skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why There Aren't More Women In Tech: A Realistic Look at the Numbers
This is a really good article that is grievously mistitled in the submission. Yes, there probably are police that 'trick' people, but this isn't the point of the article.The original is "Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong", which captures much more of the nuance.

Ignore the HN title, and read the article.

"One of the things we used to do at the Innocence Project is we would try, just informally, to predict which cases would end up being exonerations and which ones would end up confirming guilt when the DNA came back from the lab. And I was wrong more than I was right. What that tells me is that I was raised in the system before DNA evidence, where I relied on all these other types of investigative tools to determine guilt or innocence. That's one of the important things about DNA for me: It taught me how unreliable my own intuition is. Now when people say, 'What do you think is going to happen?' I say, 'Whatever happens happens, I have no idea and I don't want to speculate.'"
Each time I read this quote, I can only think of the Patriot Act.
For me, github is git's killer application. I wouldn't be using git if I couldn't pair it with github.
And here I am, looking for new monitor, and the best deal so far is 21.5" for 300 euro... But it's not TN and it's certainly not an Acer.

edit: ... and it has the same resolution than the linked 27". What use is large screen if you can't show more stuff with it? Waste of desk space, if you ask me.
Treehouse (YC S08) has the simple sharing mechanic that Facebook needs
I suppose I don't understand how reducing congestion can be seen as a "side-effect" of the medallion system. That's one of the explicit reasons it exists: to cap the supply of cabs on the streets.
Canada is a telecom backwater, says backer of Wind Mobile 
According to Naguib Sawiris, the Egyption entrepreneur, and executive chairman of Orascom Telecom, Canada is a telecom backwater. The big three telecoms (Bell, Telus, Rogers) are "a joke" and "too big, too slow."
I disagree that a message is encrypted in the first place, if more than the two end parties can read the message! If RIM can "decrypt" a message meant to be private between two parties, the message was never "encrypted" in the first place.
As much as I want to believe your statement that it is not meant to be a political statement, it certainly sounds extremely like one. However I will take you on your word and reply accordingly.

If you ask me, there is perhaps a brighter side to this. As a nation recovering from massive looting for over two centuries, a large number of us are actually doing quite well. Compared with other nations who became independent at the same time and considering the amount of resources we had at that time, we have managed a fairly prosperous growing democracy.

Regarding abject poverty and health care resources , a considerable number of people are actually getting the promised benefits. Wen I broke my hand a month, I saw a guy who earns by plying rickshaws waiting to see the doctor at a top tier hospital thanks to some government insurance scheme. Human rights issues are actually brought to the notice of people thanks to the media and public outcry often forces action.

Yes there are things to be worried about and a good number of our problems will actually be resolved much faster if the educated masses actually got out to vote. However in the mean time, technology is certainly helping solve most of our problems. Especially reducing corruption.
You can't join a Microsoft domain with anything else :(
Yeah, especially tomatoes. So many vintage varieties with usual colours/tastes, and you can let them ripen naturally. Tomatoes are difficult though, I've seen lots of newbies have trouble - it's one of those plants that people need to read up about and follow the growing instructions carefully.
And the next step is to finish what you start, no matter what. Andre LaMothe, founder of xgamestation, a video game development kit company, and author numerous programming books including "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus", describes how he motivates himself. I've always found this quote inspirational when I lose steam on a project:

"Hmm, that's a hard question. I guess that the best answer is that by the time you are old enough to understand that you are NOT going to be a rock start or a unique, beautiful snowflake, it will be too late. Lack of motivation fundamentally comes from fear -- you are afraid to do things since you don't think you can do them internally -- which is 99% true.

However, the good news is that if you REALLY try to do anything, there is nothing that you can't do within reason of course. So my suggestion is simple and basically how I start anyone I mentor -- start with ANYTHING that you want to do, something small. Then start it, work on it everything single day until its done, I don't care if you are sick, haev to work, goto school, your girlfriend wants to do something, whatever, just work on it everyday -- at some point you will get to a point where you find your own mental limits, this is usually the point where every single person quits and then sells themselves the bullshit concept, "I could finish it if I wanted"-- this is crap, the fact is THEY can't finish it, but this is just the moment of transformation -- now, here is where you are going to triple your efforts, read whatever you need to read, and finish it, no matter what -- And if you don't think this advice is true I have heard it personally from every single iconic computer person on the planet -- the key to success is so simple -- just finish everything.

You will never become motivated, until you don't need to become motivated then you will be motivated, hard to explain, but that's the way it works --

Additional, arguement -- what are you doing anyway? If you aren't 10x smarter than everyone now, how will you compete in 10-20 years? Imagine the math, physics, computer science, nanotech, biotech, etc. that will be common then -- thus, you better get crackin! There is so much work to be done and no time to do it -- if you are less than 40 and aren't working at least 15-18 hours a day you are not working enough, you simply can't compete with the best in the world unless you are willing to throttle it that much --

NeCroN.TTL "
Flippant response: you're saying that nothing was added to Closure in order for some Closure code to get written? This is not unprecedented.

