skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well somebody had to be the first, though? And if it is just about seeing famous people in the media, why not get over yourself and admire somebody who has a different race or gender than you and follow in their steps?

I suppose it is more likely to be exposed to it if you are in the right neighborhood, although I don't want to invoke reverse stereotypes? Like I could say "in other neighborhoods people would perhaps be more likely to play basketball than to code", but that seems stupid and also racist?

Although I wonder about Playstation reach across communities?

At least white girls would seem to have the same odds for being friends with a white male nerd as other white boys, though? So perhaps they were much less likely to admire the nerd, which again was sort of the point I was making, I guess.

Don't know much about interracial friendships, where I grew up (Europe) there were not many non-white people when I was young.

Again, I am not denying that there might be statistical reasons why some people are more likely to be exposed to computers than others. From that it is a far step to call for affirmative action, though, because over time, those uneven starting points should fade away - at least when we talk about coding.

Also, it is nice to worry about, but I have to ask, why should I personally (as an example) have to worry about some kid somewhere else getting into programming? What if I am busy enough with my own problems? I think it is great that some people care about such things and take steps (establish special courses, conferences, advertisements, sponsorships and what not), but I don't think it should be expected from everyone.
Security theater gone mad.
original: http://abcnews.go.com/International/taliban-accidentally-rev...
Absolutely! It's not to say that things can never change for the better, it's just to say that we just can't have everything we want and if we do get everything we want it'll most likely come at the expense of someone else not getting something they want. That's the pragmatism I'm talking about in this context.

I'm no idealist but I have to admit that their naive, pie in the sky notions are what makes the world a better place. They never work out, but they do take us a bit of they way there. Repeat enough times and you end up with something real special.
You bring up good points as well, although I would disagree with one of your main assumptions:

"so there's no lack of inspiration" --> Really, can you point to the numbers?
The only issue I have with using an iPod touch is that the camera isn't as nice so if you want to do anything with like barcodes or such you are SOL
The indicated 200 euro for the Vivaldi is nearly twice that of Android tablets with the same specs and a range of Linux ports available...
> Everyone who criticizes the TSA (and with reason) should also think about what they would do if they were given the task of trying to prevent Black Swan events with minimal disruption to the 99.9999 percent of normal travelers.

I'm deeply annoyed by your implication that we haven't. I'm not aware of any TSA critic who hasn't thought of a different approach that they'd prefer to see. Sometimes that preferred approach is "cut way back on airport security and let airplanes get blown up sometimes", which is still a completely valid opinion.

You're absolutely right that it's a hard problem. However, the problem can trivially be solved better than the TSA is solving it. There's a big difference between a problem that's hard to solve extremely well (as this is) and a problem that's hard to solve better than it's currently being solved (which this is not, at least not in the US).

As an analogy, it's a hard problem to achieve six-nines reliability with a network service, but we can still observe that holding nightly chants outside the datacenter to appeal to the gods of uptime for their blessing is a bad approach.

Bruce Schneier has observed that only two things have been done to improve air travel security since 9/11: locking and reinforcing cockpit doors, and convincing the passengers to fight back against hijackers. I agree with him completely. None of the other measures taken have helped at all.

I can easily do better than the TSA. Easily. For example, ditch the liquid restrictions. Done. We're no less safe than before, and a huge hassle and cost has been removed. Improvement!

For a more comprehensive approach, you'd probably want to cut down on the invasive screening of every passenger. Ditch the body scanners, which provide very little benefit but huge costs. Go back to the metal detectors and regular X-ray machines for baggage. Then take the money you save from this and put it into behavioral profiling, to detect nefarious people rather than nefarious items, and intelligence, to find terrorists before they get anywhere near the airport.
I don't have a replacement model, because I'm not a VC, just a guy with one startup experience under my belt. My intuition and meagre experience tell me that a less competitive, more guided atmosphere would be better, with more emphasis on slow growth businesses rather than "the next ..." Even PG has said that the whole business is structured to find the one out of hundred that brings thousandfold returns, in order to finance all the gambling with the other 99. What about a system that funded more broadly, looking for more modest returns and with clearer goals for the entrepeneurs?

There's a strong "death or glory" ethic that pervades startup culture, that I think chases out more modest businesses, to all our detriment. Look at the back-and-forth here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799163. Ryan Carson writes about going it alone, and PG pushes back with data from the pressure cooker side that co-founders are empirically necessary; Carson, though, was writing just about how a more modest business plan can be successfully executed by a single founder.
Racism and Sexism are not bad because they involve race and/or sex. They are bad because they imply that you are judging a person before first knowing that person well enough to pass sound judgment.

