skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember a few days before the start of my freshman year of high school, I was at the college library making copies of math competition tests so I could start practicing for the upcoming season of competition. While I was there, I saw a girl who was on the math team the year before in junior high, so I told her what I was doing and asked her if she wanted some practice tests. She said, "No," and just walked away, but there was a world in that "No." She was offended. She was insulted. She had been pretty good at the math competitions in junior high, but she quickly fell behind in high school and then quit the math team/club. She did drama and speech instead. She still took honors math classes and aced them, and I even heard she did engineering in college, but she would never admit to actually liking it enough to go beyond what was required by classwork.

Similarly, the girls I met in college who were getting degrees in math and engineering never admitted to having an interest in those subjects beyond doing well in their classes and getting degrees. The two girls in the math program were keen to express their interest in the money they would make as actuaries or what-not. They had to like math, or they never would have chosen to be math majors, but they never showed any sign of it, and (stung by my previous experience) I was scared to even imply that they might.

So yeah, there is a huge fear of nerdiness among women, and I don't think the "nerd chic" thing helps at all. There's no celebration in "nerd chic" culture of honestly frumpy people (there can't be in any "___ chic" culture, "___ chic" will never help anyone who isn't chic) so of all the girls I've known who I suspected of secretly liking math, maybe one of them would have felt at home there.

I went to high school in a small city (large town, really) in a rural area, and I went to college at a non-elite public school (went there for the honors program) so you guys who went the elite route may have seen vastly different things. In terms of numbers, though, I suspect my experience was more representative.
A little detail: the home page title is "Home", does not look good in the browser and is bad for SEO.

For the rest it's a really awesome website.
I think his point is that Gates was given some very generous gifts and, with them, "he fucked anyone who got in his way", "usually to the detriment of the industry".
It says in the first paragraph that he intends to support jsonp in the future. It will matter then.
This actually seems like a reasonably common attitude among indie-game devs (not universal, but not uncommon). The biggest problem you're likely to face as an indie-game developer isn't everyone pirating your game, but nobody ever playing it at all: the most common method of failure is the game that just never gets any traction, not even to the level of "niche success". In that context, piracy can often have more publicity upside than sales-losses downside.
I wish the site had a nice Features Area, so I could get an overview of what the product will do without actually signing up for it. I bet you'll lose some legitimate customers who would rather read about the product before making a "purchase" decision.
Science is a testable, reproducible hypothesis. Computer models (the foundation for AGW) never have been and never will be science.
That's funny, my friend (who was a very early MSFT employee) tells a different story. There were a bunch of different competing technologies. Writing a program for all of them meant writing it over and over, so nobody did this. The market was small and fragmented, and nobody really believed you could get huge as a software company. Bill's parents wanted him to finish his schooling instead of dropping out to start Microsoft as a result.

Businesses were confounded because some of the software they wanted ran only on one stack, some ran on another. Consumer adoption was nonexistent because switching from one OS to another required learning everything all over again. You couldn't simply go to Best Buy, get some software or hardware, and assume it would work. Hardware fragmentation kept sales down, which in turn kept pricing high, which in turn kept sales down, etc.

Either way, none of that "good old days" stuff is really the point when analyzing whether or not the world would be better off without Bill. The industry progressed, as it would have without Microsoft. We know it would have evolved, we just don't know exactly how. It seems virtually impossible to me that it wouldn't have ended in one OS on most people's desks, but I am willing to admit I may be wrong. If it weren't for Bill, we may all have been running IBM's OS for the last 20 years instead. Or maybe we weren't buying them at all, because they cost too much and were too fragmented. Would either of those universes really be better? Nobody could possibly know.

Microsoft's standard operating procedure was part of the game. You may not like it, but IP suits and lobbying are as much a part of big business as dribbling is basketball. That was the case long before Bill Gates arrived and will be so long after he's dead. You're hating the player instead of the game.
I agree that there may be some flaws in the study. But as a young, male, testosterone-fueled entrepreneur, I find studies like this invaluable for ego-control. I am always realizing that I need to check myself before hubris takes its toll. I even have the phrase "all glory is fleeting" (a la Roman generals) visible on my computer as an indirect reminder to think first, then act.
...but this part above strikes me as petty...

Sorry if it came across that way; that was not my intent.

Everyone's starting point is relative. No one ever gave me the gifts that Bill Gates got. But then again, I've had gifts that 99% of everyone who ever lived couldn't imagine.

With those gifts comes responsibility. Whenever I have an opportunity to use my gifts to do good things, I think of how proud those who made sacrifices for me would be. I imagine many people here on hn feel the same way.

