skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like my Macbook as much as the next guy, but this is way too frothy:

> Apple invented the GUI

No, they didn't. Xerox invented the GUI. You seem to be aware of Xerox's role, so I can't figure out why you'd assert that Apple making use of those ideas later would then constitute them "inventing" the GUI.

> NeXT cube inspired the web

That's stretching things, to say the least. The early web was a fairly incremental step from Gopher. Sure, Tim Berners Lee used a NeXT machine, but it's not like CERN wouldn't have had networked, GUI-based UNIX computers if it weren't for NeXT.

> Apple invented the touch UI.

Huh? Touch interfaces have been used for ages. The restaurant that I worked at in high school in the mid-90s had one on its cash register. Apple didn't even produce the first touch-screen phone.

Similarly, Google's "invention" of PageRank was pretty incremental. It was a refinement of Jon Kleinberg's idea for using link-based search ranking.

Most innovations, when looked at under a magnifying glass, turn out to be more or less incremental. Apple's had some really impressive instances of refining, marketing and popularizing. That said, most innovation is really just refinement.

Have they been the most influential company of the last decade? I think it's too early to tell, but I seriously doubt it. That's something that's clearer in the history books. We're probably looking in the wrong places completely. It seems totally plausible to me that the human genome being sequenced in the last decade will trump e.g. mobile internet in its long-term effects on society.

If any of Apple's innovations will pan out as having been truly disruptive to society, I'm pretty sure it will have been their first. Their role (along with their contemporaries, most notably Commodore) in popularizing personal computing is one of those truly game changing moments in history. My life was radically changed when my family got a computer. In contrast, when I got my first smart phone (considering the fact that my non-smart phone already had Google maps, Skype, a web browser and IMAP client) virtually nothing changed in my life.

(As a side note, there hasn't been anything that Google's done thusfar that I'd nominate for being society changing. Web search was already prevalent and the research that led to PageRank was already out there. Google Books, Street View and their work on autonomous vehicles seem like they might be some of those things in retrospect.)
- meaningless as currency: I am actually not sure how elegance plays into that at all, so I have no cute analogy to rpg's Unix/ITS system calls. The wasted computing power is inherent to the system of avoiding double-spending (I also spent some time discussing this), but that's not related to Bitcoin being worthless or not as a currency. Any damn thing can be currency, after all; currencies are as currencies do.

It would be great if tptacek actually explained what he means. It seems to be a muddled economic argument. I do not understand "meaningless as currencies goes".
Sorry for the self-promotion, but you might find http://guitaryst.com to your liking :)
More precisely: he did not fire him. Ive was there before Jobs.
// Slimey cheap key comparator.
int32 cmpkey(const void *key1, const void *key2) {
return (int32)((intptr_t)key1 - (intptr_t)key2);
}

Any C programmer's spidey sense should tingle when they see a ternary comparison function implemented like this. Let's look at the canonical example:

int intcmp(int x, int y) { return x - y; }

It seems perfectly fine. After all, cmp functions are usually allowed to return any signed number, not only -1, 0 or +1. But what happens if x is INT_MAX and y is INT_MIN? You get signed integer overflow. That's bad. In theory, it's really, really bad because signed integer overflow in C is undefined, so it could launch nuclear missiles, segfault, or give a compiler like GCC total license to fuck with your code in all kinds of ways that are hard to imagine. In practice, on 2's complement machines, it's just really bad since INT_MAX - INT_MIN = -1 doesn't have the right sign.

Returning to Cliff's code, since he's only using the cmp function for equality and not ordering, the overflow problem doesn't manifest itself. If he were using it for ordering in a sorted array or search tree, you might think that this wouldn't cause a bug as long as all he needed was a consistent ordering rather than any particular one. Well, you'd be wrong, because intcmp violates transitivity. Mathematically speaking, INT_MIN+1 < 0 < INT_MAX. According to intcmp, INT_MIN+1 < 0 and 0 < INT_MAX but INT_MIN+1 > INT_MAX. This breaks the invariants of your sorting and search tree code, so all bets are off.

The solution? Do the simple thing:

int intcmp(int x, int y) { return x < y ? -1 : x > y ? +1 : 0; }

Your compiler can turn this into a few branchless instructions with a single CMP.
Xbox 360 Reset Glitch Hack - Unsigned Code on current Kernels
Sweet!

