skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And I'll start, I have the following books (will add a few later) that I can send out for just the cost of shipping and a promise that they'll be useful to you or you'll appreciate them as much as I did:

- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed) by Russell and Norvig (hardcover)

- Introduction to Algorithms (2nd ed) by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein. (hardcover)

(a few more will post tonight or tomorrow. shipping from nyc)
Give a presentation at a Ruby conference, put photoshoped images of Matt Aimonetti and DHH as pr0n stars on each of your slides, problem solved ;-)
Programming Languages Are Slow
Has anyone ever seen an articles with a Professor's of Women's Studies or holder of a doctorate in Women's Health arguing that rates of autism in men and women should be the same and claiming that they're only different because of a misogynist agenda?

>The idea that both genders have equal math abilities is widely accepted among social scientists

Really? Seriously? Sounds like "social scientists" prefer spin to statistics.

>If, before a test, you imply that the women should expect to do a little worse than the men, that hurts performance. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This sounds like a specific form of a general psychological result that would hold true for men too. If so then this article is beyond disingenuous it is a flat lie. That aside in order for the result to have a bearing on real world test scores it would require someone to be telling women just before their maths test that they're going to fail. Who's doing that, it would be pretty easy to spot in a school and certainly in my country a teacher doing that would lose their jobs.

>These changes will encourage women to pursue occupations that require lots of math.

Why? Why would measuring maths ability change the preferred career of anyone?
I'm starting to see more women in the SF ruby community.
There has since been a more concerted effort by Gogaruco (among other Ruby functions) to be more female-friendly.
I hate to say this, but you need a lawyer.

Cease working on the project until the situation is resolved.

Package up everything you have related to this, mail, I/Ms, code, everything. Any paper notes, any receipts, anything you did to track time. Document everything, make several copies. Don't delete information which is inconvenient or contradictory to your story, if it's digital it already exists somewhere else anyway.

The conflict may not be resolved in your favor, though the lack of any written contracts, ownership agreements, etc. is going to be a major stumbling block in any litigation against you.

Establish a fair value for your labor, what was the opportunity cost to you for the 1200 hours you worked on this instead of getting paid? Don't go nuts here, if you get paid $50/hr for contract work then that's a reference for a dollar value for your time.

Establish a value for —for lack of a better term— your good will: the intangible contributions, ideas batted about, subtle shifts in the product/business strategy, and your ongoing contribution of such.

Finally, how much would you take to walk away, handing over the code, all rights, etc, for zero equity, zero credit?

Now, ask yourself some questions:

- what's the value of the product overall today? Is that based on real revenue? potential revenue? pie-in-the-sky valuation? sum of all labor/expenses?

- is your friendship with your co–founder worth more or less than the "potential" monetary value of either the 50% or 40% equity stakes, or the sum of your contributions and your walk-away value?

- is the relationship truly poisoned? Can it be rehabilitated? Can it be rehab'd with you working together? Or would it be better for you to split amicably?

- is any of the monetary value at stake worth more than the potential cost to litigation? Or than the personal cost if there's a bitter split between you?

- would you have come up with this idea, put 1200 hours into it, without the cooperation & dialogue with your co-founder?

Talk to a lawyer, learn what your options are.

Possibly talk to your "co-founder" about mediation, bear the expense equally, it'll cost less than either litigation or years of bitterness.

If you have the code base, you have a lot of power. The worst thing you could do right now is launch the product without having this conflict resolved.

I walked away from a startup after 18 months of work when the founder changed the terms of the organization of the company drastically. A number of us had worked together previously, and worked for that 18 months on mostly a handshake. We're on cordial terms now, years later, but not what I'd call friends. My lesson learned there was: if the ownership structure isn't documented promptly and up front, you don't have a startup, you have a lawsuit waiting to happen.
I'm perplexed by your inclusion of Argentina. I'm aware that most people from Argentina can trace their ancestry to various corners of Europe, but I wasn't aware that Argentina was more innovative than China or India.
I'm glad it's available — there are lots of folks that wouldn't even give a change to a full text interface these days. I and my nostalgia would certainly prefer a keyboard option, though.
With Bill Gates you at least know that there's an extremely intelligent person at the top, looking to solve real problems (assuming he's past the phase of donating Windows machines to schools).

