skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you prefer Python and don't want to have Perl around just for the sake of 'ack', check out 'pss' - a similar tool written in pure Python: https://bitbucket.org/eliben/pss

[sorry for the plug, but it's definitely relevant to the discussion]
This isn't just about keeping options open. Entropy can be seen as a measure of available useful energy. It seems that it would be natural for human intelligence to have evolved to maintain as much useful energy as possible, since that would no doubt aid survival.

If that's true, I don't think it's as much that the developed process mimic intelligence, as much as that both (human) intelligence and this process act to meet the same ends.
The need to reproduce is more fundamental, and there are plenty of examples in nature of animals sacrificing homeostasis in order to reproduce -- male black widow spiders, for example. It's obvious why this would be the case; that's how evolution works. Keeping your future options open is a nice heuristic, but it's not necessarily an end goal.
Interpersonal skills are not a one-dimensional quantity. You and the OP are saying Steve Jobs was terrible at making people happy. That's different from making people do what he wanted, an area in which he was far from terribly unskilled.
You don't listen to vinyl for the "audio quality" in the sense of getting the most precise reproduction of a recording. You listen to it because of the color that the playback process adds to the music. There is something charming about the occasional click or pop, not to mention that a lot of older music transferred to CD wasn't necessarily transferred well. And music targeting vinyl to begin with is usually mastered differently.
Google was on the scene well before 2006. I think that comment was meant to be interpreted as

"people still used Yahoo! as late as 2006?"
Sad story, but he needs to set aside time for himself to recuperate and recover from a work week. The old saying that many people have said time and again, that they will go crazy from working, literally happened to him. Why work yourself to the brink of insanity when the people you work for do not honestly care.
>The proposal requires that a system be able to process information and predict future histories very quickly in order for it to exhibit intelligent behavior.

Well isn't that basically the problem with all attempts at artificial intelligence? Processing information quickly and predicting the future is far from simple.
I think a great many other people--mainstream customers who don't read websites like Hacker News--would argue that they don't care about the free software movement or hacking devices. They think people using the term "dictatorship" in reference to computer software are extremists. They just want Shit That Works.
Um..Shouldn't Steve had yelled at said middle management or at least sussed it out before yelling at engineers?
These guys have math and experimental results; Neitzsche was, at best, far more vague.
Or… http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/04/internet-heroes-help-blind...
And u are not my mom.
The audio piece is quite interesting, thanks for linking it.
The patents that have his name on them are design patents, not software or hardware patents. If he does have his name on a software or hardware patent, it is for legal purposes only.

I'm using the Jargon file's definition of hacker [1], which is :

"HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically, or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value (q.v.). 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; example: "A SAIL hacker". (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker".

[1] http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
I haven't used linq2SQL or anything, just LINQ on collections in .NET.

A team I'm a part of (language is C#) had to get rid of a library that handled SQL and do the SQL manually because the library was making a lot of inefficient calls. Sounds like a similar problem.
Hope no one from Slovakia or Slovenia gets involved.
Most consumer "health" products (running shoes come glaringly to mind) are not backed by science.

They may need to adjust their marketing to not run afoul of the FTC, but I'm sure a slight pivot will suffice. They will live or die by how well they satisfy a (psychological) consumer need, not whether the product "works." Do any of the exercise products advertised at 3am ... "work"? It doesn't matter.

[Note: this comment is intended as an unsnarky statement of fact.]
The Atkins diet (and almost every other diet I can think of) has been debunked, un-debunked, debated, berated, and praised almost from its inception half a century ago. It has not stopped the companies that promote the diet, produce the food, and publish the cookbooks, from making money hand over fist.

With any physiological system of sufficient complexity, whether it be human digestive/metabolic systems or the neurological systems responsible for memory and intelligence, there will be opportunities for profit as long as improvement of that system is desirable and a small fraction of the population believes they have the chance to improve it and the cost is reasonable. Plus, there will likely always be "success stories" to cite simply due to the placebo effect.

We have a massive alternative "medicine" industry that supports not only the people in it, but also, ironically, the people producing the constant flow of content criticizing alternative medicine. Lumosity will be fine.
Just a few hours ago a girl at my university mentioned the men in Boston were Czech. I figured it was an honest mistake as Chechen and Czech sound somewhat similar. Didn't know it was widespread...
I am not sure the value of patent counting. It is pretty easy to get your name on a patent as the CEO.