Recommend making that "Start" link way bigger; took a while to find while just skimming.
everyone falls prey to wishful thinking

To be fair, nobody has ever designed a CPU based on current process technologies. Design teams are always saying "we think the process technology we'll end up working with will look something like this...", and based on past history there was no reason to think that the power issue wouldn't get solved like it had the past N times.
Great! Yet another blacklist to cause collateral damage for us poor email admins.

If there's one type of person than invokes homicidal rage in my otherwise fairly mellow personality is the arrogant email admin who won't allow an exception so a person on one of my RBL-listed servers can communicate with one using his servers. The worst is flat-out rejecting email (as opposed to using scoring) because the sender's mail server is listed on a single RBL of the fifty or so that are out there. It's not like the users have any knowledge of the ugly politics involved with the RBL vigilantism that goes on behind the scene of the mail servers, so in the end they are the ones who suffer pointlessly.

I once talked to an admin who had the balls to be proud that he forced one of his employer's satellite offices to capitulate and get removed from all RBLs so they could communicate with corporate. Let me tell you... I've never communicated with a more self-righteous prick.

Yeah, yeah, I know: you have the right to do whatever the hell you want on your mail servers. However, when you take the supposed high road by denying proven legitimate email due to a listing on some 3rd party list, you're being a major asshat.

We can achieve 99.5% effective filtering with per-mailbox statistical filtering. There's no reason to create yet more lookup traffic dedicated to the spam problem.

The entire RBL concept is broken. Please don't add to this ecosystem.

(Note to the creator, admins, and users of backscatterer.org: There's a special hell for each and every one of you.)
Free 3g access? That's pushing it. I don't doubt that Amazon will eventually release an Android device, but expectations must remain reasonable.
That's my stuff. The page has been up for about 3 months now and the stats will go up in a week or two.

Also, about a month ago I amended the test script to check which fonts are installed on visitor's machine. I think it could make a fairly interesting data point too. The script is currently checking for

Arial
Calibri
Candara
Lucida Sans Unicode
Segoe UI
Verdana

Helvetica
Lucida Grande

Georgia
Droid Sans

It was also supposed to check for Trebuchet MS, but I misspelled it :) If anyone has any suggestions for additional fonts to test for, I am all ears.
To me it was obvious that the time-to-compile measurement for ClojureScript was all wrong. It's a common, but annoying mistake people who aren't used to the JVM make. Startup Time != Compile Time.
Well the aluminum looks nice, I too prefer the thinkpad design.

Don't get all the fuss over the apple look. To me the thinkpad looks very sharp and functional.
Steve: Who’s Going to Protect Us From Cheap and Mediocre Now?
Thanks for mentioning Lystener! I think it's because lyric sites aren't sticky. You're there for a song, and you're gone again. Lystener switches that around, kind of, but you still need the initial urge to look up a song lyric.

That, and I do a terrible job of promoting it.
While i found your comment very insightful, i have to say that, even if you're not the one working on the "art" side of things, it can be extremely rewarding to make the existence of the final creation possible with your programming skills.
Very interesting idea, and I like the hacking nature of the solution. I was about to ask if it was using my current HN cookie to create that popup but I see now that it is...you basically are reframing the HN pages to fit into that popup, and if the user isn't yet logged in, it shows the HN login page, if you're already logged in then it's taking you to the submit a post page...very cool hack.

Someone else had mentioned that it would be an issue trying to do this by scraping, but this could just as easily be done this way. The downside of course (like someone else had mentioned) is that HN users would need to enter in their username/password to perform the scrape to count current post points and the scrape to upvote posts, and if they didn't see ycombinator.com in the URL they would be skeptical in providing these details because an unscrupulous hacker could then use those logins (if they stored them) to upvote all of their own posts. If others are interested in the scrape version of this hack I could make it ...The upside to the scrape hack version would be the fact that the UI could be adjusted as needed, but like others mentioned HN isn't know for it's elegant UI to begin with...it's more about simplicity
People seem to like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, Youtube, etc.

They haven't stopped the internet from the 1990s from existing, its still there and available. Most people just seem to like this other corporate internet a lot more.

It seems to me that in many arguments, it isn't about whether it's possible for people to have their non-corporate, idealized internet (because it is), it's about not allowing others to also have the internet they want (Hulu, iTunes, Facebook, etc), because ultimately people aren't visiting the idealized, non corporate internet, and aren't going to -- because the majority of people prefer the other one.

