skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People survived the industrial revolution, but horses largely didn't, because for the first time ever we had machines that could replace them in nearly all of their niches. People have never been threatened in this way, even as particular industries disappeared there was mostly enough menial work to retreat to that required a little too much perception and decision-making to automate. What do they do when all menial work can be done by some machine that doesn't eat or sleep or complain? We're finally starting to raise the bar on how clever and creative you must be to be relevant on the job market, and a growing number of people are inevitably going to fall below it.
And that pesky thing about not having jurisdiction over all the computers in the world.
It seems 'Democracy' will be coming to NZ soon.
I will call it a patent war, not a jihad (I'm tired of reading religious analogies attached to technology, they are an easy trick to perform on the readers mind)

And, you know, there are PLENTY of companies involved in patent wars and we don't routinely position them on the "obsessed against their competition" category. They are just litigious. In some of the examples you mention the Android manufacturers are the ones suing Apple, not the other way around. Are they "obsessed" with Apple?. Are they carrying a jihad against Cupertino, as well?
It's overblown because if Apple were really upset at Samsung they wouldn't be supplying parts for iPhone 5. Remember, according to court filings Apple approached Samsung first to try to settle it before resorting to legal means.
How do you define "smart"? Is your girlfriend simply just a better person than you are or she's just more intelligent?

Intelligence is usually something you inherit or you get as a gift, when you're born. Being smart or stupid works the same with being short or tall. Not exactly something that you can change.

It's stupid to judge ourselves or other people by these premises. It's smart to judge people by the way work with these premises. You can be very intelligent and endup doing a lot of bad things or you can be stupid as hell but do good and add real value to the world.

So don't bother yourself anymore. Love her, don't lie to hear, fuck her well and make her laugh. You'll be just fine.
Meh, nothing is going to happen. We'll probably never hear the results of the outcome of the inquiry. If NZ Police are involved, they'll just take their sweet merry time until we all forget about it and then move onto something else.
> If you cannot go forward on the current path, and standing still is not an option, the only possible move is take a step back and find a new route. Simple as that. Painful, sure, but it had to be done sooner or later.

Of course, they have good reasons to make their own mapping infrastructure. However, working on it does not mean they have to release it before it's ready (and it clearly isn't). They could have used the old Google maps app for iOS 6 (maybe with some surface tweaks), while continuing to work on getting their own maps into some sort of reasonable shape. Maybe they would have had to pay inflated fees to Google or something, but they certainly have the money to do that in the short-term. Of course the Google maps app has its own issues, but people are very used to it; continuing to use it on iOS 6, wouldn't have taken people by surprise or generated such an enormous amount of negative press for Apple.

The other possibility is that they didn't realize how poor a shape their maps were in. If that's the case, it's far more worrying, because it means they're in way over their heads, and suggests that the effort required to fix things is likely to be enormous.

Apple is usually closed mouthed, and tends to adopt a position of "trust us, really, we know what we're doing." Unfortunately that doesn't work so well in a case like this where they pretty clearly don't know what they're doing...
> You get the simplest code in the least effort if you solve each problem at the appropriate layer. People who never look down into the layers below them end up with lots of unnecessary duplication and cruft.

Well said. True in general, but especially when you're working on some middle layer of a large scale project, it really pays off to understand what's going on at least on the adjacent layers.
the old Maps app was perpetually stuck in 2007 while Android phones gained 3D views and (much more important) vector maps and turn by turn navigation

I don't need or care about 3D view or vector maps or turn-by-turn navigation (although I see how the last one could be useful for a lot of users). I, like most city dwellers, need directions that take public transit into account. I can't believe Apple released an "upgrade" which downgrades such critical functionality.
The argument that Apple needs their own map for strategic reasons is fine, but it doesn't explain why they needed to ship it before it was any good. I can imagine three explanations:

(1) They think they need to start gathering user-generated map content. "Add your business to Apple Maps if you want iPhone users to find it."

(2) An internal struggle at Apple. If the supporters of the maps project thought it was at risk of getting dropped, they might have pushed it out the door to make it harder for the company to back down.

(3) They didn't realize quite how bad it was. Just because customers started finding hilarious problems on days one doesn't mean they're trivially easy to find. With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
I certainly agree that if you are thinking carefully about the code, either way should work just fine. As someone who likes C and Python I understand that both ways can make robust software, and it took me a little time to accept exceptions at all. More broadly, most of the languages that are widely used can write decent software.

I think this is a matter of what you prefer the program to do by default, when something clearly wrong has happened, but no error-handling code has been written: you may prefer such code to halt, or you may prefer it to keep on trucking.