I wouldn't disagree that Jobs was good at his job, nor that he provided value to society overall, but I would say it is really difficult to tell the technical skills of a leader (since they don't get much opportunity to show them off).
49% of Wordpress Devs surveyed use FTP to deploy
How dare she have an opinion about management? Seriously. I'm glad you're here to police such matters.
What fitness taught me about programming
This is interesting not only for the way it lets you code, but for how it lets you pipe commands together graphically. Unix pipes are awesome and all, but chaining any more than 3 commands gets a little confusing with all of the parameters.
Also, she didn't know what he looked like that particular year. Not who he was. Some people just have incomplete photo shrines.
PostHaven doesn't have comments - and as this is the only place I post these, would love to hear any feedback! :)
Blub vs. engineer empowerment
Yes. Time in a rubber room.
Post-mortem of a failed interview
Hidden HTTPS: Get browsers to trust self-signed certificates
People listen to vinyl for its quality, not it's quantity on some technical metric.
> this self reference is a very distinct quality

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-schemer
My first thought, which may be wrong, is: Steve Jobs being a prick didn't make him more effective. He was a prick because he was so effective that he had a +5 sigma trail of early success[0]. Because of his effectiveness, he could get away with being a prick. Once he'd established momentum, it was "part of his charm".

[0] Sure, he got fired, but with a net worth of $500 million. Doesn't count. I'll let you fire me five times for a tenth of that. You can even do it in public. Hell, even have Donald Trump do it.

While it's arrogant to say this, I think I have nearly as strong a design sense as him. I honed it studying the German style of board games, and eventually writing my own games (most were failures, but I learned from them and got good). I optimized a trick-taking card game (Ambition) to drive out card-luck. Not an easy thing to do. After years of playtesting and throwing out things that suck and rebalancing, the damn thing plays well.

I was also a bit "youthful" in my self-promotion, got into some pretty awful flamewars on Wikipedia. I can't exactly hide that. I was 20. Shit happens. I certainly understand the mental "edge" that turns top designers into arrogant people. It's there, and it's part of what drives you to be great, but it also needs to be checked. Not because it's offensive or morally wrong to be a jerk, but because it makes you suck. If you're unaccountable for the quality of your ideas, you'll have bad ones.

When people see Steve Jobs's behavior, they see what someone like me would be like without a few hefty doses of humility (some deserved, others not) in my 20s. ::shudder::

As a competent-or-better designer, I will say this: you don't have to be a jerk to get good designs. In fact, often what you do as a design lead is take in other peoples' ideas, and moderate. If you shut people out (or scare them) you're losing signal for no good reason. You need all the signal you can get, because good ideas come from everywhere.

I think Jobs had one positive effect, which is that he burned away corporate bullshit. I'm sure that there was as much politicking under him as under any charismatic leader, but I think a Jobs-like figure makes it just too embarrassing to let corporate boondoggles get into the product. I'm sure there was just as much nastiness as anywhere else, but that the more successful lieutenants knew that a product that mirrored internal politics (Conway's Law, applied to design) should be shredded to pieces.

So maybe it does take an asshole figure like Jobs to keep a corporation from devolving into design-blindness... not because design requires assholes, but because of what corporations are.

That said, I can't stand the goddamn fake Steve Jobs's who use him to justify being an asshole. I am closer to Jobs than 99.5+ percent of them and not nearly as much of a jerk (I have my moments, but I fucking work like no one would believe on patience.) If you cite Steve Jobs to justify bad behavior (I've encountered this a million times) then you are an idiot because most people who behave badly are not Steve Jobs.
Coelacanth genome sequenced
There's no indication that she couldn't endure the silly dress down, just that it was a dick thing to do. Also, lady's been through a ton of shit, including cervical cancer (https://medium.com/lady-business/67303ff64202). So yeah, I think she could handle a little yelling. I'd do a little research before I put someone down. Guard your ignorance.
If there is ever an IOC++CC (International Obfuscated C++ Code Contest), I imagine that this technique will show up all over the place.

Bonus: Can you paste together the "compl" token with preprocessor macros?
True, but I think Steve was far more of a human psychology hacker than an inventive engineer. He got the internship at HP by calling the CEO and asking him for parts, and his crown technical achievement at Atari was getting Wozniak to design and build a game in 4 sleepless days and nights that he lied to him about to get the bulk of the payment from Atari: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/02/10-unusual-things-i-did... He didn't even know what FLOPS were when trying to sell Macs to academic scientists. He may have had good taste but was no engineer or inventor by a long, long stretch.
This reveals appalling ignorance of geography on the part of too many Americans.
Paul Graham Joins Watsi's Board of Directors
Can't argue with logic like that.
Sounds like this guy thinks Swordfish shows an accurate depiction of hacking.
This could be big.
I liked Upcoming a lot, and when I needed to learn Django I took a shot at making a similar clone, (though focused more on today and this weekend, something most sites don't feature).

