skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a few layers to this:

1) Forstall apparently wants to be CEO, and run the company. That puts him at odds with Cook (the CEO), and Ive (who wants to drive Apple's design decisions).

2) He's divisive. There's claims that neither Jonny Ive nor Bob Mansfield would talk to him without Tim Cook mediating. There's also claims that he "managed up" (showed off to the boss) better than he "managed down", and stole credit while deflecting critisism.

3) He was the guy in charge of Siri and Maps.

4) He was probably the one driving the post-Jobs war with Google.

Siri and Maps are Apple's way of fighting Google. Siri competes with Google Search, and Maps competes with Google Maps. There are reasons why Apple wants to spite Google, but the whole strategy could also be Scot Forstall's way of creating his own empire in Apple. Going head to head with Google requires lots of resources, which would all be under Forstall's command.

I don't think it's a good gamble for Apple. Google doesn't really hate Apple. I bet they'll port everything they can to iOS, as long as they can keep pushing their ads. Nexus might see Apple as a competitor, but Nexus isn't worth as much as adwords. As Eric Schmidt said in an interview - "It's their call".

If Apple goes down the path Forstall wants, they'll be going head to head with Google in the things Google is best at. If they stop trying to turn into a data / AI company, they can focus on what they do best - making easy to use devices which sell like hotcakes, and command a fat profit margin.

Android will hurt them, but as long as they focus on their core strengths (hardware, marketing, industrial design, interface design, and integration) they'll continue to do pretty well. They milked the iPod for a decade, despite there being plenty of better value competitors. They can do the same with the iPhone. They can do the same with whatever the next big thing is. I'd say going to war with Google will be at best a waste of time, and most likely a string of humiliating losses.
I think its safe to say now that if you're getting data from any server anywhere, you're "infringing" on 1000's of patents. They're all just kind of running together into a toxic, innovation killing sludge.

Just build stuff. Let the people who can't argue about who's first in line to steal from you when you're successful. Hopefully by then you can just pay some people to argue back.
Is anyone evacuating their AWS instances to West Coast DCs?
With hurricane Sandy bearing down on the east coast, is anyone migrating their operations temporarily from the VA datacenter to AWS' Northern California or Oregon facilities?
College leads to job leads to money. Money is generally a pretty handy thing to have.
I really feel for the Amazon employees working in the us-east data center this week. Not only do they have to worry about the safety of their families, but half the internet will be watching them if anything goes down. I can't even imagine all the contingencies they have to prepare for (e.g. engineer gets paged, but has no power at home, or can't drive in due to flooded streets). Best of luck to them.
Lopping off a senior exec over the mapping fiasco is completely warranted, but here's the next problem: The exec had several people feeding him information that the mapping app was somehow acceptable.

If Tim Cook does his job right: There will be several of those underling heads rolling, either by Tim himself or some one who takes over Forstall's area. (And which one of those two possibilities will tell us a lot about Tim Cook.)
Yes, but without the complete lack of consistency between what the home button does in an any given app.
"(Think the difference between having John Carmack on your team, versus some guy making $8/hr in a developing country)"

A CS degree, or any formal education, has little to do with what kind of programmer you are going to be. You can take a completely vocational approach in school and move on to other work individually. Or the other way around. You will end up being the type of programmer you wish to be regardless of CS. Case in point, John Carmack.
And in the other direction, the thousands of CS grads who every year simply churn out "whatever works" once they are in the field and forget about all they were supposed to be learning.
I would encourage students to be less critical about what it is they are actually learning in school, because it's what you do after those 2-4 years that will really matter.
It's been quoted to death, but I feel Jobs was right on the money when he said that at the executive level, there's no "it's not my fault."

It was at the very least his responsibility, and this story paints him as not accepting that responsibility. That doesn't look good. If the story is true, I'd consider it a big enough disagreement to remove someone over.
Very interesting take on redesigning Bookmarks.

But the mockup they produced at the end seems to have several issues, at least when it comes to compatibility with my bookmarking habits. I wonder how they plan to address these issues:

1. Only a single level of hierarchy. There's a "pile" for "school work", but what about having sub-piles for each course that I'm taking? I don't want bookmarks for my CS course getting mixed up with bookmarks for my political science course.

2. Can I toss the same bookmark in more than one pile at the same time? The neat thing about tagging is that tags are many-to-many. The concept of piles seems to be a reversion to folders. Don't get me wrong, folders are cool, too. But they have the annoying limitation of being one-to-many.

3. Relying on screenshots and/or favicons instead of page titles to represent each bookmark would quickly get confusing when you bookmark multiple pages from the same website. Can you tell one NYT article from another from 120px thumbnails of each page? (Hopefully, those buttons in the top right are for toggling between icon and list view.)

