skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This post is shot through with more lies and fallacies than you can shake a stick at. Some of the more egregious ones:

"Is the Valley deliberately keeping these groups out? I don’t think so. Silicon Valley is, without doubt, a meritocracy. In this land, only the fittest survive."

What? This makes no sense. How can Silicon Valley be a meritocracy and discriminate against minorities at the same time? Doesn't he realize that the two things are polar opposites?

"It wasn’t always like this, but girls are now matching boys in mathematical achievement."

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

You can count the girls on this list with the fingers of one hand.

"The companies they start are more capital-efficient, produce higher revenue, and have lower failure rates than those led by men."

Proof? The data shows that women start more businesses than men, but a greater percentage of them are part-time/lifestyle businesses, not startups with dozens or hundreds of employees.

"Thirty years ago, there were hardly any Silicon Valley firms with Indian-born founders. UC-Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian documented that 7% of tech companies started in 1980–1998 had an Indian founder.... according to the U.S. census, in 2000 less than 0.7% of the U.S. population and only 6% of the Silicon Valley high-tech workforce was born in India."

Again... what? He says that there were "hardly any" firms with Indian-born founders, even though his very next sentence says that Indians founded companies at a rate ten times greater than the population baseline? This makes no sense.

"Despite having co-founded a software company that we took from startup to $120m in revenue; profitability; and IPO in a record five years, I couldn’t get Research Triangle Park (RTP) VCs to even return my phone calls when I was ready to start my second venture."

I thought this was supposed to be an article about Silicon Valley? Surely it's not a stretch to believe that North Carolinans are more racist, on average, than Californians?

"TiE Charter Member Vinod Khosla advised me to contact VCs in Boston and gave me several introductions. After I followed Rehki’s and Khosla’s advice, it didn’t take long for me to get a term sheet from Greylock Partners (of Boston)."

Doesn't everyone know that personal introductions are a big factor in doing deals with VCs? How does he know that hiring a white President was the critical thing, instead of his introductions?
War will be casualty-free for societies with drone soldiers until both sides have this technology.

Building an AUV is ridiculously cheap, and can be done with off-the-shelf components. Moreover, other countries have learned from the success of our drone programs, and are rapidly developing their own. It is almost a certainty that we will have drones deployed against us in our next major conflict.

People tend to forget that there was a brief period where America was the sole nuclear power, and we could destroy whole countries with negligible risk to 'friendlies'. We had very similar discussions then. However, that monopoly of power didn't last, and the costs of deploying those weapons suddenly became infinite.

I suspect that a similar symmetry will arise with robotic weapons. War will get weirder, but it isn't going to get any less risky.
DICE 2010: "Design Outside the Box" Presentation
You misread my statement which was part of the "how would you solve the problem" thread.

My point was that now that Flash does support multitouch and gestures, it's possible to add those features to existing content (yes, this will happen). Naturally it won't apply to all projects but it's far from the sinking ship that the author suggests and rabid HTML5 supporters are praying for.
Now that I'm reading "People's history of the United States" by Howard Zinn, I'm not surprised by anything anymore. I guess all governments do this kind of stuff (and worse) on a routine basis.
It looks really cool; if only I could get it working.

Anybody else having trouble with the Ubuntu PPA? I can sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dreampie-devel/ppa just fine, but when I do apt-get update, the dreampie stuff comes up 404.
I see what you mean but I guess I see an important difference between creating a sockpuppet in these two circumstances.

On the one hand creating an account to protect your anonymity when you make a potentially inflammatory accusation about the behavior of a prominent member of the community.

And on the other, creating an account to make it appear that you have more support on the forum than you actually have.

I find the latter to be a serious problem whereas the former seems reasonable and ethical.
my money is safe... not worth it.
My Social Identity. Which site did I leave it on, again?
If cheap programmers suck, good programmers should be expensive.

In this situation be a good programmer - it's not hard, just requires diligence and methodical learning of new stuff.
I have my tweets replicated to Facebook, but that's because I never use Facebook directly, and most of my friends aren't on the twitter bandwagon. The 3 friends who follow me on both are free to stop following me on either, they won't miss anything...
Slider will require a different front end, but you don't need to toss the entire code base.

As for existing code, yes that will be a problem. But most Flash developers think of projects as evolving and/or disposable. Most of us aren't locked into stuff we did 3, 5, or even 10 years ago. We move forward and enjoy finding solutions to new challenges.
Is it common practice to log POST parameters? I've never seen such behavior outside of development environments, but that might be because I've never run a very large web application.

an unscrupulous systems administrator [...] could determine that my password is Th1s1sMyP@ssword just by looking at the logs.

Couldn't the systems administrator simply change the log code to not filter passwords, or to email the password on each successful login attempt? That seems more reliable and productive than waiting for a user to click the wrong input box.
What do you mean not crucial?

