skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think anybody was expecting a hagiography; Jobs has too many failures and flaws for any biographer to write that book. But just because Isaacson captured how Steve Jobs could be both terrible and compelling doesn't mean Isaacson succeeded. He didn't. He missed the point entirely about why people want to read about Jobs. We didn't buy the book to learn about Jobs' strained relations with his children or what he remembers about ex-girlfriends from 30 years ago. We bought it to find out how he managed to be the right guy in the right place at the right time, time and time again, realigning entire industries to his interests.

Isaacson had a chance to uncover what made Steve Jobs tick. To understand how Jobs made the company that made the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, and put giant footprints on the PC, music, filmmaking, and telecom industries. Instead we got armchair psychology and a rehash of "he's demanding to the point of being unbearable but he usually makes good calls." Why could Steve Jobs create Apple and not anybody else? He's not the only visionary in Silicon Valley and certainly not the only asshole. So why, with unprecedented access to Jobs and everyone he's worked with, could Isaacson not tell us anything new?

Maybe if you think Jobs wasn't anything special, just a fortunate narcissist, you'd be satisfied with the book. Obviously he'd be nothing without people, like Woz, Hertzfield, Tribble, Tevanian, Ive, Catmull, Lasseter, and many others who did incredible work that he could never do himself. But even that perspective leaves the question of why so many geniuses did their best work when they worked with Jobs.

Isaacson doesn't even address how Jobs learned how to run companies. I'd argue that the pivotal moment for this occurs during the NeXT days, covered by Isaacson only superficially. But NeXT is clearly the turning point of Jobs' career. Everything he did up till and including NeXT ended in flames. But after, it's success after success. How then did he finally manage to not alienate everybody and go down in a blaze of glory? How did he hang onto his team from NeXT use them to remake Apple? Not to mention Isaacson failed to understand that how NeXT's system became the foundation of everything important Apple has done since (OS X and iOS are both direct descendants of NeXT's OS).

Nor do we learn about how he worked with any of his trusted lieutenants besides Ive, like Tim Cook, Avie Tevanian, Phil Schiller, or Scott Forstall. We don't even get a sense of why they stuck by him or bought into his vision. We get some insight into the Woz relationship, but still not why they succeeded when others failed.

Isaacson had the chance to tell the story of a remarkable life in business, but he demurred. Judged against the life it chronicles, Isaacson's book is a failure.
Does anybody know how competitive something like this is? Do they get thousands or tens of thousands of applicants? I want to set my expectations accordingly.
Flight up = pro-programmed Soyuz module.

Flying = ISS is in an orbit, very little aerobatic ability

Flight down = Soyuz module pre-programmed to hit target

But NASA will swap a graduate degree in something scientific for having buzzed around pretending to shoot people in a F16/18. Perhaps they could extend this to other parts of their operation? HST staff = extensive peer-reviewed published papers, or experience with a 105mm howitzer.
TechHub heads further east - to Latvia
Things might not be so great right now or for the next couple years, but being a US lawyer is likely to continue to be an excellent job: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos053.htm#earnings. Even if median salaries drop by half from 2008, lawyer income will still be better than about 60% of the US population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

And I doubt there'll be that kind of a bottoming out. That said, I'm a 3rd year Cdn law student and programmer looking at a career in law that at least in the next few years will probably be less lucrative than being a programmer.

P.S: I also have a science degree so this post particularly caught my eye!
I understand that calling on the phone to express your opinion carries much more weight to the staffers tallying the constituents attitudes towards a particular bill.
Auspicious is good (roughly: causing hope, or offering opportunity).
That's been our observation as well, and we've tried to constrain launches in exactly that way. Techniques that can fail in a way that disrespects the query have to have a much much higher win to loss ratio in order to launch.

What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really unhappy as a result. This is one small step in the direction of fixing that, but it's an issue we're paying close attention to, thanks in part to the feedback we've seen on HN.

We very much want to avoid systematic failures like this, and if technical queries are a blind spot then please send them over whenever you see them. My email is in my profile and I'll make sure they get routed appropriately, and I tend to watch threads about Google trying to get good examples to debug.
Common Newsletter Mistakes
No, I'm not a troll. I had never imagined this before, very cool!
Buddy, I completely understand your pain.

I did my engineering at NIT (it was called REC when I graduated) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Technolo...] and I also suffered in first two semesters because I did not play the game which others were playing just to get good grades. The focus was on grades, not learning.

Later I realized that playing game of grades is not much of an effort so why not play the game and keep doing what I love to do on the side? In my final year, I was in Top 10 students in my batch. In last two years of college, I also did freelance coding for some clients in USA which helped me pay for all my expenses (tuition/pocket money/party/vacation). When college was over and it was time to face the real world, everyone who only focused on the grades suffered and I aced the interviews, found a job which I loved and finally moved to USA.

