skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having been a woman for most of my life (and a girl for the rest of it), I can assure you that women don't avoid fields applying mathematics just because they don't want to hang out with loser-types. In fact, I find most women try to pursue things they enjoy, more so than avoid things they may hate (like losers, or long division, per se).

If there's a lack of women in IT, it's probably because they don't enjoy it, or aren't encouraged to pursue it. Most women don't make professional decisions hoping to increase their chances of havin' a cutie in the next cubicle.
That is true of most adults (of both sexes) however most people (here in the UK at least) choose the general direction of their careers at the age of 14, which is when you choose your GCSEs. You get to tweak it again at 16 when you choose your A-levels (from a subset of your GCSEs) and again at 18 when you choose your first degree, but the decisions made at 14 are so far upstream at this point that you only have so much maneuverability left.

Anyway, at 14, I remember that my double-science class was almost entirely male, perhaps 5/25 girls (about 100 people in my year in total). Drama and English had the opposite ratio. Only those 5 girls would even have had the option to take a science or engineering degree, 10% of the females in the year. Now we all know you don't need one of those to work in IT, but still, if you want girls in the field, that's where you've got to catch them.
It's not 100% accurate, but it's close. The reason I did the website is so I can catch up with the good stories that were submitted earlier during the week (I usually read during weekends).
DHH confirmed to going with current logo. Are that guy delirious?
http://url.davegrey.com?06609
Well, again, that link is design oriented. I guess I'm looking for a similar article to what the original topic was about: "Science of _online_ shopping"
I've come to the conclusion that a mailing list is the correct bug tracker, together with a file in the repository. The cool part is that unless people make an effort themselves, their "problems" are not likely to influence development.

By the way: This is not a joke. Think a bit about it and you will see that it is a possible alternative.
"My iPhone" (iPhones, Oranges, and Identity Politics)
Yeah, I created an account and self-posted, but Zed seems to like you (http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-12-25.html) and I wanted to share.
IMHO the UK has already succeeded in taking the first major step to an Orwellian state. The populous look to the UK government for protection from _all_ evils. It fails to understand that sometimes bad things happen to innocent people and it is prepared to give away it's freedoms so it can live in a safe warm jail.

I'm no anarchist, I've voted in all elections I have been eligible to vote on. The sad fact is that the last bastion of common sense in the UK is the unelected upper chamber of landed aristocracy and rich business men. You don't know how much it pains me to say that :(

To get back on topic. How exactly am I going to get a certificate for a website, how much is it going to cost me? I run a website for heavy metal fans (newmetalarmy.com) and I've already had complaints about the stylized zombie in the logo so I guess I'll be an 18 site then! It's just another hurdle for fringe genres. There is no money to be made in heavy metal, people do it for the art form. But 'society' considers it harmful so it squashes it.
Unfortunately internet sites change their content rather more frequently than the content of a particular film changes. How are they going to keep up with changes?
"Lots of people can talk about what they'd like to be, very few can confidentially tell you what they're doing about it now."

This is a really, really good point. I can't think of very many people who I'd expect to be able to answer. I can't, not really--I can tell you what I'm studying, but I don't think studying quite counts, at least not with something else accompanying it.
"On the other hand, the feeling that you can get rich in a bubble if you get out in time increases the hunger for risk. Maybe not for the right kind of risk though."

There was a recent study (also posted here somewhere) showing this "greater fool theory" is pretty much hard-wired into human nature.
I think I can agree about LLC. However the way things are currently structured one would be very foolish to conduct business without the protection of at least an LLC.
IMergent
Mom-and-pop businesses are increasingly moving online, and iMergent's training programs help them set up shop on the Web.
A programmer's view of the Universe, part 2: Mario Kart
Ask HN: Classic games?
Back in high school, I wanted to learn programming because of all the amazing games back then. How many of you actually learned programming because you wanted to create your own game?

I still remember the first game I played and addicted to is this game called SimTower from Maxis. What classic game actually leaded you to become a programmer?
Health Care That Puts a Computer on the Team
In search of competition
Alley Cat - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game). I still hum the tune from time to time.
Gravity Emerges…From Neutrinos?
Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com: The Power of the Real Time Enterprise
The first time i played with real world code was when i messed with a LOMAC mod, it was just a few lua scripts and a XML file, and they were just configuration files as far as i was concerned. Game designers should make scripting and moding easy, so that it does not look like a cheap hack. It can be a good way to get kids in to programming.
If you watched any of the stock punditry two years ago, everybody knew there was a housing bubble. You could tell by looking at the charts. The discussion, which as I recall went on for a year, would how hard and how localized the "pop" would be. Safe money was at least betting on the market being overvalued in major cities and stayed away from REITS.

