skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The basic idea of how we do democracy is more-or-less sound. Democracy is pretty robust to different implementations e.g. federal democracy, parliamentary democracy, etc.

If democracy has an Achilles's heel it is probably concentration of power. Democracy works better when power is diffuse, and you even see this expressed in the American constitution somewhat. However, although the framers of the US constitution implemented diffusion of power pretty well within government itself, they did nothing to secure diffusion of power across society more broadly[1], and as it happens that is kicking the shit out of many Western democracies now as wealth inequality (and imbalance of power, by proxy) approaches levels that have not been seen in many generations.

[1] Possibly they even did this, by restricting the vote to land owners initially (although I don't think that was their motivation to do so). There is no question limited suffrage sucks of course, but I suspect participants in American democracy early on were on a much more level playing field than what we have now. It would have been a good idea to try to preserve that diffusion of power in society somewhat, along the way to universal suffrage. We didn't, and now may be paying the price.
One way to think of it is as a very early precursor to the civilization bootstrapping kits included on starships in Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought novels (particularly The Children of the Sky).
> His argument is based the proposition that different sexes/races have different market value profiles. He needs to demonstrate why that is the case before proceeding to heavy math.

Not really, his argument is that "PG's mean-post selection test (the 'PMST') is only valid if different sexes have the same distribution of abilities". If you or PG believe that the PMST is a valid way of showing that bias exists, the burden is on you to show that different sexes have the same distribution of abilities.
Re #2: "marking off-topic" penalizes the subthread so it falls lower on the page. That's the purpose of detaching it as well.

Re #3: we marked that subthread off-topic because a user emailed to complain about it. Didn't see the other ones.

General note: we started doing this as an experiment and it's clear by now that it has improved thread quality, so we're probably going to write code to support it, and let the community mostly manage it, probably by generalizing the flagging mechanism.
I know that part, I speak for the legal side of it I suppose.
You're right, and I'll give an example of what I try to do (but don't always succeed because of time contraints, interruptions, etc). I have a standing desk and a comfy leather chair in my office. I alternate between standing and sitting about every hour or so, but I also sometimes switch in under an hour, especially if I need to take a break.

I have a desktop on the standing desk, and I use the laptop while sitting. I also have one of those laptop-style desks that is really just a flat piece of wood that lies across your lap as a surface for writing on paper (rare) and reading books (I use the Kindle a lot, though). On the Kindle I have lots of tech books, and sometimes I'll read a chapter, see something I want to implement, stand up, and start coding again.
Location: New Delhi, India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technolgies: Python, JavaScript, Java, Django, Flask, IoT, Haskell(beginner), PHP.

Resume/CV: https://goo.gl/Yb4cIc

GitHub: https://github.com/architv

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/architv

email: architv07 at gmail dot com

==========================================================================

Experience: I have 3 years of experience with Full Stack Development. I have interned at 3 startups where my work involved working with various web technologies.

I am an open source fan and contributed to many open source projects. Current interests include Internet of Things, functional programming, VR and AR.

Open to REMOTE work opportunities. Do contact me if you are working on IoT, core backend development.

* Wingify/Visual Website Optimizer(http://vwo.com/): I interned at VWO and shipped integrations of VWO with Prestashop, Google Anlaytics and Call Tracking Metrics.

* MyPoolin(https://mypoolin.com/): Designed and implemented the backend REST API for MyPoolin's android app.

* Instalabs(http://www.instalabs.com/): Implemented the REST API for their android and ios app.
NVM#: Effective Environment Variables Manager
It will be visible for the last biased actor. So begin testing the later rounds and work backwards.
(comment reposted from the earlier submission that didn't catch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513574)

Hi Chris ---

In the earlier thread, it seemed like some people were reaching different conclusions because they were using different definitions of "bias". I think my working definition would be something like "there existed in the actual applicant pool a subset of unfunded female founders who should have been statistically expected (given the information information available to the VC's at the time of decision) to outperform an equal sized subset of male founders who did in fact receive funding".

Alternatively (and I don't think equivalently?) one could reasonably take bias to mean "Given their prejudices, if the same VC's had been blinded to the sex of the applicants, they would have made funding choices resulting in higher total returns than the sex-aware choices they actually made." I'm sure there are many other ways of defining "bias". Could you define what would need to be true for your test to show that "the VC process is biased against female founders"?
Except Cobol didn't suddenly gain a lot of popularity after C++ was well established. There are plenty of languages even more abstract (and I would argue easy to use) than JavaScript, some of which don't sacrifice nearly as much performance.

