skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read the other comments here and found them lacking significantly. It seems that many folks did not actually listen to the full podcast (available here: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42).

Personally, I am usually extremely skeptical of Gruber and about as far from an "Apple fanboy" as you can get. I also approached the show very skeptically. However, the critique in the podcast was very good. The technical and factual errors and the shallowness and the retelling are all things that many others have pointed out and they are all good points. But the critique makes a bigger point:

Namely, that Isaacson did not do his job of actually giving us important new insights into what and how Steve Jobs "ticked." There are some great examples of that point towards the end of the podcast. For instance, the point about the ad hominum fallacy is fantastic and I really wish Steve was called on that and we had a deeper understanding of what he really thought. Or the various examples of Apple building its strategy from the ground up rather than the image that the media likes to paint of Steve Jobs as the all-knowing ship captain who knows and foresees everything.

It's all too bad because I think we as a society and of course Silicon Valley in particular could have benefited tremendously from a deeper exploration of Steve Jobs.
Also the cache link has been sadly moved in that panel.
I read it that they are looking for jet experience specifically. Doubt that propeller machine experience is a substitute. Good luck though, I hope you make it into the interview round!
Programming Motherfucker new design
So, Photoshop for linux? Mac dev tools? What apps?
Word stemming is often desirable. I wish it were possible to turn on just that, and only for certain words.
Machines becoming more human-savvy is a slow and difficult process.

And people are generally impatient. They want things to work. Sooner rather than later. They want immediate results.

Whereas if someone has the interest, I can teach them a few tricks and make them incrementally more "tech-savvy" in a few minutes. They will see the results immediately.

The more "technical" life becomes, the more it stands to reason that more people will have an interest in becoming at least a little more "tech-savvy".

We know where Google stands on this.

Let's see what happens.
http://www.nida.nih.gov/infofacts/heroin.html about 23% of users become dependent. Alcohol has 15% addiction rate, I believe.

Heroin (diacetylmorphine) is merely a cheap and potent painkiller, cheaper than other popular ones like oxycodone. It's used in UK to treat severe pain. It's not the strongest one out there (fentanyl is stronger), nor will it make you addicted instantly.

You will probably get addicted if you have easy access and some recurrent pain issues: psychological or physical. A lot of people start off with prescription pharma, and then as their prescription or money runs out, they are forced to use cheaper street alternatives like h.

Others just like to nod once in a while, and only a small part, I believe, makes heroin their ultimate priority enough, willing to kill their own grandmother for a fix. Unfortunately, those junkies are also the most vocal and noticeable ones.

I mean, heroin is not entirely safe and it's very pleasant and it can be addictive just because it's so fucking nice. But I think a lot of people use the idiotic societal stereotypes to justify their own lack of maturity to handle detox, and right now, with the plethora of unaddictive painkillers, rehab, methadone, suboxone, support groups, antidepressants detoxing is easier than ever.
It is a biography. Not a special book dedicated to helping create Steve Jobs clones. Biography by definition is an account of someone's life written by someone else. So that means it has to include Jobs' relationships along side other things.

And you are asking for too much in the rest of your comment - give me a break. Has anyone ever succeeded in duplicating someone great by copying what the person originally did? Isn't it all about originality, opportunity, luck and other intangible stuff? If I were to ask why did Einstein "get" theory of relativity and not someone else - what would be the answer to that kind of question? How would you even begin to answer it? It's ridiculous - no offense though.

And I guess you forgot that Jobs emphasized "intuition" over rationalism several times in the book. Are you now going to ask Isaacson missed asking him "how to have intuition" or "how to be at the right place at the right time"?

You aren't going to get those sort of answers - if you did, and if that sort of thing was actually useful, everyone would be Steve Jobs and everyone could be Einstein. Life and achievements are not imitable as much as you would like to think so.

For a biography the book does a decent job - if you are asking for something entirely different from a biography it's hardly the author's fault.
I had to use them at one point. Never again!
It is pedantic to assume that history will repeat itself no matter what in every possible industry!...Things are not always just as simple to be explained in terms of periodic cycles.
A lot from reviews that have been written on different industry sites and blogs. Also the Facebook page has 500+ fans.
> If God is the first cause of the physical universe, then his existence is necessary (in the philosophical sense) and therefore changeless (in the philosophical sense) and therefore eternal (as his existence is necessary - and he exists entirely apart from time).

What nonsense. The whole notion of a first cause itself is nonsense let alone the first cause being something as complex as an intelligent being when the very reason you'd propose a first cause to begin with would be that you couldn't accept that something always existed.
Exactly.

I had to double up on classes and take some subjects on my own over the summer. Two classes one semester literally overlapped by about fifteen minutes and I had to get special permission to show up late for it. I got a passing grade for it, but finished it afterward.

