skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are a couple of links to lists of contributions by women to various fields.

Medicine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_medicine#Pioneering_wo...

Computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Computing#Timeline_of_...

Engineering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_engineering#Notable_wo...

Geology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_geology#Female_geologi...

Hopefully it's apparent that having a fresh viewpoint on a problem or in a profession is valuable.
Nose extends unittest to make testing easier (Python)
I can't find where I read this, but I believe the reset line of the camera module is typically tied to the LED, so it can't be in a powered-on state without the LED being active.
They don't seem to have any two-factor authentication, which is a big deal-breaker to me - compared to Name.com. They don't reply to inquiries about it on Twitter, too.
Bit banging your database
Well, northern California is a large area, I've checked the area where I grew up (its along I-80, about 70 miles from SF but it would be an awful commute) and its only about 10-20% more to rent a house there than where I am now, but you're right, as far as I can tell, about the Bay Area proper doubling housing costs... and yeah, lol I've been through Richmond enough and know its not somewhere I'd feel comfortable living
Nothing says the offending party won't knock you around a bit more for fun after they've got what they need.
Please don't turn this into a US-centric discussion. We are talking about ACTA, which is a global deal, and my post was about the current situation in the West in general. I don't really want to go off on an extended off-topic debate anyway, since as I noted before ACTA itself is hardly on the same level as what we're talking about in this side-track.

> Who are our Jews and Gypsies?

Islamophobia is widespread since 9/11. In England and Wales, black people are thirty times as likely to be subject to a stop-and-search by the police as white people. Don't kid yourself that we don't have rampant discrimination just because you aren't in a group that gets discriminated against.

Obviously no-one credible is equating the seriousness of police abuse of stop-and-search powers with gas chamber mass executions. But there really are extreme cases with consequences not so far from the concentration camps even today. There's a little US military base in Cuba you've probably heard of, for example, and if you don't know why they chose to use that particular base for what they now use it for, you should really look up the history. Once again, the scale is very different, but what is the difference in principle?

One can draw similar parallels with some of the other things you mentioned.

We might not have Kristallnacht, but we are increasingly living in surveillance states, and we have increasingly paramilitary police weapons and tactics, and we have military units being deployed on home soil. We are eroding the fundamental concept of due process and basic legal principles like habeas corpus. I don't really believe we're about to see the violent subjugation of an entire section of our society or that our current political leaders have any ambition to act in that way, but that's not the point. The mechanisms for such abuse should never even be created in a free country.

We might not have Triumph of the Will, but modern political machines are propagandists unrivalled in the history of humanity. For example, for several years in the early 2000s, as the most recent Iraq War was building momentum, about half of the US population thought the Hussein regime was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. That support was used to justify a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and taken a staggering amount of time and money out of Western governments that could have been spent on far more constructive purposes.

> In fact a fundamental difference between America 2012 and Germany 1938 (among many) is that we have massive amounts of people vocally and publicly against the laws our politicians are pushing and the state of the country.

And the really scary thing in all of this is that you have massive amounts more who are openly complying and think it's all being done for their safety and well-being. As I said, modern political machines are propagandists without equal. They're just more subtle about it than they were 75 years ago.
I'm sure we'd see all the major browsers work to deprecate those certificate authorities pretty quickly

What about the recent Comodo breaches? Their certs are still trusted by all major browsers (as far as I'm aware).

I realise they weren't complicit in issuing the fraudulent certs, but the effect is the same.
I have to wonder if this would be a cheap way to get my film developed? Just drive over the Canadian border and demand that they develop a few hundred feet of film for me. Would really help in production costs of small films shot on film.
My first go at my projects I was hoping to create MVPs initially, though I realize what I created fell short of MVPs, and therefore I call being at the prototype stage.

I'm not sure anyone can truly know for sure what a MVP will look like, as there are too many insights that you can learn as you're building a product.
So much faith.

Which evolutionary strategy succeeds is entirely dependent on the environment. Capitalism and the modern metropolis is the perfect environment for sociopaths to thrive, and research on sociopathy shows it is increasing in the West.

The simple fact of the matter is that when a sociopath is discovered, the discoverer will avoid the sociopath but WILL NOT WARN OTHERS due to fear of retaliation.

Fear keeps the sheep in check, and allows sociopaths to move from one sucker to the next. Each sociopath may only get to exploit a given mark (Mark1) two, three, or five times, but then that sociopath moves on to the next mark, and a new sociopath takes advantage of Mark1.

In this way sociopaths in our anonymous, private society run amok and their evolutionary strategy is highly successful. Sociopaths are found in large proportions among those who worked their way to wealth - ruthlessness and a willingness to exploit is highly lucrative in our private culture that has no accountability.

