skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In order for there to be 'reverse' discrimination you would have to achieve complete parity across every possible subsection of society and then consciously discriminate against those who used to be in the minority. Affirmative action's purpose it to reverse discrimination, it unfortunately can't do too much about bias which is rampant in hiring decisions far and wide.

I'm a Canadian living in the US and I find it fascinating that a lot of people (esp. in software) are so very concerned that hiring be based on merit. That perspective completely leaves out an analysis that merit is something you can often only build on top of privilege. There's a great cartoon that I cannot find but which sums it up nicely. A white boy and a black boy come upon a high ledge and want to explore what's up there. So the white boy gets the black boy to give him a boost and climbs on top of him to reach the ledge. Then when the black boy reaches his hand up to ask for a lift getting up there himself the white boy says "You have to get up here on your own, I did".

It's too easy to say we make decisions "blind" or based on "merit" and that therefore removes the need for a deeper analysis of race, class and gender in our society. When we make decisions blind we might assume the pool being drawn from is fair to begin with and that those with merit naturally bubble up to the top but to really have a fair why not actually invite, engage, and draw in more people with a wider diversity so that you then know you will choose on real merit and not merit in a silo of white (and often male) privilege?
certainly true, but they did pay a firm that was known to be edgy and envelope pushers. when you ride that line, someone has to police it.
Dropbox Web 5xx Error?
Link's dead, Jim.
Not really what I am looking for. The backend itself is fairly trivial. Its the end to end experience that is painful. Mostly on the client side.
Perhaps it's some sort of honeypot by pg to try and increase the signal to noise ratio, ie. everyone who voted that comment up gets blacklisted from HN.

That's what I'd do if I were king :)
Owning the Blu-Ray version of a movie is like owning the original film roll to me. Priceless experience, in fact the first time I'm really happy to spend money on my favorite films ever since the Laser Disc. I love Blu-Ray.
Dropbox seems to be down. Link is dead...
If you're subscribed to a package that includes ESPN*, then ESPN gets its share of that subscription revenue. If you're not, they don't. The analog for MSFT's licensing practices would have ESPN getting a cut for every subscriber, whether or not their package included ESPN.
Sorry, but if this were true, then wouldn't the post about the lack of female founders also be similarly flagged?
I'm assuming you're referring to the site being non-responsive? Try searching Google for "cache:url" :)
Looks like getexceptional.com too. I like this sort of stuff. Great job!
Why is everything ending with "bear" now? ReminderBear, SmartBear, HustleBear? Are we out of Get__________ and _______app domain names?
Effectual Reasoning: How Great Entrepreneurs Think
Hell yeah! I feel that should be on the top!
Dropbox: I'm a synchronized folder, not a CDN!
This was really hard for me to understand, so I'll post my summary in hopes that it helps someone else:

CityPockets is a website that helps you organize your coupons and vouchers. You import your coupons and CityPockets will plot the deals on a map and display their expiration date. This should make you more efficient with your coupons.

Josh Stevens is "The Groupawn", a Groupon customer trying to live off of Groupons for an entire year. What this means is that he has no cash, but a year's supply of vouchers from Groupon, provided to him for free as a sort of publicity stunt.

Josh Stevens broke the CityPockets website by trying to import thousands of Groupon vouchers onto CityPockets, a site whose average load is nine vouchers per user.
You can trust cookies if you disallow anonymous access and force everyone to sign in to an account, free or otherwise, before reading anything.
Dropbox kills public files pretty quickly if they get a lot of traffic. Within minutes, sometimes - seems to depend on the size of the file.
You can listen to the full TWiT that the linked clip is taken from at: http://twit.tv/293. The segment where Rose talks about Digg starts at 30:00.
Great, and that's precisely what should happen: the consumers should make their complaints heard ... not competitors who are (usually) just complaining about having not made such a good business decision themselves.
I think there's a difference between a community site for code reviews, and a commercially viable hosted code review service.

For the former, I think that's a great idea. Last year I tossed around the idea of hosting Drupal code review meetups, where code to review would be submitted ahead of time with notes, then walked through live and the attendees (who would presumably have made notes prior to arriving) would comment on it. People who had code reviews in previous meetings would return to present their changes, comparing and contrasting.

The tricky situation with code reviews by people who are unfamiliar with your project is there's a lot of context that they lose out on. A jack-of-all-trades programmer is only going to be able to discuss broad technical constructs and algorithms. An expert PHP language programmer is going to be able to contribute more specifically. But only an expert Drupal developer is going to have enough context to really significantly improve your code, second only to someone familiar with your codebase's internals. You just have to know what you want to get out of the reviews.

