skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> To nitpick the minor technical details in the book is to completely miss the point.

Which is why the criticism of those details appeared in the section of the podcast that Siracusa labelled as "minor nitpicks that didn't make the book necessarily bad, but which Siracusa was going to point out because this podcast is, after all, called Hypercritical".

The main thesis of the podcast is that the biography is bad because it's so facile.

You write:

> The real value and insight that the book provides is the access to Jobs during the last years of his life, as well as the people who played important roles in Apple's resurgence during the last 10 years.

But I disagree. It doesn't actually provide much of any value or insight, and does almost nothing with its access to Jobs.

Siracusa picks out a couple of the many good examples of where it completely just glosses over an interesting story that could have been combined with the unprecedented access to Jobs to develop some real insights.

One is the whole arc of Apple being involved in the founding of ARM, starting a mobile initiative with the Newton, divesting their shares of ARM, and eventually relying heavily on them in their new mobile technologies. What does Jobs think of this arc? Was the divestiture of their investment in ARM a mistake, looking back?

This book sure as hell doesn't know, because none of this even occurred to Isaacson. He merely writes that "Apple uses ARM chips in their mobile devices".

Isaacson writes of Apple "buying PA Semi and using them to build the A4 chips". Facile overview fluff. They bought them years prior to the mobile stuff. Why were they purchased? Was there a plan to roll their own PPC chips when they first bought them? How did the transition to Intel impact their role in the company, and what expertise are they bringing to mobile? Unexplored.

"Antennagate". Isaacson gives it a one sentence "engineers were worried that the housing might interfere with antenna operations". He doesn't use his access to Jobs to dig into the story. Why was the decision made to go ahead with it? What was Jobs thinking in the run up to the press conference? How did they decide to take the tone they did in dealing with the issue?

Isaacson doesn't dig into this because Isaacson doesn't dig into anything. He just lays out facile overviews of events that could have been gleaned from any publicly available tech coverage. He completely squanders the unique position he was in with respect to unprecedented access to Apple and Jobs.
Hmm, that is interesting. I'm surprised that ARIN has that much available at this point.
I don't think he is completely wrong but I think this is just another (higher-end) instance of the age-old tradition of companies saying it is too difficult to find engineers while being unwilling to pay fair value for said engineers.

To be clear, I know that Facebook does pay quite well by industry standards (offset somewhat by the bay area cost of living) for top talent, but if this situation is causing them an issue then what they are paying (or offering in general -- money isn't always the only thing) still isn't enough.
Startups are akin to an MBA.

Running a small but ambitious company forces a serious, motivated founder to think about every business function. I don't see any meaningful downside for the founders who choose to spend some time on this task, and I see a lot of upside.

Parker's complaints strike me as absurd. If he really believes they can have more impact at FaceBook, he should find a way to create special purpose vehicles within FB that allow founders to get equity in the work of a small team, rather than just getting .00005% of the sum of FaceBook.
The Apple System Log – Part 1
FIB sizes in core routers (operated at great expense by people you do not pay) are not an artificial scarcity.
This article is trying to figure out the solution to a problem that was solved over a decade ago. See: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Science majors change their minds once they find out that they will be required to take challenging courses, yes, but it is not this challenge, in and of itself, that causes them to "change their minds". It is that people who are smart enough to be in a position to take these courses, people who the article talks about as having great scores on the SAT etc, people like these are also smart enough to do a quick ROI calculation and realize that a comparatively easier (don't take this as a rip on people with these degrees, many of them are my friends, are very, very smart, and have made this very decision themselves) degree in econ, business, or law will yield vastly greater material dividends.

If you want people to stop changing their minds about science, you have to do something to change the ROI calculation that goes "I can work 2x as hard as my peers, graduate and receive 1/2 the monetary compensation or I can....not do that".
Supergiant Games talks about the production of Bastion
Parsing NTFS INDX Files with Python
LivingSocial Launches Test of New Food Delivery Features
Five Steps to Incident Management in a Virtualized Environment
>Sometimes because of unfinished work (but, hey, I was exploring something difficult!)

This reminded me of a passage from Cryptonomicon which has previously been quoted on HN:

"They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?

Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier-Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?

Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.

Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else."

