skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"However, the fact that the patterns of behavior aren't random does clue you in that there are systemic factors involved, which can be analyzed and tested."

That's exactly what I was going to say.

With regards to the article, everyone can bash Penelope Trunk all they want, but the fact remains that she's right. As an entrepreneur and adviser, she is correct.

People are always complaining about the lack of women in certain fields or the gender imbalance in science and technology--there are even organizations like "Change the Ratio" trying to affect that imbalance. But here's a question no one ever asks: is it in everyone's best interest to have more women in science, technology and business?

It drives me insane when people say that the whole child-rearing argument is sexist. No, it isn't sexist. That's one major thing that separates women from men--the former have the ability to carry and give birth to children. Many women sometimes find the urge to suddenly have children, and you can't predict when or if it will happen.

When it comes to matters of the sexes, you can't ignore biology.
Welcome to the future. We'll through you a party :-)
My 52 year old mother recently asked me "do you really have a copyright?" after seeing the notice at the bottom of a website I was showing her.
UpOut is amazing. Found a pancake art show in SF on there :)
Programming LaTeX3: The programming environment
Very annoying that I have to sign up with a site just to view this...
I think you misread my comment. I am surprised that practice still exists.
Some of the university libraries in Berlin are quite strict about what you're allowed to bring in (ie, no bags of any size). Fortunately, the Amerika-Gedenk-Bibliothek is close by and if they have such policies, they certainly don't enforce them.

Haven't been to the Grimm yet, but I remember passing by on the S-Bahn maybe a year ago and being excited about the huge new library under construction...I'm not in Mitte very often.
dogma... what do you mean?
If you live in the Northern Virginia Area, you can hit the phenomenal Johnson Center at George Mason University.

Private group rooms (with whiteboards), a semi-isolated reference area for even more quiet, couches, coffee tables, power at most tables, a movie theater, coffee bar, cafeteria (with everything from a taco bell to chinese food), convenience store, two banks (last I checked), a pretty good uni book store, art exhibitions, a halfway decent restaurant on the top floor and a computer store, parking decks are pretty close and relatively cheap.

If even has a private prayer area in case you need to call to a higher power for help with a particularly difficult bug.

Wifi requires you to be a student (last I checked), but tether to your phone and you're pretty much all set.

If you're working with a distributed team and don't want to shell out $3-4 grand a month on office space, just pay for parking once or twice a week and use this facility.

(also, if the Johnson Center is full-up, there's always the Fenwick library across campus that can be even more private since fewer people use it, and I believe most of the technical reference books are stored in the stacks there)
And he himself points out that by the time women are 40 and they want to go back to work full-time, these women are not going to relocate to Silicon Valley. But the truth is that if there were really a problem with there not being enough women running startups, then people like Fred would fund startups in suburbia. He’d fund startups that run at half-speed to accommodate carpools. He’d fund startups that have part-time ambitions. He’s not doing that, though. So clearly there is not that big a problem that women are not running startups: The market for funding has spoken, and it is still funding mostly men.

The market has spoken, and it is still funding mostly men that are willing to drop everything and relocate to NYC or Silicon Valley (who hopefully have minimal business experience so they can be convinced to give up more equity than they should). The things she lists as disqualifiers all apply to me, except the "being a woman" part.
What to read for your next interview?
I don't believe the 'prospects', a fairly imprecise term, have changed at all, however the probability that life has existed there has gone up substantially.

Many scientists see liquid water as a pre-requisite for life because chemical processes that we associate with life happen in the presence of it. So the question of liquid water on Mars informs the probability of life there, no liquid water, lower probability, liquid water, higher probability.

Much of the scientific community is on board with the idea that liquid water existed on Mars at 'some' time, and a few are in the 'recently' camp, and a small number are in the 'now' camp. It is subterranean, if it is there, because liquid water cannot exist under the current surface conditions.

The 'farts' was the detection of the presence of methane in Mars' atmosphere. That is significant because methane is not stable in Mars' atmosphere and so unless it is being created some how it should not exist. Its presence, especially waxing and waning, says there is a mechanism on Mars that creates methane and releases it into the atmosphere.

Now on Earth there are many biological processes which create methane and a few geological ones. The presence improves the probability that it may be caused by some form of bacteria but its creation is not required to be from biologic means.

Much of the 'fossil' bacteria hoopla in the Mars meteorite was objected to on first principals (life has to exist there, prove that first). In light of its re-examination it is slightly more probable that it represents fossilized bacteria.