It wasn't a matter of being super-human, just loving the subject. I agree, though, that if your passion isn't overwhelming, you can't do it. You can with many non-STEM majors.

The first couple years of graduate school were brutal. I had taken twenty math and science classes undergrad. Typical Russian and Chinese classmates had taken thirty to fifty and they blew me out of the water. The one guy in the program who took nineteen courses dropped out, so I was right on the border.
Completely agree. The fact is that most people in STEM aren't so much encouraged to go into STEM as deceived into it by a combination of science documentaries, science types bragging that STEM-like subjects are of Superior Intrinsic Value and Lead You To The Meaning Of Life, and parents selling the field to their children as an easy way to make money.

And a very good point about the hacker/elite snobs pissing on other classmates + gender imbalance and lousy social environment, it's not just limited to CS undergrads but is widespread in Ph. D programs as well, you'd expect that these Head Nerd types would have gotten with the program of life by then.

Combine the shitty social elements with a shitty ROI plus an increased awareness of other kinds of worth than being a coding rockstar, and you've got a bunch of disillusioned, not-very-young people who feel they have been deceived into making their life choices.

The last point is also what's making me reconsider being involved in computer science. It seems like even research universities are increasingly doing work that are more low-quality first-startup style grabs at attention, using machine learning (itself a balkanized field devoid of theory) as a semantic stopsign-marker of objective quality, and less of "classical" computer science results that were very mathematically informed.
You might like this then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanhenge
I guess it depends how you measure ROI? People usually do PhDs in an area that interests them; if they then go on to an academic or research position, it's possible for them to spend their entire career pursuing their own interests. That sounds like a pretty good ROI to me, regardless of salary!
From what I've heard, the long term consequences of the "filgrastim" stuff is unknown. It's a pretty intense drugs (it's basically causing your marrow to be release into your blood stream)
> I think that the necessary existence of God implies

There is no necessary existence of God nor can any logical argument establish it so.
Russia gets the red planet blues
I was coming strictly from the standpoint of time being the scarcest factor and thus the most important; I completely agree with you on the intellectual satisfaction of developing native apps :)
The Problem With “The 53%”
> Basically he's replacing checks, not credit cards.

Meanwhile, in large part of the developed world, banks do direct transfers nationwide and checks are dying rapidly. I'm 36 and Norwegian. Before I moved to the UK, the last time I'd seen a check in person was when I was 5-6 years old, and I'd never had a checking account as they're no longer offered as standard in Norway.

While checks are still more common in the UK, they are being phased out, and direct account to account transfers are now down to about 2-5 hours during the business day.

Dwolla faces a massive risk that the big banks will just wipe out their value proposition overnight by deciding to copy the European model.
I think the analysis is a little superficial.

K-12 education in the US channels a lot of really bright kids onto a highly time consuming and sequential STEM track, and the idea that anything other than a STEM major is for wimps is not uncommon. In addition, STEM majors is where such students are directed by guidance counselors.

I went off to college to major in EE. I had a 3 minute conversation with my academic adviser which consisted entirely of him telling me exactly which 15 hours to take. I walked out and changed majors to CHM, where the academic councilor explained the various degree options and discussed electives over the course of about an hour.

But it turns out, though I loved the theory, I really fucking hated laboratory sessions. Organic synthesis on paper was an interesting problem - I just didn't care for going through the motions, cleaning glassware and pretending I was conducting a meaningful experiment.

It took me several years to decide that there are lots of worthy intellectual endeavors and challenging problems outside of STEM [YMMV]. I believe my choice to pursue a liberal arts degree is among the best decisions I ever made.

Personally, I think the problem is that the US educational system narrows the funnel toward the STEM field too early - for all practical purposes it's already narrowing way down into the primary grades...even though the it is obvious that people can find their way into the more "open" STEM areas (such as programming) without being channeled academically toward a STEM career.

In other words, the primary reason that a person first exposed to algebra at Junior College is less likely to become a mathematician is lower expectations, both on the part of the academy and on the part of the student.
Poll: As an engineer, which is more important: technology or mission?
In deciding to join a startup, are you more interested in the company's mission and goals? or are you more interested in the technologies you'll be using and the technical problems you'll be solving?
Networking Tip #26
Ah, I assumed enjo was saying it as a negative.
I think that Shacham paper is the best primer on ROP of all the papers I've read, including the paper mentioned by the parent commentor:

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/geometry.pdf
Absolutely. The web and now HTML5 completely obliterate the old school mentality that you need to have conventional sales channels, and ancient business models to suceed. Any of these "big wigs" that think Apple and Google will dominate forever will be proven wrong.
The $50,000 Slum Shack
The Quest to Put Siri on all iOS Devices |
WaterField Designs Laptop Sleeve
Maybe the current downturn (bankruptcy filings, closing of CC accounts)is forcing people to start using cash instead of credit. I am a cash person myself, but asking people direct access to their bank accounts would be a hard sell, at least with credit cards there are many situations where they would allow chargebacks. They will have a niche market of cash based merchants, that is for certain. But it is way too early to say that their system can make credit cards obsolete within the next few years. Credit cards are just becoming popular in emerging markets where eCommerce is relatively nascent. The real issue now is securing cross border and long distance payments, being able to provide an unprecedented level of security demanded by the globalizing peer-to-peer and business-to-business transactions.
Creative directory The Loop raises $2m in funding, set to go global
Actually, I'm not surprised a company like this has started in Des Moines. Contrary to Milne's "location is just an excuse", location is everything for a start up.

Des Moines' little secret is that it's a major "back-office" financial-services center--banking, insurance, mortgages, annuities, etc. Wells Fargo, Aviva, Principal Financial and others have either their corporate or divisional HQ's there.

There's also a heavy marketing and publishing cluster there (including a couple of sizable companies owned by Hearst--which is also the parent of SFGate). But that's tangential...maybe.

Another reason is Des Moines is small and homogenous enough for people in the financial services community to know each other. And to influence/be more easily influenced.

These reasons--and others--are why I completely disagree with Milne's
statement that "location is just an excuse". It's not. Start ups need the proper environment to take root and grow--infrastructure, people (domain experts and technical), and "political" protection.

The fact of the matter is, Dwolla probably would not have survived this long in the Valley, Wall Street, Route 1/128, or Austin. It is a financial-services-oriented start up in a small, but highly concentrated, financial-services town where someone high up on the local totem pole liked what they saw.

And sometimes, that's all it takes.
wrt common practice: I don't think so. They added this feature quite recently (a year or so ago).
Skype co-founder leads $5.5m funding round for Wrapp
> My theory is that 500 2 person companies have a worse chance at making a real splash than if the 100 best ideas from that group had 10 good people working on them.

I wonder if there is an opportunity for matchmaker investors to scoop up like-minded startups and consolidate early companies to build those 100 10-person winners.
To answer the question posed by the article's title: No.

It will provide people with the opportunity to work harder if that's their preference.

As for downward pressure on wages. That's only a bad thing if there is no proportionately downward pressure on prices. Many of these services make markets more competitive (LiveOps versus traditional call centers, AirBnB versus traditional accommodations). So prices will probably drop more than wages.

This also benefits people in economically weak areas. Not just globally but also in the US, e.g. Deep South, Rust Belt, etc.
Yeah, maybe even Jersey!

I know, I know! Right?!
I solved it in ocaml, I only had this development environment this week end but it was fun. I didn't posted it on my blog but if someone wants it, just ask ;)
'Devastating' protocol flaw could paralyze Bitcoin system
Profile: creator of iPad add-ons The Wallee and Pix and Stix
Of course they throw that in to incentivize people to use them. Many people are unaware of these benefits since banks tend to not market them much, but it's there in your card holder agreement.

That extra due diligence costs time and reduces flexibility. Did those rental places accept your debit card without a deposit? Did they notice it was a debit card?
I finally have a NYC address and I'm still paying only Toronto suburbs prices!
PHP. Looking into Node.js
Hey Matt. Looks like you and I worked on similar things here. I'd very much suggest that you provide your voters with the opportunity to express more than a single preference.

Single response question: What month were you born?

Multiple response question: What would improve DashPoll?
surely the impressions were 3D scanned, not CT scanned.
Or the market price of talent goes up : The value being created by engineers is recognized by the financial institutions, so why shouldn't tech companies pay up too?

[ And I'm thinking Facebook before people get on my case about financial companies creating value in the real world... ]
I generally quote string searches but I do use pluses when I want to search for two separate strings in the same page, such as:

"Hacker News"+"Steve Jobs"
Wow, you all are making me feel slightly better about the apps I've published.
True, I also found it odd that he would have expected the teacher to know python or ruby. I program for a living and I've only just started looking into python and I know virtually no ruby. Although I'm sure if I had some well documented code I could figure out what it does, but I guess GCSE teachers only get limited time for marking and in most cases have to do it from home.
How did this guy surpass Twitter's 140-character limit?
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/156072/bitcoin.pdf
I wouldn't say "fundamentally flawed". A bit simplistic, maybe, but totally understandable. Government funds are - let's say, shady - and private funds are usually who-knows-who and pretty inaccessible. I'm not saying that it's impossible but I certainly understand Julio: as good entrepreneur, he's taking the pragmatic route. Kudos for that.
MailRank Team is joining Facebook
_I was not aware it's "easy" to run other OS's on Apple hardware. Knowing Apple, I'm still not sure I believe it._

I run linux (arch now, but once ubuntu) on a MacBook5,4. It's somewhat harder to get set up if you want to dual boot (the dual partitioning scheme is finicky, and although linux doesn't need it, OS X forces you to use it if there's a foreign OS, ugh..). See http://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook .

