skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congratulations to Tim Cook for making this decision. We might have to wait some time to see if it was the best decision, but at least he didn't just make the safe decision. It may be a risk, but it means Apple won't stagnate. It will change as a result of this.

This is all about unity.

Unifying iOS and OS X under one person.

Unifying human interface, both hardware and software, under one person.

Unifying underlying technologies under one person.

And fundamentally, unifying the team at the top, and removing discord.

No one can deny Forstall's legacy. But from what we've read in recent years I think there's real truth in this comment from Gruber:

"Thinking about it some more, though, and considering what I know about Forstall’s reputation within the company, I think that headline, euphemistic though it is, tells the plain truth: Forstall was an obstacle to collaboration within the company."

For the future? Integrating the hardware and the software was always Apple's core strength, that this just makes sense. It's an open question whether Ive has the technical knowledge for this role, but he certainly has the taste. He certainly wouldn't have let that new iPod nano UI be seen by the outside world.

Modern-day Apple has always shied away from manufacturing directly, and for good reason, but it may just be that they're too big not to anymore. That no one manufacturer can meet their demands, whether due to lack of capacity or politics. Making chips is difficult, and usually best left to the experts, but Apple now has the cash to hire the best and is in the perfect place to benefit from the competitive advantage it'd give. It'll be interesting to see how this new Technologies group turns out.
I use http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/ - ridiculously convenient.
Point taken, and I'm not really hating on Apple either so I don't really think of you as "defending" them, I'm just stating my thoughts about their strategy.

Apple completely changed the way I look at mobile devices. My first smartphone and tablet were the iPhone and iPad. I just wish they'd be more reasonable on some points, but they're obviously too successful to change their strategy unless a strong competitor shows up (and I hope that Google's strategy with the Nexus pays off).

I also am part of those who switched to Android but think that Apple had some reasonable arguments against Samsung that made them go wild against them. When you go as far as to make the charger look like an Apple charger you know there's something wrong going on. Samsung clearly tried to ride on the popularity of Apple products by making it look as much as possible as the iPhone and iPad, be it in the packaging, included accessories, look, early TouchWiz releases... there's a reason why TouchWiz on the S3 isn't like TouchWiz on the first Galaxy phones.. The customization on early Samsung android devices went too far toward Apple's direction. Even the "hardware" buttons, making the home button prominent and the other two android buttons more invisible in the design, and still keeping the home button as fully hardware on the S3 rather than going onscreen or capacitive like the other android OEMs.

Apple makes great products, but I feel like they're trying too much to milk us as much as they can.
To be fair, Google has a lot of very good engineers, so of course there are a lot of great engineers who are getting promoted. I'm pretty sure you could find an equal number of good engineers who don't get promoted. The rank-and-file programmers are just very good, with almost no deadweight.

Google's promotion process isn't, as far as I can tell, that broken. What's broken is the policy of making political-success (or, "perf") scores part of the transfer process. It's mean-spirited and creates an autocorrelation in project quality that many people never overcome.

Google would be a real company with a culture actually worth caring about if the executives manned up and did the following:

1. Go to open allocation. When you have that much fucking cash, you can invest in employee autonomy. No excuses. Do it. Learn from Valve, because you're not a cultural leader anymore, Google. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/tech-companie...

2. Get rid of the "calibration" nonsense. It's stupid, and it goes against the idea of a peer-review driven company because that bus is driven by managers only. Fire the B-student management consultants who came up with it. Get rid of the 5% firing rate, too. (I know that Google rarely actually fires people, instead humiliating them with those insipid PIPs and transfer blocks. No real difference. Firing people with a real severance package is a lot more decent than wasting their time with kangaroo-court PIPs and tearing up their careers slowly.) Firing should be saved for real problem employees, rather than a threat that turns no-fault lack of fit into a problem employee. This tactic of-- without a business need (such as in a cash-crisis layoff)-- firing some set percentage (who tend to just be unlucky) to keep people "on their toes" is mean-spirited thuggery that doesn't belong in this century.
450mbps == 56mb/s, but Amazon says it does 31mb/s.
What about for developers/hackers/entrepreneurs.

I don't see someone giving up coding just because they hit an age limit.

I can see how typical older white collar workers might run into issues, but I'm wondering if engineers would still fall into that category.
Am I really watching a Silverlight video in Google Chrome? How the hell is this working?!
Do you have any references for that? HCI has been in use since the late 70s (I believe it originated at Xerox PARC, since the earliest literature I can find using it is from there), and is now the de-facto standard term for all major conferences/publications. On the other hand, searching "MMI" on the ACM digital library only returns it as an acronym for various more-or-less related things.

