MetalMASK

FWIW, wechat's messaging server is in erlang. In terms of scale, it's probably bigger than whatsapp.

I bought the autonomous desk from kickstarter for $500 (basic model): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/403524037/autonomous-de..., so far quite happy with it. Really stable, and the table top is of good quality. I can see the author's point where the motor is not necessary but when it's cheap enough (at the low end of the $500-$3000 price range), it's certainly a nice to have feature.

Wobbly desk really bugs me and I would rather have a fixed height desk rather than a wobbly one. Testing the stability (or confirm from other's review) before you buy.

The whole article is based on the assumption that people make donation to universities as charitable donations. I find that a bit unrealistic. Give money to universities are gesture of appreciation from alumni, gain more opportunities of networking/recognition from the university for the donor and his/her family, etc. For donations with the pure purpose of helping the poor, there are other institutions for that.

3D TV is no longer a gadget that can be easily purchased on a whim and throw away in the closet later. Check the 3D TV sale in China, I bet you will find it's not more than the US.

For now I can only provide an anecdotal evident that most of the Chinese I know (including me) don't like 3D (TV or Movie). 3D movies are very tiring and draining to watch, and afterwards I don't remember the scenes as vividly as I would from a 2D screen.

I'd say this is just a sign for Xiaomi to show interest of entering the "home TV, phone, tablet as unified" system market. There are much to be desired there.

Let's see, is it similar to WordNet but with open access (i.e., anyone can edit)?

FWIW, Geography major student do have access to professional traffic simulation software (e.g., TrafficSim, SUMO, .etc) if they are interested in research topics related to traffic. I am not sure what algorithm Sim City uses, but I am assuming they are not as complicated as these professional software.

Perhaps that's the point of your suggestion, to lower the entry level to these field, or for a broader audience.

Broder's reply (posted just now): http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-f...

sorry, just saying that I actually work in the field, not just a bystander saying apple is evil. I would be very happy if OSM in the end works(which I believe it will, just need at least a couple of more years); I would also be happy if apple map were able to fix the problem--which, as I pointed out, is the under-emphasized data issue.

The map failure is just another example of where apple's design principle cannot be blindly applied to every product. Apple's top-down approach on software design is expected to fail on Maps. Maps put hard requirement on data, bottom data, nothing to do with your leader's vision. Apple's way out of this is not to engage user input to add missing data or correct data errors --OSM tried that for years, the most accurate data still comes from semi-professional survey-er.

Look at other companies that does map, google map started out using Tele Atlas, NavTeq serves yahoo, bing and mapquest. Let's face it, spatial data cost money to collect and even more costly to update/maintain. Nevteq and Tele Atlas are gigantic companies for serving basic spatial data for a reason.

I guess apple didn't do sufficient data QA before saying, "hell yeah we are going with OSM where every big player is going with commercial data."

Without a solid baseline data, any fancy pants software development would just evaporate in air.

I have to say though, the GUI for apple map and functionality has very high usability. Apple just need to adapt a different mindset when dealing with data-dependent applications.

(disclaimer: I am a PhD student in Geography with CS background, did my share of processing spatial data for the last 8 years)

also the wages of skilled worker in China, India, Vietnam, .etc skyrockets during the last 2 years.

I am somewhat doubtful about gyroscope replacing GPS. If it can actually happen, it will require, as noted by others, re-tuned/tweaked/calibrated/adjusted every day/week to void accumulated error/noise.

Keep in mind that as precise as gyroscope can get, they could be susceptible to shock (if you drop it on the ground).

But I am interested in seeing how it could develop into

Usually priceonomics provides statistics from a large poll of customer/purchase record, .etc. That is information you couldn't gain elsewhere. Somewhat like an analytics publication.

This article is just a description of a shopping experience, together with the research result you have to do before you buy something that is a new category to you.

Oh well.

"How stable is the team (meaning, how frequently does the team change members)"

Interesting point but I'd like to see some feedback from real Chinese user(s). (although I am Chinese, I am not currently physically in China so cannot test it out).

The major difference between the two maps is that the Apple one has more POIs (and it looks even more cluttered because it contains Chinese characters). As noted by beering, the base map are essentially the same in this particular example. IOS6 maps are criticized for missing spatial features in the base map (i.e., road network, waterbodies, .etc), which largely due to the use of OSM instead of commercial database.

I am not seeing a counter example here. The comparison is even based on different map range (note the IOS6 map covers a larger region than the google map example).

What I've heard is that Google maps works really bad in some rural part of Europe, e.g., South France. Maybe look for some examples there.

wait. the Author's name is Terence Eden, and who is the author of the quote appeared in the text?

"Harvard – one of the most prestigious universities – awarded an MBA to George W Bush. A man many of us wouldn’t trust to sit the right way round on a toilet.

– Terence Eden"

Wow, I haven't never seen someone who is so narcissistic about his own quote before. Don't quote yourself. If you would like to, you may repeat yourself; but don't quote.

Quoting is for referencing somebody else that support the point you are making, possibly from a more credible source than yourself.

thanks for the feedback on the tone. See constructive suggestion in my reply to awenger.

one comment on the survey vs. server log comparison: Survey also doesn't give you "why" on user behavior; it only give you what the user "thinks" the reason is. For certain occasions it provide false insights. Server logs are facts, you won't get why but you get concrete observations.

Thanks for responding to my, as noted by others, rather "rude" critique. I think you guys are building something distinctive from the surveys on AmazonTurk, SocialSci, because your recruitment poll is not chosen. Turkers went to amazon with the idea to properly do survey, your survey might took the user by surprise.

