skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As has been asserted in fragmented bits all over the place (here and in the original Google+ thread), the problem is that there is an enormous hiatus between personal and social ways of approaching gender.

On an individual scale you can see how personal expressions of sexual and gender identity can vary. [1] On a social scale, however, we deal with gender in a grossly simplified manner (and there are linguistic and historic forces which constrain us into defaulting to this attitude).

Mr Munroe is bringing up some issues (for what is worth, that of female-bullying attitude on the internet should be known to any gardener of virtual communities here on HN). But the whole issue is a much messier Pandora's box.

There are many people of either biological gender [2] who for different personal reasons wish to be more or less defined in terms of their sexual and gender identities, and in ways that a simple "I'm a {he, she, it}" form won't permit.

Imposing a (forcefully public!) choice is stepping on many people's toes, and I'm not quite sure what's the relevance of that. Google is smart. They could be gathering much better user-targeting data if they had implemented gender identity as a text field in the profile. [3] You know more about people (regardless of gender) who would fill that textbox with "dragon" than you can ever know about someone merely because they chose between man, woman, or other.

[1] An elegant if simplified reflection of what I'm talking about is given in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741580

[2] Not to mention the outliers to this binary opposition.

[3] See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741536

----

ps. — EDITED a couple phrasings.

pps. — Concerning your EDIT #2, I see where you're coming from and I assume no bad faith from you, but please realise that this position you're assuming is very hard to tell apart from the "she was raped because she was dressing slutty" argument which set the internet afire not a couple months ago.
Thank goodness for HN, wouldn't have wanted to miss that.
They did it!
Congratulations to Atlantis crew, NASA, and everyone involved. Maybe the Space Shuttle program wasn't exactly cost-effective and had it failures, but it sure sparked imagination of many, me included.
First, I don't think anyone in Green Day has a PhD.

Second, I wasn't surprised because she was a women, or a musician, or because she was part of the grunge scene. I know there are lots of smart women, and lots of smart women in music. I wasn't saying anything about a correlation between gender and intelligence or professions and intelligence. I was suprised because she's Courtney Love, and most of what I've read and seen of her prior to this makes her seem like an idiot. And this article seemed well-thought out, thus surprising me.
They do here in Europe, too. But I still don't think this applies unless they're using a generic device (iPhone et al) to create an ad-hoc connection to an authorised device in order to act as a proxy to it.
Actually "a REAL war" is a meaningful distinction because the term "war" is defined in the Constitution, so it can't be fudged without an amendment. It's only a war if Congress formally declares war on another country, and that hasn't happened since WWII.
This is not news.

This idea, in fact, has been around since the mid 1960's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_Effect
Well done to Duke for replicating and publicising it though, as it never seemed to percolate into practice.
The project is 4X over budget, 4 years late, and getting worse. Something must be changed.

Just imagine if this was a private project!
I Flunked My Social Media Background Check. Will You?
Oh, I don't know. I think it can be a positive thing for a nation to not get conquered.
Is it naive to suggest that citizens are shareholders? and to extend the metaphor, that other countries are customers/clients?
We just learned this lesson in California where voters recently passed an "on-time budget" initiative. The way it worked was Legislators didn't get paid after the budget deadline. In theory this would get them to pass a budget on time instead of drawing it out to the point of state insolvency like they did every previous year.

Did it work?

Of course not. They passed an absolutely fictional budget. It not only depends on California getting three times its previously anticipated tax revenue but it also depends on tax hikes that haven't been passed (passing a budget requires a majority while passing a tax increase requires a 2/3rds vote where at least a few Republicans have to sign on)

Bottom line: Government can always redefine terms
It's sad to see that we are retiring the US Shuttle program. In a recent article in the Economist about how the space race is now dead, the US is now are reliant on other countries to send folks up into space or the ISS ... even though they are planning on retiring the ISS in 2020.

I'm hoping that the privatization of the space programs (like SpaceX or Virgin Galatic) gets enough interest to fuel more funding and research into space travel though only a handful of rich folks could ever pay for a ride in one of those programs ...
Good question, actually. How often does one take a car in for repair, receive an estimate, and then later get a phone call "we found that XYZ part is worn out, we need to replace that as well, it will be an extra $500."
HP Play goes beta, iTunes for the TouchPad using Songbird
Do you think this is largely a North American phenomenon where .com is king of everything, commercial or not? In most other countries people are not only familiar with but embrace their own country's TLD.
IANAL.

If you run your own mail server, then they would serve the subpoena to you, and you would have the opportunity to contest it. The subpoena assumptions - that those holding the data have an interest in it - hold, and the system works as it's supposed to.