It was common knowledge.

That's how I remember it, anyway. You might be confusing this with the mortgage crisis, which is an entirely different (but related) matter.
Age of Empires and Age of Kings, without a doubt. Even led me to write a book on game programming.
That's why my Debian is fast, Bill: source code is on the server.
A book on game programming. Cool. Show us the link.
Yeah some guy I know is even trying to make other people do like he did so he can prove some point.
It's not that there aren't ideas coming from Europe to the US; it's rather that there's not a statistically significant number of American startups that are knock-offs of European ones. The converse isn't true. That there exist European copies of American companies doesn't bother me in the least; that they're probably half of the European startups does.
Very true for me personally. I built a small company with a partner that was doing low-six figures annually. I bought him out and was running the show. And on a weekly basis, I was scared to death that it was luck, a fluke, that I couldn't replicate it if it all fell apart.

It made me shake in my boots, be overly cautious. What if it was just dumb luck? What if the wheels came off? When I set down to put my second company together, and it succeeded, it was like a huge weight off my shoulders. It's like - okay, you drop me in a foreign country without speaking the local language, clothes on my back, and $20 in my pocket, and I'll be back within a couple years.

I can't say exactly what it is, but I think the idea of having something you don't "deserve" (or couldn't get back) is fundamentally really scary to people. You see the same pattern with people dating someone they perceive out of their league, and you especially see it with corrupt political leaders. For me, not knowing if I'd made it or gotten lucky would haunt me on perhaps a weekly basis until I did it again.

And now? If everything melted down, I'd go hang out on the beach and read some books for a bit, then jump back in the saddle after I got sick of reading or beachlaying. It's a much better feeling than wondering if it was dumb luck.
Mike used to be really helpful in #macdev on freenode. Haven't seen him in the channel in a while though.

edit: he also flies gliders where my current flight instructor teaches :)
RMS should by all rights be pretty happy: GNU replaced Unix on servers, and has made more progress on the desktop than Unix ever did.

I guess he never predicted that something that wasn't Unix would be the dominant OS. In essence, he chose the wrong enemy.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if RMS had created 'GNU's Not DOS' instead?
What is your business? Just curious.
Quickly growing shape in front of your eyes is a good heuristics to indicate that something is going to hit you in the head.

Incidentally, that's why I never liked ball games.
My Software Is Being Pirated
Is there a link between high achievers and boredom? I get a rush when something comes together, but afterwards comes the inevitable deflation - what then?
48% of the class of '06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either a large corporation or an investment bank.

With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming are relatively precarious. That though probably is easily overcome, since women have clearly been extremely competent in pretty much every other field now for decades.

So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of potential in both men and women. Tradition is THE enemy.

(Heard this joke? Why do baby boys wear blue and baby girls wear pink? Because they don’t have a fucking choice.)
I never understood this. I mean it's a beautiful outlook, but every time I hear people "jumping back into starting companies," it's totally confusing. To me, making that statement is akin to I'm going to walk across the room and figure out why when I get there.

I probably just don't "get" it. Maybe one day. Hopefully.
Building websites was what led me to become a programmer. Although I was programming BASIC before I knew what the Internet was, I didn't really have the drive to go further than what I was being taught.
The passion only started after I found Linux and the hacker culture.
"Regardless of what level of success they may have achieved in their chosen field of work or study or what external proof they may have of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced internally they do not deserve the success they have achieved and are actually frauds. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they were more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
http://www.miniclip.com/games/hangaroo/en/

This was the game which got me hooked to programming as
1. Seeing this game, it looked something cool .. and more importantly something which I can build. (If you played AOE, and thought you could build it .. more power to you.)
2. For some reason, I could just see how I could go about building it.

I built it in pure Java, btw .. The source for it is lost, thankfully. (My first program, I didn't undersand arrays, and had code like char varA, varB .. varZ). The next game I built was probably better, and has the code http://code.google.com/p/spaceoddece/ and http://shabda8.tripod.com/java/

Then I got a job .. left game programming ..moved to database/web development and Python. Hangaroo was how I started programming. Ah Hangaroo
Ah, Atari, good times :).

For me it was Adventure and Mercenary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary_%28computer_game%29
Insurance is there to protect you against high cost, low probability events; basically events where you can afford the expected cost, (probability of becoming sick) x (cost of treatment), but you can not afford (cost of treatment).

