skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He oversaw Siri and Maps, two products which over-promised and under-delivered, and six months ago he cashed out 95% of his Apple stock.

I think it was evident he lost the power struggle and it killed his enthusiasm. His heart just wasn't in it anymore.
Windows Update has had 'Critical' and 'Optional' updates for years. Even novice users know that; it's RIGHT on the Windows Update control panel. And if there are no 'Critical' updates, the only thing that shows up are the 'Optional' ones. Moreover, usually only security-related or Service-Pack updates are on the 'Critical' list -- Nominal Office updates are almost ALWAYS on the 'Optional' list. Geek cred is slipping fast.
Bringing Consistency to Riak - RICON2012
Sales taxes in the US vary by state. Further, not all merchants will charge sales tax for either state when shipping between states -- this generally depends on whether the merchant is considered to have a business presence in the purchasers state.
I think I know the answer to this already but, just to be sure, can this be used to create Android apps, or is this IOS-only?
> ... it would be useful to mark a few more major cities on the map.

It would. And some of the ones that are marked are kinda pointless. Anyone with any knowledge of U.S. geography can find New York, San Jose, and Seattle by the shape of the coastline. But what about Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Memphis, Omaha, Louisville, Indianapolis, St. Louis, etc.

Regardless, very nice visualization.
happy for this move. i was actually starting to envy microsoft's metro design aesthetic and loathe the changes that came in every new os x release.
A Memorization Tip
Show HN: Fun, simple feature tours for your website or app
Interesting timing on the announcement, given that the stock market is closed today and likely tomorrow too.

As both a fan and shareholder of Apple, I'm very pleased to hear Browett is out. The stories that came out a couple months ago about the changes in Apple Retail did fill me with admiration for his management style.

Also, given how Forstall is described in a Business Week profile[1], and that Bob Mansfield is not only sticking around, but heading up a new team, I wonder if Mansfield laid out an ultimatum to Tim Cook about 'him or me'.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorc...
Show HN: Bengal. Create any type of payment/funding page with your Stripe acct
The IPv6-Addressable Light Bulb Goes On Sale
Tons of questions:

1) How far along are you?

2) Pricing Ideas?

3) Target Market?

4) Funded at all?

5) Any available apps built with it yet?

6) "Store the data you care about". Can you elaborate on this?
This doesn't look like a CS degree---this looks more like software engineering requirements. CS and SE focus on distinctly different things. I might suggest changing the page title.
It's unusual for Apple to hype something like this, but in that note they mention Mansfield's semiconductor team "have ambitious plans for the future". I doubt that simply refers to making the A7 faster and more power-efficient.
GOTO Night Scrum - Why you should use Scrum with Q&A Session by Jeff Sutherland
I'm very excited about this. I left the Apple ecosystem over thier poorly-designed skeuomorphic interfaces (iCal and Address Book in Lion being very frustrating). I love the hardware, though, and I'm excited for a return to UX on par with that hardware.
Welcome to the New Pandora for Mobile
Similarly, is "I got rejected by a girl thrice, but turned that around over the course of 4 years, from the other side of the world" impressive at all? Depending on your perspective, it either shows extreme determination and ability to succeed, or a foolish aversion to "pivoting".
Bold action often results in great things.

Apple has always strived to couple great hardware design with great software. Excited to see them bring the two departments closer again.
While I typically agree that buying is better than building this was one case where building still made the most sense for us. See the post below:

https://zapier.com/blog/2012/10/14/when-you-should-build-not...

Here's a portion of an email I wrote to another email company about why we built this:

I've run email for multiple companies now, and the biggest problem I've always faced is a disconnect between what data the third party holds vs. what data is in my internal database.

There's also a bit of an issue with us (Zapier) that a lot of things happen on when a user isn't on site so we have to use the API to constantly push data to the third party if we want it to work. This requires us to either 1) figure out what data we should be pushing or 2) push everything.

The first part is annoying because it's hard to predict what is needed and developers hate getting requests to add just one more piece of data to the email service.

The second part is not great because now we spend a bunch of resources sending everything and the third party can essentially replicate our database or we push so much data that it becomes cost prohibitive.

So we just built a simple logic builder around MailGun that handles sending email. It's not perfect (i.e. we don't have great analytics and all our emails go out at the same time ever day), but we can literally segment on anything. Every single table in our database. And for a service with use cases all over the place this saves me from sending stupid generic emails or from sending an email about sales to developers or an email about github to a marketer.

edit: my hope is still that a 3rd party service figures this out because I'd much rather pay someone for this than build it. But if building is the only way you get features you need, then build you must.

P.S. I think Bryan might have spent a weekend hacking on this. So not a ton of resources lost especially considering that you can't spend all your brain waves hacking on your core product or you'll go mad.
I had the feeling that was proved by this statistics.
This "explanation" is a BS excuse.
No. It's not UI, it's HI (Human Interface) now!

