skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a difference between acknowledging a difference exists, and acting on that difference in a discriminatory manner.

Women and men are wired differently. That much is a fact. The obvious, those of reproductive organs, are visible and nobody would deny them. Those in the head, are invisible and so somehow made into a sensitive issue, but significant differences exist. Women have a larger corpus callosum than men; one could suppose then, that their hemispheres talk faster with each other: efficient multitasking. There is nothing wrong with this step: it is the same kind of reasoning that you apply to saying that giraffes have long necks to eat food in trees.

The problem about discrimination is what happens after this step: a man is unable to multitask. A giraffe is unable to eat food that is not in trees.

But these are two things. And most knee-jerk antidiscriminationist rhetoric lumps them into one. Also, I am not calling you one :)
are probably the same people that hated the movie "300" because the characters weren't wearing proper period clothing.

Granted, if you know anything about the Persians, the historical inaccuracies were a hell of a lot less subtle.
The Bible is worth a read if you have any interest in history, which most readers here probably do. IIRC it is the most influential literary work in existence, and that alone is a reason to read it.
"I knew a lot of the chemists and taught myself about the chemistry of paint. In my spare time, I was a wildlife artist. There wasn't a good airbrush paint on the market. Everybody was using automotive lacquers. I spent about two years developing one for myself."

He's a closet engineer! He just needed some impetus.
Four Free, Offbeat Apps for the Mac
I guess if GNU had actually produced HURD back in the day Linux would be forgotten or never have happened, but what's done is done now.
Acting Squirrelly: If SAP could make R/3 easier to use they would do it, right?
Dan's first point: never send an email when your angry.
This is vital. It doesn't matter if you know the person or not. The chances of you seriously regretting an email sent in anger are very high.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe
I understand why Stallman wants the GNU in GNU/Linux. But what's always confusing me is - why the slash? He's a programmer, so he knows that this is usually used for paths. But that does not seem to make sense if he wants this as a single name which should always be used. You can't create a single GNU/Linux folder - at least not in GNU/Linux. So anyone know why he didn't use another character there?
yeah, although you'd have a lot more work to do. Not only are there multiple posts a day but some of Elizer's have dependency trees reaching months back!
IPhone 3G (US) Review
New windows double as solar panels
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"

-Emerson
IPhone Apps for Science Geeks
Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer
GridGain in FireFox?
Google's Bid-for-placement Patent Settlement Cover-up
The Time Problem of the Internet
Brainstorm survey: What tech leaders want
Can Google Lengthen Our Attention Span?
I don't understand the whole "too big to fail" idea. They say that the collapse of a large institution would have a domino effect through the rest of the banking world, but how does it ever get that bad to begin with? If a particular institution is getting too big, shouldn't the other players want to hedge against its failure to protect themselves against the low-probability but high-cost situation in which a really big bank fails? Is this a situation where the market would behave like that in the ideal case (with perfect information, instantaneous communication, unbounded computation, etc) but we end up with "too big to fail" banks due to some sort of inefficiencies that occur in practice? Or is this situation due to government meddling (bailouts, guarantees, etc)? Or are these swings just due to humans acting emotionally/irrationally (e.g. in response to scare mongering news stories)?

This is just a total guess, but to me it seems like it gets this bad partly because of a feedback cycle between inefficiencies of real-world markets and government meddling. The players in the real world markets don't have perfect information and instantaneous communication, so they end up not balancing their potential payoffs against the risks. The government (or central bank, whatever) steps in to rescue the system when the situation gets bad by propping up failing banks. Sounds good so far, but the problem is that this effectively functions like a zero-cost insurance policy and insulates the banks from some of the true risk of their investments. This encourages the banks to take riskier investments, since they get part of the risk paid for for free. Now you've got a positive feedback loop: banks take riskier investments due to gov't guarantee, gov't steps in when the investment goes bad, banks gain confidence in gov't bailout and make more even worse investments, rinse & repeat.

It also seems like the governmental "insurance policy" encourages the kind of interdependency where one bank's failure can bring down other banks. It's more likely that the banks can collect on the insurance policy if many of them go down at once, but if only one bank is in trouble it's more likely that the government will just allow that one bank to fail. (I'm not proposing a conspiracy theory; I'm just saying that this "insurance" shifts the banks' costs/benefits towards mutual dependence and reduces the attractiveness of pursuing diverse/unconventional strategies.)

