4 boxes ordered.
2 to play with, 2 to eat.

+1

What? You don't like children?

I totally agree that is a bull**** ban. As one commentator put it: "We used to have this game where we threw rocks at each other... That's not even a game!"

******

Is the maps app on iPhone 5 really as bad as HN is making it out to be? I feel like it is skewed by Apple Haters, but even mainstream media is tossing poo at the company.

I doubt this is enough to place a major dent in iPhone sales. After a few months, people will forget the emotional reaction to it, and they won't want to fork over the money to buy a new smart phone anyways, thus the iPhone cycle reboots for another iteration or two.

I honestly don't think the late Steve Jobs would of allowed such a change on the iPhone, they are swapping up a high quality solution for an inferior one presumably to save money. That shouldn't fly on a premium phone.

I actually don't think the new maps app is too bad. Given it was created from scratch on a short time line, it's pretty decent.

Most of the distorted pictures people are posting are at the crossover between 3D/2D areas. As far as businesses appearing in the wrong place, this happens with google maps as well.

The 3D feature is actually super neat and I am really impressed by it. It's no simple task to create a 3D word from a 2D image.

Aren't they trying to fix something that isn't broken?

Yes and no. Basically, I agree that its a huge risk they are taking moving to their own mapping software, but I dont think its a pure financial reason. Having their own mapping software gives them much more control over they content they provide to their users. For most companies this would be a bit mistake as they are unlikely to be able to offer a better experience than google, but with all the resources apple has, given 6-12 months, they are going to have a pretty good contender for google maps, but on their own terms.

I am not sure what their end game is, but I doubt its just to save money.

For years, Google’s maps service was the default on Apple’s mobile devices. However, relations between the two companies have been strained as of late, in large part because Apple accuses the search engine of essentially ripping off iPhone and iPad software to create the Android operating system, which now powers the phones built by many of Apple’s top competitors. As such, Apple took the decision to essentially wipe out Google maps from the latest upgrade to the iOS software, on which all iPads and iPhones run.

I dunno, this sounds right up Steve Jobs alley to me

This had to have started under him. It's not like you can toss together a map app in a month. Jobs wanted to crush Android, so from a business perspective, if Apple could create something that is better, then that is one more reason to switch over. Maybe with all the lawsuits and Jobs' promise to go nuclear on Android, Google stuck up their middle finger to Apple my refusing to release a new app.

Jobs, mind you, was very risky and presented his fair share of flopsom.

Edit to add: I'm not calling the new maps flopsom sight-unseen, just saying that he wasn't immune to mistakes. I also agree that there is some end game here as well.

The Pentium 2 wasn't broken, why fix it?

This is true. Perhaps I'm just imagining it but I still do think I'm seeing a slight loss of momentum from Apple since he left.

Because the Pentium 3 was objectively better, Apple maps does seem quite inferior

Apple has been burned before by being beholding to a 3rd party developer. The whole Flash drama was the end game to how Adobe screwed them by moving Photoshop (I think) to Windows. I wouldn't be surprised if the timing of this was partially based on a contract expiring with Google like removing the You Tube app.

photoshop has been available for windows for ever

I was in the ball park

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/0...dobe-vs-apple/

PlayerList and World are bound, LocalWorlds is unbound..basically what it does in non-Prolog speak is iterate over every element in PlayerList and build a return list LocalWorlds by invoking huHoldemPlayer_globalWorld_playersWorld/3 for every Player which returns a LocalWorld.

So something like pseudo-Python
Changed the naming to be more in line with the language. In Prolog capital letters=variables and lowercase=atoms. And the predicate naming convention is describing the relation i.e. mother_of(Mother,Child) etc.
Stuff is "returned" by binding some unbound varible so usually you'll have a comment like
% +PlayerList,+World,-LocalWorlds
Indicating that PlayerList and Wold are bound and LocalWorlds is unbound so you know

Re: buckyballs...why would I keep magnetic stuff near a computer :O
I have some "Crazy Aarons Thinking Putty" to work with that my sisters gave me for some xmas heh

I used to work on Google Maps and am still friendly with a number of GMM developers, so take this for what it's worth.

