skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Discriminate involves distinction or differentiation. Given this, whenever an uneven distribution exists, some kind of discrimination or bias has occurred. Of course this does not demand that the discrimination was bad, it's just the definition of words. For example, the discrimination done by the semipermeable membrane in your cells is a very good.

So there is not actually a question of whether or not gender discrimination is occurring in technology at a large scale, it certainly is, by about 3 to 1, I think. The question is rather, who is doing the discrimination and why are they doing it. From briefly looking at this thread, I see that at least 3 cases involved sexual objectification by men, and I would venture to guess that this has happen to more than 3 women. I don't think there is enough evidence to suppose that this is the most prevalent form of discrimination, at least I've never heard of it when reading about the gender disparity; though it would certainly be interesting to learn what affect stories like this have on dissuading woman from entering male dominated fields.

I'm not sure how long the study has been out, but I recently became aware of an investigation regarding the disparity of women in professorships. This was actually kind of humorous to me. For some time, it had been assumed that this disparity was related to discriminatory practices by those doing the hiring. But, the investigation didn't find any significant evidence of this, instead, they found that it was the women who were making the distinction; working 70 or 80hrs/week isn't very practical if you want to start a family. Maybe academia is broken, I have no idea, but at least it isn't malicious and yet there is still discrimination.

Regarding technology, or, at least math specifically, there is some evidence that suggests that girls are involved in biasing other girls against it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2573548). Also, there's evidence that suggests that the different genders respond better to different language (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571075), so if you have a field mostly dominated by men, it's not unreasonable to see why it would mostly attach men, all else being equal. Again, these aren't malicious and are probably, generally, not well known. But, I think that these sorts of things can be agreed upon by most people as not being good.

Also, regarding some malicious or ignorant discrimination, I think Dave Thomas makes some good points in his keynote during last year's RubyConf about 33mins in to his talk (http://confreaks.net/videos/368-rubyconf2010-keynote).
Since I'm planning to read this short story collection, I was a little irritated to read about the ending of one of the stories in this article. Be warned, there's mild spoilers here.
It's not controversial at all, you're right. For example, here's a result that electronic devices at night drastically decrease melatonin secretion that I found for my article: http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin#fn12
I think it could be interesting for another startup founder in some niche area to find community websites in their niche. Is that the target audience? If so it's a really small niche that's probably not going to pay you a whole lot.

Also, calling it a "social network" search engine is misleading. Twitter and Facebook are social networks; the other 898 are online communities around special interests.

I'd think long and hard about what problem you are solving, and sell the benefits rather than the features on your homepage. Watch this video from the Instagram founders:
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2738

My gut reaction is that this is a solution looking for a problem.
I've worked a 4x10 shift for most of my years at my current employer and wouldn't have it any other way. My day is already "ruined" by going to work, even for 9 hours (8+lunch), that I'd rather get more hours out of a day and have the extra day off. The three-day weekend allows short trips without having to use vacation days, and having a day off during the week allows more time for errands.
Wait For Another Cookie?
That isn't an analogous scenario. The problem with trying to compare physical and virtual goods is that, for virtual goods, transferring requires copying. There is no way to transfer an electronic data file without copying it in some way. Until such a process is developed, analogies between physical and virtual goods will always be flawed.
German isn't that spread in the world as English or French, so you can count on that if you speak English, you will be understood as Germans all speak English (as the opposite to France)
I've recently discovered that when you know almost nothing about the problem someone is trying to solve it is both easy and attractive to speculate about how much better your solution is than the one reached by the people who have to solve it. Full time. For money. I see you have discovered the same. Great minds think alike?

- Lil' B
That is credible. "Part of an initiative to suppress dissident geeks", though, is not.
The idea is that the simpler hypothesis is more likely to be true, given that it explains the data equally well. It doesn't mean it is true. Also, I believe elliptical motion predicts the observations of planetary motion more accurately than circles.

A problem with defining "simpler" is that it depends on the language that you use to express it. If you lack the right concepts for it, it may seem more complex. And if these concepts are quite difficult to understand (require a lot of training), it's kind of cheating to say that a theory expressed in them is "simple". A bit like a 1k demo that uses multi-megabytes of library code.

And now, my conjecture for why Occam's Razor seems to work: it is because we pre-select simple theories. That is, there are lots of complex theories out there that are the truth, and some of them are so complex, that we actually can't understand or even conceive of them (and never will - they are not susceptible to hierarchical decomposition). Therefore, correct theories turn out to be simple (they are more correct than the slightly more complex theories they compete with; but are never compared with the actually true theories that are bizarrely complex).

