skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That definition of "hacker" is so flawed and half-hearted I can't help but wonder why you defend it so passionately. Does programming really define someone's life and meaning so much that it requires listing the same area of interest five times? I'm a coder and I find that definition pathetically short sighted. Ironically even despite that definition, Jobs still qualifies for 3-4 of the definitions you name. No one appreciated technical talent better than Jobs (see, e.g. Woz)

I could keep going, but your points seem entirely designed to throw rehashed cliches about Apple that feed some cliched narrative. Your argument about patent assignment is so oddly narrow I'm just curious why you'd drag it out absent a general dislike of patents here on HN. But other then that IP quirk, I'm quite familiar with folks who believe it's fashionable to hate on Apple/Jobs. For these types, unfortunately many of them short sighted programmers, Apple can do no good, and everything Steve did was based on stealing other's ideas — evidence be damned.

Never mind that Jobs is the quintessential malicious and inquisitive meddler, the one who helped grow a film company, a music company that single-handedly changed the industry, and one of the top computer firms that introduced the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, iPhone and iPad, the latter four two while battling cancer. Now you can argue what it takes to do that, but only one thing really matters: building passionate "A-Player" teams dedicated and willing to pour their best work into building great products. You admit this and then negate it's importance, when it's actually all that matters.

Jobs built these kinds of teams over and over again, and he was very good at doing that. Part of that was his often abrasive attitude. He didn't tolerate lots of things, no less faux "hackers" who would dominate the discussion about what it means to be hack while completely missing the forest for the programming trees.

Nor did he tolerate constant optimists, who believing in "playing, and build great things together with all of the talented people who are working so hard on your behalf." Sorry, but that's a load of bullshit, and I'd buy it from someone who worked on one of the rare misses from Apple in the mid-2000s, MobileMe. I'm sympathetic to the author, she seems to be talented (nice SproutCore shirt) and means well. But there's no arguing that even after an initial gestation period that MobileMe wasn't a steaming pile of shit. You can debate all you want about web technologies and who's fault it was at the beginning, but the idea of cloud services isn't some breathtaking impossible task and as an end-user it was bad. Equally talented folks down the road in Mountain View were doing it and after a certain point you should feel bad if you're working on a consistently shitty product.
>>> Steve clawed his way to the top, and turned himself into a god, when all of his talents were really nothing more than hiring the right people (Steve would have been an absolute nobody if he had never met Wozniak (or a man of similar talent) to flush out his ideas) -- in fact he probably would have turned out to be a homeless person

You can say the same of almost everyone that is successful in the world. Also, Steve didn't turn himself into god, people did. Ambition and determination play a huge role in successful people's lives (depending on your definition of success), but LUCK is always a huge factor.

For example...

0.) Lincoln wouldn't have become President if he had given up after a few election losses, and we could make an argument that slavery in America would have taken much longer to abolish or not at all without his leadership. Perhaps Lincoln was mentally ill to run so many times instead of gracefully accepting his loss.

1.) Elon Musk would never have cofounded SpaceX & Tesla would not be possible without him betting his financial future on the company. But you could make a similar statement that Elon wouldn't be who he is today, if he hadn't left Sooth Africa, if he hadn't stumbled upon SV, etc.

2.) JayZ would never have become what he is today, if he had gotten busted or shot in his younger years when he was dealing drugs.

3.) Nelson Mandel wouldn't be who he is today if he had given up on his ideals and dreams of the future while serving for 27 years in prison.

4.) Justin Bieber wouldn't be the most popular musician alive today if he(his mom) hadn't uploaded a video on youtube that resulted in his being recruited by some music manager and promoted just as social media and sharing where becoming the part of everyday life. He'd just be another guy that saw singing as a hobby or gained only regional fan following if he pursued his passion.

TL:DR -> Almost everyone you know, respect, admire or don't would have been an "absolute nobody" if it weren't for certain circumstances favorable/unfavorable in their lives.

On a more generic level, you could say if a person's biological mother hadn't consummated a relationship/fling/marriage with that person's biological father, that person and everything s/he has accomplished wouldn't exist.
If someone who happens to be Christian carries out terrorism, is this Christian terrorism? Or do we have a special exception for Muslims who carry out terrorism, that their terrorism is Islamic terrorism?
Steve Wozniak about Steve Jobs:

> Jobs was a good husband and father and a great businessman who had an eye for details. He said Jobs was a good marketer and understood the benefits of technology.

> When it came to Apple's products, "while everyone else was fumbling around trying to find the formula, he had the better instincts," he said.

> According to Wozniak, Jobs told him around the time he left Apple in 1985 that he had a feeling he would die before the age of 40. Because of that, "a lot of his life was focused on trying to get things done quickly," Wozniak said.

> "I think what made Apple products special was very much one person, but he left a legacy," he said. Because of this, Wozniak hopes the company can continue to be successful despite Jobs' death.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/steve-wozniak-steve...

