skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was at a SXSW panel discussion about user customizable interfaces a few years ago. Some of the panel participants said the expected things about UI difficulties and affordances and how amazed they were at the ingenuity of some of their customers who did things with their products they didn't even know were possible. An Apple guy was on the panel, and his take was different: "Apple has standards and a brand image to protect." He pulled up the black and red vampire-themed MySpace page of some chubby goth guy and proudly mocked him, saying, "Apple will never allow anyone to do this with any of our products." He spent a few moments scrolling through the page and pointing out the most embarrassing aspects of the design, really rubbing in what a tacky mess this poor guy made out of his MySpace page.

Who are the winners, the high-value brands? Apple and Facebook, who maintained control. Apple and Facebook can't stop their users from doing tacky things with their products (not yet, thank God) but they do make sure the carefully designed brand context is always visible and easily distinguishable from the user-generated content inside. Who are the losers, the low-value brands? MySpace and other companies who didn't maintain a strict distinction between their product and what users did with it.
I can somewhat understand the downvoters in this case. The discussion at hand is "should we accept objectification of women in the tech industry" with opinions ranging from "No, nothing even resembling that" (paraphrased) to "It's not that big a deal"[1]. To those closer to the first stance, we don't want those kinds of opinions to gain traction here, in this community. I've done that by commenting, others by downvoting. Ideally, every comment would get a response, but there are more of these "it's not a big deal" than there are original ideas being expressed. Really, the top comment[2] should be enough to convince you that this was not an OK move on API Jam's part.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3731608

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3731725
A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups
Combinations of NoScript, CookieMonster and RequestPolicy ensure the graph will stay nice and clean :)
I'm female, and I'm not really offended by this.*

However... That doesn't mean I'm unaffected. If I saw this sort of "perk" for a local event, I would pass on going. If this was the prevalent mentality for all hackathons (or any sort of event) I would probably just not consider going to them an option. When you already have to deal with the assumption you're not really into tech or a competent coder in your daily life, having to deal with being confused for waitstaff/eye-candy on top of that is just plain frustrating. A company that sorts this sort of mentality is most likely I place I wouldn't want to work at, just as individuals drawn by this sort of perk are not the type I want to meet.

In some alternate universe, where tech was a female-dominated industry, how would you feel if it was condoned and accepted that local tech events featured muscular shirtless men in tight pants serving cosmos to attendees? It might not be reason for offense, but it's definitely not desirable/pleasant (assuming you're a heterosexual male).

*I think the people who should be (and probably are) offended are the would-be attendees and sponsors whom the organizers assumed would agree with that statement and all the implications it carries.
There's something discomforting about seeing an apology "for any offense" from a party who is not the offender. A common derailing technique is the non-apology-apology: rather than apologizing for what I did, I apologize for your taking offense, which makes it look like you're the one who has a problem. Here, Cloudmine does this on behalf of the creeps at Boston API Jam!

Why? It seems clear to me, based on their actions, that Cloudmine's intentions are good and that they don't mean to blame the victims. Comparing this post to other blogs and Twitter messages, I think I see why, and it's the same reason the post doesn't quote or directly link to API Jam: it's written in a different register -- "professional" communication.

It's absolutely necessary to do that if your company takes a public action, like pulling sponsorship, and needs to publicly address it. What interests me here is that the non-apology-apology is creeping into the English language by sounding "more formal", because our ruling classes use it so much (and no one seems to care when they're called out on it). So, I hypothesize that whoever wrote this up was trying to stay calm, detached, and respectful, and unconsciously hit on this rhetorical device because of it.

Note, I do not think that CloudMine is under any obligation to apologize for other people's actions, or that the writer is stupid. I'm just rubbernecking a collective lingustic maladaptation.
Ask HN: What do you think this button does?
Why do you think this is taking away from other efforts? I think calling out asshats is important and it doesn’t take all that much effort. It doesn't take away from anything else.
This is awesome–a trained DB of common misspellings for email addresses would be so handy.
> It sounds like you have the email addresses of your users stored in plaintext

Just curious, but are you suggesting that plain text is the wrong way to store an email address? Your comment makes me draw that conclusion, which of course seems rather silly.
John Carmack's twitter feed has focussed on head-mounted displays quite a bit as well. Seems like a popular next step if they sort out the problems. Latency's a big one, especially if you're doing head-tracking or augmented reality.

I wonder if we'll see an "i-Eye" from Apple in a few years' time.
I think you need to moderate this view slightly.

Whilst yes, ostracising people doesn't help. Humour and sarcasm are effective team building/social tools, and "sledging" or "poking fun" are effective ways to build long term teams. Just spend time in any sports team (male/female/mixed) and you'll see this kind of joking around is abundant, and actually helps the team (not hinder it).