Plus, our language (including mathematically) notation is constantly being refined for how we use it - by adapting it to what we know. So it is overfitted to our present theory (the first thing a scientist or mathematician does when confronting something too complex is invent a notation for it that makes it simpler - the notation absorbs some of the complexity, which it borrows from our massive stores of analogies and ideas - and sneaks complexity in via the back door).

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Wigner, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENESS OF MATHEMATICS, Hamming, http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March02/Hamming/Hamming.h...

(these are perennial favourites relevant to the topic - not claiming they support my conjecture).
Hah. Wish I'd thought of some of these for last year's http://10k.aneventapart.com .

I tried to write most of my JS for 10k 'pre-minified', using tricks akin to (but not as awesome as) these. Echoing other commenters, it was largely as an intellectual exercise (to see if I could meet the 10k limit by hand) but it did make me think of a few things in a different light, and some of the 'optimizations' are things that minifiers wouldn't have done for me.

It's also a good way to get under the skin of a language, get a feel for the nuances of how the runtime behaves, and give you hints for other (more generally useful) optimisations.
You mean Knuth, the guy whose algorithms ignore the effects of caches?

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327

There is a place for academia and mathematic approaches, and there is a place for real world experience and technical abilities. Ultimately someone who is good at being programmer does need a leavening of academic background, and someone who is a successful academic needs to know something about real computers instead of the academic over-simplified illusory world that contain friction-less pulleys and massless ropes.
It's amazing how this work culture is more or less limited to North America. I was in Munich a week ago and it's mind-blowing how relaxed the culture is for a strong economy. Leisure time, which for Germany is drinking time, is highly valued and not interrupted by work.

What I find amazing is that I would love more leisure time, yet I feel guilty when I'm not working. It's not even a case of having a boss looking over my shoulder, because I have my own business.

Anyone else struggle with this and has found a way to deal with it?
Windows debugging made easy
" Asperger's Syndrome, or I am a psychopath, I am obtuse, and Incapable (INCAPABLE)"

Jesse, those are pretty strong conclusions to draw after a few short encounters on the Internet.

The world is not as black and white as you insist it is.

That you would draw and state these conclusions, for forcefully, so unabashedly, suggest to me that you are desperate and out of logical ammunition, or that you are a relatively naive and intolerant individual.

Re: "Feigning individual and asking "malicious" questions?" Do tell, what gives you, Dr. Jesse Dhillon, that impression, and how were my questions malicious?

The questions I ask, are the questions I would think any critical (critical in the best meaning) observer of the situation would ask. Her allegations, as they are of this moment, are tissue thin, and are backed up solely by her word, and nothing else.

I am genuinely impressed with how much attention this has gotten, especially by folks who similar to you, unreservedly, uncritically, buy into her story without expressing even a single misgiving about any of the stated details.

I have expressly given her the benefit of the doubt, but I have also expressed my concerns over what seem to be vague ambiguities in her claims that need clarification before I believe it without reserve.

You may wish to ask yourself, how often do you buy into similar tales, how often you do not, and what is it about YOU, that makes the difference.

And yes, in fact, I wonder if the wholesale buy in to her statement comes more from how she is an attractive, powerful, young woman, and less from her very thin statement.

But yes, I am surprised that in an internet conversation, you Jesse would so quickly and enthusiastically jump to attacks and attacks based on diagnosing psychological pathologies over the internet.

If you continue this behavior, I think you'll go far.
Work on their own projects, of course!
(I wrote the Serverfault question)

Thanks for the suggestions, here's some clarifications:

* I clarified what hardware I've tested in a comment (see below).

* I've run tests with my server ranging from 10 sec up to 10 minutes. They're consistently bad unfortunately.

* Interesting what you say about dom0/domU. I'm no Xen guru, but the culprit is probably something like that. I've been using a backlog of 1024 for the server tests (set both in Java land and sysctl.conf). The netperf are all defaults, both in terms of run time and backlog. Was actually trying to monitor the backlog somehow, but I'm not sure that's even possible in Linux?

* The server isn't doing anything disk IO-bound so this shouldn't be the case.

* syncookies seems like a good idea, I will definitely try that along with a lot bigger backlog and see if it makes any difference. I'll also try and see if netperf can be tweaked as well to provide a better, isolated test case.

Writing this off as Xen overhead would be such a shame, virtualization should not cause this much overhead. I'll continue investigating!
Unfortunately I do not see incentive for the mass to move from facebook to this new solution.

It is really though already to educate ppl about privacy issues already let alone trying to convince them to migrate from facebook to another solution.