As for a commercially-viable reviewing service, I'd wonder what sort of developers you'd have doing your reviews. I ran a developer relations team for a few years and we needed to hire serious, top-tier developers (and pay them top tier rates) to really get the kind of in-depth understanding and support equivalent to the original engineers. We spend easily a man-day across 2-3 developers for each code review we do, sometimes longer. That's going to be expensive.

In addition, I'd be concerned as to why your customers were using your service. If it's a form of "sign-off" or "best practices" review, an impartial third party before a delivery from a consultant to a client, I'd be worried for the reputation of your service. I've hired developers and put their code through code review and we all said it looks pretty good but it wouldn't actually run or perform as advertised. If a shady consultant got your service to say they were great, but it turned out their client was scammed, the client may come calling for you.

Finally, we use Smart Bear Code Collaborator. It's not bad, but it's not perfect. Maybe an MVP is simply cleaning up something like Rietveld and competing with it or Kiln as a hosted service, first.

Good luck!
The original name was WhileDile, as in you tell the link "See ya later alligator" and it says "after while crocodile". Nobody I talked to liked that one, but everybody liked Reminder Bear.
Though they forced wxWindows to rename to wxWidgets.
Which is great and fine in a theoretical world. You guys just had your economy blow up. IT doesn't matter if its big or small. It matters if it works. Ignore size.
Please, please, please share your findings :) Your blog is the sad little feed in my Google Reader list that never gets any love, and, while I appreciate that you're getting shit done instead of entertaining the unwashed masses such as myself, I think this could be a great article. So again, please :)
I wouldn't brag about a simple import breaking your site.
Market opportunity!
I wonder if discussions like this will someday be analogous to a mechanic blogging about "Why we are choosing SnapOn instead of Craftsman as our tools for building NASA cars", or a chef posting on "Why I moved from Cookware X to Cookware Y".

I guess it is important to discuss the tools of the trade, but I wonder how long it will be before asking someone what technology they used to build an app would be like asking a musician what brand her instrument was. ("Hey, great song - is that a Stratocaster?) At the end of the day, does your app enable your business to make money? Heck, I've built a business with revenues in the millions using MS Access as one of the main tools! (A long story there!)

What I have learned, which other commenters have already pointed out, is that issues like maintainability after you are gone, finding resources quickly, the size of the user community, etc. are all equally important and should not be overlooked.
#t=30m35s
If you only knew how women talk about us...
Note that said "less diversity" is in each role, because different roles require different strengths. Whether or not a given organization ends up less diverse depends on the roles in said organization.

However, I'm still looking for an answer to my question - why should YC care about diversity?
Many of the big sites will feed you non-ajax content if you're the googlebot.
The content owners (not content makers, note) are liable to just refuse to use such a new medium, relegating it to a mostly irrelevant piracy channel.
Japan Nuclear Update
Not for me, my internet choice is dsl (I think 1.2 Mbit which I currently have) and satellite. Hard tech rules rural America, as well as my parents' house.
> “At first, we suspected that it was a scam, until we Googled the guy’s name.”

What does this even mean? "This guy sure is trying to import a lot of data. Clearly he's trying to scam us."
Start up America Initiative
What are you thoughts on the Startup America Initiative that Obama is pushing? Do you believe it will be successful with its current scope and resources?
I'm really, seriously considering the idea of raising some money to cover the registration fee ($50,000). Trying to figure out now if there are more fees involved. I'm confident I can build a complete registrar and global DNS setup in 5 years (or however long it takes to get through their process).
It was clearly designed to be easy to hack, so they are not afraid of that. What they've really done is set a premium price on their content. Whether people pay it or not, everyone will now feel like the NYT is very high quality. That seems to be the intent.
The Lendle team has their take on the matter here:

http://lendle.me/amazon-api-revocation/

Quote: Our initial reaction was one of pure surprise.

Me, not so much:

Lending ebooks is a feature demanded mostly by people who don't pay money for ebooks (and don't pay money for movies, music, or videogames if they can possibly avoid it) and will not be induced to pay money by the feature.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1821923

The only use of the service is to turn one purchase of any popular book into the ability to read as many as 26 books per year free. Its essentially the classic music startup model: you don't want to pay money for music, we want to make that happen. Of course it got negative attention.
Dropbox is actually down—nothing to do with this link.
"In addition to Google's own app marketplace, Amazon, Verizon, and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android -- so there will be at least four app stores on Android, which customers must search among to find the app they want,"

http://www.pcworld.com/article/222464/amazons_android_app_st...
The total assets point is good, and would play well to a jury. But to be fair, total liabilities should be deducted. Samsung, for example has over $180B in liabilities (presumably those valuable electronics fabs are debt-financed)
I accept that my attempt to justify such humour was wrong. That said, I stand behind my main point which is the reason it was being voted up was because people were amused by it.
Their coverage is crap, but support for TMo is one of the best out there. If there was only a way we could combine the best of both worlds -- Apple & TMo's support without being tied to AT&T.

