skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually it's that those MapCodes are incomplete. They're missing the country/state designation. If you look up "Ireland 0C.T4" or "US-AK 0C.T4" you should get the correct results.

I'll cite a .doc file here, it's also available on the Developers page:

> 1.	Codes only need to be accurate enough for public, every-day use. At the human scale, when you are within a few meters of a destination, you are “there”.

> 4.	People live within a “country context”. Addresses seldom include a country name. Unless clearly stated otherwise, they can safely be assumed to be in “this” country. Codes that are known to be within a particular territory can be designed to be much shorter. For example, every location in The Netherlands can be uniquely specified with at most 6 letters . Even in a large country like India, at most 7 letters are needed.

> 6.	Short codes are reserved for areas where the population density is high. For example, every locations in The Netherlands can be represented by a unique 6-letter mapcode. However, the majority of the population is concentrated in a dozen urban areas totaling less than 3,000 km2 (1,800 square miles). By reserving the 5-letter mapcodes for these areas, half the population of The Netherlands can be found using 5-letter codes. On average, mapcodes for relevant locations in The Netherlands are thus closer to 5 letters than to 6 letters. In fact, a significant percentage of the population can be found in 100 km2 of city centers, which can be covered by 4-letter mapcodes.

> Based on these ideas, we envisaged a system that would work anywhere on Earth, and would (on average) provide the shortest possible codes to everybody. By using massive amounts of data gathered over the past 30 years by mapping company Tele Atlas (merged into the TomTom Group in 2008), a data table was constructed ...

> Finally, on top of any and all national mapcodes a location may have, it also always has a 9-letter, context-less map code.

> To understand mapcode accuracy, you need to understand that a specific mapcode defines a specific location X, but represents all the locations within a certain distance meters of X. For example, the Dutch mapcode “49.4V” decodes into coordinate 52.376514, 4.908542. This does not only mean that coordinate 52.376514,4.908542 can be represented by mapcode 49.4V, but that all coordinates within roughly 5 meters of that coordinate can also be represented by mapcode 49.4V.

(it continues to describe "high-precision mapcodes")

Why did they make it?

> The mapcode system was revived and worked out in 2006 when TomTom decided to expand their operations to countries like India and China. It was difficult to sell navigation devices in these countries, among other things because a significant part of the population lives without address, lacking not just house numbers but often even street names, which often made it hard or even impossible to enter a destination. It was thought that the introduction of a simple and ubiquitous system for representing locations (and hence destinations) would in due time make navigation devices as welcome there as anywhere else.
I just took a weeklong backpack trip. Sure, getting out for an overnight on the weekend is fun, but there's something that happens after more than a couple of nights on the trail. You forget what day it is. You lose track of time, and it doesn't matter because your only responsibilities are 1) hike to your next camp 2) setup camp 3) make dinner. No email, no action item lists, nothing but the freedom to think about nothing for a week. I can heartily recommend it.
I did not even know this was possible, thanks for bringing it to my attention. As someone who has had numerous electoral roll forms sent piled up in my letterbox, refusing to cease since repeatedly filling them in and sending them back, it's great for the government to provide this.

Big thanks and congratulations to the team that delivered this.
Thanks, tzs. So what if it's an international treaty, would you expect terrorists (possibly, wanting to boast of their hardware superiority) to honor it? There's always a risk in everything, but there are some known risks that we should never take. Qantas, Korean and US airliners were already avoiding Ukraine airspace altogether even without an ICAO ban. Sorry if the post hurt your feelings, no malice intended.
Daniela, goTenna co-founder here -- back-haul is the 'easy part.' We just wanted to start with the hard part, i.e. a communication system that never requires central connectivity; a smart network with no actual central brain.
Because we're dying as a world power. It's the cycle of history. We're slowing riding the wave of our past glory toward oblivion. Most of the countries in Africa who used to speak French are now switching to other languages like Swahili, Lingala or Wolof, the Belgian, the Swiss and the Québécois all speak French and English, it's only a matter of time.

You can bring up figures and number of speakers, it won't change the fact that we're not relevant as a linguistic group in the world and unlike the other European powers, we haven't yet made the vital switch to having a strong command of English. It's really depressing.
This isn't an ad, it's just a bad article. (for one, Yo isn't even close to the "most viral app of all time": Flappy Bird and 2048 each were more popular and ubiquitous than Yo.)
Short version: because "palantír" was taken
I'm 49 years old. Almost 50. Been a hacker, entrepreneur, and coder all of my life.

One of the things I've learned that I found most shocking? That changing things up makes a huge difference in my productivity -- and it becomes more and more difficult to do.

