skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They didn't do it to aid hobbyists or hackers per se. It was just standard practice at the time. Televisions, radio receivers, amplifiers, washing machines -- almost everything came with schematics.

Also, at the time, IBM did not consider the PC a "serious" business - they just did the minimum possible to not lose out on a possible new market. The original PC (PC-g) and even the PC-XT were basically not much more than Intel's reference 8086 / 8088 design with not a lot of modifications -- I don't think anyone at the time (1982) thought there was much IP there anyway.
Severance packages are often quite generous too. :-)

But the important point is that it's not about blaming people for things they can't be expected to control. Firing incompetent executives is, as the article pointed out, hopefully rare. But if they can't meet performance goals they should still be let go: if a company was in this position with regard to firing their employees, I'd be equally concerned if they were disparaging.
Apple's going to be fine.

One half of Apple is execution. I believe that Jobs has infused the company with a culture based on his favored principles, and it's reasonable to think this culture is sticky.

The other half of Apple is big strategic decisions. Do the iPod. Do the iPhone. Do the iPad. I don't know anyone else with a track record like that. I don't know that it's trainable. Until the next smash product line that's not from his lips to Apple's ears, I don't know that Apple is going to be fine.
Every farewell is an opportunity for a new hello.
James Lindenbaum of Heroku used a similar metaphor to describe their development philosophy in this excellent talk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BhDLm9jo5Y

Use a Machete, not a Swiss army knife.
Update on WebOS Death Watch
The fat lady may have sung...
Anyone use Jive's product at work and care to comment?
Apple boss Steve Jobs to be replaced by Tim Cook
There's nothing wrong with "they" as third person singular.
Many of us on HN aspire to the success that Steve's had. We'd love to be him, to build something amazing like Apple. But I bet he'd give anything to have the good health and indeterminate life expectancy that we have tonight. I'll go to sleep thinking how lucky i am. And I'm going for a run tomorrow, because all the success in the world is for nowt if you lose your health.
NYC's Bloomberg wants traffic cameras 'on every corner'
From the WSJ on Tim Cook: "people who know him don't consider him to be a visionary". I'd be shocked to hear that Jobs hasn't been grooming his replacement. Cook can keep Apple running for another couple of years, and I expect to see someone else come up as CEO from within the ranks who shares Steve's vision and ability to focus on what makes Apple successful.
NASA Developing Laser Communication System For Mars & More
Very interesting. One point on firing senior executives - in many cases it's the first time the executive ever failed. Silicon Valley is perhaps the only exception, but this is precisely because exits are handled well. Being good at separations increases a company's ability to take risks on hiring.
Never thought I could be so saddened by a Big Corp. CEO's resignation.
Not me, I was convinced jony I've was the man for the job.
Considering where Apple is today, especially in context of its epic journey across the past fifteen years, it almost seems like this would have been time regardless of any concerns about Steve's health. He helmed a company that started one revolution through several more, an eclipsing second act largely unlike anything else in the history of business. You need a one-in-a-million CEO to do that.

Apple doesn't need that where it is now. Its struggles are just memories today. It still needs an incredibly smart CEO that can keep the company on the right path, which it has in Tim Cook, but the era in which Jobs was critical as CEO is over. Whether he's chairman of the board or executive visionary-in-residence, it'll be a more appropriate position for Apple's founder in this new decade.

This doesn't mark the end of Apple's ascendancy, just the very end of the turnaround. The dawn is over. This is Apple greeting the day.
Maybe I've missed it but nobody has mentioned that SO allows posts to be in a community wiki format. Doesn't this reach a nice balance between the two?
I think health is the only reason that would force Steve Jobs to quit, he likes what he's doing.

Being a Chairman of the board is a message to stockholders: "Don't panic, I'm still available", if he stepped down without an orderly transition Apple stock would probably really take a beating.