Ultimately, it seems to be a disappointment rooted in the behaviors and wants of the majority, tho its rarely ever framed as such.
Xerox categorically did not invent the mouse. Doug Engelbart invented the mouse in the mid-to-late 1960s. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs for what is described as "The Mother of All Demos". As to the GUI, again PARC then Apple innovated on the original ideas of others. Ivan Sutherland is credited ad really being the first to develop the notion of the "GUI" - again in the late 60s - with Sketchpad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg. The Xerox interface was in fact essentially Smalltalk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk and http://homepage3.nifty.com/old_apple_world/photo/SmallTalk21...
The point Ben is making is not simply that Bitcoin is wasteful, although it is.

The point is that a $101 certificate for the smoke from $100 in burnt five dollar bills isn't worth $101. Or $100. Or $5. Or $0.01.

You can declare by fiat that as a proof of effort, the smoke certificate is worth something. You can try to convince people that certificates representing smoke function as a medium of exchange. But as a medium of exchange, it must reside on a continuum with all the other media of exchange, ranked by the certitude that it will in the long run be convertible to other media. And in that ranking, "smoke from burnt dollar bills" fares poorly.

There are obviously many types of Bitcoin advocates. The ones we see most often on HN are of the nerd clade. Nerdly Bitcoin advocates are fixated on the fact that "any damn thing can be a currency". This fixation presupposes that being a currency is interesting. The problem is, it isn't interesting. Toenails can be a currency. Belly button lint can be a currency. Burnt dollar bill certificates can be a currency. What's interesting is, what are good currencies.

Here the nerdly Bitcoin advocate handwaves around the fact that we actually have notions of what it means to be a "good" or "bad" currency. Dollar bills are highly liquid and have a relatively predictable valuation over time. To a lesser extent, so does gold. Bitcoin does not. It's volatilee, it has illusory liquidity (it is liquid only so long as the "exchanges" on which it trades decide to keep trading Bitcoins --- or decide not to succumb to their numerous security flaws), and it is in no place a native medium of exchange, such that some person somewhere will ever need it to e.g. pay their taxes.

To all that, add the critiques you sourced of Bitcoin; that while it has impressive virality, it largely fails at its security goal by making the cost to defend transaction integrity greater than the cost of attacking it; that it largely fails at its anonymity goal by requiring a complete audit log be made available to everyone simply in order to function; that it largely fails at its decentralization goal by requiring resources comparable to that of a Visa or a Mastercard just to scale.

What are you left with? Colorless, odorless tulips.
There are two quotes that I remember from my CS profs that have stuck with me over the years.

AI prof addressing statistical vs. rule-based learning: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful."

Systems level programming prof: "Now that you have a thorough understanding of programming all up and down the stack, if you want to minimize the amount of money you make and maximize the hours you work, then take a job as a video game programmer."

I know several coders who have worked in the gaming industry for 5+ years and they're all completely jaded at this point.
Elegant is subjective. It's better to talk about things like specs, issues, OS support, etc, and let people decide on the aesthetics themselves. Arguing over which design is more pleasing on the eye (or elegant) adds nothing to the discussion.

The original post suggesting the X220 listed a bunch of specs that it had (and that the poster needed) that the MacBook Air didn't. A response of, "Disregard that the design sucks cocks," adds nothing to the discussion even if that it your personal opinion. If someone thinks that the external looks of the laptop are important, they are not going to just blindly make the purchase based a comment on HN without personally checking it out.

The more important discussions are things like:

* X is billed as (or looks to be in the surface) a replacement for Y, but once you get it out of the showroom you'll notice issues A, B and C.

* X looks really cheap on the surface, but in my experience it's extremely durable.

* X looks really good, but doesn't run Operating System Y.

* X looks like it runs Operating System Y, until you need to use feature/hardware component Z.
I'm sure I saw a better implementation of this on someone's blog only last week, but I don't recall where.

I can't be the only one who saw this...
Depends on what metrics; iOS definitely isn't the most open of the two, for instance.
There is tech startup life after 40
I think it would be sweet if we put together a community of people who are focusing on constantly launching or 'practicing' stuff like this. I know there have always been hackathons and startup weekends, but I'm thinking of something thats continual over the long term. Even if it was just a monthly 'What have you built this month?' post on here, I think it would be awesome to share and motivation to keep building. Maybe HN has already had this, I'm just spitting out ideas.
Just came here to mention the article says he is "down to" $10 million.