It's best we all get used to it. It'll be repeated again and again from now on :)

Edit: This is what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interface

> Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for _Human Interface_ in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.

It's still a non-word, but will be an (oft-used) word soon enough (like that damn skeumorphism thing).
You have a lot of choices, basically look for anyone with big iron requirements (big data systems/infrastructure). Microsoft, Google, Facebook love PL people. Many startups would be happy to have you also.
As ever, Simple Made Easy is apropos here: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy. It is well worth the hour, either watching it or downloading the MP3 and listening to it on your commute, jog, etc.

One point the speaker, Rich Hickey, argues is that we have a bad habit of focusing too much on our experience sitting at our desks ("look how quickly I can do this one thing") at the expense of complexity in the code.

It's a short view as opposed to a long view, since over time your project inevitably becomes larger and more complex. When you're trying to add a feature to a large, possibly mature product, you're seldom doing the same kind of work you see for a framework or language's demo code. Complexity will dominate everything else, to the point where it probably won't matter as much how easy it is to change the color on a div or whatever.

That said, if you can isolate complexity behind an API (not just hide it, but truly abstract it), it's probably better for your software. The problem is that software only seems to get more complex over time, and after a while your framework which ostensibly abstracts adds its own complexity, complexity incidental to the problem at hand.

Anywasy, I sympathize. :) As I see it, programming as we know it tends to involve gluing together frameworks and APIs more often than it does writing raw code. It's a huge stack of abstractions and I wonder at what point it's futile to try to understand more than a certain subset.

That said, some people like being able to write code which ships almost instantly ~everywhere, or to a great many tiny computers in people's pockets. It's not all bad, right? It could be simpler, but it just isn't, so the decision is to take it or leave it. (Or try to replace it, but now you have two problems and/or N+1 frameworks.)
Crumble is a jquery plugin that makes it easy to create tours to introduce new users or new features. It is built on top of grumble.js by James Cryer to generate the bubbles themselves.

The library also uses a standard ordered list to store the tour information, making it accessible.

Thoughts welcome!
'Obscured' isn't the right word. It's business as usual for office (and other non-system) updates to be under the 'Optional' category..
Hey HN, this is still very beta but I'd love to get some feedback right away (I have thick skin so don't hold back). I know there's not even terms/privacy pages yet–those are coming soon.

Also, if anyone out there is looking to sell an ebook or other digital goods (icon set, WP theme, screencasts, etc.), I'd love to talk to you about using Bengal. Email is in my profile.
In a similar vein, here's a Python script which someone wrote that does a word analysis on Chinese texts:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/34994-new-too...

It provides a breakdown of the words in the text, and even does lookups to supply definitions and frequency in an external corpus, so you know how common that word is in a broad range of texts. You can then take the output and paste it into a spreadsheet program, and from there import it into an SRS flashcard system like Anki for long-term memorization. Kind of a DIY solution but it's pretty handy for serious learners of Chinese.

It's also available as a web frontend here, under the "Wordlist" link:

http://www.zhtoolkit.com/posts/tools/

With full end-to-end integration with Anki and a mobile e-reader, it would be very powerful indeed.

(I should also mention that the mobile app Pleco has a reader component that allows directly adding words from an ebook into its flashcard system, along with high-quality definitions. Pleco's probably the fullest Chinese-learning suite available on smartphones.)

edit: For mouseover definitions of Chinese and Japanese words in your browser, there's the extremely useful Perapera-kun Firefox addon. It allows you to add words to a wordlist which you can then export as a text file along with definitions. Tada, more cards for your Anki deck.
John Browett didn't last long. Jony Ive overseeing UI should be interesting and might bring an end to the skeuomorphism bug at Apple.

I wonder how this will affect iOS. Forstall has been in charge from the beginning (afaik) so we might see some big changes and even better integration with OS X now that Craig Federighi is in charge of both teams.

Edit:

I wonder if Forstall's departure has anything to do with Mansfield staying on?
So... can we now all agree that Tim Cook is a good CEO?
Typically your strings are a R.strings, colours are at R.colours, etc so it makes it pretty easy to spot if you are passing a string through where you should be passing a colour.

Here's the problem. Say you need to pass around a specific resource (reusable code somewhere in your app):

void doSomething(int stringResourceId)
^ THIS IS WRONG

The problem is that the R bullshit essentially decontextualizes what that actually means. This is a statically typed language. It should be used as a statically typed language.

And comparing the GUI design stuff to Swing is ignoring the ridiculous number of vastly better systems everywhere else. SWT is great. Microsoft, too, nailed it with WinForms and WPF/XAML kick an unreasonable amount of ass (though I won't use it because, derp, Windows). Swing sucked from day one.