OK, that's my half baked hypothesis -- what's the real explanation?
hey if it gets you in the door to give a presentation to a VC, more power to you
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No, it really isn't. You can get a corporate distribution license if you have a userbase of a few thousand to serve, or if you have a userbase of less than a hundred or so, you can even do adhoc distribution by authorising their individual iPhones. Or, you can distribute source code, and anyone that has paid the less than $100 for a developer license can use your software.

The iPhone has some restrictions on distribution, but they are far from being as draconian as some would have us believe. Honestly, the price for a developer's cerificate is not a significant barrier, and with the other modes of distribution that Apple has provided (mostly to serve the corporate and academic markets), there are enough options to find a reasonably priced solution for most usecases.
I'll try to find an economics-focused social news site and get that figured out for ya.
The Next Renaissance: A Talk By Douglas Rushkoff
Frankly, I am quite happy to die. To know that, all my achievements and all my failures, eventually, will cease to matter.

To know that I too will give way to the next generation and that, hopefully, they can make up for my follies and mistakes, because we are none of us perfect.

And I hope that, as things progress and I get older and progressively more sick, that should I tire of my body, I can choose to leave life at a time and place of my choosing.

Of course, with the way things are going, I'll be in my 50s and the only way to do it will be to run my wheelchair off a cliff. (I couldn't end this on a non-cynical note, it just wouldn't be me!)
you essentially overlook the origin of said memes.

I don't overlook the origin. Your thrust seems to be that culture only magnifies innate difference. Perhaps this is true in simple cases, but I think that there are particular examples where culture takes on a mind of its own.

I point out that existing cultural bias might be due to biological bias interacting with environmental factors long extinct. This bias is encoded and preserved, unlike almost everything else in the animal kingdom, in human culture, which can be perpetuated and passed on. Existing cultural bias might just be a carry over from prehistoric times, entirely irrelevant to whether or not there are now meaningful differences in aptitude, in this, the present.

it actually seems more unnatural to claim equality on things like attitudes towards risk and attribute difference to culture.

I never claimed equality, I simply pointed out that the differences you'd expect due to biological selection are smaller in magnitude than those due to cultural selection, and so therefore born-attitudes towards things like risk should be largely outweighed by cultural ones.

My mind wouldn't scream inconsistency if I heard that women, on average, were intrinsically, say, 30% less likely to take big risks. That kind of difference seems reasonable. But the data on entrepreneurship implies a difference many dozens of times that.

I don't think this magnitude is consistent with other risky behaviors -- many women do risky things as well, like dating strange men in remote places, running away from home, abusing hard drugs, or keeping a pregnancy in ill-health. This difference in magnitude may be explained by cultural factors, because men have greater cultural support when projecting high-status creating cultural memes (especially those encouraging risky behavior).

this argument is usually the convenient one

Perhaps I was unclear. This is a very different argument than the one typically given, because it uses the very same mathematics that the evolutionary biologists use, only applied to culture. And what you find is that the factors in culture -- the influence of the same kind of mathematics, is much stronger.

the sperm of a high-status males, whom are shown to produce more offspring, still hold good chance to yield daughters.

Can you explain the relevance of this?
Yeah...sometimes that works. But if you and your friends thought of it, what makes you think that every other smart grad student in the country didn't think of it, too? (Except for the "have an immigrant parent" part, of course.)
"... By nature, startups are very non-discriminatory ..."

I don't know about that, maybe in a homogeneous ideal Startup.

Startups by nature tend to be a blended team soup of testosterone, technology and immaturity. Of the three I don't know which is worse. Testosterone is vital because it gives drive and competition. But has the downside of cruelty and bullying. Technology circles also tend to attract a certain cloistered male culture (online or in meat-space). Hostile to difference and eager to argue. The nastiness occurs in arguments over technology is in part due to the makeup of Startup founders, Homo logicus. There is a Coding Horror article discussing Coopers observations if you are interested ~ http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000091.html The last of the Startup ingredients is "immaturity". There's a reason the term "grown-up" is bandied jokingly around Startup-up culture. It has less to do with "Age" and more to do with understanding how the "real world" works and how to deal with it. Put the founder team under enough stresses, let them get tired (because they are working hard) and put before them a decision that has to be made, now! Now place any male founder in this environment and tell me if "discrimination" of some sort will not happen. Let alone a female.