Bill Gates never used his tremendous gifts for the greater good, only for the good of Microsoft. He never cared how big the pie got, only how close Microsoft's share of that pie approached 100%.

The point of the paragraph wasn't to be petty or jealous; it was just to point out how the one with perhaps the biggest gifts of all didn't choose to share them like the rest of us would. Sorry if I implied anything else.
I love the sarcasm :)
IE9 Beta Now Available For Download
Can you cite that 7 years figure please?
Without getting specific, let's just say that there's a path from "blowing stuff up" to "software security researcher" that involved me knowing how to code C before I was 15. My history of childhood mayhem is tamer than most stories you can read elsewhere and is pretty boring. I became an ISP admin while still a teenager and all this stuff got a lot less funny, fast.
I would argue that a great portion of the total wealth of society created over the course of history has been "unintentional", using this terminology. If we don't understand and appreciate this then it will be to our detriment.
> Young hackers today take great pride removing Windows from their laptops

I am an old hacker and I always feel better when I remove Windows from a laptop.
That's "Rainbows End", actually. A statement, not a noun phrase.
Can we please stop bashing MS for the continued usage of IE6? For it's time IE6 was a fine browser (honest), and what exactly is so bad about supporting software long after it is obsolete?

If you're tired of supporting IE6 on your site, then stop. Foisting off the cost of transitioning everyone off IE6 onto a big company like MS is comforting but ultimately unrealistic and selfish.
IE 9 Beta is now available
It's especially true in the indie-game sphere, where people get their recommendations from random reviews on blogs, mailing lists, wikis, forums, whatever. Lots of those reviews are not by people who paid for the game, but some people who read them might pay. Maybe not most of them, but often non-zero. It's useful enough that some indie-game devs are pretty liberal with their "review copies"; if you're going to write up even a blog blurb on a medium-traffic blog, they'll just send you a free copy and save you the hassle of pirating it.

Really the biggest likely pitfall facing indie-game developers is that they release their game and nobody notices or cares, not even enough to pirate it. There are a ton of indie games that come out every year that never rise out of obscurity, which is the main thing publicity attempts have to overcome, at least early on. Enough people pirating it to generate some forum/blog buzz is one possible way, like underground musicians who get their initial publicity via people trading mix tapes.
Well for starters it would be a lot more expensive to print signs dedicated to the city/county of a store. Price matching becomes tedious too, requiring a calculator.
This is because you are using your intuitive definition of creationism and not the one that has been historically used in this argument.
The Most Powerful Colors in the World ...And How You Make The Next Ones
As a YC W10 startup, we were lucky to have dinner with Zuckerberg and I asked him afterwards why he chose that blue for Facebook... Cause he's color blind. Not a majestic response about how color influences mood, buying habits, etc.

He used a color that was personally best for him. And a lot of the top brands in the world now, started in garages & workshops... where the branding research consisted of a couple rounds "what if we..." before a name was born and then a logo & design.

My favorite example of this is Mercedes. The brand now stands for luxury cultivates a significant vibe... but why did the founder call it that? Simply, he named the company after his daughter... and now people name their daughters after the car!

A lot of YC companies get greif for their names (most.ly the ly.ly ones) but how much does a name / brand have on the actual product being successful.

I think it can have an influence, but at the end of the day... the quality of what you build will determine its success.

With that in mind, my fellow hackers & founders... from a guy that runs a website about color... Be more adventurous with your colors. Have some fun.
I was really expecting to see some links to sample sites on the front page, rather than just thumbnails.

I refused to sign up just to see what they looked like.
Is offshoring making Computer Science graduates the largest unemployed group
'Disregarding a bunch of things I don't want to talk about, what do you think a programmer should know?'

Seriously? You're going to take huge swaths of things off the table to try to force the discussion the way you want it to go?
Very nice. This is reassuring that such stuff is still available, legal and protects us from the peering eyes of whoever is in power at any time...
I would expect the exact opposite. In 2005 many were skeptical of the whole YC model, and consequently would have had a much more difficult time attracting investors and already-successful startups. The first demo day was twelve investors, mostly PG's friends; the S10 demo day was a three-day affair with over 350 investors and members of the press. The current batch also was able to attract some startups which already had launched and had good traction before YC even started; these startups probably would not have applied to the first couple YC batches because it was not yet clear just how advantageous YC was even for startups which could raise at higher valuations.
Selling your stock over being fired is not a principled stand. At least not in the conventional way of thinking about it.

Plus he has on occassion been labelled the highest paying CEO in the world, due to his stock options. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/12/lead_07ceos_Steven-P-Job...

