skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was hoping hackernews would have a better discussion on this topic but I guess not.

I think I'm the only person who is infuriated by Penelope Trunk's article in TechCrunch Titled "Stop telling women to do startups" It moves up to the top of HackerNews very quickly, and I'm a little disappointed by the comments in the article. The title is pure nonsense first of all, and while there are maybe two points that I could agree with, it overall is a very poorly constructed argument. As a 20-something starting her career, I would hate for this type of talk to become a trend amongst women, because this logic cannot influence the next gen of women movers and shakers.

1. Women have choices and they aren't choosing startups because they want to have their own children: FALSE women are not empowered to balance the work life continuum. For men, the startup legend is one they would like to fulfill--a la the Pirates of Silicon Valley. For Penelope Trunk, she would rather be soft on the women who are itching to live life with a less exciting career (quite contrary to her title of "Brazen Careerist").

2. Raising Money and Running a Startup is Hard, so don't just tell anyone to do it!: FALSE women should be empowered to make these decisions and push themselves into riskier situations. In fact women who have partners with a stable income and have children should feel even more empowered to launch their own company (like so many women on this list have done) WHY CAN'T THEY BE RISKY! Why can't they work their ass off and succeed--or fail? I tried to start my own company, tried to raise money and failed miserably and guess what, I'm probably WAY more clever now because of that.

Saying that women have a natural imperative to raise children is horrible backwards. Women are the only ones who can give birth, but they are also capable of building great ideas, great work environments, great products and great companies. I'm horribly disappointed in this piece.
tl;dr version - Intel's latest chip is pretty fast.

Having 'grown up' around computers I have found that this sort of 'damn!' moment is not uncommon. At some point in a person's experience there is something they do with computers a lot and its 'hard' for the computer to do (aka slow) and then suddenly one day its 'easy.' It calls attention to the growth that is the industry. My particular moment was a 1 GB disk drive, at USC that was how much space was hooked up to all three DEC-10 machines (330MB per) and it took up a room.

That being said, the new Sandy bridge is a beast of a machine. One can wonder if it is near the peak of what you might use as a desktop in the post-PC era. Sort of like the muscle cars in the 70's which were replaced in the 80's and 90's with cars that went for different targets (mileage, handling, etc).
Michael Bloomberg has advocated passing a law letting immigrants get a green card as long as they buy a house and live in it for five or ten years. That would probably work a lot better than paying a fee to the federal government, would fix the housing crisis and the economy, and get a lot of rich foreigners to come live in the United States.
I think the cleanest experiments here would be those having to do with stereotype threat. For example, women asked to write down their gender (even just with a checkbox) before a math test at the GRE level score significantly worse. Asian women asked to also write down their race are inoculated against this effect. These women are "primed" with their stereotypes and it dramatically influences performance. Even asking people to think about being a professor increases their performance!

I don't know if there are any related experiments with priming subjects with the concepts of "mother" or "feminine" or what-have-you, but it's a good place to start.

Maybe priming women with a reading comprehension test involving a passage with Marie Curie? Or Lynn Margulis? Or Sophie Germaine...

Also, this is indirect, but the study of highly talented women and men here: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/Ferriman2009.pdf

...shows a strong pull toward shorter hours/working from home for women over men, and it gets stronger as women age from 25 to 35.

I think this indicates some of the pressures of motherhood.

To this end, I think it might be a good idea to have mixed age Montessori schools at places of business. Since it's an exploratory learning model, and the place is set up to be a cool place to learn and play and be anyway, and one of the biggest recruiting draws and factors in the choice of workplace is often the school district, and a single teacher can handle the mixed-age children of a small-mid sized company because they largely teach themselves/each other, and because that's less expensive than private school and the parents could participate more in their kids lives if they were physically close to work, I think it could be a huge benefit to forward thinking companies. Don't know, but it could help both men and women.

Bonus:

Check out the graph on page 477 here:

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/SexDiffs.pdf

It plots surveyed personal importance for various issues, like "Developing my intellectual interests" to "Part time career for a limited time". You'll notice that the male and female responses almost entirely match, with the few exceptions, and there it doesn't deviate by much!
You're over-reaching. My parents raised me to be cooperative and less aggressive. It feels perfectly natural to me. The human brain is very malleable. There are some natural tendencies... I don't think the natural tendencies are quite what our society thinks they are. Socialization papers over most of them.
Objective C is available anywhere GCC is available (i.e., essentially everywhere).
I've been doing startups since I was 18 years old, for over 15 years, and so my social circle is reasonably well populated with other startup people --- mostly men, for obvious reasons --- and this sentiment is so not gender specific that it's hard to see how it's even germane.

Everyone gets ground down by trying to get small companies off the ground. I don't know many people at all who think 90(!) hour weeks and death marches are a good idea, even at launch time.

