skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that what needs to be addressed is the cultural idea that math and programming and "science stuff" is a male thing.

On a more abstract level, I think what needs to be addressed is the cultural idea that $FOO or $BAR are a $GENDER thing, especially considering what we're discovering about gender and sexuality. There's plenty of examples of women being pressured to not do X and men being pressured to not do Y because X or Y fall out of what are considered to be normal social behavior for their respective gender or sex.

How to address it? I don't know exactly, other than stressing the point, and making a point of not performing that type of implied discrimination yourself.

I'm a big fan of meritocracy in this regards -- if I'm looking for coders (or dancers, or drivers, or artists, or bakers, or whatever), I care about what they can and have accomplished, not what they look like or what their sex is. If I ever start my own company, I very well might make the application process (as) entirely anonymous (as possible) to enforce this.
single finger on one small spot

I'd like to see you hold a phone with a single finger...
The Bad Code Kata
"Maybe we should have a wall of PR people to insulate us, but we don’t."

I bet Katie Cotton and Steve came up with that line together.
When searching for people near me, I try clicking on the blue spots in the map, and I expect a list of people in the area to come up, or the list below to change. Is that not the case?
Guy Kawasaki had an article where he mentions doing a bottom up approach to financial projections. "How many biz dev meetings can I attend, how many people can I reach out every single day and add in the conversion rates for each one of them".
It's probably better than saying my company will get 1% of a 10 billion dollars market.
Book Review: Winning Through Intimidation
This is just a joke, I wouldn't take it seriously. Do you really think Carlin hated his job?
Try to search "are not perfect" in Google you will see somethings.
>Maybe someday I'll end up being a "hacker".

It sounds like you already are.
To second this, my martial arts instructor used to be a developer, and quit to start doing physical therapy. He loves it and is 100% glad that he changed.

So, just do what you're passionate about, and it will work out. Nothing beats doing what you love 8 hours per day.
I can't believe people still aren't getting this. Their return rate has been ~1%, they've received apple care calls on 0.55% of the phones they've sold.

This is a non-story blown out of proportion by the press who obsessively over-cover Apple products.

(Disclaimer, Apple iPhone owner, 3G and now 4; no problems with either.)
A lot of people ask how Apple didn't pick this up in field testing.

I think the answer is that they wrapped the iPhone 4 in plastic to camouflage it as an iPhone 3GS (as we know from the Gizmodo phone). Hence all their field testing was effectively done with bumpers on.
Good point. I'm not doing this because it seems legally dodgy. What I can do is provide a direct link to the text recipe, where available.
Google should do what the Mozilla project does with Firefox and use their Android trademark to enforce user-experience standards before this becomes an epidemic. If the carriers take their Android code and use it to punch their customers in the face like this, don't let them call it Android anymore.
I hold my phone lightly, not in a death grip. If part of my skin touches the wrong area on the iPhone 4, signal vanishes.

Capeche?
Jobs: A Free Case For Every iPhone 4 User
Design is important. You should be offering to make the designer an equal partner.

If you can't afford a designer, then launch the product with the design you have, which is not terrible.
Go back and do a PhD?

+'s -

When you finish, you should be pretty marketable
Pick up a whole new set of research skills
Support group shouldn't be a problem in a university environment
Potential for coding if you want to.
Someone with industry experience will tend to have
a good idea of what will work in reality

-'s

You will take a hit money wise until you qualify

You could perhaps look at doing a masters as an intermediate step?
One thing that I've noticed is that "hack" has gone from being something incredibly clever to being some incredibly horrible.

"Yeah, it's a serious hack and it pretty much crashes all the time".

s/hack/kludge/
How would you even define "race"? Does the concept as used in the common socio-cultural context have any consistent meaning with respect to physiology? If so, how would you measure it?

Being a member of a category isn't an inherent property of an individual thing; rather, including a specified set of individuals is what defines the category. If you try to study a phenomenon in general, but with preconceived notions about how each individual subject should be categorized, you're skewing your results straight from the outset.
This strikes me as being an exaggeration or something that has also gotten cheaper, perhaps by convention.

PEOs have solved the problem of most of the HR drudgery, for a mere $200/mo per FTE, if that.

Even the most extravagant startups I've seen don't spend more than $10k per employee on equipment, and that lasts more than a single year. Similarly, if a high-end engineer pulls $150k/yr, a 20% recruiter commission is only $30k.

Arguably, management overhead is a liability both in cost and productivity that a startup cannot afford.

Class A office space (also an extravagance for a startup) is, at most, $3 per square foot and a quick scan of craigslist suggests its easily available for $2 or less. 100 square feet per FTE, and you're just paying again what a PEO costs (a pittance compared to the salary).