And in any case, most CEOs don't make a HUGE salary. Jobs would probably get paid $750k. The fact that he doesn't make this money is (a) hardly a dent in his wallet and (b) doesn't really make any effect on wealth allocation.
It's growing, quickly. Others are entering this space, their main obstacle (besides the cost of running fiber) is that so many buildings have signed exclusivity agreements with comcast which have questionable legality. The economics make it easier to do in a city.. pay $20k to run fiber to a building with 1100 units, sell 25% of those units at $35/month, you gross $120k/year from that building. You probably have another $10k-$12k in equipment costs per building as well, but this sort of a network is quite simple to run.

This sort of connectivity will never be feasible in the suburbs without massive government subsidies (something I had hoped our current administration would see the value in).
Dollar bills have serial numbers, so it is already possible to track incoming and outgoing transactions to an extent.

The problem would come in assigning a static serial number to a pool of bits. If I spent an electronic dollar, did that dollar come from the few bucks my neighbor gave me for gas after he borrowed my lawn mower, or from my paycheck? It's not like I care which one gets spent, since they are the same, but how would you determine which one get priority. I guess the same argument applies to dollars sitting in my wallet, but its something one would have to consider designing such a system.
My point exactly ;-)
The 90s shareware approach was almost ideal for me from that perspective. I could play 1/3 of Doom and then decide if I wanted to buy the remaining 2/3 or not.
Well, I see it in ND and couple of other states, so something must allow it (probably state law).
To whom much has been given, much will be expected in return,
with great suit comes great responsibility, etc.
Micros are great if you want a very large EBS volume mounted on a 64-bit machine. The next cheapest 64-bit is $350/mo, and a TB of EBS is $100/mo.
The price of love? Losing two of your closest friends
Sounds like you've already got a good handle on things.

The primary issue with the article is that it could lead you to misdiagnose the root cause of any impulsiveness (in your business decisions) you may have.

You don't need this article, there is more value in having an experienced mentor to help you keep your impulses in check.
Do you plan to support search ? for a information filled wiki, search is vital.

Any possibility for private pages/orbs ? especially for a couple to share information.
Ok then - sorry for the duh if it offended anyone. It's really not that insulting you know. Plus I had a humorous smirk on my face when I replied. So much for my joking mood! Now, what in the name of Elvis does "sullying comments" mean?
Just launched our last startup, feedbacks, thoughts? thanks in advance
This is a double posting, we won't post again if this does not gather attention, we just want some more feedbacks. Thanks!

url : http://jerknessreminder.com
Totally agree. The T-Pain app is technically impressive and I'd say, has entertainment value.
I'd pay $5/year for CNAME support + export content feature.
Interesting, but since there's no reason to multiply two money values together (what use is a square dollar?), it doesn't really do anything. It ends up trivially degenerating into two currencies with some exchange rate between them.
How convenient, just finished downloading the previous version of Xcode!
IE 9 Beta download
While I am happy too that the new version of IE is coming soon and it supports the latest standards, let us not forget that we all were saying the exact same thing when IE7 and IE8 came out:

This new release will help developers very much by supporting the latest standards.

The problems is not with supporting a subset of the latest standards. The problem is that the latest standards change over time and IE stays the same for 2-4 years.

In the long run, as a web developer I feel that IE7 or IE8 did not help me much in reducing the work I have to do to fix the compatibility issues. Now instead of just IE6, I have to fix issues with IE7 and IE8. (I have had issues where I could fix the problem using some extreme hacks in IE7 while there was no way to fix the issue in IE8. Later I was forced to use the EmulateIE7 meta-tag for the website, which was BTW developed this year. For the curious, the problem was similar to this: http://stackoverflow.com/q/1156985/184 )

Until unless some version of IE ships with an auto-update mechanism, I will just refrain myself from going gaga over the new CSS/HTML standards support of IE. The most important thing they have to fix is their release cycle (+ auto-update) and they seem to ignore this part for a long time. Now every time a new version of IE comes out, I don't know whether to smile or to cry.
I'm actually more interested in the parts he chose to ignore, because all the replies are about things that every programmer learns in his firsts 2-3 years of work -- so nothing especially insightful, just common field knowledge.
I would say getting perspectives from different people is never irrelevant. So no I would not argue against diversity even in those cases you listed.

It is possible you just didn't recognize the cliques. They aren't always super obvious even when they are prevalent.

I like racial minorities in the workplace are a different concern than gender minorities. Mindless discrimination based on race is very much noticed and looked down on these days. I wouldn't say its the same about gender. If all your co-workers always forgot to invite you to lunch or assumed you wouldn't want to do what they do because of your race you would be right to compare.
Subsantial new infrastructure would have to be built to accommodate person to person transactions. When I deal with an established vendor, I use a credit card almost 100% of the time and while not electronic currency it is close.