4. What if I have 10,000 bookmarks? Is your idea highly scalable (pardon the buzzword), or is it optimized for ~200 bookmarks?

All of these nitpicks stem from the fact that a bookmark manager should not only help you save pages for later, but also help you manage the pages that you've saved. Here's the question: Does your product facilitate saving and organizing methods that allow the user to retrieve any page within 5 seconds, 5 years later? Because I do occasionally revisit pages after a decade or even more, after I've accumulated thousands of other bookmarks ranging from "read this afternoon" to "potentially useful to a future project".
That implies free forever, you want to commit to that? That's also what it says now when I first viewed that and yet I still went hunting for pricing. I would actually trust signing up for the free account more if I saw there was a paid option somewhere for whatever reason!
The definition of 'active editor' that gives totals in the tens of thousands is anything more than 5 edits a month. That could just be minutes of time, so I doubt you can draw any sensible conclusions about sizing a paid full-time staff from '5+ edit' volunteer counts.

FWIW, the Wikipedia article on Encyclopedia Britannica suggests that in 2007, Britannica had a credited staff of about 60, with another dozen editorial advisors. (While thousands of other advisors contributed over the decades, they're not required as continuing full-time staff.)

So your suggestion that the Foundation would need a "at least 10 times the number of people/money" -- 1000+ full-time paid editors, a $400 million/year+ budget?!? -- for serious improvements seems wildly extravagant. Is it extrapolated from the known size/cost of any real-world professional/academic editorial efforts?
I'm from New Zealand but have travelled in the US and lived in the UK. The difference is service.

You get it in the US. I remember it in every store. Initially I thought it was intimidating because I was not used to it. But after a few months and some great experiences I really enjoyed it.

You don't get it in the UK. High street stores, especially noticeable in places like shoe stores where you need service to complete a transaction. You could easily wait 10 minutes until someone was available to help you. And it could take another 10 minutes per pair of shoes you wanted to try on. So painful.
I agree - we don't really know anything about Jony Ive as a UI designer. The skeuomorphism will probably be toned down, but I have a hard time believing he will follow Microsoft's lead by copying Metro. Windows 8 and especially Office 2013 are really exposing Metro's weaknesses as a desktop paradigm.
This looks cool!

I just noticed that when clicking one level deep the MarkShow link on the left side bar links to the current path, rather than back home: http://markshow.org/License
On the other hand, Heroku could do everything in its power to keep its main system up, but the failure of a highly used addon, totally out of their control, could cause nearly as much of a problem for them.
Lots of supposition and subjectivity.

I'm pretty much clueless on this topic, but from a quick scan this seems like pure gossip. I've learned nothing at all except for various HN opinions, and I have trouble understanding if and/or what the substance is here.

What am I missing? Put another way. What does anyone on HN actually uniquely know about this situation. Could someone help simplify this?
I think our approach is that what you see today is free and future features will be paid. Expect a pricing plan very very shortly though.
PG, would you be able to guesstimate the proportion of early applications that get a follow-up please? Is it much higher than those submitted on time?
NYC is running on generator power (Because of Sandy) so we decided to kick things over to our secondary datacenter in Corvallis, OR. With our tests this happens in about 5 minutes, but we had a scheduled index reorg which we didn't account for. That caused 40 GBytes that had to be synced across the country, so we had to run SO in read only for a little over an hour.
Or even better, why should the university waste time teaching me petty things like version control instead of focusing on things that I cannot learn by myself.
Congrats to the guys at Fancy
Strangely, the link is blocked by BlueCoat at my workplace. Can someone pastebin the text?
It's regrettable you're not getting the feedback you should be getting, as this is something that will really help you stick to it. On the other hand, the very reason you aren't getting feedback is a good one: you're working on obscure articles, which is precisely the area wikipedia needs work done on in order to become the fully-fledged, echt encyclopedia (as I'm sure you know in the case of proprietary equivalents professionals are hired to fulfill the role you are fulfilling). Anyway, consider yourself a lonely pioneer ;)
And the lack of cell data was an entirely reasonable thing to complain about. I didn't say the reviews were exclusively positive, I said they were fair.
This seems to be based on the idea that learning a language is mostly about learning words. That has not been my experience as a language learner. (As disclosed in my HN user profile, I am a native speaker of English who learned Chinese to the proficiency that I was able to work as a translator and as a Chinese-English interpreter.)

Words in one language do not have a one-to-one mapping with words in any other language. As the saying goes, "The map is not the territory." Each language has its own peculiarities of dividing up the Universe of experience into words, and especially each language has a different approach to arranging words into sentences and longer utterances with grammar and syntax.

I know of a Web page that lists some language-learning resources, especially useful for the case of learning one Indo-European language (like the blog post author's native langauge) while already knowing another.

