skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An oldie but a goodie.

Mandatory warning: please don't use those unless you really know what you're doing. Most modern CPUs have instructions for computing all of that stuff and the compiler will try to use them. Those clever hacks might actually hurt both readability and performance if they're misused.

Typically on PC architectures (and even on most modern embedded systems) you shouldn't have to use those hacks.
Who at Fortune deserves to be fired for its recent long string of incredibly idiotic articles about Apple, which have been panned here and elsewhere, then?

I think the new Maps app is fantastic; the data accuracy leaves a bit to be desired, but I notice that those doing the most high-profile complaining point to errors in rural England, rural Ontario, etc. Here in the Bay Area, the data is working fine for me as well.

It is not shocking to me that a map database that is a few months old is less mature than one like Google's, which is the product of a decade's effort, and also the product of 5 years' worth of improvements riding the back of iOS users' crowd-sourced data. Now Apple has that data coming into its database, instead of flying out the door to Google's.

Maps is likely to improve, and fast.

In any case, blaming Forstall is idiotic and talking about firing him is Fortune-level idiotic. He made great things at NeXT, Mac OS X is great, Siri is great, and Maps is a work in progress that shows great promise.

Have you tried reloading map data and zooming in and out on maps in Google Maps vs. Apple Maps in an area with EDGE or otherwise bad internet coverage? Apple's app wins hands-down versus reloading non-vector map tiles.
$150 or $1000 might be enough to swing the decision about where to incorporate for some instances but for most that is a rounding error. And anyway, all expenses that you are going to have should be part of your businessplan when you're at the go/no go stage. If $800 scares you then you're not doing business.
I'm aware of what "anecdotally" means, that is exactly why I qualified my statement with the word "anecdotally".
Lots of Star Trek is silly. The ship battles were often weird, and their small-unit tactics were simply laughable.

I don't try to rag on it too much for that, though. I just view it as a stepping stone for better space drama.
From bad to worse
> Maps, however, is crucial to most people that use an iPhone

Citation please. Nobody I know uses google maps, even when we travel (which is a lot).
If they were "close friends", they're not going to drop you just because you got canned. Good people get fired all the time. It's about as unremarkable as a bad rainstorm. Shit... another one of these.

Most companies are shitty and most people know most companies are shitty and aren't going to ostracize someone just because their employer fired that person.

You are best off if you have an offline form of contact. Don't expect them to let the company know that you're still in contact with them, because that's not a fair expectation (they could be endangering their own reputations) but they'll usually be in contact with you offline.
This is great news. I've always appreciated Wikitravel, and only wished it caught on a bit more. With Wikimedia behind it I'm sure it will.

Incidentally, my favorite use of Wikitravel has nothing to do with travel -- using it for a more candid or colorful take on a place than the drier treatment you'll find on its Wikipedia page. A Wikitravel page often leads with facts and images that IMHO are more interesting than stats, rankings, etymology, and history (which is how most Wikipedia place articles start).
مشاهدة جنازة احمد رمزى يوتيوب وصور وفيديو من هنا
A Spectacle fork on the HN front page* was the reason I submitted Slate (which I also have no affiliation with).

Now the circle is complete!

The more attention paid to these excellent apps, the better. We sorely need a solid, mature, and open tiler on OS X. Slate is the best option I've used so far, and by far the most thought-out, featureful, and configurable, but it's not perfect. I've run into memory leaks a few times and some of the features are still a little quirky.

*: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4589446
"I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next." - Steve Jobs
Except even with those phones (now called 'garakei'), the software was still awful, and the ecosystem was still locked shut -- getting an app onto the phone took a lot of sweat, and a lot of connections.
I would agree with this suggestion. The article categorizes everything from modifying phones to illegal and wrong activities such as theft and spying as hacking. Things will always be used for purposes different from their original intent because humans are resourceful and care about their own wills. Neither humans nor nature care what the original creator's intentions might have been- our eyes may be "intended" for sight but worms will evolve to use these eyes as food and housing- and it's nonsense to label these worms or their evolution as good or evil. Hacking is an idea that will always occur because it's part of nature, which has no sense of justice. Morality only comes in with how we humans use our ideas. For example, the making of a knife from a toothbrush is not illegal, even if it offends the sensibilities of the toothbrush designer, but the use of this knife to harm another person is illegal.
Funny you mentioned Yodobashi because I actually stayed 5 minutes away from Shinjuku station when I was in Tokyo and did stumble into it when I was roaming the streets.

My impression of Akiba?

Interesting no doubt and you are right in a sense that they are probably closest to the "electronic-focus Japan" that we imagined but it was still filled with the same Chinese, Korean or Taiwanese branded stuff. My point is, gone are the domination of Japanese branded electronics (with maybe the exception of Sony) in these sort of places in Japan.
Could it be that he got fired from Facebook for the same reason as well? For founders, this seems like an easy way to guard themselves against dilution.

