skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I interviewed a few folks on the topic some time ago and published the results here: https://highops.com/insights/immutable-infrastructure-6-ques...

I particularly like the definition that emerged:

'I see it as conceptually dividing your infrastructure into "data" and "everything else". Data is the stuff that's created and modified by the services you're providing. The elements of your infrastructure that aren't managed by the services can be treated as immutable: you build them, use them, but don't make changes to them. If you need to change an infrastructure element, you build a new one and replace the old one'

More in the actual full transcript and in the video
8 Free Customer Service Software for Startups
The .WINE Qualified Launch Program
Well that's one of the issues, because people like yourself have a quota/percentage mentality, instead of a inclusion/diversification/look at how much we can learn from eachother mentality. And like another person said, tech companies dont only hire from california. Isn't it a bit silly that 20% of twitter's audience is black and probably the most active group, and their number of black employees is low, black executives is 0?

It's kind of ridiculous to not want to make the effort because the goalposts are always something more. And it's ignorant of the tech industry to "fix" diversity by only putting white women in roles or only asian men in roles to hit quotas.
I've seen a tendency for Hollywood to blame everyone bar themselves for a long long time. eg generic plot lines are blamed on the cost it takes to produce movies because movie goers demand the latest greatest special effects. Which isn't a complete lie, but then you have a movie like Skyline that manages to have excellent effects and at a fraction of budget of the big box office movies (though sadly Skyline was poor in a number of other areas).

Hollywood also blames piracy, but they now have more ways to deliver their content than ever before, yet remain reluctant to really push their content over any new delivery channels. So you have to question how much of piracy is down to consumers being cheapskates, and how much is due to content holders not keeping up with consumer demand (please note that I'm not endorsing piracy).

The problem with the movie industry is that they are so self absorbed that they think people owe them a decent living. But in reality they're a luxury. And these days a lot of people are cutting back on luxuries. So it's hardly surprising them consumers are voting with their wallets. It really is about time Hollywood woke up and realise that capitalism requires competition rather than whining and litigating whenever they feel their monopolies are threatened.

</rant>
It's incidental (for me) that this article should be posted today. Only two days ago, in a philosophy class on environmental ethics, I was told by the professor that my answer to a discussion prompt on "ecofeminism," which cited the development of the washing machine as facilitating the women's rights movement, would be disagreed with by feminists and that it reflected my worldview that it was women's "essential role in life to do laundry." The counterargument was that World War 2 had been responsible for women entering the workforce and not household electrical appliances. My rebuttal that this may not explain global demographic data from developing countries has thus far gone unanswered.

Apologies for the personal anecdote, but needless to say I'm still a bit offended at having been called a bigot. Particularly when Ana Swanson, a "reporter for Wonkblog specializing in business, economics, data visualization and China" would probably not have been similarly told that by writing this article she believes housework is women's essential role in life. It seems some would require extensive quantitative evidence for this claim to avoid stepping on any toes, though, and I wonder if Hans Rosling, Ha-Joon Chang, Max Roser and the others making it have quantified to what extent appliances were an influence compared to other factors.
Maven or pretty much anything XML based
Cripes, that this has to be a thing at all. It's bad enough that my skin color and sex might have had influence on my educational opportunities, but beyond that they have nothing to do with how good or bad I might be at my job.

Take any and all measures to remove the influence of bias from your hiring process (e.g., pass résumés without photos or names to decision makers). That's something we all can do right now.
Jailbreak brings 3D touch to older iPhones
I think the reason its controversial is that, with such a law enacted, oppressive governments can keep the revolutionaries in their boxes. Sometimes, you need to know the name of the revolutionaries. For example, with this "memory hole" policy, would we have ever known who these folks were, and what they were fighting for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_revolutionar...

Or is violent revolution simply not ever going to be acceptable any more because the fact of the application of violent force aspect has been usurped by the mentally insane? Are all violent revolutionaries insane, then? (Hint: no, of course not... unless you're the state they're attempting to violently overthrow, in which case you've got your "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, State-Sponsored Edition" at hand, ready for just such a circumstance ..)

(Note: I am not saying we should worship these insane gun-toting school shooters as revolutionaries - but I am saying that we are on a very slippery slope if we're going to whiteout violent revolutionaries from history, future and past. Revolutions don't happen if you don't have a figurehead to get them started.)
So from what you're implying, it didn't took you years to find a workflow that meets your needs?
Retail report 2015: how we shop, live and look [pdf]
Counterprediction: not enough characters to have a meaningful graph beyond 2-3 degrees.
Exactly. I'm secretly thinking that some of the reason we have failed so far at general AI is we are coming at the problem from a western philosophical tradition :) Nice to meet you brother
Student disqualified for using stackoverflow, on stackoverflow
My point was that in most places none of these things you mentioned actually helps reduce congestion except brute force capacity increase by building more or wider roads somewhere.

