skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The complaints are not that the book isn't nice enough towards Jobs, but rather that Isaacson doesn't know enough about technology to make this interesting or insightful, nor did he try to educate himself before writing this book.

Isaacson is at his best when he dives into the more human and social aspects of Jobs's life. As soon as things get remotely technical, the book begins to fall a part. He misquoted Bill Gates as saying that the problem with the NeXT computer was that the optical drive had too low latency. Either Gates didn't say this and Isaacson got it backwards because he doesn't know any better, or Gates had a momentary slip of the tongue that Isaacson should have known enough about to correct.

Isaacson asserts that Apple did not use NeXT for the basis of OS X, which is just patently false (Isaacson also refers to OS X as OSX). He claims that Apple evolved the existing Mac OS into something NeXT like. The truth is that Apple took the NeXTStep operating system and added some classic Mac OS APIs and features to it. OS X wasn't a complete break from the past, but it's entire core and its Cocoa API (and objective-C) are pure NeXT.

Because Isaacson doesn't understand this distinction, he completely glosses over the importance of OS X to Apple's revival. Without OS X, Apple would probably be dead today or maybe just making portable music players. Classic Mac OS was not going to cut it and it was falling behind Windows.

Classic Mac OS was significantly worse than NT-based Windows OSes, and would have been completely crushed by XP. OS X, on the other hand, provided a viable alternative to XP and it successors. Apple has gained market share because of OS X and how good of a modern OS it is. The Classic Mac OS was about to sink the entire company.

There are plenty of other examples like this in the book. Isaacson also doesn't ask many followup questions or do in-depth research. The best researched parts of the book are the beginnings chapters which are based on previous books by other authors.

This is a good biography for people not that into technology, but for anyone remotely interested in the technology, it's not that good. I'd still give it a 6 or 7 out of 10, but it could have been so much more. This is the only guy who ever got this kind of access to Steve and the people close to him and he botched it.
> TLDL

Perhaps it is not good form to comment on a podcast you didn't listen to...?

edit: As a response I take TLD[R|L] to mean "it was too long so I didn't bother", however I have also seen it (more recently) as a summary to one's own long text. I took the above comment to mean the former.
Types exist in mathematics it's just that when discussing mathematics the types are usually inferred. A lot of computer science concerns itself with algorithms rather than math.

eg. When multiplying integers and matrices respectively you'd use a different algorithm to compute the result of multiplying the respective types.

Types mostly disappear as well when using a language derived from the lambda calculus vs. the universal turing machine.
This allows the client-server to communicate lower level interaction details in realtime. Seems quite be useful for realtime multiuser apps.
ASCII Raytracing in Javascript
Maybe, but in this specific story, the claim is that a teacher first says it's OK, that the student followed the marking criteria he was given, that the teacher during the course of the project still said it was OK and that then, at grading time, the teacher turned around completely and all of a sudden said that he didn't understand anything about it, and therefore had to fail the student.

Many dysfunctional examples from systems across the world notwithstanding, this particular one doesn't pass the sniff test.
In short, you're arguing against the long tail...

Let me add also mine anecdotal experience from yesterday:

I looked for a good SQL parser/evaluator in Python (which I partly use at work). There might be one, but I didn't find any. It is easy to find on CPAN. (And this is hardly an unusual request.)
An Introduction to HTML5′s Video API
Since the late 90s, when embedding media elements like audio and video clips into web pages, developers have had to rely on third party plug-ins. Flash has become the go-to method for nearly all video sites, and has been widely used for audio embedding as well.
As a partner of Mexican.VC (http://mexican.vc), a (pre)seed fund that invests in Mexican online startups, I can assure that the your vision of how Mexico works is quite incomplete. There's well enough funding in Mexico for early stage companies. You can find angels (Angel Ventures Mexico, Mex.VC), seed funds (Mexican.VC, Wayra, StartupFactory), early stage VCs (Alta Ventures, Ignia, Fondo Emprendedor CONACYT-NAFIN) and public grants (Prosoftware, Fondo PYME, AVANCE).