I think that's the largest point: just giving out money to causes is typically a poor way to make a difference. However, if you intelligently spend that money (whether it be by empowering people through job creation or eradicating diseases) then you have a chance of making a lasting impact.
As well as just about any other S&P500 company. There's some good knowledge in here.
I think his gripe is charity in the form of cash handouts which don't fix anything. Charity in the form of research or other expense toward eradication of a disease is different.
How about 'yan' then? (You've inspired me to start a similar thread :)

edit: would w-ww work also?
Autosmush scans your S3 bucket, runs each file through Smush.it, and replaces your images with their compressed versions.

I think I'm in love.
Non-software startup entrepreneurs:

What are your Hacker News alternatives?
What forums do you use?
> Its the stereotypes that result in girls not actively pursuing maths related courses.

have you ever thought what is the root of these stereotypes? Historical oppression by males? Historically, males have had no problem "delegating" chores to women. Why producing tedious mathematical proofs wasn't considered a chore (what it in many cases is) and wasn't "delegated" to women?

> where the students have no choice but to learn predefined syllabus, girls do pretty well in Maths.

exactly. But when it is time for a real, not predefined, stuff and you have little to no guidance ...

There is a reason 2 sexes exist. Males or females are no better than each other. The Nature have no problem bringing together 2 sexes in 1 body at the pure biological level.
It is the behavioral and mental differences of the sexes that make the 2-sex species much stronger than otherwise.
There are actually 18.... I'm sorry, that was uncalled for.
Brave New Work doesn't assume genetic determinism at all. All the manipulations to produce the different castes are environmental, either prenatal (exposing the fetus to radiation, chemicals, etc.) or as the result of behavioral conditioning.
right, but since no reputation is ever gained from chat (you can only lose rep, in extreme cases) we don't think this will be a problem in practice. There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.
While it may not completely invalidate, if accurate it's further evidence that a spiritual realm is not necessary to explain anything.
Exactly. It's "edgy".
Sources: Apple to unveil revamped 11.6-inch MacBook Air next week
Having a hard time reconciling the dismissive attitude toward soda theft and the celebratory attitude toward punishment for cattle theft, otherwise awesome essay.
No.

I'm not worried about the people who think REST = !SOAP.

I'm worried about the people who think they understand REST, build systems, and discover too late that they've got to rebuild their whole communication protocol because performance and reliability are just a disaster.

So it's not just an academic debate, it's about the difference between systems that work and systems that don't.
I thought my co-founder (who never really tells me what he is working on) had made progress

Discovery, will ferret this out in court and without a patent, who came up with the idea != an equitable consideration in the eyes of the court. If he truly has not done any or little work you may walk away with a larger stake than he is looking for. Exploitation is frowned upon in most courts.
To take a perhaps unpopular stance:

There is this argument that people shouldn't do certain kinds of science for fear of what it could lead to. Don't turn on the LHC because it might make a black hole (science thoroughly disputed this before the LHC was even finished). Its ridiculous. Science and knowledge can lead to bombs, mind control, and death. Or, they can lead to space travel, better mental health, and longer life. Its all about the implementation of the knowledge.

The same argument needs to be made about software.
Proof's in the pudding, gents. If there's nothing wrong with computing and women, how come more women aren't doing it?

I don't think it's that simple. There is definitely sexism in CS. There's sexism everywhere. But your argument is that there aren't more women in CS because of inherent sexism. What other profession removed sexism from its ranks before gender integrating? Women have had to fight to get into other professions and still face open sexism in many fields. But that hasn't stopped them from getting jobs in many fields and excelling despite glass ceilings.