Your post disagrees with me, and that's fine, but I get a vibe of "good enough" out of most of it and we should, as a culture, be better than that. Android isn't. It is precisely "good enough," and that sucks because the Android people are obviously very smart people who could be doing vastly better.
Sadly enough, I'm considering it. No good reason why though.
I'm actually surprised that they allowed John Browett to receive his first batch of grants before they showed him the door. Didn't seem like he had long after some of his recent communication problems.
I just hope that they can keep the contrast and the explicit visual of what a component does. Case in point: fire up letterpress on the ipad, get a gamecenter popover with its felt and wood finish, you can clearly identify what is supposed to happen (aside from copy[if you've used gamecenter before]).
Quizlet sucks. It's all fun and games until some assholes come along and start tagging their worthless sets with tags you're following. "The Trolls of Quizlet", really? This crap doesn't happen on Memrise, and the Memrise interface is not set up to make it terribly rewarding for people to try it.
Design patterns are bullshit
> His model predicted that a 13-metre-high wave would have hit Lausanne 15 minutes after the rock fall,

not much you can do about that, I'm afraid
Just to be clear, he's not "leaving." He got fired. He got fired because after the map fiasco became apparent, he refused to send out an apology or sign his name to the one Tim Cook sent. (internal knowledge)
Sure, but I don't think anyone is worried about maintaining a perfect 9:16 ratio for reading text or what have you. Generally when a device like that starts playing 16:9 content it forces a switch to landscape mode with the content centered and at the top, leaving a 1280x48 swath on the bottom for the home bar and the top 1280x720 for native-resolution 720p content.
The qualitative arguments are valid enough, and I won't try to dispute them except to point out that most of what you argue is lets-just-say-controversial and not uniformly agreed upon.

But the car analogy is just bad. Mercedes sells cars into different markets with different feature sets than Toyota. People don't buy a Camry expecting it to accelerate like a E350. And the "polish" features are things like Leather Seats and climate control, which are objectively measurable.

Compare the Nexus 10, which by basically all objective measures is a better piece of hardware than the retina iPad. All that Apple has on it is brand and opinion.

Even Mercedes can't sell cars on brand and opinion alone.
In the US taxes are a combination of city, county and state. For example there are often city ordinances adding 0.25% to the sales tax to support something or other. For example here are the sales tax rates in California by city or county, varying between 7 and 10%: http://www.boe.ca.gov/cgi-bin/rates.cgi

The voting is ludicrously complex (Americans like things that way!). For example many bureaucratic positions are elected. Consequently when people go to vote, they have to vote on a lot of things. Here is the California voter guide: http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/pdf/

Here is what someone in my city would see as their ballot: http://www.votescount.com/nov12/root1106/ballots/bt000039.pd...

It starts out with Obama and Romney, heads into Senate & Congress, then the state senate & assembly, then into county positions and finally city positions. Then there are propositions for the state, county and city.

After that digression, the California sales taxes for purchases made in person are based on where the store is. Except for cars which are based on the purchaser address. For distance purchases (eg internet, mail order) they are based on where the business decides its tax presence is. Amazon for example took that into account when deciding where to have their presence on opening in California and actually got some tax concessions from the "lucky" cities (yes corporate welfare is well established in the US).

For sales where the purchaser and seller are in different states no sales tax can be charged. Most states then have a provision requiring the purchaser to report these purchases and pay a "use" tax whose rate is identical to the sales tax rate. As far as I can tell many do not report this.
I'm a business guy in our startup (and work with to tech cofounders) and wrote about starting and gaining reputation for my consulting company. Hope, that suits well. :)
Apple iOS Chief Leaves, Jon Ive Takes Control
Why? I'm perfectly happy with HSPA+. I'll take at least 3G everywhere over LTE.
I feel very sorry for Apple. Scott was a major catalyst that made things happen at the company.
You're only surprised because you're comparing a spec sheet to another spec sheet. And it's not thinner and lighter. And you don't know if the screen is actually going to look better. And it doesn't have LTE (no matter what the excuse).

Additionally, the Nexus 10 is massive, is ugly as hell, runs Android and thus has like 10 apps designed for a Android tablet.

I own every Nexus device in existence and every iOS device, so that's where I'm coming from. The Nexus 7 was a waste of money.
No mention of HN's "saved stories"! :)
It'd be within the reach of more families if they could take the money that would be going towards their child in the assigned public schools with them to the school of their choice. I don't understand why that idea became a partisan one.
Along these lines I think it was interesting to see pretty much why "Tornado Alley" works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_alley
At first I was shocked by the headline, but after reading the story, I actually think, this could be amazing.

Getting Jony Ive to oversee both industrial and software design, could lead to something very exciting, that provides the innovation, the software, has been lacking.

I have full confidence, in Eddy Cue, Craig, and Bob their new roles, and hope this means Bob will stay on longer.