Dr. Martha Stout in The Sociopath Next Door gives the example of a sociopath who lied and blackmailed her way into a position as a clinical psychologist in a mental hospital despite having no qualifications.

Colleagues and patients became aware of the sociopath on multiple occasions, but when they would complain to the administration they hit a stonewall because the forward-looking sociopath had sexually blackmailed key individuals.

The sociopath worked as a psychologist for 14 years before a wealthy and connected patient was exploited and harmed by her, upon which time the wealthy patient's father threatened the hospital with a public lawsuit if they did not pay him.

The hospital administration paid a settlement to the wealthy client and fired the sociopath, but did not report the sociopath to ANYONE, including its own staff. The sociopath then simply went and worked at another hospital.

Over and over again in our society the pattern of the sociopath is that when they are discovered they simply move on to the next sucker.

This did not happen in traditional cultures. Dr. Martha Stout explains how in Inuit culture sociopaths would be ritualistically murdered by a group of men in the tribe. In 19th century America, if a sociopath scammed some people in a town, those people would capture and lynch the sociopath even if they did not engage in strictly illegal behaviour.

This selection pressure prevented the proliferation of sociopaths, but now our society rewards sociopaths and has no protective mechanisms. More often than not, sociopaths use their lack of conscience as a business advantage and rise quickly in organizations through charm, blackmail, politics, and ruthlessness.

We live in the age of the sociopath. Bad people are not punished but rather rewarded at every turn. A huge proportion of corporate and government leaders are diagnosed sociopaths, and they got to where they are because the good people they fucked over along the way either did not speak up or were ignored and ridiculed when they did.
Living in (filthy) NYC, I've learned to eat pizza holding the crust and then leaving it when I'm done.
Fail Tales to Learn from From Startups That Died
The title is a play on a phrase that is frequently used referring to sex, yes, and this article does it to attract your attention.
Anything with a reasonable commute and a reasonable size will be in a dodgy neighborhood. If I had a flexible schedule and worked in SV I would choose to live down by Santa Cruz but that's not necessarily going to be cheap, either. If I was working in SF I would just live there and deal with the smaller space. You could also take a look at some of the unfashionable options like Daly City, Colma or South SF.
I don't like that. If anything here smells like Digg's "power users", this is it: the more you can post, the more karma you gain, and up goes your ceiling.
I'm not a Stripe employee (or associated with them in any way), but from what I've gathered from Patrick, they're using mostly Ruby for their stuff. They have several Lisp hackers but I don't think they're actually using it on their site.
Surely you can see that those lists doesn't answer the question. "Nineteenth century British geologist" isn't an innovation, and a woman contributing to a field does not mean that "diversity fuels innovation".
One measurable benefit to learning vim is being able to work just about any remote server.
Are you making the point that characters in the games were male, hence they were guy games? There have been a number of famous female protagonists in games, it hasn't necessarily made them popular with girls, or unpopular with guys (Samus Aran, Lara Croft, etc).

My Dad actually bought me Ms Pac-man with my atari 2600, I never had the original Pac-man (there was no point, it was the exact same game). I only listed Pac-man because it's the more renown title of the series. I also fail to see what makes a game like pac-man, goonies or super mario gender specific. I was introduced to the Mario character by my much older sister when she had these little electronic games that Nintendo used to make (she had the classic Donkey-Kong). Nintendo eventually entered the video game arena and released their adaptations of such classics as Tetris. Even back in those days the spectrum of game themes was already large enough to cater to a diverse audience. I'm not denying that there was a gradual predominance of male oriented themes, but many of the classics were pretty much gender neutral and I don't hear many females reminiscing on them. I don't know why it should be difficult to consider that girls were simply conditioned (parents? society?) to believe that it was a guy thing.
OnLive Desktop Offers You Windows 7 And Microsoft Office On Your iPad
Learned a great trick from my old boss who gave a lot of powerpoint-based presentations. He would frequently add a "black" slide (as in nothing on the slide, completely blank, just one big block colored in as darkly as possible - a good alternative is to hit the "b" key on your keyboard) when he wanted to people to stop looking at the deck and focus on him.

It was amazing how everyone's eyes would go straight to him when that slide came up - they had nothing else to look at, and he could make a strong point, knowing everyone was paying attention for the next 15-30 seconds.
Based on that example caching code (in Part 1):

> if (file_exists($file) && (filemtime($file) + $timeout) > time()) {

It would seem (at least on the surface) to be preferable (faster and simpler) to just serve static pages already, with another cron to overwrite (i.e., freshen) them periodically. That skips testing for the file's existence, the hash, time(), the comparison.

