skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BTW, just got off the phone with their GM, really nice guy, sounds like they are definitely going to be fixing this up for us and more generally... mucho relieved.

Will post more details on http://wpmu.org when we have it, at the end it just sounds like a stupid fail of policy (we've all been there) - but it's a shame it had to get to this point to change it.

We've been happy customers of their for years, hopefully now we can continue to be.
See my comment re: call I just had with them , hope to be able to report some new policies that'll stop this from happening to their other customers shortly!
I have a bit of experience with this. Flight "hackers" use a number of varying techniques. As simple as using low-cost airlines that are not registered with the main services, to very crafty means to circumvent fuel surcharges. travel and flight hacking is a very interesting world!
Same situation as jzig below! Any chance I can come by to meet everyone? Coming out from Chicago! shreyas.gosalia@gmail or feel free to text 440.212.4815
You jelly bro?
For 3 - a standard gesture for navigation
"If we met the utopian ideal we toss around in blog posts, we’d still have lots of middle-aged women in this field. We’d have black people. We’d have Asian people – not a smattering, but a majority, cause the world is mostly Asian people."

Just had to pick up on this, purely because it's symptomatic of another form of blindness. We DO have Asian people. Go and look in Asia. There aren't many Asian programmers in companies in my current town because the demographic is not a small scale mirror of the world demographic. I wouldn't expect to find even 8% white guys in a programming office in Manila.

That's not to ignore the fact that certain sections of populations are, for whatever reason, dramatically underrepresented in companies in various prominent countries, but throwing around random meaningless soundbites like that doesn't help anyone's argument.
This is an interesting point. But the story does raise the issue of "social-engineering" other people to do your bidding using (or as a consequnce of) DMCA notices.

There's still the troubling question as to why ServerBeach felt compelled to take down 1.5 million blogs over a single DMCA notice. There's nothing in the DMCA process that demands an entire "ecosystem" be killed off to eliminate a single "bad apple."

In that context, and perhaps with a re-written headline, the issues raised here are more generally extended a single company, no?
Dem warns FTC against suing Google
We have about 15-20 self-managed servers.
Usernames and Emails
Yes, though in this case the big star weighs nearly 4x as much as the little star, so it's a matter of one star shuffling around in a small ellipse with the smaller star in orbit, rather than a more intimate orbital dance if the stars had been closer in mass.
Good point about the local feature branch. Apparently i'm more stuck in svn-o-world than I realized.
Many and numerous backups, but moving ~2m blogs (there's at least 750k splogs that live in dbases but dont show on our numbers) 'aint that easy!
It looks like one of the things they're counting is clicks, so they could potentially have some pretty large datasets.

I don't know how well Mongo's map-reduce works, but in Postgres, COUNT(star) [1] does not perform well for very large tables (e.g. 100 million rows). You wouldn't want to be doing a COUNT(star) once per minute for each customer that had their dashboard open on a plasma screen.

Of course, there are other solutions to that problem: generate the counts on some more feasible schedule and cache them; have a read replica used for analytics queries; shard by customer and have no large customers.

I don't know whether their scale strictly requires the Redis solution, but in any case there are situations where it's not as simple as "throw it in Postgres and use an aggregate function".

[1] "star" instead of an asterisk to avoid HN thinking I'm trying to write in italics.
There's also the (admittedly more expensive) wonderful Widelux camera and its various Russian knockoff models. Jeff Bridges uses it to wonderful effect to document on-scenes at most of his movies, and then present the staff with a book when shooting closes. http://www.jeffbridges.com/camera.html
As did we, last week when we published it... I think HN reckons we're spam for some reason, it'd be great to have that erroneous judgement fixed up too if anyone's listening!
This is exactly what I'm building http://www.instahero.com to solve. You don't have to build your own infrastructure, just write the relevant bit of code (or select a template) and you have a dashboard.
Definitely not kosher
In the High-Tech Patent Wars, an Inventor's Lament
It's also worth noting that female developers seem much more common in asian countries too.
Me too, but I'd rather go through a program on the LAMP stack instead.
While I agree that we fall well short of the utopian ideal (rather than the farcical interpretation) there are plenty of other bureaucratic barriers to meritocracies as well.

In my experience even the most dedicated, agile people hit organizational limits on complexity or continuity and ultimately have to settle for sub-par network topologies, software stacks, and yes even coworkers.

To the extent that we all understand a meritocracy to refer to a system where things are evaluated on their merits, hopefully all agree that it is a fine ideal even if the historical meaning (like 'begging the question') is different.
> We DO have Asian people. Go and look in Asia.