Now, I don't know if they can issue blanket subpoenas to Google to request e-mails you have sent to Google customers. Certainly, they could for specific Google users, but it'd be interesting to know if they can issue open-ended ones in hopes you sent something incriminating to someone using GMail.

I would also like to know how VM hosting providers like Rackspace, Amazon, and prgmr.com fit in to this. They provide hosting and storage, but do so opaquely without knowledge of what I've stored or how I have done so. Can they serve a subpoena against prgmr.com to rifle through my disk image looking for mail, or would they serve it against me as the manager of the mail server?
IMHO You're incorrect. The line between news and entertainment is an arbitrary one.

Who are you to tell me not to watch Fox News? Why shouldn't I buy a tabloid paper to see who some celebrity has had an affair with?

You're inflicting your views of what is "good for the masses" on others.

If the masses want to be misinformed, non-intellectual gossip merchants (Which basically they do), let them.
Thanks for letting me watch this NASA. Wow.
Somewhat of a tangent, but the exploitation of this very phenomenon is one of the things that endears the book "Battlefield Earth" to me. Despite whatever other issues the author had, he wrote a darned good science fiction book.
Couldn't they just declare war against evil (terrorism, gangs, crime, etc) or some other loop hole war to get around it.
I agree with all of those points, however that while she has things in common with great startup entrepreneurs, here on Hacker News we usually contemplate ventures that offer more upside than the return of a laptop and less downside than death :-)
مشاهدة مباريات كوبا امريكا 2011 بث مباشر
مدونة يلا جول الرياضية تقوم ببث واذاعة جميع وكل مباريات بطولة كوبا امريكا 2011 بالارجنتين اون لاين على النت بدون تقطيع او توقف والقنوات باللغة العربية مجانية بث مباشر مجانا بدون اشتراك Copa América 2011
What is bad about giving all kids the "gifted" classroom? It's obviously better than the regular classroom when you look at outcomes, that's what the study says.

I didn't see a word about defining gifted down or watering down the school experience of the "real" gifted students.

I don't think your super stimulative genius level classroom actually exists...
Good example of mob rule vigilanteism rather than due process.
While indeed Facebook is also subject to the Patriot Act, I'm not aware of any contracts or 'close relationships' that the NSA has with them. The same could not be said about Google, which may very well be providing the NSA with real-time data (for all we know, since the relationship is secret).
Love the old digital tracked music!
The article is making a mountain out of a mole hill.

I'll use this feature when I cross the boarder because data roaming costs are expensive and finding wifi isn't always convenient.
One problem with this plan is that mirrors are not perfect and some non-negligible fraction of the incoming light is absorbed and/or scattered away. Even if you could build perfect mirrors, you would still likely need to place the whole setup under vacuum to prevent the light from being scattered by air.
Take a year off and take some classes that will expose you to other areas that might need people with software skills, e.g. bioinformatics.
Awesome! This looks like great fun. Plus CTF just never seems to get old to me.
No, actually, we have some fairly functional people in Congress.

They are heinously self-interested and often vote pork and lobbyist groups, of course, but we do the same thing with our own little domains (hacking, free music, code, entrepreneurship). Very people have the ability to have the grand vision, and fewer have the ability to put that view in effect.

But we could have much worse. Much, much worse. A brief survey of world history in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s should serve to illustrate the meaning of "worse".
If you're an Emacs user, org-mode is awesome for tracking time. You organize your tasks in a .org file, and then "clock in" and "clock out" of tasks as you are working on them. Very easy to manually edit and add time after the fact too, if you forget to do it (something that many time tracking systems I've used seem to make very difficult).
So what problem are we talking about them? People who care don't reveal that information. Problem solved.

Fake photo, fake sex, fake name.
Entrepreneurs Must Minimize Friction For Feedback
Inter-temporal taxation does not exist in any meaningful way. Future citizens do not send taxes to the present government. More importantly, when have you last consumed a good that was produced in the future? In real terms - and that is what ultimately matters - there is no transfer between different times (well, there is some amount of transfer from the past to the present, but this is usually not what people complain about ;)).

Now what you probably meant to say is this: The existence of the debt implies that in the future, there will be interest payments. Most likely (unless the Modern Monetary Theory revolution in education takes place before then), people in the future will be lead to believe that these interest payments come from tax payers.