Read patio11's career advice: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

For a example which you can relate to, see Swaroop [http://www.swaroopch.com/]. He didn't graduate from IIT but worked for Yahoo, Adobe, some Internet startup and he is finally doing freelancing and recently did some work for Joshua [http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/freelancing-for-joshua-schacht...]. He doesn't even mention his degree on his blog, he lets his work speak for itself.

So don't get discouraged, play the game but focus on your passion. Everything else will fall in place. If you want to talk, feel free to contact me. [My info is in my profile.]
I didn't change my mind. I started as a CS major, ended as a CS major, and am finishing up a CS Master's degree. Possibly one day a CS PhD.

I have TA'd students and have long had an abiding interest in educational curricula, stemming from my experienced being homeschooled, where as I grew older, I was able to select elective materials to study in cooperation with my parents.

There are a few highlighter reasons I believe STEM education has issues, and please remember that these are interlinked, and other issues are present, which also interlink into these issues. I've picked these because I think they are standout.

* ROI on engineering vs. ROI on the MBA course. Non-founder engineers cap their salary potential in their career, in general, and spend gruelling hours in classes. MBA's salary cap is higher to non-existent, and can apparently skiv off pretty easy in undergraduate years.

* Math education is generally broken in the US. That means that students are not ready for the rigourous thinking and numeracy demanded in STEM. They struggle understanding the basics of mathematics and computational thinking because they never have had it before, so the 'elite' students who do know what they are doing stand out.

* Hacker/elite snobs pissing on other classmates. This has happened to a few friends of mine, but not really to me. Some of the freshmen/sophomores really brag on their ability (i.e., they were coder geeks in high school) and this discourages other people. It's toxic.

* Gender imbalance and lousy social environment. A bunch of stinky guys geeking out over computers and video games which are outdated in a few years is not... primo.

* Young software engineers are expected to spend nearly every waking minute coding, just to have a chance to get a job. They need to get internships, contribute to open source, maybe build a mobile app, etc... and do well in class. This, as near as I can tell, is very rare. Only perhaps musicians have similar expectations. Spending this much time on your field is corrosive to your character and personality (see above two points).

* Culture heroes are entertainers and sports stars. Not makers of useful things.

* Focus on application instead of theory. Everyone wants to do something real cool right now, preferably yesterday, without any training. This is not realistic when laying the foundations for a solid career. Short-term thinking says, "pleasure now, pay later", which does not work well in STEM.
Are there any solutions to solve the newsletters problem?
Do you know of any online solutions that provide some kind of 3rd party newsletter management ?
I receive 5 to 10 newsletters a day which I don't read. I don't even bother unsubscribing or marking them as spam, yet a solution that would manage those
would like to give it a shot but it won't run on 10.6.8 and I only have a work mac im not sure I can upgrade to test on
> Whatever you answer, the cost dwarfs the device, and swamps its processing power.

Linux costs 0, and runs on far less capable devices than the RaspberryPi.
Is this a commercial copy of Flightgear? http://www.flightgear.org/

It seems odd that Flightgear is never mentioned on the site, even though much of the text seems to be lifted directly off their site...
I was lacking in math background going into college, though it wasn't the fault of my schooling. I just wasn't ready for it yet. I struggled with algebra, which may or may not have been teacher related. I hadn't taken trig at all, and I ended up taking calculus my first semester in college. I didn't quite fail, but came pretty close.

I took until late in my sophomore year before things started to click for me. I can't point to any one specific thing that did it, other than I had matured a bit and my brain was now ready to learn the more difficult subjects.

I went from C's and D's to mostly A's and a few B's and double majored in Computer and Electrical Engineering with a Math minor of all things.

I don't think everyone is ready for college the minute they graduate from high-school. I suspect if I had taken a couple years off and did some blue collar work for a while before heading off to college, I would have done better and gotten even more out of it than I did.

Now I never switched majors, but the thought did cross my mind those first two years. I wonder if slightly delayed college entry would be helpful to others.
Bad Credit And Personal Loans : How To Find The Right Lender
How the iPhone got tail fins: Lessons Apple learned from GM
Picture several thousand lines of C++ being reduced to 27 lines of Clojure and you get an idea.

That's not to say that you couldn't do something similar in C++, but I've met like 4 really really good C++ programmers in about 15 years of programming, so no, it's unlikely to happen.
[Ask HN] Are there any solutions to solve the newsletters problem?
Do you know of any online solutions that provide some kind of 3rd party newsletter management ?
I receive 5 to 10 newsletters a day which I don't read. I don't even bother unsubscribing or marking them as spam, yet a solution that would manage those suscriptions could help. Any ideas if it exists ?
this is probably the other quote you're thinking of. it all seems to be from Gates' perspective, however. Isaacson fundamentally did not understand the relationship between nextstep and mac os x, that's for sure. it really is a dreadful book. i think some of these criticism are overblown tho. i doubt Isaacson is using "kernel of the NeXT technology" in the operating system sense, but who knows given how muddled it all is.