The chairman of the board is fairly invisible from a public point of view.
True. To be honest, I know of that part of Apple's history from what I've read years after the facts. I still have the impression that, though it wasn't going great when he left, his leaving accelerated the descent.

But my main point is that I feel that it was an important lesson for Steve Jobs. In the 80s, he had picked an experienced CEO that didn't know anything about Apple. The current team is all about Apple and I would think Steve Jobs learned that it's more beneficial to groom internal people to take the helm.
Steve Jobs' Best Quotes
Apple just lost their greatest salesman. Luckily their products are so nice they go along way to selling themselves.
Nice one centurion. Like it. Like it.
It's unfortunate but I don't think there can be any other reason. It takes a lot to leave behind one of the most important things you've done in your life.
> The other half of Apple is big strategic decisions. Do the iPod. Do the iPhone. Do the iPad.

It's interesting, though, because to hear Apple's brass tell it, the crucial decisions haven't been "do this" so much as they have been "don't do this, don't do that."

Apple is huge on focus, and they credit that focus with their success more than anything else. Focus seems to be baked into their culture as much as anything else at this point.

A mark of a good leader is being able to build a team that can function even when that leader is absent. So far, Steve Jobs has, for all his eccentricities, succeeded in every other measure of leadership – to an exceptional degree. I'd be pretty shocked if his talents couldn't include the final part of the equation.
I'm sure Apple will be around for some time to come. However, I fear they may lose that edge in creating disruptive innovations and become a company (albeit still a profitable one) of sustaining innovations.

History has seemed to show indicate that it takes quite a bold leader, or leadership team, to make the tough trade-offs and take the seemingly insane risks to create disruptions in an industry.

Tim Cook seems capable enough of running Apple. But will he continue the tradition of risky bets that Jobs' has made? And does he have the capability of coming up with such visions - or fostering a corporate culture of doing so?

I'm not entirely sure. But I hope I'm wrong.
This is really sad. I'm just glad he got to enjoy the glory of seeing a company he started in his parent's garage become - if only for a moment - the most valuable enterprise on Earth.

I mean wow, what a ride.
Sad day. He will be missed. I wish -- and hope -- he will get better.
Compiling to λ-calculus
I really, and I mean REALLY, hope that his biography coming out on November 21 this year and his resignation today have nothing to do with his health.

In any way, thank you very much Steve, I guess you can leave your company quite happy and satisfied. :)
Teens and mobile phones
The great thing about Apple is that it doen't create disruptive products, but invents new markets altogether.
It's not like everyone but Steve has been yearning to make cheap, crappy knock-off versions of their own products. He's surrounded himself with a team that matches his 'vision'. I don't expect a lot of change.
Apple Names Tim Cook CEO, Steve Jobs as Chairman
This is really sad, but with his official biography set to be released, and now this, the writing is on the wall. I certainly hope he recovers, though.
Interestingly, he still seems interested in serving on the board of directors. This would make me think he is just tired of being CEO and it this play doesn't have to do with his health.
I guess Ben has a thing for lyrics from rappers about N*&$!s

On another note, is it a bad idea to have a successor lined up (or at least prepped) prior to the firing?
He took Apple from nearly bankruptcy to become one of the biggest, if not the biggest company in the world.
He never stopped changing the world, but best of all, he retired on his own terms.
I think you've hit on one of the key leadership traits of Jobs right there - the ability to say, "don't do this, don't do that." Especially when there are entire industries that may be urging him to do something against his vision.
Jobs is an era himself, the moment he leaves Apple defines the end of that era, no matter if the years coming turn out to be better for the company.
Steve Jobs: The End of an Era
"The other half of Apple is big strategic decisions. Do the iPod. Do the iPhone. Do the iPad."

