skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it doesn't.

This is an argument that's popped up in a dozen varieties over the last century of slowly bringing equality to a bunch of different groups. An extreme example would be the "separate but equal" line that promoted racial segregation in America; if there is no codified barrier, the argument goes, then there must be no barrier at all! Right?

The problem is that scripted barriers are not the only barriers that exist. Social barriers are much more prominent and damaging. If the culture around technology has been built in a way that encourages a certain type of usually-male character and discourages anybody else, and I would argue that this is the case, then even if everybody's invited they're not necessarily going to show up.

This isn't a tech-only problem, mind you. The acting world is famous for its cliquishness; certain sports and school sports teams also have a certain exclusive attitude. It's not that you can't participate equally in theory; it's that the prospect of participating at all is so unpleasant to certain kinds of people that they choose not to of their own volition.

The programming world is remarkably and unfortunately geared towards only certain sorts of minds. It's very late at night so I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not defining just what sorts of minds those are, but I know that I find programming a hostile and unapproachable subject in general. There's nobody out there teaching it or explaining it in a way that appeals to me. The programming courses I've taken in college failed to spark my interest entirely. So it's not just that women aren't in tech; there are a lot of sorts of people who simply aren't represented, and so the entire field misses out.

This doesn't matter if your only goal is to maintain the status quo of programming — but I think that's a remarkably shallow ambition. The more people we have programming, the more diverse and creative we'll find programming becomes. Everybody benefits from such diversity, because each potential new approach to programming will yield discoveries that bounce back to benefit people in each field. Fact is that programming is still an incredibly new industry; we haven't begun to see the extent of what it can do for society. And our progress will be limited to the sorts of people who are able to develop a passion for programming. If we don't strive to invite and encourage new sorts of people to join the fold, we're hurting ourselves as well as those others.

You're technically right that everybody's equal in tech. But in practice there's a severe discrepancy in gender, and that discrepancy will only naturally balance itself out very slowly. If we make an effort to push towards real equality we can speed up the process immensely, and it's also a nice thing to do, so I don't see much of a reason not to do it.
Seems to be that the bbc takes a better stand on this. in german tv and radio 50% of the coverage is about the tourists being brought back home. the rest tends to be focused on the turmoil and chaos, rather than the purpose of it all.

Also, there ARE european officials siding with the tunesian people: http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/2011/january/eu-us-expr...

Though, in my opinion, if Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief, says something, it only means that no one else want's to say it.
coding it up now :)
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The conditions are German language and no consonants.
Curious, did it offer to post to your wall and could you refuse and still get it working?

Or did the fact that it merely offered it put you off?

I'm not related to the app in any way, but I'm curious about your reasons.
Ah! But did the girls overlook them because they naturally preferred jocks? Or did they overlook them because even when they were younger they lacked a certain social ability that other kids had?

My youthful experience was that nerds tended to be just as sexually active as jocks. They just tended to be active in different ways.
Stage 2010, the first year of a bootstrapped service in numbers
Just to clarify my thinking on this one, the car isn't a commodity. What is actually the commodity is either x distance travelled. In the same way an airline seat is a commodity but a plane isn't. So what people are really selling and buying here is the ability to drive oneself a set distance at a set point in time. That's the commodity. The rest is just managing the capital cost around that commodity, like managing the ownership and use of a plane.
And then much later we will get mobile servers. (Only problem I see here is the question of power supply.)
What will happen when Steve Jobs' health declines, or when the stock market start to believe Steve Jobs' health would decline?

I am not sure if you can ever find a replacement for Apple's CEO....

"The analysis was therefore based only on the 3,673 adult recipients [of liver transplants] for whom the 15 year patient survival rate was 58%"
https://www.uktransplant.org.uk/ukt/statistics/presentations...
To be fair you do see the same phenomenon on game-consoles. The hardware stays the same, but newer games are always pushing the limits just a little bit further.
Double 16 is most professional players favourite close out double because darts players tend to "line up" darts. Basically, they have a much better chance of hitting it on the second go if the first one was closer.

Double 16 is most forgiving because double 8 is above it. If they hit single 16 they can go to double 8 above it and if they hit double 8 above it, they go to double 8 again (requiring minimal or no correction)

There are some players who like double tops (20) but for the most part double 16 is the conventionally wise way to check out.
I think you mean no vowels
Releasing my Wing IDE scripts
brilliant..
Is it really an easter egg? To me it seems more like they "fixed" it and broke the beatboxing trick in the process.

You can still add dummy vowels to the word to make it sound beatboxy
Yes, it's almost like auto-generated text.
The concept exposed in this article is a very important one, and one that is affecting in very bad ways our industry.

