skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have mixed feelings about this. I'm a guy so obviously don't have the experience (any) women have but I will say this.

Three things will essentially give away your gender:

1. Your stated gender;

2. Your name (with a high degree of accuracy in most cultures that I'm aware of); and

3. Your photos.

So for (1) to have any impact, (2) and (3) must be hidden. Since all profiles are public, I'm not sure you can hide (2).

Give all that, I'm not sure I understand the rationale for hiding gender but, like I said, I don't have the experience.

That all being said, I really don't see the issue with hiding it.

I strongly encourage people who feel strongly about it to be vocal about it and ask for either the ability to have it not stated or to hide it (like you can with things like the number of "followers" you have).

EDIT: on the accuracy of gender prediction from Facebook profiles:

http://cis.poly.edu/~ross/papers/NameCentric.pdf

I realize this isn't exactly the issue here. Most people concerned with harassment probably aren't worried about computer models that can predict their gender based on their name, information from their profile or their writing style. I imagine harassment is far less systematic than that.

EDIT2: I would contend that a bigger factor in whether someone gets harassed is how they present their profile rather than a single field.

For example, if your profile is public, has pictures of how partying and getting drunk, has many messages about what a party animal you are and/or your dating life, some will see that (rightly or wrongly) as an invitation for attention (good or bad).

I would be very interested to hear from people who have been harassed or bullied online or have been the victims of such crimes in the real world and hear how they use social networks and how they present themselves online. I suspect they tend to keep everything private.

I'd also be interested to hear how important it is that gender is shown on a profile. It's all well and good for us to speculate about this but I really would like to hear from some people with first hand experience.
IM Status-- How You should Use It
Spotify’s streaming music service is popular in Europe [...]

To be more precise: in some European countries. It is, e.g., not available in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium,... to name a few! It's pretty sweet that the service will be available in the US, but I bet the rest of Europe wouldn't mind either.
2days2fund is an event by Believers Fund
I love the mosiacs; They remind me of a prettier version of identicons.

My concern was just that people won't remember a random pattern of dots very well.
Big Bad Congressmen Afraid of the Dark
The vast complexity of the Shuttle literally killed innovation at NASA.
Customizable Gmail inbox organization coming soon
Well, what makes this place great is the people who come here. I often wish to see discussions about politics by the same people who post here.
I guess it is very difficult to achieve because politics tend to attract a lot of crazy people. So as soon as something becomes popular it will be filled with the wrong crowd.
We have also formed a company in the UK to handle the operations - .app Ltd, registered in England number 07869623.
There must be a calculable limit to the size of the event that you can see at a given distance. There are finite number of photons which are emitted from an event, these spread out with the inverse square law, so as your distance increases the probability of collecting sufficient photos to reconstruct an image of the event decreases and I would think at a distance of one lightyear it would be guess hard to see something much dimmer than an atom bomb.
This is correct. As soon as I saw his lex_html function, I could see that he was using regexes to tokenize and then basically drop into different contexts while consuming the document, thereby tracking multiple levels of state throughout. That's what a full-blown parser does and it goes beyond the scope of regular languages.

By "parsing with regular expressions" most people mean applying one or two regexes to the entire document and using, for example, the group capture facility to extract information. That is and will always be a bad idea for HTML, because HTML is not a regular language.

Applying regular expressions to tokenize a string for a parsing is actually a fairly standard pattern.
I hesitate to enter this, but ... once upon a time, I flipped a guy off because he cut me off in post-football-game traffic. For the next half an hour, he pursued me relentlessly through red lights, down streets, etc. and every time we slowed, he jumped out and tried to run over. I was terrified. Turns out he was an off-duty cop and was trying to impress his girlfriend - but it took about three years for me to stop panicking when I saw a police car.

OK, so I'm male and he was male, but let's assume that Google+ had one single thing on its profile that you had to fill out, and it was "Cop" vs. "Civilian". Do you think that I would feel comfortable broadcasting my non-cop status because Google hadn't thought about it?

I'm sure a cop would be really offended. But think hard about this.

And then take this kind of crap off Hacker News, man, because there are better venues for bleating that women shouldn't feel threatened by physical power and we all have better things to do with our time.
I have added a box in the Last 5 minutes based on user-feedback. It's kinda a hack, but.. It's there ;)
I assume it'd need to be a constitutional change rather than a legislative one, otherwise they could just rescind the law anyway.

Which reminds me of one of my biggest objections to the US constitution: constitutional amendments are done simply by getting a bunch of legislatures to agree to 'em, rather than by holding a referendum as in Australia.
While "juicy" interface elements are certainly found in games, the "+1" pop-up circle is no more a game mechanic than a text input box is.

