skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Diaspora's ability to provide gender options beyond the binary is a terrible reason to drop Diaspora.

For all it's problems, this is something I'd definitely defend the spirit of what they were trying to achieve, if not the exact implementation (should have provided some common options instead of just a blank text field), but when I clicked this link, I expected to see a critique of Diaspora's efficiency, security, platform decisions, protocol specification, etc.

Not a rant against "identity politics."
But this isn't idiomatic C# either, which makes it harder to write (or at least internalize), and harder for everybody else to maintain.
Neither. The solution is simple: don't fix non-vulnerabilities for the purpose of breaking jailbreaks/unlocks. In a number of cases, jailbreaks have been done via real vulnerabilities, e.g. browser vulns, but this is 1) due to closing "security holes" that enabled early jailbreaks, and 2) not the majority.
The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand
I learned this categorization from somewhere: If we like them, then they're freedom fighters; if we don't like them, then they're terrorists; and if we haven't decided yet, then they are guerillas.
And with HD quality on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZIVzkQZ_PQ
Can you provide a source for when Apple argued/suggested that?
I'm no particular Diaspora fan, but is this blog even important in the Diaspora community?

Because otherwise, I don't see the value of some random asshole's tantrum about gol-durn political correctness, whether it's about a non-binary gender field, people of the same sex being able to indicate they're in a relationship, or whatever.
The guy who wrote this rant seems to just not like the idea of transgenderedness, and wants to promote his viewpoint that "gender is a linguistic term with a hard meaning". That's fine I suppose, but of the many reasons to think Diaspora isn't going to be a success, gender being an editable field ranks really low down on the list.

Is there any content to this rant besides a political desire to maintain greater use of gender pronouns? It doesn't really seem to have much to do with the success of something like this. If Facebook replaced all its pronouns with gender-neutral pronouns tomorrow, the site would not change much (hell, about 10% of my friends purposely have the wrong gender set just for amusement). It just doesn't make sense to me that this guy was willing to forgive serious architectural flaws as fixable, but isn't willing to forgive an editable gender field?
Some ideas to save the financial system from quants
Who Wants to Buy Salon.com? Anyone?
Reddit thread on Julian Assange's old blog
Another plus for Google... they could sell the customer analytics to their AdWords customers. For example, using Groupon data, they know that the 50% off Pizza deal was more popular in West LA than in the OC. They could sell this data to Dominos who places AdWords in those two areas, and Dominos would then spend more on OC ads.

Although there might be some privacy laws that are in conflict here, Googs could probably sell the overall data (aka 58% of registered users bought this in West LA, 24% in OC), without giving away customer specifics (aka Bill Smith bought this)

I'm sure there are other ways too Google could capitalize on this.
Way ahead of you. I wrote the script after spending 30 min reading blog posts that interview reddit founders. Than I realized the movie wasn't Hollywood enough, so I added frat parties, cocaine, and made PG 30 years younger and more eccentric and more of a ladies man.

I think I'm on to a blockbuster here. Does YCombinator invest in film productions?
Show HN: Syncpad, like Facetime but for drawings
Fascinating look at Vinyl vs Digital on Music-DSP mailing list
I think the post about two turntables and a microphone being a universal interface for people with records vs the fractured digital interfaces is particularly interesting, here http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/music-dsp/2010-November/069349.html
and also the talk about how the medium (vinyl) has dynamics requirements that force the signal to be compressed before it's put on record and that emulating that might give the same effect to digital music http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/music-dsp/2010-November/069388.html
Quite a well balanced article I thought. More so than I've come to expect from mainstream media.
Iran admits malicious software (stuxnet, I assume) attacked centrifuges
What a job description should look like
How was the decision made on your torture/DU debates?
What are the probable consequences of allowing sideloading apps though? It'd mean that you could pirate apps without jailbreaking the device, right?

Why would they want to allow that?

On iOS devices, you have to jailbreak your device, and tolerate the mess that comes with that, in order to pirate. I think most people simply don't want to bother with pirating on iOS simply because it's so messy, compared to the legit way.

Also, Microsoft are going to make themselves look like assholes when it turns out they're not going to allow actual jailbreaking/unlocking after all. I just don't get this.
"This is a sign that the programming team — not some unrelated pinheads, but the five or six people who are supposed to be writing the code — have put strong, usable code last on their priorities. It comes behind marketing, behind ideology, and behind absurd identity politics."

Ignore for a minute that Disapora may be a pathological case of this idea, in that their first release was apparently riddled with easily avoided security holes.

In general, is this prioritizing of other concepts before code necessarily a bad thing?

Code is important, but users generally do not care if your code is amazing or just acceptable. What matters to them are the concepts that are visible: things like how they feel while using it, what philosophy the application embodies, and aesthetics.

