skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. The assumption behind the Turing test (a reasonable one, methinks) is that human language is as "strong" of a test as you can devise. That said, this article was about an AI that was designed to appear human, not one that tried to perform optimally. It would be trivial to create an FPS AI that performed literally optimally, but it would be extremely easy for a human player to notice this ("WTF, there's no way to get a headshot every single time!") and conclude that it's a bot.
Anyone else think Apple Maps just isn't that bad. I used it for a trip from Chicago to Wisconsin and it worked out perfectly. I guess I'm just not that interested in people with problems with Apple Maps in China or small German towns. Here in the midwest US it seems to work just fine and find everything that GMaps used to. I actually like the Yelp! review integration as well.

Oh well!

I suppose I'm the only one to know that this software is driven by a service which, in time, will most definitely improve exponentially with use.
I think the Maps team already reports to Scott Forstall...
I'm looking into why it can't find that file. In the meanwhile, I'll send you a direct link.
Flask (Python)
Actually, it just got fixed a minute ago. I was able to download it.
I currently have the app, and this was the first thing I changed :)
Yeah, I think we're for the most part in agreement here.

My main questions though are around what happens when the whole city becomes so expensive that it's impossible to live here on a budget. Sure, you can keep going further and further out, but at what point does it not make sense to even live here anymore, if you are an artist that wants to spend time creating and have no intention of trying to pull in 6 figure salaries? It's not like all of a sudden Chelsea got cheaper as Fort Greene got more expensive -- the entirety of Manhattan is out of reach, and now most of the western part of Brooklyn and Queens is as well.

I use the anecdote of the Q train not to make a generalization as to how the train is -- this was certainly an exception -- but to illustrate the fact that I'm finding myself unable to socially understand many of the current wave of people coming into the boroughs.

The charm I miss isn't really hipsters running around Williamsburg, in fact I don't miss that at all. It's more about the diversity of a place, both racially and economically. Seeing people drive down Union Street in Rolls Royces makes me second guess why I live here.
I never understood the pricing. IRC Servers are completely free and dead simple to set up. $10 a month for a room limited to 5 users for just a pretty frontend to IRC?

Why does this exist?
I didn't think it was as bad as you're describing ... and it's very hard to perform on video presentations that don't include an audience (you feed off an audience's energy and get immediate feedback ... and in my case I get a real shot of adrenaline too).
I agreed with you until... "Raise the fee to $50k [...] More of the risk of holding an H1B needs to go to the first employer". What?

Up until recently, I've worked for small companies and startups on my H1B. They would never be prepared to spend $50k just to hire me, especially when I can leave a month later if I want to. If the fee was that high, companies would demand security that their employee isn't going to leave- understandably so, but that basically results in the employee being a wage slave for x years.

As someone going through the visa transfer process as we speak, it isn't quite so bad once you're in the country. Not easily being able to bootstrap something on the side of my main job is an annoyance, and the transfer process itself is irritatingly time consuming, but it does at least let me transfer.
Well I am, upgraded my iPad to iOS 6 and that leaves me with Apple Maps in the maps app. A number of places around San Carlos California aren't in their maps "by default", if you search for them it can find the Yelp reviews and then put down a push pin. So before when I was 'searching' for a place to eat I could look at the map and see all the restaurants and find what I wanted, now I see some but not nearly a representative batch. Actually searching for something like Pizza or Mexican food will drop down a dozen pins and more than half of them land on what is drawn as blank space on the map.

So perhaps Google was just better at guessing the kinds of queries I might be making when I opened maps.
I think we can see it all over iOS 6: Google probably screwed Apple by not renewing their YouTube and Maps contracts.
It's painful for Apple to break free of Google. But if it successfully does this, it will become a true competitor to Google on several fronts. The question is, can their brand survive the backlash? My guess is YES. Their coffers are huge. They will hire and catch up in these areas -- and afterwards probably start to innovate. Most of all, they have some of the greatest designers and branding people there. Google is mostly about engineers.
But right now I think it was Google who stuck it to Apple, not the other way around.
"Shortage of (cheap) tech workers in the US..."

or...

"Shortage of tech workers who don't have kids or a mortgage in the US..."

Yeah, I'll get downvoted for this, but it's true.
Nokia has also very good maps, some claim they are even better. Amazon switched recently from Google to Nokia for their Kindle maps. Perhaps Apple could have made a better deal with Microsoft/Nokia.
I agree. So you would sell, assuming it was an introductory-course textbook for a popular class (best-case scenario), what- a few hundred copies? And that's under the conditions above.

My mechanics teacher wrote our textbook. We had about 10 people in our class. How much money do you think he made? Even if a few other schools adopted it (a VERY difficult task unless you work on your network of friends- which doesn't always go over well in academia), we're talking small money.