The movement to JavaScript is a product of web developers branching out into other areas (great!) without taking the time to learn another language (not so great :/). I don't think performance is an end in and of itself, and I don't turn my nose up at picking a technology because developers and expensive and processing power is cheap, but I still think writing everything in JavaScript is a step backward.

edit: Accidentally wrote developers are cheap and processing power is expensive :P
Exactly man. A great start to the day .. now this .. :(
God I totally understand what tech reporters have to do to reach a layperson audience but I can't remember the last time an indepth story has made me feel so ashamed about journalism as a profession.

What really got me was this completely shit literary cliche:

> The Cassandra myth reached its tragic climax when she warned the Trojans that a giant wooden horse on their shores — supposedly a gift of surrender after a long siege — actually was filled with Greek warriors who soon would emerge to destroy Troy. The Trojans laughed and ridiculed Cassandra. They realized their error when it was too late.

Not only is it one of the biggest cliches in any context, but it is especially so in computer security...it's harder to think of a context in which Trojan horse is so well-known and worn other than condoms.

But worst of all, it doesn't even make any sense...who/what is the "Trojan Horse" in this scenario? Who the fuck are the Trojans for that matter?
Hacker for Hire
Hello There, I am Oliver. I am an Ethical Hacker/Security Analyst. Do you require any exploits to be carried out? do you want to buy airline tickets at a cheaper price? I am your man, I will provide you with feeds and updates of progress from commencement to completion. I am very affordable and not to brag but I am competent enough to handle any issue you might have. To contact me, you can reach me via my kik: 2Ton9 , email: testimonyhackerteam@aol.com , tel: (678)8302162
Code that can be run, modified, and redistributed at no cost. There are worse deals. ;)
And when you want to allow two people to have a conversation without disturbing the people around them, you use this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence
Dance like no one is watching.
Analogies involving high-performance cars, usually Ferraris
> So rather than comparing mean performance, we'll compare minimum performance.

If I'm understanding correctly, the new test is based on a single data point from each group, rather than an aggregate statistic (like mean). I'm no statistician, but it seems like this data would have far too much variance and noise for this to be a useful test.

The minimum performer could be someone who had a sudden personal crisis. Or who had 10 competitors suddenly pop up. Or any number of other circumstances outside their control. The minimum performer is, almost by definition, an outlier. It doesn't seem rational to suppose that an outlier is representative of the group.

I can understand that statistically this test may be more rigorous. In practice I would expect it to be less rigorous. Because the assumption it makes (that a single outlier is representative of the group) seems even more dubious than the assumptions required for Paul's original idea.
It's refreshing to see employees who are this dedicated to the product. Kudos, Gumroad team.
Using Redis as a Service in Azure to Speed Up ASP.NET Applications
Here's some good news about somebody doing something important more efficiently than their competitors and gaining economic benefits from that. But many comments seem to be suggesting it's a bad thing because of environmental costs.

When US car companies started to recover from the recession, were people equally critical and complaining that the US's economic recovery was coming at the expense of the environment? That they should try to continue underperforming at manufacturing? Afterall, a world with less competition between car makers is surely a more environmentally friendly one. Were people complaining that GM should have been allowed to fail not because it was uncompetitive but because it was damaging the environment by making bigger cars than Japanese rivals? It seems like a double standard of people with a protectionist attitude that's pro-American-corporation and anti-American-consumer.
yes... but i think its sounds good
The true value of Google and FB remains to be seen too. You can't keep using your investor's capital in place of earnings forever.
You wouldn't really do that. But Nim can do basic type inference. So to initialize string and numeric variables, you don't need to explicitly declare the type. https://nim-by-example.github.io/variables/

The type inference extends to a few other situations I believe. Essentially it is a typed language, but it doesn't always make you declare things when they are obvious.
You never get what you deserve.

You always get what you negotiate.

So cut this crap with unpaid work. You'll only get non-existent clients.
This is due to the view that "IP industries" are the future of the American economy, and this is how they are going to attempt to protect them.
Matt, you helped me a few days ago. Thought you were part of Stripe support. So glad that our questions match your favorite type of queries and that you were there when we were in a crunch.
Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning: Papers
proven to be valued by a substantial userbase

Not so valued that they could charge a subscription to it tho', there lies the rub.
But comparing Canberra to SF isn't fair. Compare it to Sydney. It's $2k here easily a month for a 2 bed place to rent, depending on the suburb.
Since people seem interested in PGs post about bias, here's some of the more rigorous work around the topic happening in machine learning.
Robo-advisers are here. What’s a human financial planner to do?
> Of course, I did sell those CDs and DVDs on craigslist afterward

Personally I just threw them away because I was fed up with them taking storage-space (which in my flat is limited).

