skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
in one of the water cooler rooms in the canadian patent office, we have a wall of shame for patents like this. I remember one patent for a stick, and another for patenting the patent process.
Talk to business owners that have problems. Then solve them.

Freelancer marketplaces are a race-to-the-bottom commodity market.
Cobra seems to have the most potential of those bantered about, but it also looks like the most conventional language of the three.
what plans does google have to curb these false positives triggering actions on people's accounts? sooner or later, the media will tire of these stories, which means google will never notice.

whether google intends it or not, real people rely on google services for income, and losing this income can cause hardship.
A Mammal that Regenerates Body Parts Like Salamander
I'm thinking of doing some freelancing styling Bootstrap sites for people who don't like doing front-end work. Anybody have tips for doing that? I poked around on odesk and elance a bit but it seems the going rate there is roughly minimum wage.
you can essentially do just that, and the process is exactly the same:

(1) mouse-over to the bottom left of the taskbar (same place as before) and in place of a fixed icon (start ‘orb’) a small image of your start screen will pop-up which you can click to open the start screen

(2) from there just start typing (as before) and it will automatically change the layout showing you results for apps. by default the first app in results is selected so you can just press enter to launch it or navigate to others via keyboard/mouse (same as before). that’s it.

you can, of course, still just hit the windows keyboard button and start typing as well which i find faster. there are also now additional keyboard shortcuts that let you quickly search for specific items (win + q/f/w allow you to narrow search between apps/files/settings respectively)

pro tip: if you right-click in the same space (bottom left of taskbar) a menu comes-up with more power-user specific commands (run, command prompt, admin tools, etc...)
Because he happens to fanboy for Apple? I can think of a lot better reasons to hate someone...
Except you missed the part where eddieroger said, "at least in my experience," so he wasn't talking about everyone, but talking about his experience.
> While we’re improving shitty Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the Orange Store, but good luck finding them

Maybe you missed the part where they linked to an entire section of the store titled Map Apps.
Map is OK for me. It is just only the beginning. When Google Map was launched, we didn't see all the features. The only problem with iOS6 was viewing Unicode Language in Mail App. It is really frustrating.
> The city I live in is broken into subdivisions I wasn't previously aware of.

Mine too, but because Apple is incorrectly naming the subdivisions with random POI. Like a small condo building becoming the name for a whole neighborhood. It seems random and almost entirely incorrect.
> I find it odd that many folks in this debate have focused on the exiting contract and its dates.

The recent issue between Netflix and Starz will show you why it is a major focus.

As much as we'd like to ignore people/business issues, sometime they trump tech and social networking issues.
Map of current state laws: http://www.aclu.org/maps/non-discrimination-laws-state-state...

A quick google finds two examples:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/education/07marquette.html...;

http://www.newschannel5.com/story/13620898/coach-loses-job-a...

The federal law that could fix this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_A... I would imagine if you pull up the testimony supporting this bill you would find many more examples.
follow up articles:

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/22/is-going-for-r...

Any others?
Key takeaways from the SecurityWatch Summit 2012
similar sort of thing can be done in a rasterised system, just distribute the rasterised triangles over time, tada.
Every time I read something from aforementioned blog, I finished with a feeling of disappointment. No insights, no deep thought process, just plain apple-fanboyism.
Are you dragging in images from web pages? Or files from Nautilus?

Only the latter will work (speaking from experience)
Forget Call of Duty, This is What Real War Looks Like
Always? No. That does not happen by itself, that only happens if you are willing to invest vast resources to see it through.
It's great that he apologized, but it shouldn't have been a surprise. The problems that I have had are so gross, so blindingly obvious, that the most cursory use would have revealed problems. Hence he cannot of himself used the product, which is kinda sad.
Easily 1/3 the quality. What good is a map if it is incorrect? An incorrect map isn't 1/3 worse than a correct one, it's just worthless. Actually worse than worthless since with no map you at least know when you're lost. Apple's maps are riddled with errors and inaccuracies and thus it's not usable (to me at least). I won't set off to a destination with a map I don't trust, so for me the difference between the two is a map I can use and a map I cannot use.
I totally agree. I thought the developer preview was a bit flaky, the left/right-scrolling start-screen was too jolting for example (so it was good to see that's been replaced with a fade-in/out). Having now installed the RTM I really rate it.

It's so much quicker and more responsive than W7, the start-search feels more accurate too and again much quicker.

Some of the UI changes take a little getting used-to, like the charms pop-ups, but it also brings some consistency to things like per-app settings.

For anyone who wants to largely keep the W7 experience there's no reason to worry, the desktop is there, the start-bar is there, the start button is there (just without a logo), and the start-screen works very much like the start-menu, you can still alt-tab between screens, and as mentioned above the shortcuts make some of the power features easily accessible without going through the start-screen.