I think the term "vacation" is a bit loaded here. Sure, go to the beach. Travel. But there's a deeper truth here: you need to regularly make yourself work, relax, and play in different atmospheres. It's very good for you. So go work at a coffee shop. Work in a city park. Take a week and live in a cabin without electricity. Take your development team and go out to the parking garage and work using cafeteria tables and metal chairs. Whatever. Purposely vary the conditions and surroundings of your life. This is not an optimization problem; you are not trying to find the perfect place. Instead, it's diversity: people are very prone to getting in intellectual ruts. It's difficult to see this when you're in one. Mixing up environments is a proven way to identify this.
Come find me at premium.gravely.pies.
"We're sorry. Kindle Unlimited is currently only available for US customers. Please visit us again when it is available in your country"

Again.

Companies just don't learn. This is the Internet. If you sell digital content online, there is no "US customers". There are exactly two groups of customers: those with credit cards that are willing to pay you and all the rest.

This whole idea of segmenting by country is not only outdated, but harmful to business and outright offensive to customers that were not "included" in the "segment" that was "chosen".

Let's see, what will those people left outside the door do? Will they wait and "visit us again when it is available in your country"? Surely! They will patiently regularly check the webpage to see whether Amazon has graciously agreed to take their money. Or they'll just turn to Bittorrent and get the goods anyway, right now.

Anticipating responses: yes, I know, the usual narrative is that it's the evil publishers. So what? Amazon fights the publishers on other fronts, why can't it arrange for worldwide licensing here?
That sounds really great. I like the time limited parts. Things like concerts or art fairs always much up foursquare locations.
Software Engineer – Full Stack (Node.js, MongoDB)
There seems to be an embarrassingly large number of people who think web developers == developers.
Bachelorette 2014 – Alle Infos and die Kandidaten
Its technically called the "Maidenhead Locater" and the specific format can be seen on the wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System
I'm very disturbed by the steady erosion of ownership that has been happening for the past few years. Subscription models are an attractive way to get some digital content for a low price, whether it's music, software, movies, or books—but the internet has a notoriously short memory, and I fear that we're condemning ourselves to becoming cultural goldfish.

I have books and records from my youth that sit on my shelf and are there for me any time I want to revisit them. Heck, I even have software from back then because I never got rid of my Apple II.

Of course, there are emulators, and Spotify probably has 60%-70% of the records that are in my collection, and I can find A Wrinkle in Time on the Kindle. But how long is that guaranteed to be the case? And how can I be sure that the digital simulacrum are really the same as the originals, if the originals are gone?

For the moment, it's an easy answer—just don't use the subscription services, and keep owning things. But will that always be an option? Why should ownership continue to be an option ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, when it's so much more attractive to companies to rent their products to you for a constant stream of monthly income?

Will books end up getting unskippable "updates," or even being deleted at the whim of the publishers or Amazon one day?
Are books fungible?

If you're in a rich Western country, the time you spend reading a book probably has an opportunity cost much greater than the cost to acquire rights to read the book. Why would you spend 10 hours with a book whose marginal cost is $0, when you could pay $10 and spend those ten hours with a better book?
We're sorry. Kindle Unlimited is currently only available for US customers. Please visit us again when it is available in your country. (figured)
Yes, we're focused, with this first product, on asynchronous, low-bandwidth data comms. Through our R&D for the past 21 months, that's what most testers and people wanted most, especially when they don't have service otherwise.
What did ya do there?
> then noncompliance is the only moral stance I can equably adopt towards such a being.

That's kind of a ridiculous position to take. If such an omnipotent being did exist, why would it care for your petty notions of human morality?

You're saying you'd subject yourself to endless torment in order to petulantly prove a point to a creature that might have no reason whatsoever to care.

It sounds like children threatening to hold their breath if their parents send them to bed.
I will never forget bricking my first Windows PC with Slackware before I knew anything. Turned out to be recoverable but was a crazy experience as a teenager.
We'll expand internationally later!
This in itself is a red flag of amateur hour
Hey mimi, not sure I understand. The courses I'm running on growth hacking are mentioned in each of the articles linked to on that page.
Don't forget Montreal. It's the 8th largest city in North America. It has a rich history of bilingualism, but it's essentially French speaking.
Maybe his "much better problems to solve" are contributing to the birth of hyperintelligent AI.
Release Candidate 2 of Mayan EDMS now available and easier than ever to install
I'm building a website that seeks to answer this question and similar questions through user self-reporting of slow travel and expat experiences.

http://www.istorical.com

A post by a Brit who moved to Prague:

http://www.istorical.com/countries/czech-republic/experience...