From seeing some of the side by side quality comparisons (actual search quality metrics as used within the company, not just the cherry picked images being used right now that make the Apple maps look terrible), yes, it really is pretty bad. You might be lucky and have the features you use work correctly in your particular locale, but overall it's a pretty big regression, especially outside the US.

Basically maps and/or local search is a very difficult and data intensive problem, and takes a ton of infrastructure to do right. You get the first ~60% or so for free, but there's no good way to scale to get the rest of the data without driving a lot of cars around or doing some massive crowdsourcing, and a mapping system is pretty sensitive to getting that long tail right. Google's been collecting that data for years because of Street View, but it's been a billion dollar project.

Here's an article about some of the process involved. I'm honestly really surprised it got published, given how secret GT was a few years ago. Take a look at the base TIGER layer and see how it compares to reality, and then imagine doing all those fixes for every street in the US, and it gets way more complicated once you start doing other countries as well, and that's just the map layer. Local search is an almost orthogonal problem of probably lower scale but possibly higher complexity.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...ything/261913/



Very likely true.

Google never wrote the iOS "Google Maps" app, it was always controlled by Apple engineers using the Maps API, for various complex contract and control issues. Supposedly that's part of why iOS maps lagged behind Android maps, since the public maps API lags behind what's available internally. I think it's almost certain that Google has written their own maps app by now and it's being held up in review indefinitely. The Google/Apple relationship is such that pretty much any Google iOS app doesn't go through the usual app review process. (see Google Voice)

Basically any article you read about this whole kerfuffle is going to be wildly inaccurate, or at the very least, missing a lot of context.

Thoughts on http://lispyscript.com/ ?

Re: xMaps...I guess the point is that map-data is kind of valuable for marketing and thus you'd kind of like to have control over that if you have access to a large userbase like Apple has with the iPhone.

So I'm part of a fairly new automation team in a large IT org. We're developing scripts, etc that will be distributed to others. We want to track time/money saved by our efforts, so I'm putting together a tool for it.

Since doing direct db inserts from distributed scripts isn't ideal, I put together a webservice for it. I set up an endpoint that takes a querystring on HTTP GET and uses the information in the querystring to do the db insert.
So a GET request like http://blah.localdomain/service/AddR...oneySaved=3.50 will insert the record in the db

Aside from going against basic CRUD ideology, is there anything else wrong with using GET for this?

Seems fine if the url is only going to be used by a script. If it's put in the browser you have to worry about people revisiting the page accidentally and creating multiple inserts

Sorry not familiar with Python enough to confidently suggest a fix, but "MTA" is likely a Mail Transport Agent, I guess your larger script is trying to send an email and your environment is not configured to tell it how.

This http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...ing-in-crontab looks like it may cover your problem, specifically:

No opinion, but right now, I have to relegate that to the myriad other hear-it-once languages that are introduced every day.

The thread in HN is pretty funny. The Lisp guys get super defensive about Lisp and not a single anti-list flame is to be found. With community like that, you have to wonder why Lisp isn't more popular. At least they all seem dismissive of Clojure too.

Saw that Scirra thread too: Don't Worry; Be Happy?

Someone PM'ed me wanting to post this for feedback anonymously.



So, some interesting stuff going on at my job recently, and I'm gonna be getting a raise soon and I'm curious if some of you older gents have advice about negotiating and how I can get what I want out of it.

I'm in my 20s and work on a team of 5-8 engineers (fluctuates over time), which is the same team I've been working on since I started here 4 years ago. A year ago, there were 7 of us, four of whom (including me and the lead) had been here for a few years and three of whom were new. My role for the last few years has basically been the #2 on the team; the lead was always given the toughest projects, and I was basically next up after him in terms of responsibility.

Anyway, in the last year the other 3 guys who'd been here awhile have all left, two of them (incl the former lead) in August. We've added a couple junior engineers in that time, so the team is now me and 6 other guys that have a tenure of between 1 month and 1 year. To fill the void left by the lead (who had been here for almost 7 years but was only 1 year older than me, and really was a phenomenal and irreplaceable engineer), they're going to promote me as well as bring a senior engineer from another team onto our team to split the lead duties.

