skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good CEO knows when to stop throwing good money after bad. Apple will NEVER reach the search domain expertise of Google, and Maps is too valuable to let turn into a complete debacle, as Apple has learned.

We have given Apple so much money THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH IT. They have $120B in the bank, more cash than any other company has ever had. They can buy very famous companies for cash, like Cisco, Dell, Facebook, etc, and even banks like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, etc. This is a crazy amount of cash, and they are clueless as what to do with it.

I know what I would do, I would throw some of that money to improve the quality of my product for the sake of my hundreds of millions of customers. I would admit defeat, and I would pay Google for a license in perpetuity for Google Maps to be on iPhone. I would engage in some sort of rev/data share with the Maps app and throw them a few billion. Win-Win-Win for everyone.

Sure, maybe Apple doesn't extract every single red cent from the deal, but money is of secondary or tertiary importance here. Their money is already relatively useless sitting in a bank account making 0% interest. And sure, maybe they left money on the table, and maybe Apple overpays and gets the short end of the stick for once, but it's called taking one for the team. Customers get the very best maps technology and a permanent agreement to always have access to it, and Apple can stop being distracted by one of the most important aspects of a smartphone experience, which is location services. They can continue innovating in things that will make them money, like newer designs, etc.
Thanks! We've been sitting on this post a while, as we've been focused on building up the B2B bounties on the site. The leads we produce for businesses are actually way more exciting for them than a Zuckerberg meet, but we think this bounty drives our point home:

You want to get ahold of your state governor?

Put a bounty on it.

You want to get in touch with CTOs in the market for a new software solution you provide?

Put a bounty on it.

You sell chairs wholesale and want to reach event hall facilities managers?

Just put a bounty on it.

It's that simple.
In that case please consider redoing your videos with more care. Both the audio and video are poor. Your microphone should be near your mouth so that you don't sound like you're far away and the video resolution is really low.
"it appears that HN doesn't like this specific example."

Perhaps because they are focusing on the linkbait title rather than the message (which is often repeated). Stop worrying about thinking you are ripping people off because something is so simple for you to do and put your efforts into providing value to someone who doesn't know what you know.

The only reason you can charge for what you know is that you did something before or spent time learning it. You know something that someone else doesn't know. I've had wordpress problems and would easily pay $120 to avoid hours worth of research and work (unless as sometimes I enjoy the challenge and have the time to do that work but that's not business it's technotainment I guess.)
I grew up in a working class town - I'm not working class, but most of my high school friends are, and they mostly work in factories. A lot of them do just that, or listen to mp3s, or whatever. In fact I wondered why one of them posted on Facebook so much until I realised he was constantly playing with his smartphone on the factory floor.

Manual labour jobs are still shitty but it does go to show that tech can make people's lives at least marginally nicer.
Show HN: The Good Man. An experiment with CSS3 animations
I have javascript off. Thanks for letting me know.
Actually, this app is way better than what was provided before, so it is a net plus to have a Maps division at Apple.
I know, I definitely need to do a better job with the videos. I just did them this morning (wasn't planning on having them but i thought it might be a good idea) and vimeo really murdered me on the resolution, not sure why. I'll have new ones up soon, promise : )
On a sidenote, C# blog entry URLs always confuse me for a second because default rewriting rules strip out the “#”.
That's interesting. Is there any guidance as to why the tree keys are derived hashes instead of the actual file names? Obviously the original space is invulnerable to collisions by definition. Was the point simply to make the keys smaller to fit in a single machine word? Is that really helpful for performance vs. an optimized strcmp?

I'm generally a big btrfs fan, but here it seems like they got caught due to a senseless overoptimization...
well done, nice work...this looks like an awesome tool for building static sites
At a minimum, then, that would include graphing calculators.

Also, while most routers aren't exactly intended to be programmed, it's pretty easy. Easier than reflashing an iPhone, which is considered a general-purpose device, even though it's not really user reprogrammable.

Heck, the Canon Hack Development Kit makes a lot of 'dumb' cameras as easily reprogrammable as an iPhone.

And as others have noted, this study apparently excludes gaming consoles, which seems to me an unreasonable omission by any definition. ( I think the most reasonable definition that captures what you're trying to say is "something designed to run third-party applications." )
The war continues to fight for a dream in Assassin's Creed 3
When people ask why I chose UofC, I tell them it's because Indiana Jones went there.
Your point about Zuckerberg's contacts jeopardizing the relationship is one we focus on every day. It is very delicate. Certainly Mark will be seeing this in his inbox as bemused contacts forward it to him - perhaps not using a bounty link. But receiving compensation for putting together a business deal is at the heart of the way business is done. We've just digitized it and saved the connector that awkward follow-up call about the finder's fee.