True... add saying 'no' to that when it's too early... Don't ship a phone yet. Don't ship a tablet computer yet. Steve knows when to say no. I'm sure they could have shipped some kind of phone years earlier and some kind of tablet years earlier and there were probably people inside Apple who were cursing him for waiting at the time. Kudos to Jobs for waiting until the exactly the right time and until the right feature set and performance characteristics were viable.
Where does one "move up" to at Google?
Brightcove files $50M IPO offering investors rare “pure play” in online video
It would have been nice if Google would have taken the time to write detailed and correct documentation for Android, but unfortunately it is a rather incomplete and buggy mess right now. I've found myself hitting crashes and freezes that were a direct result of mismatches between the doc and the actual behavior of the code. One of these hits infrequently or only hit on some devices, which makes it insanely hard to debug. I filed a bug report, but apparently no-one at Google ever reads them, let alone triage them. I guess that's what they meant by being more like a startup?

Stack Overflow is nice as a community effort, but if a company wants developers to adopt their platform, proper documentation written by the people who know the code is essential. Hire some monkeys if you must, but leaving it up to the community to write their own docs is just plain lazy.
He's actually been on a leave of absence so he could focus on his health. This is after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (whose 5 year survival rate is sub-20%-- 6% if you count all stages). And toss a liver transplant on top of all of that.

Of course it's about his health.
He mentions on his blog that he's a photographer, so it's likely they are his photos.

Also, it's always the same woman in his photos--I'm betting it's his wife. :)
Hm...but the salesman was able to do his job year after year only because of the awesome products. Rule #1 of marketing: Start with a gread product.
Thus, mathematics unexpectedly turns into a Choose Your Own Adventure novel!
s/Possible//
Edison personally created the majority of his inventions.

Citation needed.

From what I know of Edison he was skilled at teamwork, business and PR. Which would make him more like Jobs.
Hey guys, happy to take any questions you have about the framework, either here or in IRC. We're on freenode in #batmanjs
My wife is a physician, so let me chime in. It's not so much a hazing ritual but a very carefully constructed mentorship program. It's intense, and in some cases maybe overly so, but the goal is to immerse them into the environment, and to provide a lot of experience, while being carefully supervised by more experienced doctors. After three years of this, you come out really knowing you stuff.

In software, we don't really have structured learning like this, which is unfortunate. Something that would be great to have to really make us into a true profession.
If your company ever tries this, please try harder so word gets out that it causes your developers to try harder, so I will get 20% time as well.
especially when they block competition via court orders..
Apple under Steve Jobs: numbers and the impact
This is really sad. His health is failing or he won't resign. It's an end of an era. :(
You are pretty much saying "Well the earth has gravity, so gravity must apply here." No, trademark has nothing to do with this.

If anything, right of first sale (remember GameStop buys games in bulk from publishers) protects them.
Another form of advertising that I didn't know existed until today. I'm sure that it will be everywhere in about 5 minutes, and there does already seem to be more than a few companies doing this sort of thing (so clearly money is being made!): http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=capt...
Hey - I like your approach. Its a sort of "for dummies" illustration of the indeterminate nature of 0^0 that everyone can understand.
France's richest say: Tax us more (Following Warren Buffet's suit)
I would add do Unix (OSX).
yet I do think they are fine, for a few years at least. The new stuff is flying off the shelf, and they simply need to execute now.
One thing I admire McDonald's is its willingness to train its workers. One of my colleague's teenage daughter worked for McD's when she was in high school, and later worked for another fast food joint and she was able to identify many operational inefficiencies.

Another thing is McDonald's never got stuck in the idea that its core brand is about burgers, or expanding its menu is bad mantra.

The McHappy meals for example, guaranteed regular clientelle because of its collectibles. But the parents didn't want burgers. So the business altered its menu to keep the parents happy.

In contrast, Burger King's menu has remained static.
> Also, mathematicians agree in this, seriously. Go and ask one.

Mathematician here; we do not. See http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/11150/zero-to-zero-p....