When I buy orsell something of craigslist right now it is almost always cash and the infrastructure available would have to change substantially for that to change.
Appears that AirPrint will only work directly with HP ePrint printers. Kind of disappointed...
Benchmarking GNU R: DirkE's view and a Ninja wishlist
This is great. I see one immediate problem with group collaboration that sort of makes me not want to use the site -- I have to recruit all my friends and convince them to keep adding to the site. Is there some sort of feedback loop to encourage contribution and maintain content so I don't have to do that myself?
It is almost like when you learn to write. Each times you make an error and notice it, the next time you're going to write it right at first.

The first time you forget the name of the function, the second time you remember the name but forget the semi-colon, the third time you forget the underscore, etc. Meanwhile, you remember slowly those errors. In the end, you write your code without any mistake right out of your head.
I wholly agree. Just pointing out that they're "games as a service", even if that service is a disservice.
A couple critiques for the front page:

- Change the wording on your "Call to Action" button. The fact that you can jump right in and start editing without filling out a form is great -- emphasize it, don't hide it. Saying "Sign up, it's free" makes me think I'm going to be filling out a form, creating a username, giving out my email, etc. It should just say "Try it now for free" or "Jump right in" or something along those lines.

- The screenshots of example sites should most decidedly either open up larger, or open to the actual live sites on which those screenshots were taken. If I knew better what the button did (see above) I might not have cared as much, but I always like to see what the creators consider some "ideal end results" with their product. A tiny thumbnail is just not going to cut it in that regard.

EDIT: Okay, going back, I see now the button actually says "Start Now, it's Free". I don't know why I thought it said "Sign Up", but I guess if nothing else it's worth noting that an actual "user" went to your site and misread the button. I don't know if that means it still needs to be changed, but at any rate, it happened. :-)
that's 'take a cue'
Canada is probably the leading supplier for marijuana in the United States. Apparently exchange weed for cocaine and / or guns.
Is it bad to keep yourself busy?
>The problem would come in assigning a static serial number to a pool of bits.

I don't really see it. There are cryptographic protocols designed just for this kind of things. The real thing is it would be more awkward than just cash.
You really are equating the iPhone software market with the desktop software market, where every piece is a pain to install and takes a lot of your attention and must be large and significant. While the app store is more of 1 dollar gumball machine which gives out kinder surprises, stickers and other small things. There is a plan towards a kinder surprise model. And often when developers just throw things on the app store without much planning, marketing or much of anything they usually make nothing and fail. Actually the majority don't make much at all.
have you heard of http://www.squarespace.com/? They have the same pitch: build a site, no programming required... They have a good model for income..
That's only for some mobile numbers. Landlines in the UK are currently $.03/minute. We're working on adding more international capabilities soon. Stay tuned.
Under settings, there is a Site Privacy page where you can set the entire Orb to private.
Sure, but you can Google, too! :-)

"Lisa Lambert, Vice President at Intel Capital, said:

It just takes a long time to go from startup idea to a liquidity event. [...] During the boom days, it was like 2.6 years to get liquidity. And today, the latest average from NVCA, the National Venture Capital Association is 8.7 years."

http://venturehype.com/angel-investment-asset-allocation-2-t...
That was one of the Gladwell's points in his famous book outliers.
Where do you get the 'only' from? I'm sure it is all standards based and that Apple wants all printer manufacturers to support this.

Also, it works with Printer Sharing on your Mac. Which will be the gateway to whatever printer you already have.
Done! http://blog.twilio.com/2010/08/ben-morris-wins-twiliomongodb...
I wonder how many of those 500 people would write an effusive blog post like this one about the event.
How I added my HN saved stories to a Posterous sidebar + HN-scraper on github
In very early stages, profitability is not the best predictor of a future large liquidity event (i.e. the thing YC wants to optimize for). Facebook and Google would been thusly rejected.
Which begs the question, why doesn't Amazon offer 64-bit at an intermediate price point?
I agree, the screenshots of example sites should open to the actual live site.
Tax the wealthy to pay for education, but don't worry about Microsoft dodging licensing taxes by operating out of Nevada, noooo...

http://boingboing.net/2010/04/23/microsoft-wins-its-1.html
http://microsofttaxdodge.com/2010/09/microsofts-nevada-tax-d...

tax the wealthy, so long as it's not him.

Now, to be fair, he is a huge philanthropist and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does some amazing work, but praise what you preach, Microsoft needs to start paying its dues.
The most powerful? Or the easiest to make good designs with?