Sure, there always are some cases where fiddling with lanes, transport types and other relatively cheap means of changes makes traffic better, but in the end simply more roads are needed.
>the point is, we, collectively, are losing control of our use of computing and technology.

That assumes that "we collectively" were ever in control.

The reality is that these breakthrough technologies, no matter what the century, took massive amounts of money and time to become adopted and by and large they were built by the bigs in some fashion - either through license deals or direct investment from IBM, US Government etc...

Sure there have been FOSS wins, but if you look at the major technologies, basically since forever they were funded and owned by big corporations.
> It took him years to find a workflow that met his needs.

It took him years because he wanted open source software only.

I've been using Bibble 5 for years. It's been available for Linux since eons; Bibble Labs was meanwhile acquired by Corel (surprisingly not mentioned in the Wiki page) so now it's called Corel AfterShot / AfterShot Pro; AFAIK, it's the only professional photography software that's available natively for GNU/Linux (in .deb/.rpm, 32/64bit flavours) aiming to compete with Lightroom. But it's commercial software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibble_%28software%29

Edit: clarified.
Ride with an Elephant
In defense of maven it does provide neither branching nor looping statements so refering to it as a "programming language" is hard to justify.
To your last paragraph, that completely ignores intersectionalism in thag there isnt just 1 type of woman. There are many types of women and diversity efforts should be approached with that in mind.

And sure if you want to hit diversity quotas, then hiring asian men and white women does that. BUT, it limits the advantages of diverse companies and hurts society overall which is kind of the whole point of diversity. For diversity of opinions, no asian men and white women wont be sufficient. I suggest you read about intersectionality.
I haven't seen conditionals or loops widely used within Maven's XML.
Inclusion like in speaking at tech conferences for one...
Every time I use some "configuration management" tool I wonder whether it's really better than just using shell.

Basically you lose a lot of time searching the web for how to do things that you already know how to do in shell, but the benefits are not so clear.
What is strange to me is how the invention of home appliances seems to have stopped. The refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum and dishwasher all made huge changes to everyday life. But since the microwave oven, there has been nothing major. We are still spending many hours on household work. Are the remaining chores just to difficult to automate?
It can work but it works best when the language is kept dumb.

A dumb declarative language is easier to understand and easier to maintain. It can be used to help maintain a strict separation of concerns.

The smarter you try to make the language, the worse it becomes. Ant & MSBuild AFAIK are basically full programming languages in their own right so there was really no point to them actually being their own language.
Companies primarily hire out of networks/referrals. If your company is full of white guys, and their friends are very likely to be white guys, you end up hiring white guys.
It's a bell curve.
High court in London rules Uber is legal
Rotten tomatoes represents the views of critics, which is one sort of view: was it good. Some viewers, like myself, may review more on a basis of: did I enjoy watching it. So, I wouldn't expect nor want a very strong correlation with a subset to the whole.

To put it another way, I like good movies, but have an unreasonable fondness for zombie movies, and a fabulous hatred for Goodwill Hunting, PI, and the Big Bang Theory my perception of their failure to accurately represent my area (although Chuck is fine). If I were writing reviews, I'd have to cut back on my weird personal biases to make them marketable and useful.
Common sense would tell you it does happen. It only takes one guy who'd rather hire a man than a woman and one qualified woman applying for that job.

I don't think it's a meaningfully large part of the explanation for the skewed distribution. I think there are deeper systemic issues for that. However, I don't think I've seen more than a handful of people say that quotas are in place because of discrimination either. From my experiences, I think my view here is by far the dominant one -- there is overt discrimination, but the bigger factor is more subtle. It's primary and secondary education, culture, socioeconomics, marketing and advertising to kids, in short, a bunch of stuff that serve to skew the pool of people even getting to the point of wanting tech jobs. Quotas aren't aimed at getting Klansmen to have to grit their teeth and hire a black guy. Quotas are an attempt to bootstrap the system -- maybe if we just dump a larger than normal population of minorities into our little world, it'll self-propagate through more minorities seeing this as a viable option, with the hope that a generation or two from now, you'll have the distribution you want naturally.
The conversation between Kara Swisher and Parker Harris, quoted, is rather amazing in terms of the verbal gymnastics they resort to: "I have employees, that are, you know, other types of diversity coming to me..."
So do you think a system based on buying votes on the blockchain would make catering to the non-powerful worth doing?