If you have a pre-existing condition, (probability of becoming sick) == 1. In this case, insurance is pointless.
I was speaking generally - on paper, the RDX compares well to the Legacy in terms of handling, size, braking and acceleration. I haven't driven one, so I can't comment on its driving dynamics, though I suspect the Legacy would be easier to control under extreme conditions, as reviews I've read claim it's more neutral.

As for size, I'll stand by my claim. If it's a guess, it's an educated one. To provide an extreme example, imagine several scenarios where you've had to swerve to avoid a road hazard in your car. Now imagine that your car was the size of a bus, but with the same handling. Could you still have avoided the hazard?
Unix - "UNIX is a glorified video game. People don't do serious work on UNIX systems - they send jokes around the world on UUCP-net, and write adventure games and research papers."
- Real Programmers don't write Pascal
Revolutions and Crisis: Why the Internet is still the most exciting technology
Not a game, per se, but demos got me interested in programming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene for the young.
IPhone App Serves up your Favorite Drink | TechJaws
2008 Obituaries:  Who influenced you the most?
Lots of influential people on this list who left great legacies. I admire the selflessness of Randy Pausch and the generousity of Paul Newman, but my most influencial was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A man of science who became a Nobel Prize winning writer and changed the world by following a simple principle: Do the Right Thing. Not a bad example for anyone to follow.
The first part was a funny story about a little fish that tried real real hard then failed and died without hope.

The second part is a boring series of reaches that doesn't go anywhere (literally).

I was aware coming in that Yegge's style is to make tenuous metaphors that obfuscate the point more than they elucidate (remember the story about the Kingdom of Nouns) but I was so enamoured by part 1 that I inadvisedly read it nonetheless.

(As a side note it is possible to write in the style Yegge is trying to: Neal Stephenson achieves it in "In the Beginning was the Command Line" with the story about the different drills.)
Looks like everyone spins it as they like it! I'd like to see someone release some hard numbers and apples-to-apples comparisons
The Banach–Tarski paradox
Democoding is especially nice, because it's often just a string of effects. Each effect you can add to your set of skills, and like magic they often have very simple secrets behind them.

Making fire, water, a seemingly spinning flubber effect, all of them are just a few lines of code if you just know the trick. So rewarding and gratifying to see something cool happen because of something so simple.
matt,

I'm actually down here in Guatemala right now. Plan is to continue developing the app for my startup but I have been busy studying Spanish and doing the tourist stuff.

I'm in Xela right now and will be moving on to san Pedro and Antigua. I will be back in the US by the end of January.
I wanted to learn programming when I was at the high school and I saw the first 3d games on playstation:
- Wipeout
- Battle Arena Toshinden
- Ridge Racers

More than ten years have gone, and now I'm an almost happy R&D developer at www.milestone.it . ;)
Zork and Planetfall were my biggest inspirations to learn how to program.
Best 50 Astronomy Pictures of Year 2008
This 15 year old Calvin and Hobbs comic is frighteningly relevant to today
You're right, that was a pretty crummy suggestion. I looked at the wikipedia IPSP page and didn't like it much, either. A little deeper googling gave me this:

http://icwww.epfl.ch/~gerstner/SPNM/node15.html#SECTION02133...

To help parse figure 2.12:

'Resting potential' = voltage between inside and outside of the neuron in the absence of any excitatory or inhibitory input. It is generated constitutively by ion pumps in the cell.

When cell receives inhibitory input, its voltage drops and it become 'hyperpolarized'. This causes a certain type of calcium ion channel, the 'T-type', to gain the capability of opening (it stops being 'inactivated'). When the inhibitory input ceases, the cell's constitutive ion pumps return it to its resting potential. As the voltage of the cell increases, some T-type channels begin to open, leading to an influx of calcium ions (there are more calcium ions outside the cell than inside), which in turn leads to the cell's voltage to increase further. Now the cell's voltage shoots above its resting potential, and voltage-dependent sodium channels begin to open. Sodium ions rush in, and a spike is generated.

And the payoff to me for trying to a little bit better job of answering your question is that I discovered what looks to be a pretty good resource:

http://icwww.epfl.ch/~gerstner/SPNM/SPNM.html
Chip's Challenge.

I remember finding a level editor for that game and I'm sure I spent a solid two weeks messing with it and subsequently learning VB (this was 5th or 6th grade).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, they don't make writers like that anymore.
They talk like that because you want them to.

These people are defined by their success. Audiences want to hear about it, often looking for insights. For obvious reasons nobody knows exactly what they did right and thus end up sounding as if in doubt, not least because they don't want to sound pompous.

