skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.

Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions.

For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means.

Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions.

That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment.

This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.
Freshdesk/Freshworks (Series F, $149M Total) CEO, Girish Mathrubhutham, has penned down a memoir of how a comment on HN has enabled him start his startup journey.

https://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-...
There's no native support for Windows due to completely different way of terminal is implemented in Windows and Unix-like systems. But there are some options to have it working, see this thread: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema/issues/150 (use a fork, or run asciinema in WSL bash).
What long-term goals do you have for yourself, really? Do you have any? And if you say you do, do they actually motivate you?

Building an app or starting your own business sound like typical HN crowd goals, but do they actually apply to you?

It seems to me that you right now struggle with seeing the effects of your work, and how they relate to whatever long-term goal you may have. Because there seems to be a disconnect there, you do not feel motivated. But this will not change until you: (a) have a clear long-term goal that you actually care about, and (b) figure out how to work on tasks that help achieve the goal.

Why are you doing whatever it is you are doing?
I always thought I was ADHD, then I started a business, turns out I just like to do things my way and lead not follow. I've struggled to "focus" my whole life I'm a jack of all trades and master of none.

When you find the right thing you'll know. I would do what I do now for free or if I was worth 100 Million because I love the game.
Norris Numbers – Walls you hit in program size (2014)
> Short-term because this tactic is obviously unsustainable.

I've pulled my share of all-nighters too, but (from the comment) the implication was it was a regular thing.

Far in the weeds here, I guess if I had RTFA maybe I wouldn't have bothered to comment. :-)
Are you working by yourself most of the time? I forget where I read it, but I think it was Joel Spolsky that said “Don’t be a guy in a room” because even if you can do whole projects by yourself, it gets boring and feels unfulfilling compared to working on a team.
No. After having removed outliers, I still see a clear line & slope like shown in the diagram. Maybe you don't see it, because you don't want to see it?

Also, you cannot call all of Sweden, Norway and Finland "outliers"? To me, that looks more like you deliberately destroying data, until the remaining data set fits your world view. Hmm I live in Scandinavia and I feel mildly annoyed that you apparently want to ignore this part of the world :- P

Women breast feed babies. To me it's natural and obvious that evolution has therefore made them feel happy when they take care of others, and that a bit more women like working as doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and such things.

(With that said, I think it's a good idea to encourage more women to choose STEM jobs. The article seems to agree with this and that they're good at it.)
I tend to use a simple method to analyze a post. Switch the races and genders around.

If in your post one would switch the term black woman into white man it would become "If you create a company with only white men.... you could create a very unique culture.". etc

That kind of post would cause a massive uproar for rather obvious reasons.

Yet it's interesting that these kind of posts don't.
Another, less paranoid, motivation to consider, some might argue that STEM is important to civilization and having more of it is a good thing, even if people could go into other careers that are more personally lucrative, but are more zero-sum in their potential for benefitting the human race. Making the pie bigger rather than fighting for the biggest slice of a diminished pie.
In my remote team we use appear.in. It's a great product.
The nature of the discussion is very different, though.

On the one hand you have an entity which is not born yet and which cannot make a choice.

On the other one, you have someone with vast experience deciding about himself (directly or indirectly via a will).

For clarity, I am completely and strongly pro-choice in both cases.

The first one is strongly faith based and weakly science based (when does life starts?)

The second one is way more objective and somehow quantifiable.
> I agree that it shouldn't be marketed as a "plant food"

It isn't, though. It's only this article's author that harps on and on about plants.

> fungi are not plants.

Exactly. The same author who harps on about plants in the context of Quorn also accuses the public of being scientifically illiterate.
My Qt experience is in developing native desktop applications. I have not used Qt for mobile apps yet.
ok, I'll try again. how is this notion that conservatives are not free to express their opinions not a standard political talking point? there's an entire genre of such articles in the mainstream media. it's a popular argument with white supremacists who are attempting to normalize fascism.

you're permitting a standard political talking point to be an entire topic of discussion, and then screening out some individual replies because they invoke additional standard political talking points.

you're allowing some standard political talking points and disallowing others. if you're doing that, it would be convenient for your users if you were to specify which standard political talking points are valid topics of discussion, and which other standard political talking points will get your comments banned.
Impressive feat - however, I was puzzled by this:

> Naturally, some of the workers were nervous about this idea. Matute Remus was sympathetic to their concerns, and wanted to reassure these operators and make them feel safe. So his wife Esmeralda agreed to also go into the building while it was being moved. She even took along their seven-year-old son, Juan Jorge.