Even in a best case scenario where there would be a general consensus about leaving facebook, the migration task itself is so huge that it would probably make the project fail on its own. Nobody wants to be scatered between FB, Twitter, the other bazillion sites that we're subscribed to and this newer one.
I'm not getting 'bent out of shape' on this (And really, I'd like you to point out where you were able to ascertain that from my post). I just know that the stuff used in rocket fuels is more like 98% hydrogen peroxide. Whether or not that's what he had? Who knows? I certainly don't think we should arrest people for 'having the ingredients in their home to make a bomb' because a good percentage of the population would qualify for that.
Some Java folks are looking down on C#? I don't believe it :))

In my experience it's always been the opposite: C# guys have always looked down on Java folks. And rightfully so: the language itself is nicer, the standard library is much nicer, and the CLR+CIL are vastly superior to JVM, especially in memory management department.
Like "e-business" and "social network" before it, "cloud" is simply a pseudonym for the Internet.
I have a fear of forgetting insights i just had - it's not irrational, because if I don't grab them quickly enough they vanish (though sometimes come back).
More to the point, C# has integrated an excellent map-reduce framework in the guise of (P)LINQ. Java still doesn't have anything analogous to that, nor does it plan to, if the latest roadmaps are any guide.
Alzheimers is a spectrum disorder. At its worse, it can be far more awful than losing your memory.

Language can be severely impacted, resulting in a kind of mumbling word salad effect that takes a lot of tolerance and patience to listen to and attempt to decipher. There can be paranoia, mood swings, anger, terror. The loss of language in particular helps me understand why some sufferers would rather end it all. Existing in the moment, with memories dwindling -- I can imagine living with that. But having your language cut out from under you, and god knows what is happening with your ability to think in other ways?

Alzheimer caregivers, particularly in countries with poor social safety net, have serious negative impact to their health -- both physical and mental -- as well as their finances. One study suggests that the financial impact of being an alzheimers caregiver can be as high as $600,000 when you factor in lost work, lost opportunities, stress related health problems, and of course nursing care if you outsource the problem rather than keeping the care in-family. As somehow with severe alzheimers in my family, I have no trouble at all believing this statistic.

By all means we should be understanding and loving to everyone with a debilitating mental illness, and to their caregivers. But minimizing the severity will get you nowheres when you are faced with the reality of a really bad case.
I wouldn't be so sure about FaceTime having no chance. Skype has enough weak spots to begin with.
I come to the startup world as someone who's also a musician - and music will always be my first love - and I don't think the two worlds are necessarily that far apart. Obviously not everyone wants to hang out at cool gigs and art galleries, but generally startups are started by people who are younger and more energetic and like to hang out in those areas where the artists are. In my experience those areas are normally the fun parts of town.
ah, and the legal issues is interesting to discuss. as far as i am wrong, continental legal system neglects the shareholder agreements -> you'll need to give up more that 25% to VCs so they would not be afraid you dilute their share somehow. (until the ecosystem becomes more mature and even closed)

--ps i am an amateur in legal field
We've gone with this for now: http://www.superowl.me/

We may swap out 'spoken word' for podcasts.

Thanks for the help.
I was a C# guy before I took a job at Amazon where I do a lot of Java. I prefer C# but don't mind doing either. They both get the job done.
Ask HN: Getting into OS X/iOS development as a Rubyist: learn macruby first?
I want to get into OS X/iOS development. I'm a rubyist.

Learning MacRuby would be easier for me, but I think I would inevitably transition to Objective-C as I reach its limitations (maybe some advanced stuff, libs, and iOS development).

But, Objective-C/Cocoa from scratch would be much harder for me to get into.

Is there any benefit in learning MacRuby first as a way of conditioning my brain into how Apple development works, or should I dive straight into Objective-C/Cocoa?

This is the learning path I have envisioned:

- Learn MacRuby (books, screencasts, ...)
- Learn Objective-C
- Learn Cocoa
- Learn Cocoa Touch

Is MacRuby a good stepping stone or should I skip it?
Why don't they have offline caching? Doesn't iOS's browser have (at least some) HTML 5 support?
Ask HN: Selling/Marketing to local business
I've been investigating building a product for local businesses, primarily restaurants, but I'm running into the marketing/selling issue. It's very expensive and time-consuming to sell on an individual basis. I was wondering if anyone had figured out some ways to hack the process or some tips on how to cut down the time spent per business.
If I have one friend, and our machines are never both on at the same time, how do our updates get synchronised?
Making the Most of What You've Got, in London [Startups]
I misunderstood him. I thought he was saying "most C programmers write optimizing compilers", not "use optimizing compilers".

