skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, Sociopaths might have extreme qualities which might enable extreme outcomes, but that doesn't mean we need to enable them. It is overwhelmingly unhealthy and negative for anyone connected to them. Been there.
> I can seriously try 5 startups in 4 years and I'm a millionaire afterwards,

I'm guessing you aren't in the startup world, or haven't been for very long.
I'm sorry, but you worked at Apple (doesn't matter if it had been only for a week) and you didn't know who it's CEO was? You worked at Apple, and you didn't know who STEVE JOBS was? or had seen a picture/video of him somewhere?

That does NOT compute!

There are plenty of 'Steve' stories (www.folklore.org) out there. Conclusions vary from person to person as to what kind of person was Steve Jobs, but most people wouldn't taken back the time they worked with him/or Apple. Apple's/his contributions to computer history really outweigh the means it took to get there. Sometimes it just takes a jerk (most-likely insane), human being to push people to achieve extra-ordinary things.
In my experience a data link takes far more power than wifi, so the extra use won't be very notable.
In OP's anecdote he wasn't right
Antisocial people (no guilt, low fear, manipulative) tend to be successful at managing because of ability to make decisions fast.
I'm often frustrated at folks who take the wrong lesson from Steve Jobs.

As this piece describes, they look at the dude and take away that they should be jerks because that's how things get done. And that's a terrible lesson.

In my read, as a guy who's been following Apple since he was a kid, there's one principal lesson for leaders and entrepreneurs:

If you care about making exactly what you want, make sure you're the boss.

That's it. You can define the agenda, you can get the right people, you can motivate them according to your style. You get to win all the design arguments. You get to slip the deadlines for quality.

You can definitely be a jerk in that context, but you don't have to.
Can we stop with the tl;dr's?
What are you talking about? If it's "fun" it's "fun".

Maybe I'm just blind and everyone is jumping into startups for no equity/salary. But in actuality, the startups out there offer realistic deals, if they don't, don't take the job. Simple as that.

One thing is for sure though, you're not going to get as good a deal at a startup as you would at a big company. There is a reason for that, you (should) have a possible big payout.

Now, if people are actually taking low paying jobs with barely any equity while the founders feast, I totally agree that's messed up.

Also, the Michael Jordan example doesn't apply. He would be like a Google employee that demands a higher salary, and because he's worth it, gets it. He was having "fun" playing in the NBA, so he stayed. If he went out to start his own basketball league that would be a different story.
> If anything this makes Federal Debt more useful and attractive than private debt.

A theoretical observation borne out quite well by the observed market characteristics of federal debt (e.g., the federal governments cost of borrowing.)
Its a testament to his legacy that these "You are/not like/dislike Steve Jobs" articles keep popping up. Jobs is what you call an EXTREME OUTLIER. People like him come around once every 30 or 40 years. You don't compare outliers to the mean, because they skew everything.

Nothing anyone ever writes about what to do or what not to do like Steve Jobs is relevant, because he was so far off from any of the data points we have or probably ever will have to matter. You get people like this in history; ones that seemingly do so much wrong yet change the entire world. I don't know if we'll ever have a concrete explanation for it, but for some reason the bad things ARE part of the reason for their success.

Another more common example of this is Jim Morrison (or any really good drug addict musician). Do you have to be a drug addict to be a musician? Of course not. And I seriously doubt they're gonna start dropping acid at Juilliard. But somehow there's a few of them that make it work, and I would argue that if Jim Morrison wasn't a drug addict he wouldn't have been as successful as he was.

If Jobs wasn't such an asshole, he wouldn't be Steve Jobs. There's some mix assholishness and genius (that he got absolutely perfect) that creates a legendary figure.
Number 1 infographic fail
It's a little bit crazy that all the responsibility of preserving this data resides with the Archive Team[1] and the Internet Archive[2].