If it would not be a hug expense for them (not to mention wrong market), having Apple take over TMo, build out a world class 3G infrastructure coupled with world class support, I'd be seriously happy.
Bathtubs - M1R-1515
According to their Twitter, they're doing a DB Upgrade:

<DropboxOps> We're currently upgrading our database server. We'll require about 30-45 minutes of maintenance until everything's back up.
It's pretty clear that he was talking about physical books. E-books that have no limits on distribution are affected by different economic forces. In this situation, what rights the purchaser has or should have are far less clear.
I really wish GitHub would add support for Mercurial.

There's nothing wrong with BitBucket - I use that right now - but it's clear that GitHub is the innovator and market leader in the field of online source repos.
I've had a similar experience with Weightlifting, ie, the Olympic sport.

The key really is that attention to detail and practice, practice, practice is the only known route to mastery.
Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:

There would be a folder.
You'd put your stuff in it.
It would sync.

They built that.

Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.

"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about serving public files over the Internet. It could be an easy-to-use Content Delivery Network!"

No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.

https://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-th...
Ask HN: What site or tool is your "can't live without?"
What do you find to be the best site/resource/tool that you find indispensable and use daily, and would recommend to other HNers?
No offense, but Kevin wouldn't know a good coder from a bad coder if his life depended on it. He can't read code, is essentially innumerate, and mostly just plays a techie on TV. To be blunt, he's blaming just about everybody else but himself. A college dropout who couldn't write a line of code to save his life talking about "B and C" players is offensive.
I just. Don't. Care. Any. More.
In capitalism the only way to go is to hire based on merit. You have to ignore the issue of privelage; that's a separate social problem.

Otherwise, things stop making sense: should we be forced by law to hire unqualified employees just because there's uneducated people that want jobs?
Can you please explain how your cash credits will work:
What's the dollar amount for each credit?
How much initial investment did you put into this account to fund the cash credits?
Moving forward, will your profits cover all the cash credits and/or will it be covered from your own pockets?

Thank you.
What about the import caused the site to crash?

Is it a repeatable problem?
I don't want my eyes to see anything offensive when I turn on my computer. I want only pure wholesome things, things that won't upset me or cause any unpleasant idea or thought to cascade through my mind. I don't want to hear about anybody picketing funerals, nobody should be trying to cure gay people. If something offends some people, I want to make sure that not only I don't see it, but everyone on the planet can't see it.

If everyone want an idea to go away, like Galileo's idiotic Sun-centric model, then it must be destroyed. Censor the apps. The will of the majority must be carried out!
I find github second only to the sonic screwdriver.
"No matter how much "time, effort, and little patience" wasn't going to change the world overnight to use smart TV's!"

I think my point was that not everything needs to happen "overnight".
That's interesting. The initial feedback I read on iBooks vs Kindle back when both apps were first available was very heavily skewed the other way: people seemed to prefer the Kindle app.

Perhaps it was just a case of familiarity and the majority of the reports at that time being by existing Kindle users. Apple has also pushed out a few good updates since (including proper hyphenation!) so that has probably helped too.
Zoom Kobe Nike Shoes On Sale
>if I want to watch something I can't stream from Netflix I say fuck it and watch something else

Right on. Except I'll still buy the DVD for a foreign film. Netflix Instant doesn't seem to have enough of the ones I want (i.e. Y Tu Mama, Tambien).

Renting movies on discs is so old school. Who today wants to deal with something that's all scratched to hell?
empirically correct doesn't always mean of value
They say they're upgrading their database server, and should be up again shortly: http://twitter.com/DropboxOps

EDIT: And now it seems to be back up.
Semi-phishing by legit sites (Linkedin example): thoughts?
The Lesson from Libya: Get Nuclear Weapons
Confirmed on the forums and status site.

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=35092

http://status.dropbox.com/

I'm a relatively new user (past few months) but do they usually send out any notice on downtime?
Salazar Experiments with Training Techniques - e.g., Cryosauna
No one is contesting that. Parent was simply mocking those that use Dropbox as a CDN.
It's probably related to Google Maps and their geo-code limitations. You can only query about 2500 in a 24hr period, and even then you can't do bursts without being blocked for a 24hr period. What you should do is query in intervals, store the resulting geo-code information in your database, then use that information rather constantly query Google's geo-coding services.