Seriously - I don't see what's unusual about the syntax of these examples that makes them a DSL that doesn't just look like clojure code.

If my Linq implementation is allowed to resemble the language for which it is implemented, then I can easily write a 'Linq' implementation in plain C# that will look just like plain C#. (Although I grant that LINQ refers to the syntax additions to C# and not just the library)

Not hugely worked up about this, just feeling a little 'Emperors New Clothes' about it.
It's strange how I get the same thing for free with Steam.
This is a great idea! I really think this has potential, but one thing I'd suggest is to pick a vertical and enhance the system further. Because if all you do is integration between two existing services, barrier of entry is pretty low.

I'd suggest either adding more integration points, or developing an add-on service on top of this.

Once you do that, I think you can sell this to many startups including mine in the near future :)
Just that it's a comparable situation -- so more literal than an analogy. The particular phrasing is from Komisar & Mullins' book Getting to Plan B.
One would be hard pressed to find a country of these many people and this size without any issues of its own. The grass is always greener on the other side and it's really easy to proclaim something as dramatic as "The Indian State is slowly disintegrating" .. Yeah of course there is poverty and corruption and bureaucracy and what not .. but the situation is not as bad as the commentor potrays it to be. As shabda says, the situation is certainly improving, be it infrastructure or standard of living in terms of factors such as literacy, female infanticide, child mortality, access to better medical facilities, and so on and so forth.
Hey guys,

I apologize that I got punked with the image. It is a known fake.

Having said that, the technology really does take naked pictures of folks. The only question is how much image manipulation the software performs (and how easily it can be hacked)

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray - " it performs a virtual strip search, easily penetrating clothing to reveal concealed weapons; however, it raises privacy concerns in that it appears to screeners essentially as a nude picture of the subject, and may allow screeners to gain access to otherwise confidential medical information, such as the fact a passenger uses a colostomy bag, has a missing limb or wears a prosthesis, or is transsexual."

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/backscatter.htm - "And yes, it's possible for backscatter X-raying to produce photo-quality images of what's going on beneath our clothes. But because of privacy concerns, for the time being, the peep show has been distorted: "

I would also direct you to http://www.prisonplanet.com/exposed-naked-body-scanner-image... and http://oklahoma.watchdog.org/1053/naked-machines-do-store-an...

Very sorry about the slip-up. I'm also sorry that this was taken as a political rant. This same thing happens in large organizations when dealing with other things that cause political risk, and for the same reason. And it's just as upsetting. I simply used the security business as a theme. It's what upsets the most folks, and it seemed to be easily understandable by the largest audience.

I've updated the blog to remove the naked picture and make the correction.
Straight off the bat the most glaring problem with that statement is that Linq is not part of C# in any way shape or form since all C# code is compiled to bytecode, it would be literally impossible for C# to have Linq and for it to not be available for the rest of the languages supported by dotNet.

There's no such thing as "LINQ bytecode". LINQ is just syntactic sugar that can coexist with vanilla C# (or VB.NET, or whatever) because Microsoft decided to modify its compiler and IDE to allow it. It is fundamentally impossible for you or me to make a similar change, unless we're willing to eschew the Microsoft toolchain.

In Clojure, you do not have the same limitation. That's the only point the article was making, and it's completely correct in that respect.
Wow, thanks for that. Those are exactly my feelings.

Incidentally, that (rubbish) response doesn't address the fact that at the very least they could include a citation without a link, exactly as the economist does when it discusses a research article.
On The Future of Digital Advertising
Hey guys, I've been lurking on Hacker News for over a year now. I guess it's time for me to contribute back to the community. Here's a response piece I wrote on a recent NY Times article.

Thanks for checking it out!
Gmail does have delegation for apps users. It looks like it's only available for 'premiere' accounts, but that makes some sense when you think about who's likely to make use of it.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=m...
That makes it sound like an X vs Y problem, but it isn't.

I use Steam, PSN, XBL, Battle.net, etc... They all provide me with different things, otherwise I wouldn't use them all.
I've gotten to the point that I will often choose a different library if the one I'm looking at isn't already on github because their interface is so nice for browsing code (not to mention finding useful forks).
I've used cucumber for several years and love it. The author raises these issues:

a) Organization of steps in a huge project is hard.

b) Complex quoting is hard

c) Token links in e-mail are hard

d) Manual poking of background jobs is hard

As a Cucumber user I've run into some of these.

a) Step Organization: In large projects, this is indeed difficult. I would love an os x app that could search step definitions. On the other hand, Ack makes it fairly simple to find steps. Furthermore, you can always organize them into folders.