That, plus $3k of benefits, plus employer-side taxes adds up to $210k for the first year and about $170k each additional, for a pretty senior employee. I'd expect that could be halved for someone junior.
TechCrunch wants you to give them the exclusive news of your launch. If you don't then you're somewhat less likely to get your launch covered. This is why you hear about them on TC first.
Interesting. Still, I'm no sysadmin; the point is that demonstrating you know how to find something out short of google is better than... well, not.
Good free case, problem solved in my mind. Recall avoided, patch applied, everybody stays happy.

Iphone 4gs, design it and sell it with the case.
I have a friend who dropped his career to go be an emergency medical tech / wilderness firefighter for about six years. He was/is a top operations guy, network guru, Plan 9 contributor, etc. etc.

Recently he got a bit tired of the firefighting life. Workplace politics mostly, believe it or not. Also, an interesting contrast: in the tech world, you can advance as fast as you can learn things. Not so in the firefighting world, where it takes years to convince others of your skills and to lobby for a good position on an elite team.

So he jumped back into the startup world and he's doing great. What he doesn't have in recent social contacts he more than makes up for in fundamental skills.

So, just a data point - it is possible to leave technology behind for a little while without ill effects, especially if you have deeper skills. If you're only good at the latest web framework du jour it's probably more of a gamble.
On the other hand, a "hacker" has gone from someone that takes apart/breaks stuff to figure out how it works, to someone that makes stuff (albeit often quick'n'dirty). It's two directions, really.
Most everything I ever did has been totally random. Things that I thought was safe bets went out the window. Stuff I did when hacking on beer and booze over a weekend has netted me $100/yr.

Key is to not spend to much time thinking about it, just do it. The more you play the higher your chances of winning are.
Thanks for the explanation. I hear you on the genetic testing. The whole process is frustrating. I do realize that I sound like that patient who wants to have "disease X" at any cost, and is looking for loopholes in the diagnostics.

But I want to know what's wrong with me, and what I can do to get better. This whole Celiac thing is really starting to feel like yet another dead end for me (Lyme Disease, Fibromyalgia, Sleep Apnea, Psychiatric, etc; just add it to the list.)

Still, I want to give it a good shot, and that seems to mean staying on the diet for a few months and see if I improve. If I feel better, who cares what the tests say? Though it would be nice to have confirmation, I just want to feel better.
Note also that the article "The New York Times and the Holocaust" was disappeared; perhaps it was rolled into this section of the main article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Nazis.2C_Jew...

And upon reading the discussion that ratified disappearing this article it was noted that the parallel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies is just fine and dandy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty would be proud.
NZ really doesn't have the available bandwidth to do anything like this. That is until http://pacificfibre.net/ goes live
A proper s[n]printf()-like functionality would be more than nice. No ostringstream crap, no boost's format() hacks, just plain sprintf().
Nobody in the 90s but the wildest visionaries saw Wikipedia coming

Tim Berners-Lee mentioned "General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc." as the first area for intended uses of hypertext, see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Uses.html He also mentioned collaborative authoring. The innovation of Wikipedia is public editing which made sense when the general population came online.
This morning I shopped our idea to 20 potential users. Cold-called them. They have been extremely nice and supportive, but it's been 4-5 hours since I sent them links and I am sitting on the edge of my chair staring at a blank tail -f /var/log/access :-|

--
Edit:

They have come! it's been 50 minutes since I wrote the above and already got two beta users. My other startup went for 43 days before I got a 2nd client, and the first was my former employer.

I had to warm them up with a phone call but so far 8 of them have followed the links and 2 signed up. Twelve more to go.

This is my first B2C, I think it's gonna be a different experience.
It's probably also important to note that Amazon was a pioneer and that it's 16 years later, so perhaps their model isn't as relevant today.

More importantly, I'm confident they showed their first revenue well before '02, so it wasn't just VC money paying for sysadmins (and other employees) the whole 8 years.
Vanishes? Seems unlikely: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-...
Really nice! Somehow when I search for Mexico (country), some Texas users appear. Anyway, quite useful.
I agree, but, live by the sword, die by the sword.
U.S. authorities shut down WordPress host with 73,000 blogs
Wow that was a long time ago. Fascinating read. However, the review is really too thin to do the book justice.
Maintenance contracts can be really hard to manage if you're solo, because they can make it hard for you to throw yourself 100% into a project.

Since maintenance contracts are a mixed bag at best, write them in your favor - full price, fixed number of hours, use it or lose it. Then hire or subcontract the work out for some passive income.

5 years ago, my consulting partner and I ran into this situation. We managed it by hiring our first employee. We nailed down $5,000/month of guaranteed maintenance from three customers, and hired a designer/HTML guy. (Much of the maintenance work was simple HTML.) This worked out well for us - two years later, we had five employees and large projects, plus a small steady maintenance stream that was mostly handled by one person.
In Q&A they seem to be glossing over or ignoring the whole "if you bridge the gap the signal drops" issue (demonstrated here with a paperclip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgouzUMlQpY but as I understand it your finger will do the same thing).