It's a bit homely and needs some love but I'd like to upgrade and open-source it. Anyone interested? It's called kpasa and is at http://lax.kpasa.co/ .
It bears mentioning that the comments at the end of the article are worth the read.
That's not Steve "not understanding", it's Steve saying "I know your reason doesn't matter".
This reminds me of this one time in Iraq...
It's not too surprising in a country where my physics teacher would make comments about my Dutch grandparents (from Denmark) and what I thought of all those arab simoleans (Somalis) down in Minneapolis. And this was in Minnesota, where they have such a wonderful educational system...
FOr that reason, WebRTC Data channels use SCTP but encapsulated in UDP. It is implemented in user space inside the browser (probably not what you'd want but at least encourages deployment).

[ref] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jesup-rtcweb-data-protocol
You can record the playback of a vinyl record and transfer it to a digital record without losing any information. The clicks and pops were consciously removed from some vinyl records when they were remastered. If you wanted to, you could transfer your own vinyl records to a digital format. I'm not sure what you mean by the "color" of recording, because color can refer to either noise color or tone color. You might be thinking of effects that a valve amplifier adds to the sound being played through it (distortions, not clicks and pops). In this case, you can get the same effects by using an file that has been transferred to a digital format from vinyl.
It stuns me that you think the government doesn't do this. Arpanet, medical research, technological research, the list is endless.
Hi S.F. 5158 :-)
It seems to me that Nietzsche work is frequently discussed yet rarely read.

I read Zarathustra with a goal of non casual reading - it took me 6 months, due to what is IMHO the complexity of the issues discussed. One has to frequently stop at every paragraph to ponder whether one's understanding is correct, and how it articulates with the other paragraphs.

If on average, it takes more time indeed to read Nietzsche than any other author, there might be an adverse selection against reading Nietzsche's work - to maximise utility, if one is to judge utility by the amount of book read as I frequently see in goals list (1 book a week, etc)

A consequence could be that among those who are discussing his work, especially outside philosophy (CS, math, etc.) very few people have actually read any of it - or a whole book.
Agree.

This work claims that there is no goal in their implementation of intelligence, but forget the goal of "capturing as many future-histories as possible". With a right amount of tolerance for vagueness, it is not that hard to convince oneself that this goal can explain a lot of behaviors. But saying the same thing with new words is not very useful in cognitive science.

A more interesting question to me is this: could Dr. Wissner-Gross use his own theory to explain physicists' (including his own) obsession with cognitive science, a field they know next to nothing?
> But I think that when the deaths of people like Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy in the same month as Steve are ignored

Steve Jobs was a media figure who was present up to the end of his life, whereas Dennie Ritchie has invented something extremely important decades ago and then kept a low profile. The respective amount of media coverage has nothing to do with who was objectively the more important human, only postings like yours claim to know the answer to this, and I think it's rather tasteless.
Alex, I looked at the video and I even used stop-motion frame-by-frame to read it,
but that's a real problem -- most people won't bother. It's too short and too fast
to get any form of message across to the viewer.

Since you say you're "ready to launch" rather than "just launched" I'm wondering
if I should try tracking down you main site (you provided no link), or if trying
to track down your main site would be a waste of time (since it hasn't been launched
yet)?
That non-scientific summary article is incredibly vague, but it appears to be saying that "problem solvers" are more leaderly than "problem fleers", based on the given definitions. "Guilt" and "shame" are the labels they tacked on without justification
_why oh _why
I would argue Steve Jobs is a "hacker" more than most people here. He knew how to add circuits to modify games when he worked at Atari. Most people here can't do that, let alone design and ship a classic game like Breakout.

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Articles.Deta...
Homeopathy. Next question.

People are remarkably good at ignoring things they don't like to believe. Other people are good at exploiting those people.
Competition is good when it means better language support.
Even if the users expect "modern-looking" websites - it is not something that cannot be done with IE6.

Secondly, you don't have to design 1:1 pixel-perfect copy of your website that looks the same on all browsers.

The main thing - if your developers cannot degrade the website functionality - they are seriously doing something wrong - get more experienced

You can as well design Flash site and call it "progress" and tell the rest of our users to go somewhere else. Now, how is it different from other "modern" technologies? Its W3C support?

"but that doesn't mean an iPhone app developer is going to want to spend time porting his apps to one."

If your customers still use Palm Pilot, then why would you design your site ONLY FOR IPHONE??????
I worked at Apple as a contractor after Steve's return. He was in front of me at the salad bar one day - he didn't cut, was just there ahead of me. I noticed he piled a huge amount of shredded carrots in his plate... anyhow.