While you're right that Steve Jobs would have gone nowhere without Steve Wozniak, the reverse is likely also true. Steve Wozniak had a big doubt on working on the Apple start-up; the security HP offered him was very tempting. I don't think the world would have known about Steve Wozniak if Steve Jobs didn't convince him to leave HP for the Apple start-up.

I agree Steve Jobs might have been a sociopath, but then again, aren't many higher-up people in other businesses either? I think what mattered for Apple is that Steve Jobs cared about products most of all - sociopaths at many other companies only seem to care about how much money they make.
> One has to frequently stop at every paragraph to ponder whether one's understanding is correct, and how it articulates with the other paragraphs.

Which is interesting, because Nietzsche is generally seen as one of the more accessible of the philosophers from around that period.

I highly recommend reading Arthur Schopenhauer's work as well which heavily influenced Nietzsche. It predates Nietzsche's work by about 30yrs but it is very similar (although much more nihilistic).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer
It sounds like crazy nonsense but there's just enough in it to sound crazy awesome.

I've got like, an undergraduate understanding of how this works. Does anyone have a link to an ungated copy?
At the time they came to the US, they were tiny little boys. They are from the US, we just don't want to own them.
The only insight we used to get into "bad people" was second hand, what people had seen and the things they had done. Now we get to see it all first hand. He has over 1,000 tweets from the last 18 months, Tweets that offer an insight into what he enjoyed, what he did, how he felt... we get to see him as a human. How many people saw Ted Bundy as a human? Maybe I'm overstating the value of his Tweets.
Denying people agency for their actions is just as dangerous and dehumanizing as vilifying them as inhuman monsters. They are human monsters who are responsible for their own actions.
I would say SD would be friendlier. They actively advertise in the Minneapolis area boasting of their business friendly government. They'd completely go for something like this, but then, nobody'd want to live anywhere in SD. Ever.
Boston Bombing U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Known As Aggressive Prosecutor
To the ambiguity comment:

Can is really annoying. Can is a verb. Can is a Noun. It is part of a Noun Adjunct.

The rules to determine "The chicken soup can help when you are sick" and "The chicken soup can landed on my foot" and "We can peaches to eat later" is very hard. More so if you put them in a complex compound sentence.
Many would argue[1] that “responsibility” is an entirely perfunctory concept when you admit that society should judge and control you based on the actual consequences of your actions (and expectations of similar future behaviour).

[1]One of the many is HN-aligned Sam Harris: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/life-without-free-will
The headlong stream is termed violent

But the river bed hemming it in is

Termed violent by no one.

- Bertolt Brecht
You should be able to use LLVMs libc++ with GCC, just like you can currently use GNU libstdc++ with Clang.
The unabomber's manifesto was highly enlightening, and also frightening for how right he seemed on some of his points even if you technically disagree with many of them.
Wait, what? You follow people on twitter who knew this nobody?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Eagan_Holmes#Events_leadi...
Summary: He created a status symbol using other people's ideas.
Well, the Urbit essays (linked in the article) are one attempt to resolve it, but bitrot still remains unresolved. I don't think I wrote anything indicating otherwise. If it doesn't see the light of day, it dies; bitrot is a slower death, but open source is a prerequisite to software not just disappearing into the void. I'd really like to have presented a solution to bitrot, but I don't have one.
I think you've asked an interesting, reasonable question here, but you should have looked for a way to avoid any suggestion of sympathy if you hoped to see answers to the former as opposed to reactions to the latter.
Can't they be both?
In the interview one of their uncles said that the older brother called around 2009 or so and started babbling about Islam and "holy war". So this uncle shut him off pretty quickly by saying it is a complete nonsense.

The younger brother's "V Kontakte" page has some stuff that shows him in a bit different light compared to his twitter account. Perhaps because it was in Russian he was a bit more revealing. There he was a member of several Islamic groups (not exactly extremist ones, just in general Islam oriented). He also posted few comments and even a joke that sort of indicated how Chechens have been treated, the joke goes like this: "The Question: Chechen, Ingush and Dagestani are in the car, who is driving the car? The Answer: police".

What I think happened is that the older brother could not adjust quite well, and had some beef with his relatives as they were not too close. So these two brothers were sort of marinating in their own insanity. The older one could not fit in, probably felt like a failure and was a good candidate for a brainwash. The younger was another good candidate, their parents are still in Dagestan, both brothers lived alone.

I think it is a very complicated case and I think they acted alone, because they lost it alone at some point. Left to themselves they were easy prey to propaganda machine. I personally think it is extremely sad case for every single person involved including victims, their families, bombers and their families. The only winners are those who are spreading hate and brainwashing vulnerable people at the lowest point of their lives.
Yes: http://alexwg.org/
Agree. Pursuing your Morrison analogy: so many artistic and literary figures are similarly hard to characterize. Polarizing their colleagues and fans, causing denunciations, feuds, embarrassment. Difficult to compare to anyone (i.e., outliers, as you say). Think of someone like Norman Mailer, or Gore Vidal. These people are not role models!

