phil

Totally unrelated: does anybody want a gift box? I've got several thousand.

Sure, but the problem here is "we'd like to detect rivers in TeX, but it doesn't know about glyph shape which we know is important." They're talking about clean images only.

Pinning indicates purchasing intent, and mediating purchasing intent is the most lucrative thing anybody has ever found to do with the web (search advertising being the all time greatest example).

Lynn Hill actually failed to tie any knot. She got distracted just as she was starting to tie in:

http://books.google.com/books?id=-vp31fS0OvoC&lpg=PA4...

There's good and bad news on the figure 8 itself. The good news is that they're visually easy to check -- any screw up will make the knot look very different. The bad news is that they invert at relatively low loads. That's mitigated with a long tail.

However, I've never seen any evidence that those single fisherman's people tie in the tail actually do anything. The key is making sure the tail is long enough that the knot is still tied if it inverts.

That's crazy about the rockfall -- lucky you guys weren't standing underneath!

"Interpreted" is too restrictive. For example, Objective C provides NSClassFromString().

Did you know Todd Skinner? (I didn't except by reputation & his accomplishments). That was a tragic accident and definitely shook every climber I know.

I think it's the exception that proves the rule though. Word when it happened was he'd been cleaning loose rock on rap, and was not only wearing a blown-out harness (with a replacement on order at the time) but also apparently had a haul bag full of rocks clipped off to himself.

So -- if you are one of the world's most prolific climbers, use gear you have already decided to retire, and have an unusually high working load, you can maybe get your gear to fail. But it's still incredibly rare.

I think LTCM's problem was more that they picked up all the nickels in front of steamrollers.

But it looked like there were some more nickels out in the middle of an 8-lane freeway...

I'm pretty sure it's climber error and mis-rigging by at least 10x.

Gear failures of all kinds are extremely rare.

Edit: objective hazard is significant, too: rockfall, afternoon thunderstorms, etc.

I find the door handles deeply unnerving, even though they're also pretty cool.

At an ASP of $75k (probably pretty close), that's about $1.5b/yr or about 1/3 their market cap... not bad at all.

It's also a reference to the opening line of Howl, of course: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381

I don't know if that's what Jeff intended or not, but a lot of readers are going to have a strong association with the phrase "the best minds of my generation."

I've always liked the way this is described on his YC bio page (http://ycombinator.com/people.html):

In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public.

You won't learn finance specifics from those books, but they're all great recommendations.

In particular, everyone in this community should read When Genius Failed as a cautionary tale. It had a big impact on my world view. Here's a case where the best and brightest formed an accurate, contrarian hypothesis and executed on it perfectly, but were then blinded by their own cleverness and succumbed to hubris (the partners were leveraging their personal wealth to increase their stakes in their fund) and lost it all.

Ah, I misunderstood your proposal. This would actually be a great update and is pretty plausible.

Like, a streamlined way of installing an app and the ability to launch it with some URL the first time. Relatively easy, not a platform threat.

Wasn't he some kind of general, or philosopher, or something?

This would be pretty neat, but file it under "things that will never happen on iOS in a million billion years."

He should do this for the convergence zone east of Arlington (about an hour NE of Seattle). I'm pretty sure it actually is raining all the time there, and hard.

Well that last one is pretty easy: nobody in Seattle carries an umbrella, for any reason, ever.

What are the odds you'll cross paths with the wife of a random person from the internet?

Your comments (and the others saying this should have been anonymous) are really saying that you think scottmagdalein should feel ashamed about this part of his life -- in his replies he's telling you that he doesn't. It's worth reflecting on why you feel that way.

This is genius. It's like the art from William Gibson's Spook Country come to life, but made practical and tied to a huge fan base.

Actually, an empty canvas for me to drop an arbitrary UI style on is exactly what your iPhone is. In fact, it's one of the best mediums yet invented for it.

Just tap Don't Allow.

Edit: More seriously, all four of those suggestions are very good, and I'd like to see them too. For #4, a deep link to the app's notification settings would be good enough, and probably more likely than getting a notification settings controller in UIKit.

You say that because you think Square is a little gadget for taking credit cards from a phone.

That is the little goal, though -- the big goal at Square is clearly to take over all real-world payments. The cheap reader was a simple place to start. (Go check out a store that running off an iPad with Square to see what they want to become).

You might find the parallel structure listing grievances familiar, since it was used in the Declaration of Independence (and many, many times since).

For another approach to this problem, see the Urbanspoon iPad app. It shows every restaurant in a city, drawing them as dots in a map overlay then swapping for pins when you zoom in enough that a manageable number would be shown.

This doesn't deal with clustering, of course. It's a different UI solution.

Preparing food is one of the most rewarding activities in my life, and the same is true for many of my friends.

Maybe it's an attitude thing?

The advantage -- and it's often a big one -- is that you don't have to have a corresponding server component to translate session id to session state. The state is all in the client.

Edit: wouldn't have written this if I'd seen FooBarWidget's more detailed remarks first.

Well for starters, it's common practice (e.g. in Rails' cookie store, but many others too) to leave the cookie contents as plaintext and just append a HMAC so that you know they haven't been tampered with.