If you use exceptions, you have to think about it IF you want the program to keep on trucking. Otherwise you can just let exceptional circumstances take care of themselves - if the program stops immediately, it cannot then behave incorrectly.

As a default failure mode, I do prefer the program to halt and decline to further cock up the situation (forcing me and my tests to deal with the condition) than for the program to silently swallow the error and continue as a default (forcing me to thoroughly check error codes everywhere up front out of pure fear that I will miss a condition).

This is just a convention and either one works.

If Go can become a better version of C then I might switch out C for Go. This isn't by any means going to cause me to give up Python because I use C for very specific reasons (when it is totally OK for reasons of speed or control to write a decent amount more code, and have it read more cryptically, and have to take care of many more low-level details).
Well right, I get all of that.

Just to be clear though, there is no point "adding" exceptions to Go because the functionality is already there, just named something else and meant to be used in a completely different way?
Brad gave an interesting talk at the GoSf meetup. For anyone curious about Go, I recommend going to this. Not to mention airbnb runs a smooth meetup.
This works great. It's fast and responsive. Just one comment/request: Maybe allow the user to position the web searches at the bottom of more relevant items in the result. So for example, if I search gmail, it should be the first item. Right now, the first 4 items are : Search 'gmail' using Browser, Search 'gmail' using Chrome, Search 'gmail' using Dolphin, Search 'gmail' using Firefox. Then gmail shows up. If i had a smaller phone, I'd have to scroll down to see the most relevant item.
I agree that the obsession against Google is hurting Apple, but I also feel that Apple is not the only company with a vendetta against Google. Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, Mozilla, and Dropbox are a few names that come to mind off of the top of my head. One thing that all of these companies have in common is that they had a product, and Google came though (or is coming) with its machine to copy/paste it as a Google product (Android, Buzz, Google+, Chrome, Google Drive).

Granted--That's what Google does; They take a product like search, mail, or maps and make it a lot better. Most of what Google creates up is top notch, but I think that Google may actually be the company isolating themselves from the rest of the software development community in the long run.
Ahh yes, so we are all really going to ditch Facebook and Twitter for Google+ soon? I kinda doubt it

"Although Google+ may have as little as 10% of the active users of Facebook, it’s growing faster than Facebook ever did. And more importantly, Google+ has a vastly superior user experience to Facebook and has a much brighter longterm future, in my opinion."
To summarize the article:

1. There have been many successful labour actions in the last 3 years, mostly for higher wages. However, the demands have not been for better living conditions.

2. Most factory workers are migrants, and as such, their social lives back home are separated from their economic lives in the coastal cities where they work. In addition, obvious political movements are strongly suppressed, so the workers present their strikes as solely economic. These prevent strong activist movements for workers' rights from developing.

3. Recently, companies have been moving factories towards the source of the migrant workers: the interior. The author thinks that from this merging of workers' social and economic livelihoods, the workers' rights movement will bloom and lead to a true leftist movement in China.
This article makes a legitimate point about the maps application. But I don't get the strange tangent on Google+ — why would anyone expect Apple to anoint the social network of a competitor which isn't even that popular?
...the obvious interpretation of this is that when Apple built the iPhone they licensed Google Maps but with the clause "the iPhone cannot do turn-by-turn"

This is from Google's Maps/Earth API TOS:

10.2 (c) No Navigation, Autonomous Vehicle Control, or Enterprise Applications:

(i) real time navigation or route guidance, including but not limited to turn-by-turn route guidance that is synchronized to the position of a user's sensor-enabled device.

- https://developers.google.com/maps/terms

As far as I know, that clause has always been in the TOS (I looked into the licensing in 2010 and it definitely was in there then).
Glad to save you from a switch to iPhone! Yeah, the Google offerings just don't do what I want in a launcher app. I feel like I did something right because I ended up using the app all the time; it's pretty much my interface for my phone at this point.
Gaming AirBnB in San Francisco courtesy of Rent Control
Really? I remember when I first used Google Maps coming from being a Map Quest user, I was blown away that I could scroll without having to refresh the page.
Okay, but if I am reading correctly, the original post talks about access over the internet due to designed remote upgrade abilities while the URL provided for the entrust.com article says physical access is required.