So the argument in favor of their being life on (or under the surface of) Mars has picked up some facts to help out its case. It will remain a probability until such time as someone (or something) directly observes it. And of course someone else repeats that observation.
Docracy (http://docracy.com) is a repository of crowd-sourced legal documents, designed for scenarios such as this. As others mention, it is very difficult to reliably construct working contracts from a cookbook of clauses. A sounder approach is to have a variety of complete templates, along with some community discussion and social proof of their worth.
The Nagare framework also does something similar: http://www.nagare.org/trac/wiki/PresentationTier
As a guy I have read a different article.

The article I read was about talking the talk versus walking the walk. And being aware that sacrifices will have to be made. And that people have a mind of their own and most of the people take the route of less sacrifices.

Honestly, nowadays in western world anybody can do just about anything if they put their mind and effort towards it. And acting as if women don't do startups as per some kind of society's disapproval is weak.

I was raised by an emancipated woman, who was a truck driver 40 years ago. I see the same kind of women around me. They are few, but they command respect and admiration.

And there is this other kind, too busy writing and debating to even get anything done.

My point? The author shared her experience of walking the walk in contrast to others who in a Victorian fashion talk the proper talk.
Hard to believe the ad wasn't titled "Dear Sophie's Account Held by Myself, Her Father, Not to be Handed Over to Sophie until such time as she meets Google's User Age Threshold for Regulatory Compliance."

"Dear Sophie" does have a much nicer ring to it, I guess.
Interactive Seating Charts
Can you recommend someone who can help to create interactive seating charts for a ticket broker site?
Thanks
or install something like https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync

and be able to backup your imap mailboxes without a GUI
Falcone’s LightSquared Said to Disrupt 75% of GPS in Tests
Honest question, because I'm actually curious about this. Are these extreme edition chips used almost exclusively by enthusiasts, or are they actually used in certain software engineering branches?
[ASK PG]For consistency,why not remove point system for front page articles too?
I remember seeing huge debates about people begging to bring back HN's point system in the past, and PG strongly advocating for a no point system. I'm sure PG has the data to prove his position, but if that's the case then why haven't we removed the point system for the front page articles too? Why not have the consistency?<p>(note: I am not taking one side or the other on this debate. Just want to understand PG's rationale behind his decisions)
i solved that by problem in my library https://github.com/dodo/node-dynamictemplate with the ui designers by masking their static html on my functions, which are only a subset of the part in the static html which you want to cover.

this way using a html mockup from a designer is like using an 3D from a 3D model artist, because you only load the data in, selecting what you want and putting a animatinon mesh / functionality into it.

tldr-part: look at my wip code → https://github.com/dodo/node-dynamictemplate/blob/a46fb6ed18...
This is actually a pretty popular hobby: attaching cameras to a Model RC plane and take pictures/videos. See forums such as http://www.rcgroups.com/aerial-photography-128/?s=1aecd50171...; for some great examples.
Ask HN: The perfect 20-50 people office network setup?
Lets consider this situation:
A business with between 20 to 50 employees all heavily using email, calendar, documents and working with general office work.

What is the perfect office network setup for this? Keeping in mind that the following points are important:

- minimal onsite hardware

- convenient fileshareing through a network drive

- calendar shareing

- webbmail/imap access

- some central point of administering users

- support for windows, osx and different linux flavours

- all machines must be fully usable outside the office

- bonus for beeing able to monitor clients for patches software/updates

- bonus for pushing updates/software to them

Is this business network utopia?

Current situation is using google apps, but that fails miserably on the network filesharing point.

What else is there? A large IT company pitched me a full windows setup(Active directory, exchange, sharepoint and the whole shabang), but that feels like vendor lockin-mania(and at least 2 servers onsite), we will probably never get another chance of doing this right.

All my google-findings seems to solve parts of the problem but not all.

Thanks in advance, I'll summarize results and report back.
[edit: formatting]
> outside the normal patterns of a huge system

Can you expand a bit on how a sentient human being, wishing to communicate with other sentient human beings, is outside the normal patterns of a communications system?
Earth 2
Another Earth?

Home away from home.
It's a US company so they have to obey COPPA, which requires verifiable consent from a parent before collecting any private information from the child and restricts marketing to that child. So, in practical terms, for Google to offer mail accounts to children under 13, they need to be able to collect faxed or mailed proof of consent from parents, have some system to process that information and tie it to the accounts, then they need special rules for the ads shown on the gmail site to that user.
I've lived in a lot of major cities in my life, and SF is the first one where I've had to literally dodge human shit while walking on the sidewalk.