Of course it is. Quite a few online services and applications use it to hide complexity.

For instance I am currently working on redesign of a netbank which involves introducing visual overview of your spending. Flash is perfect for that.

But for some reason because many games of mouseover event's it's is an argument for why apple shouldn't allow it?

Sorry that's not an argument, that's poor reasoning.
PG addressed it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131005

AndrewWarner does link directly to HN and ask for votes, so it's quite likely that people register specifically to upvote/comment for his submissions.

I would like to see him comment on the ruby35 account, it is quite suspicious: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ruby35
What we don't understand [about UI complexity]
God really is just a horrible way to manage processes. Either use monit or bluepill, they are MUCH more reliable.
Printing People Parts: World’s First Human Organ Bio-Printer
You agree that there is no 15% year on year increase in spending on a necessity. Thus, your stated rationale for the necessity of some sort of reform does not apply.

Do you still believe that reform is necessary? If so, why?

Incidentally, as far as reducing costs goes, the only method proven to reduce spending is increasing the marginal cost of medicine to the consumer. I.e., high deductibles, lower subsidies, no first-dollar coverage, etc. In contrast, any reform scheme which lowers the marginal cost to the consumer will probably make the problem worse.
GemCutter.org becomes RubyGems.org (at last)
I find the "correlation" number confusing. The interface presents it alongside the RSS, yet one is affected by the line I'm manipulating while the other isn't.
Please read the customs regulations for the uk http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPort... , as the US is a couple of volumes thick!

Quoting:

Excise duty is not charged on spirits used for industrial or scientific purposes, so long as it has been contaminated ('denatured') to make it undrinkable. At present the relief is managed through the Methylated Spirits Regulations 1987 (MSR), which require spirits purchased for non-drinkable uses to be made unsuitable for drinking prior to delivery to the end user. MSR allows for 3 different formulations of denatured spirits.

The spirits are only contaminated to ensure that they are not used for human consumption and thus avoid tax. They do not offer any advantages (actually fumes from methanol are toxic).
I'm slowly building a membership section, but I didn't mean to put this and every single other post on my homepage behind a pay-wall. The outsourcing company I use made a mistake. I fixed it this afternoon.

But yes, I am moving towards a paid premium model that will include older interviews. And this won't be the last time I'll make a mistake.
Bandwidth costs do exceed $100, but that's not a factor.
What's the reason for the downvoting of this and my follow-up post? This is very disconcerting, it discourages me from participating or contributing to an active conversation. HN etiquette requires a reason for downvoting.

As a long time member this is very frustrating. I'm sure I'll get even more downvotes for pointing this out.
What's for the jury to decide? The alcohol wasn't poisoned to punish people. The goverment said "this alcohol is poisoned, don't drink it." People drank it anyway. Where does the jury enter the picture?
The war on vice is properly regarded as a private war fought within each individual.
That is really neat - I just installed it. I don't usually use Python (strongly preferring Ruby) but I want to experiment with Python + AppEngine (I am tired of the hassles with JRuby + AppEngine, and using Java + AppEngine is too easy :-)

I installed PyCharm a few hours ago and Dreampie will be good for light weight experiments.
High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies
I had to install it from source on Ubuntu 9.10

after:

sudo apt-get install python2.5-gtksourceview2

sudo apt-get install python2.6-gtksourceview2
See here: http://www.robertsosinski.com/2008/12/21/understanding-ruby-...

Proc objects created with lambda check arguments and have "diminutive return" so they behave as anonymous methods.

Also, Kernel#proc is an alias to Kernel#lambda, so the only way you get the bare Proc behavior is by calling Proc.new directly.
Hey guys, i think he has removed the paywall.

This thread is very useful!
It makes a lot more sense to me to put the recent interviews be behind the paywall, and make the back catalog free.

It's typically the recent stuff that's 'hot' and therefore has the most value, while the older stuff tends to be more of a curiosity with less value.

Plus, a wide-open back-catalog is more likely to attract references from places like wikipedia, from people trying to cite it.
Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China
I'm in Buenos Aires. My IP would stand out in a minute.

What you'll probably find if you keep searching the comments here is that many people will say that I emailed or called them personally after they commented on my work here.

I'm engaged in this community and that's easier and more effective than setting up dummy accounts.
Thanks for that. I hadn't seen his comment.
ScaleDB cloud storage engine for MySQL
The real URL is pycon.blip.tv - the URL above is blog spam.

Just one video for now (the rest are 2009).
Well, it's both. As you state, they are required to add stuff to ethanol, to make it undrinkable. On the other hand, if something is already poisonous, they are required to add the same stuff. In the case of cleaning alcohol, the manufacturer would 'add' (or 'not remove', depending on the process) the methanol even if they weren't required to. As such, the cleaning alcohol is poisonous and they have to add the other stuff. My point was merely that that situation is actually more common than the first, because methanol is cheaper than ethanol.
It was initially proposed in early summer with a goal of passing something by the fall, that's not exactly a rush.

