skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It isn't obvious to me that women being underrepresented in technology fields is a problem, any more than women being overrepresented in early childhood education.

Let me be clear: I don't have a problem with women in programming, computer science, regular science, or any other tech field. I don't have a problem with a lack of women in these fields either, as long as it's not due to discrimination.

Discrimination is crappy -- but it's not clear to me that it's the cause of the disparity. This isn't the Victorian era or the early 20th century when women were expected to stay at home; based on personal observations, sexist workplaces are few and far between, at least in our industry. And the free market should solve most discrimination problems neatly: If all the companies in the world are terrible sexists who never employ women, then someone can start a startup with a saner hiring policy, snap up the un-utilized surplus of girl talent, and eat their competitors' lunch.

From the article:

> Teach computer science to middle school girls

I'd change this to:

> Teach programming to middle or high school students

A lot of schools' computer offerings are limited to "learn to use MS Office" type courses.

True, not everyone is cut out to be a world-class programmer. But understanding what's going on "under the hood" really helps you figure out computer problems; the logical thinking skills you develop from debugging are quite general; and being able to write simple scripts is occasionally useful.
Slime Mold Inspires Autonomous Brainless Undulating Robot 
"A creepy new pulsating robot can ooze across a surface and pick its own path autonomously, using feedback from its ooze controls without requiring a smart command center. It’s modeled after slime mold, which can also make decisions without any sort of neural network."
I'm not even sure we can predict that far ahead what such a revolution would mean for human civilization. It would truly be game-changing.
20K downloads is great. I've got a few iOS apps probably 1k downloads in total, though they are paid apps. After apple takes its cut I've made ~$1200 over a year.

I agree with you on the marketing part! Dev seems easy compared to marketing!
Iranian Scientist Claims U.S. Cyberattack Was … Loud
Finally sorted itself out this evening. I just went back to Lion for the day and waiting for the #xcode rage to die down on twitter. :)
I witnessed one guy implement an OAuth 2.0 provider completely wrong (he was accepting user credentials as client credentials, or something similar.) This guy was smart, and just couldn't understand the spec.

Upon reading the spec, it seemed that OAuth2 is really just some rough guidelines. Pick and choose what you need for the particular flow you're implementing.
Gregory Benford: "Berkeley, California will have a theme park devoted to its high period—the 1960s."

He's right. Berkeley has People's Park. As for the theme, well...
Lesson: Don't be pessimistic.

The disaster scenarios you imagine are inevitable are really just the worst case, and the things that actually problems aren't thing you can predict.
This might be helpful to look at the API: http://docmaps.io/Mojang/Minecraft-API
I reached the same conclusion ("Go is boring") myself, but with a different flavor.

After having spent a great deal of time in recent years doing things like GPGPU and a _whole_ lot of SIMD programming (not to mention a lot of use of the STL, BGL, etc), I have to say I'm less impressed by the boringness (aka taking good, solid choices from existing languages) of Go.

I understand that not everyone is excited about SIMD or generic programming or writing code for 32768 GPGPU threads... but Go feels like a missed opportunity in these respects, solving the problems of the mid-1990s with aplomb (which is good).

It seems more like 'a better Java' - solid, but not genuinely breaking any new ground in a way that creates a single good reason to use it.
How the Mac no longer matters to Apple
Would you say your interest in programming languages is largely academic in nature? I get the impression that Haskell mostly (for now at least) fits best with academia, Java/C# for enterprise, python/ruby for smallish web apps, Go/C/C++/Java for industrial applications (like servers, etc).

There is a very real possibility that Go is just not the right fit for you with your current requirements. No language is the right fit for every application.
I see. That makes sense, thanks.
Love the Arrested Development reference.
Is it really a language computers can understand? There's an effort to develop a PEG for Lojban, but AFAICT it's the effort of a single person. Lojban's more visible BNF grammar is pretty massive and not at all easy for a computer to parse.

It's an interesting idea, sidestepping complex languages like English in order to bring the future of human/computer interaction a little closer, but I don't think Lojban goes far enough as it's still very complex.
Netflix-style one-click email survey using basic JavaScript and Mixpanel
A big congrats to the Zencoder team. Well, well done.
IMO, that's an equally weak argument. "The free market's internet 20 years ago was terrible. Therefore, all conceivable free market plans for the internet could would have been draconion and awful."

To be clear, I'm not arguing the Government funds did not play the biggest role - or even that it wasn't the best solution available. It doesn't matter if it was. Im only arguing that pointing to an example of something invented under government funded research is not justification for blanket, undirected increase in government funding. But that's how that argument is used.
World of Warcraft is widely considered to be a highly refined Skinner box. If you're unfamiliar with the experiment, I strongly recommend that you look it up on Wikipedia and then google "wow detox". Also, you may want to research Asian governments' restrictions on XP/hour.

