skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When You Wish Upon a Star…
On Iteration - Ranges: Alexandrescu's Iterator Replacement for D
> Would it be possible to have an event where I could program and look at attractive women at the same time? Or does enjoying seeing attractive women in public make me a bad person? As a man, is this my original sin?

No, I don't think it's wrong to program and look at attractive women at the same time. I also think that dating/flirting at work is mostly harmless.

That has little to do with the above described situation though. What they manage to do with just that one line is alienate anyone that doesn't have the same sexual preferences to you. If they had left gender out of it and just had attractive staff of both sexes, then to me it wouldn't offend anyone (though it would seem as you say, a little bit out of place).
Actually, I have a business that helps people format and convert their books for Amazon, LiberWriter.com.

And, while a lot of people write pretty good books, there is also material that is ... uh... not so great. And it gets in without problems.

So, yes, Amazon certainly has the power to keep books out, but so far really hasn't utilized it nearly as much as they could.
What middlemen in any transaction usually provide is a pre-existing customer base and fulfillment. In the past you could arrange to purchase your novels, magazines, newspapers, whatever, directly from the creators, with each setting up a long distance financial arrangement ... or you could go into the local bookstore and buy it there.

In some cases, such as film or broadcast, the middleman is providing the venue. Not every creator can afford their own broadcast tower and transmitter and few people own their own 35mm projector.

Of course, now times are changing, and many people do own the modern digital equivalent of all those things, and many authors do have their own distribution and marketing channels.

Middlemen still provide a pre-existing financial arrangement. As a consumer I don't really want to set up a credit card account with every fly-by-night operation on the internet that I might want to purchase from. So places like Apple and Amazon and Paypal still have a place.

And in the international marketplace, especially in media sales, local licensors often provide the value of localization. Subtitles, dubbing, translation, etc.

It's only been 10 - 15 years since significant numbers of people have been able to purchase stuff online, and there are still issues with bandwidth for some media. The world is changing and adapting to the new normal.

Congratulations, you are living through an important period of history. Expect some bumps, inconvenience and inefficiencies while humanity readjusts to a couple of thousand years of dealing with physical media.
If you sold, would your "small profit" get you to the next level? If not, then do not sell it.
On the other hand, I am not sure why you believe the value of the domain is $30k. Smackdab is an interesting brand, but not something that would generate traffic just because of the name - a quick search showed up nothing interesting.
Making a note of this for my next Dwarf Fortress game...
> Who cares whether a man or woman is delivering my drink?

If you don't get this, then you are missing a lot. Generally speaking men on average will enjoy themselves a lot more if there are pretty girls around. There is a restaurant in town that serves Swiss Chalet grade food in town but all the chicks wear miniskirts and look like models. Even on a week night it is packed with businessmen tipping extravagantly. Sex sells, and sex appeal is a real perk.

The problem is that what is a perk targetting 90% of the target demographic and appeals to probably 85% of those, happens to be off-putting to minorities some want to attract into the industry.
There are two ways to handle this reasonably gracefully, and a lot of ways that suck.

1. In private, tell the person "I don't think your deodorant is working well enough. Just thought you ought to know."

2. Go to their manager, and have the manager say pretty much the same thing, not mentioning that anyone but the manager noticed anything.

Almost anything else comes off as boorish.
Are You Blinded by the Conventional Wisdom?
It was wrong in the source email, was wondering if someone was going to catch this.
A general question: when someone says something offensive, the apology is often "We're sorry: we thought this was funny, but obviously it wasn't, so we've changed it."

This seems to get universally condemned, and lots of people argue that it's wrong to say "I'm sorry you're offended." But what are the alternatives? I suppose they could have said that they were deliberately sexist and hoped to hurt people's feelings, or something. I'm not sure. What--aside from groveling--do people want when they aren't satisfied with that kind of apology? It's scarily reminiscent of the way cults and authoritarian regimes function: it's not enough to confess a mistake. You have to confess your malice, too. (I wish I had some examples that weren't so fraught, but that's all I can think of: The Gulag Archipelago, various ex-Scientology memoirs, and lots of interactions with political correctness.)

For what it's worth, I agree that the copy was lame, and the sponsors were right to disassociate themselves. I'm just not sure it's a mortal sin to make a tacky joke and then apologize.
Glad to see that more and more people think about data-driven blogging. We've done small project[1] in this area -- embeddable live trend charts based on Google Finance and Google Analytics data where trends can be commented right in charts. Initially, we thought this could help explain trend reasons. But we saw no traction and switched to another project.
[1] http://explainum.com
Here is that original blog: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...