I think it is more nuanced than you say, humour has to be combined with empathy to make sure you aren't offending, but at the same time, making light of differences with people helps people see past those difference (obviously within reason).
This is a single introductory sentence. You should not reason that far with it.

With that reasoning you could claim addition is impure, because time() + 1 changes over time. map is definitely a pure function. If you apply it to impure arguments, of course the result will be impure. The point in FP is to avoid using 'time', not 'map'.
Let your Android users know how their data is used - Add a privacy policy.
I cringed with the S.Jobs comparisons. Journalists should really stop doing this. And this one was completely unwarranted
If the company comes out even, is it really saving the employees 20 minutes?
Their apology is even worse than the original flyer text.

Getting super worked up about this idiocy and saying "THIS is why there are few women in tech", as some tweeters did, is not constructive either and trivializes the problem of women (and minorities) in tech.

I would argue that pointing out the sexism of the ad doesn't trivialize the problem of women in software. It's a multi-part problem. Society primes girls not to go into technology as it is ("Math class is tough!" says Barbie). When college-admitted students begin the process of choosing a career and choosing a major, society will weigh heavily on their choice.

Some women remain interested in technology despite this. And when they make this choice, the industry has to be ready with open arms to embrace women. If society does not make female programmers feel welcome, and neither do their peers and mentors, we see low numbers of women in our field. We have to do our part to eliminate the feeling of otherness in what is currently a male-dominated field, or female participation will continue to remain low. Sexist ads set back the entire industry by saying to talented potential engineers that they are not taken seriously.
The thing I like best about this is that I basically never
have to wait for somebody to get back to me.

But what about the person in the middle of "flow" that you just asked a question?
Where does this put Stallman?
There was an apocryphal tale of the landscape architect being asked "These foot paths are perfect, how did you come up with that design?" And she answers, "We planted grass everywhere and then replaced where the grass had been flattened by people walking on it with foot paths."
One switch. One head. The world.
What's your "fate worse than death"?
Softlayer is a lot more expensive than most hosts these days. They're closer to being in Rackspace territory now.

You can get a dual E5-2609 with 32gb of ram + bandwidth from a good host like WebNX for $369 / month.

And if you wanted to spend $1k per month, you can get a dual e5-2687W (16 cores @ 3.1ghz) with 128gb ram; with a 4x SAS RAID 10, plus a 120gb ssd drive, plus a 2tb backup freebie, plus 100mbps unmetered bandwidth (30tb). That literally blows the doors off Softlayer.
High Court draws line on attempt to patent law of nature through artful drafting
Isaac Asimov memorial debate - Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson 
Its live now, catch it if you can!
螺旋输送机
I like Espresso(IDE) for Mac. You can see instant changes in the preview(even the javascript)
The they was the World Health Organization. I can't actually find the article, but http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/bad-scie... suggests it was suppressed by the U.S. government, so I must have read a leaked copy that I can't find anymore. The leaked copy the Guardian links to doesn't appear to exist. But it was found that very low doses of cocaine such as the amount found in tea brewed from coca leaves are marginally healthful, and infrequent lowish doses of uncomtaminated powder cocaine aren't good but aren't very harmful. High doses of powder and basically any effective dose of crack are highly cardiotoxic and addictive. And cocaine combined with alcohol reacts synergistically and creates cocaethelene, which is very, very cardiotoxic.

Also, saying that alcohol is even more harmful than cocaine and that you should probably avoid it (well I sarcastically said you should drink it, but no one would interpret the above post as a recommendation for alcohol) is providing very safe medical advice. I don't see how you got me recommending black market recreational cocaine use from my previous post. If that's how it came across, I'd like to make it clear I do not endorse cocaine use either.
> Latency's a big one, especially if you're doing head-tracking or augmented reality.

From a coworker's Twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/#!/rygorous/statuses/168173568889327616

Numbers: E2E latency of key press->VGA signal or keyboard LED toggle: both ~23.3ms. Measured with 100MHz analog oscilloscope+300fps cam.

For that experiment he used a little custom circuit for input (button) and output (LED) that was wired to the serial port of a computer running Windows. In addition to the output LED, the button was also directly wired to another LED so as to get precise measurements of the delay. If you were to have full end-to-end control of the system and you chose to make it a top property, you could obviously get much lower latency. But to even get those numbers I believe he had to use a special driver that granted his test program privileged access so he could do direct port IO with INB and OUTB rather than delegate the work to the kernel.
I'd never heard of him and didn't particularly like the preview. I still paid the $5 because I would like to see this business model take off and the show might be funny. To be honest, I didn't find Louis CK's $5 offering all that funny.
> Programmers need distractions to be productive? Really?