A few suggestions: 1. Hire someone with experience on experimental psychology, I mean, by trade. Not necessarily a PhD but at least with some experience and has knowledge of the textbook experiment errors. Just one of those would help the design a long way. 2. Throw in some free analytics tools/result for the organization behind the survey. As you mentioned, restaurant owners and politicians might just want to run the survey for some straightforward result, well, not all surveys have straightforward result, even when designed well. Some analytics/visualization tool, e.g., manyeyes from IBM, doesn't really take a lot of dev time but would be quite impressive in the eyes of your customers (i.e., the politicians or restaurant owners).

Best of luck, Alex

My argument is targeting at the whole "survey" business, not this or that dev team in particular. I would much prefer the dev team here to do a great job, "fixing" the broken online survey business instead of adding on to it. If you are part of the dev team, I apologize for the confusion.

Not sure how the "doll" analogy applies here. When a doll sells, even to a small proportion of population, it sells. When you do an online survey, you gain very little true insight. You definitely will gain more insight from the two alternatives I mentioned (analytics on logs, properly designed experiment).

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying the whole online survey industry is wrong. Amazon Turk is wonderful, so is SocialSci. My company actually use result from Turkers for building models. The premise for that to work is a well designed experiment with qualified turkers. A survey that replacing "paywall" basically means you do not have a clear targeted recruitment poll. You get basically anyone who pays your website a visit. Survey result from that, in my humble opinion, is worth as much as server log analytics.

p.s.: I think you meant "You are being off-base" instead of "Your being off-base" but I really want to avoid discussion on grammar on HN.

No.

You probably don't need a degree in experimental psychology to understand that forced recruitment gives you invalid/biased/low quality data. These surveys are annoying to the users; more importantly, the data provided has little if at all value to the organization behind the survey. No matter how well you design your survey.

I don't even want to start on how bad/biased some surveys are designed.

The only way the survey business is still in business is because it is so distant from the revenue. If your ad campaign doesn't boost sale, you pull your ad away. Bad survey's uselessness are not so explicit so people still trust that "something can be gained".

No, stop creating useless data from online user. If you want insights on usage, do analytics on server logs. If you want feedback on user experience, do a serious experiments and plan to spend some ten thousand bucks on it.

I cannot see a clear evidence to support the claim (that "samsung copied Xcode"). If you can reach that claim from the screenshot, you can make the same claim for netbeans, eclipse, intellJ,...etc (as the author admits him/herself, any capable IDE looks similar).

If the claim is on the icon design along, the claim could stand stronger; but I guess it's not "catchy" enough to claim "Samsung copied XCode's icon design".

Why don't people make such claims on open-source projects? Is it because open-source project has no money for other people to sue off?

There is only one thing I want to know behind the story is if the author has purchased facebook stock or not. Just some background info might help understand the motivation.

This seems great, but this is my concern: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_lh5fR4DMA.

Fundamentally a psychological problem. Whether the attendee can keep it professional or not would make or break this hackathon

Hi Sha,

Great work. I checked commuting time for Seattle, WA using public transit and most of your visualization are spot on. Is the public GTFS files you are referring to come from here: http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFe...?

With regard to some of the earlier replies saying that the map is inaccurate, it might be worthwhile to use Amazon Turk to run some evaluation on how reliable the spatial data (or your algorithm for calculating travel time, rural vs local, .etc) is.

-Sen

High-quality Open-access Peer-reviewed journal that takes less than a year to get review and published is already in place (e.g., http://www.josis.org/index.php/josis). As a matter of fact, the academic community loves it.

It's a good (but wrong) analogy to compare to the "head-up" display on airplanes. However, driving is a 2D experience compared to flying. Pilot would need to pay attention to the surrounding in the 3D world where as driving, pretty much is just in a flat surface (you pay attention to your front, behind, left, right, that's it). I just cannot see the benefit of the HUD display in road driving use. There is no "head-up" necessary in this driving use case.

I echo with this post greatly. I've tried out ipad and transformer (Android), the touchpad is really indeed the most intuitive to use. I use it daily for browsing the web, writing Emails and playing some games -- and I leave the frequently used app only, switching between the windows is intuitive and very snappy, making multi-tasking not only possible but very usable.

I didn't even bother to install Android on my touchpad (even it's dual-boot) cause the lag on android is a huge let down.

WebOS's UI is similar to iOS in a lot of ways, it's like iOS (once you open the app/home screen) with an additional desktop/workspace. I look forward to some open-source development for the Touchpad. (First request would be a good pdf viewer)

ok. What I get is only a blank screen with a red banner that reads my note, and background music. Is there anything I am missing here? a slide show of pictures or what?

turns out it's not OS related, firefox not working on both Windows7 and ubuntu

video not showing in Firefox (on platform ubuntu xfce)

This is definitely one of the areas that is to each his/her own.

I found (the majority of) trance music superficial and get quite easily bored listening to them. Songs with lyrics messes with the language processing module of the brain and I don't want that kind of distraction. So I listen to classical, instrumental, OST and some techno (that are NOT tons of bass).

Example of songs I am listening to now:

Pierre Bensusan - Kourouts Nota (highly recommended)

Eric Johnson - Gem

Steffen Schackinger - On a rainy night

The Glitch Mob - Animus Vox

Klint - Diamond (OST from Snatch)

Mirwais - Disco Science (OST from Snatch)

Nathaniel Mechaly - Opéra (OST from Snatch)

...

In case anyone is interested, this is my playlist on Grooveshark: http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Sen+s+Music+For+Coding/66931...

Again, music snobbery is one of the worst topics of discussion (I certainly don't want to invoke it), to each his/her own.