There's always going to be people afraid of change, but I really don't see what there is in here to be so scared about. You're not forced to use the Metro apps at all.
I think you give him far to little credit.
THIS. Referrals are how all great freelancers I know work. Word spreads very quickly if you produce quality work in a reasonable time frame and have solid estimation skills.
Rails Rumble 2012 : Registrations start Oct 1
You mention CoffeeScript being one of the worst, and I don't necessarily disagree, but how has it become so popular despite its poor documentation? Is it because CS is just /that/ good? Or is it that it has developed a great community early on that compensates for the lack of documentation? Either way, writing good documentation seems like an either path than doing those two things.
Dear Internet Explorer
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Do they actually have a system in place the allows users to report enough detail to fix something? Personally I don't consider bug reports moaning.
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When the CEO of the company writes a personal apology, I think we can stop saying complaints about low quality are overblown.
I can't say for sure what Jobs would have done, but you can bet that Jobs would have known about Maps' limitations on Day 1, and he would have addressed the issue right away instead of waiting for 2 weeks like Tim Cook.

Remember: Jobs used the products extensively before they were launched. If Tim had done so, he would have seen the deficiencies in Maps, instead of just relying on his underlings saying "it'll be OK".
Been meaning to start using it for a while. You convinced me to download it and see what all the fuss was over.

Couldn't be happier!
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Head of cybersecurity for Federal networks says she doesn't use email.
So you don't find it admirable that Steve stands by his products?

Honestly, I think if he were still healthy and running the company, something like this would not have happened in the first place.
they cut their contract with google....
Definitely agree with this. Would cut down on wasted packaging as well.
Not at all. I would expect these kinds of numbers and I thought that it was worth pointing out another possible reason for the surmised "conclusion".
Python docs may not be exactly beginner friendly, but it's certainly not terrible.
I think his point was more that clearly the developers want people to use what they built. So taking that extra step and writing good documentation would only help ensure that people used their software. Not doing so actually hurts their chances. Not doing so and expecting SOMEONE ELSE to do it is just dumb.
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This leaves only one simple question in my mind:

If it has come to Apple issuing a public apology for shipping a partly-baked replacement for an important core app, the old version of which they are still licensed to distribute for another year...

Why not put iOS 5 Maps in the App Store, and pull it down next summer?
The Web as the Platform: HTML5 games on Safari iOS 6
Looks good. Does anyone know what BRDF was used? Or the technique for the reflections? I think you could get away with cubemap reflections for this particular scene.
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Why is the Python documentation terrible in this respect? Python comes with a language reference[1], that has most of the components you ask for (one of the components is in a document that's called something other than the language reference, but that's because it's the stdlib, not the language itself... it's certainly the same style of document, not a tutorial!):

1. Syntax (sections 5, 6, 7 and I guess also 9 if you want the full grammar)

2. Whitespace (section 2.1)

3. Operation priority (section 5.15 has it explicitly, the rest of the sections also clarify)

4. All functions, types, classes... both globals and stdlib modules are documented in http://docs.python.org/library/index.html#library-index

5. All parameters? Documentation should already have these.

6. Callback parameters: I can't think of any callbacks in the stdlib offhand, but the ones that do exist are methods you implement, and all the ones I can think of are documented

7. Default values and their meanings are pretty much always documented

8. I don't know what flag values are, but if they're just parameters they fall under (5)

9. Return values and exceptions should always be documented

10. There are plenty of cases where some input parameters causing undefined behavior is documented; some maybe not (for example I don't think urlparse.urlsplit documents what happens when you give it a scheme it doesn't know about), but MOSTLY it's documented.

[1] http://docs.python.org/reference/
I would suggest reading Brennan Dunn's eBook: http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com

You might also want to start by making a name for yourself by working on your own projects (iPhone app, web app, etc.). If you make something cool, you're bound to have people asking you to make cool things for them, too.
Look again! Your HN is now reddit.
Fascinating. I wonder what sort of evolutionary pressure forced the selection of this trait. Also, curiously, only certain types of tissues seem to have this regenerative ability... cartilage and skin regenerate, but muscle does not.
If I've ever gotten undeserved benefits for being a white male, then nobody's ever told me about it. I won't deny that they exist, but from my experience it's more a case of cultural acceptance than outright discrimination. I love programming, and damn it, I'm good at it. Is my benefit simply the lack of feeling bad about my choice of career path, that I don't belong?

