skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My overall view of the companies that it (Apple) has assembled to create its application is that they are, as a whole, rated “C-grade” suppliers.

This just amazes me.

For the longest time there were really only two suppliers of data: Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ. Everything else wasn't worth touching b/c the quality sucked. Then Google collected their own in their little cars and stopped paying suppliers. I'm not sure why Apple didn't have the foresight to understand this was an enormous engineering effort from Google - not only collecting their own data but the whole platform itself.

I worked as a consultant for one of the two major data suppliers for 3 years rebuilding their backend. 400 years sounds like a reasonable swag.
This is fantastic. Love the clean, straightforward interface. However I have a feeling that anyone knowledgeable enough to profit from this is probably already heavily invested in another system for doing these calculations and/or feel the rules system isn't flexible enough. One thing you could do is to implement sharing. ie, have a list of "top performing strategies measured from date of creation". Then let users subscribe to other users' "proven" strategies for a fee - you take half and the author takes half - this could be an alternative way to monetize the site as well attract the kind of people who make a living doing this - ie the kind of people you want talking about your product.
I definitely agree with the latter point: if you try something and it is "in ruins" you are unlikely to respond with any feedback at all. That is one of the things that Apple needs to do a better job at during their betas: I have personally often just written them off until beta 4 or 5 as "it is so unlikely to work anyway" (although I do try to pick it up once they stop doing rapid cycles).

However, for your ability to test in the future: the only thing I believe the iOS beta requires related to owning a Mac is that the downloads from Apple's website for the IPSW files are stored inside of disk image files; you only need access to a Mac long enough to restore your device, but I am not certain why you would need a Mac to work with it later. (I would love to be told I was wrong there, however, so I could add that to the list of endemic issues leading to this.)
It always surprises me how a company which prides itself on UX, and having reinvented UX can repeatedly screw it up big time with core things, maps, email (MobileMe when that was launched).

I just wonder why fix something that ain't broke and make it worse!
Is this true though? It's easy for everyone for all the armchair CEOs to say that Jobs never would have released such an epic fail, but I'm not so sure.

If there's one thing that Apple hates as much as a half-baked UX, it's dependency on another tech company. It seems pretty obvious to me as a casual developer and observer of Google maps over the years that global mapping is really really hard. How could Apple not have known this? I don't think even they have this much hubris.

Now we don't know why negotiations with Google for the maps API failed. Maybe Apple was overconfident, maybe Google was playing hard ball for Android's sake, maybe a bit of both. But regardless of the reason, the contract was not renewed and they had to release something. The iPhone without maps is not the iPhone.

The fact that they used an algorithmic approach to QA says more about the timelines than Apple's beliefs about the overall best approach. There was simply not time to get people on the ground to do a proper QA job. Apple's hands were tied.
GCC 4.7.2 Released
Thanks for the great feedback. Do you think people would be too protective of their strategies to participate though?
Would Jobs have the balls to release iOS 6 with no Maps at all for a year or more while they scramble to catch up? Those would be some huge cajones.
this is great. love the design, and I can totally see a broker acquiring this so their clients will make more trades on their backtested-to-be-profitable strategies!
It is interesting because

- this is the first time that I can put more faces on the design team of Apple, beyond Ives.

- also it shows a shift in the company since Steve's passing. I would have never expect them to go celebrate design awards in his time (but I could be wrong about this) like this
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One of my favourite conspiracy theories is that the Jetsons and the Flintstones take place at the same time - the Flintstones are the people who live on the ground...
Or ice hockey team of Lokomotiv Yaroslavl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokomotiv_Yaroslavl
From what I've heard, Google had an army of around 1000+ contract workers in Hyderabad, India, cleaning up the data for about 5 years. If anything 400 man-years sounds low :)

This is apart from MapMaker, and their dev teams, and their software improvements.

For instance, if you look at directions in India now, they're awesome, since they tell you landmarks to look for on the way [pass by * on left], at the intersections, etc. http://goo.gl/maps/b8w15 for instance.

My guess is 95% will take 3-4 years - once they accept they have a problem.
Using a quaint keyboard, no less.
For the most valuable company on earth, with more cash reserves in the bank than the entire value of most companies? Google has street view cars roaming the planet. I think Apple could do more human QA if it was a priority.
Sounds like the end result could have been avoided had the "visionary" simply not been hypocritical and avoided doing "a bad thing".
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The article does not really provide much new information. That mapping is hard is known. That there are companies who have much experience in this area and that Apple will have to compete with them is known - from Google, over Garmin to Nokia.

It's just that it is hard and that it will take Apple a lot of time and investment to bring the mapping functionality to a better level. I'm pretty sure Apple knows that.

It's just the first iteration. Apple works that way. Bring a product or service in a first iteration and then improve from there. This is how the iPod evolved, for example. Aperture, another example.

