skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-monthly-200807-2...

http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=5&qpaf=&... (global, have to pay for US only data).

And as already mentioned, Comscore shows Google at an all time high in the US.

Bottom line, these types of things are very hard to measure, so take every statistic with a grain of salt. The only thing we really know is that Google is the king and Bing is slowly growing, mostly taking marketshare from Yahoo. Anecdotally, most people who run websites are seeing barely any traffic from Bing, and on a global scale, Bing is basically a non-factor.
I think Apple did the switch with bad timing, before having a good solution in place... but in the end maybe facing some real technological challenge can be good for them? Every time they have to do serious software / infrastructure stuff they seem to be weak, even with iMessage that is not exactly that super-hard thing to do, there are reliability problems. I hope that this map stuff will make Apple a bit more CS oriented, but not as much as Google is.
What about the economic feedback effects? By a deliberate policy of expensive energy, along with massive subsidies to unsustainable industries (see: biofuels, windmills) there is a net creation of poverty. If we look at the consequences of global warming, it's going to strike mostly in the poverty-stricken areas of the world. By denying economic development to those regions and by making it difficult for the developed world to grow further, we are condemning many people to avoidable misery.

Note that we're not talking about pollution that causes direct health problems (an often conflated issue in the environmentalist message today).
Google the Merciful should just send over a few maps people and help them out. What fun is a "thermonuclear war"[1] when it's so one-sided?

1. As declared by Our Man Jobs.
As a handy guide for those who struggle with this:

Lose rhymes with choose.
Loose rhymes with abuse.

No doubt that will completely clear up the confusion! :)
I keep on seeing this get thrown around, that POST is not cacheable:

> unless the response includes appropriate Cache-Control

Forgive me if I'm dense, but doesn't this "unless" clause mean exactly that if you include a Cache-Control header, the POST will be cacheable unless the Cache-Control header says otherwise? The discussion is then really about whether max-age 0 means "for 1 second" or "never". I don't see why it would be necessary for it to mean "never" when there are two other ways you can get that behavior: by specifying "no-cache" or by simply omitting the header.

The entire discussion is about a developer who uses the following header:

Cache-Control: max-age=0
Or like a large part of Polish government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_Tu-154_c...
Maybe the 400 years referes to the number of people-years used to manually clean up map information?
I'm not sure the SBB will sue Apple. Their relationship is a little bit more complex than mere two unrelated companies:

Some context: The iPhone has a huge penetration rate in Switzerland (2.9 million devices sold for a population of 8 million people). Switzerland also has very good public transportation, held together by the train system of the SBB. And therefore, almost every iPhone user has the SBB Mobile App installed (http://itunes.apple.com/ch/app/sbb-mobile/id294855237?mt=8), 60-80% from what I heard. Which would put the install base to 1.5 to 2 million installations.

The elephant in the room is now this: Within this app, you are able to buy tickets. Train tickets, bus tickets, boat tickets. Not via in-app purchases, everything goes through the SBB ticketing system.

This has been working for three years now. Apple never blocked the app, despite it being in violation of some of the more prominent rules of the App Store.

My sources within SBB claim that there is no special agreement in place, mere toleration by Apple. I don't know if that's true, but one thing is for certain: The SBB has little interest of fighting with Apple on this front.

And Apple might not want to alienate such a huge user base, who would probably feel more loyalty to the SBB than to Apple, but that's pure speculation on my part.

On the other hand is the SBB fiercly proud of their design achievments, the clock in particular. Maybe that part of the SBB company (30 000 employees) doesn't care about electronic ticketing and will pursue Apple anyway.
To your first point, agreed. They need to come clean and make good.

I don't see what this has got to do with any general criticism of the iPhone 5 or iOS 6 though.
Trying to view the Terms of Service leads me to an error page.
http://education.10gen.com/tos
An interview with Matteo Fumagalli
log in through a proxy
The cost of freeing memory
From the FAQ: "How does Reviewing work? Why is my edit still pending/not yet live on Maps?"

"All new edits need to be reviewed by another mapper. The more you successfully contribute to Map Maker, the more trust you will gain in the system and the easier it will be for you to make and review other changes to the map. If your edit is still pending and not on Google Maps, it has likely not been reviewed yet. You can post the links to the edits you’ve made on the review edit requests forum, so that your fellow mappers can review your map changes, enabling your edit to go live once approved by enough people with enough trust in Map Maker. Learn more about how reviewing and the moderation process works here."
Show HN: Markov chain poem trainer+generator in 29 sloc of Haskell
This is a great post. I've been listening to the podcast "Back To Work" and Merlin has a similar view:

>"I think the concern of hypocrisy keeps us small. It keeps our world small, it keeps our horizons limited, and it keeps our self-worth as low as it can conceivably go. Because we’re defining ourselves in large part by what other people claim that we are. When the truth is, we’re all a goddamn mess. [...] The people who obsess most about hypocrisy are the people who are least willing to change. They have the least room to change. If you set yourself up as this paragon of perfection, then you have a lot to lose by being shown as anything but 100%. But, like, once you allow yourself to be imperfect in this weird wabi-sabi way, your world gets a lot bigger."
aside of the "math", after reading this article I came to conclusion that there is some swindle going on about "global carbon dioxide budget", a global swindle.
China Professional Food Processing Machine Supplier
Thanks for the feedback, that's definitely something we've been looking at. This is our initial feature-set that we're using to collect usage-statistics. If you have any other feedback, please feel free to let us know.
Or like Donald Trump's brain trust: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/11/nyregion/copter-crash-kil...
Thats how I read it.

Although frankly speaking, if anything 400 man-years seems very low for worldwide mapping.
Bacteria replicate close to the physical limit of efficiency
So it's a problem that $4 billion could solve in a few days, right?
Yes, I read it and still think it's laughable that anyone would mention them in the same sentence...
What's broken is this: when you make a POST request to a server that omits the Cache-Control header, iOS 6 caches that response by default. That behavior violates the HTTP spec.
> Yes, but Microsoft did not completely ban Netscape from running on Windows like Apple did with podcast apps, Google Voice etc. so the situation is not exactly analogous.

Which is not relevant, I fear. Action was taken against microsoft because they were a monopoly and used their monopoly position both to hinder potential competition and muscle their way into new markets.
I would like to defend Safari's behaviour.

To me this problem reads "I was doing something wrong, but it has worked, it should keep on working". In this case, if there has always been a working proper way, I think that it is OK to break the bad behaviour and force people to use the proper one.

As other have pointed out, the spec says: "POST responses should not be cached, unless you use a Cache-Control header. In that case do whatever Cache-Control says."

Now, "Cache-Control: max-age=0" may have been working fine up to now, but what its meaning is "this content is cacheable; please retain it only for 0 second". The first part of the sentence explicitly says that the content is cacheable, the second part is used by the browser as part of its cache policy. Please note that you _explicitly_ declared the content as cacheable. Do you want to _explicitly_ declare your content as not cacheable? Use "Content-Control: no-cache". Or just do not set Cache-Control and rely on the default non-cacheable status of POST responses.

The only problem here is that Safari is caching POST responses that have no Cache-Control header set. Yes that is a bug. But one cannot complain about the fact that a browser cached a response that has explicitly been said by its producer to be cacheable.
Don't underestimate the value of legwork and algorithms.

edit: I... I skimmed the article the first time, but... The author actually claims that it's a data quality problem, not an algorithm problem. Huh?!

second edit: I guess my only real contention is that "data quality" is a fake idea.
email #1 "Thank you for helping to improve Google Maps. Once approved, your contribution will appear on Google Maps for everyone to see. Thanks and happy mapping! "

email #2 "Congratulations! We have made changes based on your suggestion on Map Maker. Soon you will be able to see your edit live on Google Maps. Thank you for your contribution to Google Map Maker, and happy mapping! "

it's got status 'published'. is it pending some another review? I've read the faq and learn more, but still have no clue, the terminology is vague and a post from 2010 on a discussion group says 4-6 months to live.
IMO A lot of that decline/increase is probably where Bing has bought integration into an existing product. I've seen it a lot lately, "powered by Bing" and the like, but I've not seen a single person actually type Bing into the address bar. It seems to me that this increase is coming from those people who don't know/care and are just being directed to Bing, not making a concious choice of which search engine to use.
If you can get 14600 workers who can do this work and the software, you could do it in 10 days.
I got my Glif. Then later, I bought a second one.
Dawn spacecraft finds signs of water on Vesta
This must be in US-only. Bing's market share globally is almost in-existent.
> I have no idea what anyone else's experiences are, but I have never been so disappointed.

Not being in the US, google maps has never provided any kind of mass transit information. Apple's implementation not providing it doesn't really change anything.

The imprecision of the map, though, that's a problem (because it is a step back)
When I was a kid, my parents would never take the same plane. They are very careful people... No wonder my dad directed an insurance company !
As a non-English speaking person, i get more than annoyed when I see such common spelling mistakes. It's hard enough to read correctly spelled English, don't make it harder please.
Looks cool, can I ask where you sourced the historical data from?
Hey, Apple went after a freaking groceries store for using the Apl name in some other country. If they can do that, I think the watch company can and should go after Apple for doing this. And yes, this is shameless hypocrisy.
"[Apple's] problem is that they thought they did not have a problem."