[1] http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

[2] https://archive.org/web/web.php
Both you and the servers you're pulling the content from are stationary on the ground, and any satellites used are in geosynchronous orbit. ISS is travelling 17000 mph. So while it may have clear line of sight to a ground station in New Mexico one minute, the next minute that same line of sight is in Texas.

Also, for a spacewalk the video source is from a space suit, so the video signal is sent wirelessly from the spacesuit to ISS, then sent to a TDRS satellite, then to the ground. The spacesuit camera is admittedly not as good as I'd like it to be, but considering all the architecture supporting it started being put in orbit over 10 years ago, and was designed before that, it's pretty good.
Goog Analytics for Beginners
I would argue that there are plenty of better, and less publicised, examples of people who are passionate about their work than Steve Jobs.
Ask HN: CRM for Managing PR Leads
I'm looking for CRM software that's designed for PR leads. Budget is sub-$200/month ideally with multi-accounts.
You assert that text books are no different from novels? That's absurd.

(If your assertion is that text books are, in fact, art, then I agree with you. But they're a very different sort of art from the sort that _why was creating – starting from the fact that the Poignant Guide is a work of fiction, and most textbooks are not.)
Art inspired by how we say the word "future"
What I love about Chris Hadfields updates are that he is entirely world centric. "400 thousand of us live here" in Countries on the other side of the world. Devoting time not only to Canada and the US but truly communicating the importance of "International" in the title of the ISS.
As a general rule, if you're a CEO and you find yourself assembling a group of people who don't directly report to you, so you can tell/yell them how they failed you... stop yourself.

The people who failed your are (a) your direct reports and (b) you yourself. Figure out how the correct information didn't get to you, or how you ignored it, and fix that problem.

There's zero chance a roomful of individual contributors all got it wrong at the same time -- the only way they all got it wrong was that they lacked the proper leadership.
I found it is a bit odd that you couldn't pick your supervisor. I think in most universities who you want to work with are up to you and the supervisors who wish to accept you. The best advice for finding a good supervisor is to ask current graduate students. Some supervisors are well known to be good supervisors among grad students whereas others are known for being super mean to graduate students.. Current grad students usually know who are good at supervising. Also ask about the style of supervising. Some supervisors are very hand off but you get little support from them. Others can help you a lot but may impose their ideas onto you.
"The market pulls the product out of the startup." -- Marc Andreesen [1]

Steve Jobs was remarkably good at finding new markets. And once you've found one, you can screw up a lot and still succeed. Because at the end of the day, people want to work on a successful product, and they'll put up with a lot of shit to do so.

Steve Jobs probably would've been even more successful had he not been so abrasive; who knows, maybe he wouldn't have gotten thrown out of Apple the first time and we would've gotten the iPhone 15 years earlier rather than the Newton. But he got the thing that matters most right, and then pretty much everything else fell into place despite his flaws.

[1] http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups/4104...
What I found so interesting about this post is how neutrally Kottke presents it, when I was expecting something that would sway me in some direction. You're absolutely right about how unremarkable the comments are, I finished reading the entry, then paused for 20 seconds or so, just thinking "yeah, and...?".

The only reaction I could come up with was a feeling that the guy seemed to be thoughtful, reasonable, and careful with his language - that didn't seem to me like a person who would kill and maim innocents. It removed a layer of I suppose 'profiling' I'd been projecting on the perpetrators and made me feel like I knew less than I had before reading these comments. A kind of: "This is the guy that did that terrible thing? Well I guess I really don't know anything".
> I guess heat conduction is difficult if your spacecraft is in a vacuum.

Very much so. Search for "heat" in this SVG and you'll see the giant accordion radiators: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Iss027e03...

When the Space Shuttle was in orbit, it kept its giant bay doors open to expose its radiators.