Stop smoking, though. It's really bad for you.
[after a couple of downvotes]

Alright Mr. and Ms. Snark Police, so I did give the article a chance. This time from the top and made it until I read this sentence:

"In recent memory, I distinctly remember: it was past 2am, I was listening to 杨宗纬 with my amazing, noise-canceling Shures in the background of doing something that required minimal mental processing power."

Yes, this text is so well written and worth my time that the author didn't even bother to proof read and see that he forgot to fill in a placeholder.

And just in case anybody wonders - yes, I did continue to read it all the way down, but it was really hard not to go into skipping mode. The rest of the article is more of the above - contrived, rambling sentences and touches of delusion of grandeur. Very little value apart from boilerplate mock-inspiration. No thanks.

I know that snark is sometimes too easily fired out here on HN, but I was merely stating my opinion on giving the article an honest shot. I don't think that is worthy of a downvote.
I tried hstore on a project for many of the reasons mentioned. I just hated having to always represent data as strings.
Absolutely. I am an experienced software engineer in SF, and you would have to pay me WAY more money to live in Texas. The number is high enough that I would never realistically move there.
Exactly; the 2008 Obama campaign spent $760M -- not an amount of money I expect Mr. Obama to make back in his lifetime. It's not about money made while in office.

Now, you try to change the pay of every member of CONGRESS to ~40K... Then maybe you would see some changes in the process. Many Congresspeople were successful in business before they were elected. You can bet they count every dollar that comes in, even if they don't count every one that goes out.
> If you want to incentivize creators, you shouldn't copy their stuff.

They do not have the legal possibility to not want to incentivize creators. In practice, they also do not have a possibility to even vote on this, and they know that basically never anyone has voted on copyright but the companies profiting from copyright. It is like a purchased law totally shielded off from democracy.
$100K might seem too little for people already in the US looking for a green card and it probably is. However, for people outside the US, it is still a significant sum of money. If they are motivated enough to find it, they'll probably be working hard enough to pay it back (ie. don't worry about that person hogging welfare). What I like about this proposal is that it makes it possible for the "right kind of immigrant" to apply as opposed to the $1M that is the current threshold. If you've $1M to spare, the GC is just an expensive membership card to a club and will be treated as such. With no regard to being a citizen, the person will look at it as a pure business transaction. On the other hand, the person scraping together 100K is pretty much betting on their future and making this (the US) their home for multiple generations. These are the kind of immigrants that are desirable.
So you would gladly do business under the name 'Vag', and your logo would be a stylized tulip (like the ones you can see in 'The Wall')? Or did you have something more specific in mind?
The problem with this article, along with the rest, is that it is full of generalizations. It attempts to dichotomize the situation, which simply shouldn't (and thankfully can't) be done.

I didn't read past the first few paragraphs.
I think you have me confused with someone else? I haven't done anything with 3D landscapes.
Why doesn't her advice apply to men? Why isn't the title of her article, "Stop encouraging young bright males interested in SW from doing startups"?

It's just interesting that it's fine to push men into potentially lucrative careers, but do the same for women and then there's tons of controversy.

She tries to offer a counterargument w/ what she's thinks is absurd: "Men could change the world by staying home with their kids and parenting them. Men would provide a totally different perspective as the lunchroom parent. They would ask for totally different after-school programming. Men would hire different babysitters and different SAT tutors. Because men are different than women."

As a father who does do a lot of this (although not a stay-at-home dad), actually we can have huge impact in these types of settings. I've literally had several other parents saying they wish there were more people like me involved as deeply as I am. I've single-handled been able to change the tone and attitudes of lot of interactions apparently. And based on the poor behavior I've seen from a lot of children of "executive" dad stay-at-home mom parents -- something clearly isn't working with their model.

People are pretty good at making choices for themselves.

With all due respect to the author, that's not consistent with reality. If that were the case I wouldn't have so much feedback in code reviews. We wouldn't have child protective services, the incarceration rates we have, poverty, high HS drop out rates (and not just for the Thiel money), etc.... People are generally really bad at making decisions w/o guidance. No one is saying hand hold, but provide some basic guidance so that people can see all potentially avenues.
So when is Google Air coming ? :D
I would love it if I had EVERYTHING stats I could hit refresh on.
There are a lot of hidden prejudices both in this article and in the entire discussion around women in technology and the startup world.

I have a startup. I love startups. So should everybody else love startups too? Not at all.

A more direct question: roughly 50% of people are females. Should 50% of startup founders be female?