If the opposition were interested in good policy, they'd be well-served to point out bad things that are actually in the bill, (of which there are plenty), rather than wild-eyed slogans about death panels and sidetracking about abortion.
I guess all [illegitimate] governments [murder their own citizens] (and worse) on a routine basis.

There. Fixed it for ya.
The problem with saying that they "poisoned people without a trial" is much the same as the problem with saying that a police officer who shot a suspect brandishing a gun "shot the suspect without a trial." It's technically true, but it puts a totally unnecessary spin on the events, as a trial is neither expected nor required.
Thanks.

It's not about the live shows so much as it is about getting people to watch my interviews the day or week that post them.

What I'm finding is that if I don't create urgency around watching the interviews the day I watch them, people will consider them old and ignore them.
Divergences are given in so many units it's really hard to compare anything. Examples: 0.018 foot, 0.04 inch, 0.045 cm.
Filibustering is supposed to be for something extraordinary -- the idea is that majority-rules is the norm, but for a given issue a minority can really dig their heels in as an added brake on the system.

Adopting the filibuster as a matter of routine for nearly every matter before the senate, and hoping that the country will reward you for it by being disgusted with congress's lack of ability to get anything done, is not what they were envisioning when they enacted it.
Whereas art hasn't come a long way since Rembrandt and Mozart, engineering has.

Hahahahaha... Sorry, but that is just false. It's the same oversimplification an (ignorant) artist would make : "Technology surely has not come a long way since books and horse buggies - we can just read books without books and ride horse buggies without horses."

I'm sure it was just a lapse of attention on your part, though.
Warn Andrew ahead of time? You've got be joking. Why doesn't Andrew pay a fee to those he's interviewed already now, in this bait and switch interwebz journalism
Also look at kdevelop. Should be a bit closer to what you have in mind and available for most any linux distro you are using.
Big lie as far as I can tell. I'd like to see exercise tested against a placebo.
Kids these days! Need more Aristotle.
While it looks like an interesting book, there's no content here.
I agree Sequel is awesome, and will probably be my default ORM once Rails 3 settles down.

However, the new AR in Rails 3 using Arel is pretty nice too; it's a massive improvement over AR 2. You might want to give it another look.
New Critical Rationalism Blog
No, they're not dropped, as that would violate attribution requirements. They are, however, compacted and compressed to take less space (at the expense of more CPU to access, but the typical user won't notice this)
Andrew has interviewed me twice for Mixergy. I don't begrudge him for making money off of his full-time job - I get promo for my projects through his platform.
Google, Amazon, Firefox, and Linux?

Much of what we use today is maintained by private institutions, non-profit or not. Government may have built the technology, but it is the entrepreneurs that realize the benefits of the internet.

On the flip side of government inventions, we don't know what will happen if the government have not funded the creation of the internet. It's the unseen of history that will forever elude us.

I believe that academia, with their interest in information technology, would have invented the internet in one form or another.

An example of what could have been: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?_r=2&#...

Addeinum: http://mises.org/daily/2211

This mises.org article explain my view far better than I could.
Awesome Websites For High Quality Photoshop Tutorials
OH at PyCon
I'm having trouble extracting any content at all from this, even after reading all the articles. I can't see why it's bad, nor what's supposed to replace it, because there's so little anything.

And how exactly is breaking everything up going to occur, when most people can't be bothered, and want an everything bucket? Heck, if things are broken up into atomic units, microformats will probably have their day in the sun, and cross-posting will be magnified a thousandfold.

Why did they write this? An elaborate rant because they don't like reading the same thing more than once?
A really bad business move is doing something that isn't sustainable. Given that giving his interviews away for free isn't sustainable, putting his content behind a paywall is probably an experiment to see if he can build a sustainable business.
How to Incent Good User Behavior: Use Real Identity (ala LinkedIn, FB)
Booyah MyTown Players: What to do After Level 40?
Thanks. I think part of the problem is that people will see this as just a show as long as I don't take risks to elevate the work.
Filibustering is supposed to be for something extraordinary

Political junkie history trivia interjection here.

It used to be that any one senator could stop laws from passing. Later on cloture was reduced from unanimous consent to 2/3rd of the Senate. Finally it was reduced again to 3/5th of the Senate.

There are lots of other issues here, and I didn't want to interrupt your discussion, but I find it fascinating that, if anything, it was always intended that very few senators could/should hold up things. The Senate was intended to be the more deliberative and slow-moving body, and large latitude has always been given for the minority to shut things down with discussion.