An American's experiences moving to Germany:

http://www.istorical.com/cities/berlin/experiences/138

A couple of interesting posts about life in Japan:

http://www.istorical.com/countries/japan/experiences/49

http://www.istorical.com/countries/japan/experiences/78

There are only ~150 or so posts so far but I think there's already a lot of interesting insight and stories to read!
Living in another country is way, way different from going on a vacation in another country. You're removed from the tourist infrastructure that caters to foreigners and you've got to deal with all of the country's bureaucratic procedures and regulations (even simple things like renting an apartment vary ridiculously from country to country). The same places that are fascinating and fun for foreigners to visit are often stressful and annoying for foreigners to live in. Not speaking the native language makes this all the more stressful and bringing people with you that speak your language makes it a lot less likely you'll learn the native language well.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but there's a reason packing off to a completely different country and successfully 'going native' is usually done by single people right out of college who haven't yet experienced a lot of success in their own country. Yes, plenty of older, more-established people do migrate for economic or political reasons, but they usually end up living in ethnic and linguistic enclaves.

My advice? Pick another country that uses English as their primary language, so you don't have that stress going for you, and pick one that's economically developed, so you don't have that stress going for you. You'll still have to adapt to the local bureaucracy, but at least you'll have a fighting chance to understand it. Many English-speaking countries use a points-based system for immigration that favors skilled workers, so you'll also have a much better chance of getting permanent residency.
Crash claims top AIDS researchers heading to Melbourne (Sydney Morning Herald)
Summary: If you want to learn a new technology, consider implementing a side project with that technology.
From their developers' doc:

> Mapcodes can be easily translated between several different alphabets. The default system is based on the roman alphabet. Mapcodes in other alphabets are generated by character substitution.

And it's not based on representation of lat/lng, which is why it's more of an improvement:

> As explained in the previous section, by reserving short codes for the most densely populated areas, mapcodes for addresses (i.e. places that people need to visit) are on average as short as theoretically possible, within the limits we set for ourselves. One such limit is to use only rectangular areas in our definitions. Another is to limit the size of the “context” data table to about 16,000 records. Probably the most relevant design choice was the choice of character set. For example, had we allowed both capital and lowercase letters, 3 times as many people could have 5-letter codes instead of 6-letter codes.

> The mapcode system allows about 100 km2 of a territory to be covered by 4-letter mapcodes. These are usually reserved for the capital city. About 6,000 km2 can be covered by 5-letter mapcodes . Roughly 250,000 km2 can be covered by 6-letter mapcodes. If a territory is larger than that, the remainder requires 7 letters. A few territories on Earth (notably, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Mexico, Russia and the USA) are large enough to merit 8 letters, but these actually consist of sub-contexts, i.e. people there live in a state, republic or oblast much like people elsewhere live in a country. Within such a sub-context, mapcodes are shorter.
The "terrorism" and "national security" justifications aren't absolute either: They are, in the best case, a shorter way of saying "what the informed public considers the right balance between security and freedom". It's frightening if the same agencies that are given a lot of powers based on this are also manipulating public opinion.
Any reference to how they came up with any given Map Code? Like how 52.508957, 4.769173 became US-AK 81.J4W?

I see they have come up with them for all locations, but how can I take a given coordinate and surmise it's MapCode, or the reverse (without their API or website)?
I saw a lot of American expats in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It's much more laid back than Bangkok or the beach cities, and it's gorgeous up there. They seemed to be having a great time.
I'm surprised by all the comments in this thread saying that you have to physically go to your library during their open hours to borrow a book. Most libraries I know offer digital downloads through the Overdrive app.

I regularly borrow audiobooks and ebooks from the library with a couple of taps on my iPhone.
I would say Denmark or Sweden.

Everyone speaks English, 5week vacation, 1 year maternety (often paid), free healthcare, good quality of life, low crime, good summers.

Only cons are gray winthers & high taxes.
This is pretty interesting. I work for an NGO and something like this looks really useful for people working in the field to allow some sort of simple communication/location when you don't have service, or it is super expensive.
Darwin's Beagle library
Me neither - I just opened 60 tabs :)
> but I also am paying less than half of what I would for my apartment.
Out of curiosity (I understand if you don't want to say) but roughly how much are you paying for your apartment, and how close to the city is it? I'm paying almost 1500 USD for my 2bed apt not far from the city centre, and the landlord is increasing the rent in September (I'm leaving anyway). The saving of ~500 dollars per month I would imagine doesn't last very long when you factor in everything else. I don't know what income differene you have, but a month ticket for bus only is 140 euro, (190 dollars), a beer is €5 (cheap in the city centre)and I find shopping in general to be more expensive than home (outside Dublin, but still in Ireland).
Reminds me of the Cybiko: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko
The docs recommend passing a callback for parent-child communication:

http://facebook.github.io/react/tips/communicate-between-com...
My previous job had unlimited PTO and that team sucked mega-donkey balls. It worked despite the culture, here's how:

- large vacation time was scheduled around projects. The SPM gave large priority to devs over the business. Thus priorities were reduced to meet resources for that sprint (SCRUM).