I don't think so, but I find it difficult to continue the conversation past this conclusion. The reason I don't think so is that I know that my judgment on how cool startups are doesn't extend to everybody else. I intuitively feel that being a founder involves complex traits and personal decisions that I cannot fathom. To simply say the ratio should be the same sounds wrong. It sounds like the same kind of mental error that makes me want to believe everybody should be in startups. Likewise to say that women should not be in startups sounds wrong also. Or to say startups should have more women in them than men. Each possible conclusion is undefendable.

You could try to attack this problem by taking it the level of personal choices: assuming women are rational actors making informed choices, why do so many choose not to be in startups? Is it the environment? The difference in the sexes? Chemicals in the water?

Of course, that doesn't work, because once you try to start making general assumptions about the behaviors of millions of people you're going to start stereotyping and using guesswork. It can't be helped.

So at the end of the day I understand that other people don't want to be founders. And I accept that. Heck, for all I know the people who are not in startups are the smart ones, and I'm the guy who has something wrong with him. Not only am I not sure how to reasonably investigate this issue, I'm not even sure I have my head screwed on well enough to know what a good or bad outcome is.

I think it's one of those things that you can endlessly argue about, and I choose not to. If folks want to discuss why Person A made her personal decision not to stay in the startup or tech world, we could do that. But when generalizing to all women, and to all startups, in my opinion it's just too much abstraction to be a tractable issue.
Predator Drones being used for Domestic Police work in the US
Anyone who raves about the great weather in SF is clearly not qualified to give judgment on the city.
Y Combinator vs TechStars: Whose Companies Are Bringing In More Funding?
Knockbox - consistency toolkit for Clojure and Riak
Building Your Online Credibility
> encourage these young people to run for office

Which is raising another, more underlying problem: Why do we as a society have no means to change stuff by voting on it, like in a, as it is called, "democracy"? Why is the only practicable way to change something like the filesharing prohibition, as you suggest, to give up everything else and run for a political office?

> We need to turn this thought experiment into reality, get people into the gears and sockets of our society

What you're suggesting is basically trying to inject "our" people into the ruling caste because it is completely decoupled from the ruled one. I'd rather say that we simply need significantly more democracy.
You can migrate here: http://www.touristeye.com/gowalla
Weby Templates: http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/weby-templates-are-easier-fa...

Weby Templates are used in production on websites that have garnered over 500,000 uniques a month. They are incredibly easy to work with. They are the "templates for lazy people". They have 3 main benefits:

* easier
* faster
* more flexible

* The main codebase is implemented in 100 source lines of code.

* Extensive libraries only add just a couple hundred other lines of code.

* It is simple.

* It ensures that all tags have closing tags.

* It is compiled and fast.

* It is unicode compliant and safe.

* You can be fully fluent within 5 minutes since it is just Python and a transparent library.

http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/weby-templates-are-easier-fa...
The article is from 1997...
If you like this, you may also want to check out dygraphs, an open source library which does something similar and has been around for a few years: dygraphs.com
I love how you go from "I'm too lazy to look further than a pop sci summarization" to "the entirety of the work the scientist did was the pop sci summarization" to "flim-flam, fraud, scam."

Climate change "skepticism" in this case amounts to someone who is too lazy to look at scientific reports and just prefers ad hominems.
EU backs ST-Ericsson to deliver augmented reality
There is no perfect solution, and complain as I do, we still have something good and fixable.

In general I prefer less regulation and smaller government so we can let the market handle resource allocation for us. The less pie for the govt to waste, the better we are.

I believe regulation is definitely needed where there are externalities: pollution, access to education, basic r and d...
how does this compare to MySQL's HandlerSocket?
Isn't this effectively what Redis does too?

There are whole Salvatore posts about doing binary data structures in Redis string values.
Batman Equation in Google Graphs
Regarding the user interface using lpsolve, This sounds very interesting, using a full constraint solver to layout a UI. Are you aware of anything else or public that uses a similar approach?
People like to say that "kids these days" don't understand copyright, but the fact is that hardly anyone of any age understands copyright. Back in the 90's, people in their 40's and older blindly retold the fable that you didn't have to pay for shareware, regardless of what the EULA stated. I had a friend whose father was a lawyer, who had the largest collection of illegally copied VHS tapes I've ever seen. They insisted it was legal because they weren't distributing, which is nonsense.

The only thing new about the phenomenon is the ease with which a greater variety of media is now shifted around digitally.
Thanks! Most (read "all") the credit there, as well as the credit for the other useful parts of the code, belongs to David Chester.

But I'm louder on the internet and have been working with Rickshaw for a while, so I get to say "thanks" [grin].

Let us know of any roadblocks you hit if you take it for a spin!
I think they simply substituted the PG version of the real word here.
I guess I don't agree with you after all. HN is close enough to what Code Quarterly was trying to do that it's hard to believe an expensive product could get off the ground. The real problem is that too few people are able and willing to actually write quality long-form pieces.
> ...database grew to a size of 239691780 bytes (Just 228MB)

> ...gives me 14689 rows just under 360ms on average

Uh, 360ms seems like an awfully long time to query such a small dataset.
> I think for schema-less storage systems we know 2 major competitors in market. MongoDB and CouchDB.