I'm not saying Chile is not a great country (I love Chileans), but IMHO your reasons to leave Mexico are fundamentally flawed.
DNT: No Teeth, No Benefits--DOA
Maybe I'm just a slow reader but according to amazon the book is 656 pages long, I've never read a book of that length in a single sitting.
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/04/135985392/tavis-smiley-if-at-f...

http://www.tavissmileyfailup.com/
I'm not mixing them up. $20k over 10 months would barely cover the development and support costs.
My complaint about the bio is that Isaacson had exclusive access to Jobs for at least a dozen multi-hour sessions, and yet there's actually very little content in the bio that hasn't already been retold through other sources. What I hadn't already heard could have probably filled one chapter. It doesn't matter that Isaacson isn't tech-minded; any competent reader can deduce the correct meanings from his mistakes. Nor is it being too positive or negative toward Jobs, as the reader can make their own conclusions from other sources anyway. It's that he seems to have squandered the only opportunity anyone had to obtain more information about Jobs' life.
ARIN has 5.7 /8 equivalents, or 95M addresses available. Their policy is (roughly) to satisfy any requests where the addresses will actually be used in the near future ("50% utilization rate within one year").

http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html
https://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_depletion.html
https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html#four
It's written in the bare prose of a journalist. It's not bad writing, but it's not the kind of writing that is enjoyable to read for the sake of how well it is written. It reads like a string of a newspaper or magazine pieces strung together.

I suspect the many typos and small errors were caused by the book being rushed, however.
Hopefully whoever/whatever has my old Nortel IPs has better luck that I did - redundant Nortel Engineer.
Because it's new to somebody (sigh).
OK, so obviously I suck at server configuration/optimization. Any tips for optimizations that could have enabled me to support the influx of Hacker News traffic?

Note:

* Ubuntu 512MB on Rackspace

* Apache

* Wordpress with wp-super-cache and minimal plugins enabled

Thanks for the feedback!
The article sounds as though there's a lot of pressure on colleges to lower their standards in order to produce the required number of engineers. I was a math/CS TA for several years, and I don't think the problem is with tough freshman classes, low grades or a focus on theory.

Fundamentally, the main problem with students that come from the US educational system is a lack of background in math. The prospective science major who's having trouble with fractions and basic algebra is, unfortunately, a disturbingly common presence on college campuses these days.

It's hard to fix K-12 in this regard (especially as everyone wants to fix it in a different way). But if colleges really want to solve the problem, they should put more effort into remedial math classes, instead of lowering the standards (and reducing the theoretical content) for those classes they already have.
Last time I checked Dwolla still hadn't solved the ACH chargeback problem.
Printing to a virtual 7-segment display
I was accepted to Start-up Chile and arrived two weeks ago. You're in for a great ride Julio.

My biggest concern when I first got accepted was the caliber of people which would be attracted to the program. I hadn't seen any start-ups which had come out of the program, and thought maybe the government was just hopping on the incubator bandwagon.

Since arriving and meeting the entrepreneurs here, I've been very impressed. Amazing projects, great people from around the world.

You'll have no regrets with your decision. Look forward to meeting you in Chile.
If you have any questions, drop me an email, the address is in my profile.
I think of this literal mode as pretty close to the hacker mode. Most of the time our query rewriting is an improvement, but we wanted it to be very quick (just a couple clicks) to go into hacker mode if we get things wrong.

My hunch is that someone could a search shortcut for verbatim mode, but if you used it enough you'd find that you missed the query improvements.
> No one is at all concerned that this is a hack?
> I know it's interesting stuff, but I'm curious what "rights" Applidium have in publishing this information.

In the United States, reverse engineering is entirely lawful. It is even made explicitly clear in the DMCA that reverse engineering is allowed. Which part are you specifically worried the most about?

> With this information, (if I'm not wrong) it wouldn't take long to simply DDoS Siri...

