skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I can't think of an equivalent anti-female law with such devastating long-term impact on the woman.

Child support law in the United States doesn't discriminate. The office that handles child support may, as may the judge (I've heard stories of women given more leeway with payments than men), but both genders are able to be the obligor.

> in today's culture, men are also often treated extremely unfairly...

No, they are not, comparatively. It's not even on the same scale. There may be a handful of instances of men being treated unfairly, but pointing to a commercial where a man is portrayed as bumbling and equating that with the institutionalized sexism women face is ridiculous.

In fact, most of the instances of men being treated unfairly (child support, custody) are actually byproducts of sexism against women. Society places the woman in the role of the caretaker automatically.
'Thermal cloak' designed, could solve major chip, spacecraft issues
Self-healing plastic mimics bleeding when damaged
This is an amazing tool, but unfortunately incredibly uninteresting because I live in the suburbs!
A fun anecdote is to consider the belief the TDD crowd entertained that, by creating tests for a problem you couldn’t solve, you could somehow evolve a code that passed the tests and therefore solved the problem!

I'm all for a healthy debate of TDD, but the above statement seems ridiculous to me. For me, TDD helps with two main things:

- I specify the behavior I'm adding/changing before I implement it. This helps document the change I believe I'm making.

- I feel more confident when making changes to a large codebase.

TDD works for some and not for others. There are very interesting arguments to be had about the subject. However, can we please stop acting as though TDD advocates view their tests as having psuedo-mystical powers to solve problems automatically?
I'm completely with you: I absolutely love .NET, but I really wish that I could write server-side components for and on OS X or Linux. Mono's getting less painful for server-side work, for what it's worth; if you have light needs, or can easily restart the service on a regular basis, you may find it usable. But I'd definitely avoid deploying an MVC 3 app.
Don't confuse "what you should do", with "how you should do it".

For example the what is "do not get stressed", the how might be to plan your day better, keep your life simple, etc.

These small nuggets usually talk bout the how, but a lot of people either think they know better, or have resigned themselves to the fact that it really is that hard.
I get that, I'm trying to explain why it's not a reasonable basis for prejudice.
> better IDEs if you're into that kind of thing, and more.

With the caveat being you have to be into that kind of thing. Coding C# not-in VS (or MonoDevelop) is not fun.
Apparently I am racist, mean, cheap and British.
LOL - this is my fav comment on this thread.
I feel like I have seen a shift in the comments on women in tech related articles on HN over the past few weeks. 2 weeks ago I had a really hard time reading the comments because they seemed either hate-filled or ignorant (like the comment above is mocking) but I feel like lately the discussion has become more intelligent. Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?
> Don't do any business, ever?

No, but you can at least minimize the amount of bureaucracy you deal with.
What a great idea.

I find it's too easy to be ignorant of injustices when you see yourself as principled and everyone else as ignorant brutes. I've been guilty of this. It's the kind of thinking that leads you to conclude that TWS-like bots are just a bit of light-hearted humor. It's the kind of thinking that allows sexism to fly under your radar. You don't participate because you want to live in a world where sexism doesn't exist. It's a noble ideal but it is ignorant.

Truth is that even what you don't say has an impact on the people around you. If other people make sexist jokes at the office and you don't say anything about it (especially if it actually does bother you) then you're encouraging the people making sexist jokes.

I admire the author for taking a stand. And such a clever way to do it too.
Apple and Nokia Battle Over Nano-SIM Standard
Effective Web App Analytics with Redis
Sorry, if you know that you can't pay (because of gov. restrictions) or you'll have problems doing it; why engage with an international entity?
Download Coursera videos in batch
Offline playback of Youtube videos AND their annotations
> [Obligatory plug and disclaimer: Agile professional

You sell process for a living. You claim, "After all, it's not like you can have no process at all. Whatever you're doing already is a process." When you said that, you accidentally got something right.

Programming is a process. It's the only one that fucking matters if you're a shop that sells software. All the other process comes from snake oil salesmen as yourself, or pointy haired bosses who don't know a fucking thing about programming.

Programming. Either learn and do it, or get the fuck out of its way.
Personally, I wouldn't but yes it is possible as you said - Steve Jobs did it and Jack Dorsey does it.

However, this doesn't mean that you are Steve Jobs/Jack Dorsey and running two startups at once is hard work. Especially when, most people can't even run one!

There are tons of people's opinions regarding this for instance:

http://tech.li/2012/02/ceo-sundays-running-two-startups-is-m... - Argues its possible

http://learntoduck.com/startups/two-startups/ - Argues its not

FWIW: I'm not putting Steve Jobs or Jack Dorsey in the same boat, I'm just highlighting someone else who currently does it. (Nor am I discreditting Jack Dorsey by saying this - Square and Twitter are both great startups)
Spring Cleaning For The Brain?
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وميلان
مباراة برشلونة وميلان
مباراة برشلونة وميلان
مباراة برشلونة وميلان
http://mushahda.com/13.html
برشلونة وميلان
برشلونة وميلان
> "Skilled but under-emplored programmer in Russia" is like Bigfoot [also known as sasquatch] - everyone heard about him/her, but noone saw. It is a legend...