At least when asked somewhat directly, one engineer gave a complete non-answer.
Obviously these aren't staying in the cultural memory. Maybe a link to a community-maintained list of trackers should be added as one of the links at the bottom, along with "Lists | RSS | Search | Bookmarklet | Guidelines | FAQ | ...etc"
Listiki - One Month On, New List Page
That's quite flattering, but no I am not even close to that. I don't even know how to code that well, let alone the myriad of tiny concepts that make up CS.

Even if I do reach that level someday. I doubt it that I would proclaim myself a hacker, or anything to that effect. I don't want to spend my life running around claiming credit for things. If someone finds my ideas or code beautiful then they can point it out and I will cherish that moment with them.

Yeah, I am crazy like that.
Ask HN: Why doesn't this ever get fixed?
Folks,

I primarily develop on Linux but occasionally jump to Windows to write an app or two. I have been programming for 7 years, and Windows has existed for a lot more than that. I am really curious to know why the following bugs have never been resolved:

1) A file opened in Read mode by process A cannot be opened by another.
2) Why do we have to work with a backslash for windows paths when even the WWW adopted a forward slash for paths.

Also, never understood why a drive must started with [alphabet]:??? Its so clean to do just /mnt/foo

Are these even bugs or "Features" :-)
Interesting that the company uses @gmail.com email accounts and not their own domain name: http://www.hawthornelabs.com/about.html
Nah, ignore the dodge and do it anyway. It's the internet. You're not stealing, you're "citing". Just be sure to link to the original and most of these recipe sites will think you're doing them a favor.
This jives with an interview I did with a Google SRE a couple of years ago. He basically took me down a path of increasingly esoteric concepts, until we hit a point at which I couldn't recall the answer off the top of my head. He asked how I'd implement it; once I reasoned through it (and recalled the bit of information I couldn't remember at first), we quickly moved on to another line of discussion.

I assume this was an intentional approach: find an area of knowledge the candidate should understand at a high level, but probably hasn't committed the details of to memory, and see if they can reason it out.

You learn significantly more about someone when they're a bit out of their element; does their confidence evaporate, or do they work through it and come up with a reasonable solution?
So you want to build a FICO score for employees. Gotcha. I just think it sounds very challenging (or impossible) to get a number to reflect someone's fit for a position accurately.. and difficult to get adopted. It's complex enough to attribute a number that represents someone's ability to pay back a debt.. and that's based on fairly straightforward historical behaviors that aren't up for much debate... someone's skill and past job performance are subjective.. so you'll crowd-source it and hope that the score averages out, but that requires participation. What's the motivation to rate people? The whole thing sounds gross.
I do not doubt that men are more predisposed to risk, or that testosterone does not play a role in the decision-making process of humans, but I do not think that these studies show enough of a discrepancy to account for the low amount of women involved in startups, or the low ratio of women in tech fields in general.

I would not be surprised if there were a somewhat higher percentage of males versus females in tech. As it is, that is not the case, unless you're using very large values of "somewhat".

(It's getting better though, and seems to be getting better as the idea that programming or tech stuff "isn't for girls" becomes less common).
#2 can be chalked up to backwards compatibility.
They knew... Steve Jobs: "The iPhone 4 went through all of these tests. We KNEW that if you held it in a certain way, the bars would go down."
NO, I did the opposite. I had a successful, promising career dong something totally unrelated, and decided I'd had enough and it was time to do something new. Now I'm a software dev.
The seriously complex and high-performance ITA system is written in Lisp

Have you worked on it? Do you know this? Is it all written in Lisp, or are the parts that need high-performance and predictability written in C or C++?

There's a lot of language FUD out there. I say this as someone who owns OnLisp, and has spent a lot of time learning Lisp.
There's already a thread discussing the press conference http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1521752, can we avoid having the full front page loaded with the same press conference news
Does anyone know if there are amateur news sites that do things like collect shit people just report like "oh shit, this guy just got hit by a car on Damen & Wolcott" or "Hey, guys, the regime is cracking down on our protest", or has Twitter somehow filled in that gap?
Windows Phone 7 a 'disaster' says Infoworld after developer demo
Thank you for bringing that up. It's called RAII and it's one of my favorite features of C++. The fun thing about it is that it can also be used to manage other resources such as files, sockets, locks or what not.
Are there attractive, single members of the opposite sex involved with this? If so, just let me know which colleges I should apply to.
You're right; I didn't know about the -w setting. I guess that just leaves PHP.
This blog is an entertaining rejoinder to Tim's claims and book. Tim's book is thought provoking, but don't take it at face value.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-t...
It's 1% of all calls: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone... . Am I the only one that thinks that's actually a lot?
:\ really no focus? even something general like, "web development" (as opposed to "game development", "financial software").

i'm curious because i wonder what fields it's easy to find work in again after a year off.
It doesn't always take security flaws to flash a phone. I have a Samsung Moment, and you can put any ROM you want on it via hijacking their official updater (the only security flaw being that they don't checksum what they allow you to upload to the firmware).
One of the things that most bothered me in the initial responses from Apple (the Jobs emails and the open letter) is that none of them acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between antennas from other smartphones losing signal and the iPhone 4, where the antenna is exposed and can be shorted, even with one finger. I'm kind of disappointed they apparently still don't acknowledge that (maybe the live transcript is incomplete).

