skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't say Jobs has been "inviting people into his private life". He has remained fairly private.

I did say "he's granted the media many levels of access, from photos through interviews, to boost his products." Just look at all the magazine covers he's had. The accompanying stories always mix a little of the personal biography -- the arc of his life -- with the product/business news of the day.

But also, consider the 2005 commencement speech he gave -- which I wouldn't attribute to simple PR machinations for Apple, but because a distinguished public person was invited to talk, and wanted to share his insights with the future. He talked about the circumstances of his birth and adoption as a baby; his college years; his exile from Apple; his pancreatic cancer diagnosis and surgery. That is, his life story, as it could help elucidate life choices for others.

The story continues; we're still curious. While it's wrong to pry illegally into private records, and it's wrong to hound him (or his non-public family) about these things, it's natural and keeping with the usual and fair treatment of a public figure to relay major new developments in his life story.
leave the parsing to someone else and use plan9's upas mail file system

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/upas_mail_system/

http://www.quanstro.net/plan9/nupas.pdf

now available for plan9port on Unix

we don't need no stinking APIs and Libs, give us grep awk sed and cat
Whatever precepts for living a certain kind of life are, I'm sure they don't come exactly in tens and, in turn, take longer than 3 sentences to explain. Damn you, David Letterman. :-)

Sometimes I find these lists interesting (and this one isn't terribly bad), but wish they had chosen exactly one idea and expanded upon how it was important to them or how they applied it when it was hard to apply. It's better than adding to the ever growing bullet point debris floating in the web's circular currents.
there's a #math channel on irc.freenode
The WSJ doesn't run "unsourced" news; they had confirmation of the key details from multiple sources (even if the exact sources aren't named) before running the story.
Blogger.com suffers major service disruption
Programming is interesting as long as the problem that you're trying to solve is interesting. Simple as that. Entrepreneurship just greatly increases the likelihood that this will happen.
agree. plus, their interface is cluttered. it's worse than reading a pdf in the browser.

it's seems like step backwards. perhaps i'm missing the neat niche it is filling.
Thief view: Police nab twins snapped on Google
Gmail Hijacking On Mobiles
Agree with Michael's points. My strategy: Buy problem books instead of text books!

- I KNOW I won't be able to finish them. That means it's OK not to, so I don't feel bad - but also that I shouldn't buy too many.

- The material within is bite-sized. Early problems teach you what you need for later ones, and you can always stop and come back later.

- Constant feedback is rewarding. Also, some say you only understand what you create for yourself.

- If I'm not advancing at all in a problem book, then I find open books on the internet, or (better!) I buy the Dover Publications paperback of the book by a master/inventor of the field, usually for $7 or so.
hmm, i've parsed email before. is there something specific to email encoding than general files? such as parsing the "encoding" header thingy? anything else?
"Thriving" for the short term, maybe, depending on how you define "thriving". Sustainably profitable for the long term, is still difficult to forecast.
Where's the "Computer Science has nothing to do with programming" option?
While it's good that we're all paying attention to this, writing articles about it is not the most direct way to solve the problem. Simply report Microsoft to the Federal Trade Commission for misleading advertising, like I did: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663319
Where do you buy such kind of books? I can't find them in Ebay anymore. Probably it was not legal to export them.
Also mentioned here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666022

No discussion yet.
Guile 1.9.0: bytecode compiler, native threads, ECMAscript
Or it could mean that I have a lot of complex thoughts on the matter, and it will take some time to distil them into a pithy comment. That's the problem with rapid-fire sites like this, the pressure is on to respond quickly, before the thread sinks into oblivion - you have actually asked an interesting question and I would like to give it some thought.
If you like problem solving, programming will be fun whether you are an employee or a founder. Think of programming as doing puzzles. But if you are easily frustrated, you'll hate it whether you are an employee or a founder.
Cory says that the mainstream publishers: book publishers, movie studios, record labels, and their allies/dupes like the Authors Guilds are acting against their own interests by resisting their own interests by making deals with Apple, Google, and Amazon. Instead, they should be making reasonable distribution deals with anyone who asks. An individual ought to be able to create his/her own internet radio station even if it had an audience of one.

Corey didn't explicitly say it this way, but the publishers should stop looking at net distributors as pirates. Instead deal with them as local retail dealers, like your neighborhood book store or movie theater. The current setup makes monopolists out Google and Apple. These gatekeepers will ultimately have more power than the publishers to the detriment of artists, publishers, and consumers alike.
He was not attempting to hurt people. That some people reacted that way to his posts is not an indication of intent.

Of the posts of his I read, it seems that he would go that direction only when someone else already painted themselves the victim of emotional hurt from his earlier technical criticism.