This parent post looks like a much more thorough threat to me, depending on where the chips are used...
GE Brings Appliance Production Back Home
Y Combinator is a Silicon Valley company that grows other companies
I think you will be surprised how easy it is to convince smart people to do evil work. You just have to make it interesting abstract problem. Big Tobacco and Oil companies have been hiring smart people for decades now.
What is the posts count on Go on Hacker News now? Anyone been counting?
There are quite a few Go tech talks on YouTube that might fill the gap.
Without logging your caloric intake (no estimates, logging everything you eat as it actually is), it is very easy to convince yourself you arent eatng too many calories. Hoewever, for practical matters, if you do not have a significant health issue, if you eat less calories than your body burns you will lose weight. In the vast majority of cases, it really is that simple.

Find an app or website that is easy for you to use and try logging all your food (include snacks and things that you may consider to be "little"). Figure out based on your weight and activity level (be conservative) what you need to eat to lose 1-2 pounds a week and hit the goals If you do this honestly for an extended period of time, you will lose weight.
Correct, I was talking mainly about code that 'works' (i.e. is 'correct', for the given spec) but is highly sub-optimal, confusing, tightly coupled with other code, etc...
Conjure actually learns from your selections. So, if you search for gmail & then tap the Gmail app, it should be the first result the next time you make the same search.
> You have to read the comment to get the error types (isn't compiler accessible), it doesn't list what all the possible error types are (doesn't say the ones documented are exhaustive)

You're absolutely right. People should be able to use libraries without reading their documentation, and instead rely on compile failures to slowly iterate their code towards perfection. /s

Seriously, though, I believe expecting programmers to read documentation of a library they're using is a pretty low bar.

Also, no it doesn't list what all the possible error types are. To do this would require what amounts to checked exceptions in Java. The issues with these are relatively well known.

First, it complicates versioning as adding a new error type is a breaking change for all clients. When they get an error from an API, most clients either return that error verbatim, decorate that error slightly and return the decorated error, or handle a few specific error situations and return an error in all other cases. Declaring all possible error types makes your programs brittle, as it is easy for libraries you are using to break your code.

Second, they are a hassle for larger programs that touch many systems. It is easy to declare that you return an EntityNotFound error. But it is not so easy to declare that you return an EntityNotFound, MemcacheCASConflict, FileNotFound, FileExists, PermissionDenied, Timeout, InvalidJSON, ConnectionClosed, or TemplateRenderingFailed error. This is perfectly reasonable set of errors for a simple method that gets a value from datastore (possible caching it) decoding a field as json, and writing a template to an HTTP connection. Any 'simple' wrapper of this method then inherits all of these declarations. Now certainly with Java, IDEs will "fill in all the forms" for you, so this problem is a little more palatable, but Go does not require programmers to use (often heavyweight) tools to make them productive.

> code returns a singleton error (no state) presumably so the caller doesn't have to do a bunch of casts

This is a little disingenuous, as you don't really know why they made it a singleton error. I can't think of any state that would be useful in this situation, can you?

The Java version of this API throws an exception with a single field, the Key that could not be found. I think this is supremely unhelpful and just adds clutter to the documentation, as the user of this method clearly already has this information in hand.
What worries me is that while Jobs was the one to turn the holy war on, he may have been the only one who could have turned it off again. One of his greatest strengths was his ability to believe something incredibly strongly, but then to change that belief quickly (and, at times, mercurially). Jobs's war on Google would have been hot and nasty, but I think he would have moved on to other things after a while. I worry that the remaining leadership at Apple sees this war as their memorial to Jobs, and will take it far further than might be prudent.
No True Scottsman, etc.
Good points. I already have three methods. This would be one more, in the extremely unlikely event that all the others fail. A fourth backup would be overkill if it wasn't free.
Do you track what you eat? I would be interested to see what your average week of food is like.
The sad thing isn't that we found out they used an illegal warrant, they had suspicious motives, or used illegal wiretapping, but that this comes out purely because this is such a public case. Just think if so much shady business goes on in a case they know will be high profile, how widespread and commonplace these practices must be all around. How many other cases we won't ever hear about because they aren't so scrutinized? Are we yet at a place where officers breaking the law is so commonplace they just don't care or even think about it anymore? Is going by the book something we tell children about, but we all know it never happens?
It's performed by "The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security", a DoJ appointment who must have been a High Court judge, and who has complete access to the documents, premises and staff of the NZSIS and GCSB.

So, there is some hope!
Worth reading all the way through.

> “No disrespect, sir, but I think this poetry crap is pretty useless.”
> This was Troy, another very vocal cadet. Troy often sounded off about
> the worthlessness of “English.” English was his catch-all term for the
> humanities, social sciences, and any mode of intellectual inquiry
> without one “right” answer and some solid practical application, like
> building a bridge or blowing one up.

