skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not better in every conceivable way. Traffic info in Germany kind of sucks from Google, it's the best you can get (TomTom's traffic info) in Apple's app. Extremely detailed, extremely current.
You're not alone. It has been working well for me, too. But maybe Omaha is well covered or I'm not using it enough.

I have been wondering, though, whether there has been any effort to quantify exactly how bad iOS 6 Maps really are.

I mean: if this topic were about anything else, HN denizens would be quick to lecture us about how all the complaints are coming from a self-selected sample, not a random one, and how the examples are cherry-picked - not necessarily representative, and how the plural of anecdote is not data.

While there are clearly a lot of errors (and some of them very funny) the world is a very, very big place.

So I wonder how bad is "bad", really? What unit(s) of measurement would one use to quantify it? I imagine you would need a different unit of measurement for each kind of error: one for the melted bridge, one for not finding the Starbucks down the street, one for having an airport in the middle of a field...
I think the Skype implementation is in fact complete, just not released yet.
I haet when that happens.
I was going to say that your doctor won't be allowed to prescribe metformin, but I checked and the FDA is fine with your doc independently prescribing drugs for off-label use. The manufacturer of metformin isn't allowed to market it as an anti-cancer drug, but what doctor won't be aware of this?
Inside Facebook's lab: A mission to make hardware open source
I hear you: it sucked. But no matter how much a default setting might suck, it is still a "setting", as in, it can be changed. Unity got Canonical started down a very slippery slope. I can't imagine they're dog-fooding this crap.
Mathematically, you're correct that it isn't necessarily true that half of all current players are losing. It isn't even necessarily true if the pool of players is fixed, since the game being zero-sum doesn't constrain the possible distributions of winners and losers very much. The reality, though, is that the vast majority of players are losing.
it's also not just about the skin being bad, it's about quickly getting updates. That's the bigger problem IMO. Both the phone manufacturer and the carriers seem to hold up updates, sometimes indefinitely. More important than getting TouchWiz/Blur/Whatever off the phone is getting the latest Android bits on the phone. If the manufacturers pushed their skin updates as quickly as Google can push release-ready Android updates I wouldn't care as much (although the recent Samsung security issue still gives us plenty of reasons to hate these customizations anyway)
Can we all please read at least a reasonable portion of the comments before repeating some form of "its insecure because its in the browser!"? Upvote one of the existing comments if you think that's important to talk about here. Yes, there are potential issues with that, and yes it would be wise to instead download the code, peruse it, and then run it locally if satisfied with its security. Now that that's over with, can we talk about some of the interesting aspects of the post?

Have others tried programming a project in one language and transcribing it to another? I work with a fair number of languages, and I find myself falling into a distinctive mindset with each one. Several of the nice idioms I use in one language don't seem like they'd translate well to another. Beyond being an interesting exercise in the mindset behind both languages, are there any benefits to this? It seems like you'd have to cut features you might normally use in the source language until you've reached a union with features from the destination language. It seems like that'd be a pretty tough transition going from a typed and functional language like Haskell to JS.
AT&T Looks to Outside Developers for Innovation
An OS that will soon be used by hundreds of millions of people, with a depleted app store. Seems to me like a huge opportunity for devs, as opposed to following the herd into the overcrowded iOS and android stores.
Email is a federated system just like status.net, rstat.us etc. We can all have our own clients, servers, and still interact, communicate, and play well with every other email server.

Using the same means of locating a person seems very very reasonable from both a technical aspect (it works for them just fine) and from the viewpoint that people already understand that an email address represents somebody's online presence and this is how you can communicate with them. Concept familiarity is extremely important for adoption, so that should be considered.
I'm guessing has to do with the laser. From their FAQ: "Unfortunately, it is not safe to run the laser without the enclosure." Presumably it's powerful enough to fall under differing regulation in each country.
> Putting a @ before a URL tends to look like an email address, which could be very confusing, so we decided on ^

Well, ^https://tent.tent.is looks like an URL which is also confusing. What if I want to mention an URL to somebody?

I'm sorry, but this looks horrible. At least remove the https so it doesn't look like a URL: ^tent.tent.is
Reluctant to overcommit, Sergey clarified, saying "You can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this."

If you count in binary, that could be 31 years. More if you count on knuckles and not just entire fingers as on/off. :)
Are Startup Engineers Untalented?
Allowing out-of-date plugins in Chrome
Pictures can be collected automatically, and accidentally. The standards of proof for criminal and civil law are significantly different; in civil law the standard is 'preponderance of the evidence', in criminal it's 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. Duress refers to an unlawful threat, and does not apply here. Further, a criminal case can fall apart on a wide number of procedural or evidentiary technicalities, many of which go unremarked in press coverage.
> The likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Roger Ailes have had no problem showing Brilliant Jerks the door

Any examples of that?
Imagine an alternate reality where Apple released the Map program with google-grade road and POI[1] data, perhaps even pictures of Scotland that show something other than clouds[2]…

Wouldn't every map app maker cry foul and whine (perhaps with the mouths of lawyers) about Apple using their incumbent (pronounced "monopoly" by lawyers) position to put them out of business?