The current maps application in iOS already has a feedback interface. This helps to improve the data.

But there are a few things which need more consideration:

* the 3d view looks ugly when looked at close to the objects. The 3d reconstruction algorithm which creates a 3d view from images is problematic.

* the angle of the data from Tomtom is for car users. Other users have less benefit: there is a lack of detail and the usage perspective renders the map in a certain way. For example here in Europe there are a lot of local public transit users. They have a hard time identifying useful informations on the current maps.

* combination with all kinds of POIs. You need to get that data and have it constantly updated. Where is a shop, when is it open, where is a museum, where are interesting views, where is a difficult road condition, ...

Probably the mapping domain is the toughest Apple has touched in years. You need a really good idea how to deal with the challenges. Personally, I think it is worth it, but it will be a lot of work (and not of machines, but also of humans) and very expensive for Apple. I'd wish they would use more of Openstreetmap and that there would be a benefit for the Openstreetmap community.
Our understanding of the Yahoo/google T&Cs was that we couldn't aim to profit from their data (http://finance.yahoo.com/badges/tos). We may be being overcautious but we didn't want to risk getting into trouble ;-)
You could keep the strategy hidden but allow users to follow the output signals. There are some sites which already do this or similar for both fundamental and technical strategies. Motley Fool comes to mind: http://caps.fool.com/
I'm not sure whether you're specifically talking about Google's maps on iOS or not, but Google's web and Android maps clients both provide bus and train times for much of the UK.
Worked pretty well for us, already spotted a couple of funny css bugs on our home page on IE7 (of course)
My experience has been about a month.
Isn't the TomTom data really the Tele Atlas data set?

Apple has no lack of hubris - in some things they succeed spectacularly beyond all expectations, and in others - well MobileMe, Ping, and now Maps...
Possibly. If you integrate with a trading platform you could always let other users subscribe to a strategy without knowing what the strategy is (eg they only know it's gained X% vs the S&P 500 in the last few months, the author's profile and that 5000 other users have 5MM invested in this strategy). However I have a feeling that a) the money from commissions and b) the feeling of being at the top of a list will compel a lot of people to share their strategies - people blog about their stock picks constantly. Also I'd love to see some left-field data about these companies eg: Google search volume, Wikipedia edits/day, mentions on Twitter, press releases, sentiment analysis of news articles etc...
That's both wonderful and scary. I think the UI of it needs work -- if you want to treat all shell commands as functions, they imho should just return their outputs by default. (Potentially as a lazy list of lines?)

Also, I think that path should not be passed in as an environment variable, but in Clojure somehow. There's no reason for a program to pollute a global namespace with it's internal details.
> I think Apple could do more human QA if it was a priority.

Only if they realized it. It took Google 3 years to realize that they couldn't solve it algorithmically.
But why? OSM is not really used by Apple in the current map app, AFAIK.
There's plenty worth criticizing about Apple, but you didn't even mention radar://

1) "Social Experiences" - Ping failed where... who succeeded?

2) "Data Harvesting and Search" - These are two terms that are either exactly the same, or extremely different. Neither points at a clear criticism. You realize Apple pioneered desktop search, right?

3) "Data synchronization" - Where's the problem, exactly? Is there any company other than Dropbox that can claim the crown for this? Do you know how hard this is? Who is third place after Apple's second?

4) "and Security" - Again. Huh?

5) I'm terribly sorry you had a software failure and only had a single solitary backup of 8GB of your vital that was difficult to retrieve when Apple was clearly spiking 8 petabytes of traffic in one day. In this clearly entirely hypothetical scenario you've invented.

I hate defending the only company that finally brought UNIX to the desktop just because I happen to wear designer glasses.
Personally, I'd quite like it to work in places that I'm going to travel to as well.

I'm also in the same city for the vast majority of the year, but I already know how to get from home to work and back.
That's a very interesting idea. We've looked at Collective 2 and Currensee as they've done some similar things. Very interesting...
The SBB should be careful. If Apple's unhappy, they can move the rail lines into the nearest river. They have that power now.
Casablanca: C++ on Azure
Stocktwits also has some similar vibes, there are a few others and I can't remember the specific one I was thinking of right now..

http://stocktwits.com/
MSYS is much more workable than Cygwin, but it's still not a panacea. More of a placebo really.
Are Bing Maps this horrible? Couldn't they license those if they didn't have a choice? Or what about MapQuest? What about the maps used by GPS units? Couldn't they have made a deal with Garmin or Tomtom or someone like that? It may have taken more work than integration with Google, but it'd almost definitely take less work than starting from scratch. I definitely do not believe that their hands were tied and they were forced into creating their own shoddy, incomplete system.