This has potential moral implications because there is a tendency that those citizens who overwhelmingly receive the interest payments in the future are not the same as the ones who pay the taxes (also in the future). Absolutely. But this is more about equity and distribution than it is about the fact that there is a debt. I have also commented on this before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730278

Edit: I have to correct myself. One could perhaps talk about some form of inter-temporal taxation in the context of using non-renewable natural resources. However, I personally think that it's still better to talk about that in terms of sustainability rather than taxation.
Samsung Galaxy S II Review Features and Specifications
For a vendor who knows how to utilize technology at its best, Samsung continually conveys stunning handsets for public. It has been popularly known that the Samsung Galaxy S made a great success as an Android Smart phone. And this is what we expect with Samsung Galaxy S II
50% of the time, it's going to be right by simply choosing a random number.
That wouldn't end the deficit: it would give us a permanent deficit of 2.99%. Still, an improvement.
Episode 25: The one with Richard Branson
Congratulations to NASA for the successful launch.

Time to focus on our next space endeavors.
While I do look down on celebrity gossip reading, I'm aware that that makes me a snob. However, that's not the issue I have here.

My issue is with the way papers like this, and indeed Fox News, report real news, important news. Reading celebrity gossip may be something that I don't understand, but it's not something than affects me, whereas the actual news, that has a very real impact on people's views on politics, society, the world and so on. That is something we should all care about.
Ask HN: So I just got my Google+ invite, now what?
Any advice on who to follow, things to check out, etc.?
He lives in a modest home in Omaha and will probably give more money to charity than anyone in history when all is said and done. Do you really think his political views are driven by his own personal gain?
While I think privacy and gender issues are incredibly important symptoms, there's a deeper debate being had here:

Will the internet of the future be a place where your persona can generally be isolated from your person? Historically, online spaces were a haven for that type of anonymity.

The trend is firmly in the opposite direction; with good and bad consequences.
What is Proxy server blocking
Proxy server is the form of the server which actually takes into account the requests from the clients that somehow belong to the other networks or servers. The proxy serve r is mostly used in the com
Oh, you too. That is not what sexual objectification means, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_objectification

Specifically, sexual objectification is when you see someone as nothing other than a sexual object - they have no other characteristics in your eyes. Now, knowing that, I would like you to explain to me how making the judgement that someone is not attractive is in any way shape or form sexual objectification...
This seems a pretty unhealthy attitude. Basically you're saying to never, ever attempt to protect your belongings from a petty criminal.

Well now, we are going in an interesting direction. I live in Toronto. I am happy that we do not have as many firearms as you might find in Texas. There is a massive and somewhat difficult chasm to cross between the two cultures around the question of "Protecting your belongings from petty criminals."

I'm willing to engage you on this question, but I fear that the HN server will run out of disk space before we can find a common ground.
cool... :)
We have not been at war with Eurasia for the past 40 years. We have always not been at war with Eurasia.
This is a flows vs. stock thing that I could have made clearer.

The additional currency that is issued by the government does not disappear in a black hole (with the possible exception that, technically, dollar bills do get lost in the wash). Instead, it either ultimately flows back to government, or ends up in one of the other sectors.

I think the relevant constraints are clear to everybody here, which is why I was not more explicit.
Even so, I think it would be fascinating to interact with a device that consisted of mirrors, even if was just to experience a delay of a millisecond (or whatever is the minimum amount of time to perceive a delay).
Just for fun... it might not be impossible:

You can reduce R^2 to {x | 0<=x<=1}[1] and thus, by induction, we can reduce R^n to {x | 0<=x<=1} for any integer n.

If I remember correctly, there are about 10^80 particles. The position of each particle is a point in R^3 so the position of all particles is R^(3*10^80). So, the position of every particle could be stored by the position of a particle on a 1 meter (foot, inch, whatever) long stick.

Of course, you run into problems if space is discrete or, in any event, with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle but you can still store a lot of information with each particle.

Horribly impractical of course, but like I said, just for fun...

[1]http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/infapp.htm
Agreed!

My state, like a few others in the US, has voter initiatives that become constitutional amendments. The last one that made the news was the one that made it illegal for me to get married.

Another initiative from a few decades ago is a major part of why California can't raise enough money to fund itself now.

So yeah, I'm not a huge fan of ballot initiatives.
The office that is just like a giant playground
Eventually the elected body will split into a faction that represents business interests and a faction that trades entitlements for votes.