By launching with sad POI data[3] they enter the map market as the underdog, or at least that cute three legged dog. Virtual immunity from an antitrust meme on the internet. In a couple months they could have a "look how great they are now" meme instead.

Remember what Coca-Cola's president, Donald Keough, said about introducing "New Coke" just to have it reviled and drive people more firmly to Coca-Cola Classic: The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.

EOM

[1] POI is arguably the easiest part of mapping if you have tens of millions of people to enter corrections.

[2] Clouds over Scotland is fixed by writing a couple checks to imagery companies and running your source blender program again.

[3] Without exception, the POI location failures I'm seeing are because the data is wrong in Yelp. Reporting to Apple didn't yield a quick response, reporting to Yelp got it changed in Yelp, but it is still wrong in Maps. It remains to be seen how frequently Apple will update.
I keep thinking a lot of Bret's points are absolutely wonderful food for thought, but blur the line between tool and use of a tool so much that they will never be practical. It is as if he's taking the outcome and suggesting the language should have known the outcome, but the point of coding is to enable all kinds of possible outcomes, and that set is not quantifiable before the fact.
Really?!

That is why you have to import android.support.* versus android.app. Which forces you to have some form of preprocessing in the Java code.

Plus the API for the action bar is still missing from the support library.
Basically for the same reason that this onion article is funny:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...
Those are not commercial vendors.

Still, if you want I can post all the Linux kernel ABI changes.

The changes done in Apache during the 1.x to 2.x transition.

Or many other examples, as they are quite easy to find.
I just found this Firefox add-on today and I'm completely in love:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearly/

Here's what appears to be the Chrome version:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/iooicodkiihhpojmme...

Makes it ridiculously easier to read basically everything on the web.
This is a fascinating response to the Khan academy's curriculum. Some of the things he is raising here are faults of programming languages; I'm still against the idea of positional parameters. Khan Academy's curriculum is Android to Brett's iOS: you can copy some of the features, but it isn't a cohesive whole because the ideology was not as thoroughly internalized.
FWIW I set my own instance of this up for anyone who's getting locked out of the main server.

http://www.feoh.org/1110
I think Gruber said it best:

"I don’t understand why so many reviewers bend over backwards to grade these things on a curve. If Google or Nokia Maps had the problems and deficiencies the Apple Maps have, these same reviewers would (rightly) trash it, and declare (again, rightly) that Google had finally lost its touch.

These aren’t “beta” maps. They’re bad maps. It’s that simple. It’s true that their presentation seems closer to Google-caliber than their data, but improving the data is the hardest part of making maps like these. By the time Apple releases “a serious update or three” the entire market will have changed. The truth is, Apple has released a would-be Google Maps competitor that pales compared to Google Maps. Just say it.

The mass market doesn’t buy, and doesn’t want to buy, products based on what they might become months from now if these companies somehow dramatically improve the software. They buy products for what they are today, out of the box. Google and Nokia are Apple’s industry peers. These are the big leagues, this is The Show. They’re charging customers real money to buy these things. They should be judged by the same standards."

Of course, he wasn't actually talking about Apple maps then so he didn't try quite so hard to see it from their point of view.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/04/21/mccracken-beta-h...
Google seems to still weight those links, just differently or with less weight.
I understand this frustration as a developer, but users don't seem to care, or else Nexus would be selling like hot-cakes. More to the point, as Android slows release cycles and focuses on things like "Project Butter", having the absolute latest becomes less important.

I mean, you're right and I do NOT want to be making excuses for the version fragmentation out there when Apple does such a better job with updates (granted, it's much easier for them).
except the computer can and does run the code, and can then provide super-textual information
Vannevar Bush's ideas about information organization and consumption in the future were eerily accurate. Reading about the history of Memex and the roots of the Information Architecture field in general is something I highly recommend for anyone interested in Information Science, etc.
We do not have zero saturation. There are many other channels besides the 404 one suggested above.

To be honest, I can't remember the last "missing child" face I saw.

That may be because you have subconsciously stopped looking.
Storytelling to Problem Solve
It wasn't a Droid, but I took back the Motorola Atrix HD I got from AT&T the day I got it because of the Motorola crap on it--thin as it is. Because, honestly, it's still terrible. Some people might not care that things are changed just for the sake of changing them (the back/home/task-switch buttons are changed very slightly, for no good reason). I do. Because they don't know how to make it better in the process of doing it. Blur makes it worse, and it might be only slightly worse, but it is worse.