The problem is that (as far as I know) nobody's explicitly told "congratulations, you have gained additional benefits due to your gender and/or race!" It's easy to pinpoint moments of discrimination when you're the victim, but it's not so clear-cut when it ends up in your favor.
How YOU Can Fix The Economy
Oh, I don't haaaate him. I just find his opinions obnoxious, and it doesn't seem like people will stop listening to him any time soon.
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I wonder how long till apple makes something similar to google's mapmaker.
watch map edits in real time for a while and you'll see the power of local people for fixing a lot of map issues.
http://www.google.com/mapmaker/pulse
I could be misunderstanding here, but isnt this what monads are for?
The web as the platform
Not following at all. Enforcing an existing, voluntary contract is indeed the routine practice of "business" as I understand it. Suing a competitor for patent infringement in an effort to kill its product is not. I don't see a double standard there.
It took 3-4 years of learning Erlang and Scheme first before I could fully grok Haskell concepts. Monads aren't as bad as you think they are, read this if you haven't: http://ertes.de/articles/monads.html

Haskell's strengths: it's succinct, safe, feature-rich, and compiles to fast programs.

* Succinct: due to Haskell's strong focus on mathematical abstraction (I may be abusing that term here) it makes reasoning about programs easier on a general level - if you get the general case right then any potential problem that fits it will be solved by it. Succinctness also makes writing the code much faster (it's kind of like escape velocity with Emacs - takes a while to get a reasonable map down in your head, but once you do you're 5-10x more productive than you were before).
* Safe: this one's obvious - Haskell's type system is brilliant in every way and paired with flymake for haskell can make writing robust code very straightforward.
* Feature-rich: lots of libraries, native support for multi-processor/multi-core concurrency - I'm still waiting on something like OTP for Haskell though; Erlang takes the cake there simple because of OTP.
* It's fast too; granted you have to be careful to not let non-strictness bite you in the ass, but that's generally very easy to profile and nail down if you can't.

I love Haskell, I use Erlang at my startup and I'm working on some big personal projects in Haskell.
I don't want to change the fact that barriers are low, in fact I celebrate it. The fact that kids from the poorest parts of the world can pursue programming as a career is something I celebrate and work towards.

It isn't about money, it's about the quality of stuff we're producing and how much we're polishing our skill. The overall quality of everything seems to slip over time in the name of cost savings. By being a mediocre programmer rushing through and putting out crap software you're only being a cog in a machine that's making the richest at the top very happy.
Introducing TelAPI
Introducing TelAPI – Today’s Most Feature Rich Telephony API
Have there ever been any studies done to look at the effects of any biases when you're actively trying to tell a bot apart from a human? My guess is that the judges end up looking for specific traits and characteristics. Bot developers can then include these in the AI. The issue is that those traits may not be even close to matching an actual person in other situations, but they're enough to provide a local maximum of sorts.

In this case, the fact that on average bots seemed scored as more "human" than actual humans is more of a sign of a critical flaw in the judging system than any great progress. It looks like they reduced typical human behavior to some very simple things, such as holding a grudge or other irrational behavior. If that was a major part of the judges' criteria (consciously or subconsciously) then all this contest proved is that bots can be programmed to be more irrational than human players.
Yes jp but you've picked an extreme example. It was clear that was a monumental sweetheart deal. Netflix was never going to end that one day early because whatever came next was going to be multiple times higher. Apple could have, most likely did, say "Well we really want turn by turn and voice and you won't allow it. We need to bring those features to our phone. We have two choices - go out earlier than we want with our Maps or extend this agreement until XYZ date and give both sides time to continuing negotiating this." Google comes up with an amount and Apple decides which is the better choice. The date is a "forcing factor" to drive a commercial conclusion but not the immovable object that forces you to go out earlier than you want. Make sense?
You will notice that the name at the bottom of this Apple letter is different than the name that appeared at the bottom of previous Apple letters. This change may have some connection to their new willingness to admit having made a mistake.
> Having done a bit of Prolog programming in the dim and distant past, my intuition is that trying to make everything declarative is a mistake...

Calling Prolog "declarative" or "logical" is just marketing. Prolog is really built around two concepts: unification and backtracking. This produces a system that can be used as a general-purpose language, but you will probably get more mileage thinking about it as a database engine, capable of expressing non-finite relations. Compare it to SQL, which only supports finite relations (finite number of rows in each table). Indeed, optimizing Prolog compilers will remind you more of SQL engines -- optimizing Prolog compilers produce indexes, does that sound familiar?
Do you have a mailing list or something, so I'll know when you're available in the EU?
Google is in the strange position of wanting to get a piece of hardware into the hands of every person while at the same time having services that they want everyone to use because that is how they make their money.

They are constantly biting their own hand because making any service Android specific limits it's use and making services available on competing hardware limits their own hardware penetration.

