skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The United States of America is the only country in the world with "America" in its name, hence we're called "Americans". (Likewise, Great Britain is actually the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", which means if anything, calling UKians "British" actually excludes part of their population.) If you follow the general rule for naming nationalities (take the country's official name, drop any preceding "People's/Democratic/Federal/Socialist/United Kingdom/States/Republic/Empire/Emirate of", and add "ish" or "an" or "ian" or "n" or "ese" to it or drop the last vowel depending on what sounds best) and apply it to "United States of America", you get "American". Sorry we picked a lame and generic name[1]. I think we considered "Columbia" at one point but it's too late to change it now and people would confuse us with Colombia.

"USians" is technically more ambiguous since we're not the only "United States"--Mexico is "Estados Unidos Mexicanos", which is Spanish for "United Mexican States".

As you may or may not have noticed, the names of countries don't always exactly match every single geographical use of the same word. Some people in Greece were similarly upset about Macedonia, which is why lots of people call it the "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia". I don't think anyone ever calls their citizens "Former Yugoslav Republicans" rather than "Macedonians", but my Greek isn't up to finding out for sure.

If you want to go further back, "Germany" and "Spain" are Anglicizations of "Germania" and "Hispania", which in the original Latin incorporated much larger areas than these current countries. I don't think many Polish or Portuguese people really mind, though, when I don't refer to them as German or Spanish despite the fact that they live in Germania or Hispania.

[1] Historical reason: of the original 13 colonies, they each had their own names, and the only thing they really had in common were that they were United in opposition to the Crown, that they considered themselves States, and that they were of America. By the time they had become a single nationality, it was too late to pick a more interesting name.
Being homeless in Canada is 'something else'. You don't really realize how harsh those winters are until you're in Toronto and you see the streetpeople after a night at -30 Celsius.

I've lived on King street, where it ends on the lake, and from there it was about a 20 minute walk to the office. Every day I'd walk that same route and meet probably between 5 and 10 people living 'off the street'. They'd all be equally friendly. They had their own spots.

The police in Toronto was pretty laid back at the time (I'm no longer there so I have no idea how they are today), when a really cold night would approach they'd round up the homeless people and bring them to a shelter. But every year, in the spring one or two bodies would be found in the melting snowbanks. The unlucky ones that avoided the shelters and slept in 'their' spots only to never wake up again.

Winter in Canada is harsh.
See also https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=DRM+writes+to+boot+sec...

This is a pretty nasty thing that's largely coming to light just now because GRUB2 uses a significantly larger portion of the space between the MBR and first partition ("embedding area," 24KB vs 10KB).

What we have is separate applications (GRUB2 and whatever Windows application) trying to use off-spec storage (the "embedding area") at the same time. Seems to be a bad idea on everyone's part, not just the GRUB or rogue Windows app developers.

The "embedding area" is not guaranteed to exist, be a certain size, or be unused: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=embedding+area+is+unus...
3 squabbling companies must cooperate to plug well (AP)
Personally I would not use FB Connect unless you're already a name I can trust.

If I'm not wrong, when you use FB Connect, you can capture only the user id. The disadvantage is you are not able to build a meaningful customer database, but this also depends if customers info is important to your startup. Secondly your startup will live and die with Facebook. This makes sense only if your startup is a Facebook app.
This comment, like many others, is pretty critical of using FB Connect exclusively, which is something I understand and why I posed the question in the first place.

It may help to provide a little more context. The reason that FB Connect is used exclusively is to solve the pervert problem that has plagued videochat applications.

The FB account is used ONLY to track users, and on the landing page we make it very clear that we never reveal your identity to anyone and that we never post anything to your wall or your friends' walls.

We use the FB login so that if you are reported for misusing the site we can block you permanently. The thinking is that if we just allow you to create a new account or login with different accounts, then the pervs will be able to continue to access the site even if they are blocked on one account.

On the other hand, I'm getting the sense that this could be a big problem for legitimate users. Perhaps having multiple sign-in options would be OK, assuming that if you're a perv you'd be wary of signing in using your real account info, and that you'd really be going out of your way to be a jackass if you waited til one account was blocked before and then signed in using another account.

I'm surprised that the HN community seems more averse to using FB connect than I expect most normal users are. Either that or people that are critical of FB Connect are more apt to respond to this.