Sometimes. I work from home, so I'm mostly distraction free, but sometimes I need distractions to get the motivation flowing again. I think the perfect office would have the opportunity to work under many different environments, depending on your mood. Moderation is, like always, the key.
> A smarter candidate will figure out you're playing games, which defeats the purpose. I think you also want to consider the reaction of the candidate after the interview. Suppose they answer honestly, then figure out what you did to them.

It won't make any difference. A smarter candidate would know you're playing a game but not care. They would give you their honest answer because if you were not interested you wouldn't hire them and they would not care because of the manipulation, and if you were interested in hiring them they would not be as interested because of the manipulation but would understand that despite their honest answer on a personal question you were impressed by them -- this would help even things out.

It's win/win.
Do they typically sell the foreign distribution rights, or an option on those rights. It is an important distinction with respect to business model.

If it is an option, then the foreign distributors can wait to see how the film does domestically before deciding whether to go all-in, which also works against doing a simultaneous global release.
This article was published yesterday, before Senate deliberations started. I watched the progress on C-Span all day today. Republicans were for it in word, Reid wanted more restrictions (opposite of article). My analysis suggests strong bipartisan support so no one pisses off the public because the bill is so popular and the unity of the House on the issue sets a bar for their support too.
Would it be tacky of me to mention that LGBT geeks might be interested in my side-project, GayGeeks.org?
You don't (and won't) even know their names

How in god's name can the guy who (corrected) had linux named after him ever feel sad?
Disagree. I think today made it very clear that anyone organizing this kind of event is going to lose all of their sponsors and their event space within six hours if they try to pull this crap, which feels new and powerful to me. I've never seen a backlash quite this fast and successful before. They've canceled the event altogether now, it seems.

Honestly, I wouldn't even be surprised if it kills Sqoot as a company -- that's an incredibly powerful warning sign in the only language many people understand how to interpret: your funders telling you they no longer want to have anything to do with you.
Sexist comments like the one on the flyer are dumb, and these people deserve to be called out on it, but to imply they are keeping women out of tech careers is ridiculous (and in itself, sounds kind of sexist to me - like we are tender plants who change our career paths because some jerks like to see boobies).

If the flyer reflected the spirit of the event and the attitude of the organizers, I'm glad for the heads up so I know not to attend, free beer notwithstanding.
He strikes me as the kind of guy who just wants the best tool for the job. If it doesn't exist, he makes it.
What are the dimensions you would recommend for the rooms?
While more human friendly, that would inhibit serialization.
Take what I say with a few grains of salt - I'm one of those weirdos whose always tried to be at least a little bit different - to avoid ever becoming wholly "in". But, in my experience, othering isn't going to drive people away, not in any significant numbers. Sure, it can make people feel uncomfortable in the wrong context, and cause social tension, but so can criticizing ideas, or mocking political parties. What you call "othering" can just as often help people feel that they /do/ fit in, by demonstrating that what makes them "different" does not in fact make a difference to anyone else.

Look at it this way: differences do exist, and they're going to be acknowledged, even if they're totally inconsequential. Artificially suppressing occasional acknowledgment of differences - race, height, gender, religion, and sexual orientation being, I think, the "big five" - isn't going to do anyone any good. I would make the case that jokes about these are in fact important in any "accepting" (or whatever buzzword we're using today) culture, and that failing to ever acknowledge them in "polite conversation" only teaches that these differences are a bad thing. Which isn't the right message.

I think you're probably (P =~ 70%) talking about the qualitatively different phenomenon in which a single member is repeatedly singled out for othering on a daily basis - but it's easy to confuse the two, especially when focusing on something as subjective as language and social interactions. However, the latter (let's call it "bigotry", shall we) tends to come with other symptoms that do more direct harm - let's address them directly.
> For the record, I want to use technology to combat the ever-growing tyranny of complexity, which is the source of an extraordinary volume of what I term petty injustice. I don't believe in the efficacy of central authority, so my work must empower individuals to take action for themselves - to select simpler contracts for example.

You sound a lot like me. Somehow I woke up one day and started seeing groups as a network of nodes with poorly designed interfaces. ;)
The ironic part is that his blog is hosted on wordpress.
Do your parents have "impressive jobs"? Beware of those who want you to fulfil their thwarted aspirations. And even if they do, you don't have to follow in their footsteps.

In my experience when in high pay/high stress jobs, I spent far more and could never save. The low pay/low stress jobs were the ones where I had fun and managed to save heaps.
I don't understand. Which women were accepting it? Most of today's backlash came from women who code, which is the group being objectified.
There are people who would put down the money for a one-way trip.
No. I have no need of your specialized political vocabulary. The literature of our culture are way ahead of you: "Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." Exodus 23:9
Comments were removed for several reasons; one being that it adds the ability to add non-JSON data to the stream. In order to keep the spec simple and more interoperable, comments are gone. Don't expect them to return.
What 4 Global Trends Will Drive 21st Century Investing?
That's interesting. What exactly did you spend money on when you were in the high-paying jobs?
My toy web server can achieve similar performance using a much more modest hardware (Core i7 2640 laptop), using way less RAM (a few dozen kilobytes).