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

The best single bit of advice I can give for someone who wants to learn a language thoroughly is to do a lot of what the blog post author is doing: reading in the target language. The section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975 has great advice: "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original).

祝你好運。(Good luck!)

AFTER EDIT: The comment posted by _feda_ before this comment was posted that it is important to read target language text for meaning beyond one's current reading level, using context rather than a dictionary to figure things out, is correct. That has much to do with improving understanding of the second language, just grappling with the language directly a lot, not always relying on bilingual reference books.
I'm using Anki to learn Japanese, but since I started from scratch, I'm learning the words here first[0]. Start with a word from there, use an English-<Language> dictionary[1] and Google Translate together to disambiguate, then search on Google Images in <Language> to find an image of the term. Searching in the target language double checks that you have the correct term. After that, just practice in Anki.

The method I described is from a Lifehacker post earlier this year[2].

As an aside, Anki is excellent. In the past few months version 2.0, a new version deserving of a major version number, was released for Windows/Mac/Linux, and just recently for iOS. The corresponding Android version is a little behind but I imagine it will be out soon too.

[0] http://www.towerofbabelfish.com/Tower_of_Babelfish/Base_Voca...
[1] http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi
[2] http://lifehacker.com/5903288/i-learned-to-speak-four-langua...
I disagree, Linux only needs content parity. The hook is price. As long as gamers are in a student/lower age demographic price is the main barrier to purchase, and I'd argue, the main driving force behind piracy of Windows.
Japan is definitely more insular than Korea, but keep in mind that whenever you see a "weird Japan" story on the internet, it's probably "weird in Japan" too. Tokyo has such a large number of people living in such close proximity that it enables the birth of some very weird subcultures, but these people are most definitely not taken seriously by your average Japanese person.

Compare this to a story I saw on AC360 the other day - there's a salon in San Francisco that rejuvenates your skin by punching and slapping you. Imagine a Japanese person reading about that and thinking "wow, Americans are so weird!" That's the same position you're in with that donut head thing.
Ask HN: Open-source business strategy meetup/group in the SF Bay Area?
Choosing an open-source business model and accompanying licenses are big decisions for a startup. There's a very delicate balance between contributing code to the commons, fostering a community and being profitable, and there's no one right way to build a scalable business around open-source that doesn't devolve into a consulting and support business model that doesn't scale revenue and headcount wise and becomes a time vampire diverting engineering from building a better product.

With this in mind, is there a group or meetup in the SF Bay Area or an online discussion group where founders and key employees of startups using or exploring open-source business models can get together, network, get advice and bounce ideas of each other?

I'm doing a lot of research on this myself, but there is no substitute for talking to others who've been down this path before and have wisdom and knowledge to share.
> The exec had several people feeding him information that the mapping app was somehow acceptable.

That might be an excuse Tim Cook himself can reasonably use, but not the exec directly responsible for the development of the new Maps app. He simply can't say he was getting information from a small number of direct underlings - he should have been in the trenches talking to the developers, testers and beta users and getting feedback directly.

He was putting his reputation on the line by being the original public presenter for the new Maps, and if he was prepared to stand up in front of the world and say "this is great" he should have first been prepared to dig a little deeper into the true nature of the new app.
Do you know which are these companies or founders?
Pat probably meant 'idiosyncratic' instead of 'idiomatic' (unless it's a non-idiomatic use of 'idiomatic').
Google maps tracking and setting my home location without my knowledge
A week ago I was using my tablet (nexus 7) and on my gmaps app (Version 6.9.1) I noticed something odd,I had a 'home' icon assigned to my exact gps coordinate.

I've never put in my home address because I always use the city I live in as the starting location.

I think that the app is using my GPS coordinates to link this location as my home due to the amount of time the tablet has spent at this location.

Also you can't edit the home location icon from the app, you can only edit it from maps.Google.com under 'my places' and the address was incorrect as well further proving my guess that the app tracked my GPS location and set the location as my home without my permission or knowledge.

I'm just asking if anyone else is getting this on your app.

This proves to be a very big security risk since I was not informed of this setting and idk if my tablet was stolen, my keys probably would have been stolen as well and voila, my tablet and pretty much everything in my house is open for him to steal.

Pretty big deal. Discuss away.
Also PG thanks for the reply I was wondering do we have a chance with founders 35+ but still did an early submit
A basic map application just requires data, projections (which is a solved problem, if a little tedious), and a rendering system. Path finding is also basically solved (it's Algorithms 101, though you need something a bit more sophisticated to make it scale). A basic mapping app can be hacked up in a week. A good mapping app is obviously much harder, but it's still doable.