I agree that many developers are perfectionists, and this affects very badly their work in many forms: over engineering, as many times to gain the last feature instead to find a compromise you are forced to add a lot more complexity. Not releasing at all, as some time you'll end in an infinite loop and the code is never good enough. Users less happy, as if you release with the precisionist state of mind you'll hardly be able to release often. And so forth.

It seems so obvious that software is a matter of approximation, and still so hard to apply it in practice apparently. Maybe a big role in this matter is played by feeling not well with the idea that others will look at your not perfect code? Possible, even if many times I think it's much more a matter of mindset.
You missed the easter egg. Look harder.
O’Reilly Webcast: Introduction to MongoDB
Are you bootstrapping this entirely (i.e., have quit your normal job and working solely on this?) or are you working at a regular job and working on this on the side?
Would this be better labelled "Why web programmers need to learn JavaScript"? An awful lot of programmers will never need to touch any JavaScript.
Ask HN: How can we make the real Tunisian Revolution?
Hi,

I have seen some interest here in the Tunisian revolution. I'm looking for your opinions and suggestions on how we can implement a democratic government and educate more people.

Today, after the storm, I walked down the street. I was amazed with the change. In the past, all people talk about football, now they all talk about politics. Something no one talks about in the Ben Ali Era, even with one word. Internet is free, even Wikileaks works now.

Here are some backgrounds about the revolution

1. Bouazizi sets fire on himself, because of humiliation from the authorities

2. The poor people went on a strike, with cell-phones asked their relatives in other cities to go on strike.

3. The manifestations took place in several other places and gov. was exteremly upset.

4. The Internet users were suddenly freed and every one began to talk about politics (sharing videos and status).

5. Government, extremely upset, killed 25 person in less than 24 hours. An estimated 89 were killed in the last 5-6 days of manifestations.

6. Tensions got high, manifestation become violent and they set fires on parks, hotels, resorts.. The red area of Ben Ali.

7. Ben Ali speaks to people, asking them to cease. He opens the Internet, freedom of expression, access to media (like Aljazeera). He certainly lost.

8. With Facebook and Twitter, a big manifestation took place in front of the ministry of interior.

9. Ben Ali runs away, his militia are still in the country, along with his corrupt system and disorder took place.

So what do you advice? We don't have an armed opposition, we don't have a political opposition at all.

We just want to leave peacefully and securely.
A little of both I guess. Note that I am not saying girls "deserve" it at college for what they did (or rather didn't) do at school. But y'know, as frustrated as she is, that kid had probably explained the ls command a hundred times to people. Both blaming the other for their inexperience.
And then you end up with a T-Rex in San Diego. As Oscar Wilde said "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life".
When I went to college, I experienced the same. There were quite a few quiet dropouts, but the loud-mouthed ones were more spectacular. Mainly because they'd promise to do something and then fail, leaving the rest of the group hanging.
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Hmm. I see where you're coming from, but I don't think that the kid's impatience and intolerance necessarily came from the fact that she was a she. I'm a guy who's seen plenty of exasperation and arrogance from other guys.

(And on the flip side, I know a few programmers who are incredibly nice and patient people but still have problems talking to girls. So I'm not denying that some guys find girls intimidating. But I think that inexperience isn't necessarily what leads to poor social skills in other areas.)
I rarely comment on these threads, but I had a quick look at yours and I like it a lot. It's fresh, nicely designed (although some of it could be a little "tighter" perhaps although I'd struggle to quantify that). I also think it fulfills a useful niche. I think it's going to live or die by the price points to some degree - companies who can afford X probably already have the capabilities of visualising this data, where X is the problematic point, if that makes sense.

But I think there's a niche there. It's certainly something I'd consider using if a project had this requirement.

Only one design point I'm not so keen on - the cutting off of the descender on the "y" of sunny trail on internal pages - it just feels a little jarring to my eye. Fairly minor quibble though - nice project!
On the other hand,

I think fair amount of Japanese will be satisfied with this, and even like Groupon more than before the incident. It looks like similar to apologies done by Japanese executives, though Mr. Mason did not do deep bow.

http://asiajin.com/blog/2011/01/17/groupon-ceo-andrew-mason-...
Yes, life is so much bigger than arguing which phone is the best. Until it matters again.

See: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/hamiltonian.png
As soon as they start talking about "link building" my spam sense tingles. The same for "social media optimization".

So what is left? Glorified mod_rewrite hackery?

/edit: That's not a flame. I'm just interested what non shady SEOs do. The last time I looked into SEO it was all about rearranging your HTML so the spider would get to the content fast. And to put nofollows on your links to get the juice flowing the way you wanted.