Nevertheless, no one I've met tries to debug in Release mode, only Debug mode.
None of Us Knows What We're Doing
It might be that simpler theories are more often true due to the nature of our universe - but that is not what Occams Razor is about. So its really two different issues.
That analogy is terrible. I know a few non-technical people who own and operate an Android phone with no problems. You could hand one of these "mere mortals" an Android phone and an iPhone and they couldn't tell the difference.
I don't think you have much of an alternative if you want to make good software for iOS. As for programming for OS X, cocoa has bindings for ruby, so that shouldn't be a problem. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/RubyCocoa
Sorta amazed this works on my iPhone!
To be honest, I'd say a lot of the java ecosystem exists to make up for failings in java itself. A lot of other languages are just plain better out of the box with either more robust built in features or language design that avoids common problems. For example, C# doesn't need the equivalent of spring and hibernate because there are equivalent, or indeed superior, built in or 1st party options in the form of LINQ and asp.net mvc. Similarly, there's less need for 3rd party build tools like ant because msbuild is available right out of the box.
Hmmm so it doesn't render right on some browsers. Okay. I will fix this.

I really like Latin Modern/Computer Modern, just when it all goes to plan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
It's also interesting to see how the approaches differ at each order of magnitude from 140byt.es to JS1K to 10K Apart.

At the smallest end you really have to work with what you're given and triage fast, whereas with JS1K you see people writing decompressors _in_ their code to get around JavaScript's occasional verbosity.
Ah! Now I am enlightened.
>I just assumed people would have/understand iTunes

\ You thought every person in the market for a tablet has iTunes?
Bookmarks - Public Bookmarks
I've been working in C# for the last five years or so, and I couldn't ever consider going back to Java again, every time I look at some code, even my own, I just see all the nice things that are missing.

There is so much that might seem like syntactic sugar at first, but when you get into it, you can just express yourself in a lot less code compared to Java. Sadly, there also seems to be a culture thing around Java to make things needlessly complicated, whereas the culture for C# is about writing less.
Ask HN: Can governments actually stop bitcoin?
The first couple hours were a poor experience for me too. iTunes on my dad's Mac Mini said it was the latest version but it turns out it was just the _last_ version for PowerPC, and it can't activate iPads. Then I poked around with libimobiledevice on my laptop, but I couldn't find the right commands to recognize the device. Finally someone with a newer Mac came home and it was smooth sailing after that. The activation process definitely could be improved.
What's the landscape look like for dynamic Heroku scaling?
Scaling Heroku workers is pretty easy -- you can do that with reasonable reliability in your jobs themselves. Scaling Heroku dynos, however, is a bit trickier. It seems like this area's a good target for a SaaS approach.

Unfortunately, the landscape right now looks pretty wretched. HeroScale is dead as far as I can tell (it claims to be "back in mid-February" and it's now May), and the few gems that try to do this are buggy, unmaintained, or both.

Is there a reliable solution out there?
I definitely found reading posts in this thread rather bizarre. This has become more of a spectacle than an event that happened to an actual human being.
On what basis ... the simplest hypothesis is the most likely one to be true?"

Occam didn't say that. The true hypothesis is the one confirmed by experiments. One would use Occam's razor to choose among equally valid explanations. Now, when you don't have a valid explanation, don't expect William of Occam to fix that for you.
Ask HN: How to learn to be a self-taught hardware (EE?) engineer?
In terms of technical skills, I am pretty much pure software (rather web dev). There are MASSIVE resources out there for learning how to program, base on CS tracks, or base on self-taught web development advice from people who've done it.

Anything from recommendations from learning Python, Ruby, PHP, to the order in which you would normally learn how to program something... HTML, CSS, Javascript and some backend language, etc...

Perhaps I'm a bit naive in hardware development but just exactly what topics in what order would you normally study if you were going at it solo? Yes I do realize hardware development and electrical engineering as a whole is typical an extremely difficult major as it is in college but there's got to be a few hardware hackers out there who are primarily self taught? Advice for someone with no hardware knowledge and where to start?
At least in Europe, Skype is the only recognized brand in VoIP. Even my grandfather knows what it means to call someone on Skype.

How will FaceTime catch up? Should Apple offer a Windows version, like they did with iTunes and Safari?
We always called them "teaching colleges," which is a name so accurate it hurts.
I'll keep this around if I ever need to write a compiler.
As a Canadian, the whole G20 business makes me terribly ashamed of my country. It makes me even more ashamed that people like the comments on the article exist.

At the risk of making this a political statement - what else can you expect from the population that elected Rob Ford?