I don't know why there aren't more women in CS and I don't think anyone does. I always find it interesting that the word first 'computers' were women sitting at mechanical adding machines computing artillery and other mathematical tables. They were all women.

A woman, Grace Mary Hopper, wrote the first compiler and coined the term 'debugging'. If people had viewed programming then like they do today would that first chance been given to a woman? The first 6 programmers of the ENIAC were women. Is that because people viewed programming like we view typing today?
yan is cool, you've got it
Upvoted for insight! This is true, however I wasn't trying to suggest shock treatment. As you said, there is significant evidence against that. In fact, I don't think such a thing happens often without a change in regime. However, production and a larger workforce still do contribute much more to growth. Constant aid, however, has the danger of making the economy reliant on it. Thus, a transition from the latter to the former is desirable.
Amazing feat. But funny to ponder about the fact that it took 14 years of work to save 1.5 hours of travel time. On a serious note, Hats off to such forward-thinking people.
Are you at all willing to ship to AK if I were to cover the cost? I'd love to get that Algorithms book.
nudist?
Flawless micro is an enormous, essentially insurmountable advantage, if backed up by even a modestly capable "strategic" engine. Even the world's best starcraft 1 pros make many micro mistakes over the course of the game--I'm talking blunders so bad that even I notice them. This is because a human cannot be everywhere at once, while an AI can. Take all the "mistakes" away and what you have is something that is nearly unbeatable without doing some sort of cheesy all-in strategy that gets lucky.

I think the true test of a Starcraft AI would be one with human-like restrictions. E.g., only so many actions allowed per minute, only vision of the current screen, built-in delays for actions that would tie up a human to perform, etc. Then the contest is truly more about intelligence and less about brute force.
Wow who'd have thought that microtransactions, a billion dollar segment of the gaming industry, are worth more than impression / click / action based advertising!

There's a reason Zynga's worth so much and it's not because people view an ad on the way to their precious farm.
> assuming he's past the phase of donating Windows machines to schools

Why do you feel the need to throw that jab in there? Windows is the more prevalent computing platform in the world. Stepping aside from our nerd world for a second, you could argue he would be doing them a disservice trying to ship them Linux or something that wouldn't be compatible with the most popular software in the world.
can you send me a discount coupon?
chukgray@gmail.com
So, I don't understand... he's tweaked the online Sarien to run well on iPad but he's not releasing it? For legal reasons?

If anything, isn't this campaign just going to drive negative Activision attention toward Sarien allowing people to play Sierra games for free online? They don't have some special dispensation from Activision as far as I know...

EDIT: this TouchArcade article makes it more clear. Apparently he's still putting the final touches on it; sounds like it'll be released pretty soon. I continue to fear that his work toward getting Activision to do something with these games will end up forcing the issue and getting him a C&D. If that is to happen, I hope it at least gets released first.
http://toucharcade.com/2010/10/15/sierra-adventure-games-com...
The most visited website is still google.com and anyway why would it be important at all how many visitors you have ?
I am located at Czech Republic. All market is local and consist mostly of just one big wholesaler who takes most of my production. Rest of production is sold directly or consumed by myself or my family.

It will be much more better to sell directly, but it is still just kind of hobby as I spent most of my time writting software.
Thanks, I'll try to remember to write that up sometime.

Capsule summary: if you were to personally log into an arbitrary trial customer's account, you could predict whether they were likely to buy the software based on your intimate knowledge of customer behavior, and your guess would be far better than random. You can code heuristics to make that guess. You can make your heuristics adapt to data you collect, such that they no longer depend on your (flawed and limited) intimate knowledge.

Pretend that you assign customers something like a credit score, and simply chunk them into four buckets, from "people I'm most confident will buy the software" to "people I'm least confident will buy the software". My conversion rate for the free trial of my software is ~2%. Bucket A is closer to 20%. Bucket D, the largest bucket, is below .1%.