Nobody is perfect. Be it life or work, we all do mistakes. It is easy to disillusion ourselves or justify ourselves, that others were right. In this occasion, it is probably easy for Noah to relate to few things that didn't go well and assume them as reasons for getting fired.

If Mark Zuckerberg used this tactic so that he could have more value for his stocks at the end of the day, then it is quite a disgusting one. I have great respect for Mark. I hope it is not true.

If so many people were fired, then clearly there was a problem with hiring the right people.
> To be fair, this really only applies to GPL licensed stuff and similar licenses.

I think I made my use of the term "open source" clear in the context of the original, i.e. to refer to GPL.
What i am not able to gather is why computation in ruby , we already have scipy which is widely used and known in scientific community . There is no advantage than ease of writing , but python is already great in this area .
Turing's Cathedral

Darwin Among the Machines

Technomanifestos

Possiplex

What Technology Wants

A couple of not computer related, but quite interesting books-

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
$100-125/sqft is roughly new construction cost for suburban housing in the US.
Yes, in those fields we literally "do write software more than anything" [else we do]. That is, most of what we're doing is writing software. So the fact that there's no formal training is a huge waste.
Thanks man, appreciate that, and I hear you. I tried to maintain my cool and approach it as diplomatic and honestly as I could. This has been brewing for awhile and we have never responded, so I wanted to give as much context as possible. There is still much that could be said, but we'll save that for another time. I truly think all of us are just interested in making stuff on the Internet, and that's all I really care about: making awesome stuff with awesome people. Thanks again. <3
I wouldn't say they write software more than anything. I would say that there's a steadily increasing amount of time and energy invested into writing software, and very poor coding practices are used because of their lack of a formal grounding in CS and their short-term focus on obtaining the results necessary to publish their next paper and/or obtain their graduate degree.
It sounds like he got a severance package that includes non-disparagement, in which case he should say nothing.

If there's no severance, then he can air all the dirty laundry you want. Whether he wants to is up to him.
In my experience this also applies to failures and other things that don't turn out so well. If you make a mistake, don't spend more time thinking about it than is necessary to figure out what went wrong and fix those mistakes. Learn from it and keep going.
A bit like the old iPod Classic and its Games on iTunes, then?
Stranger still, it is said that the stitched leather theme was modeled after the upholstery in Jobs' Gulfstream jet! [0] Both iCal on OS X and Find My Friends on iOS have the same motif.

“But before Forstall, it was Steve Jobs who encouraged the skeuomorphic approach, some say. “iCal’s leather-stitching was literally based on a texture in his Gulfstream jet,” says the former senior UI designer. “There was lots of internal email among UI designers at Apple saying this was just embarrassing, just terrible.”

[0] http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-softwa...
Steve Jobs added Google Maps to the original iPhone just weeks before unveiling
His conversations end in "yer fired!".
Newsflash: A lot of people live in rural England, rural Ontario and Rural Holland. Besides, it can't find places like central station in Amsterdam (hardly rural). I don't care whether it's the app or the data, I don't care that it's working great in the bay area. What I do care about is that I had a perfectly working mapping solution, and now I have a second class thing that's just not working. I don't know about you, but IMHO having wrong directions is even worse than having no directions.
On the other hand, I live at the bottom of a hill, 100ft from a traffic light. A new development opened up at the top of the hill, and now SUVs barrel down the hill at >50mph, see the green light, and accelerate. The speed limit is 25mph.

So when I hear about communities in Palo Alto "viscously" blocking traffic, I wonder if perhaps they are simply attempting to return traffic levels that were present when they bought their houses to raise their children.
I actually support "vicious" speedbumps. People regularly drive 40 mph on my road which has official speed limit of 25 mph.

Instead of spending money policing main streets, I support draconian camera-driven enforcement on side streets.

Make unmarked google-maps-like cars with high quality cameras and software. Park it on streets and watch for traffic. Send tickets remotely to speeders (equivalent to running a red light). Split revenue with the city.

Hmm, maybe I should run this by my city council. :)
Here is my thought process...

Regardless of how you feel about PHP, I've spent enough time with it that I can make it work and write good code, quickly.

I do want to switch to another language at some point (I'll leave the reasoning for that out of this discussion).

Why switch to Python 2.7 if it's going to be old in a year or two? Even if there isn't a huge difference between 2.7 and 3.x it sounds like it would be a nightmare trying to upgrade any of the old work that I would have done in 2.7. So either I've got some projects that will be on 2.7 forever, or I go through the hassle of trying to upgrade. I'd rather just wait and avoid the whole debacle.
I hope so, but why not do the right thing in the default identity provider?