I don't.
Not sure if sarcasm or not, but it's REALLY hard to understand wha ankther races experiences without listening and people who listen without being dismissive/judgemental are exceptionally rare.
So they find random pattern in specific data. It wouldn't be bad if their results fit some political agenda, as long as the results are truth. Problem is it's not just a matter of showing results that fit political agenda and remaining silent about ones that doesn't fit. Problem is that almost everything, fits agenda or not, is false, ireproducible random noise. You almost never see the results building on earlier results in social science, like it is in all other sciences. You only see "studies" spewed out like from some kind of social study generator, and none of these matter even to themselves as they are forgotten as soon as they are published.
Did some benchmarking, xarray has performance boost comparing to pure php implementation.

The benchmark code is placed at https://github.com/Ronmi/xarray-benchmark
AFAIK, the technology isn't really anything new (see drones), but I took the article to mean that the "breakthrough" was in doing this safely within civil airspace. My use of scare quotes is really just because it's the first time (in the UK, don't know about elsewhere); it's more of a milestone than a breakthrough.
The lab industry is not that technologically competitive, or else we would have some lab-on-chip tech deployed by now.
They're talking specifically about someone competing with another person. There's no competition in this post, it's strictly about inclusion.
How to Exploit Vulnerability in Siri and Google Now
Beyond the mining applications mentioned in the article, I can see aerial or tethered robots working on highrise building construction, washing windows on existing structures, or examining and treating specific plants rather than "cropdusting" entire fields in agriculture.

A fresh era of technology transformation is underway and robot drone applications are already creating an economic ecosystem of tech companies and new jobs for operators, while replacing some dangerous jobs in the process.

The FAA is late to form rules for commercial UAVs based on Sec 333 that Congress has already passed in 2012 (the FAA rules were supposed to be complete one year after to enable commercial UAVs [1]. Perhaps we need congress to pass more direct regulations that allow for expanded commercial use, while leaving hobbyists and tinkerers free to experiment and build new things. I'm a member of the AMA (Academy of Model Aeronautics) and the biggest concern among members is the ongoing erosion of our right to fly (although hobby craft are supposed to be exempt from FAA rulemaking per Sec 336 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 [1]) as the FAA has recently lumped any "non-hobby" RC planes, quadcopters, and sUAV "drones" all in the same bucket of full-scale manned-aircraft.[2] This would include tiny handheld lightweight drones to larger craft up to 55lbs.

[1] http://www.faa.gov/uas/media/Sec_331_336_UAS.pdf and http://www.faa.gov/uas/legislative_programs/section_333/

[2] http://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amagov/2015/02/15/dotfaa-an...
> When a bunch of reviews can undo the effects of a massive, weeks or months long marketing push, I'd say it's time to rethink your product strategy.

Whenever a debate about advertising pops up on HN, many people defend it as the necessary way for consumers to find out about good products. Healthy free markets depend on informed consumers, but to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion.

When communities were small, reputation was king. If your town had two bakers, everyone knew which one was good and which one sucked. No amount of advertising would fool the townsfolk into going to the sucky one.

But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person.

I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless.
In my opinion moves to global unification are unavoidable. Free trade also makes the world richer and better. Against the TPP there are justified complaints, that must be addressed (e.g. individual freedom), and others that are plain anti-capitalist propaganda.

One world, with freedom and abundance for all.
I read your post wrong before. It doesn't mean excluding black males. My other comment still applies.
I'm wondering why they don't mine reddit threads for ideas and then compile them into articles. I often find the comments much more interesting than the articles, so, if they filtered out good ideas they would have an inexhaustible source.
For implementing backends which provide REST APIs.
I've kept an eye on https://commando.io/ for the same reason.
RocketCake Beta 2 released – free responsive website designer
> if we forcibly try to overrepresent every minority where do we end up?

I am so tired of this sort of fantasy catastrophe based on a fantasy exaggeration of of a reasonable point.

If your question is, "What would happen if we reversed the polarity on the diversity-suppression machine and suddenly conferences were as diverse as they had been previously vanilla?" then the answer is: the conference would be about the same, but with a different set of speakers.

Heck, let's try it. The industry has been unusually straight white male for, what, 30 years? [1] Let's try 30 years of conferences that are exactly as biased but in the opposite direction. In fact, let's just try 3 years and see how it goes. My guess: lots of good conferences and a much more diverse set of people joining the field and not quitting the field because they're tired of dealing with bias.