It's no co-incidence that a question in the application asks how long the founders have know and presumably worked together. Because this is a sort of heuristic of future success. It's interesting that Mitch Kapor discussed the issue of poor behaviour in Startups (but not specifically with founders). Behaviour that would never be tolerated in big business at StartupSchool '07 ~ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator-StartupSchool/~3/... [ approx 20Mb] Kapor was most proud of the culture created where good behaviour resulted in a non-discriminatory workplace. It must be easier to do this when you build a 1000 employee company and have a Business background and wide experience.
One of the principles that YC is founded on is that many of the very best founders were sitting on the fence. So even if there's some minor force pushing one group of people backwards instead of forwards, you'll discover a big difference in the number of people on each side.
Is this from the onion?
I'm glad he exists, though, because he makes me look like a moderate, even though I'm a pretty dedicated free software fan.
I'll go right ahead and bite the karma loss for suggesting that "near death experiences" and perhaps head trauma causes people to lean towards the bible.
Jeff Han: The Amazingly Orgasmic Pixel Guy
If you want to make a startup, you do it.
If you want to raise money, then sure, you do run the risk of not being able to. I think that could be for many reasons.

These days though bootstrapping is well within most peoples reach, male or female.
There are no excuses.
I don't know if that's great advice business wise, but if I look at my life, moving to Italy was the source of a huge amount of growth and learning. I also met and married an intelligent, beautiful woman there, which helps me stay positive even as Italy itself gently decays.
Am I the only person who wishes they WOULD fail? It seems like it's the only thing that would scare these massive companies into taking less risks.
I can show that you don't need to finish a PhD in AI to do research and create AI to solve problems people have never before successfully approached. I've done it myself (though unfortunately most of it is locked behind a walled garden of IP).

If this is a course you're interested in, here's what I suggest.

1) Read up on AI breadth first and shallowly. Focus more on machine learning, search, filtering, and so forth, than heavier (and less successful) topics such as knowledge systems and computer vision.

2) Go through a list of startups that you like, use, or admire. Imagine the simplest cool/good/useful thing the startup could do with a cute little algorithm.

3) Develop the basic idea for it, contact the company, say you'd like to hack on it for cheap.

4) Kill the problem.

5) Use that startup as a reference. Find another one, but this time, ask that you can publish the method.

6) Repeat. Blog about your conquests. Explain how to replicate and extend your results. Eventually, focus on a bigger project to tackle. If your interests align with a research program at a university, consider entering the PhD program then. With this behind you, you'll probably get in anywhere.

If you're interested, I can give you some pointers on the development of quick and useful recommendation engines, which practically every startup can use. If you'd like, send me an email at daniellefong@daniellefong.com
Presentations are a cost. If they won't lead to funding, they give information to the VCs, they waste your time, and they get your hopes up and then slowly disappoint you.

If being a curiosity gives a negative first impression, this likely outweighs any additional time to speak.
The cost you pay for this is that your place in grad school and your fellowship are now predicated on your ability to bullshit. This emotional weight may be worse than just plain not getting the shiniest fellowships, or into the most prestigious school.
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Oh, and the 10 was an upper bound. If it's 3 that's even better - women are even more of a limiting reagent and they have less of a evolutionary need for massive amounts of wealth.
The easiest way to prove something is genetic rather than cultural is to examine different cultures throughout the world, especially isolated ones like pygmies or aborigines.

The paradigm of man as provider and woman as nurturer, and the mating ramifications of that (i.e. women preferring men who are able to provide, which most closely translates in our society to wealth, and men preferring women more fit to raise children, which in our society most closely translates to healthy appearance) are virtually universal.

That would strongly suggest that it is genetic rather than cultural.
Take a look at "The Road to Reality."

It starts assuming nothing more than basic arithmetic, and builds up to differntial equations, tensors, string theory, quantum relativity, etc.

I'm warning you up front that it's very math heavy. It takes some work to get through, but its worth it.
a) irrelevant
b) I don't think anyone suggested that "dominant, decisive, intelligent, women" are any less likely to start startups than "dominant, decisive, intelligent" men. (I'd define the characteristics that drive one to start up differently, but you get the picture. However you define it, it may be that fewer women have those characteristics).
a) ok. undoubtedly a part.
b) Perhaps you have cause and effect bakcwards. Perhaps women with fewer kids are more likely to become high status. Perhaps both are just correlated and caused by some other factor.

And Hillary Clinton is getting a lot of the treatment she is now because her refusal to concede for a long time when it was clear that Obama would be the nominee has been potentially very destructive to her party. I'm not so sure a male candidate who did the same thing would be thought of any better, or at least not much.
Think about the impact it would have on everyone else though. These companies aren't small companies. They're huge conglomerates that play major parts in peoples financial situation.