Steve was wearing his usual black turtle neck and blue jeans. He was kind of leaning forward and I noticed that I could see his underwear since he wasn't wearing a belt. I seriously pondered, "I REALLY SHOULD GIVE JOBS A WEDGIE". Sure, he'd be pissed. Sure, my contract would be cut short. But I would be THE guy who gave Steve Jobs a wedgie. I chickened out and didn't do squat. Missed my chance for greatness.
Maybe we should just say that anyone can hack anything, and that everything should be secure.

Unlike in real life, an attempted but failed attack will do no damage, ever.
It is also seems compatible with some experimental parts of economy, such as the study of soldiers of different countries trading MRE which suggest there is a value in diversity, not just taste or quantity.

If there wasn't, why would say french soldiers be exchanging their wine and pate de foie gras MREs - especially after having satisfied their curiosity of what other MREs taste like, ie after the first trade?
One Man’s Currency Is Another Man’s Bet
Cuts of beef? There is more than one way of doing it, it's completely cultural.
What Chip Vulnerabilities May Be Lurking in Commercial IT Systems?
Do you work at healthline?
He means according to Justice and Good, not the law.
Of course, it is easier to support only 1 mature platform , 1 database, 1 application server, 1 library of whatever. However we don't have this luxury even on the backend, and you cannot seriously expect it to be different for browsers.

And if you don't develop cross-platform because of lack of time this is fine. Please, don't cover it with insults about dumb CEOs and ignorant lame users - bad excuse for bad programming habits (not personal, just generalisation).

Again, there is no technical reason not to give workable version of the website to all major browser users. It doesn't have to be a pixel-perfect copy. It just has to work.
That link by james altucher gives him too much credit. This paints a more accurate picture of what happened at Atari: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)
Raises interesting questions about preservation and archival. Would be interested in hearing more on the angle of open-sourcing as a means for increased productivity.
40,000 comments on manhunt article useful in any way?
I deny that; it seems implausible. But I have no more information than you.
It will be interesting to draw psychologists who research human intelligence, especially those who do so from an evolutionary psychology perspective, into this discussion. I aspired to be a physicist back in my high school days, and yet today spend most of my time with academics among psychologists. It's good to see physics prompt some thinking about the nature of human intelligence.

A bibliography I like about current research on human intelligence from the classical and avant garde points of view in psychology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
Fantastic but why just games though?
I think it's about trying to minimize entropy (disorder) of the system. Maximum entropy is maximum disorder (which the universe tends toward naturally), such as when the pendulum hangs below the cart without any intervention.
Did Vinod Khosla use the Boston tragedy to promote a portfolio company?
Yes, you'd need a linter to stop you from using explicit null in your code. but than be layered on top of javac with something FindBugs and its friend @Nullable. It's not "Standard" Java, but it is compiler-time enforcement.
I agree, the ability to connect widgets is one of my favourite aspects.

It lets you create a customized for your specific needs instant feedback so you can keep changing the source and see how it affects your "calculated view."

I want to be able to answer questions like:

- What is the diff between the output of my program as is and at master^1 commit.

Sure, I can manually copy my repo, check it out at master^1 and save its output to file1.out. Then save the current output as file2.out and do a diff. But since that takes more than 5-10 seconds, the cost outweighs the benefits and I'll say "screw it, I'll just keep going as is."

On the other hand, if I build a tool that makes it possible for me to answer that question in under 10 seconds (and keep answering it as I make relevant changes, if I want to keep getting the feedback), then that will change how I work.

Unix pipes are absolutely great, but there are some areas for improvement.

- It's hard to visualize the output at the intermediate steps of the chain. So if you have "cmd1 | cmd2 | cmd3", you'd have to spend more effort than it has to be in order to see what cmd2 and cmd3 got as input.

- They are limited to text for visualization of output. Most of the time this is good, but what if you want to see a plot of 2D points?

- They're typically executed when you press Enter. Sometimes you might want to say "always execute this whenever source file changes."

The awesome part about software is that you can create and do anything. If something is harder than it could be, you can make the computer make it easier for you [1]. It only costs time and money.

[1] http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=711
I can keep insulting you if you like.
That's why I adore small startups where you can grow with others while being pushed to innovate. And people you work with likely to have the same mentality. The fact that the limited resource presents such challenge it's actually exhilarating! Well, my current job though hits almost all items on that list. It sounds depressing, but it has been a great learning experience! I like challenges and I don't believe in complaints, always make the best of the current situation. (really, I'm just squeezing every bit of learning opportunities out of it... big organizations got huge resources. Ha! =D)
Catching up to early 20th century western philosophy. Relevant links:

- Heidegger/World-disclosure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Time)
- Nietzsche's will to power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_to_power)
- Process and Reality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_and_Reality)