Pretty good observation. I think most people are operating on 10-12 year old data when they think that. They think "fall of the Soviet Union" with now hungry scientists slowly turning to the dark side to become less hungry mad scientists who will inflict pain and suffering upon us all.
I've never encountered those flamewars before (I don't know web2py), but I searched a bit, here is the web2py dev discussing one particular criticism:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/web2py/dmN54cpMuXo/discuss...

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/web2py/GQWCsNzwP28/discuss...

Armin Ronacher's take: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/2/1/exec-in-python/
Does a Tobacco Company’s Environmental Efforts Really Matter?
I can't take you seriously when you link to a white, male comedian telling people not to get offended.
I realize this is just a startup, and many things that wouldn't fly at a large company are considered fun, however, the founders should really think twice about even having a TWSS bot.

They are basically providing documented proof in writing of a hostile work environment. Sure, this employee handled it well and had a little fun with it, but there are many more litigious employees that will take your company to the cleaners with just a couple printed chat logs.

The fact that she's complained about it and her concerns were shrugged by male employees and supervisors makes it even more egregious. This kind of story makes ambulance chasers salivate...
No, I agree. I'm glad I assumed correctly. Still, I was more concerned the message would get lost in downvotes.

What caught me was the specific wording used. Specifically, this caught my attention:

> I'm so irritated by women calling out sexist behaviors

For obvious reasons, this stands out.

All things considered, good job.
Honestly, I hope America gets universal healthcare as well. I just don't get "if this is struck down, it'll pave the way for true universal healthcare." I think, logically, that universal healthcare would be more likely without the individual mandate in place. At the same time, politically, this will come as a major blow and be seen as many voters as a court rejection of socialized medicine in the US (even though that's not the conclusion will even draw).
Sounds like Adobe finally figured out how to monetize Flash. Too bad it's at the expense of their most important resources, their developers.
I install adblock to make viewing content on your site bearable. No, I really don't want to know the one weird odd tip of anything, or a flashing banner, or something that starts talking, or these pop-under windows. I can't even use merriam webster without adblock to lookup a word unless I want to get an audio blast of something, a netflix pop-under, and 2-4 other tap dancing gifs surrounding a definition. I can't even pay for an ad-free subscription to the site.

I use adblock to make your site usable. But hey, I understand, you have to keep up the good fight. Keep fighting your users.
You probably found the wrong person. I know the author personally, she is a great hacker and worked for FreshBooks for years before moving to her current job.
And ECMAScript which they held back for a year or more and garnering the wrath of Brendan Eich not too long ago.
From the perspective of racism (which is the context here) it's perfectly valid.

The UN's definition of racial descrimination:

"the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life."
Interesting, it could be my 10.6 system was an upgrade from 10.5. Might have to boot my PowerPC MacMini and see what it says...
Perhaps I missed the part where our local representatives of the porn industry wrote a bot that clumsily interjects talk about porn in the middle of unrelated HN conversations, and left it turned on even after people politely asked them to stop?

I'm not actually sure I've met that many people in porn (I've met some aspirants, but does that really count?), precisely because it doesn't always come up in casual conversation.
Since your fingerprint is going to be primarily based off your user agent, if I was running this in the wild I'd only check for presence of a handful of extensions and I'd ignore their version entirely. I'd just be looking for a couple bits more information to add to standard browser fingerprinting techniques.

For most advertising purposes, you don't need to track a user for that long anyway. Conversion tracking, view-through attribution, frequency capping, retargeting, interest-based behavioral targeting... sure, businesses would ideally prefer that the unique identifier last for thirty days, but 'every other week' would capture the bulk of the benefit.

A truly shady business could rely primarily on cookies, local storage, etc. but use browser fingerprinting only to repopulate user IDs after data deletion. Incorporating extensions into the fingerprinting could make this technique a lot more effective.
I'll answer the question narrowly (and out of ignorance on the state of scholarly opinion on the bombings) - the Mongolians practiced depopulation as a regular (normal/frequent) form of policy. The pair of nuclear bombings were a one time policy decision intended as a knockout punch.

To counter my own argument, I'd like to say that if ww2 continued, nuclear bombing would NOT have become standard US war policy. However, seen in continuity with the fire bombings of Tokyo, Dresden & etc - I might be over-optimistic.
And in the end there will be no jokes.

> I think we all agree that if somebody's feeling upset by
> the jokes, it's not a huge loss to our comedic palettes
> to have to find another source of humor, right?