Would be interesting to know if he is still happy with the arrangement
The marketing material assumed that the people reading it would be heterosexual men, and gave no consideration to the idea that a woman might actually want to attend an event. Finding women attractive is not a sin. Assuming the whole world should revolve around what you find attractive without giving any consideration to the other half of the world's population is sexist. Not "I hate women" sexist. Just "women don't really qualify as people the same way men do in my mind, and no I've never really thought very hard about it" sexist.
I've experienced very good as well as bad touchpads on normal laptops. I believe it's the hardware, actually. My ALDI Medion Akoya netbook was simply excellent (I believe it's a rebrand of the MSI Wind), my current ASUS EeePC 1215b E450 touchpad leaves a bit to desire compared to that one (even though it is bigger).

On the other hand, when I have to use a friend's Apple touchpad, I usually find them awkward to use. But given that Apple's got such a good name I'm certain it would just be a matter of getting used to its "feel" if I had to use it more.

Maybe you got the same experience in reverse, that even the good touchpads feel strange to you because you're used to Apple touchpads.
I think you should try it. I have always thought that Albert Einstein was able to focus a lot more on his research thanks to his low pay/low stress job.

I have also been thinking on trying, it is a bit difficult to try that with family, but I guess it could work.

Do try it, it would be nice if you share your results after.
I'm a strong believer that evolution/sex are the primary drivers for almost everything we do in life. The outrage in the comment thread here is part of the "pretend it's not like that" mentality. I'm sure the marketing people here senselessly thought "hey we want lots of programmers, most programmers are guys, what do guys like, girls!". I'm not offended by this, but it is clear they are alienating women (and homosexual men). If it was reversed; "lots of hot men serving beers", guys probably wouldn't be in a rush to show up either.
As one of those elusive "females in tech" who generally gets somewhat tired of hearing about all of the complaints about sexism in tech, because I think a lot of people are overly sensitive to it, Sqoot's actions were the first thing I've read in a long time that actually offended me.
I considered using it, and in fact, I'm currently writing an article for Smashing Magazine comparing various options for selling digital goods. I'll probably try it out for my next product.
So they're OK with scantily-clad booth babes handing out beers at sponsored events, but they're not OK with a poorly-written post about scantily-clad booth babes handing out beers at sponsored events?
Triptrotting: How to Build A Global Community | Entrepreneur Stories
You can't always please the literal internet.
One of the co-founders has a long diatribe about how awesome it was to have dropped out of De Paul University.

Perhaps if he had stayed in school, he would have learned how not to be a misogynist, and maybe figured out how to spell as well.
I think some people should loosen up. Yes, it's a bad unfunny joke. But it's not that big a deal.
I agree.

This was a prank gone bad. No one got hurt (apart from a few egos). Pulling sponsorship because of that is just lame.

Don't get me wrong, I have the deepest respect for women but that doesn't prevent me from pulling (even sometimes sexist) pranks on my wife. She does the same to me and we smile at each other.

I dare you, everyone that's horrified by their prank say it out loud (and mean it!):

"I have never, ever made a sexist joke before in my life. At least not a kind that would in any way offend someone"
It doesn't take much caffeine to produce fasciculation (specially on facial muscles) in some people, for instance.
I wonder if the brackets were not around the word female if it would be considered as offensive. Regardless it was a stupid thing to put on there. I don't even get why they added "female" to that sentence.
Scala 3 - A Roadmap (by Odersky)
Gadget New: NOKIA LUMIA 719 THE IMAGE DISCLOSED
No. In the case of IE 6 or Windows XP it's been shipped to millions of users and they have to go through the trouble of upgrading themselves. Besides, those are platforms, not frameworks.

If there's a bug or security hole in Rails 2.3, we go in and fix it for our users and ship it immediately.
> I think we all do agree that offices without fixed desks are a big no-no. Some companies tried to do that a while ago, where you just have a cart with your stuff and work where you're needed (with thin clients way back when, and laptops a bit later). Yuck.

I'm curious why people feel this way. I've never worked in this kind of environment, but where I have worked, I've never actually had that much stuff at my desk or in the office. And I always felt like, while I could customize my workspace to work better for me, everything belonged to the company anyway so it would be silly to feel territorial about my workspace. Give me five minutes to adjust everything and I'd be ready to go at any desk.
Looks good. But I have a design suggestion for you.

Based on general heuristics, lightbox image button on top-right corner (http://imgur.com/a/LoQ6D) should be to close lightbox image rather than expand it. Its confusing and there is no other way to close it apart from clicking in the background page.
And that is an excellent response. But if, instead, one's response is to stick their fingers in their ears and sing "LALALALA" as the original essay did, then you can't have such discussions.
Haven't read them all but just skimmed, but I still don't see why he can't just sell his DRMed PDFs of books he writes through some third-party.
> Or does enjoying seeing attractive women in public make me a bad person? As a man, is this my original sin?