Thanks for the feedback!
Google Maps optimizes bike directions for bikers using bike paths, roads with lower speed limits, roads with dedicated bike lanes, and even bike trails through public parks.
I'm curious as to why people don't use the browser.
Similarly interesting/confusing is the Traffic Light Tree that was in Canary Wharf, London. It's recently been removed to make way for some roadworks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Light_tree

Note that it's art rather than something functional.
Garantia Data to Offer the First Redis Hosting Service on Windows Azure Cloud
In-Memory NoSQL Company extends Redis Cloud and Memcached Cloud to .Net and Windows developers
I don't understand the logic behind lack of airplay support. Can anyone explain the rationale?
To add to your claim that math is fundamental to computer science, I think there's a big factor that isn't being mentioned: knowing math future-proofs your career better than knowledge of any technology or language.

Mathematical depth is the irreducible core of a computer scientist's value. Fundamentally, what computers provide is the mechanization of knowledge. In the same way that robotics came along and mechanized all of the entry-level manufacturing jobs (the root of the current "skills gap" in manufacturing, more so than outsourcing in my opinion), over the coming few decades I expect that computers will mechanize most entry-level knowledge workers' jobs, if they haven't already.

And the wacky thing about comp. sci. is that our entry level positions are in fact basic knowledge-work. As the field matures, the fields that are the bread-and-butter of basic vocational computer science are increasingly swallowed by more sophisticated technical solutions that are more mechanized and productized. Comp. Sci. is an ouroboros, eating its own tail of unskilled positions.

The most obvious example currently is sysadmins: computing infrastructure is being productized and sold under the umbrella of "cloud computing," and its main value proposition is that you can cut your sysadmin budget by a huge margin. Similarly, QA and software testing departments are having their lunch eaten by better testing practices and automated solutions such as CI: the jobs aren't disappearing entirely, they are just being consolidated into a tiny department (maybe even one dev, part time) that can maintain an automated infrastructure. At a more basic level, data entry positions started drying up years ago with the advent of OCR, and now most of the big easy targets are entirely mechanical (ex. the post office/shipping).

In short, the best way to provide enduring value is to provide mathematical insight that can't be mechanized. If you can recognize optimizations and opportunities that take advantage of the unique structure of your domain, you are unlikely to be swallowed by someone with a productized version of your livelihood. If all you can manage is CRUD apps for enterprise, then when someone comes along with a general product that reduces your department from many guys writing software to one guy managing the product, you aren't gonna convince anyone of your value. At that point your only defense is the behemoth of bureaucracy, but the competitive nature of business suggests that it won't be a great defense for long.
NYC's taxi commission says "yes" to one-year trial of taxi-hailing apps
No, there's not as big a difference as you're implying -- because ALL mapping data is imperfect, therefore ALL smartphones are capable of actively misleading you. And paper maps can mislead, as well! (I'm trying to think how many "this place is closed/moved/never here" notices I sent Google Maps myself, because of the number of times I've been misled by Google Maps!)

A smartphone is not a replacement for common sense. In Apple Maps, you can clearly look at your destination and say "Hmm, wow, that doesn't look like sprawling medical complex, perhaps this tiny out of the way building isn't a hospital".

People have been misled by Google Maps and MapQuest and Tom Tom for years and years. How common are stories of people driving off of cliffs or other such nonsense because a GPS said so?

Yes, Apple Maps isn't perfect, but it's a long shot better than Google Maps and MapQuest were six months into the product, and is actively providing superior maps to the baseline of a decade ago, or even five years ago.
Just watched your getting started video and am really excited to try it out. Seems super clean and easy to get things done with. Installing now.
I'm in full agreement with his comment about timing and many of the ideas of the dotcom bubble. I wouldn't go as far as saying that all of them were good. But, many of them were excellent and were just very poorly timed. Even when you just think about the infrastructure cost of building something during the bubble vs now, it is astounding how much more affordable it is.
Absolutely. I'm agreeing with you... just trying to provide some more detail.
I liked the article and thought it was good but ruined by the link-bait title.

As said, the the article itself was good though.
The title is completely inaccurate and misleading. He made $120 for what he says is 30 seconds of work. It's more like 3-5 minutes if you include communications back and forth with the client, connecting to the server, looking around etc.
Apple found guilty of infringing three patents in court battle with patent troll
I think the better question is why are (almost all) economists unaware of basic economic theory?

Economists are largely unaware of what you describe as "basic economic theory" because you've defined "basic economic theory" in an unconventional way that's incompatible with how most economists describe economic theory.

There are a couple of econ departments that subscribe to "Austrian economics," and they view Hayek as basic economic theory. But they are viewed ideological hacks by the larger community.
Show HN: Our Startup launched an App, makes donating to charities easy
The irony is that the best way to find out if mathematics is actually useless to either programming or real world problem solving is to know a lot of it.Just staring at it from a safe window and then making catholic pronouncements does not help.
> http://u2.fm/ (not sure why it's down atm?)