No. I strongly strongly disagree. I don't want a thermal dead of society, I don't want knee-jerk reaction to anything I say because I just mentioned some forbidden word, no matter with what intention and what context.
We are slipping toward the concept thought-crime, and I surely don't want what. Neither do I want to live in
the world where all must pretend, that genders don't exist.

You ar offended but what I say? To quote Stephen Fry: "So fucking what?".

To think that it is impossible to tell and be entertained by non-PC jokes is as moronic as thinking that you cannot write (or enjoy) crime fiction without being a murderer.
Although I suspect what he is saying is a factor, to say it is THE reason is a major oversimplification. You have to examine a whole host of things.

For instance, geography/natural resource endowments have to be taken into account. Just look at Saudi Arabia. It is a country where a few do really well but compared to other developing countries it is doing pretty well as a whole, all because it has large oil deposits.
millions enthusiastically working for the future.

Were these the 14 million in Gulag, or the 20 million that Stalin murdered?
…and how exactly are Adobe going to know what 9 percent of net revenue for a given movie is?
I view Agile the same way I do P90X, which if you swapped one term for the other this post would probably be just as valid. Yet, I use P90X and get good results. Is it dependent on my motivation and physical abilities? Yes, of course. Will it help an unmotivated person become fit? No, of course not. But what it does give some people is a road map to follow and a process for following it. Much like Agile does.

My team is using Agile and it's effective. It's not a silver bullet, but it keeps us on the same page for the most part and it gives the business team goal posts for getting features designed and queued up. If us developers sucked, it probably wouldn't help that. But since we're all decent, motivated workers, it has been going pretty well.

So is Agile a sham? Sure, whatever. So is P90X. I'll keep using both, thanks.
It's weird how it's taken over 10 years for this to come to light. Here's how it was originally broken to Thoic members back in 2001:

http://pastebin.com/TW2rdkrx
Three Things We Don’t Know About Obama’s Massive Voter Database
It's much less useful, it's much less open, it's much less intellectual, it's much less friendly, etc.

Hacker News is a joke.
Why Watching Movie Tweets Won't Tell the Whole Story
Google Summer of Code (updated)
As with whichever framework you choose you will have to get inside its code to understand it, adapt to it or fix it, I would advise to choose one framework that has code that is pleasing to read and follow very strictly conventions. Right now my box is broken so I can't check but last I have checked Django had a relatively good pylint score, while Flask had a seemingly slightly more messy code base.
Off topic (sort of), but this reminded me of 2001/2010. Arthur C. Clark was on pretty much on target. In 2010 he predicted we'd find life on an icy moon of the outer solar system. He happened to posit it was Europa (around Jupiter) but then the original novel had the mission flying to Saturn. The movie and sequels changed it to Jupiter because Saturn was hard for the special effects. Anyway, pretty darn impressive sci-fi speculation that might come true. And now back to our original discussion....
Maybe I did! It seemed the posting account was a "Denise", and recent changelogs on the project website only attributed documentation changes to her.

Her approach to "hacking" sure differs from mine ... from using "#!./tbenv/bin/python" (rather than "/usr/bin/env python" which will find the virtualenv link) making the code unusable for most people out of the box, to requiring a bunch of third-party libs to complete a simple task, to copy-pasta even preserving tutorial docstrings, you have to disconnect from the IRC server to reload the application logic ... it just seemed very sloppy to me.
Spoken like a true cowboy programmer who can't collaborate his way out of a wet paper bag and blames process when a team he's part of fails because of that...
I'm glad Adobe has finally taken the initiative to phase out Flash.
* C# is statically typed and compiled, which means a lot of problems the would be runtime errors in a Ruby on Rails project will be caught before deployment at compile-time.

* Being compiled also means theres a lower overhead to running C# code - there's no interpreter overhead.

* Anecdotally, many large sites (e.g. Twitter) that used the Rails stack have complained that the technology behind the site caused problems when they grew. Conversely, Stack Overflow, a large site using the ASP.net stack has never complained that C# was a problem in their growth. Correlation not causation, maybe, or perhaps the "Rails doesn't scale" mantra came about for a reason.

* Visual Studio is probably hand down the best IDE out there with good reason - Microsoft is heavily incentivised to keep developers using the Microsoft stack so making it hard or undesirable to abandon their development environment is important for it.
The point about decentralization is to ensure development can continue unhindered by political factors. With an empire it's very easy for the ruling aristocracy (or autocrat) to kill development. Yes, you can have enlightened rulers, but then the system hinges precariously on just a few people.