Re-re-quoted here for convenience, though the original davidw comment with quote can be found here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866629
Windows Memory Acquisition with DumpIt
Enterprise programming would have been a LOT more fun if I'd been allowed to use filter/map/reduce directly, instead of writing thousands of lines of C++.

In the end, I just resigned to go and do iPhone software for a while. I suspect any one person only has a certain amount of programming in them, and you don't want to waste it.
Breakthrough could improve battery capacity and charge time by 10
Sniffing Passwords Over a Wifi Connection
Types define the encoding for some pure mathematical thing, and they define the set of things that can be done to objects in that encoding. Something is the same type as something else iff they share representation and a particular set of operations. There are ideal types, and there are practical types.

UTF-8 and Unicode are great examples of a practical type. Null-terminated UTF-8 is a type, but unicode is an alphabet of characters in the abstract. The type called "UTF-8 string" has certain permitted operations, and a particular representation in machines.

Another good example is the set of all integers modulo 2^x, and the type consisting of unsigned x-bit binary integers for x86-style processors. The x86 add operation is permitted only on the later, which makes it a distinct type from, say, the PPC integer type. (so does endianness, but that's encoding, not the op)

Ideal types are things like sets, trees, lists, and so on. Their encoding is such that all everything is possible. Look at any functional language. These things are in math, although often less formally defined. The only problem with ideal types is that bottom is a member, which is a problem for some operations permitted on said ideal type.

To put this all another way, types convey something terribly important: What is this thing, and what operations can I do with it. In math, we tend to hand-wave both of these things away, and instead rely on human intuition to determine what something is (set, integer, field, vector, etc.) and what we can do with it (intersect, add, integrate, rotate, etc.) But if you look hard, you'll see types in math. Vectors are bold, fields have arrows, integers have an initial assignment, sets are capital letters, and so on. A human must do type analysis to figure out of an operation or encoding is conforming.
Great question, guimarin.

Actually, most of the value we provide to our customers has less to do with trying to second-guess the algorithm and instead help them optimize their content according to well-known best practices (recommended by Google, etc.) for very large numbers of pages and keywords. That is, there isn't any magic involved -- it's about making sure that your content is unique, high quality and relevant to your customers.

Regarding free tools like Blekko, etc., this industry has always had free tools and yet our business has grown dramatically over the last 12 months. Larger companies have needs that free tools have never been very good at fulfilling. That's why we built Ginzametrics.
As am I, unfortunately. Still, a presidential veto, however unlikely, still seams more realistic than the bill being defeated in congress.
Engineering Fun at Scribd: Remote-Controlled Skeleton Car
Heroku's Python Build Pack
Not just material-wise, but also in terms of competitiveness
I agree with this 100%--debit cards and check cards are a bad deal for consumers, compared to credit cards, and I only use mine at an ATM I trust.

I want to make this comment just so people reading these posts aren't confused--charge cards, which I talk about in the above post, aren't the same as debit cards; charge cards are much closer to a credit card that you have to pay every month. These are a great option for people who want to avoid revolving credit and can afford the annual fee most of them charge (but they come with perks). Anyway the charge card demonstrates it's possible to do easy electronic payments, in a way safe for consumers, without tying them to credit.
I did a double take when reading this line...

"The only fee would be if someone paid you. We take a quarter. We really want that quarter. It's all we want!"

He should probably say "25 cents" instead of "a quarter".
For reasons unknown to me, the local property oligopoly accepts debit/credit rent payments only through an outsourced web service which charges $50 per payment. Perhaps they've convinced the property owners that they have a patent on paying rent online or something. Maybe there's some sort of risk involved. Maybe there's some sort of arrangement with credit card companies to discourage people from earning reward points on their rent every month.

My bank's website doesn't list the company as one that it knows how to pay bills for, and wants you to send them a copy of the physical bill to get it added (there are no "bills" for the rent, so nothing to send). A direct transfer might be possible, but they don't seem to be advertising their account number.
Yes, THANK YOU! I find myself doing that as well. I don't understand why that is seen as an improvement.

Also, I always used the + to mean "the following word or quote surrounded string HAS to appear in the result text".

That seems different than quotes meaning "use this text exactly as i typed it".
Tecnolog�a RFID
> In languages with Hindley Milley type inference ...

Small correction, it's actually "Hindley-Milner type inference".
Nice work Ray, things have really taken off since we got lunch! I take it you decided to stay down in the bay area :)
I always used the + to mean "the following word or quote surrounded string HAS to appear in the result text".