If you see cucumber steps as methods, the author is basically saying "having methods makes things hard because I don't know if someone has already written the method. Therefore, I have given up on methods and now write everything inline."

b) Quoting: Cucumber allows for multi-line step definitions

c): Token links in e-mail are hard: Not sure exactly what he's talking about. But check out http://github.com/bmabey/email-spec which I helped write / solves e-mail issues for cucumber.

d) I have a step that just says "And the system processes jobs." In this step, I just run all the delayed jobs. It's not that hard.

To be fair, I haven't looked at steak very much, and am just going off of this blog post.
The number of times you are getting downvoted reminds me of a disturbing trend I've noticed in online discussions about India, and in the papers when I've visited the country. There's a crazy nationalist streak there that doesn't seem to be familiar with the idea of "loyal opposition" or the value of dissent. That worries me a lot more than the corruption.
Indeed.com does this and appears to be doing well.
Their auto-renew behavior is unfortunate, as is the customer service scenario you outlined. Did you get any resolution through contacting their customer service?
Wow, thanks. I hadn't heard of that one but it's way better than the Monaco I was using.
We're dependent on Twitter for two reasons. Firstly, people who go to conferences (at least web/tech conferences) tweet a lot, and a big part of what we're planning in the future involves capturing tweets made throughout and event and making them easier to browse / filter through. Sign in with Twitter, say you're attending X and we can capture your tweets from the start to the finish of the event.

More importantly though, many speakers have Twitter accounts - which means we can create speaker profiles for people who have never signed in to the site. When we went live, we had close to a 1,000 profiles in our database - many of them people with thousands of followers. If /any/ of their followers signed in they would see that person's speaking appearance. It neatly solved the bootstrapping problem for us and meant that most of our first wave of users got at least a few recommendations.

I'm a big advocate of OpenID (see http://lanyrd.com/search/?q=openid&people=simonw ) so launching something that depends on one identity provider goes against my own principles to a certain extent, but the enormous benefits we got from bootstrapping off the Twitter ecosystem (and the reduced effort in engineering compared to trying to integrate with a bunch of other providers as well) was a worthwhile trade-off.
>Correction, Aug. 18, 2010: This article originally misidentified Raymond Towler as Raymond Fowler.

I don't usually post things like this, but this is hilariously ironic.
I can appreciate and understand that you didnt mean to come of as combative, but to me it did come off that way - and others since im not the only one pointing this out.

Can you name the compiler change that enabled Linq without looking it up? Can you define Linq, what it basically is? It feels like if you could you wouldnt make such a statement since all Linq is at its core is an iteration engine. Its literally just methods you dump your collection into plus an anonymous method on top and vrooom goes the engine applying the method to each item. The pretty syntax form you usually see is not actually Linq the framework and leads to significantly more problems than it solves, its basically just for PR purposes.

Edit: This feels like it might get out of hand and spin into a good old nitpicking programmers war. Reading my post again it came out way more confrontational than I meant, and I didnt mean any insult by it. My main contention is that the Linq syntax is often confused for the Linq framework - they are not in the same state let alone ballpark. Plus the argument can be made (and i would agree to a large extent) that it wasnt the compiler that was modified to allow Linq, it was Linq that was waiting in the wings for the compiler team to implement features they had planned quite some time before. However I am also being a stickler and stubborn, I nitpicked when even from my point of view it wasnt such a large error - it was the way it disrupted the flow of a pretty good article I was getting into, thats what made it stick out for me.
No, this comment on the blog is the closest so far to what I was talking about:

rjbond3rd: "I'm mangling the quote but what I've heard is: 'Tackle a difficult problem by redefining it as a series of solved problems.'"
I2 Files Suit Against Palantir Technologies - Misappropriation Trade Secrets
Growing herbs on my balcony is pretty simple and easy. I've tried growing tomatoes, but they take more effort and time in comparison.

I haven't tried other vegetables yet.
Between my business partner and I, he is the one that is married.

I don't have firsthand experience of the comparisons of struggles in entrepreneurship and struggles in marriage, but i do feel that my business partner has always had the moral support in his personal life that,for me, sadly has always been missing.

So i'm a fan of it from that perspective.

But that said, if the comparisons are fair, then from what entrepreneurship has taught me, hopefully it should serve as a better foundation for when i'm married.

Entrepreneurship, i feel, makes you a much better-rounded person in many aspects.
Cyber Defense Weekly: USDAs $10m Cybersecurity Contract
App Engine moves past AWS as the cloud platform highest in demand (per eLance)
This is so common that it's been named the Ultimate Attribution Error:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error
The fundamental flaw of your idea is that you think the way women shop for jeans is "broken". It is not. Women like to go to the store and try on clothing with their friends. It's also not just jeans... it's t-shirts, bras, shoes, coats, blouses, etc.