Lately, there have been tons of high-profile hacks that boiled down to taking control of victim's email and resetting passwords to other accounts. What's seems to be the best response possible from web developers? Is it:

a) Demand that all your users use Gmail with enabled two-factor authentication, then smugly blame them for all security issues if they don't.

b) Stop using emails for password resets, since you don't really know how trustworthy your users' email providers are.
Given the average eCPM of $1.00-2.00 from AdSense, that account earned between $1m and $2m in its lifetime. This is probably the only company in the world that can shut down such a high earning account with a template no-reply email with no explanation and no recourse for even a simple phone call. This is what monopoly means in practice. Such a Shame!
This is just flatly bad advice. Entity selection and the decisions that come with it should be made very early in the process or it can have very negative unforeseen consequences down the road.

Education and clarity is important in any new business venture, especially one that involves multiple parties. If nothing else, a good buy-sell agreement is crucial in avoiding misunderstanding and back blood if one party wants out.

Liability protection is also hugely important. What startup doesn't need a bank account? Separation of entity an personal assets and liability is a big deal and should be meticulously maintained and documented from inception. This discipline is hard to pick up late in the game, and there's no reason for it.

Also, if your attorney is recommending a C corp as your best choice of entity, you either have a very unusual situation or a bad attorney.
Python 3.3.0 Release
I've seen each VP (except Mansfield) talk in person and I have gotten a very different impression of Forstall. He was one of the most impressive VPs in my eyes (he talked a lot about his passion for bettering accessibility and making life-altering impacts with iOS).
Getting fired itself is not a big deal because companies rarely give bad references. A bad reference not only makes a defamation suit a slam-dunk, but it puts them at a severe disadvantage in a he-said/she-said termination suit, and those can run into the millions.

Being unemployed in a down market (regardless of the kind of termination) is bad, and short job tenures become damaging after a while. Also, if there isn't a severance package, it can hit you financially. 2-4 months without a salary is a pretty serious cost.

So I'd generally agree with what you are saying-- the probability that getting fired will seriously fuck up your life is low-- but being fired is still best avoided.
Interesting: Ubuntu 12.04 I suppose.

I have CentOS 6.3 on my 'must just work' PC, and play around on the laptop, which currently has Debian on.
Speed bumps are great up until you need an ambulance or fire truck to get to you quickly.
I used it three times yesterday.
Because they just went in beta and there's tons of other stuff to iron out first?
In the dsPIC family, any RP pin is routable to any peripheral. Most GPIO pins are also RP pins.
I replied this somewhere else but just a note that I was staying about 5 minutes away from Shinjuku station so I did stumble along into Akiba backstreets when I was there. Also, when I was in Osaka, I visited DenDen City! All of these places are probably the closest thing to what I imagined when I was young but my point remains that I expected loads of unique Japanese branded electronics but was surprised (and underwhelmed) to see the same Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese branded stuff I see anywhere else around the world.

p/s: I'm probably not your typical "foreigner" since my heritage is Asian, I speak passable Japanese and I had one of those pocket mobile wifi thingamajig (GlobalAdvanceComm) so that I could use Google Maps to find my way around.
The biggest issue with Siri was the same as with the current Maps blunder, where it works well for US users, but causes issues for everyone else.

There are some videos of non-native English speakers trying to use Siri on their new 4s (before additional languages were added), which are quite funny actually.

The same goes for the new Maps, which seems to have most of its issues related to countries outside the US.

But especially with iOS6, it's actually the first time for me personally where I feel like I'm downgrading my device instead of upgrading it: youtube app - gone, maps - replaced with inferior alternative, ...
True, and I granted that point already. However, a lot of people live in China, too, and it's being widely reported that Apple Maps is much better than Google Maps' data, in China. I'll just give one link, but a little googling around proves the point quite well:

http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/gadget/314283/apple-maps-bet...

You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of errors.

And what you have now is both Google Maps (via Safari), and also a new Maps app that is internally superior and relies on a less-mature dataset which will mature quickly and give Google some much-needed motivation to improve its data as well. I'm not sure why this is such a big disaster.

Edit: By the way, Apple Maps finds Amsterdam Centraal (not "Central") Station just fine, if you spell it correctly. I just checked; it finds the exact same place as Google Maps.
> One-line installers are fine. Automatic upgrades are not

Are you talking about minor-version upgrades, security patches, etc? Or any kind of upgrade? I think there's a big difference.

In the case of minor-version upgrades or security patches, what exactly is apt-get taking away from you?
Ideas on CBC Radio did a good documentary about this.

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2012/08/07/all-in-the-famil...
I thought this sounded familiar:

http://nerdtwilight.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/apples-steve-jo...
> For founders, this seems like an easy way to guard themselves against dilution.