Was this incorrect?
10 Minutes to Hiring the Perfect Candiate: Use Functional Job Description
Wall of text... could you try adding paragraph breaks?
A rising star in the Apple constellation
The Vaio X has been discontinued. The nearest equivalent to the MBA 13" I'm contemplating is the Vaio Z, at a cost of nearly $1000 more.

Apple products have always been derided as "under-speced and over-priced", yet customers keep voting with their wallets to the contrary. Knowing first-hand how those Vaios tend to blow their superior specs in the oddest ways, I'll take the Air.
There's a certain type of personality (very prevalent in the valley) who won't work for a big company like facebook, twitter, or google for any amount of money. I would imagine these types of people make up the majority of the YC class.

Maybe they'll get bought via a talent acquisition but as soon as their golden handcuffs are off, they are out doing their own thing again. The reason they allow themselves to get bought via talent acquisition is to be able to easily raise money in the future.

I think Sean Parker is reacting to these types of people. I think the misconception is that the increased funding sources is what is driving these people. I would suggest that they were always there, but 5 years ago they were just living poor and working their ass off to build a startup (usually unsuccessfully).

I do believe I'm part of this group. There's no amount of money that would compel me to take a corporate job. Sometimes money isn't what matters.
Addicted Gamers May Have Physiological Differences In The Brain
I think the issue is the stigma; when one fails out of Calculus and the alternatives are taking College Algebra or switching majors, the stigma has the influence of shifting preference to a different major.

My first degree was History. I went back for engineering and failed Vector Calc and Electro-Mag both twice before finally understanding the material and getting an A in each. I was 30 when I took those, and was too proud to take the remedial.
This sounds like it has potential, although I can't test it yet. You should try searching Google for information on COM programming. Try finding information on "COM Events", for example. Good luck. Macy's is on the the first page! Bing is not any better.
From what I remember GCSE ICT is a complete waste of time.
All we learned was how to add clipart to a MS Word Document and how to use some weird proprietary non relational database system. We also had to know something about the data protection act (I think , it was such a waste of time I never bothered to goto the exam).

If you want to do university Comp Sci you will not need this qualification at all, just skip the classes and concentrate on maths , science and english.

If you just want an "intro to using computers" course, there is better stuff on youtube.

Of course it could have improved since my day but this article doesn't make it sound like it has.
USB Cables
With the exception of the single number-bubble, iOS icons don't include dynamic information on them, and therefore aren't regularly changing in appearance.

The icon to run the photo viewer in WP7 appears to consist entirely of a thumbnail of an image from your photo album. That means that every time you take a new photo, the image changes.

Your contact list application itself contains a grid of thumbnails of contact photos, which is a superfluous feature, and may cause a lot of confusion if other applications also contain a grid of content thumbnails.

Pushing information onto tiles is itself one of the key usability problems with WP7. The controls that you interact with to invoke functions should not do double-duty as general-purpose info delivery systems. Apple gets this right; the ability of controls to convey information is limited to conveying state information that indicates whether/when you need to interact with the control itself, and the shape, placement, coloring, and imagery of the control don't change for trivial reasons.

I understand the visual appeal of the Metro UI, but ultimately, this is supposed to be a functional user interface, not a Mondrian print.
Except that the other half, the less know, was lazy and shallow.
AMD releases Catalyst 11.11 and CAP 1 for Radeon GPUs
I just priced out the closest Vaio Z to the Air I'm contemplating - near $1000 more for the Z.
Thanks. Fixxed the typo.
Stolen Government Certificate Used to Sign Malware
OpenSUSE Linux 12.1 is Almost Here
Currently Google offers me the ability to change the background image on the Google home page.

How about the ability to use something like Google "classic" with the old way of using the + sign?

Hide it as an off-home page selection, that way only people who really want it will choose it.

I'd also be interested in something similar for an "advanced search syntax" mode. Probably not very useful for the majority of people, but could be something a minority might be very passionate about.
My guess is that this phenomenon has something to do with boredom (as mentioned in the article). I have never studied IQ, but when I reflect on the IQ tests that I take I realize that a big part of my problem solving process involves rapidly imagining potential solutions and mentally "testing" them to see if they make sense.

Does anyone know what this type of thinking is called?