What makes you think that a faction that represents business interests does not also trade entitlements for votes? The real problem is that ALL factions in a democracy demonstrate the universal human tendency to take benefits today and put off obligations for the future.
Harboring? I think you mean 'unsuspecting victims of'. They would clean it out if they knew it was there.
This is exactly as Plato said. The republic - in action before our very eyes.
Being able to watch a live video feed of the launch is pretty amazing. Previously, TV coverage (if it existed at all) was terrible. This makes me wonder what the fate of NASA would have been if the past few generations had grown up with access to this kind of coverage. I'd like to think that NASA would have had a lot more support than they currently do.
We currently have at least one needless war. So I wouldn't put it past them.
The world is counting down until the day the newest Samsung smart phone lands. The Korean vendor really knows how to please mobile users with the launching of Samsung Epic 4G Android smart phone.
I didn't downvote you, but I'm not certain you really understand the results presented. This operates just like labeling theory. If teachers stopped treating kids as dumb kids and boring them with idiotic busy work, then those kids wouldn't feel so bored and demotivated at school. There's a huge detrimental effect to any student's learning when they feel that the teacher has a low opinion of them. Why should they work their butts off to try to earn the respect of a teacher when the teacher has had their mind made up about the kid from day one? I've had friends who were labeled "slackers" try to work hard and reverse the label only to be accused of cheating when their test scores were no longer in line with the teacher's expectation of them.

Most teachers have no awareness of how the petty status games they play in their classrooms deeply impact the performance of their students. Many teachers also don't understand that if they can't communicate an enthusiasm for the subject, then they've failed as educators.
No. I don't think you are wrong. Games are for entertainment first, but that doesn't mean you can't also have them be about something else.

It all depends on what you want to do. What message do you want to get across? What do you want to define as the project's success? and a host of other questions. From there you should be able to whittle things down until you get to something that sticks.

You have the buffer to figure these things out. However, I kind of like the first suggestion too. Go become Batman! Go educate yourself on a ton of different topics that interest you. It'll only make you that much more dangerous as you progress in life.

Out of all the things I've gained in my last 14 years, experience has been the most valuable.
Yup; sucks to have to watch it on TV from Tampa. There's an Atlas V launch on August 5, though; those are even cooler in some ways.
Right, they'll do that right after they give up their gold-plated healthcare and instead take the government offering for the uninsured.

Gabrielle Giffords would be permanently disabled and disfigured, unable to ever speak or move because of lack of therapy if she was an average citizen standing in that crowd, with the average american insurance or lack thereof.

I love how the topic is constantly steered off healthcare. Remember the mosque in NYC? Remember how all that noise suddenly disappeared?
Not exactly correct. Spacex hopes to do the first resupply mission to the station before the end of the year.

http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php
Was advising a startup yesterday and all I did was cut the fat and distill their product vision. They felt it was helpful but they had already done all the work. Just a matter of adding focus. Great post (as usual) from Andrew Chen.
It definitely needs some big picture explanation up front.
woah, link to article about win xen pv please?
Your basic underlying thesis here is that we are all hard-wired lemmings, slaves to our biology, with limited capacity to adjust our behavior on the basis of reasoned morality.

I reject that thesis. We are not animals. Our evolutionary history does not dictate right and wrong.
You can fix failing schools in 10 minutes: establish that teachers can be fired if the test scores aren't OK. This has the disadvantage that it's a hell of a lot easier to go back and tweak the tests handed in (see Atlanta; see some DC schools) than it is to educate the kids.

But the test scores look great.
Worth noting - non-RIAA bands actually lose money touring. Smaller bands signed to RIAA labels still do not do very well with touring.

In many smaller scenes, a successful tour is one that breaks even. They sleep on promoters floors, eat shitty food, and play in bars. I hear a lot of "fans" that download all of their music and think that they support the artist by going to their show. This is not the case.

The one way to really make money as I understand it - which is noted in the book you mention (though it is kind of dated now) - is royalties. If you are fortunate enough to have your song featured in ads and get into heavy rotation on the radio, you get paid outside of your recoupment costs (which they pull from record sales).
I came here to link to this. Albini's article is far funnier and far more relevant to aspiring musicians.
You could make that case with some examples, but even then, the metaphor overwrites the reason why governments are formed - for the public good (and the protection of personal property, if you are a fan of John Locke). Thus, governments in your metaphor lose their actual purpose.

This ultimately typecasts actions that a government does, into business actions. Even though some of them would make absolutely no business sense. For example, why would a country raise tariffs or raise trade barriers? This would demonstrate weakpoints in the metaphor that other countries are clients.

A more extreme example would be where a country starts to kill people, by going to war with another country, or killing it's own people due to political upheaval. The metaphor really breaks down in that case. Businesses by and large, don't go and kill people intentionally. Obviously there are some historical and modern examples (Chiquita comes to mind) but I don't think that "Killing People" is in anyone's charter.
Redefining GDP and deficit are likely, they are already looking at redefining CPI see-

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/aarp-screams-blood-murder-w...

Orwell was an optimist.