Middle-aged women, on the other hand. Since the article he's responding to is about sexism, that seems a little more salient.
One trick they used which I know well is booking one leg of the flight to a ghost or hidden city. For example my outbound flight was CLT>PHL>LGA. Not always the case but there are certain routes where it is cheaper to add a 2nd leg on. So in this case I booked that leg but just didn't take the flight from PHL>LGA. Incidentally this trick only works if you are carrying on your bag and you are on a one way flight. If you did this on a round trip on your outbound flight the airline will cancel the rest of your ticket.

What impressed me though is that they found a flight that I could not find on the airline's website. I don't know if it was a code share flight with some other airline but I looked all over USair's site for the flight I bought from some random discount site and could not find it.
>Google is promoting their own services on their own website.

Microsoft was doing the same thing by promoting Internet Explorer within their OS.

>all you have to do is type in bing.com/yahoo.com/duckduckgo.com instead of google.com.

The same way you could type getfirefox.com and chrome.google.com and get those browsers in Windows.

If you want to see the real anti-trust violations, look at the mobile market. All three Apple, Google and Microsoft can be held responsible for violations.
I had this argument with my mum about the word 'meritocracy' a few years ago. She was convinced that it couldn't have originated in a satire, as otherwise politicians wouldn't have adopted it because that would just make them look silly.
The planet is a Neptune-like gas giant, so no civilization there.

The gas creatures beg to differ.
The inflammatory and rambly tone will likely cause a lot of people to miss what I think is actually a point worth considering:

>A meritocracy is a system for centralizing authority in the hands of those who already have it, and ensuring that authority is only distributed to others like them or those who aren’t but are willing to play by their rules.

It's analogous to IQ tests having cultural biases, but people's claiming they measure intelligence objectively. Whoever sets the metric controls the outcome, and whoever is currently in charge sets the metric.

I'm not sure it's actionable information, but it seems worth remembering.
Don't listen to these official Rust developers, the real reason is that they're secretly functional programmers who would rather corrupt you into using Rust's implicit return values rather than the holy return statement.

fn heresy() -> &str { "I am the corruption lurking in your heart" }

And not a semicolon in sight. Disgusting.
What the point of such an headline?

Public outcry?

The agricultural industry needs to find new ways to make food more affordable or more efficiently. Until we find a way to bioengineer proteins from say bacteria, and keep a familiar taste like chicken, we will have to keep using animals.

Finding a way to recycle pig waste to reduce the carbon emission and also create seafood seems like a good idea to me.

What's the alternative? Letting the pig waste pollute natural resources and keeping seafood price up???
The article said they could rebuild the count if they needed to. So something in regards to each click is being stored. If you were using postgres you'd just setup a trigger on that table to increment the click values (stored in another table) as appropriate. No aggregate function needed.
French president pushing homework ban as part of ed reforms
Save Your iOS 6 SHSH Blobs & Submit To Cydia Servers For Future Use
>What would you have them do instead? They're bound under OCILLA and the DMCA in general to act in a certain way. Any other host on the Internet will, if they are interested in remaining in business, act exactly as ServerBeach did.

No, not EVERY host. FusionStorm for example actually read and comprehend DMCA claims, to narrow down their scope. You DO NOT turn off a customer of this size WITHOUT GETTING ON THE PHONE with them FIRST. I hope this will teach ServerBeach a lesson. However, as I said in another comment, the overall landscape here is deteriorating is far beyond ServerBeach's control: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657833

PS. I should also add here that the revenues of a company that pays $70,000 for hosting annually could well be above $2m/yr, and such company could be capable of raising serious legal issues with their hosting company.
A New Home for Hacker Dojo
Look at how many asian computer scientists there are in Seattle and the valley, or even NYC? This just baffles me, because Microsoft (my employer) is very diverse, I would bet that Asians make up a super minority if not a majority of the Redmond office. As for my own office in China, I think we have 1 or 2% Caucasian, maybe less. But to be honest, it doesn't feel that much different from the west coast.
Bizspeaking.com is the platform designed to enable everybody share and promote great products, you can think of it as the Reddit for products.

We are still pretty new but are rising fast. Please drop by and email your suggestions to info[at]bizspeaking.com
I had issues with the way the article made the following argument:

1) If computer programming was a meritocracy, we'd only have the best computer programmers in the field.

2) Most computer programmers are white males.

3) Most people are not white males.

4) Ergo, computer programming is not a meritocracy.

I trust most people saw the logical flaw - the author is assuming that the ability to program is currently evenly distributed. This is not the case. Pick 20 people at random, off the street in Palo Alto, put a gun to their head, and tell them they must solve FizzBuzz, in ANY language. FizzBuzz is famously hard, but it's not that hard; you've got a good chance of getting a few solutions.

Now do the same thing in Bangui (capital and largest city of the Central African Republic). Odds are you'll get a lot fewer. Probably none.