So when you listen to tech millionaire turned hacker Ben Bitdiddle, unless (A) you insist he talk about his surfboarding experiences or (B) Ben doesn't mind coming through to you as an egomaniac, the observation described here is very much expected.
For all of you small business owners, you can relate to this
Oxite has caused a big brou-ha-ha in the .net community. Apparently the ALT.NET crowd wasn't very happy with how Oxite was created, and it is recommended that it shouldn't be treated as something to emulate with your own code.

http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2008/12/15/ox...

I think most of the ALT.NET community over-reacted and started acting like a bunch of jerks instead of providing more constructive criticism. I like the way Rob Conery handled it better by actually providing suggestions to make the application better.

http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/some-thoughts-on-oxite/
You're at least partly right. Some treatments would plummet, some would remain expensive. We really have no idea, the market is so distorted and the perfect system will always be subject to debate.

In my opinion, we can't ever have a true capitalist market for healthcare because the price elasticity of demand for some treatments is so high.
I sent this article to my dad, who is an engineering and architecture consultant, and works extensively with the construction industry (New York area). He thinks this can't work in the US, because these houses will end up costing far more here than in Germany.

These houses will only be affordable to manufacture as factory-assembled models. Most people in the US have or want fairly customized houses, which fit their specific requirements. Factory-assembled cookie-cutter homes did not take off here, and it seems unlikely that passive houses' special properties will overcome the distaste.

Assembling custom passive houses on an individual basis, by hand, will require highly qualified construction labor, which costs a lot of money. Most contractors working on people's homes are woefully incompetent and cannot be trusted to put in a level floor, let alone a hermetic seal. This includes union workers. Contractors who know something about building typically charge huge sums for their work, and often make awful mistakes anyway. (Typical story: an elevator which, at the ground level, stops six inches above the level of the floor because the idiot construction foreman decided not to remove an extraneous beam his workers accidentally put into the foundation where it jutted into the elevator shaft.)

So, at the end of the day, a passive house in the US will probably cost two or three times as much to build as a conventional house. Considering that, in my dad's experience, it's hard to convince people to put in the bare minimum of insulation required by building codes ("what, this insulation will cost me an extra 20 thousand dollars?!"), a passive house will probably be a niche curiosity, bought only by wealthy environmentally-conscious consumers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee

"Jennifer added the number eight to her own name while she was a teenager because of the prevalence of her first name."
"Most women don't make professional decisions hoping to increase their chances of havin' a cutie in the next cubicle."

Not consciously, anyway. And it doesn't have anything to do with "havin' a cutie," it's more to avoid going into fields with a social stigma associated with them and their typical practitioners.

This social stigma is decreasing (even in IT -- "geek" is no longer an insult), but nevertheless it is still there.

For whatever reason, women seem to be more influenced by social cues -- or perhaps just influenced differently than men. It's not wrong -- it just is. Therefore, my guess is that a lot of the gender disparity is still extant for social stigma reasons and the concomitant avoidance of that stigma.
See also: http://blog.coworking.info/

These hacker spaces seem to be more hardware-hacker-focused (rather than webgeeks-in-an-office-focused) but it's a similar concept with similar challenges.
See also "Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008" in Discover. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=401401
I get 403 on that link..
Hopefully there will be a post-Christmas bump as people cash in on iTunes gift cards.
This exemplifies why tax avoidance (NOT evasion) has become one of my favorite pastimes.
Works for me. I recreated it here for you as well:

http://tinypaste.com/pre.php?id=3b399
Debt elimination
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Top BPO
BPO Companies came into existence when cost effective outsourcing was a demand of the hour.
I wonder if this is another Garrett Lisi ...
Off-Topic:

I like the way his articles are setup. Definitely one of the most aesthetically pleasing websites I've visited in a long time. And each page is customized...
That's a little over the top. Almost Rand-ian at the end there. I think small business owners should, however, start to cultivate a difference in perception between small business and "big" business.

There is a substantial difference between the startup founder who employs 15 and is the hardest working guy in the bunch and the executives of something like GM or AIG who are still not quite sure why its wrong to ask for a bailout while flying around in multiple corporate jets and taking fancy executive retreats.

Its going to be very important in the next couple of years to be sure that the needed reforms that will reign in the recklessness of the latter does not adversely affect the former.
That guy sounds like a passive aggressive, condescending dick. He may have some nuggets buried in there, but they're difficult to find when he drops phrases like "while you get here at 9, and mentally check in at about noon".

I worked in an environment where the business owners subtly questioned the worth of all of their employees once and I'll never do it again. I hope that I'll treat people differently if I'm ever in a similar position.