skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone who A) likes Apple and B) has ever been in a Dixons store in the UK will be overjoyed with the other departure, Browett (head of retail and previous Dixons CEO) who is leaving immediately (compared to Forstall's year long "transition" departure). Dixons is everything that Apple should never be; terrible customer service, clueless minimum wage staff, horrible retail experience, and generally used only by people who desperately need something immediately or are too naive to find another store.

Recent news out of Apple regarding "cutbacks" at retail suggested he was nudging them in the same direction. Given that he got his first stock disbursement last week and was due $58 million over the next few years if he hung around, I'm guessing he was pushed. Great decision from Cook if that was the case.
That's a pretty useless chart. It appears to be just charting carrier claims.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but yeah, the chart is flawed. Dallas, TX shows Sprint for example, but Sprint's LTE in Dallas is notoriously bad. As in, many people never see it, and I've never seen one single person claim to get it regularly. I think I've seen it mentioned that the maps are "4 to 5 year" projections, but today's actual coverage is something like 4% of DFW.
You can get the current time in the other time zone (try time in <location/code>), but yeah, an actual conversion would be pretty handy. And seemingly a very simple step from there.
I wonder what this means for the possibility of future Apple devices having haptic touchscreens.

edit: What was the downvote for?!
I assume you're counting the hours spent in evenings and on weekends too?
Given that 50% of the posts talk about skeuomorphism and honestly I didn't know what it was, here's the definition from Wikipedia: "A skeuomorph, or skeuomorphism is when a product imitates design elements functionally necessary in the original product design, but that becomes ornamental in the new product design".
Luxury Brands Can't Grab Emails In Trademark Dispute
I'm not a big fan of the concept, but it's an interesting tech demo.

Now, compare the page as designed versus the page without CSS enabled. The one without CSS enabled is a much better user experience.
It will be interesting to see how Apple approaches a minimalistic Jony style. Will it they make similar choices to Microsoft's Metro interface?
Yeah.

That's a blog post that I should get around to writing a rebuttal to some day. Because it is widely quoted and off base.

In theoretical frequentist math world, it is correct. If you peek repeatedly, eventually you'll come to confidence when there is no difference. Back in the real world, it is perfectly acceptable to use a strategy like, "We'll set a really high confidence (eg 99.5%) for cut-off until we get to a couple of thousand successes, and then we'll drop our standards substantially (eg 95% cut-off). If we are forced to stop for business reasons, we'll choose whatever happens to be ahead at the moment."

And yes, I can use Bayesian statistics to demonstrate that following the strategy that I describe creates acceptably low probabilities of making somewhat wrong business decisions, while allowing you to make good business decisions more quickly. And in practice people can follow it without needing a strong statistical background. (If I did enough work I could come up with a sophisticated optimal curve to use in making decisions. But I have not done that work, and in practice explaining it would be more work than it is worth.)

Why is this? Two reasons.

The first is that you only really get "independent peeks" at different orders of magnitude of data. Thus if you wait until you're past a small amount of data, you don't get a strong "repeated looks" effect.

Secondly coming to the wrong decision only matters to a business when the chosen option is substantially worse. If you follow a rule like what I gave, your odds of accidentally making up your mind in the wrong way if there is a business-significant difference are surprisingly low. For instance if you would detect a 2% difference as significant, and there is a real underlying difference of 1%, the odds that you're making the right decision right now deciding at a 95% confidence level is 99.2%. And if the real difference is a 0.5% win, your odds of making the right decision right now is 91.5%. (This despite the fact that you'd expect to need 16x as much data in order to even have a good chance of detecting a 0.5% win!)

Thus the decisions that you're making are usually correct. And on the occasions where you make the wrong choice, the mistake is usually not materially worse.
People's reactions to this announcement are overly focused on Forstall's assumed support for heavy skeumorphism (and their excitement at his departure as lead proponent). I think his record as head of iOS since its inception is a much more salient issue.

Forstall led development of the fastest-growing, most popular computing platform of the past decade or so with, to be sure, a few notable screw-ups, but mostly incredible innovation and efficiency. While his departure does sound like the result of a power struggle that needed to be resolved, I really believe we're shortchanging his incredible achievements. Forstall's departure is not unequivocally or even clearly a victory for those who are firm believers in iOS and its ecosystem going forward. The only reasonable reaction is that we'll have to wait and see.
Interesting that Eddie Cue remains the company fixer, taking on the quirky Siri and the flakey Maps app just as he was once given a completely fucked up MobileMe.

This is good news.

Even better news is Browett's ouster. The business with his cutting operational corners in retail was a very, very bad omen. If they'd left him in, he might have poisoned a very important well for the company. Hopefully his replacement is closer to Ron Johnson's set of retail and service values.