I think there is a way to take the knowledge that the customer who is using the app right now is in Bucket B in a fashion which makes the business a staggering amount of money. (Identify the customers at the margin, then push them over it.) What I lack, which has prevented me from blogging about this, is an empirical example of it working that I can talk about.

I think it is potentially as simple as "Offer them a coupon." or "Give them explicit directions on the interface to try the features that you know distinguish bucket A from bucket B." These interventions are, of course, split testable.
Very nice!

Hm, this is an interesting development. Sort of a HN pay it forward.

The subdomain giveaway thread referred to is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1796231
Your "friend" might even claim you were an employee of the LLC.
Part cash, part financed (bank + previous owner). More than 1.

I'd love to talk to your friend. :)
This is a big topic. If you want users to respond to a shortcode (like 40404), you have to register that and pay a monthly fee for it's use ($500 - $1000/mo). If you go that route, you probably want to pay a mobile aggregator like mBlox to manage the connection for you. They have an API and you can integrate that into your application.

If you don't mind using a long code (10 digit normal phone number), you can do it with a GSM modem hooked directly to your server. But that has some redundancy and reliability issues. There is free software to support this though:
http://www.kannel.org/
http://www.gnokii.org/

If you don't mind your users needing to use a keyword at the beginning of all your messages, like "BofA BAL", you can use a shared shortcode. That's a lot cheaper and there are a bunch of providers who can supply that service.

Sorry there's not too much specific here. It's a big topic. But if you google around using some of these terms, you should find more info. Or respond back with some more specific questions.
how about "net" to 64.202.189.170?
And how do you define whether something is "HTTP-based" or not? Because using HTTP is not quite a good enough condition: SOAP can use HTTP as a transport, and XML-RPC has always done that (I'm not sure it allows any other transport).
I'm working on a scheduled shuttle service from San Francisco to Oakland Airport. Was a huge pain point for myself personally to get to the airport. We're hoping to launch it in time for the holiday travel season!
Don't write software because it'll cause a blackhole? I agree, that is ridiculous. I'm joking of course, the thing people are concerned about is being spied upon and never knowing it. That's not ridiculous.

I don't particularly like the software's intended purpose, but I have to say, it's really very clever.
Anyway this is an old idea. There are solutions like this available long time ago. This for example: http://mobile-spy.com/
> You're still going to have people calling anything with HTTP in it REST-ish

aka "SOAP is RESTful"
Right, Bill Gates - the inventor of the PC, word processing, electronic spreadsheets and more ...
Whats that old saying? "Dont give a man a fish, teach him how to fish."

Unfortunately, some people cant even afford fishing equipment. So a mix of both is very important. Why throw tonnes of money? Throw some jobs with that too.
Considering what else SF has to offer, that's a wonderful compliment. Thanks!
It's a tough issue. I rarely oblige anybody asking me for money on the streets. If they ask for food, I don't mind buying them a meal, but just giving out money doesn't sit well with me.

If I could give somebody $50 or $100 and know that it would be used to make their life better, I'd do it without hesitation.

Might be an interesting field for a non-profit organization?
Cofounders wanted
User last seen in 2004, yes, I'm ok with that.
I've a few that I'd like to see used eventually:

* inhaling.com - political satire?

* awk.us - because awk is cool

* grep.us - something unixy and searchy

<edited formatting>
The highlighted item is no more than 1 hour old, as measured by the time of its first appearance on the front page.
It irritates me to see the same rehashed blog posts submitted every week, decrying the reign of male terror while offering no new insight whatsoever. I crave insight. I want to see fresh theories on how entrenched social norms can be turned on their head. But none are to be found on HN. My current, deeply cynical but so far correct assumption is that the only way to see more women in tech is to let social entropy run its course -- in other words, wait. I sincerely hope someone will prove me wrong.
> When he says that's a raw deal, then see if he'd offer the same in reverse.

