skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Selfish Gene - Dawkins, The Red Queen - Ridley

I've read these books midway through high school, already interested in biology and medicine. The depth and complexity of how life forms handle evolutionary pressure is mind blowing. Why you favor relatives over strangers, the competition between mother and child, progress through collaboration of genes etc. You see the world completely differently (after reading many more books on geology, genetics, anthropology, anatomy, cellular biology etc) afterwards.

For a novel: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson,

Truely changed how I look at computers and encryption as a not mathematically inclined reader. Building a computer out of church pipe organ components etc.
The Point of the Banach-Tarski Theorem – not just a curiosity
The Mind's I, by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett

Blowed my mind when I read the Chinese translation of this book 25 years ago in College.
And here's the patent, which has expired due to unpaid fees...

http://www.google.com/patents/US6341380
Star Maker, by Olav Stapledon.
PowerShell returns objects, not strings. Which means they can have as much information as you like without being overly verbose :-)
It is, and this is stated in the FAQ: https://github.com/t-d-k/LibreCrypt/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#...

Sadly, the FreeOTFE licence means I had to change the name.
Why not, if you can combine them permanently using a shell script?
After series of setbacks, spacecraft prepares to unfurl sail
Catch-22.

We're all playing a game and most of us aren't even aware that we can choose not to play. Yossarian is one of the bravest characters in all of literature. He stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming evidence that all of the world disagrees with him.
Yes, there is this strange idea in new generations that GNU/Linux is UNIX, without having tried DG/UX, Tru64, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, Irix and many others.

Just drop a GNU/Linux user into a default HP-UX installation and watch them getting around the system. Hint, those nice GNU flags and utilities aren't there.

As for what UNIX turned out to be, I think Rob Pike as one of its creators is a good quote:

<quote>

I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!

I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

</quote>

Taken from http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pi...
Foucault's Pendulum.
"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?" - looks like Indra Nooyi doesn't.
This is the apex of website design.

(Heck, it's the most memorable site I've seen today.)

And I can't help but think this looks like some weird cult. Will anyone put $41 down to see what we're getting in for?
I am really curious about how much parsing and formatting occupy *nix source code. (IIRC 30% of ls), and if it would be a good idea to decouple the way you mention it. my json-infused distro is still on my mind.

ps: this lisp machine talk mention how 'programs' (I guess functions) exchanged plain old data rather than serialized ascii streams making things very fast. There are caveats of adress space sharing though but it's another nice hint we could investigate other ways.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk
Here's a photo from five years later when I took my mom flying

I am digging those trousers, dude.

Looks like you had some kind of primitive instagram equipment too. Far out.
Many shells already come with a few default aliases that call ls with different arguments. Your "four programs" can be combined in a simple alias.
Sgt. Rock. Last warrior standing.
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon. Both the short story and the book (I read the book first, so I'm more attached to it). It is still deeply moving after all these rereads, decades on.
You are made of carbon :) Just saying.
I remember a time when i didn't even have the time to patch a freshly reinstalled windows 98 machine before a virus coming from my internet provider network would scan and infect my computer. I had to find and install a patched version of the OS right from the start.

Mac OS fortunately never had problems of this scale.
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkings. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene)

The idea that organisms evolved to be survival vehicles for our genes totally inverted and simplified my view of life. It gave me a plausible explanation for how we came to be, and put the final nail in religion's coffin (for me).
Powershell is readable but barely writeable.

Bash is the opposite, it's very easy to do complex things if you have some basic knowledge.

for instance a one liner nested loop to replace a string in a bunch of text files which are a few directories deep. Easy to write but it takes a while to read.
"Elements of Set Theory" by Herbert B. Enderton....

ℝ ≈ P(ℕ)
I read 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond in College and it is single handedly the most insightful book I have ever read.

One of these days I will buy all of Jared Diamond's and Robert Greene's books and read them multiple times.
Daniel Dennett Is Wrong About Free Will
I won't be doing that.