I realize I'm in a minority compared to all purchasers, but I full-stop refuse to buy an Android phone (or tablet) that isn't stock.
Google did not have turn by turn data when the iPhone was introduced, so it's not surprising the deal did not include it.
(Android maps app had turn by turn only one year after the first Android phone was released).
How I wish he was teaching JavaScript. THAT is how you teach. Everything I've seen/tried online is abysmal.
Rust and Go provide me with more day-to-day pleasure than... well... a sadly large number of things. This is a good resource for learning more Rust, thanks.
Couple random thoughts:

1. Is Bret Victor now the Linus of cutting-edge programming environments?

2. I don't have enough experience with Light Table or the Khan Academy environment to know whether Khan is just a first step on the way to something like Bret's vision, or more of a diversion. I was fairly impressed with the Khan env in my limited time with it.

3. I HATE telling people they shouldn't speak their mind and/or say what they think is the truth, and I don't think Bret shouldn't have written anything. But it's difficult not to seem ungracious. Josh Resig clearly knows what he's doing, at least in the general sense, and he was gushing with praise for Bret, while this reply basically says John did everything wrong.

If Bret feels that way, I truly believe he should say it, but that doesn't make it fun. This is the essay equivalent of cringe humor I guess. Hilarious/Informative while making you feel bad.
I had a hard time reading this (like others did) because I felt like I was one of the brilliant jerks he is talking about.

But there is something to the effect of a "bad apple" on the barrel as a whole:
http://www.inc.com/matthew-swyers/toss-the-bad-apple-employe...

From my own experience, the best way to diffuse me when I'm turning into the "brilliant jerk" is to give me some projects with some breathing room. I'm a lot less jerky when I having being through a serial stream of "jumping on the grenade" on critical/stressful projects that were about to explode.
How are you going to make money? Can you track/located a iphone that does not have an icloud account?
Just open sourced this Chrome extension, "GitHub Extras". Help make it awesome?
I have a theory, but I'm willing to have it be completely torn apart: never base your product around one single API.

If that's all you're doing, then you are often performing a core function of the API provider, whether they provide it yet or not. API stuff should really be ancillary to what you're really doing. Unless you want to get bought out by said API provider.
How not to compete with the market leader
Hitler Finds Out About Apple's new iOS6 Maps
No I didn't read the WSJ article (just tried it, but there's a paywall) but from what I understand from this article is that they were willing to add more features (incl. turn-by-turn) in exchange for more "branding" as John Gruber puts it.
Twilio, and other companies like it, have drastically reduced the barrier to entry into these markets. The direct result of that is much greater competition. 20 years ago, having a call routing engine could be a company's "secret sauce" all by itself because it was relatively difficult to route calls. Today, call routing is a commodity. If you sell a commodity service, you either hope to differentiate by branding (think Apple) or compete on price (typically on lower total cost of ownership, which includes price, ease of use, support, etc.).

Twilio partnering with AT&T only ensures that your commodity features will be that much more reliable, because there is a greater revenue stream backing them. The product you build either has to be differentiated (unique in some way), or cheaper (remember, AT&T is not in the business of giving away things and has specific guidelines on margins acceptable to them).
Here's the GitHub repository:

https://github.com/cambridgemike/agile-testing-extension
congrats to Michael and Ainsley! I've known them for a while and they're really smart. should do great!
This is interesting, but what happens to the javascript execution environment? Does it get reset, or does it inherit all the objects that were instantiated in the old page?
Thank you for your reply. I have ordered Tom White's book and it should be here in 5 days I hope. In the meantime I am reading the Jimmy Lin's book online. One of the problems I am trying to solve is that I have 100+ VMs that are collecting logs and I wanted to find a better way to parse those logs and be able to make sense out of it as they are running against a single machine and it's hard to understand what happened in which VM at any given time. Many thanks for the information.
What you should do with this jerk - put him in charge.
Prototypal inheritance in net: delegation at last
I really like the last line:
Maybe we don't need a silver bullet. We just need to take off our blindfolds to see where we're firing.
Don't care for what he's got to say. Not anymore. He lost me at "rotating pedestal smoothly rising from the stage floor" in his iPhone 5 post. If it wasn't obvious whose paycheck he was on before, it became pretty damn clear after that.
In my experience those people might get things started but they leave for the next "sexy, trendy and unstable" language and then actual engineering gets done to get "productive, stable, serious, and pragmatic." actually working.
ReadyCase: Multipurpose Iphone Case.
Mandatory 'subtext' (from Jonathan Edwards) links

- http://www.subtextual.org/
- http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=680
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtext_%28programming_language%29

