skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you likely would not be on this forum right now if not for him, the IBM pc only happened after early Apple validated the market.

Years before the IBM PC came out, I had a Heathkit H11 (a version of the PDP-11) and was writing and selling software for it. I'm fairly confident that the PC revolution would have happened with or without Woz. I had been working with 11's, 6502's and 6800's for years before that, and it was pretty clear that there was a revolution in the works.

The students at Caltech (75-79) I was with were all excited about microcomputers and quite a few designed and built their own systems from scratch (it wasn't very hard, the chips pretty much just plugged together). Hell even I made one around a 6800. None had an Apple II, mainly because a PDP-11 was the preferred system used to dev the software for the microcomputer boards.

Woz certainly made enormous contributions, and nobody can say what the shape of it would have been without him, but it would have happened anyway.
Some additional information on this, including how the system has been in place since 2010, with the recent change being that you're now (somehow) getting text messages without registering your mobile number:

http://riyadhbureau.com/blog/2012/11/saudi-women-tracking
> Has Woz ever demonstrated any expertise in design or UX?

Woz built a computer with an integrated programming language (Integer Basic) that he wrote himself. So the first Apple II hardware and software were both Woz' creations, including of course, the UI, primitive as it may have been: the first computer that you turned on and was immediately available for programming, with a color display, and nice tricks like the ability to display the code you're typing and the graphic result at the same time by splitting the screen, something that AFAIK never was made available on any other similar 8 bit computer.

So yes, indeed, Woz back in his time revolutionized personal computers UI, too.

By contrast, remember that the Altair had no screen and no keyboard (many used various terminals, ASR-33 teletypes or S-100 expansion cards to provide for a UI), and that you had to load a program from either the front panel keys or paper tape before doing anything with it, which was a huge PITA.
Not many household name games are built as a part time hobby. I'm not saying wait until you're a multi millionaire :)

You can easily make a decent Flash game or experimental iPhone game part time. My first Flash game, with over 200 million plays, was made in two weeks including the time it took to learn Flash.

The additional hours will get eaten up by business stuff and maintenance once you're full time anyway.

I dogfooded my own advice, for what it's worth.
More reading here: http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2012/11/02/dead-pigeon-sparks...
I've spent a lot of time researching Logic Programming and I'm always amazed how little known some of the languages/tools/techniques derived from it are. For some software problems Prolog, Constraint Logic Programming, SAT solvers are the natural choice for easy representation and solution and yet usually people end up rolling their own DSLs when there are so many out there.

SWI-Prolog has some very useful web features, there are even libraries to expose Prolog through web services. Java has tuProlog, another really clever piece of software which is actively being developed.

I look at some of the claimed benefits of functional languages and so many apply to Logic Programming, its just a shame that it's often ignored because it is so different.
Whoa whoa whoa guys, timeout! I thought Rails enforced REST conventions on all your models and therefore Gives You An API For Free? Wasn't that its big selling point? Or of adhering to REST in general?
Why Black Friday Is a Behavioral Economist’s Nightmare
Turning Point Clicker, popular college tool, has zero security
Facebook wouldn't let me invite my friends... jQuery to the rescue!
Magical rocks have this same problem.
Constantly Striving
Qualitative Market Research Vs Quantitative Market Research
That's why I attempt to mitigate the halo effect by using counterfactuals, historic branch extensions and alterations.

For example:

Steve Jobs, an art school college dropout, doesn't meet Wozniak - Where is he now? Steve Jobs gets himself killed in India. Steve Jobs doesn't get hooked onto computers or doesn't hang out with the right hobbyist crowd at the right time, in the right place, with few other options to pursue.

When you look at history you'll see a bunch of events that could have - and most probably - should have happened and things get a whole lot less certain. Things are only guaranteed to people because they happened - but at the time - not so much.