While all those (trivial) operations are no doubt lightning fast, that code is already serving static pages, so the cache seems like it has no real benefit (to me).
Good, then I wasn't too paranoid when I put aluminum foil over the webcam on my laptop (which for some reason didn't have an LED attached to it).

Interestingly enough if the guy had used tor and an online hosting system brought with his stolen credit cards, he would properly never have been court.
Tucker Max Gives Up The Game
I made a conscious effort to do that more on a recent talk that I gave, and I felt so much better with the results.

It's surprising just how difficult it is to force yourself to pause for even a few seconds, but the payoff in terms of your audience having an opportunity to understand what you've said is completely worth it.
The way I validated my ideas, instead of a landing page, was simply asking the people who would be users and getting feedback on the features and function. This replaced the need of having a landing page. I then created a prototype, which I had hoped would be enough for an MVP, though you gain insights while developing that you couldn't see otherwise - and realized it wasn't enough for the user adoption and usability level required.
I don't think the agents are all that sophisticated, but if they notice you doing any funny business, you will get the third degree. So don't try anything.

If you're that concerned, make sure it contains nothing but Free (libre) software. Then you will be able to prove your innocence.
as with all regulation, don't forget the unintentional side effects: spammers with many sockpuppet accounts will be more present in proportion to typical users that only have one account
The author makes the argument that "movie studios, often cited as the driving force behind the two controversial bills, are losing money to online pirates, but that doesn’t tell the whole story" but I disagree. From my own experience, people tend to pirate things they didn't have the money to buy because they had already spent it on all the movies they could afford or because things aren't available in the States (some manga series and anime being examples).

Would there be more money flowing to the studios if piracy didn't exist? Maybe. But maybe not. I've had friends who ended up buying special editions of movies they pirated because they liked it so much. Or friends who buy merchandise related to the anime or shows or whatever.

There's just too much going on, too many factors, too many different people, to conclusively say that piracy is linearly related to losses for studios. There have been studies that tried to determine if piracy is bad for studios and the non-studio funded ones have said it's hard to determine. But writing an article that says "yes, movie studios, piracy is making you lose money" when it's not even proven gives the MPAA and RIAA more ammunition that we shouldn't be giving them.
I would hate to see this become a partisan issue. There are plenty of people on every side who hate this crap.
I guess this is just semantics, but in my book 'aggressive' is by definition a bad thing. For the traits you cite I'd go with 'assertive' and/or 'self-assured'.
I agree with you. I usually try to avoid coffee (or at least limit myself to decaf) which seems to help a lot. Unfortunatley, the downside is I usually get a headache which probably says a lot about my addition to caffeine.
It seems as if people that consider the system unfair always want others to pay more. This includes wealthy people who want their own tax rates increased (Warren Buffett). They never willingly donate their own money to the government.

In fact, I don't know anyone from any income group willing to donate money to the government.

What is fundamentally unfair is that the government is terrible at 99% of things it tries to do. This affects everyone regardless of their tax rate.
One other trick that someone gave me once when I was wandering all over the stage was to put on the ground something (maybe a dry erase marker) that I could put a foot on. For some reason, that really helps to keep you in one place and you don't even really notice the object while you are presenting.
On behalf of authors everywhere, please don't use the flag button as a downvote button. This, for several reasons:

1. It's overpowered. Based on some experiments I conducted a year or so ago, it seems like 1-2 flags equal about 10-20 places dropped in the rankings. It's brutal. A single person in a bad mood can drop a story like a stone. I don't know the exact maths, but a single flag seems to have the effect of many downvotes.

2. It's not what it was designed for! According to the guidelines, flagging is meant to be for "spam or offtopic", not for stuff you don't like or disagree with and want to downvote. If you disagree with it, write a comment to explain why, or find a comment that agrees with your disagreement and upvote that. Flagging is not a way to express disagreement!

3. It's mean. I regularly get articles on the front page, and I don't care that much what happens to them (though of course I like to see the discussion they generate!), but once upon a time I did, and I'm sure that's still the case for many. When you put your heart and soul into an article, and it miraculously got picked up by HN, and it's on the front page, and people are finally checking out your blog, and it's getting more visitors in one hour than it had in the last 6 months... and you see the story suddenly vanish to the second page because someone flagged it... wow, that feels like a punch to the stomach. So please don't flag "real" articles, only flag spam/trash.

If you think an article sucks, post a comment to explain why you think so. Maybe you misunderstood. In any case, the feedback will be clearer. Please don't use the flagging sledgehammer to express disagreement.