That's akin to what's known as a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy-sell_agreement: One of you makes an offer to buy (or sell). The other must either accept the offer, or he can flip it around on you, in which case you must accept it. (This is akin to "you cut the cake, but I decide which piece I want.")

If you went that route, presumably you'd want to put the buy-sell agreement in place first, then one of you would make the offer. You'd want to think through which one of you should be the one to make the offer - that could vary greatly with the circumstances.

(Disclaimer, more or less mandatory for lawyers: I'm not your lawyer, YMMV, etc.)
carlos is correct. An example of this is how America deals with developing countries that they are trying to rebuild.

Countries that are addicted to American "financial" aid don't go anywhere, but countries that create an environment, enforcable rule sets and standards that attracts foregin direct investment from businesses around the world prosper and raise their standard of living.

Charity is a bandaide and not a solution. Constant free aid kills inniative, inntiative creates economic prosperity, wealth, etc.
The timeline is interesting.

"Launchpad users encouraged to use real names"

"Also in 2001, Schwartz wrote an article for WebTechniques magazine about how to make a "hot or not" style voting system in Perl. Originally, his article referred to Hooters..."

"Amaya Rodrigo Sastre asked the candidates what they were planning to do to encourage women in the Debian project...The responses frequently harped on meritocracy,"

"Marvel [sexy] halloween costumes"

Meritocracy and sexy wonder woman, oh noes! Those mean geeks. I hate them so much.
so we don't need to get into the hassle of learning how to meditate again?
Home improvement upgrades for geeks
It was very simple in my case. Few generations of my family are making wine, so we own vineyards, wine cellar, equipment and such. Now it is just plain work, experimentations and more work.

It is actually very similar to software business: start small, create some product, learn from your mistakes and iterate.

You don't need tons of fancy equipment and huge infrastructure from the beginning.
Do you espouse the same views with respect to colour and religion? Am I being overly sensitive if I quit a job where people routinely draw attention to the natural fact that some people, myself included, are not "White?"
Things You Didn’t Know About The Empire Strikes Back
Ironically, I was just trying to head off a negative conversation. I figured it'd come up since I mentioned that Bill Gates was using his charity to solve real problems. When saying that, somebody usually mentions how the foundation has been used (in the name of charity) to market Windows to future generations.
>> There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.

Is this a good thing? Personally, I don't know, nor would I care, how to implement a reputation system in chat. But I would hope that the answers in chat would be of the same caliber as the static questions.
That is not entirely true. The various versions of WebKit and the capabilities of the phones vary widely.

You can't just make one version and throw in flexible CSS. That doesn't even work within the iOS platform (between iPhones and iPads).

These are very different, from the point of view of the user. For example, on the iPad it's easy to use multiple fingers at the same time, while on a phone, two or three fingers are the upper limit (and it's really hard to exactly hit a target then).

Next to that, people also have different expectations on various platforms (like buttons being in different locations), etc. etc.

My point is that you can't make one app that works great everywhere. You need to know your audience and provide really great custom-made, hand-optimized solutions. Anything that promises automatic multi-platform compatibility is an exercise in mediocrity.

Who's using Java applications on their desktop? Right, nobody. It just sucks and doesn't work; and that's why platform-specific desktop apps are still alive and well. The same thing is true for mobile web apps.
Thanks buddy. I'm here with you in the coalition of #peoplewhocanrollwiththepunches.

Speaking of which, aren't entrepreneurs supposed to be the people who can take a beating and bounce back up instead of complaining? Isn't every good idea shouted down from day one? Doesn't every great leader meet resistance and naysayers.

Getting beat up on a bit gives you the skills to deal with the real world. Being coddled by sensitivity yields weak spirits. Adversity breeds strength. That's what sport is all about. It's what freedom is about. #braveheart
Diaspora is on GitHub. :)