I wonder if those two know each other.
Appeals Court Caves to TSA Over Nude Body Scanners
World currencies at your hand
We want to create an easy to use, complete and handy currency converter. We are working, giving our firsts steps, and you can help us using it. Thanks.
Can You Live Without a Data Scientist?
Jeannie, an API for building Siri-like apps
I have only one rule regarding my technology purchases: it has to work. Apple maps don't, so no iPhone for me. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by animus.
1. I think Victor is the Engelbart of our generation

2. The Academy's program just makes "guess and check" easier, it does not fundamentally present additional information (intermediary computational state) to the user

3. He said that he had to respond because he was cited as the inspiration. It is as if I said "this post is inspired by gfunk911" and then filled it with things that you disagree with.
The way to read this is not a neg on the Khan academy project but a push into what Bret sees as the absolute solution to the problem being solved. Ie. a new programming language, which is outside the scope of Khans project of teaching.
This is what google needs to adopt. Platform does not need to be closed to be successfull. See how gmail is doing on open platform 'email'
No, the WSJ reported that they were not, and the quote you're taking from Gruber's article is based on that WSJ article.
Sounds fair. Download ad replacement software to look at Grooveshark.
What's to prevent a browser extension from listening in on any password?
Don't install stuff you don't trust.

I didn't mean to imply otherwise; merely that the author shouldn't claim that their site is 100% safe just because it's Javascript running in the browser.
> how would you go about implementing this in a real life class format?

Allow experienced professional educators to shape education policy.
The original VB was a far worse language than VB.net ever was.
I don't get it, is he complaining about the Android OS or the UI skins that manufacturers choose to install on their devices?

Does this mean that if I apply a custom theme to my Windows7 install it is no longer "true" Windows7?

Older phones not getting Jelly Bean is a silly complaint at this point, can't we get past this?

I just really don't get these type of articles, I can only assume they are link bait since they rarely make any sense. Then there's the entertaining comments as people argue over their phones as if it matters somehow in their lives.

And here I am commenting on it, argh, the cycle never ends!

Is this guy trying to convince me of something? What's the point of this article?

At least the author justified his stance by describing the devices he's purchased. This has become the tech industries "I'm not racist because I have black friends" statement that is starting to appear in so many places now.
Quote from Linus.

> THE USER DOESN'T CARE.

Source: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477#c129
- I'd provide a default avatar for new users.
- Bookmarklet before the browser extension.
- Ability to cross-post messages to Twitter but only on demand.

In any case, don't forget to remind me sooner rather than later that I signed up with you and I should come back.
putting mentions in the metadata is brilliant.
I am curious at what default on means, such as will all links use this by default?
I wouldn't call this "massively" multiplayer. More like a MUD (multi-user dungeon).
Not at all! If Apple's maps don't work for you, that strikes me as a very good reason not to buy an iPhone. I might even go so far as to suggest that "reasons not to buy an iPhone" are a good thing; the whole market could use more competition.

It's the "Apple has made a terrible irresponsible mistake" stuff that confuses me.

Incidentally, where are you that Apple's maps don't work for you? I'm in Chicago and they work better for me than the old one did.
Android is second-rate because it's only in Jellybean that they've conquered the latency issues. People are using Android devices for passive consumption, rarely for any kind of content creation, because virtually all the content creators are and content creation software are already on iPad and have given up on Android, in much the same way that musicians almost exclusively used Macs for 10 years because nobody took audio seriously on the PC. That was OK because PCs had many other uses, but since tablets are more lifestyle than business devices, ceding all the early-adopter and tastemaker types to Apple was a huge mistake on Google's part.

Fragmentation is not that big of an issue among the Android users and developers I know. A craptastic multimedia stack was a much bigger negative.

I say this from a household with 4 Android devices and no Apple ones, incidentally.
What use is the traffic data if the underlying map/POI data can't plot a decent route to overlay traffic info on?
I believe when the original contract was put in place, Google was licensing their street data from one of the GPS incumbents with a "no turn by turn" restriction. It was only later that Google made their own street data and could offer turn by turn. In that light, it makes sense that Apple's contract had the restriction.
Quote from me.

> NOT MY POINT.

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577307
"More Google branding, less user privacy."

I highly doubt user privacy was one of the reasons Apple chose this path. Does anyone have any corroborating evidence for this claim? I can imagine they did not want to share user data in order to retain a competitive advantage but I have trouble believing it was in the interest of preserving user privacy.
> Please, this guy.

Yes this guy. One of the best writers about things related to Apple.

> He defends Apple as if it were a deity.

No, he does not.

> I don't think I've ever seen a truly substantial
> criticism of Apple come out of him.

My guess the reason for that is that you just dismiss Gruber as "this guy" and don't read what he writes.

Do we really believe that Apple is infallible?

No.
I dislike that this small gem is written in coffeescript.

https://github.com/rails/turbolinks/blob/master/lib/assets/j...

For various reasons we don't use coffeescript in our projects but now if we want to use turbolinks (which sounds great) we'll get a coffeescript dependency.