I understand he nearly lost "everything," but boy would I love to lose everything and be down to "just" $10 mil.
Glyph 0.5.0 released (Document Authoring Framework)
http://nodeknockout.com/judges - 172 judges

http://nodeknockout.com/teams - 297 teams

http://nodeknockout.com/entries - 200 (right now) entries, which I think means teams who have deployed at least once.
me too. but it's possible a lot of these startups raised with convertible notes, and so would not have valuations yet.
Strange, new gcc (4.4.4) produces a much nicer assembly for key1!=key2:

.LFB0:
.cfi_startproc
xorl %eax, %eax
cmpq %rsi, %rdi
setne %al
ret
.cfi_endproc

Clang 2.8 does something similar to your _compare (I expect new versions to be a bit better)
In this comment I would like to propose "Flitcoin". Flitcoin is nearly identical to bitcoin, with exactly one difference. In Flitcoin, instead of brute forcing a nonce through SHA-256(x) to find hashes with a suitable prefix of 0's, Flitcoin brute forces a nonce through HMAC-SHA256("bananas", x) to find hashes with a suitable suffix of 1's.

Please explain to me why my Flitcoin is inferior to your Bitcoin.

As you do so, note that all the world's Bitcoin software is trivially upgradable to Flitcoin; in fact, it requires less than 10 lines of code to do so.
My practice thus far has been failing and reflecting on it. I've been writing and talking a little bit about it lately: http://blog.maxlynch.com/startup-lessons-learned-part-2

Writing out what went wrong and getting feedback on it has been immensely helpful.
I have actually grown in a friend circle where if you disagree, you keep on debating till we arrive on a consensus, or at least understand that ours points have reduced to personal preferences or till one of us is really hungry. I was probably expecting the same here. People are not as idle as I am.

And I guess, there is still a lot to learn (and that will be the case forever). Thank you!
Xbox 360 Reset Glitch Hack - Unsigned Code on current Kernels incl. X360 SLIM
I'm sad seeing HN fallen down to reddit level of trollfest between apple fanbois and apple haters. Off-topic, but it had to be said.
instead of showing an image, have you considered doing that orange 'Y' logo with HTML+CSS?
Brilliant User Onboarding by Zynga, Words With Friends. Good Lesson.
You are citing as an authority on code quality someone who says Bitcoin should use Bcrypt instead of SHA-256 because Bcrypt is less amenable to hardware optimization.

I hope to make the starburst of applicable points that follow from this by implication instead of explicit argument.
I think you bring up a good point. The person making the mammary physics simulation or Braid are probably two different types of people.

I think the reason for this is because the person working on Braid chose to balance technical challenges with other things important to them. A 2d platformer is certainly less interesting to build from an engineering standpoint than building a navier-stokes based milk dynamics solver in CUDA :) But, the Braid engineer knows they are working on an ambitious, novel piece of art. It's this tradeoff that I don't think most people are making, and I think most video game engineers do not see themselves as agents to push the boundary of contributing in an artistic sense to a greater whole as those on games like Braid do, particularly.

The post in this thread sparked my comment because it mentioned the most drawing position in gaming is the coveted engine programmer position. To me, this sounds like people want to work on bleeding-edge technical problems without regards to the fact their engines are probably being applied towards shoveling out violent, dry crap from the mainstream gaming studios. I once had one-dimensional goals like this too ("I want to work on global illumination algorithms!") but this has changed for me dramatically over time.
Of the top of my head,

- Machine Learning by Tom M Mitchell
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html

For general reading and introductions I also like:

- Pattern Classification by Richard Duda

- Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by
Christopher Bishop

For a bit more emphasis on statistics and math, I usually dive in to

- Classification,Parameter Estimation and State Estimation by van der Heijden

And last, but certainly not least:

- Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by
David MacKay, available here:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/
No, most people don't even know what an MP3 player is. The only people I hear that from these days are nerds. Everyone else says iPod. The same way we say 'kleenex'.
x = INT_MAX & y = -1 is enough to break your intcmp example. There are a wide range of inputs that would cause a problem.
I back up with time machine too. I used it once when I had to send my macbook pro in for maintenance. I just hooked up my timemachine drive to my wife's macbook pro, and it worked great.
The point is that a $101 certificate for the smoke from $100 in burnt five dollar bills isn't worth $101. Or $100. Or $5. Or $0.01.
You can declare by fiat that as a proof of effort, the smoke certificate is worth something. You can try to convince people that certificates representing smoke function as a medium of exchange. But as a medium of exchange, it must reside on a continuum with all the other media of exchange, ranked by the certitude that it will in the long run be convertible to other media. And in that ranking, "smoke from burnt dollar bills" fares poorly.

I still do not understand. Bitcoin's value is not based on making smokes.