Um, what about Riak, Cassandra, Voldemort, and Hbase? (I'm sure there's a bunch more I'm forgetting)
I haven't done benchmarks yet but if you are looking for HandlerSocket benchmarks http://blog.creapptives.com/post/3329352663/the-nosql-dogma is the link
It's really hard to know for sure, but there are 40K apps and games in the WP7 marketplace. Just 13 months ago there were 0.
How did you build it? Are you using hstore SQL directly? Do you just have migrations with raw SQL in them?
Reading the whole article gives nothing better.

What was written in the whole article has nothing significant. If the study had something significant, then the author of the article didn't report it.
Maze Generation: Algorithm Recap
So, I guess python, perl, and ruby would lose a contest to COBOL which has a ANSI / ISO standard[1] and is available across multiple platforms? I think implementation based standards have a place.

[1] http://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=INCITS%2fISO%...
As the creator of intellectual property, my first priority is putting food on the table. The macro-economic benefit of trading my intellectual property is irrelevant to me.
Thanks for the summary. I've stopped clicking on TechCrunch linkbait precisely because I don't want to reward this sort of idiocy.
reddit used (and still for the most part uses) postgres as a schemaless storage (although they don't use hstore).

Also, I'm pretty sure Heroku uses hstore, because they're the ones that taught me about it.

So not everyone forgot about it.
He did it with his own C compiler (tcc).
Consider agorism.
Thanks, I didn't find that when searching. Very similar idea, but a slightly more involved syntax. I see it uses string building rather than a lib like lxml which probably makes it faster.
Thanks for taking a look!

There's a little more info in our recent blog post about this too: http://bits.shutterstock.com/?p=103

In particular, here's an example where you can switch between stacked, percentage, and line views; toggle on and off each data series; re-order the stack with drag-and-drop; zoom in to a time slice; add smoothing; add annotations, etc:

http://shutterstock.github.com/rickshaw/examples/extensions....

It can make a difference, having this functionality around when you're trying to dig in and read your data.
In the US it depends, but I'd venture a guess and say most public university libraries are open at least regularly to the general public. Most of the schools in my state are on this [1] list, and most law libraries I've encountered are also open to the public as well. After hours access is usually restricted to those with a library card though.

[1] http://www.gpoaccess.gov/libraries.html
It's in my profile. Not sure why HN is not letting you see it.

You can contact me at charlie (at) kindel (dot) com
Our system is messed up. I would let anyone in with a degree from one of the top 25 or so schools abroad. IIT, Tokyo, Cambridge, etc. Also anyone with a 2 year grad degree in the top 20 in their field in the US can stay. Only lastly would I add buying your way in, though 100k seems low. I would think 200k, with an alternative of making a 500k investment instead of retiring the debt.
What I learned about this new library afterwards: it was allowed before it got too crowded and university members couldn't get workplaces anymore (they have about 1,250 places and 30,000 students). So now, you can enter the library as a non-student, rent books but you are not allowed to use the workplaces (they check at times if your student-id is laid out on the desk but they didn't when I've been there)
Your metaphor is also invalid. Copying digital media is nothing at all like making a cookie from a recipe.
This is ridiculous advice unless you are only going to apply to very small companies where you will only be talking directly to other programmers, very few recruiters / hr people are going to care about your github projects and for a company of more than a few people you are probably going to have to get paste one of these people first. You need a resume to get you in the door then you can bring up your github work later on.
The reason we need women doing startups is (as corroborated by the author's own argument) that women think differently than men do in many ways, and we need all kinds of ways of thinking amongst people who are creating on the web.
the ads on phoronix are getting pretty over-the-top
This is an incredible achievement.

The "key traces of water" is awe inspiring in itself. However, what is more impressive is that Opportunity is still chugging along 7 years longer than predicted and making these discoveries. Unfortunately, NASA is pretty bad at displaying successes and explaining why it is important.

The press release: http://marsrover.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20111207a.h...
Best technology websites 2011
These losses started in 2008, during an economic downturn that we haven't fully recovered from. But I would have expected the losses to be much larger (than 3.1% in North American and 0.85% globally), especially for something that is entertainment / recreation.
The longing to take it slower and treat yourself right, and not grinding yourself into the ground for the sake of sexy business and easy cash, is perfectly reasonable. The notion of life balance is quite well represented around here, contrary to what the minority that dominate the echo chamber would like you to think.

Time enjoyed is time well-spent.
Yes, this is quite subjective. But it's a starting point.

What do HN'ers consider the best tech sites of 2011?