeah, it seems to really vary. In my short time of playing around, I haven't noticed much reduction in quality at all around my city (Brisbane, Australia) over Google Maps.

The only thing I noticed so far was that St. Lucia Golf Course was incorrectly labelled as Indooroopilly Golf Course (which is a few kilometres away). I reported it.

I'm actually fairly impressed with the number of businesses from Yelp - I wasn't aware that it was available in Australia, but it has all of even the most obscure little cafes and shops I've searched for around town.
And yet most of the Democrats in Congress voted for the surge. Schumer did not switch to a withdrawal position until June of 2011. Is that a flip-flop, or soemthing more nuanced?

http://polhudson.lohudblogs.com/2011/06/16/schumer-urges-afg...

IMO, he had just decided the 'Decent Interval' strategy was decent enough.

TY for the link, certainly more Congressional dissatisfaction than indicated. I will note that both Administrations supported the bill, so I'm still not sure who flip-flopped except for the House Republicans (it had failed an earlier vote and Pelosi publically said she'd just wait for the Republicans to cough up enough votes, which they did).
Wasn't there a study done recently where they determined that applications on iPhones actually crash more often than on an average Android, except that no error messages are thrown up at all.. you're just sent back to the home screen so the user thinks "Oh I must've pressed the Home button by accident"

My own anecdotal Nexus experience (I own the Google updated GSM version): no crashes (although there was a brief syncing outage last night), updates are smooth and fast, and the whole "it just works" thing applies.
Pirate Bay Financier Files For Bankruptcy, Focus Shifts To Peter Sunde
Edit: Nope. I got some of the facts wrong, so the below is mostly hooey, in substance if not in conclusions. Read the Reddit post that saurik links, it's much higher quality.

---

Misleading title is misleading.

What the article's describing is not a study that's looking for toxicity in GM food. It's a study that's looking for toxicity in Roundup, delivered in both drinking water and on food.

The food does happen to be a Roundup-resistant variety of maize. But there weren't any study groups for non-GM maize with similar levels of the agent, nor do there seem to have been any study groups for resistant maize grown without Roundup. So the effects of the agent and the maize that's been engineered to resist it have not been isolated from each other, meaning that the study doesn't actually provide any data to address the question of whether "GM Maize Can Cause Tumors."

However, there were groups that were given Roundup in the water but no GM maize. Which is suggestive - it suggests that this study was never designed to study whether "GM maize can cause tumors." It was testing Roundup, and the maize was only being included in the study because Roundup-resistant maize is obviously a good way for Roundup to enter a person's diet.
The Samwer brothers fill a (pretty big) hole in the market. They execute proven business models in countries before the market leader can get there. If US-based companies would put more emphasis on international expansion the Samwers' business would melt away. (I'm a American who's lived in the UK for years and gets really irritated that a lot of great US companies don't bring their services here.)

side note -- I have to think there's a market for a group of experts based in major European/Asian markets that would specialize companies in clearing the hurdles to expanding internationally. Get a handful of people in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russia who are experts in local regulations and can work fast to expand a US-based business.
People keep saying this, but it isn't anywhere close. The web interface is buggy (it doesn't respond to all the clicks) and much more importantly, if you click on an address in any other app, it will take you to Apple maps.

A good chunk of my navigating is looking up addresses in other apps (like Yelp) and then clicking on them.

This is now horribly broken and there is no workaround.
Good infographic, surprising to see that the number of female students in CS has gone down so much.
I think part of that is due to education. If you spend 12 years getting trained to sit there and do what others say, it's not surprising that you have that as your default.

It could be sample bias, but the friends I have who went to Montessori school, which trains people in self-direction and independence, seem to be much more willing to try things and to take responsibility for outcomes.
How to convert e-book formats
There's a large enough proportion of them connecting to wifi networks at a given time and a very large number of devices. Plus it's a very small static page.
Ask HN: Client won't do 1099, should I be worried?
Client wants to go through w-2 instead of 1099. Bit of an old school software company instead of the usual startup. They flat out refuse to do 1099 through my LLC. Anything I should be worried about?
Means it has hit a level of success then, remember when every thread about Ruby would degenerate into "YEAH! But RoR doesn't SCALE! HAH!"? Level of snark seems proportional to the level of success a language is enjoying.

I must admit, I've not tried Go yet and I'm not overly sold on some of the syntax aspects but it's nice to see a new language doing well against established players.
Nice catch. It's a MacBook Pro (completely forgot about the existence of non-Pro MacBooks).
I could see theoretical CS merging back into math, and software engineering being part of engineering. The latter is more likely than the former.
The OTA update from 4.0 to 4.1 was "press button, wait a minute." And far as "figuring IF" my Android device will upgrade: I use a Galaxy Nexus. It'll get upgraded to the newest version for the foreseeable future. You might be shocked at how very, very little "work" that was.

(Yes, I'm saying "don't buy non-Nexus devices." Not like that's a hard one to grasp, though.)
Why did they stop using Google Maps?
So I've been seeing all this hatin' on HN this morning so I figured I should check it out on my device. I mapped my commute (1 hour) and the only oddity I saw was the waviness coming off of a bridge. Beyond that Philly's buildings were all rendered correctly and my route was exactly the same as Google maps. YMMV

P.S. I must say It was really cool to see Cira Centre (The Amtrak Building) rendered in 3d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cira_Centre
Awesome. Debugging has been a small annoyance for a while now. Even just being able to set a break point and step through incrementally is a huge step up from nothing.
Everybody.

If everybody knows how to lead, then nobody has to do much leading. Working on teams like that can be incredible; when an issue comes up, somebody's always ready to take responsibility for sorting it out. It lets people focus much more on the end goal rather than process.