More precisely, as Arturo Magidin points out at http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/11150/zero-to-zero-p..., if we view exponentiation in the 'discrete setting', then $0^0$ must be $1$; whereas, if we view it in the continuous setting, there is simply no good answer—unlike $e^{i\pi}$, which also lives in the continuous setting, but has a perfectly good, unambiguous answer. (lotharbot gives a nice explanation below of the ways that this is consistent with existing mathematics; but it can also be derived from the definition of the exponential function, with no further arbitrary conventions needed.)
No one really 'beats' pancreatic cancer.

http://www.pancreatic.org/site/c.htJYJ8MPIwE/b.891917/k.5123...
Scott Meyers, Andrei Alexandrescu and Herb Sutter: C++ and Beyond
The showman, the leader, the visionary. Get well soon, Steve. We will miss you.
I think there's a bit of contradiction in all of the hand-wringing about whether or not Apple needs Steve to survive. Given that his health has been in question for several years, and speculation about what will happen if he has to leave, and given that he is a visionary, masterful auteur who guides Apple's strategy so successfully, don't we trust him to have accounted for all of this and developed a succession plan that continues Apple's success?

If there was really a dearth of innovators, of executors, of strategists at Apple when he leaves, wouldn't he have worked to solve that problem? Great CEOs are hirers and developers of great talent. I suspect Jobs has done as good of a job setting up what happens after today as he has everything else.
Agree. Look at how Microsoft performed while Bill Gates was CEO, and after. Although I don't rate Bill G as nearly as much of a visionary as Steve, leadership and vision of technical companies matter.
That one was actually a pretty easy call.

NeXT was bought because Apple had fucked the dog on their next-generation operating system strategy. NeXTStep gave them a solid new platform upon which to build Mac OS, and the rest is history.
hey Nick,

Great to see it released! One thing I always find helpful is a comparison/discussion of where it fits with others in this realm.

congrats,
Jack
> should we be surprised that Apple are using that which the law allows them

Yes. Your argument seems to be that we should expect companies to behave exactly as badly as the law can possibly let them do so and that they should receive no reproach for doing that. If you use this argument then you are implying that the law should enforce good behavior in every single thing every company does, since there is no other force to make them do good things (remember, you just argued that nobody should complain about what Apple does because it is legal).

Clearly the above is ridiculous and the whole premise of "free" societies is that people and companies are granted wide freedom to do things and the law only regulates the most severe of these and that people will motivate good behavior by each other and companies by shaming them and judging them and refusing to deal with them when they behave poorly.

So yes - when Apple behaves badly they need to feel judgement from the community and this is how it happens. The company does something bad (suing over a frivolous feature to block an entire competitor's product), and we express surprise and shock that it did such a bad thing.
Making tomorrow a buying opportunity.
Mathematica says "Indeterminate" =)
It was bad form to just post a link without any background...

There is a well-known usability bug in Win7 explorer that the engineers are aware of but don't seem to care about.

Bug report: http://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsServerFeedback/feedback/...

More discussion: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-f...

I'm irritated because it seems the only attention given to Win7 is critical/security fixes, while any non-critical bugs will be ignored and the answer will be to simply buy the next version of Windows if you want the problem to go away. IMO a lack of attention to detail and caring about your users.
Well, his health is probably forcing him, so it might not be his own terms, but what he accomplished is still the benchmark for anyone else.
Butler Lampson's "Hints for Computer System Design" (1983) is a classic paper with some great anecdotes:

https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/blampson/33-H...
You do recall what happened to Apple the last time Jobs left?

I think Apple will be fine, but those doubting do have a valid case to make.
And one more thing… iQuit
Why do you suspect another such person exists? I mean, I don't even like Apple but I have to admit replacements for Jobs don't exactly grow on trees. If they did, Apple would have some real competition in their spaces instead of rolling over the other guys as they have been for the past 5 years.