He could consult a few hours a year for an aerospace company or something and make a lot more. That's my point.
Sounds like a carnival game ;)
The one about highlighted table rows makes total sense.
Another valid title could be "Interview with Irresponsible Aloof CEO who lives in Bizarroland."

If there was any explanation of why Color is a giant smoldering pile of failure this article encapsulates it pretty well.

I'd put particularly salient quotes from the article here but they're all fine examples that could be used as chapter headers in a book called "How Not to CEO (or wasting other people's money because YOLO)"
But that's exactly what's already happening. What's missing from the equation is the "skilled" aspect. You can't just hire anybody. A tech firm needs to hire tech people who can do the job.

The current problem in the United States is that the supply of people is high but the supply of skilled tech people is low. So the problem you're facing is high-wages for skilled tech workers (even for immigrant tech workers) but no jobs for the high number of non-skilled people. What the US then wants is for lower (not poverty, but lower) paying jobs that pull from the high supply of unemployed, non-skilled people to allow them to gain momentum and skills through training. Throwing money at the skilled people doesn't solve the problem because it's already here.
It's available in Mexico too, thanks!
They don't have the money to move 2000 miles to a coast where they know no one and everything is 100% more expensive. Either that or they are not willing to live in a 500 sq ft apartment with no parking.
What does color make these days?
“I do this historically. I take off for a little while and I vacation. It’s nothing new or exciting,” he said. “The roles of founders and CEOs is to get everyone engaged and give opportunities to people. And when things haven’t worked out as expected, the best way for me to recharge is to go on sabbatical.”

The only similar situation I can recall is Michael Arrington taking a break in 2009 after someone spat in his face at a conference:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/28/some-things-need-to-change/

The spitting incident was the last straw. I believe Arrington was truly burnt out from working like a dog for four years, and putting up with a lot of other stressful situations (Crunchpad, legal threats, etc.). And, to his credit, he came back after a month or so. It's also worth noting that he had a CEO (Heather Harde, who joined TechCrunch in 2006) still running the business.

As for Color, you can imagine what would happen if a CEO at practically any other company in a similar situation (major product failure, staff bailing, impending pivot) took off on an indefinite sabbatical for months. He or she would be out.
Can I ask a question - why do I have to hear about a new platform or language once a week? Is there some problem existing languages aren't solving? Seriously. It's like this place falls in love with a new platform once a quarter. Before it was Lisp, Python, Ruby, etc. Now it's Clojure and anything else that has less than 1000 people actively using it. Did I somehow wander into the hipster bar of the programmers? I just don't get it. I can't keep floating from language to language leaving a cluster fck of code in my wake because I'm onto the next big thing.
A close reading of two [Apple] apologies
Sorryforthiscode – iFrame Injection
According to several sources close to the company, Nguyen has not been seen at Color’s Palo Alto headquarters for more than two months. The speculation was that Nguyen was “probably either in Tahoe or Hawaii.”

And then a little further down...

We’re told the changes have come after a power struggle between members of Color’s board — some of whom are loyal to Nguyen, and others who were anxious for a change.

The guy hasn't even shown up for work in two months, and there are still board members who are loyal to him? He must have some pretty awesome blackmail material on them.
In spirit, here's mine [0], where I maintain a configuration that works in a similar way for both bash and zsh and does not try to make one identical the other[1]. It respects login vs interactive, and is reasonably fast on start (i have a few ideas to make it faster).

It's designed to be lean, DRY, simple and modular. You can use it as is, overwriting you own dotfiles with setup.sh, or you can pick-source each file/feature you want individually (some need a couple vars set, grep for DOTFILES_).

It leverages available software but tries not to break when it's not available. It works under both Linux and OSX.

It includes an implementation of something like vcs_info for bash, leading to a much more configurable PS1 than git's provided bash prompt support.

Its prompt tries to use colors semantically, and keeps things logical and non-cluttered.

If this reads like this is the best thing since slice bread, that's because it is! ... for me. But I'm sure you could find a useful thing or two in there.

[0] https://github.com/lloeki/dotfiles

[1] I went all the way to hack support of right prompting and reverse-% cleanup on non-newlined output in bash. It works well... most of the time, but when it breaks it's ugly so I just disabled it.
Yeah. but any companies whose names I might actually recognize?

thought not, pythons is clearly dead....

</sarcasm>
Klout goes Bing
If by healthcare do you mean all employees who work in hospitals (including many low paying positions), or more prestigious, higher paying positions like RNs, MDs, etc? And what about dentists and other allied health fields?
If you want to hire good physicists, you'll need to pay whatever the market rate is for physicists. But if you want to hire good software developers, you'll need to pay whatever the market rate is for software developers, and the fact that they cost four times more than physicists isn't really relevant.
This is a sad commentary on the computer literacy of the average user. Tabbing is a basic, basic concept graspable by small children.