If you cannot understand the difference between admiring attractive women while programming, and listing "Women" as a
"Great Perk" you need to have a serious conversation with yourself.

> Medical doctors have been mostly men, and, in my experience, exhibit pretty much the same desire for women as tech people, but that never stopped women from flocking to become nurses.

What decade are you living in? You should check the current demographic breakdown of doctors, lawyers, scientists, and programmers. I'll give you a head start: one of these is an outlier.
When you created a Random instance and pass in a long value (i), it is used as a seed. And then the seed used to generated random number.

Your seed value from 0-100 is only varies in the last 6 bits out of 64 bits. Which I assume probably caused this whatever psuedo-random function Java is using to generate very similar value for seeds with that low level of entropy. You can look up the formula in Java SDK and do the math.

There's no need to pass in seed value to Random constructor unless you really want to reproduce the same random sequence.
Exactly. Not only did it implicitly say that women can be seen as a perk, but that there are only heterosexual men who want to attend to this event, and that they all want to have a drink served by a woman. It just wrong in so many levels.
I'm a doctor and the profession is still quite dominated by men. The women are far more likely to fill primary-care specialties while the good-ol-boys dominate ortho/neurosurg/EM/plastics and most of the internal medicine subspecialties. The women in my specialty (ortho) tend to lean toward the masculine side (in personality). A lot of it is about fitting in.
Ha I don't remember that one but lol!

Everything was much more fun and innocent back then. It's definitely that that I miss the most from the early days of the web.
Slippery slope. Which is why some people react negatively when such proposals first appear. (But the data will be warehoused domestically... this year... except when it's displayed abroad...)

My other observation would be that traffic control is an an aspect of governance. Again, a slippery slope. Once you start outsourcing your governance to a significant degree, your not really autonomous, anymore. My comment may appear to be making a mountain out of a molehill, but when you can't manage your day-to-day affairs without going and depending upon overseas, well, there you are.

For citizens and for governance, it's the death of a thousand cuts.
No? That's not what anyone is saying? That's not even wrong?
Tried the "Black and White Squares" one. Was pretty fun and definitely suitable for 'young folders'!
Yup. Especially since you transition away from an active lifestyle of walking/biking everywhere for classes.
For me, there's so much viscerally wrong in this comment I'm just flabbergasted. I wrote a long reply and erased it. I think I'd rather just leave you with a cultural observation.

Americans tend to mired in sexism to a much greater extent than for example Sweden, where I'm at. The above comment would simply not be made by a professional in Sweden. I guess we don't equate sexism and fun to the same extent some americans do, nor is the female body under the same bizarre governmental scrutiny (abortion, an issue, honestly?). That there's a link doesn't seem entirely implausible.
The problem here is not that most men are attracted to good looking women. The problem is that they made it a marketing point, which is blatant objectification. "Booth babes" aren't even advertised like this.
> This was a prank gone bad.

A prank? As in "haha, we got you!"?

> Don't get me wrong, I have the deepest respect for women but that doesn't prevent me from pulling (even sometimes sexist) pranks on my wife. She does the same to me and we smile at each other.

Your wife presumably is comfortable in the knowledge that you respect her, because she knows you well. A woman showing up at a hackathon likely hasn't known the organizers for years.

I'll smack my wife on the ass, but if I walk up to random women and do it I'm going to get the cops called on me.
Inflammatory and less than accurate would be the words I would use, but the general slant of the article isn't off base. If you're talking about the comment on the bottom of the page, that Skunk Works employee never said she was an application developer... she said she was a professional model and actress who knew about the product and wasn't an idiot. Blue is wrong and off base to make generalized statements about the women themselves at those shows, but it doesn't change the fact that the whole "booth babes" practice is incredibly sexist in general. If the only issue you take away from that article is that Blue is a terrible journalist, I think you're proving the overarching point.
The alternative is to realize why it was offensive instead of just that people got offended in some abstract sense that is unrelated to anything you can comprehend. For bonus points, further show enough empathy that you realize that what you said now offends you, too, culminating in some kind of "Damn, I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that" apology.
It's both: the public grants a monopoly and expects a social contract in return for this.

Note: the public CAN withdraw the monopoly at any time.
Oracle v. Google - The "Final" Damages Figures
http://www.minimagnetosphere.rl.ac.uk/
And CEO's--who spend the most time outside the office--get the biggest offices at all.

Offices aren't intended as workspace, they're intended as status symbols.
Why Sexy Websites Suck at Sales
Note the site is powered by VHX.tv so I think they might have beat you to the punch here.