For that matter, it's much more devastating when an uncontested empire falls, rather than when one of many powers may fail.
ThinkRelevance: The Podcast - Fogus on Himera
In this episode of ThinkRelevance: The Podcast, Michael Fogus discusses Himera, his new ClojureScript compilation web service, along with reading, German rock, and a bunch of other interesting stuff.
The case is lost. You don't find many who would even bother to think about what you are saying, you will be just down-voted by knee-jerkers, who cannot be bothered by contemplating what is sexism, what isn't. They just know what's not acceptable and act accordingly.
HN is humor free zone, no matter what kind of humor that is.
The thing I don't like is that when you have both scrollbars and pagination, there are two very different ways of getting more content onto the screen.

That's one to many.

It doesn't matter that they reflect different things - client-side display of already-retrieved content and interaction with a server for new content. That's a detail that a user of software should not have to react to.

Infinite scroll is one response, maybe there are others?
Critical Java hole being exploited on a large scale
Fuck boring lectures
Fuck boring lectures

Lectures are probably one of the most wrongly used tools these days, I won’t say there isn’t a prof. using a lecture in the way it supposed to be most certainly aren’t.

You probably know this kind of lecture: You are in a lecture where you are going to learn the most awesome subject in the world. You are excited and you can’t wait for the prof to start his lecture!! And than something magically happens, I don’t know how they do it but all the excitement drops to a negative level. I need to slap myself in order to keep my attention and that’s the moment I realize that the prof did it again, make something really boring!

The weirdest thing is in a lecture that the prof starts reading the things on the lecture slides. I always wonder if he thinks I’m some kind of idiot who cannot read?!

What I want are lectures like Walter Lewin gives on MIT (http://ocw.mit.edu and here’s a promo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zc9Nuoe2Ow_). He can make boring stuff even fun and entertaining with some kind of magic touch! That are the lectures I’m willing to pay for, because right know I’m paying a lot of money for my boring lectures where I don’t go to most of the time and that annoys me.

I’m replacing more and more lectures by fun ones on the internet, sometimes from khan academy, sometimes just youtube videos and sometimes partly courses from MIT open courseware and Standford online courses. I’m also really excited about the udacity (http://www.udacity.com) courses. But in general I’m realizing that I’m slowly replacing my university courses by online courses because they are just more awesome!

Are there more people doing the same thing? Because than we may want to reconsider how our university education system works and if this is the most effective way of teaching students?...
7,113 emails received in the last 30 days!
As if there is agreement that "sexist" jokes (or people telling them) are antifeminist.
Microsoft Disrupts the Zeus Infrastructure
No need for the self-righteousness. The guy's a web security researcher who's doing AdBlock users a favor by posting this stuff publicly.

If he was actually trying to screw over you rascally freeloaders, he wouldn't be posting instructions, he'd be quietly deploying and profiting.
The power of mediocrity: business lessons from the king of bagels
Case in point?
No options? Silverlight? WebGL? Sure they may not be perfect, but for 9% of revenue, companies will consider alternatives pretty quickly
The other problem is that the people who write those rants are probably not half as good as they think they are.
Git-sweep: a tool to remove your merged feature branches
This is all perfectly appropriate for a quick hack. She's not yet hanging her career on the polish displayed in her Python bot.

Have you considered submitting a pull request? I'm sure it would be welcomed.
This has been an open secret for a long time.
Russian refers to anything related to Russia, including:

* Russians (russkiye), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries (where they are also known as Ruthenians or by other names)

</wikipedia>

Close enough?
> This sounds like a losing battle, unfortunately.

Saarland Pirates would disagree with you.
This blog post offends me a little bit. The post screams hey, I am a cowboy programmer, and it almost implies that if you employ processes then you are stupid.

In this day and age, I would have thought finding the right tool for the right job is common sense. Apparently not.

Agile, among many other things, is not a silver bullet - it never was and it never will be. The key thing is to experiment and find what works for you, your team and your company. Most software projects are done in a team environment - putting a bunch of talented developers and designers together actually isn’t as simple as many seem to think. One example is right out of that original blog post:

> Given that I am not a fan of prescribed process as the solution to our problems, you can infer my opinion of the general quality and effectiveness of those programmers who teach these courses.

From that attitude, I can already see that he is an interesting developer to manage.

A team needs to function efficiently as a team. Having one or two ace developers aren’t going to help a lot if they can’t get along with the others.

Not to mention that people have spent time and effort proving that techniques such as TDD work for certain projects [1].

As many things in life, there are always people who try to take advantage of others. No doubt there are questionable ‘agile consultants’ who try to make a fortune out of uninformed clients. Just because some people aren’t using agile effectively or even correctly, doesn’t mean agile itself is a sham. Developers constantly make mistakes and write shitty code - should we say all the programming languages out there are a sham?

Keep an open mind is important, and a lot of times even necessary. To dismiss agile all together is in my opinion childish, and offensive to others who try to improve things and create more value.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/nagappan-1...

Originally posted at http://fredwu.me/post/20058808238/agile-is-not-a-sham
The new Comcast Xbox Xfinity app is the first nail in net neutrality’s coffin