N'bad, Tim.
That link certainly seems reliable, well-researched, and unbiased.
Chilling Brain Scans Show the Impact of a Mother's Love on a Child's Brain Size
And to add to that, installing a .deb or an .rpm (if that's the route the software is distributed, like with Chrome) is a one-click solution (the rough equivalent to an .msi).

And if someone wants to give you simply a precompiled binary, they can do that too. Though in Linux you need to set the executable flag on it so you don't shoot yourself in the foot like you so easily can with malicious .exe files.
Skeuomorphism is when a product imitates design elements
functionally necessary in the original product design, but that
becomes ornamental in the new product design

Examples: leather/paper/textile textures, hyper-realistic shading, analog controls/displays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
HNotify.py: be notified when the time is good to post on Hacker News
It is funny that many people seem to have this idea at the same time. Must be that the time has come for this.

A while back I wrote a bunch of python scripts that do the same thing for subtitles for myself.

Regarding your problem with Goethe and Mann: Maybe you shouldn't try to start with "the masters". I read books in various languages and have come to the conclusion that after a hard day at work I just can't read a nobel prize winner in a foreign language. What I can read, however, is a crime novel, or something funny (Maybe even a comic book).

Here is a book that I would recommend for you to read if you want to read an important, well-known but easy german novel:

"Der Schatz im Silbersee" by Karl May: This is an escapist western written in the 19th century and actually one of the most read German novels of all times. Rest assured that every famous German you know (including Einstein and the bad one with the ridiculous beard) have read this in their youth.
I wish the overreaching claims were more honest. In reality tools like this are focussed on a particular subset of application types. For example you couldn't make space invaders using this, and probably not dropbox either.

I far prefer claims saying explicitly what it is good at, rather than implying it would good at any application type.
Then you create a new metric, you don't just throw your hands up and say, "well, I guess this stuff just can't be measured!"
> Heck, we could start by testing the hypothesis that getting everybody to focus lots of classroom time on standardized tests improves actual education.

It's been done.

A quick Google found me this: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/study-finds-standardize...

Which is from 1992. I'm sure if I put some effort into it, I could find more, or at least demonstrate that standardized testing has not meaningfully changed in the last 20 years.
You can run pretty far in fifteen minutes if you have to.
There's nothing wrong with it. I'm just saying that "open" here doesn't mean "open" as other people use it as in "open source" or "open access".
I doubt that metadata will be infringing. It doesn't have any real information content.
The book I wished I had read when coding my first PHP project
"Honestly, which bastard came up with at-will employment?"

Some bastard, and they are not in short supply, who was not a fan of unions or the strengthened bargaining position that they give employees.

See also "right to work" states, where "right to work" means "right to find yourself without work and without recourse".
It's a design technique where the artist creates user interfaces that tries to mimick the real life object as much as possible.

Take for instance some of the apps on iOS. The have book bindings, rings, shadows, etc.
Essentially, trying to mimic real world (as in the physical world) applications and appearances. See Calendar and Contacts on iOS for a perfect example of skeuomorphism to the extreme.
That's what's so weird, though — that particular reel-to-reel design actually seems like a deliberate combination of both influences.

The skeuomorphic look of Podcasts was based on a physical product design by Ive's legendary design influence, Dieter Rams:

http://www.cultofmac.com/176008/heres-the-braun-tape-recorde...

In retrospect, the tension inherent in this odd compromise seems palpable. It's like listening to the last album a band releases before they break up.
Detecting APTs By Analyzing Network Traffi
Backbone.ViewKit: Backbone.js view management and transitions for mobile apps
Steve Jobs' Yacht Unveiled
Probably not, considering their long history in "candy" UI. OSX's chrome style already strikes a good balance, I think they will keep it that way and just phase out the hyper-realistic apps.
As to point 1, I actually changed that a long time ago, but it seems Tumblr is caching the post on the specific page. If you go to the main blog page, it shows up correctly.

Point 2, the study addresses the number I brought up for the entire US.

Point 3, as I wrote, "The smart universities have realized this, and target their admissions process to select those who have it."

Point 4, Facebook tracked text. There was no complex machine learning algorithms, no thought of scaling, no esoteric languages.
Well a Director of Human Interfaces would be responsible for defining the Human Interface Guidelines.
Another upside: iOS and OS X are now both run by the same person. Hopefully this means that when there is convergence/overlap between the two platforms, it will be done more thoughtfully, rather than taking something from one and awkwardly bolting it onto the other one a la Launchpad.
So here's my experience with Google's recruiting process.

I exchanged a few mails with the recruiter, who offered a SWE position. Then two telephone interviews followed (with the recruiter and extensive interview with some developer), then they arranged an on-site interview. Apparently the 2nd tech phone interview wasn't needed.

For the on-site interview I got some paper-mail, where the position had been changed to SRE.. So I'm thinking to myself.. right, this is going to be interesting.