But like taligent said, it's data that's the real problem. Mapping data tends to be dirty and heterogeneous. Do you have a point, or a polygon? You're in trouble if you just have a street address (geocoding can be very hit and miss). Metadata (like the projection) can be missing. Locations can be slightly wrong, and you'll draw a highway running through a shopping mall, or connect streets which don't quite connect, or have gaps in a street because it changes street names and there's a tiny gap between the two streets (which doesn't exist in the real world). How do you normalise the field names? How do you even get the data? Once you've got everything into your database, you move onto the next city / state / country.
Direct quote from Jacinta Richardson in support of the Anti-Harassment policy:

> Statistics say that 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted, and specifically 1 in 6 women will be raped in their lifetimes;

...

> Let's assume there were 700 attendees at LCA, and 10% of those were women. That's 70 women, 25% of whom have been sexually assaulted, or 17 women.

Ts'o was saying that, no, the 1 in 4 statistic is a) a result of dubious research, b) does not necessarily apply to a room full of strangers at a technology conference, and c) that using said statistic to push an agenda is misleading at best.

No redefinition of rape involved. In fact, Ts'o cited a review of the 1 in 4 study that concludes the conductors of said research was doing exactly that: redefining the term "rape" to bloat the statistics.
I think that might have other less desirable connotations.
Note that this announcement is based on a processor license, not an architecture license - AMD are using an ARM design off the shelf, not designing their own new ARM core.
Do you have any advice on the length of the video? The application asks for a "one minute long" video, but most of the accepted videos I've seen are usually longer. Some are as long as 4 minutes. Does the length factor in to your decision?
I have pressureNET running on EC2 in US-East. It's collecting data about Sandy from a bunch of Android users in the region, and I only realized a few hours ago that...it's gonna get hit by Sandy. I'm not sure what to do.

The Android app has a hardcoded server URL to the DNS of my instance. If the server goes down, and I prepare a backup, all my users will still be sending to the old, dead server (assuming Sandy takes out AWS in that region). So I can also update the app and give it a new server url. But I'm going to lose many hours of valuable hurricane data as users take time to get the update, etc.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how I can handle this?

I realize my mistakes and know how to fix them for next time, and my current data is obviously backed up. But for incoming data...am I screwed?

Edit: I have an idea. I'll update the app and give it a backup URL to use only if the main one is non-responsive. Then I'll publish the update and cross my fingers.
http://quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-well-does-Apples-Directly-R... on Directly Responsible Individuals
God says...

8:6 And when the king asked the woman, she told him. So the king
appointed unto her a certain officer, saying, Restore all that was
hers, and all the fruits of the field since the day that she left the
land, even until now.

8:7 And Elisha came to Damascus; and Benhadad the king of Syria was
sick; and it was told him, saying, The man of God is come hither.

8:8 And the king said unto Hazael, Take a present in thine hand, and
go, meet the man of God, and enquire of the LORD by him, saying, Shall
I recover of this disease? 8:9 So Hazael went to meet him, and took a
present with him, even of every good thing of Damascus, forty camels'
burden, and came and stood before him, and said, Thy son Benhadad king
of Syria hath sent me to thee, saying, Shall I recover of this
disease? 8:10 And Elisha said unto him, Go, say unto him, Thou mayest
certainly recover: howbeit the LORD hath shewed me that he shall
surely die.
C type qualifiers and friends
C type qualifiers with examples
Edit: Rewrote my entire comment...

The delay on the app side should only be 15-30 minutes. Use a replication database (much like the Postgres follower system on Heroku) to ensure no loss of data and you should be fine.
Because they have no reason to do so.
Sounds like a good move. It's important to signal to the entire Apple organization that nobody is untouchable if they screw up. Apple's culture is generally pretty tolerant of mistakes as long as people fix them quickly. I think in this instance, the problem was that 1) He didn't publicly accept responsibility for the problem. and 2) He couldn't fix the problems fast enough.

I know that right after the maps issues came to light, I suddenly got a bunch of recruiting emails from the Apple mapping team. Sounds like the team was caught flat-footed and didn't really have a solid plan to immediately fix things. When you have a pressing and urgent systems engineering problem, I definitely think it's a bad idea to suddenly distract your team with tons of recruiting interviews. Building a good team takes a lot of time and focus. I would normally assume that Apple would transfer their best engineers from other teams to fix the maps app, but maybe Scott didn't have enough goodwill built up within the organization to make that happen.
My gut says that it would have been signed by both.
As per usual linode doesn't really say much about anything really.
What alternative is there even? You can't look at patents to avoid infringing because having a policy of looking at patents can actually put you in a worse position when you inevitably violate one (and if you are doing anything, you will).

The only thing you can do is have your engineers operate like patents don't exist, and hire a bunch of lawyers to cover your ass.
It's a matter of personal preference. A seemingly endless expanse of text seems daunting. I like the idea of pages, they break down the text into more manageable pieces.