Citing dropped call numbers or return rates or showing other smartphones with signal reduction caused by something completely different just seems like willful misinformation. I suppose their usual MO is to not acknowledge complaints head-on, but that's usually with new features people would like to see. If I can short an antenna and change its RF characteristics so as to lead to an instant dropped call, that seems like a fundamental engineering flaw, and I would've liked them to acknowledge that.
It's always easier to blame the tool for your failed craft than it is to be a good programmer, isn't it :)

Do you object to the attractive nuisance doctrine?
I think you're seeing a knee-jerk reaction to what is seen as a knee-jerk reaction to Microsoft. The truth is, MS clearly sucks beyond any hope. People are sick of hearing it, though, so especially if they use Windows and don't know any better, they deny it and become angry.
The Guy Who Worked For Money
Based on the little I know about signal strength for digital phones, the number of bars really doesn't matter, The bars could just be replaced with an indicator letting you know whether or not you have strong enough signal to make a call. And from that perspective, the stats discussed today that there is less than one additional dropped call per 100 calls make this whole thing seem like a non-issue.

However, what I haven't heard discussed and would like to hear about from someone who knows what their talking about is whether or not signal strength affects data transfer rates. I use data a lot more than voice on my phone and if it's significantly easier to reduce the signal quality on the iPhone 4, I don't think I would get one.
The Cloud Watch List (July 16th)
Q: Are you willing to make an apology to investors?
Steve: You know we hear from customers who love this phone and have a great experience with it, and we're doing a lot to help them with any issues they're seeing. To investors, you know, you invest in the company we are, so if the stock goes down $5... I don't think I owe them an apology.

Whether or not Jobs is bs-ing about loving his customers so much, I wish more CEOs took this attitude. I think that doing your best to make your customers happy reaps far more benefits in the long haul than doing your best to make investors happy. In Apple's case at least, the fact that they ignored what their investors demanded of them during their dark days actually made the investors a lot more money.
The problem with a lot of these posts on HN is that the audience seems to be rather biased towards low-performance app areas like web, and business apps.

Oh noes! I have to handle 10 requests a second!

Take a look at the SWENG-gamedev mailing list for some of the performance issues that people face in games and game tools.

/pissing-contest

Note: obviously this is not an argument against C instead of C++. It's more to forestall the meta-discussion.
Google search: Political power
Recipes are not subject to copyright unless it "is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions" (e.g. you are clear on a conventional recipe, but not copying something like the detailed explanation of why/how various recipe choices were made such as you would see in cooks illustrated.)
More Installable Webapps for Chrome Available
I'm fairly certain that the percentage of women in startups is much lower than can be explained by purely biological means.
That seemed very weird to me. When I interviewed, it was customary to have a Googler who was not an interviewer take you to lunch at one of the cafes. If you were a referral, it's usually your referrer; if you know someone at Google, they try to match you up with that person. It's your chance to ask questions of an employee in an informal setting, where they won't be making a report back to the hiring committee. And I know they still do it, because I was the lunch interview for a friend of mine that just applied a month or so ago.

The only thing I can think of is maybe they couldn't find interviewers for the normal time slots, and so they had to schedule one at lunch as well. Qualified interviewers are often a scarce resource at Google, mostly because of people like me who never sign up for it, and they try to avoid assigning more than two interviews/week/person to avoid burnout and let them still get actual work done. It may've been a choice between "schedule one during lunch" or "wait another week until a different interviewer is free".
This is a good step, but the state should also be taxing them at close to 90% as well. That way all the other billionaires who don't care about philanthropy are forced to contribute back into the system that allowed them to gain the wealth in the first place.
What you see there is a drop of between 6 and 22dB (from four bars to one [+]). Gripping the iPhone will reduce the signal by at most 24dB.

I don’t know whether they don’t acknowledge that. They showed a “X marks the spot” slide. That, to me, seems to be a pretty clear acknowledgement that merely touching that spot weakens the signal.

[+] http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-...
I love fantasizing about future revenues and FU money. But, I've worked like a dog for every dime thus far.

Regarding revenue projections based on New Hampshire state population, see http://sivers.org/1pct
The Windows stream open statements allow for simultaneous access by another process.