Back to your regularly scheduled discussion.
Indeed. If the market economy had had its way in the early 1990s, we wouldn't have open access and HTML, but islands of walled garden networks (MSN, AOL, Apple eWorld) running closed binaries.

(That scenario would probably resemble the mobile phone market quite a bit. "Sign up for MSN, get a free Dell PC and 2000 free online minutes! * Incoming email messages now just $0.03 each + $0.99/megabyte for attachments.")
Becoming asynchronous - The first step towards distributed applications
Getting a New Home at Homes and Garden
Also stuff like this only works in simulations, the actual trading fees make this totally unpractical.
Can someone explain what exactly is XRD and what it is useful for? I'm not being sarcastic, just trying to figure this out.
Ah, I didn't know that Proc.new != proc/lambda :)

They both return Proc objects though, so I wonder if it is possible to "convert" them.
Googling, I find this one claims they are not using friends credit scores, but are using other aspects of your social graph and content:

http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=111&sid=1869379

A different news item, upon which I based my comment, said IIRC that they were using friends credit worthiness as a metric. Call my cynical, but I find it hard to believe they won't, sooner or later and as such data aggregates throughout commercial databases and so beyond the requirement to request reporting from (in the U.S.) the "big three" credit reporting agencies.

I don't have that item at hand, but here are a couple of more that Google turned up (quick search and scan). The link above and the first below both seem to be based on the final, third link.

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=697&#...

http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/social-networkin...
How on earth did you get that from what I wrote?

I said that health insurance is a necessity, pretty clearly I thought, because incidental care is so outrageously expensive in order to finance an inefficient and broken system. The fact that it shouldn't be so expensive just to take care of incidental medical needs doesn't change how things work -- it just highlights how much need there is for reform. So, yes, health insurance is effectively a necessity unless you're a big time gambler (everyone loses eventually), and yes, it's still going up by 15% a year, so yes, nothing's changed in my opinion that some sort of reform is neccessary.

On your final point, I must be completely missing what you're proposing. How does increasing the cost of medicine make it less expensive? You're saying reduce total spending by making healthcare inaccessible?

I think you're mixing up unit costs and aggregate costs. Yes, increasing unit costs to infinity would reduce aggregate costs to zero.. so? Where's that take us, nobody gets a checkup and every hospital visit is an emergency room visit? Aren't those like 100X more expensive?

Trust me, I wish that this particular not-quite-market was functioning properly and there was no need to have this discussion. But it's broken, and the only way I can see to fix it is by government action. What else can we do, community-organized boycott?
Not that it makes you one, but just so you know: all drug addicts can't imagine how they got by, or would want to get by, without their drug of choice.
MobileMe gets slightly more compatible with Mobile Safari
I also recently discovered this awesome plugin that uses screen for the heavy lifting: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2711
Motorola's official 2.1 OTA update for Droid found in the wilds.
Thanks, good point. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I thought that traditionally it was rarely used, usually only when there was a very strong difference over a particular policy. (Also, I believe there are still single-senator anonymous holds in the senate but those are a different thing).

Filibustering every single routine bill to come through the senate out of cynical political game-playing is a travesty. These people swore an oath to serve the country, and they're disgracing their office with about 8/10 of the filibusters they're invoking.
I haven't read it, but the reviews it's getting seem pretty negative. The author is active on the related linkedin groups but doesn't seem to be willing to respond to the critical reviews, which completely puts me off from buying it.
This is why I prefix my password with several z's. It makes typing the password feel different than typing the username, and since this change, I've always managed to catch myself quickly enough.
Don't forget, that first space flight came 50 years later...
I posted this last week:

http://m5.posterous.com/slime-like-communication-from-vim-to...

It lets you open a vim session from ipython, and send lines, selections, or the whole file back to the shell. If you'd like to do some hacking, it doesn't seem to be able to send single function definitions yet.
Do they have to know whether they are in a game or not?
Information should always be free to the community

Bullshit. Information is power.

Mixergy should concentrate on monetization with different ways rather than subscription model

Agreed.
I've recently read the book actually only first "20~ things" out of it and it's a pretty bad book. I stopped reading after 20.

On paper "97 things" idea seems great but in practice it's pretty much rubbish. I've read 97 things a project manager should know as well and that wasn't good either.
What's wrong with "just a show"? A show can both achieve a lot and can be worth a lot.
Seriously - if any of these Ritalin / Adderall etc help you think clearly and do more than just let you work on less sleep, you most likely have ADD, and can treat it in a structured way with a doctor helping you, instead of ad-hoc self medication.
I was under the impression that the world wide web eventually force the walled gardens ISPs to connect to the rest of the internet.

However, I could not found details to support or disprove what I said regarding this matter.

All I could get from my useless google searches is this ancient 2005 thread and it was about AOL connecting to IRC and usenet(in the second post): http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/7630.htm