Lots of food for thought though. Ultimately, the question is whether offering multiple sign-in options dilutes the security feature of being able to permanently block those who misuse the site. While it does dilute this slightly, I'm starting to think that the trade-off might be worth it if only allowing a FB sign-in is so repulsive to so many...
Somewhat related, Android does not bounce back at the end of lists. The list simply stops scrolling...which is rather ambiguous considering if the phone lags, it looks like you're at the end of the list...and then suddenly it starts scrolling again
There was a girl living in a house of mine that stood empty for a year because I couldn't sell it. Before then she was living in an old caboose.

We talked quite a bit, she was a gifted artist on the one hand and totally out of touch with the world around her on the other.

She said she could talk to trees and was completely fascinated by eyes. Last I heard from her she was living in Spain, doing drugs living on the street again.

I don't think she was homeless out of need as much as that she simply chose not to be a part of this society of ours.
This is a good point.

We are in fact doing a "hard launch" as a result of the need for a critical mass of users. Its a videochat website, and if noone is there then you'll just leave.

As I mentioned in another comment I made just before this, I'm certainly reconsidering the decision to do FB-only.

The main thing I want to stay away from is allowing users to create accounts. We don't want pervs to be able to get booted off and then just quickly create another account. But it does seem to make sense to offer Google, Twitter, and perhaps another sign in option.
The Canadian government has all kinds of monopolies, the LCBO is just one of several. You can really see how Canada has its roots in The Hudson Bay Company when you study how that came to be.

In case you're interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson%27s_Bay_Company
> It's also quite extensive in its coverage of compiler implementation techniques.

With only two pages about SSA ? (which is the internal representation used by most compilers this days)
The Twitter Revolution That Wasn't
Agreed.

I lived and worked in downtown Chicago for close to 3 years. There is a large population of beggars. About 90% of them are black males. During the same period, I also saw lots of black males, who looked like these same beggars, in convenience stores and grocery stores buying alcohol and tobacco -- ONLY. Not other stuff along with it. Only those things. They often favored a certain kind of beer. I often saw that same kind of beer can, or wine bottle in a brown paper bag, discarded empty in the gutter or near trash cans in the same neighborhoods. Eventually, you put two and two together and conclude that it adds up to four. Do all of those beggars buy alcohol and tobacco with the money they get? Probably not. Are all of them addicts or lazy? Probably not. Are probably a large portion of them that way -- and/or mentally ill? Probably yes.

But once you see that enough with your own eyes you begin to feel less sympathy for many of them. Not a total lack of sympathy or empathy -- I don't want anyone to live that kind of life, even if it is a case of failed willpower -- but it also hardens you a little bit when there's a call for more aid. Some people truly have hard things happen to them, and it's not their fault. Some people truly bring trouble upon themselves, and it is their fault. And it's hard to distinguish between them from a distance.
The second is wasteful, the first can be useful. It will help to plan before execution so you have a good mental model of the parameter space that your business is operating in which will help you with guidance when decisions need to be made. It would be delusional to think that you can completely model the problem before you have data so as you go forward you'll have to adjust the model and therefore the plan.

It basically is an instrument to cut down on the number of surprises that you'll encounter along the way and it gives you some measure of control.

Some people get stuck at the planning stage, they never make the jump to implementation, but at some point further planning becomes a pointless exercise and you just have to bite the bullet and do something.
I've had the same experience. Truly humbling, indeed.

One mental condition that really fascinates me is schizophrenia as you begin to understand reality is the brain's way of interpreting chemical, visual, auditory, tactile and other external stimuli, but also via its internal chemical reactions, neural connections that can go haywire.

Cognitive dissonance is another topic I'm fascinated by and wish everyone would know about it.

Anyway, if your interested in these subjects, but don't want to read very technical papers, I recommend reading Jonah Lehrer as he'll point you in some interesting directions:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/frontal-cortex
Well women are obviously interested why else would we be having this discussion? It obviously comes up and the fact that it keeps coming up means there is underlying issue that is not being addressed. Nobody is saying it's an issue that is easy to address but both educators and women in tech keep bringing up the issue so the incumbents are not doing a good job addressing it. Plus, it is in everyone interests to have all kinds of people be technologically savvy whether they are male or female.
> there are women... who complain about how there are too few women in tech, and then there are women who just go out and start companies

Never heard it put quite that way before, but very well said.
Totally agree with this. Spend a year out east and all of the homeless people there get a seriously rough deal all winter. I cannot actually comprehend how anyone survives it.

Living in Vancouver though, it seems that everyone that could get some form of transportation has ended up here or in Victoria; it certainly feels disproportionate to the population/economy.
Unfortunately, I think test taking falls into the same trap -- drilling for memorized procedures, without necessarily really understanding the material in a meaningful way.