I don't think it's wrong in general to prioritize your application's philosophy before its code, and I don't think the example the author gave is a pathological case of this idea either. It's a minor change to the code, but the idea of gender is massively important to users of the application. What do you think people will actually care and talk about: how rock solid the code on Facebook is, or the fact that they just made gender a text field?

I think the author overreacted pretty badly in this case. Diaspora in general may have too low of a priority of on strong, usable code, but this was not the case that proved it. Nor is placing strong code low on your priorities list a bad thing.
There are a few advantages apart from straight up hourly rate:

1) The big one is that you get a ready-made team of project managers, UX designers, QA, developers that have either worked together before or at least share methodology and culture, and so have already gelled somewhat.

2) People in these various roles come in when you need them, and leave when you don't. You might not be able to afford to hire an experienced designer or QA full-time, but you could afford a couple weeks of their time, or two days a week, or whatever. This flexibility can make the end result higher quality and less expensive, even with a higher per-day rate.

3) It's hard (some say impossible, but I wouldn't go that far) for non-technical people to hire technical folk, because it's hard to know what to look for. A consulting firm has already done this for you, has a track record with these people, and is staking their reputation (and hopes of future business with you and your contacts) on them.
You fail to provide any reason why it is incoherent.

Not everybody that disagrees with you is incoherent.

> People who leave their front doors unlocked are not themselves responsible for burglary.

I agree with that and I would like to live in a society where that was true. However, the insurance company and the police in the region where I live consider living in an unlocked house reason enough to lay at least part of the blame with the owner of the premises, insurance companies respond to this by refusing to pay out, the police responds to this by saying they will not spend time investigating the case.

> Burglars are responsible for buglary.

Yes, they are, they are the perpetrators. But locking your door makes it harder for burglars to do their deeds. We also have a proverb here that illustrates some of the culpability of the keeper of the resource, 'the opportunity creates the thief'. Not giving people opportunities significantly cuts down on the risk.

> Information security people in the US government were apparently negligent with information they were charged with protecting.

And not for the first time. They also support leaking information when it suits their purposes, such as the Valerie Plame scandal.

> But those people weren't information owners or stakeholders.

I have no knowledge of that.
Julian Assange's old blog
within 10 (green), within 100 (red), 1000 (purple) or 10000 (blue)

What are the units being discussed here - "within 10" of what?
The easiest way to example SyncPad is "Facetime for drawings". It's basically a whiteboard/sketchpad app but for the first time is tied to a remote central server that let people share live whatever they are drawing on the app (you can also import pictures and other stuff like that). Because we know that not all the people you'd like to share your sketches with may not have an iPad (or maybe they don't want to spend $10), we also made a read-only version for iPad and a browser version (accessible visiting http://mysyncpad.com/roomname). The back-end runs on Erlang + Redis on EC2.
Don't miss reading the actual application (link at the start of the blog): http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html
A new "systems" language? Really? What about an IL to replace Javascript as the lingua franca, rather than doing this?
Matt Douglas (the author) is CEO of http://punchbowl.com/ whose users have a life. It makes sense for him to have a lifestyle that helps him relate to his users. How big a part do you think the lifestyle of your users should play in optimizing the work-life balance of founders?

I'm looking forward to discussing this and other topics with Boston-area hackers at today's meetup.
Uhh, there's also no problem with using regular expressions to provide a normalized set of genders in the database for pronoun agreement.

"Gender is a linguistic term with a hard meaning." Credibility: 0. This doesn't make sense from a linguistic, gender theory, or even psych standpoint.
Migrating Your Existing Applications to the AWS Cloud
Great job! If you want to sketch with me, post your room name in this thread.
Haha, the beginning of this post really had me worried :-) It's not until the end (just before the edit) that he actually makes his point.

If you leave the value as an editable text string then the software will not know what gender to use. It is now completely useless. If someone wants to know whether to call the user “he” or “she”, “Mr.” or “Ms.”, they will now have to ask separately.

He should have put this first, the rest of the rant doesn't really make sense without it.
If you pay the $10k then you've got to realise that's just the start.

Once you iterate a few times, pivot and do marketing you could easily spend another $50k to try recoup your sunk costs and even then the chances are high that you will still fail.
You can't just invest in a hedge fund, there are some crazy requirements. As an individual investor you have to make $200,000 for at least two years straight.
Dennis Crowley's top 5 pieces of advice for entrepreneurs
Paisapay
Sometimes the straw that breaks the camels back isn't a particularly big one. It just has the nifty attribute of being the one last thing that puts someone over the edge.