Since Apple makes all their money on hardware they just don't care. They focus on making the best hardware they can and then build software on top of it. Jobs for the longest time didn't even want to put iTunes on Windows but eventually relented when people were buying iPods for their Windows PCs.
> In Bash, we often use PgUp to search through the command history. In Zsh you just write part of the command and press Up. This will let you cycle through all command lines that contain what you have written, not just those that begins with it. If you don’t write anything Up works as usual, by cycling through all commands.

This is not true, you can do that in Bash too (via .inputrc)
http://blog.theliuy.com/2011/inputrc-keyboard-mapping-config...

Edit: Maybe I misunderstood though, does pressing Up really let you search all command lines that contain what you have written, not just those that begins with it? It doesn't seem to do that on my zsh.
OS X 10.0.
This isn't something to be happy about. We trust those that practice medicine have been properly trained and rely on a well established body of knowledge. Human lives and health are placed in the hands of this person. Much different than someone building a rails site.
Any one else using Fish?
> Don’t open links in new browser tabs

I agree that this can be confusing, but it's helpful for external links. I'd rather have a user be confused for a minute than have them completely forget about my website. Not to mention, when you close the new tab you'll probably end up looking at the tab containing my site again. At the end of the day, it's a usability vs visibility tradeoff.

> Don't have an FAQ page

Do you really think most users don't know what a FAQ is? Unless your target audience is 12 year olds I really doubt this is true. I do agree though that having a separate page for your FAQ means your workflow is lacking the proper information users are looking for.

> Don’t give table rows highlighting mouse-overs if the rows aren’t clickable

Totally agree. I think this is the biggest thing Twitter bootstrap gets wrong. Sure it's easier for lining up a row, but if you use zebra striping that won't be an issue.
I'm fortunate enough to live in an area with pretty good coverage by the new Maps. I'm also savvy enough to point out errors, as I'm sure most people on HN and other various tech sites are.

I'm not saying that it isn't a big stumble for Apple, because it is, but it's only going to get better (not that it can get much worse for some). Apparently maps are hard. Apple already knows this, and most of us are figuring this out too. But Apple have the resources to make it better, and I am willing to help.

This move was inevitable for Apple; it had to happen sooner or later, and the longer they waited, the bigger the gap they'd have to make up to be "on par" with Google Maps.

And Apple should start with a web interface to the maps. It would make correcting data a lot easier.
To be fair: it's never worked like that. If you spent the 90's on anything but windows (or the 70's on anything but IBM), you saw the same nonsense. The best you get are brief moments of purity, where the growth of a new platform or environment is so fast that it makes more sense for all the parties to collaborate instead of compete. So in the first 4 years of the "post-iPhone smartphone" world it was nice, just like it was in the early days of the internet.

It's a maturing market now, and not so nice. We have to wait for the next disruption now.
I've had some great experiences, e.g. Gregory Smith's PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance. When considering purchasing a book on a niche topic like Magneto or PostgreSQL, I think it's worth waiting for prominent community members to get review copies and write about their impression, e.g. http://www.postgresonline.com/journal/archives/192-PostgreSQ...
Obviously the maps app should never have been released. Beta testing showed that it had issues. I give props to Tim Cook, though. Steve Jobs would have never apologized like this.

I'm worried about Apple's software development lately (Lion, iTunes Match, Maps) but this apology makes me feel a little better about them acknowledging mistakes and working to fix it. I know they obviously have the in-house talent, they just need to get quality control back to mid-2000s form. Hopefully this dust-up over maps wakes them up.
From trying it there does seem to be a reasonable level of detail.

I don't of course just mean the bug reports, I mean every email going into customer support, every snarky comment directed at Apple and so on. It'll encourage them to dig deep, hopefully.
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He's extremely popular but also manipulates truths to tell fabrications and outright lies. I think anyone who behaves in such a manner is actively harming society by discouraging intelligent discourse. This type of behavior is seeping into many facets of life both big (politics) and small (mobile phones). He's basically FoxNews for Apple.
Ubuntu Unity has hardly been a huge hit with users either.

I understand the abstract appeal of having a "unified experience" across multiple product lines. But people just don't want to use an interface designed for tablet interaction on their desktop PC.

Why is this so hard for product designers to understand?
Apple CEO Tim Cook apologizes to customers for Maps in iOS 6
Apple on Friday published an open letter to customers on behalf of CEO Tim Cook, who formally apologized for Apple's new Maps in iOS 6 and "the frustration this has caused our customers."
Yeah, I thought as much. I just mentioned it to help a new user, because the standard in Bash seems to be PgUp and beginning-of-line search, while in Zsh it is Up and full search.
> Now go find prior art for this where it shows steps a, b, c, d. Not easy anymore is it?

Go out side. Turn left. Walk to the park. Look at the 11-year-old boys on the swingset.