Sometimes taking risks is the best way to profit. And they're not called risks for no reason. And I doubt the company wanted to lose money intentionally..
Men have always been encouraged to have sex with a lot of different partners, not to sire children with them. (Children were, of course, the reason that men developed the urge, but the urge stands separately, as shown by the fact that men do not decrease their mating habits when there is no chance of pregnancy.) That's clearly still the case in modern society. Spend 10 minutes in a high school locker room and you'll see that.

Darwinian theories about women being wired differently than men are perpetuated because science backs them up. We don't know exactly how, or how much of the difference is genetic vs. cultural, but it's just a reality that men and women have different motivations, aptitudes, etc.

Nobody would argue that evolution has made us different physically. Men are much stronger and better coordinated. Women are more able to bear pain and often have stronger senses of smell and taste. Why would it not stand to reason that evolution might make each sex better at some mental tasks than the other, just as it has physical? It's not sexist to point out that male weight-lifters are able to bench more because men have been designed by evolution to be stronger. Why is it sexist to say we show up more frequently in science departments because we have also been designed by evolution to be better at math?

Sexism is not believing that one sex is different than another, it's believing that those differences make it inferior.
This Week in Ruby: Zen and the Art of Programming
a) Genes are not expressed the same way in men and women. To oversimplify a little, if a gene is only activated in the presence of male levels of testosterone, it will not be expressed in women. In the long run, natural selection hooks up genes that are beneficial in men and harmful in women to testosterone-sensitive gene promoters, though this may take a long time, and in the meantime you may end up with women with deleterious traits that were beneficial for their fathers.

While we're at it, similar mechanisms account for the difference between a neuron and a muscle fiber, which share identical genomes.

b) A very successful man can end up with hundreds of concubines and children. A significant percentage of Asians are direct descendents of Genghis Khan, and there was a King Niall in Ulster who is said to be an ancestor of 25% of the men in Northwest Ireland. Monogamy somewhat limits this in our culture, but most people for most of the time humans have existed have been polygynous. For a woman, this is impossible - she can have a dozen or so babies at best.
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It'll impact everyone else ANYWAY. Why?

Taxes. Someone has to pay for the government bailing them out. And because it is essentially a blank check with no oversight, they'll make the mistakes again. And again. And again.

There's a reason it's called "risk". Because you have a chance of FUCKING IT UP!
This:

"We’ve got an album (When Will Then Be Now?), too, which we’re trying to get on iTunes. That will be a sad day for the music industry."

made me chuckle.
Ask YC: Is there a market for 2D virtual worlds?
So the hot trend this month is 3D virtual worlds that are embeddable on web pages, namely Vivaty and Lively. As someone currently working on a 2D virtual world, naturally I was a bit concerned. Luckily, these offerings are half-baked, spotty in platform availability and customization. However, it may only be weeks before these issues are cleared up. Their mere existence is a real motivator for me to release.

So, is there a market for 2D virtual worlds that span the web? And what types of people would choose 2D over 3D? How do I cater to them?
I remember once reading that before modern medicine, 1/4 of pregnancies ended in death to the mother due to the baby's size. That would certainly explain why women don't take mating lightly.
It's like saying the OS is too important to crash.
"What is obvious to me is that some proprietary companies have made obscene profits by preventing fair competition to keep prices artificially high and stop people from switching to lower cost or free alternatives."

Vendor lock-in is not new, and not exclusive to software by any means. It's an ages old tactic, and one that's been considered fair game forever. A corporation out to make profits is foolish to not use it where possible.

You can't ever stop someone from switching to cheaper or free alternatives. You can only make your product so good (if only through legacy support) that the cost of switching is higher than the cost of buying your product. This, again, is neither new nor unfair.

Abusing near-monopolies (which MS did) is unfair, but has nothing to do with proprietary vs. free. It's perfectly possible to have proprietary software without that. It's like the difference between drinking sensibly and drinking and driving.
I believe that the most precious thing in our lives is being alive, and I spit in the face of anyone who is cowardly enough to give up on his life at any point, past, present or future.

Sorry for being harsh, but that's how I feel about it.

Yes, spend every resource on the planet to keep me alive for one more second.
Um, which part is history: the burning bush part or who begat who?
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The Pylons Book (first draft)
Also check out the much improved docs for the upcoming .9.7 release: http://docs.pylonshq.com/

The docs still need a little work, but should be a big improvement when they're done (in the next couple of weeks I believe).