NOTE: this is not a comment on the rants validity or the OP's political viewpoints. I'm just pointing that inflating this one issue into his sole reason is probably inaccurate.
I agree that diplomacy is highly complex, yet I'm wondering how much real damage will be done by Wikileaks revelations and how much good ...
For me it's more about the mismatch between the public
image and what's happening in secrecy. Ultimately, in a democracy, every action of the government should be open to public inquiry. maybe there is some information, in special circumstances, that cannot be released straight away. Yet, I personally believe, it is very little.

I just read an interesting article about these issues by	Craig Murray a former British Ambassador. Submitted it also here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1951145
If the namespace has a sensible name, it make it easier to look up the fns you don't know.

A possible solution would be to (use) all of the new namespaces by default so you don't have to go looking for them if you know the fn name, and you don't break (much) existing code that way as well.
I am learning just by reading the comments of you guys correcting/sh!tting on the poster. As a noob to PHP it is sometimes nice to see what not to do.
Still a terrible argument. You make assumptions based on a predefined list of known values, and anything outside of that is non-gender-specific (ie, "them").
yes, and I used it when I saw this submission back when it was on 7 points. But it appears that enough people didn't that this submission has remained on the front page for over 3 hours. So, as I explained, I felt that system of flagging wasn't working in this case and that a comment was warranted.

I could as well reply to your comment that that's what the downvote button is for.
The silliest part of this? The complaint that after entering gender, the software doesn't know what title to give you.

Presumably, he thinks software can't parse words like "male", "man", "m", "guy", "trans-male", or whatever and offer "Mr." as a default choice.

Presumably, he also thinks nobody is going to say, "I'm a Mrs., not a Ms." or "I'm a Dr. and don't you forget it!" when looking at the default term of address for their gender.
JavaScript Perlin flames in 1k
I believe we should strive to make machines/software adapt to people, not the other way around. This change seems like a good idea to me, if it's well implemented.
Are you really arguing that highly portable mobile devices shouldn't be proof against an in-person attack by someone you know, say over the course of a shower, or having left your phone on your desk over lunch? Of course that's a security hole. (So is single-user mode.)
The Jester Hits WikiLeaks Site With XerXeS DoS Attack
Infamous hacker The Jester is claiming responsibility for a DoS attack that disabled WikiLeaks hours before the release of thousands of documents. The WikiLeaks Twitter account said, "We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack," for several hours on Sunday...
I looked at the Norvig lis.py code and took the time to understand every line. It's a clever program and taught me a few new Python tricks. The main reason he can get it down to so few lines of code is that he leans back on the capabilities of Python. E.g. garbage collection, arbitrary objects stored in hierarchical lists, lambdas, use of dictionaries for the environment/symbol table. If you try the same thing with a language like C you either need library support or more lines of original code.
I tend to judge languages solely on their aesthetic utility unless they're designed to make something very difficult possible (e.g. Erlang). And this one isn't any more pleasant to read than Java or C, it just happens to be a little different. Given the long list of advantages to using Rust, why they can't use an existing syntax?

Also, I've always felt queasy about using -> or => as arrows. And the word 'let' instead of 'def' or 'var' gives me a strange flashback to middle school which I can't quite pin down.
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For those not ready for a larger server plan, we do offer a free-forever Developer plan ... https://www.cloudkick.com/developers
It's difficult to juggle loyalties. Sounds like Microsoft is taking a pragmatic approach, which is great for developers - but the carriers still hold a lot of power.

In terms of their phone OS, if the network carrier's needs aren't met, maybe the platform will go the same way as Zune?

--

As much as I admire the decision, I still get the feeling that MS is reacting and responding, rather than forging ahead with a truly innovative strategy.

Re. Kinect; I thought that Microsoft initially disliked the hacking attempts (and bounty) put forward by ladyada - and even put out a pretty harshly worded statement confirming that position.

It's fairly straightforward to see how highlighting the openness of a platform can drive buzz, true interest and sales; especially when the Kinect's recent history is examined. But if this is a reaction, how likely is it that the corporation's culture is changing from the inside-out? (i.e. will this be a lasting change?)
Here is a good post on the same topic, http://www.jetcooper.com/blog/how-to-find-a-technical-co-fou...
> Surely, in that case, the market will make certain these valuable resources (regulators) are distributed in such a way as to maximize value, yes?

Value to whom?

How many bank regulators lost their jobs when the banks almost went down? Were the relevant agencies punished in any way?

Of course not - they were rewarded.

Govt insists on control without liability. What could possibly go wrong.

Also, regulation is systemic risk. And if you believe in "too big to fail", what does that imply about the US govt....
It might be too soon to ask, but what distinguishes Rust from Google's Go or the D programming language? It seems to me that we've got three programming languages competing for the same niche.
Oh there's some benefit to be squeezed out of it I agree. It was news to me that google are sending this info.