This means I can't prove ownership, but at least I don't feel like I'm having some sort of moral dilemma around my digital collection.
James Lovelock described what humans do as a system of producing an enormous amount of garbage to create artifacts (many of which are ultimately garbage too.)

There is a lot of applause given to fiat currencies, but when prices are continuously appreciating it becomes extremely difficult to determine if the underlying factors are from sustainable demand (as opposed to software and information tech where we have strong deflationary pressure.) You can borrow money, and you just need to earn enough to cover the debt. You can also just borrow more.
12 Years an Intern: Unpaid internships, feminism, and importance of self worth
I've always admired Gumroad for its execution, professionalism, and design chops. Good luck to you all. Other companies will be fortunate to gain the Gumroad team.
It's reasonable to think that the bias would decrease over the company's lifetime. In early rounds there is little data on the company, so more decisions are made on hunches, and there's a lot of potential influence for bias. While there's potential for that in later rounds too, there's also a lot more objective information. The company is either making money or it isn't.

The importance of relationships to the funding round also plays a role. If you get as far as an IPO, it seems unlikely that the stock-buying public is going to stay away because the founders are female/black/etc.
File under FUD.

This will become a 'talking point' along this lines of 'fast, flexible and free, pick only two or heartbleed'.

Which will be said over an expensive lunch with some salesmen from a non-free operating system company.

And then the WashPo reading boss can say 'yes yes I was just reading about this'.

... Profit.
Please give me a way to switch this off.

I appreciate what you're doing, and it seems an improvement for use on a small screen - but on an iphone 6+ it is much worse. Everything was a great balance before (and the comment pages are still readable), but now the front page is terrible.

The giant font causes titles to span multiple lines and breaks the flow of each item. It is much harder to read than before. Also it was one of the few sites that used a natural size font on the 6+ display...

Any chance we could get something like ?fontsize=14 on the end of the url for such specific tweaking?
If you see nothing wrong with this statement, you need to watch more PETA videos...
I'm going to disagree with most of the others here and say that I definitely do prefer the look of the old site. The simple, clear paragraphs of text give me a feeling of "take your time, relax and learn; there's plenty of interesting things to read here." In contrast, the new site feels like in-your-face flashy distracting "TRY OUR AMAZING PRODUCT NOW!!" marketing, which just evokes a visceral "go away, leave me alone" reaction not unlike that I experience from seeing ads.

In addition, I had to scroll far more in the new site to read everything than the old one. For being basically decorative, those pictures are huge.
Great job *team. :)
> Copyright term hasn't been extended to life + 120 years as earlier feared. Only to life+70 years which it already was in the USA anyway.

Which should be reduced (even life + 70 is ridiculously long). This agreement makes internal reform much harder, because it solidifies the bad status quo. Same goes for many other similar things.
Most UI layout doesn't involve that much computation. JS is definitely fast enough.
Essentially that you're rolling the dice in a lot of ways when you have a child. They could be born with serious medical problems. Something terrible could happen to them through no fault of their own, like being in an accident or being the victim of a crime. Every human being will experience pain, sadness, and suffering in some way at some point in their lives. At the very least, they will have to face the foreknowledge of their own death, and the loss of family and friends that die before them. Creating a child forces a being to experience all these things that would otherwise never have had to. In an antinatalist world view, the possibility or even guarantee of good things happening to the child does not "balance out" or justify forcing them to experience negative things.

I also don't want to have any part in contributing to humanity's self destruction and inflicting of suffering on other living things. We are not rational creatures. We largely do whatever we want, including hurting and killing each other, and make up all sorts of justifications for why it's okay. I'm no different in this regard, I just don't want to perpetuate that further.

I'm a vegan, and there is no possible way to live a normal life as a person without having at least some negative effect on animal suffering by proxy. More than likely, the child would be much worse than the best possible case, and would eat meat, eggs, cheese, and use other non-food products made from animals.