Once you see the world through this light - it's difficult to make the kind of statements that others make about the past and the future. It also reduces the effect of both the halo and hindsight biases and just generally lets you get a feeling for the anthropic principle and its constant interference with daily life (aka we would not be discussing this had Elon not been a success).

These are called mistakes of omission (could have happened) and not commision (did happen). The deeds of omission far out weight all the deeds of commission.
maybe take a look here:
http://nixos.org/docs/papers.html

from a theoretical, conceptual view point, nix is the holy grail in package management.
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Because apparently geeks have groupies and sling code while playing beer pong and downing shots. Who knew being a geek was so cool!
good show Matt, way to celebrate the holiday
If governments can censor for a "good" purpose, they can also censor for a "bad" one. For example, the laws and technology that allow you to interrupt access to a piracy website could be used to censor any controversial content (note that many positive advances in society, such as women's voting rights, were controversial when first discussed).

So, strong enforcement of intellectual property laws means problems to... free speech and society's progress, if that involves filtering or censoring content on the internet.
The Hernandez family, which is Christian, told InfoWars that the sophomore is declining to wear the badge because it signifies Satan, or the Mark of the Beast warning in Revelations 13: 16-18.

Not this shit again.
40 terrorist plots! What a load of nonsense. I see it works on some people though. The fact is, most of the cases I've followed had no follow up... because they were thrown out for being ridiculous (remember the Disney world "bombers"?). The ones I've been hearing about for the past few years were almost certainly FBI entrapment (i.e. the person would had done nothing had the FBI not convinced them to and funded everything). So I'd put this number at closer to zero. Even if it's one or two, they still would have killed less people than have died on the highways trying to avoid TSA.
Customisable Project Management - ProjectVision
Yea, that's what I tell people when they tell me this rock hasn't been protecting me from tiger attacks. Maybe the rock isn't doing anything, but is the risk of being mauled by a tiger worth testing this? Use your head people!
The H11 was released a year after the Apple I.

I had a KIM-1 at the time and the Apple was lightyears ahead of it, even though they shared the same processor.

Most other 'personal computers' were still stuck in hexadecimal keyboard territory.

I've rolled my own (6800, '09 and 6502 based boards) and learned a lot doing that but the Apple I and later the Apple II (neither of which I ever owned but an uncle of mine had an Apple II that I played a lot with) was a real computer rather than something more akin to a large embedded system, programmed with paper tape and terminal interface using current loop. The Apple stuff rocked the world of personal computing.

The difference was huge, and I'm pretty sure that the design elements present in the Apple II raised the bar considerably for the competition and had a direct effect on the PC lineage.

It would be nice to interview the designers of the original IBM PC to ask them where they got their input.
In all the articles I've read so far on this issue, I'm only being told that the ITU wants to control the Internet.

Can anyone point me to any actual information from ITU itself on what it wants to do ?
There are some parts which are not being properly interpreted though e.g. PEP 8:

"[...] the <span class="pre">''.join()</span> form should be used instead. [...]"
Then, why reinvent the obvious other wheel?

http://nixos.org/nix/
Total load of bullshit. TSA has never caught a single would-be terrorist. Not one. I'd submit that the FBI/CIA have also never stopped a terrorist plot that we don't know about. The reason I'm confident in saying this is because of the ones they have told us about. Why would you tell the public about cases where you pretty clearly entrapped someone if you had better examples?
Thanks - just opened an issue for that. https://github.com/d0ugal/peps/issues/1
How about Uber set aside $20 per ride in a fund and issue customers with claim card, a bit like a store rewards card. If the law ever gets changed so that Uber can refund the money then they commit themselves to do so, perhaps up to a limit of 5 or 10 years.

Soon the city will be full of people owed hundreds or thousands of dollars in refunds, a pretty solid reason to push for changes to the law, and demonstrate to the public just how much they're getting ripped off.
The Perfect Push Mail Server - Debian Squeeze With ISPConfig 3 & Z-push
can you give a brief summary of what the conclusions are?
Sneaky, and enormously helpful.
^ Must work for Google
>What would you think of an oncologist whose patients never contract serious, life-threatening cancer?