You could argue he should've reacted differently to this self-victimization, but I worry what that would do to the signal-to-noise ratio of the forum in question. If people who require emotional coddling are encouraged to participate in technical forms, then a lot of the conversations focus on that rather than on technical point.

ESR was not entirely wrong when he stated you can pick exaggeratedly "friendly" or useful; Naggum's goal was to keep the forum firmly planted in the realm of useful, even if it meant offending some people along the way. I think there is some virtue in this. Of the posts of his I read, there were nuggets of very good wisdom in all of them.
Good point, I thought this was an Ask HN for some reason.
It's funny that this is upsetting people; Bittorrent is based on the same concept.
It's mundane, very very mundane. I don't think you can be, like, super-mundane, because being surprising in any way, even if it is for how mundane you are, would make you in fact not mundane at all. So although I don't know how to say it, this is as mundane as you could possibly get before you cause some kind rip in the mundane-exciting continuum.
Modern financial engineering is only about 30 years old. That's easily comparable to the fundamental works of physics, biology and computing.

As for the next big thing? My guess is that the field of high dimensional analysis (encompassing machine learning, compressed sensing, etc) will be comparable in importance to any of the fields you've mentioned.
It just feels so seedy. Like they're ripping people off.

Their flash rendition also doesn't look as good as PDF.
HN Action: Help stop IE8 FUD, report MS to the FTC
There have been a few articles circulating since yesterday criticizing Microsoft's new 'Mythbusters' advertising for IE8. While any public attention these articles garner obviously raises awareness to an extent, the vast majority of naive users will still simply take Microsoft's claims as gospel.

To stop this from happening we need to get the ad campaign stopped in it's tracks. One of the easiest ways to do this is by reporting Microsoft to the Federal Trade Commission for misleading advertising.

Complaints can be submitted to the FTC here: https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/

I have already made a submission that reads as follows:

-----------

On this web-page:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/browser-comparison.aspx

Microsoft repeatedly make unfounded claims about the abilities of it's latest web-browser (Internet Explorer 8). These claims offer no statistical proof to back them up and are completely at odds with the considered opinions of most of the online community and many professional security experts. I personally believe that they are attacking browser providers without a reasonable basis in an effort to retain the custom of un-informed users.

Evidence to support my claim is:

http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2009/03/18/pwn2own-2009-day-1---safari-internet-explorer-and-firefox-taken-down-by-four-zero-day-exploits

"Today's first day of Pwn2Own contest is now officially over [...] Between two winning contestants, they were able to compromise Safari (twice), IE8, and Firefox."

Microsoft claim that IE8 is more secure than Chrome and FireFox, yet the very same security community that discovered the IE8 exploit listed above failed to find any exploits in Google Chrome. In a seperate interview one of the winning hackers (Charlie Miller) said:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2941

"There are bugs in Chrome but they’re very hard to exploit. [...] The’ve got that sandbox model that’s hard to get out of. With Chrome, it’s a combination of things — you can’t execute on the heap, the OS protections in Windows and the Sandbox."

Your attention to this matter is appreciated.

------------

Make sure that your submissions are well thought out, contain some evidence to back up your claims and are polite, nothing invalidates a cause more quickly than it's supporters coming across as fanatics!
I keep hearing about how Erik was such a smart guy and how he contributed so much to the Lisp community. I have a serious question for those of you who say that his net influence was positive despite his abrasiveness: other than "The Long, Painful History of Time", a few pithy quotes, and a lot of rants on usenet, what exactly did Erik contribute?
Still, the overhead is large if it employs single byte confirmations. It turns symmetrical what could be an asymmetrical communication.
Being able to embed documents in another page is neat sometimes, but putting up with all the other hassle that ability apparently implies isn't so neat.
When building an application, one does not think: will I be doing programming or computer science here?

Who knows what will happen? Maybe the implementation will turn out to be straightforward. Maybe not and some novel algorithm(s) might need to be developed.

Even for routine programming a CS major might be helpful. At least you might have a better understanding of sophisticated library usage (e.g., encryption).
Most of that I am pretty automatic on. But one thing that I notice when I'm coding is that I don't really know many commands to make it easier to handle everything in between two brackets or parenthesis or what have you. Sure, there is the '%' key. But are there other useful commands as far as that goes?
If you are a good programmer its very easy to become friends with math/phys/cs profs. They typically have many projects that they are not looking at at the moment for lack of programming power. Offer a few hours a week of your time to a particular project that you feel interested in. You will learn crazy lots. This is what a "Grad Student" is. But IMO this is much better than being a grad student and suffocating through the bureau-crazy.
You don't have to insult me with this "not grammatically valid" nonsense. Look, anyone seeing your explanation of the correspondence can see that your view is somewhat naive.