(note: I don't know if pg would agree with the above, but these are my feelings)
Ask HN: Is there a site for voting on web applications to be implemented?
I guess sort of like this http://www.reddit.com/r/somebodymakethis but maybe more substantial projects, and there would need to be a way for people to say how much they would be willing to pay (and probably pay for it in advance, for that to be a realistic measurement). It would be nice if they could collaborate on refining the idea as well.<p>Kickstarter seems to have something a little like that last part with their rewards, but those concepts are originating with the artists or entrepreneurs rather than the public.
A "recent study by professors from several leading business schools" is wrong because the author thinks "in the end the girls realised that they were better off marrying the nice guys."

This is the echo chamber they speak of.
Speaking of faith, I didn't see a single source or statistic to back up any of the claims you've made here.

I'd settle for a source for this, actually:

A huge proportion of corporate and government leaders are diagnosed sociopaths

Particularly the "diagnosed" part.
This was on my mind earlier, but, finding myself unable to put it into words, I didn't comment.

My first thought when I read the article was "lol 'built a wordpress.org,' nice." Then I realized I was being an idiot and that it's great that they're learning. But something didn't jive---excluding my little sister, at no point can I remember teaching a female anything technical without getting either impatient or patronizing.

But, as I think about it, both are signs that I wasn't really there to teach. I was either trying to impress them, or uphold my self-image of being smart, or something else that wasn't teaching.

As a single guy of no particular attractiveness studying a technical subject, I consider myself a member of what one could call the aspirational class of the social world. I don't feel satisfied with where I am in life. Considering the low value we place on teaching in our society, I'm pretty sure teaching would not be a good way to remedy this.

I wouldn't be surprised if many male teachers of technical subjects aren't really happy to be teaching at all. Wallowing in their discontent or outside ambitions, perhaps they're unable to fully engage in the empathy required for good teaching. Questions "obvious" from the instructor's point of view will be brushed off or scorned, reflections of his self-hate. A male student hearing this will think, "Fuck him, I'll learn this anyway." A female student will think, "Why on earth am I hanging out in this environment?"
I agree that it's not a gender problem, or at least not only a gender problem. But the problem being more general does not necessarily imply that the solution should be equally general. I think a class like this might be just thing thing to get a certain class of women interested in programming, which is never a bad thing, even if it doesn't help people like your granddad. A similar class for older people might be just as successful. Sometimes being very targeted with your demographic is a better approach than trying to solve an entire, huge problem in one shot.

Of course, I imagine there are plenty of women who would never attend a class called "Ladies Learning Code," but they might be receptive to a different strategy. The point is that having multiple fronts in this war on computer illiteracy may be more effective than having a single big one.
This is relevant beyond food.

Most "western" meals involve food preparation that anticipates forks and knives being present. This doesn't happen in, for example, Chinese cooking where food is cut into small pieces prior to cooking.

Or in the NE of Thailand where traditional foods are eaten with sticky rice balled up as a makeshift utensil.

The food preparation anticipate the end user's utensils.

Much like application development.

The iPhone anticipates... fingers.

Android anticipates fingers but also expects the user the know/learn about the home/menu/back buttons. I'd say this is more akin to expecting the user to have chopsticks.

Both are simpler that traditional knife/spoon/fork meals (mouse and keyboard), but there is a difference.
The laws behind this have existed since earlier than 1948 [0]. The revision of the form is interesting but censoring anti-government material at ports of entry is far from new.

[0] See http://uscode.house.gov/download/XHTML/uscprelim/PRELIMusc18... §552. Officers aiding importation of obscene or treasonous books and articles
"Despite the early appeal of the jerks, however, in the end the girls realised that they were better off marrying the nice guys."

There is a meme within the 'manosphere' that women spend their best years (youth) enjoying themselves with alpha males, and then settle with a beta provider when they realize that alpha males won't commit to them, while their looks are fading and their biological clocks are ticking.

If given the opportunity, they will cheat on their beta husbands with an alpha lover. So yes, the nice guys end up with the girls, but only because the girls settle.

With regards to leadership - Leadership will at times require tough decisions. People may have to be fired / laid off for example. Some people are not cut out for that - their delicate sensibilities couldn't bear the thought of firing someone. An 'asshole' would find it easier to make the necessary decision.

"Nice guys don't finish last. It just takes a while for the true value of positive, collaborative leadership to shine through."

It has become politically correct to emphasize collaboration and teamwork above individualism. I'm not arguing for either. I think that among us techies, who perhaps tend to be more intelligent and self-directed / motivated than average, 'strong' leadership may not be as necessary as among, for example, soldiers. War can't wait while every private gives their opinion to the Lieutenant.