The real lesson here is that the internet is an echo chamber for context free judgments.
Android SDK is horrible even with the recent updates.

You are far better off running Android in VirtualBox. It's small, really fast, and works like it should.

See: http://androvm.org/blog/
Anatomy of a Python Package
Taking a quick look through this it looks pretty good! I find that beginners have tons of trouble navigating the slightly tricky waters that is packaging in Python, so more resources is great.

One thing I think is missing is to point out not to use setuptools, but to use the less broken, more maintained, drop in replacement distribute (http://guide.python-distribute.org/). That website also has some further information on the packaging ecosystem that's worth flipping through.
Do you honestly think one of the largest players in this market (and arguably, the smartest) would release a tablet that's heavier, hotter, and with worse battery life than an Ultrabook?

How exactly do you figure that Microsoft is one of the largest players in the tablet market? PC market, yes, but they're a late new comer to the modern tablet world.

Now as far as asking whether they would release a tablet that runs hot and has poor battery life -- I don't know, would they release a tablet that suffers from 5+ second delays while typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTtf_BgFS08 ?
Bitey, the fake serial killer? Super-Omar jumping out of the window? "The Dickensian aspect"?

The middle seasons of The Wire were about the city of Baltimore. The first season was an excellent long-form procedural.

By the last season, Simon seems intent on retrofitting a structure of "each season is about one failed institution" --- the police, the working class, then politics, then schools. For the last season, Simon chose the news media, a subject dear to his heart. But whether newspapers just make for boring TV (see _The Newsroom_ for more evidence) or the story arcs from the last seasons just brought too much baggage, the season was unbalanced and disconnected. Each season involved some degree of suspension of disbelief, but by the last season The Wire was trying to do so much that it was impossible to ignore how silly the whole serial killer plot really was.
Model for predicting number of Youtube views of Gangnam Style
For me personally (working at a ruby startup in Toronto), this is the breakdown of people currently working in dev

1 white female
3 chinese canadian males
1 japanese canadian male
1 korean male
1 russian male (guess he counts as white)
3 white males
1 cuban male

We have 5 founders, only one is white, all are male. 2 are on the dev team, one is chinese (CTO), the other white

We have interviewed many, many people in the time I have been at the company, to my knowledge only two have been female, one of whom we hired.

This is normal in my experience with good shops. If I walk in the door, and it is wall to wall white guys, you are going to have a much harder time selling me on your company. This is regional, anecdotal, etc. I am not saying there is no problem, obviously there is one if we have only ever had 2 women try to get jobs at our company. But here at least, it isn't backroom racism. My guess it has a lot more to do with the boys club feel at pretty much all engineering faculties in north american universities.
Woah. Awesome story but was kinda disappointed with the ending, just leads to more riddles & codes.
> "The fact is that he was arrested for having a wierd [sic] outfit."

It's not possible to know that yet. It may never be possible, if the TSA withholds certain information, or that information never becomes part of the public record.
You might have very atypical media use. I fit podcasts in by replacing other media use.

I was just looking at media use data in Germany† and people spend tons of time using different media: 242 minutes of TV (that’s four hours!), 191 minutes of radio, 83 minutes on the Internet, 23 minutes reading newspapers, 31 minutes listening to audio recordings, 22 minutes reading books and 6 minutes reading magazines. That’s minutes per day (numbers from 2012, Van Eimeren, Frees 2012).

Those who are younger (14–29) use media a bit less – but still quite a lot: 138 minutes TV, 146 minutes radio, 150 minutes Internet, 10 minutes newspapers, 72 minutes audio recordings, 30 minutes books and 4 minutes magazines.

So if people just forgo a little bit of TV use they will easily be able to fit in a weekly 1.5 hour podcast. If you look at the time when people use different media (radio use peaks in the morning at 7, probably when people are in the bathroom or on the way to work, TV use massively peaks around 8 in the evening, Internet use is pretty evenly spread throughout the day) you can also see that radio use is also a prime candidate for replacement by podcasts.

By the way, the data I was looking at can tell you very little about how people use podcasts, because in the general population very few do. Only two percent use audio podcasts at least once weekly.

—

† I’m sorry, but I’m too lazy to look up numbers for the US right now. The paper with the data from Germany is the one I have handy. As far as I remember the details of US media use are different but they are broadly similar (as would be expected for two similarly developed countries).