So I show up on-site, and 5 interviews follow, with a ~1hr lunch break in the middle. The 1st guy who interviewed me was a bit pompous [hey, he had a PhD!], but OK; the 2nd and 3rd guys were extremely arrogant; the 4th guy (my supposed team-leader) seemed to have had a bad day but was otherwise OK; the 5th guy was the ONLY with whom I felt I could build accord and have an engaging conversation. With him, it didn't feel like an "interview"; we were more like two equals talking about an interesting technical topic.

The guy who I had lunch with was... interesting. Suffice it to say that I had the impression that he was on the verge of explicitly telling me NOT to take the position I was interviewed for. (As in, crappy job and crappy place to live in.)

They tried to impress me with how every employee gets two big screens, a laptop of their own choice, how big systems they're working with, how good the food in cantina was, the fancy office space, etc.. Their attitude was in general as if they were interviewing a teenager whose "wet dream" was to work for google.

I never found out what kind of project I would be working on. Everybody's attitude during the interview was "you ask, and we'll tell you if it's not confidential". The SRE position was briefly described as "root on google.com".

It turned out that I'd also be required to be periodically on-call (since the position went from SWE to SRE underway), and that the people I'd be working with would be the same people who interviewed me.

So I got an offer, a contract came in paper-post and I found out that I'd only be having ~15 workdays of paid vacation per year. Incidentally, in the country I was supposed to move to, it was allowed by the law to work NNN hours unpaid overtime per year... Guess whether NNN matched (or maybe was even greater!) than the number of paid vacation days.

I didn't take the offer, and it turned out to be a damn good choice.

I'm rather sure that somebody without other hobbies or desires to have some free time to spend on things other than computers would have had a different subjective experience.

[This post is deliberately vague about some details in order not to reveal too much about the persons involved.]
Not sure if that's true or not but there's probably more to it than just that correct?
Doubt we'll be seeing any major change like that at least until iOS8. For iOS7 it seems too soon. We might also see it in Mac OS XI, but I also doubt that's coming until 2014.
Thanks! This is great. I've been trying to use a method like this while learning chinese and it's working pretty well.
Skeumorphism is when a user interface is stylized to look like real world materials (e.g. the Calendar.app on OSX is made to look like a leather desk calendar). The big argument toward it is that it either looks tacky or ruins usability.
If you've heard the recording of the Enron traders joking about the California power crisis you know that some of those grunts were pretty unethical.
Jury's still out at this point[1], but this certainly makes me optimistic. Or, at the very least, intensely interested in what this new arrangement will yield.

[1] He seems to certainly not be a bad CEO if we're talking about the set {All CEOs}. But you'd have to be really really good to not look awful if you're following Jobs.
Valuing Teachers: How Much is a Good Teacher Worth?
I got to check three of these, but one (version control) was only because I took game programming. A person could easily earn a CS degree from my school without using version control for any class.
You can also search, "time in Seattle" (in Google) and it'll show current time at that place. And you can do time difference calculations.
Personally I find things like version control and system administration to be things that students should learn for themselves. They should be encouraged, even actively encouraged (in fact they are already in most institutions) but there shouldn't be a class dedicated to this stuff. You are in University, studying CS ffs. If you can't learn such petty things for yourself, what good are you?
NYU terrorism class asks students to plot terrorist attack
This was also my first thought on the departure. The announcement did look ambiguous on whether Ive would be the final sign-off for software UI. I certainly hope he is, for the reasons you mentioned.
It's worth noting that Dixon's eventually scaled back its high-street presence completely and is now found only in airports. If his role at Dixon's was what got him a job at Apple, I'd be really surprised!
Getting a certificate error trying to open this page.
While I agree that a course on version control wouldn't make any sense, I'm pretty torn about this. Most of the developers I know have shitty git habits, and it's not an accident.
I agree that the analogy is wrong: Apple & Google are competing head-2-head, Toyota & Mercedes generally don't.

But it's interesting to think about why. It's typical that as market categories mature, we get segmentation. Start with the model T, eventually you have luxury SUVs, sportscars, minivans, large sedans, smarcars....
That's interesting, do you have a source for the stock cash-out?
Well he wasn't very liked either.
Skeuomorphism is a design approach where digital interfaces retain certain elements from their real-world counterparts. For example, the notes app on iOS looks like a real-world notepad, with its leather binding and yellow lined pages, including a torn paper effect along the top where previous pages have been pulled out of the pad. (Obviously these pages do not exist in the digital world, and therefore this design choice is an attempt to insert "realism" into the UI for the purposes of familiarity == skeuomorphism)
As with most communications distances, that depends entirely on where the other person is sitting. I never use monads, for instance, and only use type-classes when they look really applicable. Still, if the person I'm talking to has never heard of a map() primitive outside of MapReduce, that causes issues.