As a longtime Austin resident, I'd almost consider that a nice problem to have, because it would mean that walking was an integrated part of my daily routine rather than something I have to explicitly make time for so that I don't lose my mind from all the driving I have to do.
Cube gears - generalized solution found
> Actually a key/value store with link walking, you can just write map reduce for that document oriented feel! Again I won't bother writing a map-reduce job just to fetch out document with particular values

I thought CouchDB required this as well?
I think the better question would be, whose companies are making more money, rather than raising it to spend.
Advertising to kids is a low to non-profit activity.
For anyone trying to learn Ruby I highly recommend you get a copy of Eloquent Ruby.

I wish I had learned it with this book by my side. I consider it one of the best introductions into the language and how to write idiomatic Ruby.
Founders series: Lessons learned from starting a dev tools company
I didn't see your comment until much later. I was just assuming that was a given. Of course if you know you're low in vitamin D, you should be taking vitamin D pills, as I do.
Too bad his comedy doesn't translate over text.
Fair enough, I was thinking of Memorial. And, for that matter, I was thinking of one particular library at NC State which may have been for math and science only.
A parent can't 'over-rule' a federal law.

"Hey Mr Food-N-Liquor owner, I give you consent for you to sell my 18 year old alcohol" etc
I stopped reading the TC article when I hit the byline, having read her writing before.

Kudos, I guess, for her omitting (or TechCrunch excising) the advice about how women who really want to succeed should get plastic surgery, focus less on work and more on capturing and keeping a man.

That "Blueprint" post reads so much like satire that I actually read the entire thing, only to discover the woman was dead serious. "It's no small feat, but Botox and Restylane will be your best teammates in this part of the adventure." For real?? And that's not even the worst part of the post. Egad.

Anything for page views, I guess! :/
"Dear Sophie" pretty clearly implies it isn't Sophie's account to me. When you write an letter (especially one that hasn't been sent yet as the commercial implies), you are the owner of the letter, right? To cite the Bible, it is Paul's letters to the Corinthians, not the Corinthians' letters from Paul.
You can rip-off the labour of hard-working artists, but eventually something has to give.
Are you counting return internship offers? Many interns aren't looking for full time job offers. Only 2-3% percent receiving offers seems rather low.
FWIW, I noticed some images loading in the description overlay in a podcast I was listening to on my iPhone. So, it looks like iOS devices render HTML content in ID3 tags.

I've been meaning to explore whether they run JavaScript too but haven't gotten around to it yet.
That is not entirely fair, automation is the only way to admin millions of users and when nonsensical factors like COPPA get introduced to the system this happens. And I don't think that they did anything wrong here considering the consequences of not complying with the law.
Ask HN: Review my startup myaudiostock.com
http://myaudiostock.com/ is a website we launched some time ago, it offers music samples. We have some problems to get users.

Please let me know what you think, thanks!
"Extremely long"?

- Credit card number/expiration/code

- Billing address

- Name, e-mail and phone

That's all it asks. That's exactly what everyone else asks for. The merchant can even pre-fill all these fields but the card info before sending the buyer to PayPal if they filled them out on the merchant's website already.

It's especially weak to make such a complaint based on your "recollection" while you're two pages away from the actual payment form for Louis' show.
I'm closing in on a year myself. One thing that HN has clearly done for me is turn my interest in technology into an interest in businesses driven by technology -- it's moved me up a whole meta-level.

I can't help but think of technology now in business terms. What does it cost? How much is it worth? Is that a viable business model? etc.

For years I suffered under the familiar problem of being a technologist that was viewed by non-technologists as being essentially thought of as a high paid janitor. Nobody cares when things work great, but you get beat in the broom closet when something falls down.

The business-side that HN taught me has paid off tremendously, pay raises, promotions, more responsibility. Without any perceptible change in my skills as a technologist, I'm out of the broom closet and into the board room these days!
That is the better question. Unfortunately the revenues of startups are usually trade secrets. Funding events are based on investors looking at revenues, so they're the best indication available.
Connecticut geeks seek personality for team
Leaving aside my glee that we must reach into mythology (edited, thanks rubidium) to help Google's case, any letter that begins "Dear Sophie" sounds like it's a letter... to Sophie. And while she might not be able to read it right now, my initial guess as to why would be that infants don't have great reading comprehension, not that Google can't find an algorithm to get around COPPA.
Protecting democratic protest from suppression using sublethal chemical weapons
Isn't this an old story? I feel like I read this exact story a few months ago.
> The only legal way to record copyrighted material is to do it to time-shift,

This is simply not true. It's the same type of ignorance the OP is complaining about. Just to start with, fair use exceptions. Not to mention we've carved out custom exceptions for education, disabled people, etc. etc.