But this wasn't that complex that it justified hiring an expensive SEO company. Sure, they all did that link building stuff too - but as noted above to me that's shady (it was mostly about spamming digg-like sites with top 10/5 articles).
Brisbane?
Use the drones to build the cranes!
It is of some importance to people yet to upgrade to either one. Google's voice translator app & rush poker tipped the balance for me.
> How do you read the documentation of a core library?

Ahem... I have read a lot of Perl5 documentation and the only response I can think of is "I don't know, probably with my eyes open" (yes, that's rude). I just find what I need (by means varying with the situation) and read it.

No, seriously, could someone explain me this question, please?
I think there's a few factors at work:

1) The programmer was there once, and probably worked through it on their own. Nobody held their hand.

2) The information being asked is probably in every programming book every written and duplicated hundreds of thousands of times on the internet.

3) Dealing with past programmer-hopefuls has been really disappointing as most of them never get anywhere.

Helping people learn is -awesome-. Holding their hand and doing everything for them is horrifyingly boring and frustrating.

At work, I've had people who were genuinely interested in working hard and learning. They were great and I don't regret a second of the time I spent. These people were generally inclined to look things up for themselves, and only ask for help when they get stuck.

I've had others that I gave way more time than the good learners and they were going nowhere. Then management stepped in and told me I didn't give them enough time and demanded that I spend 1-2 hours every day with them. After weeks of losing 5-10 hours a week, I finally managed to get management to see that no amount of time would help. These people were generally inclined to wait until they could ask a question, instead of looking it up for themselves. It often meant days of non-productivity since they get lost again as soon as you leave their desk.

So to conclude, when a novice programmer asks a really naive question, the first response is to assume they haven't done any legwork on their own, and so the question is really annoying.
Women do better in all schooling.

This is mainly because in the 70s all the curriculums and teaching strategies were rewritten to emphasize feminine learning styles.

When was the last time you saw a teacher in a classroom use the socratic method? That's a male learning strategy that is no longer used because women find it confrontational and competitive.

Male learning styles tend to emphasize contest, competition, oppositional debate, and criticism while female styles emphasize co-operation, discussion without criticism, observational learning, and role modeling.

The schools from kindergarten up have shifted almost completely to female learning styles.

Is it surprising that women make up 60%+ of university students and almost always have higher marks?

The special clubs and programs and self-esteem boosting women get from the media and so on helps too I'm sure. When was the last time a Dove commercial told some nerdy guy that he is beautiful the way he is? :p
Arguments like this are enjoyable so long as they're argued with a spirit of fun. But I think too frequently people forget the insignificance of the debate and begin really getting angered and hurt over the other side's arguments.

I mean, it's a phone OS. Neither iOS nor Android is going to have a monopoly. Some people really don't like the idea of a locked-down phone, and they're completely happy with Android. Some people care more about the excessive polish that Apple's so good at delivering, and they're completely happy with the iPhone. Some people aren't completely happy with either, so they either jailbreak iOS or they come up with some other compromise. But really as long as there's something for everybody, it doesn't matter if other people are enjoying their other phone.
Maybe you could find something here? http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
Ok so that's weird. I was just showing this to my sister earlier today and noticed that there was no Listen, just Beatbox.

Naturally I was delighted that they recognised the meme ... but, talk about a race condition. I thought this was nothing new and here were are, a 48 minute old HN submission whereas I was showing my sister probably 50 minutes ago.

Slightly related, the first hit on google for "google beatbox" is translate.google.com
Or a healthy one. It's not hubris to recognize your own strengths and accomplishments.
Hmm, it's sad. We need a stronger start-up/tech entrepreneur scene in Europe. Everything is so valley centric :(
I use the same trick but instead of calling it name, url or email I just think of something which won't be used anywhere else. Last time I did it I called the field do_you_like_{site_name}. No more bots and no humans hurt.
http://rosscarbery.com/
Comparing Apple, Google and Microsoft
My concern is less with Job's health as such. Rather I'm concerned he'll get bored. He's done it. He showed everyone that he's awesome. He's overcome his forced exit from Apple and shown the world his magic. So what now.
He hasn't lived in Japan very long at all if he doesn't recognize that this is one of those stereotypes with some significant basis in reality. Japan has almost twice the US's suicide rate, and it is indeed an act with heavy cultural significance.

Suggest removing sticks from nether regions... both of you.
Yes I think it's important. Nice to see the people behind a site, so it's not just a faceless organisation.
If you explain in terms of what it actually means, a large subset of people will and do care. "Huh? Farmville wants my phone number? What the heck for?"
Next up : recreate the Thylacine.

That's the one I want to see brought back from extinction. Though I'm not sure that any suitable DNA still exists.
I've started working with an SEO on a few things and I've seen a few things he does. mod_rewrite hackery is a part of it, as is validated HTML,/CSS meaningful titles, reducing load times as much as possible (basically doing well in all Yslow tests), accessibility stuff and other bits & pieces (like generating XML sitemaps, product feeds for Google product search etc etc).