If memory serves me well that team is ex-Boxee.
Meaning and Silicon Valley
It took me a while to realize they weren't offering beer to women.
Any chance you could switch industries and, say, work in advertising or something? I don't want to share a career with you.
The link chain is is kind of ridiculous. There are no additional facts given, the other "articles" are just editorializing what the previous wrote about the facts in the original...and in the process some of the facts become distorted as alttag pointed out.
The flat panel market is not driven by screen accuracy, as is demonstrated by the consistently over-the-top display settings on every model in the big box retailer. The screens are not shown on the sales floor as accurate, nor could they be as the lighting conditions of the store are far from any average home lighting use. Further, there are few if any models where, once home, unpacked and connected, will provide any presets that are accurate. It takes a concerted effort on the part of the consumer to modify the settings to bring the screen closer to accurate.

But ask any of those new flat panel owners if they'd be willing to give up the flat panel and take their old CRT back, and the answer will be no.

That's essentially the iPad 3 screen compared to the iPad 2 or other tablets. The accuracy is of some interest to professionals in various industries. Though, without built-in color management, the accuracy of the screen may not be of much long term value to those same professionals.

There is one possible longer term affect of the accuracy of the iPad 3 screen: consumer expectations of color accuracy may be set according to this screen and if other tablets fail to deliver close approximations of that accuracy, those tablets may be considered inferior. However, in this case "accuracy" could just as easily be replaced with "looks really good", which doesn't necessarily mean accurate at all. An average flat panel consumer may believe that "brighter is better" (LCDs are known to have higher brightness than Plasma), but their belief doesn't make it true (because it isn't).
Cloudapp Roulette
Cloudapp Roulette. What is it? What this program does is generate a random 4 character alphanumberic file ID, and appends it to the cloudapp URL (cl.ly). It then opens ten browser tabs / windows so you can browse what Cloudapp item exists there.
prank == joke

Sorry for my poor choice of words
More Consumer Reports Sensationalism
Okay, but I still don't see this as a relevant or useful contribution to the discussion about how to lay out an office. I really don't like the attitude of "we're going to deliberately make it harder for you to do your job, and we expect you to man up and deal with it."
Which sentence did I write that is actually wrong? I'm glad to have another doctor writing here, but (respectfully) I am not particularly interested in how "masculine" you think women in your specialty tend to act to fit in. The statistics do not appear to back up the argument the previous poster made.
Tech population =! world population.

To not recognize that the tech population is dominated by men is to put your head in the sand.

I like to code, I like to look at scantily clad women, and I fully believe they're just as equal as men.

EDIT: Downvote away. You don't have to believe in fact for it to exist.
I don't doubt what you say, but medicine (like most highly-skilled professions) has a long lag time. I would wager (without looking it up) that the median graduation date for practicing doctors today is around 1990. A beter indicator of current trends would be to look at medical school enrollment.
Thanks - it wasn't clear who the middlemen were : The uncooperative website, someone distributing to the website, the music publisher, the artist's agents, etc...
I like it. It's a much more polished version of something I tried to do with http://www.facster.com back in 2005. I was writing blog style stories to go with queries of statistical abstract data. The stories are gone now, but you can still query the DB.
They've got VM images locked into Amazon Web Services. That's not the same as publishing VM images in an open format.
Official Objective-C Literals Docs
This was not sexism. It was a poor attempt at humour.
What reason do you have to think that Heroku or any of the sponsors had any knowledge of Sqoot's women-to-fetch-beers plan before the announcement?
> perhaps even servers at restaurants

what a tool.
A strong case for using separate computers for work and personal use
Do you have sources to back that up? (That it appeals to 85% of the target demographics).

Either way, you are treating women as objects, as perks, as things that men want to look at. And you are treating men as cavemen who want to see women all the time. These ideas have affected (and are affecting) society in a bad way. By using women in that sense, they are promoting the idea that women can be used in that way if you like.
Stripe does this really well using a js lib. The sensitive data thus never hits your servers and it's a much better experience for devs who don't want/have to deal with PCI compliance.
I really do not like that you require a username to signup, email should be enough.
And what if it doesn't offend them? Just because it offends you doesn't mean it should condemn them.

Men like women. Men are, speaking factually, the extreme majority in the tech industry. Don't be shocked if your values don't match those of others.
With all the hubbub over sexism in tech over the past year or two, what kind of idiot uses language like that in the description? It shows a tremendous lack of a clue more than it shows sexism (though it shows that too).
In fact, I'm buying it because of this (amongst other good reasons). Love this line!
In addition, the marketing material assumed that the people reading it would be drinkers, and gave no consideration to the idea that a non-drinker might actually want to attend.

In addition to sexism, the marketers seem to believe that "teetotalers don't really qualify as people in the same way drinkers do, and no I've never really thought very hard about it".

(They also seem to feel the same way about people who don't like massages, people who don't work out, and people who don't like cupcakes.)
I agree it was a poor attempt at humor, but it was an attempt at sexist humor.