These comments aren't going to be available to everyone who hits OP's site. If we're lucky, it's not a popular site and no-one will see it. If we're unlucky, the next web app you use could be coded by someone self-taught by articles like this.
The difference is that I'm a psychiatrist and you judging from your comment most likely aren't.

This means I actually know what I'm talking about.
I've been caught in this argument before. A situation arose with a client who wanted a male/female binary and I argued in favor of a third choice for those who didn't wish to self identify, as I have a few friends who are activists in this area. The client's argument was for marketing targeting and metrics they needed it that way. I didn't get very far.

On my own project, I put 4 options Male / Female / Transgender / Decline to state. It worked pretty well. I have it always default to Female. Men will instantly change it, women are happy and anyone who's serious about gender identification issues or really need to hide it both have options. I've been given compliments by LGBT activists for the selection choices so I guess I'm doing something right.

Either way anyone who won't identify as M/F is a corner case. If you offend anyone its a tiny subset, and even of that group its likely they'd pick the gender they identify with. It does screw up email targeting and metrics a little bit, but I imagine not by a big enough sampling to make much of a difference..
Conflicting Advice from Entrepreneurs on Fundraising, Vision, Hiring, etc.
I think you vastly underestimate people, concider the two tricks at 3:30 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHDnGp1_W8c flip something from foot and then balance it on your head without using your hands. Note unlike the example pendilum it needs to balance in two directions.

Even more flips, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6NgAPmSCKM&feature=relat...
CEO - Company Alignment
thanks for building this. i would love to use twitter lists, but find their UI makes it totally impossible to create and maintain lists.

however, i am having problems getting anything useful out of this tool either. the first search i wanted to do was for people i follow in X location. i attempted to use the bio field, but whatever i search for in bio ends up with an @ in front of it, and it doesn't seem like it's searching the location field anyway.

also, it would be chill to be able to search for people i follow that have tweeted about, say, ruby in the past two weeks or something so that i can easily put them into a "rubyist" list or something.

its nice to just see everyone in one place in one list with checkboxes, which makes this nicer than twitter's list interface, but i have a feeling based on the filters (number of followers? twitter client?) that this tool wasn't designed with the average user for personal use in mind.
US Seizes Websites, Alleges Counterfeit Goods
"They should allow Netflix subscribers to view brand new DVD movies on the day they’re released, but on a pay-as-you-watch (or 24 hour “rental”) basis. I would gladly – and I mean delightedly – pay $10 to stream a new movie, even movies I would have no intention of buying on DVD. "

Would people really fork over that much money just to watch a newly released on DVD movie?
Outstanding Typography Resources
Politics aside, this seems like a lazy technical implementation on Diaspora's side. They could have a "Male/Female/Other (please specify)" dropdown--allowing total customization, while still offering the ability for 99% of their user base to see male/female pronouns.
... a case they appropriately lost, as you're aware.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/apple-loses-...
From http://news.ycombinator.com/w2011form :

>For each founder, please list: YC username; ... personal url, github url, facebook id, twitter id;...
Wikipedia A/B Testing: Impact of Jimmy Wales' picture
The 5 Coolest Hacks for Microsoft's Kinect
They probably didn't recycle those cars because they were full of asbestos. There was some controversy then about sinking them, though of course fish don't get mesothelioma. (I suppose toxins are the same reason electronic recycling is harder than it seems like it should be.)
Ask NH: SXSW sleep/hotel/crashpad ideas?
Looking to go to SXSW next year for the first time, anybody know the best places to stay? are there any hotel deals?

What's the best way to do this? hotels? hostels? other options?
Interesting. I wonder how they make it so cheap, especially considering the traffic.
was submitted and killed recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1951138
Ask HN: Legal to access data on purchased used NAS?
Hypothetical question here.
Generally, is it legal to access/use information found on a used storage device that you have purchased?

Specifically, suppose company A is a competitor of company B. Company B goes out of business and has an auction to sell off its assets. Company A purchases used Network Attached Storage devices from auction. The NAS is not reformatted, and contains various data from Company B. What information, if any, is legally fair game for company A to access, and or use?

I would assume information regarding account info like account numbers, login credentials, etc would not be legal to use (IE it would be fraudulent). But what about information like product information (SKU / product interchange relations), pricing matrices, etc.

Perhaps none of it is legally fair game? I don't know. Please provide input regarding this hypothetical situation.
There are two important things here:

1) If someone has physical access to your computer/car/phone/whatever, you should consider it compromised already; it's all just a matter of how easy it is for the first person to do it. (Smart cow problem)

2) Real-world security, at the end of the day, is a tradeoff between safety and user friendliness. This is why it doesn't make sense for Hacker News to use two-factor authentication, but it does make sense for your bank. Every additional security feature has its tradeoffs; adding new ones lightly is as bad an idea as not considering security at all.