Note that I'm not at all disagreeing with the point, but.. geez. People are dumb.
> "The speculation was that Nguyen was probably either in Tahoe or Hawaii."

> "Nguyen, who called while on his way to board a plane to Maui..."

> "I do this historically. I take off for a little while and I vacation. It’s nothing new or exciting."

> "About Color’s next upcoming board meeting: “I’m going to have to call in, because I’ll be in Maui."

I feel very bad for all the great and responsible people who work at Color.
Since H1B workers are handed a pretty bad deal - they can't change jobs without a huge hassle - I suppose there is little incentive in paying them well...

Maybe lowering the O1 visa requirements...
An Online Bioinformatics Curriculum
The answer to this is pretty simple and long overdue. We need writer's guilds and developer's guilds, basically unions that protect the content producers from abuse by large corporations.

All it takes is one lawsuit to shut down an ad service or app store. We forget our power as citizens or opt out of it/throw it away so easily.

This is traditionally how environmental and other groups have stopped corporations from impinging on the public's rights. I'm not saying this is ideal, just, it's how it works because the corporations will never, ever change unless we force them to.
Yes, thanks for correction, I recollect the forbidden planet thing.
I think this hits the nail on the head. You learn more about the concepts of programming itself, rather than just about a single set of syntax and procedure.

At my school, they downplayed specific languages entirely and I think it was very beneficial. We were expected to learn the basics of a language for a class in the first week, whether it be Java or Python or whatever else. Obviously details would always come up later on, but the attitude was always "don't worry about the language, you can learn it as you go, worry about the concepts" and in that mindset, I definitely think the learning was more effective.
Color was a great idea, far beyond any social network. The concept of an elastic network which cannot be influenced, where you cannot friend or unfriend people and where a system decides who is your friend was just awesome. Adding friends or contacts manually is so 2005.
My friend, unless you are extremely well known or a brilliant self-marketer, you are going to learn something important about the industry. There's a reason that the finances of the industry work out the way they do.

Importantly, if you want widespread adoption, you need to target a course. Yours targets several. I've seen a few hybrid-course experiments where the instructors combine courses that have been traditionally taught separately (like calculus and physics), but they are to my knowledge still rare. I've not seen a course like the one you are writing a textbook for. Who teaches such a course?
Or hypens, or periods, or whatever delimiter makes the user happy.

s/[^\d]+//g <- Not just easier on your users. Easier that what you were planning to do instead, too.
Requires much hassle to use on Linux and a case-insensitive filesystem on a Mac.

Why bother?
If you'd like a phone interview with CPAP.com shoot me an email at johnny dt goodman at cpap dc.
The letter he should have written is exactly the letter he did write. Apple is not a bulleted-list kind of company, nor are they a reveal-implementation-details kind of company. No one knows, nor do they need to know, where inside the organization (and under whom) the Maps team lives.

The important message, "we know about it and we're going to fix it", is all that needed to come across.
Despite being a pretty active participant in Ludum Dare, I've never pursued the October Challenge yet.

Working on the last 10% of a game (the polish) is the hardest part of the development process; not only is it a lot of work, but at that point you're much more likely to be burned out from working on said game.

Despite this, I'm currently working on a game with great potential that I hope will end up somewhere :)
Some people may think your post is a little over the top, but I agree 100%, and I would have used the same tone

Bill Nguyen is very overrated, and apparently he specializes in "exits", getting te startup to a point barely enough over the threshold of getting a buyer (surely one that's not an expert) and selling.
Developers, ignore creating Windows apps at your peril
Wait, so are you saying if we can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere on Venus, it would be livable eventually?
A/B Testing - Calculating 'Confidence'
I wonder if we can compare what happens over the long therm with people who intuitively understand math vs. people who learn to understand it with the help of metaphors such as above?

Are such un-abstractions helpful for teaching basic math knowledge? Advanced math skills? Both?
Yeah... lets not forget that Guido van Rossum himself is employed by Google (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum).
Is this my intellectual property legally?
So I modified a version of OS Ticket, a PHP based ticketing system, for my company. Previously, our company used Quickbooks Online and used the 'estimate' feature as their inventory of systems. THis was horrible so on my own time at home, I slowly modified and made a new ticketing system. I started using it for myself to manage repairs better and it worked great. The manager caught notice of the system and suggested we used it to replace the current system. At the time, I programmed EVERYTHING at home in my spare time. I was not given any company time to work on this. I was an hourly employee what the system got implemented. Three months later I was promoted to a salary position(basically made me the 'Network Admin + Lead Tech'). They would give me input on problems here and there and I would write fixes for them. I did this a few times for them. Fast forward another 6 months, and I am ready to leave this company. The system I made is our primary and only system in place now and I believe it is my property. I realize the database information belongs to them and that is not what I want. I want to just prevent them from further use once I do leave. Any input would be appreciated.
It should take you 30-60 minutes to setup an IRC server depending on how familiar you are with, well, Unix. 0 minutes of maintenance per month. And once it's done, you can have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of users on it for a marginal cost rapidly approaching $0/user. In contrast, by the time you get to 50 users on Grove, it's $125/month.