On top of all that, I think Google has more business intelligence than to actually let the contract for iOS maps go. Maybe both sides were just bluffing and never thought the one party would cut the other loose, or something like that, but you'd think with a deal this big at some point someone would come back with their tail between their legs and reopen negotiations.

Of course, it's all speculation at this point anyway. It'd be nice if someone with knowledge could come in here and elucidate, though the likelihood of that is really small.
That's great. Next step is implementing piping :-)
It goes something like this:

Some manager sees a problem at work and mentions it to his golfing "buddy" at the 19th hole, who is a consulting senior partner at some management consulting company.

A week later he gets a call from his golfing buddy inviting him to discuss those problems over lunch. A proposal is made and the manager then contracts the management consulting company to do an "investigative study".

Consultant(s) are flown in from various distant places and disrupt the business with lots of inane questions for two weeks. Managing partner appears onsite on the first day and last day (if you are lucky). The junior management consultant is then tasked to write up a report, that the senior manager puts his name to.

The invoice arrives for 1 million dollars. Report doesn't get read by the business and nothing changes. Management consultancy blames business for ignoring advice.

Cycle goes on. Golf gets played. Drinks at the bar, manager spills his guts about problems at work to his management consultant golf buddies, who are just a little less drunk than he is. Expenses accounts get charged.

The long con....

N.B. You will notice that the management consultancy expense account is charged when reeling in the client at the golf club bar, whilst the expense account of the "mark" starts to be charged when the ink on the contract is still wet.
The article actually breaks down the exact lacunae in Apple's approach - it's certainly has more map domain specific insight than all the other articles on iOS6 Maps put together. And it has recommendations which are very specific and not hand-wavy.

From the article

1. Completeness – Features are absent and some features that are included seem to have erroneous attributes and relationships.

2. Logical Consistency - Expecting the data across different sources to be completely consistent ie 'An example of this could be having a store’s name, street number and street name correct, but mapping it in the wrong place'

3. Positional Accuracy – is considered the closeness of a coordinate value to values accepted as being true

4. Temporal Accuracy – particularly in respect to temporal validity – are the features that they map still in existence today?

5. Thematic Accuracy – particularly in respect to non-quantitative attribute correctness and classification correctness.
My guess would be QA found lots of problems, reported them, fought for them, and, at the end of the day, deadlines are deadlines and the maps app shipped. QA is not some magical barrier and usually is overridden when a go/no-go decision meets are hard ship date (like 'this device must be released now because there's an entire supply chain and retail chain that needs to be coordinated').
I found this to be a quite good resource:

philipbloom.co.uk

Philip Bloom has become kind of the Paul Graham of the "DSLR video shooting" movement.
I thought Apple did have a relationship with Tomtom for this?
Two to three weeks on my unique attempt since I reported it. Maybe because it was a major location, in Westminster there was an Iceland store showing on top of Parliament Square.
Here are a few things that work for me:

- Limit the number of hours you're in front of a screen during the day.
- Don't look at any screen past 5 p.m
- Don't exhaust yourself mentally during the day, stay focused.
- Exercise regularly.
− Go outside.
- Don't concentrate on hard problems a few hours before going to bed. Relax.
Assembly Programming with Visual Studio 2010/2012
I built something similar for my own personal use, so it's very interesting to see something similar polished for mass consumption.

The only thing I'm confused about is what you get in the Pro version..

"3 Months of Unlimited Access to Every Area of QuantBlocks"

How is the user supposed to know what "every area" is? How could anyone expect to know what they get with a subscription? Most importantly, how could they know if a particular symbol would be available in the pro version, what about futures, forex, etc?
I don’t understand why Apple made such blatant mistake. The clock app wasn’t included on the iPad and an alternative version clearly missing on the Appstore.

This version of click is well made, simple to use as this kind of app should be..

Borrowing the design of very well known clock is a good idea too.

But Mondaine (the owner of that design) have licensing option already in place :
http://www.mondaine.com/private-label/

So clearly Apple could have just bought the licence of this design.

But they could also have taken this opportunity to ask worldwide watchmaker to give their clockface designs for the official Apple Clock application.

I am sure every watchmaker in the world would have paid without questions. After all they are all spending millions in magazine adverts.

I don’t understand the position of Apple just after the Samsung lawsuit.

The result is to show Apple being arrogant once more and it put the company in a mismatch branding situation that could have been avoided.

Clearly somebody at Apple is not doing his / her job.
Are you saying it doesn't matter if you are targeting legally protected classes specifically or if you are cutting off access to a wider group that includes them?

What is a sythetic transaction in this context? I tried googling it but couldn't find a good definition.
And what is hard to believe for US citizens last summer was relatively COLD globally - only slightly above 1950-1980 average: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_la...
It's funny that you mention it because, as Rob said, we've been playing with the idea of adding a competitive edge, but the commissions is a cool idea. We were also considering a kind of achievements approach as well as a leaderboard but want to try and keep the idea of it as a tool as opposed to a toy.