(I realize I'm being pedantic. As a game developer, this sort of playing fast-and-loose with words annoys me in the same way people talking about "programming in HTML" may annoy you.)

Regardless, while I think it overstates the case a bit, I do think that that pop-up is actually a good driver of user behavior, at least on a moment-to-moment level.
New Chilewich Fall 2011 Introductions now at Unicahome
The difficulty is that the aberrations in a large group can have disproportionate impact on those outside of the group.

So, men who abuse women may be the exception, but for those abused women, their perception and comfort with men may be permanently changed by those exceptions. Randall is not saying all men are the exceptions. Rather, he is saying recognize that those exceptions have had an enormous impact on some women's lives, including simple things like being uncomfortable publicly identifying their gender.
Ah cool, its good to see you respond quickly to feedback
Yes. About a factor of two. It's not going to kill you.
hugh3, you are exactly right. I updated the original post as I was thinking through how this amazing physics experiment could be helpful, and it dawned on me, it wasn't.

I could just use my Canon to accomplish the same thing.

I think my brain was more caught up in the fun of walking through the thought than accomplishing something with it.
It might just me getting old, but I do not agree to the praise this article has for an alleged clean and easy-to-use interface. I personally find it too busy and confusing (the one with the notes and arrows). But then again, I'm over 30...
Site appears to be temporally unavailable.
yeah, i agree. on the other hand, they go smaller - i was looking for something that would label users on a feed of short comments.
What's sad about the attempts to make it "on-message" is how bad and shallow they are.

India is a big and complicated place, and there is a lot to think about its economic development. Are big foreign companies favored over small and/or local ones? Why, what kind of dynamic is at play here?

How does the new economic power of women affect the sex selection of infants?

There's just two examples, right of the top of my head, that I think (hope!) would be of interest to the hard core mother jones readers.

But that's not where this goes, instead we get the shallow, almost caricaturish, money isn't everything undertone. Mixed with not enough money undertone, the workers should be getting paid more, they work 30+ hours shifts and still have to have bunk mates. All this mixed with, life sure can be complicated in this modern ever changing world.

And none of these issues are explored in depth, it's just "doesn't it suck how little they are paid, doesn't it suck that money doesn't make you happy, hey look a Marxists!"

I guess I would mind "on-message" editorializing a lot less, if it was part of a really good article. And what's most disturbing is this sense I get that maybe there could have been a much better article, but then it wouldn't have been on message, and to make it on message some bad things had to be done to the writing.
I supposed getting your throat slashed is always a possibility in situations like this. But, then again, this is probably a comforting story for the criminals when you consider that the police officer was given "the names, phone numbers, and locations of the suspects", and yet decided to go away on vacation for a week before going to arrest them.

If the criminals had murdered the neighbor, the police might be more inclined to go after them right away, and the criminals would have been worse off.

Of course, it would take logical criminals to realize that murder would get them into more trouble than (unarmed) robbery.
I much prefer the US way.
Here's some stuff to get you started:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1498497...

http://www.springerlink.com/content/l4317522286237m4/

http://www.ece.gatech.edu/research/labs/bwn/surveys/mesh.pdf

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.132....
Treating Students as Gifted Yields Impressive Academic Results, Study Finds
rmc, good point about the specifics of Mars. The range I found is 100-400 km. I think the (useless?) point I was making still more or less holds, but my calculations need asterisks next to them with a clarification at the bottom: "Would require you to be able to see through the Sun"
It's a question of comfort in an online space, which is all about perception, not actual risk.
How does one do something like this? What technologies did you use to get the data and to make the graphs?
Yeah, sorry.. my little blog apparently can't handle front page traffic =/
Wow, impressive. And I love your humour about warnings :)
Well, we could have a constitutional convention.
No mistake at all. I write iOS apps both for myself and as a contractor. All of the web services that my apps run off are done in C# on Windows.

As many others mentioned, the best tool is the one you already have/know.
My understanding is that it's 1530GMT: 1630BST :)
The State, like Twitter, is good at some things, and not at others. People insist on using it for things in both categories. So 'give the police more money' is not always a great idea for reducing crime - I'm from an area where the police have enough money to buy very nice toys indeed, but that strangely hasn't accompanied a drop in abuse of police power, police racism, or prosecution of the abominable War On Drugs.

As for filters - I admire the woman in the story, because she is a great example of the entrepreneurial mindset.

1: Attempt to achieve your goal by conventional means (call police).

2: Actually notice that conventional means will not get you what you want.