If you'd like, I can dig up some extensive articlage written for hard sci-fi writers about dealing with heat for engines and for life support.
CISPA Would Have Spoiled Reddit's Boston Investigation
FWIW, it's an inevitable occurrence of cargo cult management, a sort of post-hoc reasoning, and it's not just young CEOs of tiny startups that are prone to it (but immaturity and inexperience do seem to be correlated with this particular brand of Jobs-envy).
There's a third factor - Steve was very good at active listening. He oozed it in interviews.

I saw it big time when Walt Mossberg made some comment about "Oh, we can't say that". Steve latched onto him like a pitbull - "Why not?". Walt said "Well, people get annoyed. They write ... letters".

You could just see Steve's thinking - "I don't understand what he's saying, or why he's saying it. Figure out why."

You can also see it, indirectly, if you watch him when he was talking tech. He's well known to not be a great techie, but he knew quite a bit. Maybe he was just well briefed, but I think it was because he knew to ask questions to the guys who were briefing him.
CISPA passed
I can't speak for Russian EVAs [1], but in US EVAs we always have a long tether reel attaching us to station. If we need to get further than that tether reel allows, we attach another tether reel before releasing the first. Additionally, we have a sort of jetpack called a SAFER [2] in case a tether (or the user) fails.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra-vehicular_activity

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Aid_for_EVA_Rescue
Lets not forget that it's hard to imagine Steve being successful if he hadn't paired with the equally extraordinary Woz. Yes, Jobs got along just fine without Woz, but only after the Apple ][ gave him enough runway to continue pushing his vision. Jobs was special, but he still made errors that would've tanked lesser companies.

It should also be noted that Jobs should be given credit for dragging a reluctant Woz into the spotlight..their estrangement is to me one of the most bizarre and saddest mysteries about Apple.
Honestly, I don't think he could have been more successful no matter what he did. Apple's comeback is easily the most dramatic in the history of business.
that's not a bad idea.

there should be a <cake> tag.
Wasn't Summly bought due to an agreement between Yahoo and SRI?
This Is the Modern Manhunt: The FBI, the Hive Mind and the Boston Bombers
I'm waiting for the corp blog to come back up and list 7 products being shutdown, with the corp blog itself being the 7th item on the list.
You DO need special compiler support for Maybe! Specifically, you need algebraic types. Consider Java. There is no pattern matching and no syntactic construct to decompose algebraic types. So an Option has to be cast to Some before extracting its value, risking a ClassCastException if the Option was actually a None. This is just as bad as having nulls, since programmers will just cast without looking.
Research hasn't born that out: Stanford researchers found that guilt correlates highly with leadership ability:

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/leadership-guilt-f...

Note the difference between guilt and shame. Shame correlates negatively with leadership ability since it makes people shrink from challenges and disconnect from people. This may be why we get many high-functioning sociopaths in position of leadership: sociopaths are the only people who do not feel shame at all.
Dealing with callback functions in loops in Javascript
Out of curiosity, what was it that was keeping you at that job? Lack of money? Family? Moving options?
It doesn't even need to be a wired mic. There are lighter wireless mics available.
How odd. I usually find myself thinking exactly the opposite when someone posts a video or audio clip.
Ideally it would probably be just coast while looking for a new job in your spare time.
Reddit users setup live collaboration to track Boston manhunt
Ultimately, Steve Jobs had an insight into what computers could be, how technology could work, that was not only powerful but that Apple worked to execute throughout the entire stack of its product. From industrial design to operating system to software, his vision infused Apple's products in a way that very few other computer manufacturers have seen. Even now, as "well-designed products" are becoming a popular thing – due, in no small part, to Apple's influence – it is difficult to find products that are as thoroughly, nit-pickingly well-thought-out as Apple's stuff.

Back when nobody had much of a reason to believe in Steve Jobs and his vision, his tyrannical style was what got teams working outrageous hours, sacrificing personal lives, and shipping products that all sane people were convinced couldn't be done. So at a key moment in Apple's history, he provided a push that brought the company great success.