And then the #1 thing that really causes friction is recursion. Most people interviewing on behalf of BigCo's seem to think recursive algorithms are dirty and will always/almost-always overflow your stack. I learned in second-semester of freshman year of college that with a little work, every recursive algorithm can be made tail-recursive can be made iterative, and that rejecting recursion wholesale is premature optimization.

The best interviewer I had on the topic (who couldn't offer me a job because I'm a hardcore algorithms/CS guy and he ended up needing front-end web developers, no harm no foul) accepted my recursive answer and then proceeded by asking me to make it iterative. That was the best, in my opinion, both because it shows a level of "academic" knowledge about recursion and iteration, but also because it was exactly what I would have to do in a real job situation: transform a theoretically correct algorithm into a usable implementation that can perform well.

The people I want to criticize are the ones who seem to believe, or want to believe, that no such usable implementations of functional or academic techniques can exist, categorically, and hence that anyone who answers a question with anything so "functional" as a recursive algorithm must be a stack-overflowing, head-in-the-clouds academic or simply an amateur. Hence why I bring up Scala and why I'm not much of a Haskell programmer: it's damn well readable and usable for people who aren't functional-programming gurus, you can write code in it that plays well with CPU and memory, you can use a wide ecosystem full of libraries, and it comes with just enough functional magic baked into itself in just the right way to make the "magic" parts (like the Option functor) easy to learn and use for people who don't care about functional programming theory.
Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist and why this matters
Already a few interesting answers
I don't know if anyone ever doubted Tim Cook as a good/credible CEO. The only issue is whether or not he can be jobs-level which is unlikely but remains to be seen.
Standardized testing has nothing to do with science. There are studies in teaching and learning that do attempt to gauge the effectiveness of different teaching approaches, etc, and they typically use randomized trials and carefully controlled situations to be able to measure the effect.

But more crucially, the subjects (both teachers and students) in those studies are not rewarded based on the outcome of the study. Even if there is a correlation between the test and what we want schools to achieve (whatever that is), making teachers jobs contingent on that outcome will select for teachers who are good at achieving those results, which increasingly will diverge from your desired outcome. It's an example of dangers of "optimization by proxy" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_...).
How eBay uses big data to make you buy more
no offense taken ;) it's a free course that I created to help others with their applications and to showcase the prototype of crowdcademy. There will be paid courses eventually, but on much more complicated and lengthy topics such as learning Photoshop or a specific programming language.
Dixon was DRI for those dreadful apple genius ads over the summer. Good move indeed
I've heard this argument before and it's a load of crap.

If I had a choice between a C64 with BASIC and an iPad with a browser, I'd take the browser every time.

Within twenty seconds you can have http://jsfiddle.net/ up in a window and be programming JavaScript.

Within a few minutes you could create a Linode account and be using vi through ssh.

Within a few days you could be creating a much more significant application using the enormous selection of open-source tools that never, ever existed on the same platforms that GORILLA.BAS came from. You could do things that were virtually impossible in the 1980s in a matter of days or weeks, even with no prior experience.

People decry the App Store as "closed", but it's basically open to anyone with a hundred bucks and the ability to ship an executable to Apple. Sure, theoretically you could've shipped your game on your C64 on floppy disks, as some people successfully did, but the enormity of this undertaking is well beyond the ability of most beginner programmers. It was basically impossible to go it alone without a publisher for distribution. Now anyone can self-publish.

If you ask me, the ecosystem has never been more open and accessible to developers of all ages and backgrounds. It's also more open, more friendly to users of all stripes, not just enthusiasts. Your grandmother can buy apps through the app store. This sort of thing simply didn't happen in the so-called glorious old days of "open" computers.
The Best Mac games sale ever: 6 top games for $30
AMD Will Build 64-bit ARM based Opteron CPUs for Servers, Production in 2014
Please have a look at Lenovo Yoga IdeaPad.
Nice work. For almost all learning, there is a better solution out there . . . it just takes individuals to go after a creative solution using their brain . . . which is really language/dialect independent! Bravo.
This statement out of michaelochurch is just silly. Most managers I know consider 20% time to be important to those engineers that desire taking it. That said, not everyone tries, and you can lose your ability to do 20% if you underperform.

michaelochurch appears to have had a very strongly negative experience with his time at Google - I'd implore you (and everyone) to not base your assessment of what the company is like on his experience alone, especially since I've got pretty much entirely opposite experience.
The key to success at most companies is to please your boss's boss, indirectly of course.
Well, these days, I write a website using web standards, it works great in Chrome, Firefox, and IE10, except for one CSS style that IE doesn't support, ruining it for IE10 users. And so I unintentionally end up creating something only usable in Chrome or Firefox.
Sure. Here you go:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57425920-37/apple-exec-sco...