This doesn't tell us anything about whether white males are unusually good at programming; it tells us a lot about the availability of computers and programming training in the 179th (out of 187) poorest country in the world.

In other words, the central argument of the blog rests on conflating ability with opportunities. Because a black female from the CAR is every bit as capable of being a good programmer as a white male from Brooklyn, it follows that black females ARE just as good as white males, and since there are more black females than white males in the world, if a tech company has more white males than black females, it is clear proof of racism and sexism. Except no; in the world we actually live in, the number of people who have the skills, background, and experience to work at, e.g., Google is quite small, and (sadly) mostly male and a mix of white and asian. And yes, that is due to racism, but it isn't itself racist.

But the article seems unable to make that last step, and as such it renders the whole thing rather pointless.
Don't Outsource Your Identity
I'm astonished (in a good way) to see a perspective this radical represented on HN. Considering how the discussions of sexism usually go--i.e., a circle jerk in which we all congratulate ourselves for having slain the dragon of "political correctness"--I can't imagine it will be received well... but in any case, major kudos to the author and submitter.
I suppose there will be the outcry from the Jewish and Muslim factions, as this food is arguably non-kosher and non-halal.

It'll probably culminate in a law suite requiring these products to be labeled as such, instead of slipping them in behind the scenes.
I thought that recycling animal waste into the food chain was one of the suspected causes of CJD.

e.g. http://rense.com/general10/MDSS.HTM

It seems like a bad idea to me... (primarily from the unknowns, not the knowns)
>he's responding

She.
Yup, and as such they should receive an award for "Game Theory" not economics.
But at least today, searching isn't just a matter of a better web crawl, or a better algorithm against web data. A key component -- perhaps the key component -- of providing good search results is being able to incorporate user feedback from previous searches.

Imagine a company with a 100% market share. Your startup wants to complete. It crawls the web, applies the latest in NLP and semantic search technology and produces an index. And, of course, buys a Super Bowl ad. The public is curious; they try your product once. And they discover that it sucks, so they never come back.

You simply can't compete on relevance without the user feedback. But without the volume of users, you'll never get the feedback you need. This is almost certainly why Microsoft made that crazy large offer for Yahoo all those years ago; it was their attempt to acquire volume to improve their relevance.

Consider the "Bing Challenge". I haven't tried it personally, but the feedback on HN has generally been "meh". And yet Bing claims that in blind tests, some better-than-expected percentage of users prefer the Bing results. How can this be? Well, one explanation is that the test has been cooked somehow to prefer Bing. But another explanation is that Bing's existing users are more likely to be "average users", while readers of HN are "techies" who overwhelmingly prefer Google. So Bing may simply be producing results that are preferred by the kind of customers who are already using Bing -- and against search terms which are more likely to be used by the kind of customers who are already using Bing. This is consistent with the hypothesis that user feedback is the primary driver of search quality.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not at Bing. And it's a job, not a meaningful personal relationship.
>>We've been happy customers of their for years, hopefully now we can continue to be.

ServerBeach should be the one concerned about retaining you as a customer, their $75k/yr is at stake. While painful in the short run, you have the option of moving to a more empathetic provider. In any case, I hope this gets resolved quickly for you.
> But social events are not mandatory was what I was after.

Again, it depends on what quality of life you can live with, and how you're able to achieve that quality of life. Most people would be in serious emotional pain if forced to live as hermits, which is what happens to you after you alienate enough of your friends. Depending on your circumstances, Facebook (and the leaving of it) could play a large role in that.
You can have a meritocracy, and still have an unfair demographic skew.

Given a black box in which the inputs are infants and the outputs are people applying for software jobs, if the black-box is unfair, then even if you have a perfect evaluation function in your interviewing process, you will be skewed to the input of the black box.

All that being said, of course we have an imperfect evaluation function. And it is almost certainly imperfect in ways that favor white males. However, given the pool of applicants, I think the bigger factor is the black box.

As an example, the ratio of men to women at my company is similar to the ratio of men to women in my college computer science classes.

If you shift the black box back a bit and you have inputs being babies and outputs being high-school graduates, you will see a huge skew still, and this is part of the reason for affirmative action at the HS level.

I propose that it is easier to give unfair advantages to minorities at the college level than it is to fix the unfair disadvantages before that level. This is why I support affirmative action.
Microsoft was actively creating patches that broke other browsers, and offering discounts to prevent companies like Dell from selling competing operating systems. That's a little more than some advertising.

Just picture it, run Microsoft update Chrome and Firefox break now what?
> The point is that America's global hegemony shouldn't be maintained.

That's purely a matter of opinion, so there's no point in arguing about it. As a non-American, it's pretty obvious why/that you don't want America to be dominant. As an American, it's pretty obvious why I do.

> Quite apart from the jackass immorality of it, maintaining hegemony implies indebting America to the point of economic collapse while generating more and more enemies.