It'd be like measuring which country has better literature by seeing who does better in spelling bees.
Sounds like schizophrenia to me. I subletted to a person with schizophrenia (a very nice korean guy, very religious), also. As I point out somewhere around here, it's a truly fascinating mental condition.
I am not a doctor but from your description of her there's a good chance she had schizophrenia. Her statements are consistent with it, and problems keeping friendships and jobs leads to financial and social problems with then leads to homelessness which then leads to more problems, including drugs, and it snowballs from there.

If this was the case, the root affliction is not her fault, and she probably needed anti-psychotic medication on a regular basis, and government financial aid to keep her off the streets. Talk therapy is almost useless for that condition. Though giving her shelter and helping her to keep social connections is vital. So it sounds like you helped her out a lot.
"It's as if a country called "The Grand Duchy of Europe" referred to its citizens as "Europeans", to the great dismay of everyone else in Europe."

If the European Union ever turned into a real country rather than a loose confederation of allied states (just like the US did between 1776 and 1865), I bet you'd call citizens of that country "Europeans". Unless their respective countries had joined the EU in the meantime, the Norwegians, Swiss, Russians, Icelanders, Turks, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians (or is that Former Yugoslav Republicans[1]?), Kosovans, and Bosnians may or may not be annoyed at that usage.

[1] Some countries call Macedonia the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", since some people in Greece are annoyed that they named their country after a region that extends into Greece.
Here's a little about it.

http://www.deeptherapeutics.com/
I am not living under a rock I just prefer to keep the discussion away from conspiracy theories and petty overused arguments about how "the man" is keeping everyone down because there is no merit in such arguments and it doesn't address or advance anything.
Thanks for the correction.

I guess I should stress that my point was simply the joke that nature has an unhandled exception - not an actual introduction to Doppler effects or anything.. (Of course, it does still bother me to get it wrong like that :-)
No, I'm sorry but American is not the colloquial usage, it is the correct usage as defined by the members of that nation for the English language. Here[1] is a listing of those names for the citizens of the countries.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Yes, that's because the winters there are somewhat lighter because of the presence of a large body of water to the West.
"and there's something about gender that just has this shaping force on our interests and talents."

What would that "something" and that "force" be?
Agreed. It would make "intelligent, successful" people be more humble about their accomplishments, if they realized that they were really lucky to have the genetic dice roll just the right way that their brains worked basically okay, with no significant distortions or blind spots in their reasoning and functioning ability.
Except that a lot of the time this discussion isn't started by a female interested in entering the tech industry. I've seen a few posts by women in the industry railing against some sexist thing some other member did [1]. I've also seen a few articles by men saying the tech industry needs to be more open to women. And I've also seen articles by women who are not in the tech industry saying that the tech industry needs to get more women, even though they themselves aren't really trying to get into the industry.

So, we have really one set of women with some sort of interest in actually being in the tech industry, but they're mostly talking about someone doing something stupid, which can and does happen in every other industry. I don't think a limited number of misogynistic instances is really indicative of the state of the industry.

If someone can point out a recent article written by a woman who tried to enter the tech industry but couldn't because we're a sexist bunch, I'd love to read it. So far, though, I just haven't come across that.

[1]: The one that comes to mind is the talk given for some Rails function a year or so ago. I don't remember who gave the talk or what it was about. I just remember it caused a big stink.
The Offutt Air Show 2010 | Horizontal Image
feedback welcome by the way
In the US, we have state monopoly liquor stores as well. They were instituted as part of the regulation scheme when alcohol was legalized at the end of Prohibition. They continue on as major revenue generators for the states. Many states don't have them, but many do as well.

Ontario is one of the Canadian provinces which implemented Prohibition as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Canada
I have Jonah lehrer's blog on my feed. However I wouldn't recommend his books though (or most other mainstream pop-psych books). We recently read it on /r/NPBC (Neuropsychology Book Club) and I thought the book was an oversimplified interpretation to sell his predeterminer narrative of the book.

Currently we are reading Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens" (really enjoying it so far, very dense.)

You can read Lehrer's unofficial reddit interview here (The OP, subtextual, is a professional Neuropsychologist):

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d1pib/jonah_lehrer_aut...

You can read my thoughts on his interview and his book on the comment's section. Same username.
I think that ML has some features (such as pattern matching) that makes it a better fit for writing a compiler than Java or C.
Agree. Right solution would be something akin to BootMagic,
which stores the code in a separate small partition.
Or, as a half-measure the can use code compression (LZ77 or similar).
It's a touchy political issue. Some people, for ideological reasons, would prefer gender equality everywhere possible. Some people suspect that women are different from men in how they use software, and that women are better equipped to serve female customers.[1] And some people think the low numbers of women in startups, or in the tech industry, indicates some fundamental discrimination or injustice against women.