Crucial insight, there. From the perspective of an observer who has no special affection for Apple, it's surprising that a company of that competence would succumb to such a basic process error.
Maybe one for multitouch and one for more accurate single touch detection?
> There's already a similar mechanism in the URL handlers, but Apple don't let you choose which application to use if multiple ones are registered.

It also doesn't let you override core applications (in that it picks the first one either way), and last time I checked it if two applications registered the same handler and you removed the first one, the association didn't switch to the second one it just broke.

May have been fixed since.

> I'd also like widgets one day.

I just want toggles in the notification bar (DND, airplane, 3G, roaming and location would be sufficient as far as I'm concerned). Instead of the waste of space that Stocks is (yes I know I can remove it from the notification center, and did)
Found a workaround. You can still get to the login page: http://pandora.com/login

From there you can say you have forgot your password: http://www.pandora.com/forgot.vm?target=

Completing this form sends a forgotten password email to your registered email address.

That link provided allows to you reset your password.
We're using Xignite's API right now. It's super-simple to integrate with.
FWIW the vast majority of the non-american citizens did not have mass transit on Google Maps either.
The most important thing you need to know about the Well is that the only reason it still operates is that if it shut its doors, a group of people (numbering in the hundreds or thousands) who used the Well to get to know each other really well (the Well is about 25 years old) would have a much harder time keeping in touch with each other.
There is actually a question on Quora: How Should I Use Quora? It's been answered only once. It should be made into a board and employees, admins and reviewers encouraged to answer it (as well as users). It could be sent to all new users, who have the option to opt out of following it. I link to it in the follow-up, The Quora Crisis: How Long Can The Center Hold? Have you read it? Yay, Hacker News! Grateful for the conversation... Grazie mille
http://socialtimes.com/the-quora-crisis-how-long-can-the-cen...
Why did you choose that over something like Yahoo! Finance or Google?
This is the first event that people will put down to a lack of Steve Jobs that I think actually might reflect that...
An attacker would just grab ALL keys, decrypt them, and look at those of the form Uxxxxxxx.Password.
Ask Rolex, Breitling, Hublot, they all seem to be running out of cash

Apple's profits are very down-to-earth compared to some of these brands
haha...FUCK U TOO APPLE!
Ladies, Are You Ready For A New You?
The suggestion to acquire TomTom is certainly bold and thought provoking. If you live in a city like London maps is essential and a core feature for phones.

Google must be pissing themselves laughing. Just as Apple get their act together google will probably wade in with a killer app? OR will they? Perhaps they'll not bother and use it as a marketing ploy to push Android?

Fascinating article.
How to create sharing services that work with the new Chrome '+' sharing button
9 women won't give birth in a month.
When I look at science fiction of the 60's, 80's/90's and 00's, I can usually identify three loose categories.

First you have the "techo-utopianism", as mentioned by the author. The structure of society is fundamentally different, a utopia that removes all traces of internal politics and war. The technology is dreams at best compared to anything they had in the day. Humans, and possibly earth, are the only real links back to the present day. Or you might have the alien race, often paralleling the future humans of other stories.

In the 80's and 90's you get a lot more cyberpunk. The utopia themes have disappeared, leaving more of a more realistic world of corporate greed and capitalism; often a dystopia instead of a utopia. Technology is usually more 'personal', effecting the everyday life of people. The story itself is often more personal, related to a person, and their experience of the world. People are much more 'human' then before. In other forms of science fiction, the aliens might be more human in their actions and technology.

The science fiction of late is more personal again. Technology is no longer the driving point of the story, but it is the interactions between people themselves that makes the story. In fact, the technology itself often has no form of scientific theory behind it. It's also much closer to reality, technology of the current day stretched to its limits by designers. If aliens are involved, they are usually used as the token bad guy, or simply another background plot piece like the technology; the stories are rarely about the aliens themselves.

So, I guess the answer to "How do we see future people" is "ourselves", for the most part. I must admit I'm not that versed in science fiction though, but this is what I have seen though my experiences.
yeah that caught us out - we found that even though the data is freely available from those sources, you're not allowed to include that data in a commercial app :-(
A cautionary note on backtesting (ie, assessing how trading strategies would have performed over a historical period in time).

If an a posteriori probability distribution is a good fit for historical events, it doesn't mean in any way it is going to fit future data points. It may or may not.