I'm sure you'll come to the right conclusions.
Hey guys, DocMaps.io is a fun project that I have been working on. Would love any feedback.
Gallery: Apple iPhone prototype photos
"A creepy new pulsating robot can ooze across a surface and pick its own path autonomously, using feedback from its ooze controls without requiring a smart command center. It’s modeled after slime mold, which can also make decisions without any sort of neural network."
To be honest, I'm not all that impressed with the quality of my brand-spanking-new 27" Apple Thunderbolt display. Not what I'd expect for a grand.

My 5-year-old Samsung 244t is still a better image.
1. twice the rates? That's outrageous. You do know it's SOP to regularly get quotes for your merchant account? First data will match those quotes. Think of their (typically) annual rate increases as motivation to do your job and get the quotes.

2. Read your contract. First Data (and every other processor I've ever dealt with) gives 30-days to withdrawl from the contract when they send their notice of rate increase.

3. Did you look over the interchange matrix first data gave you? It's pretty clear on what you need to submit to receive the qualified rate.

4. Authnet gateway? I like their gateway too... but it's an added and unnecessary expense. First Data has a gateway that you can get them to include for free (although you will have to do your job and negotiate for it).

5. authnet CIM? For a few thousand dollars in hardware, you can store the card data yourself... unless you're dealing with a small number of transactions, you're going to have to do this anyway.

Yes, I know dealing with credit card processing is a pain.. but the above? You're just tossing money out the window.
MyObfuscate:  Protect user privacy while debugging with production data
I actually need to start looking for a graphic artist for a small job soon - Do you have a recommendation for where to post other than Craigslist?
No, In-App-Purchases are not a good alternative to paid upgrades
I'd like to agree with Marco's argument (and probably do over the long run). At the very least, I certainly hope this particular argument is correct.

But, seriously, the cognitive dissonance on display here is absolutely breathtaking. This is the exact argument Android fans make about iOS. If he wants his argument to be convincing, he needs to address the elephant in the room.
Docracy Mobile Privacy Policy
Denser cities sounds like a con to me. I would much prefer to not be 2 inches from my neighbor.
The rise and plateau of the Japanese economy is one of the most interesting case studies on macroeconomics I've come across. There's a great review of it in "New Ideas from Dead Economists" [1].

It's fascinating to look into why the "inevitable," didn't come to pass. Likewise with many of the doomsday predictions we see here, the pivots that prevented many from occurring (arguably, fall of the USSR, massive public health efforts, sheer luck)are sweet spots in history. It'd be interesting to do some kind of meta-analysis of future predictions and these little events that seemingly held back the fates. I can almost groan about trying to assess the qualitative data now...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/New-Ideas-Dead-Economists-Introduction...
I'd love to hear commentary from Twitter or Instagram on the rationale for this. I don't think it's very plausible that this is due to 'strain' on Twitter's infrastructure as the Techcrunch article alludes. If API call volume was really the cause for Twitter blocking the API call, I'm sure Instagram would have been happy to throttle the volume of such API calls by limiting the amount of Twitter friend searches over a period of time (ex: you can only find new friends once/week).

It all seems very counterintuitive and you think that Twitter would be encouraging content creation and engagement on their platform as it creates defensibility for the service. Consider this: Twitter probably is positioned to spot emerging trends faster than any other service by being able to mine emergent links, etc.

I think this is going to leave a myriad of mainstream users disenchanted by Twitter locking them out of their friends list.

I signed up to Twitter very early (user id ~5000) and have been enamoured by it's growth and how it's established itself as the preeminent destination for open conversation and realtime search/discovery. There are a lot of smart people at the helm of Twitter and I have faith that they'll realize their mistake and fix it. Otherwise the conversation will go elsewhere and it would be a shame to see all that value dissipate.

Thoughts? Keep the conversation going on Twitter: @raja
Sounds like this is kind of like a mix between codeacademy (learning to code online) and dev bootcamp (learning to code in person). The problem I have with codeacademy is that when I get stuck I don't have someone to immediately answer my question, which is unbelievably frustrating. On the other side of things dev bootcamp requires you to be there in person which just doesn't fit my schedule.

If these guys can actually merge the convenience of sitting at my computer with the human element of learning, I'll gladly drop 3.5K to learn web dev in 2 months. Are there any alumni of bloc on HN that can share their experience?
it's justification

s/it's/its/

The same goes for the OP, BTW:

This change is definitely a problem, as you say, but I think Debian
going it's own way makes it even worse.