3: Come up with an alternate plan (DIY sting operation).

4: Execute fearlessly.

I argue that those four steps, broadly, are what a good startup founder does.
http://hubski.com

My site. Still in development, but active. We are pretty eclectic. Join us dammit. :)

EDIT: A bit more info: I built Hubski for the very same reasons: I wanted it to exist. The model is a bit different than HN, as you can follow people and tags, and with the next few updates it is going to be even a bit more so.

But yes, I do think an intelligent general social aggregator is possible and needed. I hope you'll join us. We've just a couple hundred users so far, but the content and discussions we do have are surprisingly quality.
Politics makes people crazy. They start out just normal. I have utterly vivid recollections of September 11, 2001 - the world suddenly split into idiots and people that agreed with me. (Mostly idiots, sadly.)
Thanks, as always, grellas.

But is this really a new doctrine? I mean, clearly the character of Cinderella is in the public domain, but I assumed that the Disney representation was copyrighted by Disney, and that if I wanted to make my own (commercial) representation of Cinderella, I'd need to make sure mine doesn't resemble the Disney version too closely.
It's similar to the StackOverflow April Fools' Unicorn Avatars: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/37328/my-godits-full...

Which you can try out at: http://unicornify.appspot.com/use-it
Right. Pyparsing is a nice parsing library, and it uses regular expression. I'd expect most parsing libraries do let you define stuff in regex. But they can't do recursion, right?
Interesting thoughts, and I agree with most of them. Perhaps you could think of my two number scale as a first approximation...? :)
As an immigrant I have a very hard time buying this. Shoot, I've been living 24/7 for years in a foreign country, and I've not had a single moment of identify crisis.

This concern over the call center workers' lost identity seems silly to me.
It's also much faster than BeautifulSoup, and uses much less memory. Matters if you're running in a memory/CPU constrained VPS like I was :)
farico, you are exactly right, and that is the point. You just add mirrors to make the distance needed shorter and shorter.

I was just taking the example to a logical absurdity to reason that we could potentially make a small array of millions of mirrors, here on earth, that could see back in time in "real-time" if you pointed it at something.

But as I soon realized, this is basically a video camera =(
The article is a bit breathless and has an odd Apple-specific thrust to it, but that aside I'd never heard of webdoc before and using it is actually a pretty cool experience. I can especially see this appealing to casual bloggers or teenagers as the interface allows you to do almost anything without needing any offline processes.
In this scenario, I think that the 'three skulls' result was about as likely to come up getting in the car and driving to the public location as it was during the actual confrontation.
Woah, That's really cool!
I hadn't seen that, but yes, it's designed to be along the same idea, except more year-round friendly ;)
Pivotal Labs’ Javascript Setup
What will happen to the International Space Station?
I'm returning to this a bit late. Sorry.

I still think you're reading an implication that is not actually being made, and subsequently getting huffy about it. I see no "clear implication" other than "this is not how those three things are most commonly learned currently". I cannot understand where it is that he is posing those three things against all other things.
I think people are blowing things way out of proportion when they start talking about the sexual assault risk implication of a setting in an web app.

Imho, what happens when gender is given undue relevance is what you see in a Youtube comments to a guy playing guitar vs comments to a girl playing guitar. On the former, the worst you get is guitar skill/technique bashing, on the latter, creepy lewd comments about your body.

When you're in a social environment, giving prominence to irrelevant facts, no matter how true or harmless they are, that's just noise that detract from the experience.
Emmerdale village helicopter ride and tour
I am baffled why people still have irreplaceable files stored only on their local hard drive.

Forget having your computer stolen, what if your hard drive dies?

If you aren't backing up your critical files, there are a myriad of cheap cloud-based options: http://tarsnap.com for geeks or the paranoid, Backblaze/Mozy/Carbonite/Dropbox/Arq/etc. for others.
See also: The Problem With Music by Steve Albini

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
That's a specious argument. Something like gay marriage is the result of writing a law; the deficit is an accumulation of many public spending programmes enacted under the law more often than by its creation.

This is basically a method of legislating a budget cap. Your 'slippery slope' argument in its correct analogy is no more than passing a law that outlaws gay marriage in the first place.
Wow. Way to start a flame war.
What do you mean by "evaluate her requirements and build the simple online presence she needs"?

If it's custom work based on a spec developed by interviewing her, it's going to take a while to do. It's probably not going to be "simple". Maybe simple off-the-shelf software will work for her though, how about Wordpress?

Actual SEO takes a long time to do and has a very long-term (re: months). This will be costly.

Can she afford online advertising? It's expensive (see yesterday's discussion of AdMob).