They don't have to be that way, but it's a lot more likely.

After they are gone, asking "were they a good person" is usually not the right question (unless you were close to them).

If you know them mainly through their work, the right question is, "do you value their work?" Here's the relevant quote from Auden:

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
This is a poor attitude for any means of governance and order. A crime (robbery, murder, harassment, etc...) is more than an attack on an individual, it's an attack on the system as a whole. It's much more important that we prevent these malicious acts from happening at all than it is that we provide retribution in an "eye-for-an-eye" manner, and hacks are no different.
Even a deranged motive provides some explanation, which is more than we have.
Explanation != Excuse

http://www.lewrockwell.com/callahan/callahan60.html
He will not be treated as a normal citizen and will be interviewed by the "high value detainee interrogation group" https://twitter.com/abc/status/325417178927083524

edit: Carmen Ortiz (prosecutor in Aaron Swartz case and now Boston Bombing/Manhunt) confirms use of public safety exemption
Imagine the fallout from a large DNS amplified DDoS attack under this law. I guess that would be an incentive to filter recursive lookups
I don't think Apple would be where it's now if it wasn't for Objective-C, IMHO. I don't know why, it just feels right.
People should try to compare what Bill Gates achieved, and what Steve Jobs achieved. Bill gates is not microsoft itself, but steve jobs was apple itself.

Jobs's success was thanks to Bill Gates's success. You don't snap and make iphones without all the experience brought by what microsoft pushed on computer manufacturers.

Not to mention OSX grew thanks to unix too. objc is still a massive pain in the ass for many developers, who just want to use C/C++ and forget about objc stuff NOBODY USE. How come a device which sold so much, wants developers to use stuff that begins with NS prefixes ? When does ideology got into technology ? Nextstep is the only piece of sh*t jobs seems to have created, and that's how he wanted to shove his dick onto nerds.

Jobs was a salesman figure. You now discover that's what our pre ww2 consumer world likes to buy. Salesmen who looks like the guy who either buy it or make it. Nothing new here. Stock don't reflect value of something that is aimed at research and looking for programming talents. People who can apply their skills onto a market in need to evolve. Please tell me how many traders actually know what is the industrial difference between all those techs which depends on the stock they buy.

Learning both programming and electronics is not for everyone. Even today, there are very few former mechanics who can know how to trade automotive stocks, but the economy don't care about them.

You can be good at selling differently-sized cars to be more competitive, but in IT, the possibilities are so far from exploited into the right direction, it becomes quickly irrelevant to sell cars with the same underlying technologies.

But all of this is nerd rant. Good luck telling western consumers all of that. At least in Asia, people are able to understand technology and that might be why android has so much success. Over there they make the different between hype and charlatans.
I don't believe that humans have free will although from time to time I doubt my believe because it is so extremely far from our everyday experience. But this kind of thinking is not dangerous; either there is free will and everybody is - at least partially - responsible for his actions or there is no free will and we are done because everything just happens and we cannot even freely discuss this.
A third train of thought is that we evolved to live in groups, able to show great empathy--the source of most "good" actions--for members of our group, and no empathy at all for anyone else. That would acknowledge our natural tendencies to be helpful and loving, selfish and destructive, depending on worldview and circumstances.
Yes, I was personally contacted by one of the founders after I made an enquiry. I was asked to fill out their online doohickey to evaluate whether I would be allowed to "be on their team."

Haven't done much of anything with it right now as I am not all that open to giving a bunch of guys on the internet more personal information than what can be mined from my LinkedIn profile. I am certainly NOT open to giving out names and contact details for my references to be bugged by completely unknown strangers before I've ever spoken to anyone and seen if this is anything of interest to me.

It seems intriguing, but I am playing it very carefully.
CipherCloud used DMCA Takedown on StackExchange discussion of their cryptography
I interpret that quote differently than you. To me he's saying not that we won't learn anything from evildoers, but that it's important that we really try.

And I think that's exactly right. The younger suspect seems by all accounts to be a smart young man. It's important that we try to understand what drove him to do something so terrible, even as we denounce it.
Even if you don't have free will, if you set off bombs and shoot cops for no good reason, there is something wrong with the way you're wired inside. Someone might even say it's "your fault".
I made http://1fiesta.com

It only works in Oregon, USA, but let me know if it it's interesting to you guys and I'll add more places.