Since the science tells us that his methods reduce the rate of cancer (all metrics we can test to a degree), I'd think he's doing good work.

TSA, on the other hand, has been been called out by many actual security professionals for having shit practices that don't actually work. They're basically pulling a rain man scam and people like you are buying into it because you think there's no way to prove it hasn't magically stopped something we didn't even hear about. Actual professionals who don't have money invested in one conclusion or the other are saying it isn't helping anything.
Wait, the BBC caused the famine in Ireland in 1840s, nearly 100 years before they were officially founded?
And magnet link: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:66a30e1f6e602ba6c6d9b31a1e8fd1becf7289e0&dn=201211%5Fmusk.mp4
"A large, loud portion of the public will openly hate you regardless of what you do. Learn to live with it.
No-one will ever take your project as seriously as you, or fully realise what you’re going through.
Everyone will think they know better than you about your own project.
Getting noticed at all is incredibly difficult .
The odds of you making money out of it are slim.
If you want to succeed, you’ll likely have to sell out. Just how MUCH you sell out is up to you.
You have to develop a VERY thick skin.
Being open with the public isn’t neccesarily smiled upon 100% of the time.
You will meet many “game developers” but very few people who are actually developing games.
You need to have the ability to listen to all advice given to you. Remember that listening to advice doesn’t mean you have to take it. But listening can’t hurt and you never know what you might learn."

Lots of this is applicable to founding a startup too. Good advice tbh.
There's an implicit context of the Apple 1, so saying "the computer" is perfectly fine. No one is claiming Woz invented all computers.
From Idea (Saturday) to Build (Sunday) to TechCrunch (Tuesday). And Now?
It's not a reinvention, it's a fork: "Guix is based on the Nix package manager." [https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/guix/]

(More info here: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2012-07/msg000..., taken from icebraining below)
The forum we are talking on exists by the virtue of the fact that millions of people now have computing devices, and that trend had a couple of breakthrough moments, specifically, the 4004, the 8008, the 6502, the KIM-1, the Apple I (and later the II), the TRS-80, and after that a cambrian explosion of computer brands and models culminating in the PC standard and everything that followed from there.

A computer with a built-in glass TTY / memory mapped display and a dedicated keyboard was a game changer.

Likely that revolution would have happened eventually but I'm fairly sure (having been there and having used / played with most of the above, if not outright owned them) that the Apple I was a catalyst.

Hidden agendas can be inferred because people say stuff that makes no sense until you realize that they are gaining through some other channel than the one they are communicating on / about.

So if a guy tells you that you should go and deal with a specific bank and makes a real effort to hook you up you can infer that there may be a hidden agenda there. If he does not care which bank you deal with that would count as proof that he likely does not have a hidden agenda.

You can't be sure unless he tells you or until you find evidence.

I'm saying that you'll find it hard to find anything that you could pin on Wozniak that he would say because he gains from those words in an indirect manner at your expense.

I'm the last person on the planet to defend Apple and their products, I think they are just as bad or even worse than Microsoft and I wished they'd see the light and quit trying to push us back into some kind of locked-in new world of computing.

But I'm not going to deny the effect they've had on personal computing and how much I respect Steve Wozniak for his contributions and lack of guile.
According to the site of the project, "Guix is based on the Nix package manager."
This could turn out way better than current package managers if GNU doesn't screw it up.
Probably correct. Another option is that the message was produced using a cipher machine, which were in use by the allied forces at that time. If a machine and records of the pre-arranged keys still exist then decryption might be possible.
Sounds like he will be charging ~$500,000, with an free (optional) return ticket included in the price.

No telling what condos at Colony 1 will be going for.
Rails doesn't enforce anything - but it does encourage you to follow a RESTful style (not necessarily REST itself).