Very few people have that sort of all-pervasive vision; most of the people who think they do are deluding themselves. Most of the time you don't need an asshole on top driving things. Heck, it's possible that even Steve didn't have to be an asshole, that his dickish personality was just a shortcut he used to get things done conveniently.

Plenty of brilliant people have unpleasant or antisocial personalities. Sometimes it's because that's what it takes to make people who don't share your vision do what they're told. Sometimes it's because brilliant people are human too, and as flawed as any of us. Usually it's somewhere in between.
Why not call it a living standard?

http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5
> XP falls out of support next year

But Vista and 7 do not, and you can can run IE8 on them just fine. IE8 itself is supported as long as Windows 7 is, which is Janurary 2020 for the extended support phase.

> Once you're on non-antique Windows, there's nothing preventing you from going all the way to IE10

Nothing. Nothing at all. Unless you consider a large collection of legacy applications that either just plain don't work in anything other than legacy IE or simply haven't been tested (and signed-off as compatible and SLA-covered by the supplier) in anything else.

They can't take the risk of not getting getting those apps thoroughly tested before upgrading and that will cost money (as will any changes, or complete replacemets, needed) and more importantly a huge amount of time (nothing moves quickly inside a bank no matter how hard enthustic and/or concerned people push - organisations of that size have trouble working up the inertia for significant internal changes).

My suggestion has always been to install something else alongside IE and migrate that way: keeping IE around for those applications that require it (or have not been signed-off as working well on something else) but having something better for applications that don't rely on "classic" IE's excetricities. I get funny looks for that suggestion though - the thought of training users to cope with two programs where they once had one seems to trike TS people cold.

> approaching negligence

One of the key drivers working against building up change inertia is fear of neglidence (or accusations there-of). Large organisations have a significan aversion to risk, organisations within regulated industries (where you may do more than fail: you may fail and pick up a hefty fine and/or loss of license along the way) in particular, if they were people you'd probably call them neurotic on the matter. Change without sufficient plannig is a form of negligence, and fear of this is a large part of what adds friction to any forward movement.
@Nullable plus static code analysis gives me quite a bit of static-time feel goodness in Java without any need for Optional/Maybe.
Run. Cycle. Swim. Play Chrome Super Sync Sports
You need to quantify "are not as effective." Is it 1000000000000x as effective? 5% more effective? If it's not boolean (such that "do not exist" is the effect), then the problem is probably significantly less severe than it would appear.

For the record, I completely disagree. For instance, personality would likely dictate what the most effective method would be on an individual basis, so that no general claim can be accurate.

I've personally been involved in collaboration over e-mail that was more productive than most meetings I've ever taken part in. I've never thought "this sucks, we should be doing this meeting in person," but I have thought the opposite many times.
I don't know where you are, but my Troop has all of those. The national organization is pretty heavily Mormon, so that's an obstacle. But our Council just removed the rule against gay Scout.

And hey, the Girl Scouts are bigoted against boys, right? That's pretty disingenious; they are purpose-selective in accordance with massive issues with prepubescent youth. Pretty hard to mentor boys when they're constantly showing off to girls - try to change that!
It seems less like coattails when you consider Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Jack Welch, John Rockefeller, etc. In fact, anecdotally it seems being a "narcissistic asshole" is an asset rather than a hindrance.
People used Yahoo in 2006?
I wasn't questioning the sending up of the microphone or video camera. I was just surprised they didn't send up something smaller/lighter. I kind of imagined there there are people who are tasked with "light weighting" everything that is sent on a launch mission so long as the lightweighting doesn't compromise on the engineering integrity of what is being sent into space.
Most of this article, except the cafeteria anecdote, isn't about Jobs, or about megalomaniac CEO's in general.

It's about utter failure of middle management, and how they can totally fuck both sides of the company.

The lesson here is not "don't be an asshole" (although you shouldn't), it's "don't hire ass-kissing assholes".
Don't be silly.Those things all contribute to standard of living, are directly experienced by humans.