"""

After informing Gassée that Apple was buying NeXT, Amelio had what turned out to be an even more uncomfortable task: telling Bill Gates. 'He went into orbit,' Amelio recalled. Gates found it ridiculous, but perhaps not surprising, that Jobs had pulled off this coup. 'Do you really think Steve Jobs has anything there?' Gates asked Amelio. 'I know his technology, it’s nothing but a warmed-over UNIX, and you’ll never be able to make it work on your machines.' Gates, like Jobs, had a way of working himself up, and he did so now: 'Don’t you understand that Steve doesn’t know anything about technology? He’s just a super salesman. I can’t believe you’re making such a stupid decision. . . . He doesn’t know anything about engineering, and 99% of what he says and thinks is wrong. What the hell are you buying that garbage for?' Years later, when I raised it with him, Gates not recall being that upset. The purchase of NeXT, he argued, did not really give Apple a new operating system. 'Amelio paid a lot for NeXT, and let’s be frank, the NeXT OS was never really used.' Instead the purchase ended up bringing in Avie Tevanian, who could help the existing Apple operating system evolve so that it eventually incorporated the kernel of the NeXT technology. Gates knew that the deal was destined to bring Jobs back to power. 'But that was a twist of fate,' he said. 'What they ended up buying was a guy who most people would not have predicted would be a great CEO, because he didn’t have much experience at it, but he was a brilliant guy with great design taste and great engineering taste. He suppressed his craziness enough to get himself appointed interim CEO.'
"""
Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (pp. 302-303). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Your suspicion is probably true, but the example in the essay was considering wasted time akin to poorly invested money. Losing a day to email/HN is like losing a few dollars on a horse race compared to sinking half your fortune into a diamond mine in Zaire. Obviously, those losses per day add up, but I think its probably just as wise to learn how to watch out for the large time investments that are going to simply absorb resource without return yield.
The issue with fragmentation that ultimately leads to consolidation is the cost incurred by companies and developers to support all of these platforms.

I can't tell you how much it pains me as an android user to see an app only available for the iPhone. As a developer, it's magnitudes worse to have to send messages to my users saying "we'll be getting to an [x] platform app soon!" when realistically it just stunts our growth to develop the same thing 3 times.

I can't wait for the end of this native app nonsense.
"Why does the future have to be like the past?"

That's what everyone says in a bubble: "History won't repeat itself this time!" Unfortunately, while industries and companies change and evolve, human nature (specifically fear, greed, and hype) doesn't change. The wise learn from history while the rest keep repeating the mistakes from 15-20 years before.
Pretty sure it's not a coincidence that Mark Zuckerberg emphasized a related message at Startup School ("don't start a company unless you're really, really passionate about it"). Facebook, like every other tech company in the valley, is having trouble hiring enough engineers, and this is a campaign to make would-be founders think twice.
I'm glad it didn't require 20 years of Java experience.
Great things about Fluid Marketing plan
At any time short cipher Text is actually accomplished working with viral interaction, it’s very cost-effectual. The introduction of peregrine merchandising organizations is apparent Well-thought-of list and eating house makes, faculty member zones, institutes of upper scholarship, political figureheads, activities locations, and so on. are using that new SMS advertizement engineering, and then for those who.
Here is who gets paid by debit from my bank accounts: my employees, my lawyer, ATM cash withdrawals, and my credit cards.

No damn way I'm giving random vendors permission to ding my bank account. Credit cards are about cash flow safety & billing safety. Debits from a bank account are no substitution for this. Would you use a debit card at a strip club?
> I haven't used a stick in years (ever since this new thing called the Internet showed up).

The first USB sticks came on the market in 2000, so I very much doubt you stopped using them before the Internet showed up.
"Applicants for the Astronaut Candidate Program must be citizens of the United States"

:-(
That's the right answer.
My favourite bits of the book were the bits dealing with his personal life. It's a side of Steve that was never really revealed before.
Boom!

http://www.korg.com/ikaossilator
The command economy argument is a subset of the transaction cost argument. Lots of people have long-term plans, and some of those plans involve extensive cooperation from third parties. Companies are a smart abstraction for coordinating this behavior, but that's not all they do.
At first glance I thought this was going to tell me they can now replace bones that are identical to the ones in your body. This is still completely awesome nonetheless - the doctor could literally show you what they intend to do and the practice for surgeons this could offer I imagine would be priceless.
The funding environment has changed quite a lot since then. YC didn't even exist when FB started.