As per the direct no apology firing of Browett.. Sweet! I was actually hoping for that. I was insane to gamble with the Apple stores reputation and service for a litle more margin. Having now seen a Dixons, I have no idea, why he was hired
The man's got taste. That's good enough for me. Though I fear that it probably is "bye bye overt skeumorphism", but what if the new ideology is "hello excessive minimalism/removing every last pro feature left"? Let's hope not.

I don't use iCal or Address Book much, so I don't hate that stupid skeumorphism like the rest of the world (I like it though when it's used sparingly and isn't just keep getting in your way)...
Has promise, just needs some tweaks.

I would try to make it 'less sensitive' when transitioning, so the user doesn't accidentally switch images.

Also there needs to be a way to tell that there is a layer of images. Maybe some relative positioning on the ones that are hidden?

Cool idea though.
As of FF6, Firefox defaults to listening during the bubbling phase; before that though, the parameter was required in FF.
Apple has used the term HI for a long, long time.
My first reaction: PayPal employed more than 450 people?

Apparently, yes. According to Wikipedia in 2007 they employed 2000 people.
Free icon generator iconbench - for web/mobile apps
He's in the pocket of big tobacco, wall street and the health insurance industry, for one thing.
http://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm-gladwell-2/
Sounds like Germany should start hooking up with the dudes who figured out how to turn electricity and water into Gasoline. Perfect energy storage.
Many CS degrees are all there are at institutions. SE is merely a focus you can take in that.
What was your 20% project?
Red Hat releases 'almost-complete' implementation of Ceylon language
The standardized tests I've seem often ask question similar to the ones you give, and are actually not all that bad.

The real world alternative to standardized tests is usually tests designed by the teachers themselves. There's little reason to believe that those are somehow better (or even close to the standardized ones, which are usually well thought out).
Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10 - Amazon Ads and Data Leaks
>identifies as removable storage

Managing your music collection as a distinct set of files and folders is a rather 90's concept. What matters is how the files are presented to the end user - they can be all slapped into a single folder and given GUID names as long as the resultant database presents them in a clear and meaningful way.

(Only partly kidding - I think your criterion for a "shitty" music player will find a great deal of dissent :3)

>Linux programs like Pidgin have support for almost all IM protocols known to man

Weak support. Anything beyond simple chatting almost universally doesn't work. File transfers, picture syncing, god forbid voice and video chat.
Big Apple exec changes: iOS VP Forstall and retail head Browett are leaving
3amopsguy@gmail.com
5 Tips for Finding Great Freelancers on ODesk
Apple has been using the "Human Interface" terminology since the 1970s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini
I remember HIG, surely (having read it many times, first for pleasure and now as a developer), but it was always H+I+G, never H+I+something else. But I can be mistaken...

Edit: It doesn't matter if you're an iOS/OS X developer or not. Even if you're a web designer, you should really read Apple's HIGs carefully and thoroughly. They're (by any definition of the word), "great".

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/UserEx...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/userexperience/Con...
Hmm... I thought that they would want to limit it to one or the other, for security purposes.
Very cool!

At https://github.com/darius/spaced-out I tried to do something vaguely similar: from an aligned parallel corpus, automatically make a prioritized spaced-repetition deck for language learning. (I think I used Europarl.) So you get examples of the words in context, plus they're sorted with the most frequent ones first.

(There's also an SM2-based flashcard reviewer in Python. It's all very crude; I decided I didn't want to learn Swedish enough.)
It depends on which state you're in I believe.
This is crazy. If you have another metric for student performance other than test scores, just say it.
"I still have no evidence, but I'm going to use more extreme appeals to emotion and stronger language to try to make you overlook this point"
What is parallax, in the context of the Nexus?
You are utterly delusional my friend. This is laziness.
Designing without the burden of implementation
I can't wait to see how much cleaner future versions of iOS will be.
I'm relieved about this. Pretty much all of the missteps at Apple that I've cared about were related to this guy. I'm confident that Ive will clear things up soon.
Looks like Maps fiasco was too much to handle. Didn't they ask their SVP of hardware to leave when they had antennagate?
> Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. If you don't believe in the scientific method then you shouldn't apply it here.

Sorry, what's the null hypothesis here, and where's the control group?
You're the second person that mentioned skeuomorphism. Could you please explain what it is and why it's a big todo? Most of my cursory google searches don't provide any particularly insightful definition of what it is. The blogs/rants usually just dive into why it's good or bad.
The academic field behind UI design is HCI (Human Computer Interaction), so HI makes more sense :)
Looked great but... still we didn't hear too much about Colin Percival, did we?
Although, his success may be somewhere close - I don't know exactly.
Most interesting part:

John Browett is leaving Apple

So his views on retail really did not fit Apple after all.