And if someone else does that for me, I've suddently got 400 (n^2) aliases that I can't reason about.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The core story is one of stalinist Faust but the whole arc is much better.
Why free will matters

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/free-will-matters/
Solaris by Stanisław Lem. Well, maybe the loneliest might be a more accurate description.
> PowerShell returns objects, not strings. Which means they can have as much information as you like without being overly verbose :-)

How does the user know exactly which output he is going to get? The formatting program cannot know anything about default expected output - so it either must be specified explicitly, or objects must distinguish between default_for_formatter_to_output fields and more_verbose_hidden_fields - I'm really not a fan of the amount of man <command_name> using Unix involves, - but is the alternative really much better?
I am biased towards fiction.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The timeless beauty and innocence of the book remains unparalleled.

Light in August, by William Faulkner. It is the opposite of the above, dealing with complex emotions. Faulkner's prose and characters are unmatched in their depth.
"Alter table" can take a pretty long time on mysql if you have enough rows. Missed some ad revenue because of this, but it would have been a lot worse to try to make everything perfectly scalable from the start.
ROS is a popular framework with permissive licences [1]. It is used with many different types of robots; among them also bipedal humanoids [2].

[1] http://www.ros.org/is-ros-for-me/
[2] http://wiki.ros.org/Robots
It depends.. I spent my childhood riding fright trains, visiting every dump and basically coming home only to sleep. I don't regret.

Another common situation, is when parents or relatives or mere circumstances are forced children to perform some very restricted, repetitive tasks, like agricultural jobs or any other kind of dumb labor. This is usually a disaster.

Add to this a constant abuse, social pressure and wrong, primitive conditioning, especially for girls, to complicate the matters.

Basically, unless one is lucky enough to be a lonely street kid, not a member of some gang, to develop a habit of reflective thinking and acquiring knowledge by understanding the causes of events, one will end up what they call "developmental delay", or just aggressive ignorance.

BTW, some Eastern countries, where there are most population are poor, there are much less problem in urban areas, where kids could escape restricted repetition of rural life in poverty.
Is Terry/TempleOS in the current batch of YC? He tried to apply some months ago. If not, maybe someone can give his work a chance, like they did with some non-profit orgs?
Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Both a work of literary and technical genius.

Le ton beau de Marot, also by Douglas Hofstadter. Was blown by his description of how making the typographical choice of starting the first word of each chapter with letters decreasing in height to the normal page font size, caused him to rethink a whole chapter (he couldn't use descenders, which limits the first word, which limits his first sentence, which constrains his first paragraph and so on).

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Every single chapter is potentially mind blowing. The whole approach of trying to instruct rationality through such fiction is itself brilliant I think.
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

This changed how I look at my life

http://www.amazon.com/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules/dp...
One solution is to optimize shell programming for terseness, since it has to be so interactive. Then you can sacrifice this Unix rule in the name of terseness and get commands that are nice and simple to write and good enough for 90% of uses-cases, but perhaps bloated and not as strictly composable as the Unix philosophy would like. Then these commands can be implemented by simple compositions of other commands that are a bit more lean and verbose, and so probably won't be used much for shell programming.

A nice bonus is that you can answer "what is `ls -m`?" by referring to an alias of something simple like first using a command that outputs a list of file names which is composed with a formatting command.
It is entirely possible to trojan a system with an encrypted OS partition, by using a bootkit.
For extra security, you should boot off a removable medium. Even this can be attacked if the BIOS is infected.

LibreCrypt is useful against very specific threats. Protecting against attackers that have repeated physical access to your PC, and the technical nous to install keyloggers etc. involves way more than just using a particular Windows program, no matter it's features.
"Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees" by Roger Fouts.
Speaking of which, anyone knows why the IOCCC results are stalled? Winners were announced but winning source code not yet released.
Gödel, Escher, Bach[1] has shaped the way I think in many ways and really warped my perspective on allot of things.

There's also the Imperial Radch series which is a very, very good sci fi series which is unlike any other sf I've ever read[0].

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333324-ancillary-justi...

>Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction, Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
It is not enough to have a walled garden; you must also salt the earth of your neighbours.
Zero sum fruit flavoured game theory.
That's an interesting point. abstracting out parsing/serialization from the data piped between commands would lead to more consistent argument handling for all commands.
And what would you call an alias that gave you a coloured, sorted listing of the current directory?
I wouldn't say you need 400 aliases. You'd only need aliases for the commonly typed pattern, not for any possible combination you might ever use.
Very interesting. I've heard about some of this before, they made a movie about it w/ Jodi Foster called Contact :)
JSON doesn't support behaviour (methods). They are very useful for composing programs IMO.
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett

The story of Everett's life among the Pirahã people in the Amazon. Everything you thought you knew about humans is wrong.
I'm just going to answer with the books that rearranged my understanding of the world the most. In no particular order.

"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

"Quantum Computing since Democritus" by Scott Aaronson.

"The Strategy of Conflict" by Thomas Schelling.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "The World until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond.

"The Retreat To Commitment" by W. W. Bartley.

"The Myth of the Rational Voter" by Bryan Caplan. Despite the name it made me appreciate democracy a lot more.

"Wars, Guns, and Votes" by Paul Collier.
This guy is fascinating. Apparently he is building an operating system based on directives he received from God. Also there is a program called After Egypt which is a game he made based on the story of Moses. In this game you can go speak with God and Terry regards this program as an oracle of sorts. He speaks freely about God's thoughts and reactions to his efforts in his videos.

Edit: grammar
It is a sublime example of the good old-fashioned “motherfucking website” of 20-odd years ago. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

I would buy one, but I live in California, where I cynically expect it never to rain again.
I would be very interested to hear you say more about your experience with Agile!
There are some sane defaults in the PS case along with heuristics that try to map arguments between pipe-out and pipe-in cmdlets. The parsing/serialization and formatting are done by the environment, not by an individual program.

It works pretty well. In the end there is also some convention that helps it work more consistently.

In practice, it is kind of cool to be able to construct new objects as the pipeline progresses so that can customize that behavior. I've found that with some aliases for default commands it can be reasonably succinct as well.
"Your Brain at Work" by David Rock is full of insights about the human brain in daily situations. What makes it different from many other neuro-biology books is that it does not only present scientific knowledge but enables you to put that knowledge to use immediately. It really changed my way of thinking.
Freemium allows you to have more users and more chances to sell.

With a paid app, the same users would have to make a decision to buy based on just a picture, description and reviews.

Many freemium apps work really well by selling in-app currency. The most effective ones, sadly, were games that made it increasingly difficult to progress without spending said currency, making people addicted and choosing to spend money instead of time, which they valued more after a certain point.

Angry Birds found out two years ago just how much freemium beats the pants off them.

Look up pricing tricks online. One is when people see a too-low price that looks out of place next to the others. They think they caught a good opportunity.
Some people also feel quite strongly about Minion: http://practicaltypography.com/minion-alternatives.html

Fonts are so divisive!
"Freedom from the Known" by J. Krishnamurti.

"I Am That" by Nisargadatta Maharaj.
The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William flake (1997) https://books.google.it/books/about/The_Computational_Beauty...

A totally astounding introduction to how computing fits into the broader scale of understanding other phenomena in our everyday scientific lives — and, unlike most “oh wide-eyed wonder!” popsci books it contains code, equations, and deeply significant diagrams.
Ask HN: What are some examples of startups that failed mainly because of timing?
After watching this, https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed I tried finding some startups that had novel ideas that failed because of timing. One example is "MyMobileMenu" by Reddit founders in their initial YC application, which was scraped because mobile adoption wasn't there. Do you remember any?
Fiction: 'Anna Karenina' & 'War and Peace' by L. Tolstoy.
Non-fiction: 'Quantum Psychology' by R.A. Wilson.
I have to wonder how this might possibly relate to Native Americans? Especially in light of the pilgrim history boards that were discovered. 1917 was just 10 years after Oklahoma became a state, it was called Indian Territory prior to that [1]. And Indian boarding schools [2], where they tried to wash the "savage" away, were a big thing back then. To this day oklahoma has a very high Native American population and current reservations/nations reflect Indian removal [3] as there are many nations there that did not come from that area.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Territory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schoo...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_removal

edit - added 3rd citation
tl;dr: she's been introducing slightly healthier products and sales have stoppend falling.
Why Do We Publish Our Personal Horror Stories?
Attorneys at War: Inside an elite Israeli military law unit
Volvo is working on it as well. They are currently running a year-long experiment with a hundred self-driving cars in southern Sweden.
PS will take the text output of any command line program and turn it into .Net strings that can then be manipulated like any other object. You can write PS cmdlets in C/C++, there is an SDK. It will also marshal COM objects into and out of the appropriate .Net types.