And FB would clearly be in that 100, given the massive growth it had. For every potential FB, there are lots of borderline useless apps that get funding, and wouldn't have when FB was first funded. Those people could have instead been working on FB.

He's not complaining that startups are getting funding, he's saying that the overavailability of funding is acting as a repulsive force, keeping engineers from grouping up.

Whether that's a bad thing on the balance, I'm not sure, but it's not an unmitigated good.
This was a fun week's worth of work for Team TeachStreet. Felt good to get everybody working on a single project (we've spent many months working on lots of different areas of the site, and working with different partners). It was really refreshing, and you could almost 'feel' morale climb, as we all had a chance to just have fun for a few days!
Show HN: A half-year viral project that did not go viral
Extract iOS Device Photos from an iTunes Backup
The IBAN account numbers we use in Europe have a 2 digit checksum against errors (mod-97 - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Numb... ). Banks are also not allowed to charge more for inter-EU transfers than for national ones, so in most cases transfers are free (because they are free within the country).

The banks didn't do this willingly, they were forced to by the EU.
I'm getting worse and worse results for all sorts of queries over the past few years, not just technical ones. I can't think of specific examples from the main search right now (I finally snapped and switched to DDG a few weeks ago), but here's a particularly terrible one from the Android Market:

https://market.android.com/search?q=yore&so=1&c=apps

I appreciate that Google thinks I'm an illiterate chimp who doesn't know how to spell "your", but really truly, I was looking for a game with "yore" in the title. That's why I typed it. It's even an English word.
You're right about the avenues, but as for the streets I decided to make them concentric circles, completely analogous to lines of latitude. So they never intersect.
One of the few jobs I'm too tall for.
Hello, all. I'm a software engineer working on BitTorrent's Live protocol. First, thanks for your patience while it's in Beta.

It seems many people in this thread came late to the stream, after the event was over (it was from 8:00pm to 10:00pm Pacific), so that explains why some of you weren't able to view the stream (we're working on adding archives of past streams soon).

If you'd like to be emailed invitations to future events, just fill out the email subscription link here:
http://live.bittorrent.com/

If you have ideas or suggestions, you can add or vote on them here:
https://bittorrentlive.uservoice.com/

It looks like a lot of you have questions about the technical details of the protocol. I'm not sure how much we're ready to disclose, but I'll mention this to the team and perhaps we can put together a juicier "about" page.

Thanks again.
Flash is Dead (No.)
I have a rejection letter from the last round. IIRC, the letter said the number applicants was either 2k or 20k. Sorry for the huge range, but it was ~4 years ago. I believe they accepted 12 into the program.
a search for:

os x

does what you say, but a search for

"os x"

does what the GP says, and matches with the numbers cited, too.
Yes, you thought of exactly the reason - debit cards are not safe. And I don't just mean fraud - mistakes happen too.

Additionally with a debit card you have to make sure to have enough to cover all your purchases.

With a credit card, you (hopefully) have a limit much greater than you need. Then once a month you go over your finances, pay the bills and you don't need to micromanage your account.

And http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3240408 brings up an additional point. Leave your money in savings, and transfer to checking only when it's time to pay the monthly bills.
Limits App ( http://limitsapp.com ) - An iOS app to track what drinks you have and discover when you're over/under the current drink driving limit. Just a fun app so we can exercise some freedom on all those little big details that clients seem uninterested in.
It's not FUD. If you donate bone marrow, the likelihood is 100%. The likelihood of donating may be < 100%, but that's not what is being discussed.
Apparently it's Hindley-Milner type system or Damas-Milner type inference. I didn't know that myself until I watched the video.
Comparison of the most influential YouTube videos on Twitter, G+, and Facebook
> Do you think there's an even remotely interesting, non-obvious answer to that question?

I'm sure of it. The answers to those kind of multi-faceted, tradeoffs no matter which direction you favor questions are precisely what provide real insight into someone's character and decision making, and precisely what Isaacson failed to pursue.

> And do we really need Steve Jobs to answer questions about PA Semi? Is that how you would spend your limited time with Steve?

Getting answers to questions that no one else could answer about what his thoughts and motivations were for making moves that still aren't really understood by many observers? Absolutely.

It would be so much better than a 600 page mess of regurgitated material from folklore.org and fluffy, uncritical overviews of the last ten years.

Take the App Store. Isaacson devotes all of a couple of sentences to mentioning that Jobs was initially against it, but was talked around to the idea. He completely squanders a fascinating exploration of Apple, Jobs, the myth of Jobs as font of all of Apple's good ideas, and the dynamics of one of Apple's most critical successes in the last few years. What were his objections then, and what are his thoughts on it now? Who talked him into it, and how did that play out? How did they approach the idea once Jobs was convinced?

We get no investigation, no insight, nothing of value. Just a declarative sentence from Isaacson stating the obvious, and it's on to the next facile overview.