Maybe MMI is a mistranslation from other languages? This Danish site [1] uses it, and I know the used French term is "Interaction Homme Machine", which I can easily imagine being translated to Man-Machine Interaction

[1]: http://www.eit.ihk-edu.dk/subjects/mmi/intro.php#0
Classroom work? Like it used to be when we were kids. You went to school, and learned the material in class, and the teacher had a grasp on where everyone in the class. You did homework, and took tests prepared by your teacher. Now teachers in some states have to spend 30 min a day just teaching HOW TO TAKE A STANDARDIZED TEST! "here you go little johnney, fill in the bubble the whole way"
"Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X)."

I'm on Windows 7, and in my experience the memory issues in Firefox haven't been completely resolved yet (though the Mozilla team are actively working on it). However, as a workaround I have found the Memory Fox add-on useful:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-fox/
AMD and ARM Collaborate to Build 64-bit ARM-based Processors
My understanding is that Android devices with custom images (SELinux-type-stuff compiled into the kernel) have been allowed on their network for some time. This wasn't just contractor-spec custom hardware - employees were allowed to use their personal Android devices provided this stuff had been installed.

So, the big news here is that that's no longer required, and that stock Android devices will now be allowed.
"We believe that the bar for training and hiring of front end JavaScript developers is even more attainable, and that is why we have chosen to be the first, and as of now, the only training program specifically for that market."

You know what I want--a twelve week, intense course on scientific computing in something like Python--for people who already know some core scientific subject and statistics. If we took http://www.drewconway.com/zia/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Dat... as a guide (and yes, yes, data science is just a name for something that has existed for twenty years), I want a program to move people from traditional research to data science.
So you think that NVidia's experience with consumer ARM chipsets (for tablets) is more important than AMD's experience in the server space?

Not so sure about that.
How to Add Quora Sharing Button to WordPress
Forstall did a great job bringing Mac OS X and its Core Technologies to a mobile device. Let's not forget that.

As a side note, I do hope iOS will become more open under a new leadership.
You joke, but Apple is a pretty terse company. Sometimes you have to read between the tea leaves (pun/misappropriation 100% intended)
I wonder - do you think the great experiment for 'no idea' applications is going to be abandoned after the upcoming class?

There is such a consensus of thought in the startup world that "ideas are useless, it's all about execution." But, I think this is flimsy thinking. Amazing execution with a shoddy idea doesn't benefit anyone. This account seems further validation of that thought.

I think a great idea has the opportunity to build consensus among founders and aid in forming a team. It seems nearly impossible to find other people to join existing ideas and be as passionate about their promise and future.
I have strong opinions about dining and auto repair (I'm neither a particularly noteworthy chef nor mechanic). Others have strong opinions about health care, hair-styling, home remodeling, child care, legal representation, or any of hundreds of other widely available services. Somehow we have a system in place that allows expert service providers to consider all of our opinions so as to provide satisfying service. It would be great if something similar existed for education.
You're referring to a value judgement, right?
The guy was an SVP, passing the buck isn't really an option at that level. It's about ownership.
Why hurricane forecasts have gotten much better — but could soon get worse
Is there a chance that the move away from skeuomorphism and putting OSX and IOS under one umbrella is a response to the direction Microsoft is taking with Windows 8?
Show HN: Watch LIVE Twitter photos related to #Sandy hurricane in real time.
An app we made quickly using Node.JS, Express, Jade & Socket.IO to show photos uploaded to Twitter related to Sandy hurricane.
You can cancel the password prompt, it's only for a single logo on the page, strangely enough.
I don't know about that PR move you suggested. It's not very becoming of the market leader to publicly express that their own product that hasn't launched yet, and won't for 3 months, is buggy and incomplete - and to be patient with them while it gets fixed. I don't agree that calling it the best ever was such a great move, but that's what Apple does.

In a couple years, it won't matter what happened with the Maps launch. It'll be great by then. And nobody will be talking about it - just like 0 "average consumers" talk about antennagate.
Usa and europe battered by
Hire fast and fire fast..something i learned along the way in my small time in a corporate environment, works great for startups too.
It's mentioned here for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface. I always got the impression it was a term emerging from the military in the 1940s-50s, when they began to study the ergonomics of cockpits, flight control systems, etc.
What kind of application is it? Promoting it in front of niche communities and giving them benefits to share your app would go a long way in terms of building your own community.
Scott Forstall Enters His NeXT Period
I understand. I'm just wondering if he put himself in that position or if someone else did.
> Big-O, grammar, automata, etc. are the fodder of academic papers, not the Real World.

I have personally needed all of those things in the Real World.