When dealing with output from command line apps I usually take the time to parse out the data I want from the strings and turn them into strong types if I'm writing a script...If I'm just trying to get something done with a command prompt I just do whatever gets it done the fastest.
I think there's a bit of a disconnect between how people talk about/defend the unix shell and the reason it's actually still there. People often defend the simplicity or philosophy - despite, as the article points out very well, much of it being clearly poorly designed.

But really the reason most of it exists unchanged is simply path-dependancy - we used it then so we use it now. It works well enough that there's not enough incentive to drive a large change. There are dozens of different shell-like environments and scripting languages, but they never really took over out of plain intertia. That, and the conservative attitudes of people defending their Unix traditions (related in no small part to how much effort they put into learning the thing in the first place). For new people arriving on the scene, its still less effort to learn things, even when they get truely arcane, than to use something which relatively few other people use or even roll your own alternative...
Google's places API has the days numbered sunday : 0 through to saturday : 6 so I guess the US system has moved in to API land.
It might seem inconsequential and I can't answer on behalf of the author of the article however if you have ever done the rail and sail you might understand it a bit better. I get what you are saying but the difference in faff between taking a plane and casually walking from the train to the boat is huge.
Here is a video, in Arabic, he says he interpreted exploration reports from 13 oil wells.They asked him for a draft on how to handle oil industry.
He called for separation between ownership and operation, to treat the Norwegian oil company as a private entity. They did it right when they prepared well. He said his contribution was in establishing a scientific basis for the government role in the oil industry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEiqveFm1Yk
Do one thing and do one thing well doesn't equal do one simple thing. Furthermore, ls can actually do One Thing Only if this is enough for you and that is plain ls. What would be the better alternative? Have multiple ls, ls-color, ls-long-color, etc?

The discussion about Unix philosophy, standards, etc is a different story but I did not see that from the articles examples.
Remarkable to see this level of detail on CNN, rather than a tech-community site.
Behaviour could be implemented by shell commands. That way, if you wanted to implement a method for a particular object, you could just write a binary/shell script/whatever that reads the object from stdin and writes its result to stdout
"The Beginning of Infinity", from David Deutsch, in which evolution, Popper epistemology and theory of computation blend into a world view fruitful of thrilling perspectives for humanity. To me, as mind blowing as anything can ever be.
Although it's a nice idea - as engineers it's clear to us that Terry is highly capable - he isn't a good match for YC.

Sure, they could do something, but it would only be to humor him. I don't think that we should be encouraging that.

When his stuff is posted here he's getting real respect from his peers. His illness it totally irrelevant. It would be sad and IMHO wrong to turn him into some sort of VC "circus freak" attraction.

On the other hand doing something truly altruistic to help him would be of course would be very nice.
> Yes, there is this strange idea in new generations that GNU/Linux is UNIX, without having tried DG/UX, Tru64, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, Irix and many others.

I think that it's not so strange, seeing that you have to fork over lots of $$$ to get your hands on hardware that would run Solaris/HP-UX/AIX/etc, plus licensing fees. You can't easily rent a cloud server for an hour to play with it (with some exceptions, like SmartOS on Joyent). The high barrier to tinkering reduced proprietary Unices to expensive niche environments that are willing to pay lots of cash.
This, a thousand times.

As a Linux user / developer, it's surprising to hear colleagues talk about how important it is to separate content from presentation regarding, say, TeX, but ignore the benefits of Powershell doing the same. Unix users actually expel cycles trying to express things like times and file size as regular expressions to operate on strings, rather than dealing with them using their real data types.

A big part of this is that remoting has sucked - most webb app developers don't use Windows - so a lot of people who should have been able to find out for themselves hasn't been able to. Microsoft supporting SSH (as they announcedd recently) should fix that.
Entangled: Why America Must Stay Engaged in the Middle East
Patterns of 'bad' startups