—

Source: Van Eimeren, Birgit; Frees, Beate (2012): 76 Prozent der Deutschen online – neue Nutzungssituationen durch mobile Endgeräte. In: Media Perspektiven 7–8/2012 (p. 362–379).
Yea thats what I am getting at, but I also feel that when your an entrepreneur you have an attitude that may not be in line with a more corporate setting.
> Well somebody had to be the first, though? And if it is just about seeing famous people in the media, why not get over yourself and admire somebody who has a different race or gender than you and follow in their steps?

Because not being part of the majority can make it feel as though you do not belong in a given career or sphere of human endeavor. Is that really so hard to grasp?
Paranoid passengers dogpile people who aren't terrorists the moment they do anything even vaguely unusual. Now imagine what would happen if this guy actually got on the flight. How long would it be before they turned the plane around?

The TSA seems to be redundant.
When can I buy a phone using this?
You don't need to be an expert to know that there's more to the situation than:

On the internet, nobody even knows your skin color.

I agree with a lot of your points (Google's first search result wasn't the best study I guess :), but I don't think you've spent enough time researching the area to make broad statements:

But I think there are plenty of ways around it, that are open to everyone.

Is that really true? I'm essentially trying to drive the same point home as anu_gupta.
>Last point: look, if a life of flying around the country and working long hours is your idea of a tortured life only a special breed of men known as "entrepreneurs" can bear, then you need to pull your head out of your ass. That life is stressful and that it takes hard work to get ahead are universal truths. The rest of us aren't just coasting along in a risk-free world.

What I find especially amusing is that it seems to be the entrepreneurs that are doing it with other people's money that complain so much about stress. the "crazy people" that do it with our own money generally don't go in for that kind of chest pounding.

The real problem here, I think, isn't the chest pounding, but the fact that they really believe that depriving themselves of sleep is somehow helping the company, and that sometimes they actually do it.

You can argue all day about the optimal number of work hours, and maybe have a point that some people can effectively work more than the 35-40 hours a week of "real work" that I advocate.

But sleep? Study after study has shown that shorting yourself on sleep does horrible things to your performance, no matter how you measure performance. If your performance really is critical to the performance of the company? the most important thing for you to do is to get adequate sleep each and every night.
"If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study. I’d become expert at Google Scholar. I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes and CliffsNotes to help me understand books. I’d watch relevant teachings on Academic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy. (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.) I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia to help me with my studies."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-...
This is a fine example of what hacking is about.

Thank you for publishing this.
Entrepreneurshit. The Truth About Building Starutps
> What does it take for you guys to agree that someone shouldn't get on a plane, a backpack full of c4!?

Are you seriously satirizing the idea that the line should be drawn at items that are actually dangerous?
There is an old Russian joke about this:

Professors of a music school gather and try to figure out who to enroll ethnicity-wise.
One of them says they should accept jews for every opening because they make perfect violinists.
Another one tells they should accept russians only because it's a russian state after all.
Then someone offers to to accept them evenly: five jews, five russians. But then there is an argument that jews only make up ten percent of citisens and therefore for nine russians they should accept one jew.

Finally, some rogue professor blames them all for being racists. What would you do!? They ask. Who to accept?

"We should accept those who are the best at playing violin!"

The same thing applies here, plus innocence until proven guilty. As long there are no facts that those speakers were selected by foul play, they should not cancel the conference. Anything else is racist.

Regarding sponsors who pulled support: who do you think gave them this idea? I have an answer you won't like.
Looks great, but just a quick one: don't charge $5 for premium product, it just doesn't like premium. Either give all features for free for launch period or charge more.
They normally have that posted somewhere, but it varies greatly from airport to airport.
it's easy to sling mud, and I'm fighting my knee jerk reaction to sling some back but I wonder if Josh was provoked into that comment, otherwise it seems unnecessarily aggressive....especially given that the ruby community is probably poorer for not having the conference at all.....nose, face, spite etc.
It appears to me like you're taking the total outsource IT spending and dividing it by the total number of people on the Romney campaign payroll. Of course that yields a non-sensical answer.
Thanks! I knew of this book, but for some reason, I never decided to take a look at it. My current main thought is to start with Big Nerd Ranch's Objective-C Programming book, and then to me onto this iOS-Programming book. Does that seem like a solid plan?
Michael Schwern: “Who else are we driving away? What ideas are we losing?”
Are you sure it's a good idea to use this name, when an established company like Storify exists?