A lot of this should be covered by any half decent site but as you may not find surprising, most sites out there don't know or don't bother.
Smalltalk in the Enterprise
I agree with this and the Article, I was a front-end guy who became a good back-end guy, who spotted the opportunity early on for serious development work to be done back on the front end. There are not a lot of really good language guys over on the front end as the article implies, but I think that will change with time.

Just 2 years ago the whole thing was in flux, was Flash or Silverlight going to take the interactive web crown? Was a backend focused toolkit like GWT going to save the day and keep the developers on the back end? I would say that the score was not settled until as late as mid last year.

Around the time that jQuery was crowned king. Their is no doubt now where web development is heading, disconnected browser apps communicating to the server via REST and JSON. (can I take a moment to tell all the haters, I told you so). All kidding aside, now it just remains to be decided what the traditional pieces of that client stack are.

Dojo offers a compelling and robust toolkit, that I personally like very much and recommend to people doing large apps in the browser. Then there is jQuery, the juggernaut, with something like 40% of the mindshare it hard to not declare jQuery the winner and move on.

The problem is for large application jQuery on it's own falls down miserably. It has to be paired with the likes of backbone.js and underscore.js to provide any basis for large app development and even then it is still a little more spartan to develop with the jQuery/backbone stack than it is Dojo.

While it is very easy to just call the game for jQuery, Dojo provide a scrappy underdog and a dark horse in this race. The point is, once "the one" toolkit is decided I think you will see more developer migrate over, and I think jQuery's dominance is starting to become that transition point. Making them feel comfortable about what they are investing their learning time in. This is an area where developers cant afford too many missteps and false starts in, if one wants to remain marketable they must choose the technologies that offer the greatest prospects, until recently that was not very clear on the client side.

For me, as of now, I keep one foot on each side of the fence until the dominate framework of the client side emerges. I think Dojo still has a long shot in this as people come over and realize that Dojo is the most robust toolkit available.
That's a toughie. Apple's had an extraordinary decade that'll be hard for them to top. I certainly think it's prepared to have another extraordinary one. But whether it'll compare to the decade of the iPod and iPhone and iMac is a bit trickier.

That said, I'm going to bet on them surpassing themselves. The iPad is a truly extraordinary device, and Apple will spend years and years making it more and more powerful, more accessible to the public, and easier to develop for. (At least, I hope that last point is true.) At the same time, they're continuing to evolve the Mac OS X to a point where it's really differentiated from Windows, and serves a different kind of purpose for different consumers. I think they might see a resurgence in laptop/desktop popularity. In fact, I'm certain their desktops will become more popular, especially with the huge screens; the laptops will get more popular unless they're eclipsed by some future brilliant iPad.

I'm also going to bet on the Apple TV seeing a lot more attention than it's received so far. I have the latest one and it's a beautiful little box. I can see them doing a lot to innovate in the world of streaming video and music. They've got the iTunes store, after all, which is still expanding. And they've shown hints in the last two years that they're looking at new innovative ways to deliver content. I know the iTunes LP hasn't seen much attention recently, but systems like that which add more content to the music we listen to have the potential to really invigorate the music world, especially if they give indie artists access to those tools.

It's possible that the iPhone will soon see a peak, especially if competitors finally rise to the occasion. But I predict it's still going to rise in popularity. And the iPod touch still hasn't got a decent competitor. Certainly no music player comes close. Maybe the 3DS can compete with it as a gaming platform, but the 3DS isn't attempting to be a universal device like the touch.

The new millennium has been kind to Apple. I don't know if they'll be able to keep up their momentum for another ten years, but I wouldn't rule it out either.
Maybe he'll start a Dylan tribute band. I'd pay to see Jobs singing I'm a rolling stone...
I don't see any "Beatbox" button, it says "Listen".
What sort of features have they agreed to further implement or refine? I suspect something like this is in their grant contract.

Note that, like all EU money, the Scala people will have to fund themselves and then a year or so later would they actually see the check.
I agree in principle, but this fraction would be easy to get if they just had to buy a server after a fixed number of clicks. But they only have to if the peak usage grows. Peak usage grows, they buy some servers, then go on for some time processing huge amounts of clicks. Things might get even more complicated if they decide to spend the (now) excess processor power on something else.
25 Set of Amazing Free Social Icons
This is really amazing sets of free social icons, many ideas with a beautiful designs! they are free, find the icons that suitable with your project and download them. but do not forget to read the author license.
Yep true - but if she'd had any experience of geeks she'd just have shrugged it off as nothing personal.