Sounds like at least a couple weeks of full-time work. How much would that cost at your mother's Tai Chi instructor rate? 80 x $50/hr? Many web consultants charge more. Even at $50/hr that's at least $4k + the inevitable extra time required.

Sounds expensive and not so simple. This probably will come off sounding really harsh about your question but cost is what it really comes down to. There's a gap between what people need to charge to make it work for them and what small businesses like your mother's are likely willing to pay. How can that be closed? Standard software. Not evaluating her requirements.
Unwanted is unwanted, but I can easily see how the other person being physically unattractive to you making it even more unwanted.

Imagery also helped make her example real.
Carmack: Unquestionable that mobile will surpass consoles
> That wouldn't end the deficit, that would just ensure the deficit was 0 the day before elections.

I think that's the point. Short-term borrowing is sometimes a smart idea, as long as there's a real plan to pay it off. The idea would be to only discourage irresponsible borrowing.

> This same logic, if we allow it to be applied to the deficit, could be applied to other things.

I think it's fairly uncontroversial that having unpaid debt is bad and should be avoided.. so it's not too similar to issues that are actually controversial.
Soyuz will carry on doing resupply missions as per usual. No change there.
Generally speaking, the creative industries are full of people and businesses that operate by screwing over creative people.

They view creative people the way a miner views a resource in the ground: as something to be strip mined and then discarded. I've encountered raw contempt... in a sense they are jealous of the ability of creative people to be creative, and this fuels their desire to co-opt it and take some of that glory for themselves.

But, part of the reason there's so much of this is that creative types are often horrible businesspeople and have no desire to learn. Instead, there is this myth that you get "discovered" and then someone else does the business for you.

Reality: you get "discovered" by a predator. If you don't want to be prey, you have to do it yourself.

Edit: this doesn't mean you have to be a 100% indy do-everything-yourself self-publisher or bootstrapper. But going into things with your eyes open, reading the fine print, and thinking like a businessperson is part of doing it yourself. Businesspeople do go into business with other people and other businesses, but they don't think "wow! I'm getting discovered, now I'm set!" They think "hmm... what's the value proposition here?" and they run spreadsheets and they look for hidden places where they might lose value or not get enough value for their money. Then they push back, and negotiate. Think like this or you get screwed.

Oh, and if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
Your URL has to at least contain your company name. If it doesn't, your customers would be confused by your email addresses and what popped up in the address bar when they use Google to find your website.
Dr. Chandra, RobotCrunch

Subtle jab at Arrington? =)
Personal Design Rules
Would Warren Buffett fire the entire management of any company he owned that borrowed more than 10% of earnings in one year, regardless of circumstances? Because that is what his suggestion amounts to.
If a frustrated user repeatedly sent me threats of physical violence packaged in a complaint letter, I'd turn it over to the police in a heartbeat. That's absolutely not a helpfully frustrated user, that's a real threat. This behavior is not just socially unacceptable, it's so unacceptable that there are longstanding legal structures in place that make it illegal. There are no distinctions between virtual and physical here, it's a real person communicating a threat to another real person using a digital medium instead of a physical one. Filming yourself committing a crime in digital format vs. physical tape/film is basically the same idea. "It's just bits" doesn't hold water or we'd not have most of the internet child porn laws, or most of the copyright and patent law cases going on, none of the internet censorship laws, Wikileaks wouldn't feel threatened, etc.

People are routinely arrested and convicted for basically the same type of behavior directed at public officials spawned from aggravations and frustrations of similar sources..."bugs" in laws, perceived unfairness, disagreements on important decisions, racism, xenophobia, etc, etc, etc (I suspect enforcement is greater in this situation because public officials tend to know the law and exercise their rights against this behavior more often).
as in 10^6 possibilities, ignoring backgrounds? For the curious, that means collisions are expected >50% of the time with ~1200 samples, and someone could easily generate collisions on purpose with little effort.

So it works well for a simple signal (which is the goal), but shouldn't be relied on if people might try to abuse it.
This does not address the question of whether a balanced budget is even desirable. Equating the budget of the currency issuer with the everyday experience of the budget of the currency user is a fallacy.

Looking at the respective balances of the three sectors of government, domestic private, and external, it is obvious that flows are conserved. Given net imports (i.e. more money flowing into the external sector than out of it), a balanced government budget can only occur if the private sector is in deficit, i.e. more money flowing out of the private sector than flowing into it.

Empirically, external balances change only very slowly, unless artificial trade barriers (tariffs etc.) are raised.

So in the end, the political choice is between deficits in the private sector, and deficits in the government sector (and of course a range of choices in-between).