But the point of this is to strip out the defaults in Rails that are included because they are convenient in full-blown apps, that aren't needed in apps that only serve APIs (reducing bloat and probably making things faster). How much of an issue those things are in a real application will vary.

From the article:

> we can remove many parts of Rails that aren't important in an API context: many middleware don't make sense, and all of ActionView can go away

...

> Similarly, the structure of ActionController::Base is interesting: it includes a ton of modules that implement various features. This means that we can build an alternate 'controller stack' that doesn't include all of the ones that are in Base.
You can pretty much use this trick everywhere...
>Innovation is a risky business model. The companies can see what worked, tweak the theme and add to the game content, and have a MUCH higher chance of success.

Sorry for the hijack, but this is a key point to understanding why we need some kind of patent system. Thanks for this comment that I can come back to whenever there's another patent fight. :)
The preferred way of launching an app in Scala is as follows:

object HelloWorld extends App {
println("Hello, world!")
}

Rather than manually creating a main method, as is done in the OP blog.

It's also possible to simply write:

println("Hello World")

and that would be the entire app, but the preferred way of doing things is to extend App
How does one see what another has upvoted?
Innovation has a long-ish cycle. It's hard to evaluate it without looking at a 3-5 year block. It's probably also best not to look at the current year (unhatched chickens).

If you phrase the question as "Has Apple been innovative in Jan 2009- Dec 2011?"

I think you find they've been pretty innovative.
If his son paid $25 then that's the price of the game/experience for him. One should always consider total cost of ownership of anything, not the initial outlay.
The H11 was just a repackaging of the PDP-11 which had been around for years, at steadily dropping prices. It was far, far more powerful than the Apple II.

Apple had many firsts, but it's an awful stretch to say the PC revolution wouldn't have happened without them. It's like saying we wouldn't have airliners today if the Wrights never existed.
Musical instruments. Are they worth the pain?
Window, window on the wall… [PostgreSQL]
The security checks at airports serve very little use in preventing the destruction (through a small explosion) of an aeroplane, given that after going through the security checks it is perfectly trivial to buy large quantities of pressurised containers and accelerants.

On the other hand making sure no one has guns on a plane seems worth queueing at the metal detectors for. Maybe that is just me being anti-gun though...
+1 for the 'functional programming in Scala' mention. Really awesome and fun class to take.

Lecture are available here: https://class.coursera.org/progfun-2012-001/class/index
This has some good ideas and research, but the author seems fixed on the idea that the message was produced by an SOE agent using a poem cypher. This seems unlikely to me because the cyphertext is written on an official-looking form. Blank message pads and quantities of homing pigeons are presumably not something that an under-cover agent would want to carry around with them.
Developing scalable services with node.js and redis (chat example)
ActiveModel::Serializers is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!
Scala takes more time to learn, but targets a different audience. Scala runs on the JVM which lets you leverage Java libraries etc. For long-running apps Scala is usually faster than Go, but will use more memory than Go.
People display apparently contrarian behaviour all the time for perfectly rational reasons. Nobody 'wants' to pay taxes, yet we often vote for governments that raise taxes because we agree with what they intend to spend it on. We agree with the national speed limits becaus ethey improve road safety, then break the speed limit with embarrasing frequency.

I think this is another similar case. Hardly anyone really wants to die, but most of us can appreciate that eliminating death would rapidly lead to appalling resource crises, so I can easily see a majority choosing to ban such a technology unless the fairly obvious potential negative consequences can be shown to be resolvable.
You'd have airliners today. But likely they'd be the airliners of a decade or two ago.

The Wrights are an excellent example because they did what they did when they did it, and there were still people talking about whether powered flight was even possible. Kitty Hawk was a milestone for exactly the same reasons the Apple I was a milestone: huge improvement over the status quo, accelerating development and validating a market.