Also check out the list I made at http://dontstartaneventaggregator.1fiesta.com/
They get a month off twice a year (in between sessions), effectively, and outside of a few peak intensity periods (interviews, demo day, maybe applications), it seems dramatically lower stress than working at a startup.
Are there any good counter-examples of uber-successful tech CEOs who aren't/weren't jerks?
> One thing this article fails to mention is the wide range of Android devices which makes testing harder. It is much easier to test and launch an iOS app vs Android app.

Bullshit. I'm an Android dev and unless you're dealing with low-level hardware stuff, this is not an issue. I've done both high level stuff and low level stuff, so I've seen the difference.

And even if you are doing low-level hardware stuff (like you might for some intensive games), there's nothing stopping you from targeting a handful of the most popular Android devices and then expanding from there. You can restrict which devices your app will show up for on the Play Store.
Neither the airliners.net discussion nor the New York Times article seem to think this is a serious problem.

example on airliners.net: "The cracks are on the outer glass surface, which is non-structural. The glass is used as a wear surface since it resists scratching and pitting much better than the acrylics that are used for the main structural part of the window. So a "broken window" is not a big deal at all."

nytimes: " “Even considering that the 787 is a new aircraft, which tends to come with initial glitches, we are not seeing a higher incidence of reported problems compared to other aircraft,” Mr. Yamada said."
It's Trebuchet MS, a standard font on Windows/OSX, with Arial as the fallback if you don't have it...
I think one important reason for a debate like this is that the leaders we choose as role models defines the direction we move as a culture. It's a moral question we're debating (or that we should be debating) - is it better to emulate Steve's leadership, or someone else's?

Shrinking from normative discussions like this is essentially abandoning the idea that there is any moral dimension to technology, which is more dangerous than any side you can take in the debate.

There is a difference, of course, between meaningful discussion and fanboyism. But whether or not Steve is worthy of the praise he has is definitely worth discussing.
Reality is not so dichotomized. Human choices are influenced by both nature and nurture (i.e. environment). In psychobiology, I believe the consensus is that nurture contributes at least 50% to personality development and consequently propensity for certain choices and behavior. If inherent nature can't be changed, how could have the environment been different, to change the outcome? That was what I got from the parent comment.

By the way, if we're talking about "fundamental" qualities of a person -- from a biological standpoint, there is some evidence for a genetic propensity toward 'good' (e.g. altruism) or 'bad' (e.g. violent) behavior. But the vast majority of people land somewhere in the middle.
He just set a goal of keeping the potential energy maximized for the rod, just like a big blue set a goal of winning at chess 30 years ago, both by 'predicting the future'.

I don't see anything new here except the phrase 'future histories' which is not even defined because it just means 'the future'.

As soon as I saw it claiming it can win at the stock market I knew it was BS.
Aside from embedded/routers and Windows machines, it's few and far between. At the very least you're going to have something ancient like Perl 5.6 or 5.8 installed.
Shift+Ctrl+M on Linux (Ubuntu 12.10 here).
If this is a new piece of scientific research, why is there already product marketing around it? The website has named the product "Entropica", and has a demo video that is (while interesting) pure marketing.

New research ideas do not typically come packaged as a product for sale.
I'm curious as to the basis of your statement. I believe the opposite to be true. Gene theory, the general theory, anti-biotics, the structure of DNA, the function of neurons, and the transistor all came from specialists. Is it not the rare breakthrough that comes from cross-disciplinary work?

The cross-disciplinary breakthrough is often characterized as unifying, and hence rightfully celebrated. But they are neither the norm nor the most influential.
I think the Dorner thing has some factors you're not quite taking into account.

1. He was a trained professional
2. He knew their hand, their next move even
3. He was an outed cop on a rampage based on inequality in the ranks of the LAPD

I don't think Dorner was ever going to be brought in alive, the LAPD didn't want him to have a soap box to preach from or to give him hero status. I remember shaking my head as I listened to police scanner while they started to set the cabin on fire.

This was a scared confused kid hiding in a boat with the nation watching and wanting to hear what he had to say. The other seemed more like a shut it up, sweep it under the rug, the guy is a nut, let's all just forget this happened kinda thing.
One issue might be manpower ... My impression has been that MS's compiler team is woefully understaffed / overworked given the relatively influential position of their products.
> That's bad, because the most interesting breakthroughs came from cross-disciplinary work.

True, but I think the signal-to-noise ratio is also exceptionally low. The most amazing breakthroughs come from insights that span disciplines, but it's also easy to think you have an insight when what you really have is a mistake. I'm not weighing in on this one in particular, but as a general principle I think caution is appropriate in cases like this.
You still need to carry the same mass of hydrogen and oxygen than the resulting mass of water, though.
The "Public Safety" Exception to Miranda
I ran it through our stuff we do fine with segmentation of your comments. We still have trouble with certain poorly formatted numbers, or if you do something like for get a space after a sentence that ends in a number. "I'll take 2.In case I need one later."

Typos are really hard for rules systems.

PS
Glad you didn't hate it.