You might be thinking of http://2u.fm.
in general, a gaming rig mining 24/7 will generate about $30/month.
UX Idea: Real Turn-by-Turn Navigation
Cool, I didn't know that. Does the Android version of Google Maps have this?
In an Elm-backed website, it would be completely boringly straightforward to emit the output with time-handlers attached to atttach to the time stream. No need for awkward setWindowTimeout callbacks.
I like the saying, the economy does not need economist, just like evolution does not need biologists.

The things we talk about today are not really that diffrent from what Adam Smith argued for/against a couple hundert years ago. Today you have people like Stigliz arguing against markets with much more sophisticated models then the people that argued against Adam Smith. The people that argue against Stigliz use much better models too. So where does that leave us?

I conclude that we should let the market be the market and not try to influence it, its a far more complex thing then economist understand. Trying to influence in to one direction will probebly just cause ten more things that are unexpected. The market is not perfect, not even close, read Stigliz as a good example of this but I highly doute that the goverment can improve the end result in most cases. If you look at the pridictions of TOP economist at every time X, the are almost always wrong and you get some other people that get it right, these people are then wrong the next time.

I barly trust the goverment to do the easy things write, tweek a huge economy is far from easy.
Paying flickr user here. Flickr is perfect and that's it's problem. I don't need social integration, I don't need filters, I don't need multi-platform sharing. I need an automatic resizer and reliable CDN and flickr is a remarkable both of those.

Flickr is not dead nor is it on life support, it's just not interesting. But just because something's not interesting doesn't mean it's not exceptionally useful. Flickr's search is best in show, it's CDN is always fast and reliable and API is comprehensive.

A massive user-base and obnoxious valuation don't make something important, sometimes just being useful, even if underutilized, is good enough.

edit: it also contains many amazing collections that are easily browsable, searchable, and aren't under threat of disappearing from the internet 'cos of a passing fad.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/sets/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/sets/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/sets/
OTOH, making the colon less invisible can reduce errors of omission.
Either the author or Andreesen completely misunderstands or misrepresents the concept of network neutrality. Network neutrality doesn't mean users don't pay for the bandwidth they consume. It means they pay the same price for that bandwidth regardless of what it's used for.
Slowpal: Free your transaction history from Paypal Hell
To me, technical debt comes in both the intentional and non-intentional form (and more often than not, the latter). In fact, I'm a firm believer that all software tends toward entropy, so feature additions inherently add to technical debt if conscious care and refactoring is not taken.

Technical debt (to me) is measured in "extra time to add the next feature", however in practice this measurement is impossible, as your control is a theoretical application with the debt removed.
Having played with a toy geolocation feature detector for text, I can safely say it's extremely hard to do well.

My first attempt is inspired by Peter Norvig's spelling corrector using a corpus built from the places2k.txt file, but it gets confused when the words are transposed. My guess is that Google is using some sort of n-gram based approach for maps and search, where as their little sidebar map is similar to what I built. (Or only applied to the most clear-cut n-gram—a little while ago there was a search for the movie "The end of the world" that would return a definitive date, which went slightly viral.)

Try searching in Google for "San Francisco" versus "Francisco San." Maps is fine, the search is fine, but only the first version brings up the little related info sidebar on the search page.

I'm surprised that Apple had such a hard time dealing with search, since they have some experience with Siri. I should have trusted this guy's opinion more:

http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2011/10/siri-techn...
Gee, we hope not. But the term is in pretty wide use these days among recruiters and sports enthusiasts. But we see your point. Will try to be a bit less ambiguous next time.
His comments on the middle class, environmental regulation, and net neutrality paint a picture of an out of touch elitist. His comments on AirBnB "eating [all] real estate" just make him sound delusional.

I'm disappointed, I always liked that guy.
Interesting. http://labor.vermont.gov was shortened with the bit.ly domain - perhaps they caught on to the redirect.
so that would be a no then. you still need internet connection to download the initial data. nokia's app is fully offline
Should interaction designers learn code?
Well, that's the point I'm trying to make. It's not a hit the drawing board problem, it's a refine the algorithm problem. How many "if you google this string, you can't find the right site" problems have there been in the life of Google search? They continue to refine pageranking don't they?
This is only applicable when the project scope is pre-defined/fixed.

What would be the price setting methodology, i.e. how would this person charge in a case when smth truly innovative would need to be developed? :-)
When you're charging for work like this, you aren't just charging for the 30 seconds it takes to fix it - you're charging for the years of experience that enable you to do it, plus the 30 seconds it takes to actually do it.