That's worth a lot in my opinion, it moves the needle with a large jump rather than a tiny increment.
Could be a page/offset in a one-time pad.
Also check out: http://blog.typesafe.com/free-pdf-from-typesafe-scala-for-th...
In my experience most people find that the best introduction.
You can control it remotely from your phone too which is really nice :D
The Value Of A Facebook Like
Thanks for clearing it up :)
> They are okay with them by default, and don't even bother asking.

I think it's even stronger.

I for one am not ok with lack of CCTV installations as in:

"They (stole my bike/slashed my tires/robbed my office) and (there was not a single camera to record this/image from only available camera was so crappy that it doesn't help)."
USA really needs to implement the EU's Data Protection Directive....
You do realise I said the same thing?
but this is not the attitude you have to have when writing compilers. from the compiler standpoint, it has to be correct, even in corner cases (which are not even as corner as you would like them to be).

A competent group can leave a dormant process that communicates over pipe for example and then the warmup issue disappears (it does not really appear for long running web application servers to start with)
>Sure apple have been innovative and have released some really ground-breaking advances in product design and standards, but he's commenting on the fact they have been stagnate of late.

The iPhone was released 5 years ago. The iPad, 2 years ago.

It actually took _more time_ to go from the first iPod to the iPhone, than the whole period the iPhone exists.

What exactly has the competition (MS, Google) produced at the same time that is innovating (not in some "groundbreaking tech" sense -- in the "a new product category/market" sense)?

Nothing at all. Google's innovating thing was search and maybe mail. Android is a me-too, first sold one whole year after the iPhone. MS innovating was mostly Windows and Office and the .NET ecosystem. Surface is a me-too going after the iPad and Metro is just a UI (and not a very good at that). So what's the point of comparison here? Vaporware like the Google glasses thing?

Plus, Apple brought to mass market (or, more precisely, brought to market, because only like 10 guys had those before) stuff like hi-dpi displays, unibody construction, and thunderbolt. And that "ultraportable" thing (as opposed to the dying netbooks), mostly inspired by Air? Introduced merely 4 years ago, again by Apple.
Nomadic programming
And it's that thought pattern that will mean that if we find a key to immortality, those of us that would rather try to manage the fallout rather than be consigned to the earth will be denied the opportunity.

Well that and the inevitable 'OMG unnatural, stop playing god'.
This isn't quite true; x86_64 has more general registers, which are helpful in writing VMs. At one time, Apple JavascriptCore was 60% faster on x86_64 Safari than on x86 Safari on the same machine, though I think the gap has reduced.
Not sure why the downvotes, but it's true. Ireland was an occupied state, and most of its food production went overseas to the UK. Including England in the total population makes no sense.
If you take a step back in perspective I think you find that both companies are incredibly innovative... compared to other big companies or by any fair standard.

Microsoft sat on huge market influence and a captive market for 15 years with Windows. Even with the recent changes in the consumer OS market, they still have a incredible market power. Yet, You can't really honestly say that they haven't advanced the product with innovation. Apart from Windows they also went into new product categories. They've been developing genuinely futuristic technologies.

Compare the innovation at MS to the innovation at Sony or Panosnic, IBM or SAP. There is (was?) a lot of hype around companies of more recent generations. Take Salesforce. They were applauded for being innovative and pioneering SAAS for enterprise. Forbes most innovative company. They are innovative, but not more that Microsoft. Nt over the long term.

Compare MS (or Apple) to companies considered creative outside of the tech industry and it's Mike Tyson vs a skinny 14 year old. Ikea? Toyota? The Prius is creative and innovative. Toyotas quality system is one of the big innovations in manufacturing. Ikea really has had a cultural impact with their designs. Their way of setting up stores is innovative and creative. But these companies do not compare to MS or Apple. If you take 3-5 year blocks individually you will find big-to-huge innovations from Apple or MS in every block. If you look at Ikea or Toyota, you won't.
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