Maybe this could work as a publicity stunt to persuade the general public that there is no risk, but I can't imagine that you can reassure an expert who is familiar with the actual risks by rising the stakes. (Not to mention putting his wife and child in danger for a psychological exercise)
How? I imagine sterile enourmous vats and tubes in a continuous process, like a brewery.
Yeah, isn't it wonderful that when you factor out the discriminating variables, discrimination all but disappears?

Choices made by women are influenced by the glass ceiling, society expectations that women will take care of children and the elderly, and the traditional fields where they're expected to work. The decision to measure the gender gap by comparing equal working hours and equal job positions is not innocent, is itself a politically motivated and comforting way to make rational people think "I told you, there's nothing to see here". You need to evaluate what causes women to have those less hours in less paying jobs, to see whether there's discrimination or not.

Yet the salary wages discrimination reappears when you factor in hours dedicated to domestic work (the "second shift"), differences in salary between fields with equal risks (exposition to chemicals, hardship) where workers are majority women vs those with more men, or companies' (irrational) tendency to default in promoting male workers over females in similar situations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-...
Can satellite save the NHS?
Skype seems to have a better quality compared to WebRTC based solutions nowadays.
> as much of a gender-equality-utopia Scandinavian countries are, they're certainly not free of gender roles and the societal institutions that enforce those

Compared to Algeria, Albania, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE, Romania, etc? Please get your head of western social "justice" bubble. The factors that you think the article doesn't take into consideration are not explicitly there because they are implicit to everybody who really knows these countries.
Michael Arrington is named as an advisor to Nexo [1]. Is this connection legitimate?

[1]: https://nexo.io/
The exact opposite is true for me most of the time. The open office ruins it, working on my own or limiting contact is productive.
To be clear, this is the research I'm paraphrasing, but they seem to be suggesting that the men have the STEM skills to compare with women, but they don't have the non-STEM skills to compete as well in something like Law or Medicine or whatever. So they have a comparitive advantage, not an absolute advantage in STEM fields.

(I also just replied to someone else to point out that "putting more people into STEM" could be considered good for the human race. I personally think that more people should be allowed into Medicine for example, because there's some monopolies there that are driving costs up. Probably feels like an attack if you're a highly paid doctor though).
SpaceX “We Choose”
Conservative people always emphasize that equal opportunity is all a society needs, and there is no need to worry about the actual outcome.
And now they find themselves in a minority position in one area of the US, and ask for affirmative action for themselves?
Funny!
I'd suggest taking a look around you and maybe ask that question to people you know in person. I know this feeling myself, especially when starting out with work after college. Always beating myself up over how I don't have any side-projects, if I'm going to cut it at work and basically why I'm not on the same level as Linus Torvalds, or some other genius programmer already.

I think the truth is that I was heavily influenced by e.g. sites like HN, where it's always touted as the ultimate virtues to have these side-gigs and basically be working all the time. When I looked around though I realized that this is just not the reality for the overwhelming majority of people. Most people are happy just working their 8 hours and then _do something else_

So, my advice would be to 'stop trying so hard'
>The major cloud vendors are also rapidly evolving with Azure Functions being the most integrated and useful with AWS second and GCP far behind.

Can you expand on this, please? I've got a very basic understanding of the first two, would like to know more.
I oppose racial diversity and am not a racist.

The problem is that the word "diversity" doesn't actually mean merely having the presence of different races. Nobody who argues for "racial diversity" ceases to argue the moment the first black or Asian person is hired.

Rather, the phrase "racial diversity" has become code for its own kind of racism against white people. It doesn't mean the dictionary definition of diversity, consisting of multiple types. It means specifically eliminating and pushing out white people on the grounds that there are lots of them around in western countries, so harming them in some concrete, objective way isn't really harmful.

Moreover, the tactics normally used to obtain this so-called diversity are usually anti-meritocratic: literally the promotion and rewarding of people who do not deserve it on the basis of their work or skills alone, but just on the basis of skin colour. This is poisonous and demeaning to those people who do work hard, but don't benefit from being born "diverse".