Comparing doing an Internet startup doing to the kind of research required to discover new things about the world is a bit ridiculous. No sane person would say it takes the same level of intellectual rigor to do a startup as research physics. This is not to say it is not hard but, well, Twitter is not "rocket science," but rocket science is. Let's strive for intellectual honesty.

Also, I did say autodidactism exists and is great. Sure many people teach themselves to program. I think the issue here is in scale and magnitude. Sure, Ramanujan's are out there but not everyone we chat up with at Borders about string theory is one.
whoa, i didnt see that. thats pretty rad.
I bet they would be more exciting if armed with a crowbar. :)
But at least with BT it's optional...
It doesn't matter if each one is used once, say in a loop.

If you have 14 slots in your cache, and you loop over 15 regular expressions, no cache policy (unless it also tracks regexes it has already lost from the cache, which effectively gives it more than 14 slots) will work, except maybe some kind of cache that just remembers the first 14 regexes it sees, and only forgets one randomly every 10 more regexes it sees. Such a cache policy would be really really stupid in most cases not specifically designed to thwomp, say, an LRU cache or a regular deque or something.
There is a third option. Work for a company with interesting projects and good people (probably not your local government or a financial institution). Do some reputation building by contributing to OSS, blogging, and outside mentoring. All of these are a break from your day time routine. I've given help to a couple of startups recently, and I've seen more companies requiring or encouraging OSS participation of their employees.
Introduction to Catalyst (A Perl Web-MVC framework) - Part 1
Great suggestions, I would also make sure you are getting enough sleep. If caffeine or other drugs are keeping you up, try and phase them out and see if you can go to sleep instead of staying awake worrying. You don't mention if there has been any changes in your life but it's normal to react to a significant change (e.g.death of a relative or close friend, end of a long term relationship, loss of job or other significant financial setback, etc..) with stress.
Full recording from his iPhone available here: http://www.dailynewscaster.com/2009/04/02/audio-full-version...
> But I still stand by saying that Feynman was more entertaining.

I agree that Feynman is entertaining, and he's something of a legend.

I do feel that Hawking is not just fascinating in his own right but he's AMAZINGLY inspirational. Given the adversity he has faced for much of his life, the fact that he still pursues his love of science should be a lesson to all of us.

To call his story merely "extraordinary" is doing a grave disservice to such an incredible individual.
Ask HN: What should I do with this project (HandyFind)?
I developed some software that improves on how you find text in documents, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zizoaped950. It's a major usability improvement and I expected someone like Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, or Google to have done something similar by now. (I released the first version 5 years ago. Apple did it to some extent when they started animating the display of found text, but that’s only a small piece of it.)

1) Is there any way I could make money off this?

2) If not, is there any easy way I could get a big player to "steal" the idea to benefit users (with very little work on my part)?

I started the project for fun but now I want to create a viable startup and I’ve stopped working on it. But it would be nice if I could do something with it.
Are you suggesting trading programming time for mentoring time, or just programming a math teacher's projects as a means to learn?

How would you initiate something like that anyway? I would feel more than a little awkward wandering on to a local campus and knocking on doors in the math dept. Are there any online resources/communities?
This is how I got started programming professionally. During my freshman year, my CS prof had funding for a climate research project and he first set me up as a UNIX admin then a C and Perl programmer. In addition to learning UNIX and programming, it paid about 3 times as much as any other work study job, and I got to put "participated in NSF funded research" on my resume. I wasn't even a good programmer, I just wasn't as bad as everyone else.
When your byte-trading program encourages you to trade bytes, there's nothing to be upset about. When your [web based] pdf reader forces you to trade bytes -- well, some people get upset.

IMHO, you should have rather used rapidshare or megaupload for comparison. I don't use rapidshare and scribd for more or less the same reasons.
A classic rant.

"In many ways, the current [2002] American presidency and XML have much in common. Both have clear lineages back to very intelligent people. Both demonstrate what happens when you give retards the tools of the intelligent."

Erik will be sorely missed.
A really good book for analysis:

http://www.amazon.com/Analysis-History-Undergraduate-Texts-M...
Sorry, wrong again. Stream byte acks are way more effective than packet ones. Tcp endpoint can receive several packets of data and then send just one very small ack packet (you only have to send the byte stream position after the last received packet). I'm not sure what you mean by "asymmetrical", but that's probably as asymmetrical as it gets.

It's called "delayed ack" or something. Iirc, it's all described in rfc793.
No.

Scribd: To watch our crappy swf stuff you have to upload another PDF.