He means "going its own way", of course.
> obviously not possible for companies to do research anymore

Er, does Google nor do research? apple? IBM? Samsung? My dad worked for a railroad. They did R&D...
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Bravo! I believe that's as accurate a prediction you could make. As soon as you dive into specific issues, such predicting what will happen with China, virtual reality, space exploration etc, you'll have a much better chance of success if you predict status quo, or nothing at all. You hit on something though. We won't have "real" AI in 2037, but believe we're in the midst of a machine learning and computer vision revolution. Self driving cars should be possible in 25 years, technically. Whether there will be legal issues or not I can't guess.
The Stigma of Minority-Based Startup Accelerators
2 month hackathon on a remote tropical island
I'm sorry but this is not actually happening in a meaningful way for the vast majority of people. Your city will never be on the list. There's way too much local government corruption and cable-co monopoly. Please stop wet dreaming on your HDTV. You'll void the warranty.
Functional Programming Conference Update
I'm not sure to the overall level, but it is increasing - looking to top $8bn of direct investment in the US this year... http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/25/investing/china-investing-us...

Speaking from Australia, China made $9.9bn investment last year, also growing... http://blogs.wsj.com/dealjournalaustralia/2011/12/30/chinese... - here they are generally looking to up their stake in mining/energy companies. I think its much the same in Canada as well.
To be fair, no programming language has really taken a first-party approach to those specific problems.

SIMD and GPGPU both fairly difficult low-level concepts as they stand: I think there would definitely be some valuable postgrad research in looking at how to create higher-level interfaces to graphics acceleration and GPGPU/SIMD that are as simple and effective as Go's goroutines.

The main problem is that SIMD and GPGPU (even hardware accelerated graphics, to a lesser extent) are bolt-ons; they're not a core part of every computer, which is why they don't usually form a core part of any programming language. At best languages might choose to integrate this functionality into the standard library, but i don't think it will ever come built-in for a general-purpose language (maybe for a domain-specific language?).

I've actually been attempting to write a GPGPU interface between Go and OpenCL[1], so it's certainly not impossible to do GPGPU or SIMD in Go (via cgo), but it would require writing your own 3rd-party libraries or making additions to the go runtime/compiler to develop a novel interface to this functionality like goroutines that can run on the GPU (a dream many people in the Go community share).

[1] https://bitbucket.org/genbattle/go-opencl
The iOS sandbox is less restrictive in practice than the Mac App Store one. iOS manages to give a perfectly fine user experience by partitioning the user's home directory per application. Getting away with that on the desktop is harder. It's a different paradigm -- very few Android users, I'd bet, interact with the file manager on a regular basis. Every Mac user uses the Finder.
The commit details are back now. :)
I don't understand why the author is using 'IronSpread' which is available on Windows only. For python there are modules like xlwt (www.python-excel.org) and openpyxl (https://bitbucket.org/ericgazoni/openpyxl/) using which one
can generate excel files from python.
If a developer is going to offer a version upgrade, it's the fact of a previous version purchase that signifies eligibility. The app store clearly has this purchase information. So why not give the developer the option to set previous versions to act as "coupons" reducing the price of the new version by a developer specified amount? When version 5 is released at $20, let old versions be set so they can no longer be purchased anew. Let the developer set owners of version 4 as seeing the price of version 5 as $10. If you own version 3, then perhaps 5 is $15. Let previous versions themselves be upgrade coupons.

In-app purchases are left as orthogonal to these upgrades. The developer could perhaps be allowed to continue to push out bug fixes for older versions, or even old version DLC.
We are building a similar site called CodeHS ( codehs.com ), which is focused on teaching basic programming to beginners, with an emphasis on giving help from real people. Not nearly as intense, and focused more on being fun and accessible.
This sounds really interesting and compelling.

As someone new to Go... What would be the advantages of using Go over Python (taking into account the emergence and future ascendancy of pypy)?
I can understand the reasoning if one is an outside investor with no ability to influence the company, but anytime I see active managers selling stock it is a bad sign. They can give any reason they want, but most owner operators will keep as much ownership as they can if they feel comfortable with the direction of the company. Of course I'm not talking about starving and living in a motel room because you don't want to lose ownership. In these cases where existing cash wealthy managers sell off parts of their ownership they're saying that they think cash/other investments are worth more than their company's stock; actions speak for themselves.
Is there some way that's not a ridiculously fawning news story? E.g., the claim that it's well worth the price tag, or that it delivers dramatic results?
The real reason? Twitter doesn't want Facebook to have direct access to their social networking lists.
The author makes valid points and some of the reasons why I tested Go recently are named, but when it was ~15x slower than Perl and 10x slower than Java on some simple regexp matching, I gave up on it.
Are there any apps that use a dictionary other than EDICT? EDICT is great if you are trying to read a textbook or something, but if you're trying to decipher manga, anime, or a conversation that took place anytime after 1995, it's nearly useless. Actual denshi jishos tend to do much better, but are really optimized for users that speak Japanese natively.
What? FREE internet plan, average speed?? Incredible!
A far-off solar system
There are a huge amount of business books that are not written well; however, many of the books in his spreadsheet are quite good.
"If you're an insider in Zynga or Facebook, you might have slightly more information than the stock market"

What if you're the guy running the entire company? Will this mythical 'market' you keep referring to run your company better than you can?
...except for the prosperous and peaceful part, right?