I think the most important property of a good leader is behave like an umbrella. Guard the shit and magnify the happiness. If someone takes the stance of firing employees to justify dilution then, in my not so humble opinion, they dont deserve to lead.

>Nobody is perfect. Be it life or work, we all do mistakes.

And be man enough to own up, learn from the mistake and don't repeat it again.

>If Mark Zuckerberg used this tactic so that he could have more value for his stocks at the end of the day, then it is quite a disgusting one. I have great respect for Mark. I hope it is not true.

"I'm a CEO, bitch". Does that sound familiar? The whole of Facebook works with the preamble of "Mark is always right". That sounds more like a dictator than a founder. And a dictator is only interested in his own interests.

>If so many people were fired, then clearly there was a problem with hiring the right people.

Or, the founder just wanted to get work by paying less. Ideally these people should have been hired as contractors. But the founder decided to create an illusion of a long term commitment to compromise on the Cost to the Company.

Disclaimer: I had worked for Facebook, got fed up with the idiocy and resigned after 3 months.
Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?
I use duplicity http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ in conjunction with S3 (and possibly Glacier soon) to store encrypted backups. the data's in "the cloud" but is encrypted.
I've forgone traditional auth in favor of Persona because there are just too many advantages. The user might already have an account, the flow is very good if they don't, it takes literally three minutes to integrate django-browserid (or whatever it's called now) versus skinning quite a few templates for all the login and reset forms, it saves the user from having to remember yet another password, etc etc.

I couldn't be happier with a signin solution. It even complements my legacy solution very well, you can see a demo at http://www.yourpane.com (click "Persona", never mind the email field.)
I just used Spectacle, it work well. Spectable is helpful and easy to use.
But after that, i try Slate. At the beginning, it quite complex to config. But after 5 minutes, i really love Slate. Slate is more flexible then Spectable.
I got lost when the author talked about moving the speed limit from 35 to 25 mph would increase property values by $100k. Seriously?
Defending the maps app as "a few months old" does not excuse the fact that it is not as good as the app it replaced. I'm sure it will improve in the future and may lead to improvements in all map apps as a result of increased competition.

(I've never used Apple Maps.)
email it to yourself
Here (UK) we have speed bumps that are narrow - cars hit the bump, buses ambulances and trucks hit the bump ... though cars in the US are pretty big, so not sure this would work.
Can you elaborate on why you say that?
They pay net 30.
"It's a huge pain in the ass to cars trying to navigate through."

And therefore it's a real pleasure to bike, walk, or take transit.

Having moved away from Berkeley to a city that prioritizes car travel above all else, I find I choose now to drive two blocks rather than walk because it's just unpleasant to get buzzed by cars doing 50 in a 35 on residential streets.
Or the original iPhone, for that matter.
It is being widely reported based on one source (http://anthonydrendel.com/blog/2012/9/24/ios-maps-and-china....) that gets basic facts wrong.
The black text on a dark gray background pretty much told me all I needed to know about the site's designer, but when I got to the first gray text on a dark grey background, I bailed.

What, pray tell, is wrong with black text on a white background? Or at the very least, personal tastes being what they are, any significant contrast between text and background?
I will only support this when we are all required to use self-driven cars that can go twice the normal speed limit safely :)
I think part of the problem with those demos is that perhaps the robot detects humans in the room and I keep reading from their press releases that they do indeed slow down when humans are near and stop entirely when very close.
Whatever script inc.com uses for its bizarre mobile frame doesn't work well on Chrome Mobile. I can't get more than halfway through the story.
Ah, I haven't used any of the dsPICs. Thanks for the info.
Maps are an interesting area for bikeshedding to occur, because any two people can both be experts in their area yet both experience wildly different results.
I really like the overall result of Persona when used for logging into a web site, but has anyone come up with a good way of integrating Persona login with mobile apps or APIs?

I suppose mobile apps would ideally use some sort of Persona login service provided by the underlying OS, and until such a thing exists I guess an app could reimplement all the user-agent logic and load the user's login page in a webview. But I have no idea how at all I would go about designing an API for a website which uses Persona for logins.
I couldn't agree with you more.

When I was in Osaka, I stayed at a backpackers and I met a few young Japanese locals. Between my extremely poor and limited Japanese and their broken English, we were somewhat able to maintain a conversation and I mentioned the same thing to them.

Since it was only a subset of 5 or so people, I wouldn't count it as the general consensus of the Japanese people but they were very aware of how stagnant the big Japanese tech giants (and the country's economy) have become and how Japan is already lagging being China and Korea.

What I did find interesting is that these young blokes blame the government rather than the company themselves.
Citation might be difficult, but since we are doing anecdotal evidence anyway my experience is that most people use maps apps extensively.
No, it didn't have 3rd-party apps aside from web apps on the home screen.
A visual version of a similar analogy: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2012/09/09/progress/