Granted this is also being tested on localhost with static content (no disk I/O) -- but shows that event-driven servers are not that novel or difficult to write: my code weighs around 1700 LOC of (might I say) readable C.

Static file serving is also fast (using sendfile(), etc), but needs an overhaul to achieve usable concurrency. Currently there's a ~4x performance drop while serving files, but I'm working on this.

(The sources are at http://github.com/lpereira/lwan by the way.)
close to the one i saw, but not the one i mean...
Fixing stupid mistakes like this is a lot more straight-forward than figuring out how to encourage young girls to participate in science - it's a completely different order of complexity and the former can be acted upon immediately and effectively whilst the latter cannot. It's the difference between having a recycling bin in your house and changing the idealization of suburbia and car-culture in North America.

It does help. From the perspective of a female, this sort of "overblown" reaction makes it clear that this sort of mentality is not considered acceptable by the community as a whole. If it was a case of people shrugging it off, if this sort of thing could occur without anyone batting an eyelash... I'd have a lot more second-thoughts about my career path for one, and I'd have turned away from the start-up community on top of that.
The company that was hosting it pulled out too, so I don't imagine they had any choice.
That's odd. I haven't noticed any slowness (and I've loaded the OP several times today).
I was thinking of something more HTML5y
I'm far, far more impressed than Jon Hamm does. I've been a techie all my life, and I would walk straight past Linus if I saw him on the street. I only have a very vague idea of what he looks like.

And why should it otherwise? He's famous for what he's done, not who he is.
Have you signed away your kids' right to 'enjoy life'?
When you transcend being concerned with what other people think - that's when you truly become free.

Take the leave of absence and enjoy a semester of doing something different. Then with that experience under your belt, you will make better decisions for your future.
Are you quite sure you know what you wrote?

"Sometimes there are no second chances. Sometimes you should get it right the first time. Especially when it comes to something as obvious as this.
"Sorry, but this is not some subtle mistake."
Artic Fiber has a high level overview of their plans:
http://www.arcticfibre.com/maintenance-and-repair.html
Amazon doesn't have a durability SLA either. You can only find statements like "X is designed to".
I don't know what it would mean for something to be "bad for the market."
Introduction to Haskell Video Lecture, Stanford
Actually, these third party services can be a lifesaver when it comes to PCI compliance. If you use a service like Stripe in it's entirety then you don't have to worry anywhere near as much about PCI compliance yourself.
What's it like to watch a character based on you or someone you know in a film?
I had no idea he moved to America. Anyone know the reason? Redhat?
Yes, sometimes there are situation where you screw up an interview and don’t get the job. Sometimes there are situation where you write sexist crap and lose your sponsors. That happens.

Whoever made this will get a second chance, only not in this instance. Simple as that. It’s a mild punishment for being sexist. So what. Deserved.
The credit card one is especially important. We run a hosted online ticket system for some of our customers and noticed they were getting a bunch of 'Invalid CC' responses from their payment gateway (and paying for each invalid attempt).

We implemented the Luhn[1] algo credit card check on the checkout page. Invalid CCs would trigger a little warning but still allow the form to be submitted. Invalid CC transactions dropped ~90% immediately. Even better we were able to get rid of the 'select your card type' field since that was detected by Luhn. A little JS was a win all around.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm
Software Defined Radio based on DVB-T USB sticks
If this is what the second dotcom bubble popping feels like, we're doing really well as an industry!
This is bike-shed, but `stringify`? What's wrong with `serialize` or `toJSON` or `toString'?
Taking a brief look at the article's source, it looks like wired uses a huge number of javascript includes. These vary from word press plugins, to tracking analytics, to even a konami code robot.

This, along with the image heavy layout and the fully expanded comments section can probably account for your load times.
Hmm. I thought this was going to be about the real EggDrop, http://www.eggheads.org/ (nice to see it's still being updated).

It seems crazy to me that they managed to get $1MM in funding, for an app, before it was even released or had a proven track record.
"Someone should build a (subscription) service ..."

I think you misspelled "open-source widget library".
Yep. I have a policy of at least replacing any shared_ptr usage with intrusive_ptr, for that reason. (A downside they both share is that they have copy constructors.)
Other parts of the world didn't keep as good records, so the data is not great. A drought in north America seemed clear, but other parts of the world did not seem to be badly affected.

That's kind of the nature of change - some benefit, others loose. Anyway, I was just listing another example of a benefit, not trying to make a value judgment.