> I wouldn't go to such a conference since the probability of bad talks would be too high.

You understand, don't you, that your implicit assumption here is that there just aren't enough competent non-straight-white-dude speakers to fill out a conference list?

In my experience, the conferences that work really hard on diversity are better. Why? Because to get a diverse speaker base, you have to work really hard on outreach. You're going out beyond the usual suspects. You're finding people who wanted to speak but had never got a shot. You're finding the people who never even thought about speaking but would be great.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
I'd love to see a study of these tech adoption trends and their effect in an even shorter timescale like in post-Soviet countries.

In Russia even a few years ago, all my friends' parents would obsessively pickle the hell out of whatever they could grow. My impression is now that that tradition has almost disappeared among the younger generations.
Solu: the Finnish pocket computer that wants to take over the world
Well, one of the main advantages of using a configuration management tool is that the configurations you're writing are actually repeatable, and these tools tend to provide you with a lot of modules that take this in regard for you. If you were to use pure shell, you'd have to take a lot of things in account just to take care of this aspect alone. Also, these tools provide abstractions that make it easier to execute things as a unit (such as adding a user and a number of things having to do with it) without having to think about all the details. Often, they can be used on multiple platforms in the same way, too. So yeah, I do think configuration management tools solve real problems.
I wanted to preface this with a "as a minority", but no.

As a human, I feel we are driving wedges where we should be finding common ground. And the biggest culprits seem to be the ones who have the most to win if they didn't do so.

If you come from a different background, that's great. It means you may have different ideas to solve a problem, to create something, to make art, music, life.

But that should be part of who we are. Our culture.

"I am a person from this country. I grew up playing these instruments, reading these stories, eating this food" says what you have done in your life, what you know, but it doesn't dictate what you are, or put a box around you that can segregate others.

When we put labels on ourselves, or say, "you can't possibly understand where I've come from" we're saying that others aren't "privileged" enough to have had their own experiences that allow them to relate; that you're life is more interesting and important than theirs, as you feel you're at a different level, or they're too ignorant to understand. The irony is amazing.

I wish this woman didn't speak as if she is a voice for women, or black people, or "people of color" (another odd phrase, as even my white friends can be darker than me), because it seems she only speaks for herself.

Women get a celebration, she shits on it.
What if Indians got a celebration? She mentions brown, but talks about being black.

Unless she was born in India, she wouldn't understand life coming from anywhere in India. How does having "black" skin make her relate to Indians? What about other brown people. Did she live her childhood in Bolivia?

To end with, I must say I hate this kind of thing. It makes "minorities" look bad. I don't want to be seen as something that needs help. I want to be seen as somebody who is exciting, who makes fun things and is intelligent. If you want to eat delicious food for my home, learn about the culture or history, then just ask. But that is part of who I am. It's not what I am. What I am is me.
I would just like to say that when PG announced he was handing over YC to sama I was a bit nervous. Not because I didn't have faith in sama, but because handing over the reins hardly ever goes according to how the departing CEO/President/founder says it will go.

I must say Sama...I am truly impressed. I honestly wasn't sure how much better YC could have become when PG stepped down, but looking back...just from the outside looking in...it seems to have gotten at least 5X better if not more.

So keep up the good work you (guys) do. I suspect though that it is also testament to the team you have around you as well.

PG used to say you were one of the smartest people he knows, but many people are smart. It is quite a different thing to be effective and you have been remarkably effective at doubling down and significantly improving the value that YC truly creates.

It is wonderful to witness, as much as watching Musk do his thing.
There is plenty of evidence for hiring discrimination of all sorts. Oceans of it. For example:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903

It happens in all sorts of industries and across a variety of axes. I've heard some argue that no, tech is different, that we're special, special snowflakes. But they have no evidence to back that, just feelings that bias is something only other people do.
- Maybe windows users are winers.

- Maybe IBM's Mac settings/environment is sane(r) compared to their Window's.

- Maybe their windows environment has to support loads of legacy apps.

- Maybe 90% of the Windows complaints are about one small gripe (where is a chart about the types of complaints?)

- Maybe Mac users mail the help desk, instead of call.

- Maybe Macs are handed out first to people who want them. What happens when every employee who didn't ask for a Mac gets one, will the numbers stay the same?

Not a fanboy for Windows; I'm typing this on a Macbook Air. I'm really just annoyed by these insinuating percentage magic, which in this case somehow has to show the supremacy of OSX.