Prosperous: clearly people in Asia & Africa are much, much more prosperous than in 1987.

In the developing regions, the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day fell from 47 per cent in 1990 to 24 per cent in 2008. [snip] The number of extreme poor in the developing regions fell from over 2 billion in 1990 to less than 1.4 billion in 2008.[1]

Even in the US and Europe income per person has grown substantially since 1987[2]. Don't let the current economic problems overshadow longer-term trends.

Peaceful: If you live outside central Africa the last 25 years haven't been bad. In 1987 Iraq was at the end of the Iran/Iraq war and Afghanistan was in the middle of attempting to expel an invading superpower. Not much change there.

Of course, the various central African wars have been a complete disaster - only WW1 & WW2 have been comparable.

OTOH, there hasn't been a nuclear war, which was what people expected in 1987.

[1] http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/mdgoverview/mdg_goa...

[2] http://www.bit.ly/SWICYq (Sorry about the short URL - it goes to a Flash Gapminder page)
Besides being excessive, why?
There was an article on HN not too long ago about the merits of having the startups office in Hawaii.

Something about the beaches... and team building. :)
I find it curious that more than one of them predicted a decrease in literacy. Indeed, the opposite seems to have happened.

When I was in college, my English professor vowed that he would make us better writers by forcing us to write an essay every single night. And it really worked.

Yet we live in a world where people are writing, constantly writing, in a way my English teacher could barely have dreamed of. High school kids, debating endlessly with a hostile audience every day, are turning into frighteningly persuasive writers all on their own.
You spelled "hackathon" wrong in the title.

EDIT: unless it's meant to convey that you "hack a ton" but I'm really not so sure...
You checked wrong- they've been profitable for a while now.
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Well, I decided to organise this because I have loads of experience in location independent living and communal living. I have experienced how great it is when you are in a place that makes you feel good, surrounded by people that are smart and motivating. In a luxurious villa on a tropical island, there is no distraction. By having a cook and housekeepers as well, you really don't have to worry about anything but getting shit done :)
The budget airlines in Aus require you to be there 30 minutes before take-off.
I've missed a flight because of this; I was about five minutes late. I got on the next flight but the T&C clearly state they have no obligation to make it up in any way.
Right, that makes sense and is probably accurate, but all the links they share on Twitter and Facebook and Hacker News are going to stop working once these people stops running their link resolvers.
It's true that VCs have moved a lot of eventually worthless equity but they've also moved a lot of really valuable equity. Google, Amazon, Genentech, Oracle, etc. are companies with real, fundamental long-term value which could not have existed without some kind of investor (whether you call it a "VC" is largely semantic).
Virus plays AC/DC at Iran's Nuclear Power Plant
ouch! Correcting asap :)

EDIT: if only I could get a hold of the guy who has the logo source..
coroutine is an old concept before threading became popular. It was usually implemented as a green-thread library. For C, setjmp/longjmp was used to implement it. Some libraries messed around with the stack register to implement it.

GO puts it as a first class citizen in the language. Other languages might call it Actor, light weight thread, fiber, task, etc. It's popular in embedded systems to implement cooperative threading using coroutine due to its simplicity and low overhead in resource utilization.
Hmm, this would indeed be a simple, yet non-catastrophic explanation (and useful UX to boot). That would make sense; and if this were the case, I'd be glad I was wrong.
If you want to make a quick fix it in an unrelated function or the same file would be easier to do git add -p <file>. It allows to decide which change to stage.
So the teacher decided it was the best overall to let the students in, abandon the one student, it's best for him to listen to the talk (!) and go with the policy. I know it might just be me, but with this behavior I have the feeling he is supporting this policy.
A round of applause for the Clean Air Act!
What's the catch? Equity? Price? There isn't such a thing as a free lunch.
That article only talks about combatting obesity, and the conclusions are tenuous at best.

Regardless, being non-obese and being fit are very different things. I found that out the hard way.
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If you restrict the vertices you are looking at to the ones within some fixed distance from a central vertex, there are only finitely many cases. This could make brute-forcing possible. (I do agree, though, that this is non-trivial and it looks like that was mainly what you were getting at).
I'd love to hear what Dave predicts for 2037! I'm gonna try to contact him...