Anyway, I made a website for a large PANTS manufacturer. You'd measure your hips, waist, inseam and then put it into a web form and get a custom pair. After much promotion, we had an amazingly low number of customers. Like.... less than 50... for a site that we charged $300,000 to build. The men's version did a little better... but not much. The website is no longer available. Like the Kin and Google Wave, it was put out to pasture a few short months after going live.

You could try it again but I don't think shopping proclivities have changed much.
see my reply to nathanmarz
Sadly, I think book DRM could be successful. Amazon is trying to create a de facto platform - rather than just a device - and so long as they port it to as many devices as they can, it will do well. Many are avoiding Apple's book service for this reason.
Many of the surveys I've seen in doctors offices & similar don't distinguish well between "almost never" and "never". I know a fair number of people in my family are in the "almost never" category. They might have a glass of wine at Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner, but that's about it. I don't know what they tell their doctors, but given the usual checkboxes for frequency of alcohol consumption, "never" is probably what I'd select.
Using "link" on Google's search shows something like 38 and Yahoo Website Explorer shows like 7... but going from Google's Webmaster Tools shows 2.9 million
http://imgur.com/cTaKE.png

I have no idea what is up with that discrepancy...
The problem isn't the number of cabs on the street; it's the number of cars on the street. So charge a congestion tax. Even if there are 10,000,000 cabs, if the congestion tax is set appropriately, they won't all be clogging the streets, since they won't be able to make a buck doing it.
Doing Dissertation Research Right
The writing of a dissertation is important. If you wish to make a substantial difference in your field of study you need to be able to write a good dissertation. Therefore, having a good knowledge of all that makes a dissertation successful will enable you to produce a good dissertation.
Who Broke the News (or the Embargo) First RE Gmail Priority Inbox?
I was born, raised in and have retired to Joplin, Missouri. I assure you we don't have a "global-warming conscience"; we're about a Red State as you can get ^_^.

If you go on to read the Journal's article, I'd note that the Chicago Police Department is so notoriously dysfunctional I'd throw its results out on that basis.

Whereas we're really serious about crime and punishment, e.g. we passed a special sales tax which not only funded the street light program but also hired quite a few police officers and so on. And our justice and penal systems preform more than adequately (e.g. sentences are serious and we maintain enough prison space that we don't have to release ahead of time due to overcrowding).

Bottom line: you have to do the whole package, street lights alone are not a silver bullet. Which is a point argued by some in the WSJ article.

While I don't know if this has had any effect in these respective cities for street crime, it bears mentioning that Missouri is a shall issue concealed carry state since 2003 or so while Illinois along with Wisconsin are unique in absolutely banning it for civilians.

In Chicago prior to Miller (or rather its future enforcement years from now) simple handgun ownership by normal civilians was effectively outlawed and permits for long guns were not easy to get, so that deterrence to a subset of "property crimes" that can become violent crimes if it turns out there's someone in a house being burglarized is absent. As well as anything based on "hue and cry", if you hear someone being assaulted outdoors you can't legally go help them while being effectively armed.
webOS 2.0 Details
Larger companies seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach. I suspect after the HP acquisition announcement, things probably look a little more up. The community itself is definitely still growing (One of the few brightspots in the way Palm launched WebOS was the way they handle their community)

There are a growing number of apps (although growing at a much slower rate than some other platforms), and there is at least some sentiment that because of the small amount of competition and the quality of the development platform, that it's a good idea to release a WebOS app.

And yes, Sprint, Verizon, and ATT are all selling the phones in the U.S. Most likely there'll be new hardware in a couple months.
Straight off the bat the most glaring problem with that statement is that Linq is not part of C#

Parts of it are. Query expression keywords[1] are defined in the C# 3.0 Language Specification (see 7.15 Query expressions)[2].

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310804.aspx

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dfb...
At work I have a Windows laptop connected to a dock with two monitors. I have a Kinesis freestyle keyboard. Most of my development is done on a remote Linux box, so pretty much everything I do is through SSH. I use a variety of software to make this as pleasant as possible:

dtach - this is a life saver whenever I get disconnected from the interwebs. It detaches a process from the controlling terminal.

dvtm - a tiling terminal manager. I used to use gnu screen but I prefer the layouts that dvtm offers. This plus dtach replaces 99% of what I used screen for.

Vim - my text editor of choice.

pyclewn - integrates gdb with vim nicely.
Reach leads early in buying process by emailing timely after visiting your site
I am kind of excited in seeing node.js used in a mobile platform. There are a lot of things about WebOS that I really like.