I'm not privy to any information, but this is likely what happens as we had to advise some of our users that were having a similar issue with Google Maps.
I presume the answer "HN" is too meta?

pastebin ftw.
I'm going to make this a stand-alone comment instead of inserting it to an existing comment thread, because there are too many places it could be reasonably inserted.

If you do not read the description of a patent, and then read the claims, interpreting them in light of the description, you have NO CLUE what the patent covers. If you do read the description and claims, then you MIGHT have a good idea of what the patent covers. To fully understand it, you have to get a copy of the file wrapper, which contains the correspondence between the Patent Office and the applicant.

The file wrapper is important because if the applicant argues for a narrow interpretation of something in the patent in order to get the examiner to approve, that narrow interpretation is what will apply when the patentee tries to enforce the patent.

For those who want to read the patents, I recommend using pat2pdf.org to get them. You can give that site a patent number and it will give you a nice PDF of the patent. The links most people are citing (including the submitted article) are to the USPTO, which is not as nice. In particular the images are not available on some OS/browser combinations. A PDF from pat2pdf.org works everywhere.

I don't know if there is a way to get the file wrapper for free, but you can get the history for free from the patent office. To illustrate how important the file wrapper can be, of the patents in question:

5,778,372: it was initially rejected (a non-final rejection, which I believe means the examiner is open to hear more arguments).

6,339,780: it was rejected five times (3 non-final, 2 final which I believe means Microsoft had to convince someone to override the examiner but hopefully a patent attorney or agent will jump in and clarify).

5,889,522: rejected three times (2 non-final, 1 final).

6,891,551: two rejections (1 non-final, 1 final).

6,957,233: two rejections (1 non-final, 1 final).

PS: it looks like you can perhaps get the documents in the file wrapper free online here: http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair
As disruptive as onlive seems to be it's basically low latency vnc for gaming and where the iPad keeps breaking sale records, onlive is growing slowly. Unsure why it isn't taking off more
+1. esp in finance
Who said I was contesting anything? I was agreeing. Well, not agreeing with mocking anyone, but rather praising the Dropbox folks for not trying to make Dropbox work under these circumstances. Trying to make Dropbox do something it wasn't designed to do is hacking. If it doesn't work, fine, I would never mock someone for trying to hack something.

Replies need not be antagonistic, you know. I'm more than a little amazed how quickly people assume disagreement. Aren't we all one big happy family?
Huh, so it is.

The Dropbox bandwidth limit for non-paid users is reportedly 10GB/day. If the file's 20MB, that's only 500 views. Definitely not a CDN.
It appears that social networks are pools of acquaintances. Hmmm interesting...
Justin.tv's social video bet pays off with 150K downloads
To be fair, I'm assuming that the percentage of terrible developers is constant, it's just that A: You're hiring more of them, and B: More people are being terrible web developers rather then terrible desktop application developers.
It makes sense that the post on women founders wouldn't be similarly flagged if the difference is related to comfort level.

Comfort comes from trust and exposure, among other things, and I'd say that most white men have more relationships with women than with people of color.

The legacy and history of the feminist struggle and the civil rights struggle, although related, are vastly different. I would be careful equating the two under any circumstances.
Mercurial.
the power of Kevin Rose?
How does this compare to Scribe?
Just flag the story. It's practically a magnet for these types of comments and doesn't offer anything else interesting anyway.
are we really posting 5xx error message of website? what is next cnn's 404 error?

you can down vote. have field day!
It's a DRM'd copy[1], and which devices it's supported on depend on the studio (and other mysterious factors). Some will work on iPod & PSP, some only work on Windows.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_copy
I had hoped that this would have been an internal install of Diaspora one day...

The whole concept of a "business" social network seems to me like a fit that a startup tries to force every now and then. If it were me I'd look at combining project management, CMS, and CRM, then put some access controls on it and the ability to use the service only over email.
I'm not a slob, but I hate to shop. I tend towards a small number of brands specifically because I know if I buy them I'll be viewed as reasonably fashionable, and I know they're consistent enough that I don't need to try them on.

It'd be great to have more options, but I really don't want to spend four hours trying on clothes in a mall to come up with alternatives.
* DropBox

Simple file syncing between my home and office computers? Versioning, when I need it?

Dropbox tops the list.

* SimpleNote / nvALT

The easiest way to take a note and have it available anywhere.

* Instapaper

I do more reading through instapaper than I do through RSS feeds. The new feature that shows you articles liked by your twitter / facebook friends? Amazing.
> Too much reliance on information, less on originality.

I dunno -- if there's a giant, fairly-comprehensive question bank, and you can quickly reproduce from memory a good answer to each question, isn't it just possible you've actually learned the material?
I sent you an intro email to Pervasent, tehy are an accomplished app house with over 100 apps...
Did you notice a trend in the patents GOOG has received over time?