Bitcoin 'miners' hum away in a room, getting hot and consuming ergs and producing nothing but imaginary points. Which could have been produced by getting a job or trusting a federal reserve or something - anything but this enormous trust theatre just to keep people out of the loop.
DataSift Announces Strategic Alliance With Splunk
Who the fuck is erin caton?
No tech background, yet tech manager
There are several different "pre-breathe protocols" used prior to US spacewalks to avoid the bends. Some involve taking the airlock down to 10.2 psi (as opposed to 14.7 psi for 1 ATM) and sleeping there overnight. Also the crew may hang out in the suit while still in the space station for several hours before the spacewalk. The suit is pressurized with pure oxygen and is at a 4.3 psi.

All of this does make for a long day. Even though the spacewalk may only be 6 or 7 hours, entire day with preparations and clean up afterwards is exhausting.
Python engineers: Join team StyleUp (YC W13) to take over the fashion industry
We are building the Pandora for fashion.

Who we are looking for:

Part-time and full-time engineers who get stuff done fast and have a great attitude. You'll be working closely with our CEO to develop new product features, shape the product vision and monitor and improve the StyleUp system.

No, you don't have to have the best fashion sense in the world (we can help with that!) but we would love you to know:

Python/Django stack with a MySQL database
Front end using Bootstrap for CSS; jQuery/jQuery UI
Hosted on Amazon EC2; deployment in Fabric and Boto (EC2)
A variety of functional integrations including SendGrid and Facebook

If you want to join the team:
Ideally, full-time engineers will be based in NYC. Please email your resumes to our CEO Kendall@thestyleup.com.
That is still not precise enough to be used in a rigorous analysis. Can the adversary solve exponential time problems to perform such transactions (and for that matter, exponential in what parameters of the system?)? Can the adversary collude with other parties in the system? How many parties can the adversary collude with? Without these sorts of details, it is very hard to rigorously analyze a system.

"Perhaps this is so obvious that people consider it not worth explicitly stating"

If the security definition is not explicitly stated, it is very hard to analyze whether or not the system is secure. How do we even talk about security without defining our terms? There is a polynomial-time algorithm for "reversing" a Bitcoin transaction and spending your money again that is detailed in the original Bitcoin paper -- does that mean that Bitcoin is insecure (I would say yes, but it seems that most Bitcoin proponents say no)? Without a definition of security, it is hard to say.

There is also the matter of determining whether or not Bitcoin's security meets my needs. As a simple example, consider the ElGamal encryption system. It is secure -- but only against chosen plaintext attacks. If you need a system that is secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks, ElGamal is probably the wrong choice (you need Cramer-Shoup). With Bitcoin, however, there is no clear security definition, so how does one even decide if Bitcoin satisfies their security needs?
I'm guessing regular employees wouldn't be allowed to build something with similar proximity if they pooled their cash. Still a perk.
Why IBM might ditch servers and become Intelligent Business Middleware
The guy who wrote this should go back to school and learn how to spell.
Demand your data back and liberate small data
Megaupload says US trying to change rules to allow prosecution
Jobs' first ouster is often credited as the reason for his vision and success when he got back. Believe it or not he was a much worse CEO the first time around
Michaelochurch, I've read a bunch of your blog posts concerning alternatives to VC funded startups and I have a question for you. Why raise any funding at all? Instead why not save a year or so's living expenses, pick a niche market, do contracting in that area and then try to OpenSource and productize a common problem that a bunch of your clients have. This approach is very similar
to what 37 signals does and seems to work for some of my friends.

http://37signals.com/about

Software Engineering, done this way, does not require a lot of capital. What are your thoughts on this model?
I would be interested in hearing more too. Shoot me an email.
How is it that he was so successful and how did apple become the behemoth it is today if the man at the wheel was so insufferable?

Think about it like this - how many assholes are there running companies? If you assume there are hundreds or thousands, then eventually at least a few of them are going to be wildly successful.
"The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things."

I thought that sentence seemed familiar.