Maciek416

The "360 view" (like Google's Street View) data for my city (Toronto) is wildly out of date. Across the office where I work there is an entire entertainment center complete with a 50 story condo on top -- which is entirely missing (and still shows a parking lot with cars parked in it) on MapQuest 360.

[edit: from the looks of some movie billboards at this intersection and a few other hints, it looks like the data is from mid-2006].

[edit 2: I just checked my own neighborhood and the building I currently live in, along with the neighboring building are both not yet built. Two condo towers south of my building are still only half-way built. MapQuest Maps == Street View Wayback Machine?]

They used to work in VMWare/etc if you converted the VHD files, but for the last several months the new ones MS has been providing are made to only work with VirtualPC on Windows.

Here's some more data from Mozilla's own testing setup:

http://arewefastyet.com/?machine=5

Where JM+TM stands for "Jagermonkey + Tracemonkey". It looks to be gaining on V8 and Apple Nitro pretty fast, considering the timeline involved.

This could present a significant barrier to reliable online shopping for clothes. It'll be interesting to see in the coming years, as more of these retailers offer online ordering (GAP is finally offering their catalog to us Canadians, for example), whether fitting will be normalized somehow, or whether each retailer will instead stick to a specific size translation table as I've seen some places.

Either that or someone will have to build a website or tool that aggregates the investigative work for us. I know I'd pay a small premium to eliminate the guesswork.

(EDIT: I wish there was a way to OpenID-ify personal body measurements for this purpose so every clothing site I visited could automatically select the best-fitting clothes for me. GAP small/medium t-shirts are wildly different from Threadless' small/medium American Apparel Ts)

I'd like to know how much obesity is caused by a structural "finish everything on your plate" problem. By this I mean the tendency of certain folks to finish everything that is served, no matter what their hunger level is. Also, I've heard it said that people who eat from smaller plates will consume fewer calories over time.

In the study, the group given water also had their food portions slashed by a substantial amount. What happens if the portions stay the same size? How many people will read or see re-hashed versions of this study in their daily papers or news and simply prefix a large glass of water before their dinners, only to find that it has made no difference?

There's a similar service, myus.com , which accomplishes this for non-US residents.

I've seen this type of markup produced by in-browser WYSIWYG editors that don't inspect the existing DOM/markup for redundancy when applying various styling commands.

In some dramatic cases, you would see alternating re-wrappings of (strong,bold,strong,bold,strong,bold) tags as users who were using different browsers (which produced slightly different markup for various style commands) would re-bold each others' sections of text from day to day.

The boy's gaze is made to point up and to the right to make it look (from our angle) as if he's facing the actress playing the game, but given that this isn't a holographic star trek TV, she's seeing the same picture we are.. Which means they're not seeing eye to eye.

A few years ago Bruce Sterling gave an interesting talk about the future of materials science, among other things. One of the highlights of the talk is his discussion of "mining the dumps". These metals won't go away that easily. In many cases, we are concentrating them into convenient future mining sites (dumps)

This technique is somewhat reminiscent of Dazzle Camo:

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

What's interesting is that Dazzle camo is typically used to confuse the visual systems of human beings, not computer vision, but some of the principles and tricks seem to be the same.

It doesn't seem to show a market cap or number of issued shares. Does anyone here know either of those numbers?

A popular desk amongst many technical people I know for many years was IKEA's "JERKER" desk. It was well-known to be extremely sturdy -- able to hold very large CRT screens -- and relatively inexpensive in most countries.

There were a couple models, but they now seem to have been discontinued.

Lately I've seen more people buying the "GALANT" as a replacement, which is a similar series of desks from IKEA, except with far more configuration options. These desks are not as industrially-weight-bearing, but I guess not as many people are sporting CRTs anymore :)

Wow, this is a tremendous piece of news. Not only is Canvas supported, but a huge list of other impressive standards-related stuff as well.

To boot, there will be support for ES5. I'm not up to date on where the other browser-makers are at this point, but could it actually end up that Microsoft will be the first out of the gate with a widely-distributed ES5 implementation?

This is a pretty remarkable service, but there is one awkward caveat mentioned in the article:

"Unfortunately, because of licensing restrictions, we can only offer Mass Effect 2 for play under Windows. So, if you do not have access to a PC, your only option to play it on a Mac is under Windows using Boot Camp or a similar system. We apologize for the inconvenience. OnLive has no other games in the pipeline that are Windows-only, and we do not expect to have any others."

D'oh!

[edit: As a Canadian surfer, I run into US services and sites every week that don't allow non-US users. Netflix, Comedy Central, etc. I could imagine the licensing issues could be similarly irritating with OnLive as well]

I'm beginning to think that linguistic prescriptivism is going to have a hard time holding up against the crazy mixing bowl that is the Internet and, to a wider extent, globalization. It's fun to play grammar nazi and all, but I've started to resign to the fact that people are simply going to do what they're going to do. Look at the state of English only a couple centuries ago. Language evolves quickly.

Who's to say login can't become a verb? "Google" and "email" did. Busily propping up websites like this with guides and corrections is like a finger in the dike.