I don't think that's true at all. You don't need to spend billions of dollars on costly wars in order to keep yourself in control. You just have to render other people irrelevant, which is exactly what would happen to the Arabs if the world's dependence on crude oil were to vanish.

> The objective instead should be to maintain the quality of life of American citizens.

Which America's global power contributes to.

> And there are all kinds of countries, from Japan to Switzerland to Norway to Slovenia, none of which attempt world domination, where citizens can live fine.

And they pay the price for it - literally. Energy costs are much higher in Japan, for example. If I were living in Japan, I wouldn't be able to cool my entire house during the summer (or heat it during the winter). I've experienced it in Tokyo myself, and it's a significant degradation of quality of life.

> Many across the spectrum, from Dennis Kucinich to Stephen Walt to Ron Paul, have explained this better than I can here; if you are interested in the geopolitics I suggest you look them up.

I know exactly what they've expressed, and I agree with a lot of it. You're still missing my point, which is that you can achieve global hegemony and domination much more effectively through technological innovation that you can through military might.

> Your points about history are equally preposterous. Just because modern middle eastern states are young it does not mean that middle eastern civilisation is young. By that logic, China and Greece are both younger than the USA.

Once again, the age of the "civilization" is entirely irrelevant to modern geopolitical concerns. The age of the state, on the other hand, can at times demonstrate political stability/power.
I find it hard to fathom how in one sentence, you speak against political parties, and then in the next, you propose proportional representation as a solution.

I am very much in favour of electoral reform, but the most common suggestion is always proportional representation which I cannot support. Under proportional representation, I am no longer voting for my personal representative to government, I am forced to vote explicitly for a party. I lose having anyone directly responsible to me (or my district, anyway), and it becomes impossible for an independent to be elected.

So what are the answers to ensure minority representation? I don't know, but here are some ideas that I think are worth exploring:

1. cutting the number of electoral districts in half, but giving seats to the two top vote getters in each district.

2. preferential voting. It opens the door for third parties. I can give my first preference to a fringe party while still ranking my favoured major party ahead of the alternative. People always say that it is too hard to count, but Australia has managed for nearly a century.

3. Any candidate (within some area) that gets more than 100000 votes (or some appropriate threshold) is elected. This is sort of like #1, but with larger areas and more candidates.

4. Additional direct democracy; technology should open up new possibilities in this area.

These are simply suggestions to think about and should not be considered mutually exclusive.
I'm well aware that I disagree with the founders on this question. After all, it's hardly the only thing I disagree with. Other items include whether women should be allowed to vote and whether people should be able to own other people.

I think the federal government's original setup makes a great deal of sense when you're trying to tie together a loose collection of independent states, but no longer makes much sense today, now that the states have almost completely been subordinated to the federal government.
I haven't smoked in several years after doing so consistently and heavily, and I'm much better off for it. My mind is no longer foggy, slow, and as prone to needless diversions.

So, no.
Better than the US, but not as much as you would think. Diversity hires in my office (in China for an American company) mean female, not even the various ethnic minorities that are a more than a bit underrepresented (I haven't met a Tibetan or Uighur programmer yet, but then we aren't out in West China).
Downloading browsers on dialup internet wasn't fun.
It is not absurd. More blame may go to the service provider. But the actual consequences in the real world matter.

The whole tone from the government is to encourage the rights of those making claims against those taking advantage of their rights to publish. It is not at all surprising to repeatedly hear of draconian actions taken on the basis of DCMA. Exempting the DCMA from criticism based on what is actually happening is not sensible.

DCMA, and the related pressure from the government on related matters, is of course likely to cause people to make decisions to essentially turn of the printing press (the server) when confronted with DCMA notices.

Granted, in this instance I would blame the host for a large portion of the problem.

I also find Pearson's actions ridicules. The consequences of their silly action were very bad. The host shouldn't have made the bad decision, but they wouldn't have been put in that spot without a silly action by Pearson. To me the host deserves most of the blame but DCMA (and all the hype around government's get tough policy for the copyright industry) and Pearson deserve blame also.
There are three parties involved in a DMCA request: presumpted rightholders, hosting organizations, and website owners. The law, as currently written, basically allows the first group to pressure the second into screwing the third.

There is indeed a (rarely exercised) chance for site owners to get back at "malicious rightsholders"; however, there is no real accountability for hosting companies, which are then free to "err on the side of caution" (i.e. quickly pull as many plugs as possible to avoid a costly lawsuit). This should probably be rectified: hosting providers should be held accountable for unwarranted terminations as much as they are held accountable for hosting illegal content.

One could say that "the market will hold them accountable", but looking at the increasing frequency of this sort of takedown shenanigans, I'd say that's a naive view.