Hence, use backtesting with care while trading.
From average age in the photo it is more likely these people are only senior positions or alike. There are surely more.
Where was Apple's QA on this? This seems like a colossal oversight for a company previously known for sweating all the small details.
It's sad that, after all the facts, you still think it was a court case about rounded corners sigh
ドラクエ10 RMT
...so actually, I did not 'provoke' that post, but was rather 'provoked' by it (just a little). It was the first thing showing in my stream upon signing up.
Apple actually makes this kind of mistake often: they positively excel at some things (retail relationships, hardware supply chains, physical design, software integration) but really suck at other things (social experiences, data harvesting and search, data synchronization and security, dealing with developers): even "within" the Apple community this leads to a number of well-known failures, from Ping (a similar situation to Maps, with Apple suddenly being forced to compete with Facebook as a deal fell through for functionality they considered critical) to MobileMe (now replaced by iCloud, which has its own set of glaring issues which, if you haven't noticed them now, you might the first time you need to restore an 8GB iCloud backup "all-or-nothing" on the same day tens of millions of other users are attempting to restore their devices with a new version of the firmware).
I thought it was reasonably entertaining to consider 400 salary years at $100k each just to see what the numbers looked like.

Apple has had trouble with Big Data, in the parlance, but iCloud is still running. They've made some pretty dumb mistakes with their online services over the years, but they still do happen to be syncing data (if even just push notifications) to something on the order of a hundred million devices.

Catching up to where Google Maps is today will take somewhere between 10 days and 400 years. I'll bet good money that they have this nailed within a 95% tolerance before next year's new hardware model.
Apparently they have an office in Australia already.

And it's 10 hours i.e. one sleep between LA and Sydney.
I only read the first page, but I didn't like how it started: pointing to thousands of high temperature records in the last year as an indicator for global warming. As any AGW person can probably point out, ice ages occur in cycles and hence some global warming is probably natural. The real question is - is there man made global warming? I think the science says yes, I just don't like this article making a bad case for it and in fact feeding "the opposition".

Of course even if the global warming is all natural one could still ask if we should try to stop it, that is another matter.
Ten developers each giving their boss a copy of Mythical Man Month won't make him read it any faster either.
yep you're totally right, but hopefully it's still useful!
I think Apple should look to hire someone like this to help draw together the various problems with their maps app (However for a first attempt I think its fine). Its not insurmountable problem, and given what Apple is capable of, its something they can make better with a bit of effort.
But most web designers would be slicing PSDs at some point, right ?

And Cygwin is a joke. Dealing with the page separator differences alone would make it unbearable.
QA on the scale of what they needed wouldn't work. You have to bare in mind that Apple like to keep things close to their chest. To have at least one person per city testing this worldwide was impossible.
Additionally, I will point out that the "cache: false" that people are discussing does not seem to be documented as part of the XHR interface; it is only something jQuery manipulates, and it seems to do nothing very useful with it: all it means is "if this is a GET/HEAD request, append a query-string with a millisecond-accurate timestamp"; it does nothing for POST requests, and it does not add any cache control headers to the request that could be used to indicate to either the browser or to upstream proxies that the content should not be returned from a cache.
They look pretty awesome. I had some mobile app idea a while ago but commercial data rates are just too scary, good luck with this app!
My biggest disappointment regarding this whole matter is that as a result, OSM is getting a lot of negative criticism. More-so than Tom-Tom.
Pandorhack: Stealing Pandora Passwords
The headline doesn't seem to come up in the article at all.
Not necessarily.

While your desktop can handle 8 connections the 3G connection can't.
the decision to switch to there own maps was made while jobs was around. its also not the first time apple replaces a product with an inferior option and insists its better, final cut pro x comes to mind.
NPRs Planet Money has an excellent series on this now. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/27/157499893/episode-... and http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/09/18/161358307/episode-...
Done:

Pandorhack: Stealing Pandora Passwords
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4553184
Absolutely true, backtesting is not a guarantee of anything. That being said, I can't remember who said that "No model is perfect but some models are useful."
Oh really? That's interesting - does that apply even if it's not distributed with the commercial app? I'm sure I've used trading platforms before which use Yahoo...
Epic commit message
From my previous edits, I think it's in the order of weeks.
I'm certain I've seen clocks which pause on the minute like the stop-to-go ones sold in rail enthusiast magazines, railway museum gift shops etc. many years ago. Obviously, they don't include an actual stop-to-go master/slave system, they just fake it.
How far back does it go?
Excellent post, full of valuable insight.

Apple lacks the ability to mine vast amounts of local search data, as Google was able to do when it started its mapping project.

Does anybody know what this means? Don't the queries I make go through their servers, and isn't my location a relevant parameter for those queries? I don't see why this can't be mined.
Xignite allows us to show the full historical data of an instrument, but because we're taking a lean approach at testing how people use it, we're limiting them to a few years.
I tend to agree with you. They just need to stop the project guys asking for "pre-order" types of donations. Or make them not send the product to the backers for that they're paying.

It should be 100% clear that it's just a donation, whether it's $10, $100 or $1000. But you're not getting any product for that donation, until the product launches, when you can go and buy it.