This is just scaremongering. Knowing an IP address is enough to DDoS a server. Are you suggesting that it's somehow unethical to independently publish the location of a publicly-available server? Are you also going to indict the DNS server that gave it to them?

> Or port Siri to Android (effectively stealing IP).

Theft relates to physical property. I'm not sure what would be stolen here as Apple still controls the Siri server and requires a unique iPhone 4S ID to be used. Again, though, reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is legal in the United States. There's no way to frame this as stealing.

> (I have no bias either way, just pointing out, if someone figured out how to reverse engineer dropbox, so you could use their space, without a dropbox account, would we all be going "wow, this is so cool!" or would we be crying out "this is such an irresponsible hack!")

This is a red herring. Your proposed situation suggest a security vulnerability of some kind wherein Dropbox hypothetically allowed someone access without paying. No such vulnerability to Siri was found; all requests to the Siri server were made using a valid phone id and returned valid, official responses.

The only thing that's unclear to me is if the anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA extends to technology used but not created by the author e.g. Apple did not create SSL but they use it to secure transmission - does this make spoofing an SSL certificate an instance where the DMCA's anti-circumvention law would come into play?
And why do you think they haven't been automated?
I agree that this can work. However, they are very strict about collecting any sort of personal data from the MT workers. Thus you may end up not having any stick from this because you cant ask them for an email. Cellis, how did you get around this?
Ah, god. Please stop posting this garbage. He says barely anything (usually a rant with little details or insight) and people eat it up. Gruber is a dramatic fanboy.
This is available for windows phones as well as iOS. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grantophone/id476003757?mt=8
And that's why my contracting rate on boring shit is so much higher than the average google coder.
Ask HN: Insurance against file-sharing lawsuits?
Hi HN,

I pirate a bit here and there to save me a few bucks. I was wondering, if any form of insurance exists for file-sharers like myself if we get sued for sharing copyrighted material?

A quick google search reveals one such insurance exists in Sweden, but I live in the US. Does anyone know of any such litigation protection service in the US?

Incidentally, this sounds like a good startup to form, if something like this doesn't exist. I'm considering forming a non-profit/co-op insurance for file-sharers in the US if one doesn't exist. I don't how hard that would be though. (I've never formed a company myself before.)

Also, would this be legal? (IANAL)
They're not necessary, but they sure are useful.
You get all sorts of perks, like fraud protection, extended warranties, etc, etc. You get cashback (or miles or points, or whatever). All you need to do to stay in the black is to pay your balance at the end of the month. Best thing ever if you ask me.
I feel like they're examples of really awesome use cases, so it shouldn't matter if people can't use them. Not to mention, I feel like this tool is targeted for terminal junkies who likely already have awk/sed.
Yes, I believe it does. I believe verbatim requires an on-page page.
The CEO Should Be The Chief Experience Officer
He's actually disrupting the market for the $7000+ device, I wonder how many the $7000+ people sell, presumably he could take most/all of their sales + a load on top who couldn't afford it in the first place.

I assume at this point the $7000+ device people think they have some better features that make it worthwhile and are reluctant to do their own iPad app. (Innovators Dilemma).
Here is the code in the video:

http://anonymous-lulzsec.com/entries/encoders/same_enc-same_...

http://pastebin.com/gT7qErZF
i'm only on chapter 34, but i'm not enough of an old timer to comment on historical accuracy.
Which definitions? I've seen definitions of "modern browser" that only exclude IE 6 and 7.
C++11 Concurrency Series: 9. Condition Variables and Message Passing
I think specs are important on products that are configurable. You measure the value of, say, a computer by the individual parts used to assemble the product. You remove and replace any of those parts, the value immediately changes.

Ipods, Ipads, Kindles, etc. have no (easily) configurable parts, so the price you see reflects all you get.