I've got a name fairly unfamiliar to many speakers of English, ("Maciej", or "Maciek" in the everyday diminutive form). There aren't any invalid characters in it, but I have on several occasions had it re-written or transcribed by a human being after I've entered it into a form on a website, often to something completely different or garbled (with the implication that I spelled my own name wrong). In particular, my bank did this to me and for about a year and a half I was receiving statements addressed to a "Macie J", where someone had clearly thought the J was part of my middle name (which itself is another tongue twister to English-speaking folks).

No wonder so many immigrants to Canada and the US change their names :)

Without getting too politically-charged here, I find their association of the word innovation with patents to be awkward.

While there's no question that some of these same metro areas would appear in the top right of any chart claiming to map "innovation", I think in this case the visualization would more accurately be titled "Mapping patent clusters".

Are there other, perhaps better ways of measuring innovation? I can think of plenty of companies and people who are innovating but not necessarily patenting.

I guess the truck-load of revenue isn't sufficient because investors still expect Microsoft to push fresh and innovative products. They certainly have the people and the business units to do it (look at all the ideas that Microsoft Research goes through every year).

The question is, how do you get a really original and fresh idea at Microsoft to make it past the cannibalistic obstacle course we've all heard about? Surely MS has the spare cash to throw around to "test" ideas like Courier on the market, so why don't they? It seems like a much more sure thing than Zune. Then again, perhaps that experience has made them more risk-averse.

If you were Ballmer and wanted to promote stock growth, what would you do -- if you could try anything at this point?

John Hessler's blog, where he actually discusses methods for the cartographic analysis mentioned in the article, can be found here: http://warpinghistory.blogspot.com/

Here's a sample map made by the mapmaker Mateo Prunes (3200x1800): http://fglorente.org/zen/albums/mapas/Mateo%20Prunes.gif

I tried to generate a "massive" amount of data, but I hit the script CPU usage warning pretty quickly :). Have you tried using Web Workers or perhaps timer-chunking your data generation loop?

Actually, what you say touches on one of the reasons why Node is exciting for js coders.

Working with Node's callbacks for I/O feels a lot like working with jQuery's XHR/animation callbacks. It's a consistent flow that will feel familiar for a lot of js coders immediately. Speaking from personal experience, it really does help the brain keep moving.

Many javascript programmers are more than familiar with server-side development, they just haven't necessarily had a super productive environment within which to flex their skills, but that may be changing.

It's cool that you're trying for basic API compatibility with Node, and it would be neat if you could make use of some of the libraries that have been written for Node. The only problem with that is that some code written for Node is already using features of Javascript which exist in V8 but not in JScript. Ryan has written about which ES5 features are implemented in V8 and available in Nodejs here:

http://wiki.github.com/ry/node/ecma-5mozilla-features-implem...

They demoed this at jsconf this morning and it was quite impressive. They did a side-by-side comparison between the NPR iPad app and a sproutcore-powered equivalent in mobile Safari. The browser clone looked and ran great, and actually had much smoother scrolling animation.

This is amusing and absolutely true.

The small town (population: 120,000) that I grew up appears on Google Maps before NYC or Washington are visible.

I can't imagine there are that many companies out there who are making products like this. Nike+, Runkeeper, Garmin.. Who else? Having only ever used one application like this, Runkeeper, I find it interesting how similar it looks to Runkeeper's UI and feature set.

If you've got a ready-made team that can make a product like this but is unwilling to leave the bay area, it would seem there aren't a lot of companies around that can absorb a whole team like this overnight. I wonder where they'll turn up.

One significant advantage that Selenium seems to have is that it accepts CSS3 selectors as target element patterns. Chickenfoot has XPath, but not CSS3. A bit of a bummer because this otherwise looks like it will be fun to play with.

Like others are mentioning, Javascript is clean, familiar, easy, and has some compelling language features to boot (closures, JSON, etc).

Cultural norms and design patterns in Javascript Land increasingly orbit around projects like jQuery. This sort of influence works out spectacularly-well if you've spent the last several years working countless hours on browser-side code and suddenly stumble on nodejs and its evented/closure style of programming. Perhaps this doesn't describe you, but from my vantage point, this describes a vast number of programmers. There are a lot of people in that demographic who want to be able to rapidly write out web apps in the same frame of mind client and server side and not have to switch to thinking in Python or Ruby.

The fact that V8's engine is competitively fast isn't hurting these efforts either.

Similar over here: tried "IVV" but didn't get the ETF I expected

After the crazy dire news events of the last year or two, I was quite surprised by my experience in selling + buying last summer in Toronto's market.

We listed our condo early on a Friday afternoon, and were inundated with offers and interest that same day. We had a buyer over-asking within the same day, and it was all done in under 24 hours. I asked my agent about this, and she said that it was typical of the activity at that time. The market was surprisingly hot. We had no problems with the bank, in spite of reading about a widespread slowdown in lending.

I'm not the only one in my social circle to have bought/sold/gotten loans last year, and I've never been sure whether this has been a product of lucky demographics (mostly technical people) or whether Toronto has largely weathered the storm.

Can any other Canadian HNers throw in a data point here?

Whoever brings it to market and gets it into a very large number of homes and businesses first at a reasonable price will likely claim the innovation trophy.

Unfair? Perhaps, but energy inventions and technologies over the last several decades have always had a nasty tendency to be "10 years away" or "thought to be viable within 3-5 years", etc, and then promptly disappear off the radar.

It's not enough to merely invent and talk about it, marketing is important. Just look at the tremendous push that Bloom has done over the last several days.