BitTorrent: To download a file (=bittorrent is content agnostic) you should re-upload parts of the file that you have already received.
Usenet was only predominant for about ten years. But programmers have been rejecting Lisp and the ideas behind it for nearly fifty. No matter how much we like it, it's not going to win. Think of it as your secret weapon à la pg.
same for gmail with dots
I think there are ways to address a lot of issues like this when you have Facebooks financial resources but I agree with your point in that I think a lot of people don’t see the issue here.

The issue with low level tech support people is they lack judgment. Nice people, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re the guy answering tech support inquiries for $10 an hour you probably don’t have great judgment. So if you give tech support people carte blanche access to the engineers they will generally pester those engineers to death.

But the reverse of that is sometimes those lower level people ignore a legit problem.

Now I don’t know Facebook’s policy. If I had their money I’d probably create a tree structure of some kind where more competent people supervise the less competent people and so those less competent people can pester an intermediary who can then forward worthwhile info up the chain. But even still you’re dealing with the judgment of low level people.
No see, that would be an acknowledgment of guilt for an actual illegal act by the TSA, which opens up a huge can 'o worms for liability. They will never admit something like this until compelled to do so by a court of law.

I hate to get all high and mighty, but my impression of the TSA and the CBP is that they are both goon squads staffed by people who are so otherwise powerless in life that they have to take it out on average civilians.
That's what you think.

asks perpetual motion powered hovering maid to replicate another iced tea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project (for the list of interesting contemporary scientists, I'll nominate Venter. That guy is a trip.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractals

All since 1970, is that recent enough? And, ya know, sometimes it does actually take a little time for major achievements to be recognized as such.
optional and doesn't take manual user intervention. it's automatic, no hassle. and you're only sharing bandwidth not new content.
Start with a small one, predict how data will turn out and see how close you get. Then go for a bigger one. Disclaimer: This opinion based on (almost) no real experience.
The only thing it gets right is the (US) State I am in. Still, that might be good enough for some people.
Cybercriminals refine data-sniffing software for ATM fraud
You didn't say 'entertaining' before, you said 'interesting'.
I'd also like to request a "Computer Science has nothing to do with Entrepreneurship" option.

Look, programming is about solving problems and programmers are people who know enough tools to solve those problems. What a CS degree means is that person MIGHT have better tools (being educated in various algorithms and system types). That's all.

Entrepreneurship is about solving one specific problem namely: how to make a company successful. The tools you learn in Computer Science have nothing to do with that. More to the point, neither does what you're programming. A person with the greatest program in the world can fail with no business savvy and a person with a crap program can become a billionaire with enough business savvy.

As for fun, the reality is that all programming requires some fun and some tedious work. Even if you're living your dream programming exactly what you want to you'll still need to deal with tedious stuff like error checking and browser compatibility.
Has anyone ever heard the phrase "don't speak ill of the dead?"

The truth is, most of us are going to leave behind a mixed legacy. Some good, and some bad. Traditionally we try to remember the good at times like this.

If one of your friends or family members died tomorrow, would you want to come across a discussion dissecting that person's every last flaw, or blaming them for far-reaching problems?

Given that Naggum was such an online personality in the functional programming world, it's likely that some of his friends are among us right now. Surely we can refrain from statements that increase their pain.
If your opening paragraph hadn't been misperceived as the rantings of a sociopath, people who read your second paragraph ("love the one you're with") would have been pleasantly surprised by your insight.
You could also say that computer science has nothing to do with almost all computing jobs since programming tends to be pretty routine in an algorithmic sense. Few people invent non-trivial algorithms.
I just downloaded a book off Scribd last night, and it didn't ask me to upload anything. I've never uploaded a document and this isn't the first time I've downloaded one.

Just to make sure I'm not crazy, I found another 100+ page book and downloaded the PDF just now. No requirement to upload any files.

Doesn't anyone fact check stories before posting their comment rage?
Comparing doing an Internet startup doing to the kind of research required to discover new things about the world is a bit ridiculous. [...] Twitter is not "rocket science," [...]

I disagree. I agree that building a start-up involves less rigor than doing research, but rigor is just one variable among many in the success of a research (or a start-up.) I don't think that building a successful start-up is less of an intellectual achievement than doing scientific research.
clickable link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zizoaped950
Interesting. My question has been downvoted. But it has not been answered.
Maybe I am being particularly thick right now but I am not entirely sure I follow what he is objecting to. Google (and Amazon) allow me to find authors I am interested in and buy their latest book - their self-published book because their publisher dropped them due to poor sales. How is Googlezon equivalent to publishers in this context?

Just because Googlezon have dominance (let's not have the M-argument again) in their market does not mean their cultural effect is the same as if there was only one book publisher. Google and Amazon aren't a publisher in this context, they are a discovery service.
That's good. I only wish that Google Analytics or other major analytics platforms incorporated the same feature. It would be relatively easy to include.