It's funny how often I run into people in the tech/science/math scene who have similar opinions. Maybe they phrase it differently -- "Why go to college for something like English, or Art, when it's not going to be cost effective" comes up a lot -- but the sentiment is the same. I'll leave the argument that they are worth studying to commenters more intelligent and more eloquent than I am, but I thought it was interesting how similar West Point and the Bay Area were in this respect.
These are all words in the article, let's look at the actual track record, after all in a politician past performance guarantees future performance

Under Obama the NSF and NIH budgets have been flat. As far as the actual practice of science goes, there is no difference between the candidates. We didn't know that five years ago, when it was guaranteed that there was going to be a Democratic president and Congress. Most every university started building projects to expand their aging facilities, considering that Democratic administrations had always been favorable to the sciences and that under Bush II federal funding for the sciences had been flat. The increase in funding didn't happen, and that is part of the reason that US universities are in trouble.
It is worth noting that Google themselves didn't offer turn-by-turn directions until Android 2.0 (October 2009). Interestingly, Google Maps Navigation launched in the US shortly after they had ditched Tele Atlas (owned by TomTom) as a US data provider. It was speculated (though not confirmed, as far as I could find) that Google ended the relationship because it was too expensive/restrictive with respect to turn-by-turn navigation.

That makes me wonder if original turn-by-turn restrictions were Google's idea or a requirement of Google's existing contracts. If so, it's obvious Google decided to continue those restrictions for their own reasons and so history has repeated itself.
Undergraduate or Graduate level?

http://www.degreeinfo.com/forum.php is usually quite helpful for these kind of questions, especially if you have some priorities (i.e. on a budget, time frame, reputation, specific amount of credits, etc)
Not sure what buffer overruns you are referring to, or why this case requires reflection at all.

err := readMessage(reader)
if n, ok := err.(net.Error); ok && n.Timeout() {
// handle timeout
} else if err != nil {
// handle other errors
}

You can see an example of exactly this pattern here: http://golang.org/src/pkg/net/http/server.go?s=29962:30008#L...
Why Learn Go : Rob Pike [video]
The new USB 3.0 power delivery spec supports 3A at 20V over micro-USB for potentially 60 Watts delivered via micro-USB and 100W over USB. The idea is to get rid of laptop charger plugs entirely and replace them with USB. A bunch of companies are on this standard, including Dell, Foxconn, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and Nokia. Apple is absent for some reason. This standard will also allow external hard drives, printers, etc to be powered over USB without a separate power plug.

This will be an interesting change if the standard catches on. I wonder about the failure mode of 60 watts through micro-USB though - I expect dramatic smoke and flame :-)

http://www.usb.org/press/USB_Power_Delivery_Spec_Completion_...
I think "why did they ship the new maps app before it was ready?" is the most interesting question about this whole debacle.

I don't think they actually gather user-generated map content via iOS maps, so (1) doesn't make much sense to me.

(2) strikes me as weird reasoning. If there's a good argument that Apple needs their own maps, enough to justify the acquisitions, it doesn't seem likely that the project would get dropped.

I don't think (3) makes sense: they cut out critical functionality like public transit in directions. I don't see a reason to ship something which reduces useful features unless there was a very compelling reason.

I think the most likely reason was actually pressure of some kind from Google's side.
I agree with you, it'd drive me crazy for a long article. It would be really useful as a bookmarklet for presentations or something though.
Hey Mark,

Went back through and cleaned things up. Thanks for the suggestion!
Cool. Thanks again. Also just came across this question on stackexchange http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/165380/how-to...

Quoting part of the top answer here:

"""
Here is a partial list:

Use the language all day, every day. Usually this means being full-time employed in the language.

Read all you can about the language. Especially, "best practices" and idioms.

Join a users group to talk with others about the language and what they do with it.

Work with other people's code! There is no faster way to learn what not to do in a language than to have to clean up after someone did something awful.

Support the code you write - every bug becomes a tour of your worst decisions!

Study computer science and languages in general

Learn a very different language. A great compliment to C would be a functional language like Lisp. This will turn the way you think about your procedural language inside out.

Learn to use the frameworks and APIs available for that language.

Take the time to do your own experiments with the language. SICP is not applicable to C, but the attitude of learning a language by testing its limits is a very productive one.

Read the history of the language to learn why it was made the way it is.

Attend conferences to hear the language authors speak, or to hear what industry leaders are doing with the language.

Take a class in the language.
"""
I think the point is that if those are always the first 4 choices for every new query, it could get annoying quickly. Also, aren't those 4 suggestions redundant? Shouldn't it just have a single "search the web" suggestion, which pops up the standard browser selection dialog and allow the user to choose the default?