I suspect that if more people remembered the stuff they learned in college, it would get a lot more use. "I'm never going to use this in the real world!" can be a terribly self-fulfilling prophecy.
Hypertwish lets cons spear more phish
SnapBite: My YC S12 Intern Story
> paid only slightly more

I see SIM free S3's selling for around the £500 mark. How much is the slightly more?
I'm mixed.. I think there are some teams that could thrive even without an idea, as long as they are committed to working with eachother when things go rough (which they will).
Reasons why I bookmark pages:

1. I meant to type Ctrl+W and missed slightly
2. I meant to type Ctrl+F and missed slightly
3. I meant to type Ctrl+C and missed slightly

My bookmarks are a mish-mash of random pages on which I accidentally pressed Ctrl+D, nothing more. I think I'm a particularly anomalous edge case on this particular issue because as a web developer I tend to flit around between browsers constantly so no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be useful to me.

I try to curb what I call my "data hoarding" tendencies too. If I start bookmarking things for real, I tend to fall into a harmful pattern of bookmarking too many things. Next I start fretting over whether they're organised correctly, whether they're named clearly and so on. I've found it's better for my productivity if I just rely on the address bar autocompletion.

It's always cool to read about this kind of usability work though. Mozilla is still king in my book!
I think what bugs people is that the browser could be seen as tricking the user, even lying to the user; not whether the clickable link is bad but whether we should trust what the browser tells us in a very fundamental way.
The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, etc. Forged a New Economy
Yes, as long as he's not giving presentation.
Skeumorphic features are defined by the fact that they are unnecessary carry-overs from older or different objects. They can be useful and style choices too, but a digital button does not need to indicate depth, whereas a mechanical button does, because it needs to protrude from the surface in order to be pressed.
Who wants to bet that Marissa called him already? Seems like the perfect fit for the new Yahoo mobile oriented strategy, does it not? I have no clue to be honest.
Only one or two more check boxes on the survey are covered by a SE degree over a CS one at RIT. I think this is largely vocational degree not even SE. That might reflect an industry bias in the CS degree though (revision control required in all classes, technical writing and software engineering are required in the cs degree)

Edit: I should note that SE and CS are separate departments at RIT, there is a real difference in curriculum and that difference is not what this survey is getting at. A major in the IT department is what is closest to this survey, not SE. Somewhat anecdotal because its one University though.
What specifically is the harm they are alleged to cause? Teaching to the test?

I wonder what teachers who currently "teach to the test" would teach if they had no test to teach to. I seriously doubt that they would suddenly become paragons of pedagogy, that it was somehow the existence of standardized tests was the cause of their deficient teaching.

Of course it could be argued that tests offer a shelter to such teachers; in standardized test's absence, they would be replaced by better teachers. I also think this is an unlikely scenario. The absence of standardization would result in non-uniform results, some districts might come up with good measures of teacher performance and successfully replace teachers, but I suspect most would not. Instead, the formerly "teach to the test" teachers would stay on, and that their teaching would not improve as a result of their new-found lack of accountability.

No doubt some replacement for standardized testing could be invented, but that is irrelevant if we are arguing that such tests are worse than useless. I.e. that doing nothing is better than doing these tests.
Crying that something is on HN should really be a bannable offense. I have a feeling these are the same people who are constantly trying to delete relatively popular wikipedia articles over "notability concerns".
Ownership of a bicycle isn't about physically controlling the bicycle. It's about the path of the bicycle through space-time, which is exactly how color operates -- it tracks the flow of information through space-time. There is no physical aspect of a bicycle that controls ownership. It's color, just like with bits.

I'm sure we both understand well enough the trade-offs that society makes in granting copyrights. Reasonable people have differing opinions, but these trade-offs existed long before computers, which have only shifted the balance of the bargain. The fact that bits encode information as numbers is irrelevant to the discussion.
World Time Buddy is another good one: http://www.worldtimebuddy.com
Yes, it is slow and clunky, but better alternatives are next door. So why complain?
I don't see why AMD can do ARM better? AMDs strengths compared to Intel are in its APU and the number of cores they can cram on an x86.

I think they confused the market, severs, with the technology they actually have - x86.

Their biggest asset is the existing infrastructure and people to build x86 - there are 2 companies that can do this: Intel and AMD.
> I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark.

There's a Firefox extension called "toomanytabs" that tries to improve the "volatile bookmark" experience. Frankly, I think it should be called "notenoughtabs".

Btw, I have found that Opera can reliably handle 400+ open tabs simultaneously. The downside is that it's not Firefox. And Chrome took out vertical tabs in 2008 or something. bleh.
Be careful when saying things of the form "$DEGREE_PROGRAM should also include at least one class in $SUBJECT." You can make persuasive arguments for the relevance of a dizzying range of subjects, and at some point you have to prioritize.
"iOS is stagnant"

iOS only seems stagnant because they don't have to trumpet every year about how they've finally gotten rid of ui lag or completely overhauled the system appearance. These are points in it's favor to most people.
Scuttlebutt is that it was an executive-wide decision based on the coming renegotiation of their 5 year agreement with Google regarding Maps. Google has been letting iOS maps lag behind Android maps (e.g., Android has turn-by-turn navigation, iOS maps didn't), so Apple was understandably not excited about renewing that agreement, and leaving themselves very vulnerable to one of their biggest competitors. But they didn't have something comparable, so they pushed a weak maps app early to catch Google off-guard--and they did. Google didn't have an app ready in the app store to replace the one they lost in the OS.