Anyways, that's how I think when I'm trying to solve a puzzle. I notice that the hard part is not in testing my imagined hypotheses, but in hypothesis generation. Where am I going with this? Imagination. I've noticed that my ability to rapidly imagine different scenarios is a key part of my ability to solve difficult problems. There are other components, like working memory, logic, etc, but imagination plays a big role. At least for me.

If what is true for me is true in general it could mean that people who are more inclined to imagine complex alternative worlds in their heads are also more likely to enjoy the "out of the ordinary" mental states provided by drugs and alcohol.
Nvidia's ARM chips power supercomputer
Thanks! We did end up staying down here as it was easier to run the business from SV. Hope you're doing well!
I disagree. They kept just about all of NeXTSTEP, apart from the UI (but keeping browsers in the Finder, etc) and Display Postscript.

They kept the Mach stuff. They kept the Unix stuff. They kept Terminal.app so you could access the Unix stuff. They kept the Cocoa frameworks, Project Builder, and Interface Builder. They retained applications as file packages. They retained file extensions in favor of app/creator codes. They replaced interpreted DPS with Quartz. They changed the menu bar from floating tear-offs to a single menubar. They got rid of the Shelf on Finder windows.

What did they not use from NeXTSTEP/OpenStep that was of any significance? About all I can think of is YellowBox on Windows.
This made me smile. Thanks!
> Why do the avenue lines meet at an antipode? In Manhattan, they are parallel, they don't converge.

Sure they do. Manhattan isn't a plane; it's a region on the surface of a sphere. From Wikipedia[1], "In the spherical plane, all geodesics are great circles. ...all great circles intersect each other."

Clearly, it's the non-intersecting streets that are at fault here. They should intersect, but don't.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_(geometry)#Spherical
They had no real GUI in the 70ies, it was a terminal with mouse control. The GUI comes at the end of the 70ies, beginning 80ies and the guys from Apple came over, at that time, to see the concepts and prototyps.

From there, they started their own GUI metaphor.

I like the part in the video, when the guy inserts this big magnetic storage :D

As for Apple, the kernel is open source, but the whole Cocoa layer is closed. As for Android everything must be open, apart from the Google applications. Or not?
OS X is technically correct, but it's 202M hits on Google for OS X vs 82M for OSX. As far as I'm concerned both are widely used by technical and non-technical people and mean the same thing. It's a tiny mistake that could be fixed in one second, why are we even mentioning it in the context of Isaacson allegedly blewing the biography?
If you want to be optimistic you could carry a /8 on your books at ~$150M. That's a drop in the bucket for most companies that hold /8s, so it's probably not worth arguing about.

The legacy class As were given out by Jon Postel just for asking; if you would ever need more than 256 subnets then a class B wouldn't be big enough so you got a class A.
The Workings of AUTH CRAM-MD5
NASA Planetary Science Program Faces Uncertain Future
Apple names Arthur Levinson as chairman of the board, Bob Iger joins
Researchers Publish New Attack on XML Encryption
From experience...it also helps to have some patient programmer friends around to help (I'm one of the developers that helped Nathan build the app). :)
Gruber blew it. This is a bunch of nonsense.
Supermoms web series to feature Clorox.. is this the next Old Spice?
Parker suggests that one reason it will end badly is
because the Internet industry will ultimately consolidate
just like the PC industry did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Why? Why does the future have to be like the past? As rich and well connected Sean Parker is, he cannot predict the future. Coincidently given his stature it makes him probably the least qualified to predict what will ultimately happen in the computing industry.

There is no reason the computing industry cannot be more flat than it has in the past. I believe it is highly likely the industry will continue to fragment. Android, IOS, Windows7, BBX... there will be more platforms in the future, not less. More diversification, not less. The game has changed forever, as it should.
Dear YouTube, please add the video voting feature from this Mozilla demo
Show HN: Single property website tool (Beta)
Your strawman argument here against everyone in the world besides you is almost adorable.
Nah, the real problem is just that other degrees, MBA, Law, etc, are just plain easier AND result in higher social status plus frequently more money.

Maybe in-demand engineers make more than the average lawyer, not sure about that. Maybe an MBA isn't really that much easier? But I'd say higher social status, especially in the USA holds true.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/g2pgc/some_jerk_s...

It is a long thread so just search for "nathanbarry" or "onevoice"