It's really quite sad that this is actually a topic for debate, and that the ever more extreme elements in California have tried to make "meritocracy" a dirty word. But ultimately it'll be to the benefit of companies in other parts of the world who don't care about this strange and poisonous offshoot of political dialogue. I doubt there are many companies in Russia or China that force all employees to spend time on unconscious bias training, or who reliability promote unqualified people because of their DNA.
Amazing Videos of Animals – Amazing Videos 2018
I'll second this and on top of that would advise you to try to get some more insights into your personal drivers / personality (I fell for Meyers-Briggs or MBTI, but have to be honested that personality science feels somewhat hand-wavy.). It might be that being a freelancer is not the best fit for you and perhaps being on a team or in a team-lead role would fit your personality better. For me external demands and a corporate environment where there is quite a lot of appetite for thinking outside the box gave me a lot more energy than my studies and first job(s).
Fun fact: the Radeon GCN ISA actually has an instruction for taking the middle value, aka median, called v_med3.
Yeah, perception is a big part of it.

When I was in startup-land, if we had a big deliverable we'd work until we couldn't work, which usually was about noon to 8am. Then everyone would go home and sleep it off, and the next day we'd try to not do that again... sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Now that I have a "normal" job, I still occasionally do a big coding sprint of 20 hours or more, but I don't do it day after day.

In startup land, when the CEO came in at 7am and saw us frenetically coding away in the Nerd Loft, I sure hope he told everyone we all worked 20-hour days. :-)
https://xkcd.com/1013/
Retroshare is a Qt desktop application with a recent Android version: https://github.com/RetroShare/RetroShare/blob/master/retrosh...

LibreOffice has an Android version: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/BuildingForA...

These are the projects I am affiliated with.
Don't be so sure it's unrelated. I ate gluten for the first 25 years of my life. I stopped eating it for more serious problems but, when I did, the knee pain I had since 15 also went away.
And what is it that you do?
Why don't you ask him why he thinks that, instead of writing it off?

I agree it seems odd to believe that anyone could be against having children. But the world is full of large groups of people who hold odd and unsubstantiated opinions. Perhaps he's met people who really do look down on him for having kids. Perhaps he's stumbled across a group of old fashioned Malthusians who think children = population growth = destroying the environment and he's extrapolated that belief out incorrectly onto a much wider group.

To your wider point, conservatives are absolutely victimised in some parts of society. That's what the entire article in the WSJ is about. That's what happened to Damore. Note that Damore filed a complaint with the NLRB: they wrote a memo that put the word "scientific" in scare quotes, and stated that bringing up scientific studies of gender differences was sexual harassment. So literally attempting to argue conservative viewpoints by reference to scientific studies is now considered sexual harassment and the government will not defend it: if that isn't going to create a feeling of victimisation, what is?
We do use Uberconference. Conference sign in could be confusing for first timer, but otherwise it is solid (with some glitches from time to time).
> it is common for a guy to feel the onus of securing financial safety for his family

In other words, this is not about what the article claims (girls are just not interested, presumably for biological reasons) but about expectations hammered into all of us by society.
I'm not either way invested in this, and can not contribute much to the conversation. However, a certain pattern strikes me in the way you are dealing with this conversation, which I've seen before and for personal reasons touches me.

First, I appreciate your politeness and structured responses. It would seem so natural that everyone argue in this manner and yet I find it rare enough that it deserves appreciation.

So for the personal reasons mentioned above, I wanted to ask you this, and you are in no way obligated to answer:

- Do you think most people in this thread are delusional and/or refuse to see a truth which seems painfully obvious?

- Do you sometimes feel this way about people in the real world/other subjects? Often? Always?

- As a thought experiment: if it turned out that masses of people were, as a rule, not ignorant but instead wise, would that impact the way you see yourself?

- Would finding out the truth be equally satisfying for you regardless of what the truth turns out to be?

- Do you find yourself wanting certain statements to turn out to be true?

- Can you identify why?

In any case, I wish you the best of luck with your search.
I've had tiny conversations with people like Alan Kay and Walter Bright here. Now, I'm a humanities undergrad living in Istanbul with a soft spot for programming and computers, so without something like HN, this sort of interactions were impossible.

HN is bustling with domain experts and very smart people, lots of experience, just the best kind of guys to rub shoulders with.
I've still got one laying around, was given one by a friend working at Mozilla to take a look at Firefox OS webapp development.