Anyway, the point of all that is to establish that while I'm now sharing the lead responsibilities, I'm also the only person on the team that has really solid knowledge of how most of our code systems work. Talking with the VP, when he told me about how they were bringing the other senior guy on to split the lead duties, he mentioned I'd be receiving a promotion and a raise but said we'd discuss the details later. What are effective methods to use when talking with the VP to articulate why I think I deserve to get paid a certain amount?

Some other relevant stuff:
- The previous lead told me how much he made when he was leaving, it was almost 2x my base salary (but I got paid overtime, generally amounting to a ~15% increase on top of that, and he as a lead did not)
- I know our company will pay to keep our talent when necessary, from hearing stories about bidding wars (some successful, some not) when guys get offered positions at other companies.
- I'm a pretty nice, non-confrontational guy (never asked for a raise or anything before, did receive one nice one based on merit in the past), and I'm pretty happy at my job, and I don't really want to threaten to leave or start interviewing elsewhere for the sole purpose of trying to extract a better deal. At the same time though, I don't want that passivity to hurt my long-term $EV in life because I'm not aggressive in asking for what I want or forcing others' hands to get it. Not sure how to reconcile that.

The rough number I have in mind is about 50% more in base salary, but includes overtime exemption, so works out to be about a 30% raise when taking no more overtime into account. In the context of me stepping up to now mentor the younger guys, and taking over the lead's responsibilities (which, while I will eventually be sharing them with someone, will be me until I do a lot of work getting that guy up to speed on how our code works), taking default ownership of anything in our section of the product that doesn't have a clearly defined owner, and probably spending a ****ton more hours at the office as a result of all of this, I think that's fair.

So here's my feedback on that as a guy who pays/hires programmers:

1. I would be up front that you know roughly what the guy that was leaving was making. Don't come right out and say you know exacts or that he told you, just avoid specifics.

2. "I'm not demanding or expecting that you take me immediately to that compensation level, I realize I need to prove myself. I would like for you to give me an idea of a plan to get me there, timeframes, things I need to do to earn that." That discussion can be pretty frank and you should be able to give input to what you're asking for in terms of the 30% actual increase to their bottom line.

I think your general attitude is good going into this, just be honest and tell them you want to be fair to them and you want them to be fair to you.

because it came up today and because it's awesome:

This is where I think Apple will fail pretty hard. I never got the impression that Apple is the type of company that cares too much about what their customers want. They tend to have a singular vision and stick with it. This sort of management certainly works for them as it just so happens to be what users want (sort of), but I simply don't see them using customer feedback or spending money on matching Google's innovation. Already you see it: they outsourced the map to other companies and didn't bother to do QA internally. They are well-known for going to China, demanding to see the ledgers, and tamping down on the Chinese company's profits. They are known for restricting app development company pricing, etc etc etc. Sorry to say it, but outside of marketing and making things look cool, they don't have any special talent, and where they seem to fail at more than anywhere is their user-influenced decisions. With their track-record of ruthless profitability, I can't see them going out and driving cars across the country.

Apple isn't an information company. They focus on design and usability. They don't have any data-intensive experience in the vein of search engines. They collect data on how to best open a box. That's fine, but I think they are way over their depth here. However, Apple, has the resources to fix this issue and hire the talent to make their maps engine awesome, but they really put themselves in a tough spot here and I don't think the timing could have been worse, considering the laggards. Even Microsoft, with experience in Bing, isn't going to be completely lost. I'm not sure how well the Surface will do or if Windows phones are dead in the water, but the point is that they have some data to work with.

Cool stuff.


I am speculating and I am no better than an armchair quarterback in this regard. However, I think watching this whole war unfold is interesting. I always like to see how the companies handle themselves and wonder what escape hatches they all are using, and sometimes ponder what they are thinking. If I was to be non-thinking, I would say that Apple took a huge mis-step and didn't think things through before releasing the map API. I, however, don't believe for one minute that they wanted to release something this prematurely. Something bad happened behind the scenes, and I can't help but think that Apple brought it on itself.