I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's position seems abnormally tenuous.

Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.
Scaling Pinterest
I am disappointed a bit at Mr.Cook's recommendations. I think that some of the major problems with Apple Maps exists outside the United States. I am in Canada, and there was a problem from the get go with maps (well documented, I won't go into it).

None of the solutions recommended in this letter are good solutions. Loading a webpage adds how many different steps to getting an address, Bing and Mapquest are not available in the Canadian store, and Waze looks like a cheap gimmick to me(first impressions, it may be a good product).

I don't want to jump on the 'look at Apple falling' bandwagon, but this is a major blow to their reputation. I can appreciate the letter, but don't offer recommendations in your apology that don't work, that makes you look actually incompetent.
Sure, I'll try to play with it this weekend. I'll have some questions for you if I can work on this.
Thanks!
That or maybe the board members are his relatives?
Google Alters Google Trends; Combined With Insight For Search
So your ok with them taking away a better product for a crappy one simply because they know about it and are trying to fix it? Both of those points have been obvious to Apple for at least 6 months, when the beta came out.
Cool, I'll take a look that those. I didn't get around to seeing the computer history museum this summer, maybe another time. It sounds awesome!
>Store and marketplace are the two obvious ones.

Well, and "shop" and "mart". Still, even if we branch out to a few less obvious ones, we're looking at a few dozen possible names at most, and some of them are ridiculous like "The Software Application Emporium", and oh man hold on I have to run over to the trademark office real quick.
Quoverr - Facebook Timeline Photo Covers
The best Facebook Timeline Photo Covers on the web. Quoverr.com is the place for discovering awesome and high-quality Facebook Photo Covers online.
Maybe he was too aloof, or maybe not, we don't know. But what we do know is that most startups fail. I think you're being overly harsh.
Not money.
I don't think the title is misleading. It's a pretty naive and obvious way of having a free book. There is nothing wrong with it, except in the eyes of google's automatons.
It's strange to me that most of the talk around Color is focused around the founders and not the investors. The investors are a much more interesting subject. I mean, there are always going to be people willing to accept 40 million without a real product, heck I'm probably one of them, but I'd like to see interviews with the people who thought it was a good idea to give a company at that stage much money. I'm much more interested in hearing from them.
Based solely on what's in this article (perhaps reality is different), this reinforces my inkling that people get truly rich from mostly just two things: who you know, and marketing. Market yourself (or your product) well and know the right people, and you too can be the CEO of a vaporware company funded with more money than most people will see in their entire lives, while spending your months on sabbatical in Tahoe and Hawaii. Unbelievable. On the other hand, this is Techcrunch, and the reality is undoubtedly a little more nuanced than what's presented here.
Bazinga Logo Facebook Cover
Bazinga Logo Facebook Photo Cover for Bing Bang Theory Fans
There are many people leaving Microsoft right now. Mostly good people. There are four types of people who stay at Microsoft:

1) Top performers who are on a fast-track (<1% of workforce)

2) People who can't get jobs elsewhere (30%)

3) People who have families and are tied to Redmond area (40%)

4) People who can get jobs elsewhere but have visa restrictions and are afraid to upset their status (30%)

Everyone else leaves or has already left within 2 years. I joked with a colleague yesterday, "Hey, have you talked to anyone from the old team?" "Yeah, I've been forwarding their resumes..."

Microsoft is working to reduce people in #2 and #3 through its performance review system. They then want to increase people in #4 so they have more people who can't leave them as they start cost cutting when Win8 isn't a roaring success.

I personally find it heart-wrenching to watch friends who would leave their abusive situations and work for a start-up but cannot due to silly visa paperwork. I just don't trust that Microsoft would want more people to come without restrictions to work for a specific company. It does't benefit them at all.

I just wish skilled computer science people could work for whomever they want. Our industry would be so much better off. So long as you pay taxes and are a lawful person, I support anyone living in this country.
As I mentioned a few comments up, I don't think you can implement a countermeasure like that without violating the TOS. And even if you were technically in the right, you'd be right back in the situation of automated bots thinking you were up to something fishy and banning you.