On another note, when will they be fixing those awful navigation icons on Plasma Mobile?
Ask HN: I'm interested in blockchain but put off by the hype. What should I do?
I have been dabbling with blockchain for a while, I see it's potential and would like to focus on it sincerely, but I'm put off by the hype it surrounds. I feel I'm just following everyone else and soon I'll be too late as blockchain will enter the "trough of disillusionment" (Gartner hype cycle). Chasing hype makes me nervous so that a part of me tells me to focus better on something quieter, less "sexy". But I'm interested in the technology!

A broader question is: what to do if you are interested in a hyped technology?

Sorry in case this question doesn't make much sense, but do you feel the same?
Actually I didn't even know it's supposed to stay in the most recent settings. I just go and click on it every time I open FB.
"Son, there's a reason they call it 'work' and not 'blowjob'."

And that quote is both flippant, and exactly correct.

---

1) anxiety, impostor syndrome, uncertainty, vagueness, complexity, open loops, etc etc all conspire to create some analysis paralysis and the general sensation of everything else being more fun that we all know too well [0].

2) Be honest and figure out exactly what it is that is making your focus fall off

3) Start doing Test Driven Development. It's a decent enough habit in general, but for you specific problem it is golden because it a) forces you to define your problems better up front thereby decreasing your anxiety, and b) contains problems requiring less overall focus to complete your tasks.

--

[0] http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/the-intern...
Here's something I churn out every time a 10x thread starts again; it has some references in it:

A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance.

The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work.

Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]
When I was brought in to work on Edgeio, Mike (who I knew from before) introduced Keith as his partner in Archimedes Labs, not as his employer. And he discussed the work they were doing to launch more companies under that umbrella. He firmly gave the impression on multiple occasions over the following year that Techcrunch grew out of the research he did as part of that partnership, and never once suggested it was somehow a separate, personal project.

What he told me and what went on behind closed doors may very well be very different and I'd rather not jump to conclusions about it, but at least to me it seems like a very different situation in that he himself presented it differently at the time.
> Here [1] is an archive.org link from 2005, that lists Mike and Keith equally, on a post posted by the web designer who also did a lot of early work on Edgeio

Well it's been a while (long time no speak, too) and 12+ years are known to change memory and bits, but I remember those times. I remember the tension between Techcrunch and Edgeio because I lived it, and I'll say that the resurfacing of these this subject is not surprising.

Because I know I would be biased and I have fond memories of those times, I don't think it would be fair to put my version of events forward. I will say this: despite his flaws, I have to give Mike a ton of credit for sticking with Techcrunch - he put a ton of energy into making it what it eventually became, even if that meant less energy spent on other projects.
The author initially writes,

> Before we get into the struggles of working remote, [...]

but then never gets around to describe those struggles. I wonder what they are.
I've often felt similar. As well as peoples other suggestions that are useful, I've found wearing glasses helps, I don't usually, but when I do concentration is definitely easier.

Only first had to wear them from a few years ago so the prescription isn't strong.

But yeah, do tend to flit between tasks a bit.
I recently had to use Go for the first time at work, while generally Common Lisp is my go-to language.

I kinda liked it for a systems language. It has conveniences trickled down from higher level languages[1] that are missing from C & C++ and which make them such a chore to use

[1] for example: garbage collection and being able to print an object without have to import vast libraries
No-install, no sign-in is amazing. Appear is one of the services I've referred people to the most, for just that reason.

The main critique I have is their push to monetize as of late has been clumsily executed in my experience of the product. The expanded "pro" features have shifted around without enough heads up. The chatroom ownership system is not at all clear in how it interacts with paid accounts. We abandoned a few rooms used widely in our org until we figured out whose random account we had used to own a room earlier (from a prior push by Appear for room ownership) and got ownership transferred to a paid account.
>>People seem to be drawn to creating a DSL for their problem set, and then programming in that.

You have to create a DSL for your problem, no matter what programming language you code in. Its just that most people never program in anything beyond their area of exposure, and their DSL which they creates just appears very normal to them. But not to others.
"Absolutely refuse to add any feature or line of code unless you need it right now, and need it badly."

As I've gotten older I've seen the value of this rule. Though it sounds merely negative, it can produce effects that seem little short of genius.
But surely by that time we can have, say, electric sheeps, right?