And plus, isn't software king nowadays anyway? Maybe companies like Amazon and Apple recognize hardware may be reaching some plateau with diminishing returns in speed, efficiency, etc. (or at least the differences between hardware competitors is becoming more negligible over time); therefore it's irrelevant to add a spec sheet.
The book is very gossipy and does a decent job with Jobs messy personal life, but he completely failed to capture Jobs' and Apple's impact on the industry.
Yes, that's the whole problem. I'm tired of paying for other people's airline miles, cashback, etc. This is an inefficiency built into the payment system, and it harms small businesses and lower-income people the most. I try to avoid using my credit card out of principle, because I don't like charging merchants more.

I appreciate that Dwolla is trying to remove this inefficiency from the system. Mass conversion to a more efficient system would, eventually, mean cheaper prices for everyone.
Compiling F# to JavaScript with Pit
I recall a post, I think it was here, that floated by me that said something like the most productive people only actually do about 3.5 hours of solid focused work a day. Now I wish I could find it.
Did you listen to the podcast?

The main complaints were:

1) Isaacson doesn't know anything about the tech industry.

2) Despite knowing he doesn't know anything about the industry he's writing about, he didn't even try to learn anything about it, and it shows.

3) Because of 1) and 2), Isaacson solely focuses on everyday stuff that any lay-person can relate to; this is all fine and well and the anecdotes add color to any biography, but when it is the sole focus of the biography of a man who is interesting precisely because of what he did in and to the tech industry, it entirely misses much of the point of what people find interesting about his life.

4) As the only guy who ever had direct access to Jobs, he should have used that privilege to dig into more of the reasoning of why Jobs did many of the things he did in the industry, not to write some People-magazine style fluffy personal interest story.

5) On a nitpickier level, what little technical detail it contains is often flat-out wrong, like the claim that OS X didn't use or contain any of the software developed at NeXT.
So, can 2 guys in a garage beat SV giants nowadays? You need technology, right?
THE Tim Clark of Android fame?
Harmful dogmas in fault tolerant distributed computing
Senators introduce "STOCK Act" to stop "insider trading" in Congress
Those recent imperialist Romans, right? I wonder what happened to them? Actually, to speak like a troll too, this reeks of American-centric imperialism to me. When will you guys realise that you don't own the Internet and the rest of us are not particularly interested in the street-plan of Manhattan?
Http://autoaccidentsphiladelphia.com/blog/2011/11/15/113/
I think it was a story that studied gifted young violinists in Austria or Germany- the study said that while average students "worked" all day from 9-5, the gifted ones split work and play- they worked in spurts of a few intense hours, followed by personal time.
Sam Trickett Wins Partouche Poker Tour
Sean Parker is ridiculously overfunded.
Information Flow: The Secret to Studio Structure
Out of curiosity, how does google judge search result quality? It seems as though search is trending toward the idea that more results are better, when usually the opposite is true.
$100? heh the 16gb 4s is $200(+fees, tax, etc.) because its subsidized with a 2 year contract. I think it's something like $650 if you buy it unlocked. compared to a $25 - $35 computer? Apples and oranges ;)
If the computer successfully guesses exactly the thing you wanted and does that instead of what you said, it can make you marginally more happy than a "did you mean", since it avoids the reaction of "well why didn't you just do it then?".

However, if the computer guesses wrong, that will cause significantly more frustration to the user. This disproportionate amount of annoyance means that the computer must guess correctly far more often than it guesses wrong. Unfortunately, Google's current system frequently guesses wrong, and then compounds those incorrect guesses by using them by default, taunting the user with their original search.
Fair enough, I enjoyed your comment overall, a lot of good points. Maybe I read too much into it. Apologies if I did!
موقع معرفة دائرتك الأنتخابية لعام 2011/2012 برقمك القومى
http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/12-020.pdf See graphs on p. 10. Discussion: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.arin.ppml/14144
For that 10% figure to be meaningful, we'd need to know how many people are trying to search for something precise and not receiving it.
Looks like this was already suggested by jdludlow [1]

> * The tags should be links so that I can click one and filter on all projects with that tag.

Or was that not what you meant?

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238678
And getting what you built into the hands of the people that need it is nontrivial and I'd argue it's the hardest part.
I believe you're correct. This same sort of thing is the reason why amazon was able to essentially say no to Illinois when they wanted them to start collecting sales tax.
This isn't just whining.