If there were another Steve Jobs working at Apple he'd have quit a long time ago to do his own thing.
The lessons of code 42: software innovator matthew dornquast's tech-biz wisdom
Google is destroying your memory
P2P Alarm Clock
Yes and yes: 31 Things I've Learned in 31 Years
> it helps to have an understanding of the mechanics

My claim is the exact opposite. I claim you don't need to understand the mechanics ( just blindly abide by the rules of the group or abelian group or finite simple group or whatever), which is why the approach is better. If you show a monkey red means stop and green means go and reinforce these rules by rewarding with a banana, eventually the monkey will stop when he sees the red. Not because he understands the mechanics of traffic management. Simply because he is abiding by the rules. Similarly, large portions of math can be approached by either the definitional route ( ie. rules ie. define propositions & theorems that logically follow if those props held ) or via trying to understand actual mechanics by mapping everything to real world phenomena ( x = distance, dx/dt = velocity, d/dt(dx/dt) = acceleration etc. ) which are problematic because the mapping breaks down due to the nature of physical reality ( like friction etc. )

How would one explain say Hilbert's 7th problem via the actual mechanics ?

If a is algebraic and b is irrational show a^b is transcendental.

What does that even mean when you map them to the real world ? Instead, the solution is to build upon theorems that logically follow from the axioms you start out with.
Problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_seventh_problem
Solution:
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/hilberts-seventh-pr...
Jobs Expected to Remain Closely Involved in Apple's Product Strategy
but not all languages ;)
Bloomberg west is already 40 minutes over time discussing Jobs' departure. Given the current market position of Apple, this comes at a bad time for the US economy in general i guess.
This is a great opportunity for Scientific American to release a few old back issues in digital form. A HTML version of the article in question is available, but it would be nice to see in the original format. The issues are sadly out of print when I visit the links.
Cross site poll: What do you think will happen to Apple now that Steve Jobs has resigned?
http://www.wepolls.com/p/2073012
Admittedly there's some asymmetry there. A better way to say this is that it would be easy for Asian companies to conclude that there's no incentive for them to develop original IP because they're just going to get crushed in the IP courts in the West anyway.
Steve Jobs is leaving at a good time. Apple is the best company in the world. I hope he has his health and can enjoy being with his family and taking a backseat role with Apple.

Enjoy the ride Steve. Thanks for being such an inspiration.
> Also, mathematicians agree in this, seriously. Go and ask one.

As an erstwhile mathematician, I don't know of anyone who would suggest that -e^(i pi) is defined as 1. It falls out, rather elegantly, from the definitions of the constants involved.
It's an amusing way to put this, but yes, it's true. An example of such situation is the case of continuum hypothesis. Both it and its negation has been proven not to lead to contradiction, so while most mathematicians ignore it, effectively treating it as being true, many set and model theorists play with things like Martin's axiom, which makes sense only if continuum hypothesis is false.
PLEASE:

body{
color: #000000;
}

Thankkk you!

Other than that, looks cool! Definitely will be trying it out in my projects and reporting back!
It's always tough when the former CEO is chairman of the board. Has the feeling that daddy is looking over your shoulders...
I'd like to see some examples in JavaScript, instead of CoffeeScript. Since at this point only a smaller subset of developers use CoffeeScript, I think it might be overall useful to more people if the provided examples used plain JavaScript (that, and CoffeeScript developers tend to understand JavaScript already, and may already be used to converting one to the other).
The WSJ comment community is horrible. It seems to be made of up of unemployed Gordon Gekko wannabes, without the smarts.
Oh, I'm sure there's plenty of room for Steam competition.

The point is, I've never met, or even heard of, a GameStop fan. Maybe they can do it, maybe they can be the go to solution for online distribution. I just doubt it. They try a lot harder to get their hand in your wallet than they try to give you a fun gaming experience.

It's hard not to hear about valve promotions from non-valve people(sorry to harp on steam). I've never had that experience with GS, and i think it's because they make people uncomfortable.

my comment's peer's discussion of gamefly is exactly what i mean. high regard for GS just seems ... really really rare.