And beyond all of these reasons, there is just the fact that a person cannot consent to being born. If I had a child, they would be quite likely not to have such a pessimistic view of their own life, but there's no way to know that in advance. I would be making the choice for them because of what I wanted. I see having children as an extremely selfish and destructive act.
i was in the same boat with a charger that i bought in 2013. they sent out an email explaining that was a design fault (non-reversible current limit) and they were willing to replace/refund. i wanted a replacement but unfortunately i bought it when i was travelling to the US and they can't ship outside the US. they refunded the $20 and 2 of the 5 ports still charges fine.
I did some searching on Google Books, and rather surprisingly it looks like "Big Iron" was first used in the 1960s to describe airplanes, coming from "Big Iron Bird". In the 1980s it was used for computers.
For all those wonderful command-line games and applications on the web with Lisp I suggest reading "The Land of Lisp" ;)
China's ecommerce spending to blast past $1 trillion in 2017
"Math is hard. Let’s go shopping”.

I would like to read an article that covered all the areas you raise, but I suspect we would be in the minority.
ZipCode – Real Estate Hackathon in SF with $25k in Prizes
I think this is a really good start for the most common types of bias. A few counter-examples that might slip through the cracks of this test:

Only examining the sample without looking at the population of applicants has its limits. Especially as multiple interviews becomes the norm, filters that don't affect the distribution of outcomes will be missed. For example, the person screening resumes might weed out anyone with an ethnic-sounding name. A different person, who is not biased, interviews the candidates. The quality of the candidates accepted will be the same, but the number of minority applicants will be smaller than it should be.

Measuring outcomes allows for external biases to distort the results. Start with a company that is biased against women, so that the average female founder is better than the average male. However, that same level of sexism exists in the market, such that the company's performance is hampered due to prejudice against the founder. The VC's bias would be hidden by the counter-bias in the market.
Let's assume that bias does persist past selection through the duration of the program. Does that change the interpretation when you look at First Round Capital's data that shows its female founders outperforming the males by 63%? I don't think it does.

The test may not be sufficient to prove that you have no bias, but it may be good enough to prove that you do. When it does indicate bias, it seems likely to be correct.

To put it another way, if it is 1948 and the only three black people in Major League Baseball are all superstars, then the distribution of baseball skill among black players is extremely unbalanced or there is a lot of bias keeping the average and moderately-better-than-average black players out.
No, YC is more than the brand. YC has an ethos, and the brand is a result.

The ethos is evangelism for basic business practices derived from common sense, rationality, and empathy.

The brand does have perks for founders, though. The network is actually that awesome, yes. YC is extraordinary for making it easy to raise a seed round. Some good ideas take time to mature, and a seed round helps them get momentum.

I wish more investors would try to emulate YC.
Ah, I see. The I/OAT DMA copy offload is essentially equivalent to an asynchronous memcpy(), so anything addressable on the memory bus could be a source or destination (with some caveats about alignment requirements and pinned pages if copying to/from RAM).
> Joy's law is the principle that "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” attributed to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy.

> Joy was prompted to state this observation through his dislike of Bill Gates’ view of “Microsoft as an IQ monopolist.” He argued that, instead, “It’s better to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals. If you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customers’ needs.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy%27s_law_(management)
I do. As founder of Tech in Asia, I admit I struggled a little initially because I kept thinking about money. But as time passes, I learned that there are things much more important than money. Don't get me wrong, I still think $ is important, I do want to be rich (who doesn't?). But money isn't as important as building a company with great culture, values and mission that is worth pursuing.

Life is too short to chase for money. Enough is good, more is better. Live within your means. I don't crave for a luxurious life. Money is an item to allow us (the company) to keep doing what we love doing. Valuation is a measure of how much the company has grown but I'm not obsessed with it. I rather spend my time being happy. Building a company with good culture, values and worthy mission makes me happy. If you're interested, our culture code can be found here: https://www.techinasia.com/culture/ :)
This is exactly it. Twitter should not have gone public, or at least nowhere near the valuation it received. You don't take in a lot of investor money without having a fully fleshed-out plan on how exactly you intend to put it to good use. Twitter's IPO was not based on logic and proven methods for growth. It was a bunch of people jumping on a bandwagon hoping that Twitter was going to be the next major player in the social media bubble.

Small and medium-sized businesses should be raking in investments to accomplish a single specific and realistically obtainable goal at a time. Large businesses who haven't yet found a way to be profitable aren't going to magically find a solution to all their problems by experimenting with dozens or hundreds of new ideas at high cost, with the desperate hope that one of the ideas will randomly catch and save the business. That approach is pure gambling, and so far the gamble does not appear to be paying off.

I honestly can't imagine what people who invested in Twitter expected to see happen. I figure that with Twitter being the next most recognized name in social media after Facebook, people simply imagined that nothing could go wrong. "Everyone knows about Twitter" does not translate as "everyone uses or will want to use Twitter".