To put it in strictly economical terms, it would have taken the client more than $120 worth of her time to develop the expertise necessary to fix the problem. Thus, paying $120 for the fix - no matter no long it actually takes - is worth it for her.
Most people slow down.

Slowing down means more time for observation and reaction. As a result, it's actually quite a safe interchange.

(Most traffic accidents are the result of inattention coupled with insufficient reaction time. If you aren't paying attention, bad things happen. If you are paying attention but there isn't enough time to do anything about it, bad things happen. Thus, safety is highly correlated with both getting driver attention and increasing the time available for reacting.

Narrow twisty mountain roads are often much safer than the country roads leading up to them -- because drivers know they need to be involved and aware. Long straight highways are safe at high speeds because drivers can see obstructions and changes far in advance.
He was in the right place at the right time and now he's rich. And that's the only reason why anybody is listening to him now, certainly not for anything else he's done.

Cheaper labor? How about a more effective labor force? Ugh.
Singapore's system sounds like the most logical system. College doesn't work for everyone, and there has to be a way for these people to succeed in society instead of penalising them or pushing them to drop out of high school. Too bad it could never be implemented here in the US because it pretty much sets up discrete social classes.
Let the Crowd be Your Cofounder – Competitions for data-driven startups
The "login GUI" is actually the process that launches user's sessions and then passes control of the screen/input to that session. It has to have "better than" administrator level access to do so (since it has to broker administrator sessions).

Even if you ran the actual GUI as some special user, that GUI would still have to be able to do a bunch of powerful things using SYSTEM level services, so any exploit would be equally as powerful if it went after the SYSTEM login GUI or the login service.

What you're suggesting would be meaningful feel good security with no actual teeth. Attackers would just use the boot disk to alter a different file or process.
Aetna CEO Sees Obama Health Law Doubling Some Premiums
Ask HN: How To Be a Good Leader?
I been trying to make some cool projects with some people, sometimes co-workers or friends, I can make them excited enough to start a project, but I can't manage to keep them excited to finish a project, at first I thought it was them but after many different groups I started to think that maybe I wasn't a good leader and I need to get better at it
I am an econometrician... exactly the sub-population that the author faults most for not knowing about Friedman's thermostat.

We haven't heard of the thermostat because it does not introduce new ideas to us. If the data includes hill height, this is an example of multicollinearity. If your data does not include hill height, this is an example of endogeneity.

Both concepts are taught in considerable depth in an undergraduates first course in econometrics. It's a nice examples, but the author's claim that these phenomena are outside are awareness shows a striking ignorance of basic econometrics.
>Wow, what did people do BEFORE a smartphone!

The question is not what they did BEFORE the smartphone, but what they do now. What they do now is to use the maps application that came with the device they bought.
What's the difference between this and Yeoman ? (http://yeoman.io/)
I agree. However, the Kindle Fire exists primarily to facilitate sales, including video sales. I don't understand why they are so passive aggressive towards Android users who do not buy the Kindle Fire, but want to rent videos. Honestly, as an Amazon prime subscriber, this dismissive Android treatment diminishes the value of Amazon's ecosystem for me.
Which parts aren't working well for you?
I very much appreciated the run-this-remote-file | sh installer method before I learned what I was actually opening myself up to. As handy as it is, this practice really should be discouraged, imho.
Sure, this will be my 3rd published title (http://amazon.com/author/joelmartinez), though first as the sole author. From first contact with the publisher to today was about six months, actual writing time was approximately 3-4 months, and the rest of the time was the editing process (still have to review/approve the final laid-out PDF tonight, actually).

Process-wise, the first step is to have a solid outline and target audience in mind. That will inform the book's style and keep you on track as you put the proverbial pen to paper. When working on an individual chapter, I like to write most of it longhand. That forces me to rewrite it as I transcribe it to the computer and I find the end-result requires many fewer iterations to complete when I do that. Aside from all that, it's all the same things any author will deal with, things like writer's block, etc. Just make sure you are prepared to really focus on getting it done once you decide to write it ... because there's nothing worse than starting a project like this, and then letting it languish. It will always be on the back of your mind and you won't be able to enjoy relaxation time until you get back to it.

Anyways, hope that helped, happy to answer any other questions you might have :)
It's changed a few times over the years, so I wouldn't get your hopes up. I've lost and gained it before. I think it was around 100 when I joined, then it went up to 250 or so, now it's apparently 500.
As a timed test, I wanted to see how long it would take me to search for my favorite Phoenix, AZ coffee shop (Lux). I did the test from start up to clicking on the pin on an iPhone 4.

Google Maps: 22 seconds
Apple Maps: ??? It took me to Luxembourg

I think I know which map app I'll be using from now on.
Filtering the Noise — A Digital Spring Cleaning