Or just read Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitations_and_exceptions_to_c...

Granted, they're a lot narrower than normal people believe they are. But they're a lot wider than "only one exception", and both mental models are equally incorrect.
The UAVs were used by the press, not police surveillance.

Maybe the US press could do the same, they could cover events like Occupy Wall Street using remotely controlled quadrocopters since real choppers or journalists on foot were not allowed in the area.
I've never really programmed in C++, but I have to say (as an iOS developer who's programmed in Java, Basic, C# in the past) I love Objective-C. It's really easy to write good, object-oriënted code in the language and it got so much better with the release of iOS 5 and the new SDK, especially because of ARC. I'm not sure if C++ has anything comparable to ARC.
Ad hominem attacks aside, let me address your points.

Firstly, destruction upon leaving scope in Objective-C would add some magic unexpected behavior that doesn't conform to what we expect from standard C stack-based functions.

In C++, when an object is normally declared, it exists on the stack, therefore it will disappear when the scope ends. The fact that the destructor is called is nice.

In Objective-C, all objects exist solely on the heap. All object-orientation is done at runtime, not at compile time, which leaves it open to be a lot more dynamic and open to fiddling at run time than C++ is. This of course loses a lot of the speed that C++ has, but it's not a big deal in most standard applications.

Since creating an object requires specifically allocating it on the heap, having it destruct when the pointer leaves scope is no good. That kind of magic behavior is exactly what would lead to awful bugs in Obj-C. If you want short-lived objects, you call their autoreleased constructors, which means they will self-destruct next time the thread's event loop ticks. It's an extremely common pattern, and happens so often in code that you don't, as you claim, 'have to understand the details of the implementation'.

And there's absolutely no need for the derision in your post. Please make your points and defend them like a civilized person.
Sure, email me at al@alvinlai.com or just enter your email on the front page of http://handpick.me and I'll send you an invite.

- Alvin
Not to mention better. To get a gmail level of features and service, I would have to spend an arm and a leg. It's a completely unrealistic solution.
Agreed, but of course the massive write parallelism and fault tolerance of DBMS like Cassandra comes at the cost of dropping ACID, which may cause a lot of complexity elsewhere in the system. It also comes at the cost of limiting the types of queries you can perform without resorting to procedural code (at least in the case of column family based architectures). In other words, it comes at the cost of productivity.

So, even if sharding is not easy, you can do quite a lot of it in the time you save by not having to code around the limitations of most noSQL DBMS.

The day will come when RDBMS are secret productivity weapon of smaller companies that don't feel they have to act like they were Google.

That said, there are very good reasons not to use RDBMS in cases where the data model or specific access patterns just don't fit. But in most of those cases, I find that using in memory data structures combined with file system storage or something like BerkeleyDB is a much better fit than any server based DBMS.
1) Here's a thread on LessWrong on how to learn math: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ub/discuss_how_to_learn_math/

2) Here's a discussion on learning math on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108723

3) This is Cal Newport's advice on acing technical courses: http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/11/14/how-to-ace-calculus-th...

His advice to a new MIT student: http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/04/28/on-becoming-a-math-whi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system
I don't know about that. I am located in Toronto, Canada and would be interested in a UX design/front end development telecommuting job that paid $120k+.

However, nobody really wants to hire somebody that they can't watch. In the past I have emailed several companies about job postings that list telecommute as an option, and in all but one of the cases they where not open to somebody more than 3 hours away from the office.

I don't really understand this position. I am in ET so the time zone can't be an issue. I am in an English speaking country so there won't be any language barriers. I think companies in the US need to realize that increasingly fever people will want to move there because it the US is become very scary.
This is awesome, thank you (didn't think to check if you were in Github, but the explanations are great too).
The fact that it makes Google look bad doesn't impact its fairness. I acknowledged that that's not an illegitimate way to run the business.

But that doesn't really matter to a little girl whose correspondence with loved ones has disappeared down a black hole. That despair is as reasonable as Google's indifference. And, it points to a great opportunity to make a reliable mail service that addresses the needs of the ever-growing population of young people who will need email long before it is regulatorily convenient to Google.
Not sure I'd blame Google as much as COPPA, and the politicians who think parents can't make this choice on their own.

Of course, our kids can still find p0rn, violence and who-knows-what-else online with no filtering whatsoever. But at least they can't blog about it.
COPPA seems ridiculous and naive. Its harder for a kid to access GMail/Facebook than a porn site! I don't think Google is not to blame here. They should have sent a warning to the daughter's email address atleast. Tomorrow all someone needs to kill my account is to crack into it, and change my date or birth -- and let Google do the rest.