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. That's part of what he's saying - it's harder now for good startups to grow when everyone wants to and is incentivized to make their own web startup.

The other part he's saying is that people can have a larger marginal impact on the world working at a place like Facebook than they could in their own startup. For the median case, this is true.
Thanks for the comment.. i knew about some of the programs you mentioned there .. http://mexican.vc got my attention in particular.

I did research when started the company but a lot of doors where closed at that time and my options where to take a Loan or leave a part of the company to the seed funders.

I think gov should do something like Startup chile where they offer "free money" to start a wildfire in entrepreneur attitude.

*please add me to my twitter @j_camarena, will be cool to keep contact :)
Quoting Sweeney in the article, “One experiment after another has shown that people will make poor decisions about anything that involves their privacy. They want the new utility, they want the new shiny thing, because we tend to discount that any harm is going to happen to us, even when we’re told that it could.”

I'm very much a privacy advocate, but if the user is willing to trade their privacy for some added-value, then so be it.
Gioco Per Ragazze Online - Dancing Party Dress
X64 Kernel Privilege Escalation
"Government" as it pertains to legislation is just a collection of 535 individuals (adjust figure for your nationality). Smoothing that all into a single proper noun will hamper understanding of what's actually going on.

That's true in one sense. However, pretending that everything would work out fine were it not for a few bad apples will certainly hamper attempts to keep the system running properly.

It would be far better to acknowledge that much of the behavior of a democracy results from Public Choice Theory, and so it's going to work out this way even if your favored politicians are lucky enough to win the election. With that out of the way, we can start to shore up the places where the system is vulnerable to malfeasance.
Man vs. ROP - Overcoming Adversity One Gadget at a Time
He didn’t finish his complaints in one seventy minute podcast.

It’s actually a great and hilarious podcast – independently of what you think about Jobs. Siracusa is in his element.
Visualizing Interesting Log Events Using Splunk’s Google Maps Application
A bit speculative: this is more related to Ad revenue. A wider spectrum of search results means more Ad variety and the ability to serve more advertisers per search query.

I'm annoyed by Google's search quality by the day. I'm starting to use DuckDuckGo more (unless there are other alternatives).
The problem is that math types are equivalent to dependent structural types. You can say, "let x be a set with a comutative binary operation". In languages with Hindley–Milner type inference you can do almost the same (you will miss the dependent part).

And the most famous languages with static typing (Java, C++, C#, Scala) do not have such power.

For more information, I'd urge you to see the amazing presentation[1] of Daniel Spiewak's, Uncovering the Unknown: Principles of Type Inference, and James Iry's Types à la Chart [2]

[1] http://screencasts.chariotsolutions.com/uncovering-the-unkno...

[2] http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html
Thanks! i will need some coders for my startup on the near future, feel free to send me a tweet (@j_camarena) if you want to talk or just keep in contact :).
CAPTCHA Hax with TesserCap
Ballmer shoots down Microsoft breakup advice
New organization to allow real citizens take back their country: United Republic
The Curious Case Of Unpatchable Vulnerabilities
Warn HN: Silk breaks HN's OAuth login
FYI, just found that the Silk proxy on the Fire breaks OAuth (possibly normal user/pass as well, wouldn't know) login here. You'll have to un-tick "Accelerated browsing" in the settings to be able to login (and stay logged in, turning it back on bounces you out).
Setup, use node.js and npm on Windows cheat sheet
A "TLDR" is written by someone who HAS read something for the benefit of those who haven't. Thus, TLDL, when followed by an explanation (as in this case) is implied to be written by someone who HAS listened.

(Note that there is a difference between posting "TLDR." to mean "I have not read this" and posting a "TLDR:" or "TLDR;", which means "I have read this long thing, and am trying to be helpful." It is, understandably, a confusing distinction.)
And I almost fell off my chair that it wasn't a fart app - nice to see someone put in real effort, create something useful to an under-served segment and see success from that.