Only one proprietary driver (for wireless) is needed - the rest Just Works. (And flash plays smoother than on OS X :P )
Totally right there with you. Pretty arrogant to want to meet without an agenda!
Don't forget that the end of fragmentation can be the end of innovation. It's 2011 and browser standards don't support taking a photo. There's tons of other things that standards don't support and there will be more. And if or when browsers are the only platform, fragmentation will come there. It's already happening, Chrome supports native code, IE will not support the same format.
Try:

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Feed/itunes.sta...
CardMunch – Business Card Reader App For iOS by LinkedIn
I thought Adobe will dump this Flash/Flex thingie as open source?

People can look at the code, modify, extend, do whatever they want isn't it?
I couldn't resist the speculation temptation :)

Correct me if I'm wrong; When I'm searching for (unquoted) "Canadian equivalent to SOPA Bill". I'm getting results about Soap, Telenovela, Spas, Dishwasher Soap, TV shows (and 1 related hit). The result, as you mentioned, could be ranked independent of Ads, but the Ad spectrum is wider (Soaps, Spas, Soap operas, TV shows, etc...) [I'm not getting any in this particular case].

If it's restrictive search (quoting each word - sigh!), the search result quality is slightly better (first 3 hits), but the potential of Ads is also low.

I know you put the user first - but wouldn't you speculate in my case?
You claim that this class of people won't work for a "big company" for "any amount of money," yet in the next breath you admit that they will work for those companies in the context of a "talent acquisition."

What is a "talent acquisition" if not an alternate mode of compensation to persuade individuals to "take a corporate job" who previously considered themselves above such positions? Yeah, it sounds more impressive to tell people "we got bought by X" instead of "I took a job with X," but either way they've "gone corporate." You're still dealing with the same endless HR meetings, PHBs, "culture," etc, as all the other "drones."

Yes, a good number of such "acquisition hires" leave after earn-out is complete, typically two to four years. This is actually a fairly lengthy of time for any high-value employee to hold any position in the valley these days, startup or not.
Planet, the Python real-time web framework.
That is a bizarre argument though, you are saying that capitalism works fine so long as companies are run as soviet states?

No, I'm saying that embedding command economies (structured as companies) in a capitalist economy allows us to gain the benefits of a well run command economy while mitigating their harms.
Yeah, I totally understand. The company was recently acquired by Google, so I guess you can consider having some measure of 'safety'.
For the most part, Twitter is moving away from Ruby to Java/Scala/Clojure.
What he is basically trying to say is that your chances of achieving "success" or "making an impact" is better if you work for Mark Zuckerberg than try to become (someone like)Mark Zuckerberg.

Wow what a narrow definition of success!For example by working for facebook how can I get every child in third world countries to get a decent education?How can I get every woman in rural india to break free from male dominance?

My respect for Parker just took a strong hit!
> educational system is a lack of background in math
>

I think the whole "math is tough" point of view is not defensible, yet a large percentage of the non-technical population believe it. Yes, math is tough if you are 8 years old, but when you are 20+? Really?

Rather than standardized aptitude tests, I think we need good math textbooks for adults. Not for dummies, just regular explanations focusing on the applications.

On that note, I want to shamelessly add a plug to my upcoming book, in which I explain //all// the high-school math in 50 pages. I decided to add this section, after I saw many of my students struggling to find t in equations like: 3(t+4) = 4(t+3).

Email me if you want to see, and be a test reader. Oh yeah, the book also covers university-level Calculus and Mechanics in 150 pages.
Personally I stepped away from pre-med because I couldn't stand the idea of my major determining my life for the next ten years - graduate programs, internships, residence, all that stuff, it's daunting when you're 21 and all you want to do is STUFF. Going premed would mean what I'd done was just the beginning not an accomplishment in and of itself. That was daunting and a bit demoralizing. The fact is it's not for everyone, and not just because of the difficulty (I never excelled in math or organic chemistry), and people like me who get in because it's interesting often find that the career paths that present themselves are strictly defined and entail a lot of drudgery. I remember perceiving this very clearly in my 3rd year after doing a lot of prep work and it was an easy decision. I ended up majoring in Psych with minors in Neuroscience and Cog Sci, for the record, which was hard as hell anyway, but technically a BA and not applicable to STEM-type employment.
"Frequent travel may be required"