Love the data idea, in fact surplus of data is already a bit of an issue; we're running out of screen real-estate.
I suspect it's almost entirely native English speakers making this mistake. Those who learn their English as an acquired language are taught about this sort of thing, and it's known intellectually.

Native English speakers just rattle stuff out, and don't know any explicit rules (and their exceptions) to go back, re-read, and check.
Think of Delicious or Flickr. "Having ruined them" might be exaggeration, but still not far from the truth either.
US Will Spend $3-$7/Gallon Of Gasoline "Saved" By Consumers Driving Electric
Yes, Tele Atlas was acquired by Tom Tom about 5-6 years ago, so it is the same.
Why do you need a Mac to run iOS betas? Does iTunes for Windows no longer support loading firmware updates from a file? You can register device UDIDs on the developer program Web site, and extract the first firmware file from .dmg with any one of several utilities on Linux and Windows, so I'm not sure why you'd need a Mac, unless Windows can no longer flash iOS devices.
I still don't understand how Kickstarter is different from Pledgie, from which has been around for much longer. At first I thought that Kickstarter would hold the funds for the backers and return the funds if the project fails, but that appears not to be the case. How is Kickstarter anything more than a Donate button, a donation counter and a mailing list?
So what if we said "3 Months of Unlimited Access to Every Daily Upgrade" ??

We're doing daily agile upgrades so we're trying to communicate that they'll get access not only to ALL of the global equities data, but also all of the updates that we make in terms of ability to save strategies, indicators, etc.
>It's just the first iteration. Apple works that way.

Sure, all software works this way. We all know the "release early, release often" mantra. The difference is that Apple replaced functionality that many users depended upon with something completely inadequate. It'd be like Sun or IBM going in and replacing all the super specialized custom microprocessors in your server farm with experimental souped-up 386es. Sure, they're the same type of thing, and hypothetically they should serve the same function, but you don't just go out and replace completely functional stuff without at least the basics firmly in place.

It is clear that Apple released iOS Maps very prematurely, mid-development. This was stupid, and there's really no use splitting hairs about it. Some bugs or problems are to be expected, but a critical function that most of your users depend upon, that has real, serious consequences if failure occurs (lost in a dark alley, etc. etc.) ought to be better than what Apple has put out. Add to this Apple's draconian policies that forbid Google from offering "Google Maps" as a third-party app on the App Store (though I guess today it looks like they may be waffling a bit on this), and you have a very serious problem.

I guess we can say that it may be good for Android adoption. :)
I think it can be summed up as:

In the past we didn't know technology, but we knew people. In the Present we don't know people, we know technology.

I leave you with this example from shit_hn_says:

https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/236755578901393408
You can limit the number of slots per reward, which is essentially the same.
Yeah, we love stocktwits :)
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Apple is smarter than this. They would not have released such a half-baked replacement unless they were forced to. I suspect Google refused to renew knowing Apple were working on a replacement but were not yet ready.

This is Apple's "Vista" moment and will inevitably draw the "wouldn't have happened under Jobs" comments. How Apple recovers will form business school study material for years to come.
I have been member since 99. Best community for a long time. Last years it had less activity.
3 Cardinal Sins When Selling The Cloud
Depends on their bus factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
"All models are wrong, but some are useful." George EP Box.

I put that quote on the front page of my masters thesis.
Did they also have you in separate cars?
Your time investment goes without saying. It's the other expenses that matter.

People don't go around saying: "this latte cost me $48 dollars -- $8 dollars for the latte and 1 hour of my time ordering and drinking it at Starbucks".

Not to mention that people also have free time. It's not as if you're making money when you are off of work (except if you have a passive income scheme, in which case you keep making them even while you go around shooting a movie).
Moving Cloud Technologies to the Wide Area Network Layer
I don't think 3-4 years is a crazy estimate. This is pretty cutting edge stuff. If you hadn't already seen it, the Atlantic piece on the technology is a fantastic read: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...

On the other hand, this actually is one of the rarer problems where throwing 10,000 contract workers from India for 5 months could solve much of the problem, especially since Google has already paved the way on the harder parts.

What I really want to see is a serious quality comparison between Apple and OSM.

edit: And the million dollar question... How much of Google's map data was correlated/verified against iPhone positioning data?
Yes, you're apparently right: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/11/apple-tomtom-ios-6-maps/

I'm not sure what all that deal entails, so it's hard to say whether it could have been better executed upon, other than to say it's clearly not ready yet. I find it hard to believe, however, that all of the incorrect placement of destinations and, in some cases, even the inclusion of destinations that have not existed for decades, also occur in TomTom's car navigation systems.
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