[1] Think about the 50's and 60's--there were tons of companies almost entirely run by men who produced lots of products used almost exclusively by women. You have to wonder how well they really understood their customers.
I spend a fair amount of time reading HN, but this is one of the topics I skipped over.
I'm not so sure about that. My experience with homeless people is that most of them are honest to a fault.

They wouldn't be begging if they were not. Begging is asking for money. That's an honest persons last recourse when they have no other options.

A dishonest person would steal, not beg.
> All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

the problem i find is that your choice is between 150% (employed) or 0% (unemployable).
"too few women in Tactial Special Ops teams"

There's intermittent controversy over having women in combat. Countries that have tried it, incidentally, find that it's a liability because men tend to go apeshit protective when female soldiers get hurt.

"But I'll never see that because I think secretly deep down they know, gee, people are different, genders are different, and there's something about gender that just has this shaping force on our interests and talents."

If so, it may be helpful if more women were involved in software, because if women are different from men that probably extends to how they use software, and it would be good if software was better for women.
I wonder if there is a way to bring realizations born of other people's experiences home in any meaningful way. I sometimes think about what advice I'd give my 17-year-old self if I had to attend college again, but I admit that the younger me likely wouldn't have listened. It's hard to know what to value in the moment, and I find it's equally hard to absorb what others with the benefit of hindsight tell you. I'd bet that none of these expressed regrets really surprises any of us, but chances are we'll all have the same ones on our own deathbeds -- despite knowing better.
Perception is everything. That's people's reality.

We can rationalize until the cows come home, but that won't change anyone's perception. For that, you must convince them, individually.

The problem is not, I believe, Facebook's inability to explain some service of theirs, it's the fact -- and I mean fact -- that they have repeatedly changed the rules regarding privacy of information in their favour. Because of this, they have lost trust.

By associating your business strongly with Facebook -- if it's the only authorization option -- you will be perceived similarly. Thus, anyone who doesn't trust Facebook will most likely not use your service.

But that's just my perception.
I'm frankly surprised that this it the first you've heard of it - I've seen the term "USian" used with no possible connotation of disrespect for years, often by Americans themselves. IMHO it's unbecoming that your first assumption upon seeing this word is to assume that he's hostile against your country.

Trust me on this one, if you've spent any time on the Internet you know it's a passive-aggressive ditch at the US (at least common enough to deserve a couple notes in Urban Dictionary[1]). Anyway, when did it become the role of members outside a group to tell them whether or not they should be offended by the name they are called?

The problem is that the name "America" is hardly exclusive to the USA. It's as if a country called "The Grand Duchy of Europe" referred to its citizens as "Europeans", to the great dismay of everyone else in Europe.

This is completely irrelevant. Citizens of the USA have an official demonym in the English language and it is American. The argument that it is an attempt to avoid ambiguity is bullshit because no one ever uses the term Americans to refer to all inhabitants of the North and South Americas.

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=USian
Vaksel has it right though. And of course it would work on reddit. Just slap a link underneath it that says 'click here if you don't want to see these ads'. That goes to the payment page. And offers you a 'you're a cheapskate' option that disables the ads without payment.

Positioning reddit as poor and hard to monetize is a fantastic strategy if you want to buy it back some day.
There is a middle ground there.
The chassis.
> These days woz seems like he's basically kicking back and enjoying himself.

I think he always did.
If you wouldn't recommend Lehrer, what would you recommend?
That project has matured a lot, it's now called byobu. It's friggin' awesome. https://launchpad.net/byobu
Makes sense, but then I don't understand how owners get away with the practices they describe in the article.
Do you have any protection in place from brute forcing pass phrases? Since your pass phrase suggestions are simple english words, it would be rather quick to dictionary attack it. Also, why would I send someone a pass phrase that they'd have to select, copy, and paste vs. just click link? I can't submit a jot either. I get 404 and 403 (csrf issue) when submitted.

Just out of curiosity, was this created during the 2010 djangodash?
It's not about artificially injecting people anywhere. I guess I am not being very clear. It is important to have balanced representation in any field that is considered valuable to society and it's even more important to have balanced representation in a field that has high overall impact on peoples' daily lives. Technology is such a field and I don't understand why everyone is being so defensive about the subject of including more women in technology.
Fb connect on main signup form, regular signup a click away: signups down ~15%.
Well-designed main signup form w/ fb connect as an option: signups up 8%.

30k new users per day, data statistically significant. Ymmv.
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