- We had a flexible work schedule so if you needed to be home because the guy fixing your water heater is coming at 3, we made that possible. The philosophy was that as long as you were meeting your targets, everything was peachy.

- We had one guy who would occassionally go on two/three day breaks and not tell anyone - including the SPM. As a team, we just left him alone and if he can't finish his task, oh well, we didn't bail him out.

- Ironically, most of us took fewer vacation days with unlimited PTO. You have the outliers who will gladly abuse it, but prior to my departure, I took a total of four weeks (20 days) of total vacation time. Most companies give that anyways.

Simply put, as long as we gave a long enough notice and put things into the engineering calendar, no one gave a crap. A lot of our unlimited PTO success boils down to prioritizing resources and expectations with the business. This company is around 300 people, so not a small company by all means. We just ensured that we all gave appropriate notice. For me, my formula was 1 month advanced notice for every week I wanted to take, so three weeks off meant three months ahead.
It's unfortunate that their map-encoding solution appears to be based on TomTom's dataset, instead of Google Maps. It therefore thinks my house is my neighbor's house.

Open Street Map is, sadly, no better, thinking my house is a different neighbor's house.
Adobe Flash targets Canvas, SVG and WebGL
Nice. I'll check it out, so bookmarked!
Then submit a patch to fix them.
Oh, brother.
From their reference doc:

> The mapcode system was revived and worked out in 2006 when TomTom decided to expand their operations to countries like India and China. It was difficult to sell navigation devices in these countries, among other things because a significant part of the population lives without address, lacking not just house numbers but often even street names, which often made it hard or even impossible to enter a destination. It was thought that the introduction of a simple and ubiquitous system for representing locations (and hence destinations) would in due time make navigation devices as welcome there as anywhere else.
Great link. It's annoyed me to no end that people think they can 'feed the world' with just 'one more [dangerous and unsustainable] science hack'. (Hint: the world will find a way to get hungrier)
Expanding on the other replies, monads are not useful in most languages because most languages are not powerful enough to use them. The syntax is too heavy, because you need lots of function closures. The type system is too weak, because using monadic values without higher-kinded types is much more difficult and less useful.

The fact that everybody tries to import monadic values into their languages is evidence that they would indeed be useful; the fact that such libraries are always useless in practice and incapable of even transliterating the Haskell, and often fail to even implement the full feature set of monadic values in Haskell even if you're willing to type reams of code, is why you don't use them in other languages.

You don't ignore monads in non-Haskell languages because the other languages are too powerful to need them, hurr hurr Haskell is teh weaks... you ignore monads in other languages because those languages are too weak to usefully implement them. If they could, you'd see them, and I am very, very confident over the next 10 years you're going to see more and more languages coming out that really have and really use monadic values, because they will be strong enough to do so, and once you have that, the value proposition is just too good to ignore. They are too darned useful to ignore.
Sorry, I'm in launch mode. :)
Is it just me or is this page painfully slow on mobile...? I have a Nexus 5.
They call it

...a free, open way to make every house ...

and then they say

The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be
altered in any way

not very open
Yes that's exactly what it is. That's why it requires a one-time connection to a PC, so it can get access to adb.

Don't underestimate the usefulness of a good UI, though. But yeah, if you're familiar with systrace then this doesn't really do much for you.
If we want to make the analogy apt, it would be like the mobile service saying "To make a phone call, please first call the kill-yourself company and tell them where you are so they can kill you."

Google does not sell the information. It puts up ads that users may (or may not!) click on. The clicking is the point at which the information transfer occurs, and it is voluntary and transparent. Or as transparent as it can be, anyway - if you are unaware of how the internet works when you click on a link, that does not make Google culpable for presenting said link.

The information Google has about the user is never given to anyone, least of all the ad buyers.
Relationships are hard
You sure about that? A quick glance at
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun... tells me that there is a difference in rent, (I know it's not accurate) but I know that the rent in Dublin has increased from that figure. Most people I know are now paying 1400-1600 USD for 2bed apartments, so I guess SF could have changed too.
AWS CloudWatch Logs – Making Innovation Easier and Cheaper
R3 does look fast, but there's a cost to crossing the JS -> C barrier. It's almost certainly possible to beat it using the same algorithm written in pure JS.