That's my synthesis of the analysis of a bunch of Apple watchers, so take it with a bowl of salt. But it makes sense to me.
Spf13 - The Ultimate Vim Distribution
Funny, a lot of the technical questions I had to do in pre-screens and in the interview itself were naturally solved via recursion and were what the interviewer was looking for. This is both with Google and large financial companies.
Keep in mind he has a year transition period at Apple. After that, Apple likely gave him a list of verboten companies as part of the severance. Google is certainly on that list. Yahoo may or may not.
Apple always made the maps app. The original app used Google data, and the new app uses other data.
AMD is no stranger to using busses and sockets that are compatible with "other" hardware.

The original Athlon was bus-compatible with DEC Alpha chips - some logic boards could take either with a firmware upgrade.

Also, there have been FPGA's that slot into Opteron logic boards (Celoxica made one around 2006), and various other chips that connect directly to the hypertransport bus as accelerators.

It remains to be seen what they'll do with this. Will it be a Xeon Phi competitor (lots of cores, high thermal footprint) or something aimed at lower end uses.
Windows seems to have to have the support, but is not widely used http://techreport.com/review/23631/how-windows-8-scaling-fai...
Show HN: Userfox (YC S11) — Better Welcome Emails
> You typically don't have the opportunity to do that in a startup, because you have to focus on the immediate business needs and on staying alive rather than on pushing the state of the art forwards. "Good enough" has to be good enough in a startup.

Interesting. That's something you don't often hear... but it makes a ton of sense to me. I've only worked in academia and one mid-size corp, so startups are kind of a different world for me. :)
Are there libraries that can turn voice into phonemes? It would be cool if I had to say a phrase and the computer scored me on how close I got to it.
Here is a link to their C++ code: http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/trillion.zip
Forstall may have been trying to do a move similar to what Jobs did when he returned to Apple. Jobs lost confidence in where the company was going and sold all but one of his shares. The maps may have called Forstall's "bluff".
Instead of wasting your time reading the article and then complaining, use it in finding a real HN worthy piece on the New section. I know for a fact there are lots of really interesting stuff that goes by unnoticed with 2 or 3 votes.

That's pretty much the only thing you can do to improve the situation.
Folks who've used tour things like this: how do you detect if it's the first time your users are using your app? Do you make a db query every time they log in? Do you use cookies? Cookies seem unreliable and a flag in the database seems a waste of resources.

Thoughts?
"many US citizens are now embarrassed to own BlackBerrys"

That was unnecessary. Unless the author is shorting RIM.
idea's are a dime a dozen right? with the right team/talent within that team, execution on whatever idea you choose is what's going to matter in the end to your business and to potential investors. Great idea's have still failed and i can guarantee the multiple factors that brought that on happened because of the wrong team and incorrect assessment of product market fit
When working with engineers from Israel, I still hear the term "MMI" used frequently. They use it the same way I would use "HMI" here in the states.
Are you in Singapore at the moment? Would you mind answering a few questions about the 'scene' there? My email is in my 'about'.
I walked that line with an intern this summer, bringing him onto a startup in the same space when we were probably going to fail by summer's end.

Here's how I mitigated it:

1. Helped get him paid by a grant from a program at his school.
2. Was upfront and honest about the challenges.
3. Made sure we at least had something people wanted before bringing him on.

At the end of the summer, despite doing a lot of frustrating things, he's counted the experience as a massive win and a great experience.

I'm not saying these founders were anything less than forthcoming, it's hard to know what's going to happen, but I think it's important to only sell the dream when you have some reason to believe you can deliver it.
My mistake. For some reason I had this associated as being a Marine Corp stationing. Thanks for the clarification.
Guess, I got a problem with defining success of a person who works in a sphere that I don't know very well, unless there's an article in Wikipedia about him. That's my problem but I don't know how to resolve it.
Show HN: Figure My Bills
This is my first "real" app I've written in node.js.

This app came to be because the last time I changed jobs, I went from getting paid once a month to once every two weeks. Since two weeks doesn't quite line up the way once a month does, I had a hard time figuring out how much money I needed to set aside to get into the new rhythm. So, I wrote a little script that figured it out for me.

I wanted to play around with node.js, so it was a great excuse to create full app. Let me know what you think!
I'd say it is stagnant because when you look at the design, it just feels old. I'm not much of a designer, I can't tell you why, but it just seems dated. Perhaps it is the skeuomorphism, maybe something else, but something is off about it now.