I like your project, but if this catches on, it's better to change the name sooner rather than later.
Another reason to run sshd on a different port is that sometimes tcp/22 (indeed sometimes all tcp ports except 53, 80 and 443) are firewalled off. I have experienced this with free wifi on a few occasions. Running sshd on port 443 usually makes it possible to connect in this situation.
Looks like this page is from 2007 and the latest version of the debugger works with Java 1.5.
Absolutely. His intent was to provoke "in the name of art" and it cost him. Idiots like this just help to validate the roles these TSA take up. A slap on the wrist and a 'go away now' wouldn't stop other idiots from attempting the same thing.

At least they caught the guy - imagine how he'd try to paint the TSA as useless if he was allowed on through.

You poke the bear, you get the horns.
That's just utter nonsense.

(You haven't even defined what you mean by "working" and "not working." But let's assume you mean that certain groups have an advantage in society.)

I'm a white male. I'm not particularly attractive. I am not able to exhibit certain class indicators. I am not very sociable or "cool." And I don't agree with mainstream ideology. Also, I don't have many social connections.

All of these are a pretty big disadvantage compared to, say, a black person with relevant social connections, or a handsome and suave white male, or an attractive female.

But at the end of the day, meritocracy still rules, and if you're good enough, you can get by just fine on merit.

That's just reality, and it "works" just fine.

And if there is any correction I want to advocate for publicly, it's certainly towards merit and away from any other factor. Any other factor ought to be irrelevant and is just going to change the balance of unfairness rather than improve the situation.

And, fortunately, in a free country (and even a semi-free country like the USA), merit is an absolutey overwhelming advantage.

That doesn't mean reality is fair. It's not. It will never be. Forget "fair." What we want is for things to be just.

And when you start discriminating based on race or gender, for any reason, you stop being just.
You could probably use 'container commands' to start/stop worker processes after each deployment. I'm only reading the Elastic Beanstalk docs for the first time, so I haven't tried it myself - but it looks like it could be the right solution:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg...
Why is it less interesting, why does skin color matter? Would be it be less interesting if all speakers wore plain white t-shirts too? Why do you care at all about anything other than the content/experience?
Hi, thanks for the feedback.

In fact, the free account has all the features of premium, except the possibility to directly upload photos which we haven't implemented yet.

Just trying the waters here with a concept that we wanted to get out ASAP, to see what people think of this kind of story visualization :-)

We definitely need to spend more time with the pricing.
Their argument was that there were only white guys available from the list of popular ruby presenters. I'm saying they may not have tried very hard to reach out if they didn't even ask a closeby popular presenter (yet they asked a ton of white guys from the US). There were others that also weren't approached - I mentioned Keavy specifically because she spoke about it publicly.
There's some text up on the main http://2013.britruby.com/ - among other things it says:

"We at Brit Ruby were well aware of this fundamental and important issue. This was one of the reasons why we encouraged everyone to submit a speaker proposal. Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these issues. Instead the community should have worked together and allowed us to bring these issues to light at the conference. How can the community address these issues if every time someone tries they are shot down and accused of such awful things? "

I really feel for the organisers. Organising conferences is a bloody hard and often thankless task. But when you're aware of the problems with sex and technology conferences - and when their are numerous examples of previous similar shit storms - doesn't putting out a male-only speaker list just seem a tad... sub-optimal?

In the last year or so I've been to about a dozen technical conferences and events in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. The only ones that didn't have female speakers were the ones with only 1-3 speakers. I can tell by the quality of the female speakers I did see that they were not chosen for their sex.

Great female speakers are out there. You don't have to pick by gender quota.

I helped organise the UX stage of Agile 2012. We had a 50/50 male/female speaker split on that stage with zero effort on my part - apart from rabidly pursuing good speakers - some of which were female (the selection process was briefly discussed in another thread for those who might be interested http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993049). Plenty of female speakers on the other stages too.

At the moment I'm organising a UK conference for early next year (http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-uk-2013...) and the survey has already produced some great possible speakers of both sexes, and a volunteer team of one man and four women.

Wearing my conference organiser hat: If my CFPs and my personal network had only produced a list of male speakers I'd be going "Fuck. I've messed up somewhere." because I see great female speakers every time I go to any major conference.

I'd be reaching out to folk like http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/, or http://www.womenwhotech.com/. I'd be looking to how other folk got more great women speakers at their conferences like http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speake....

Because if I didn't have some really excellent female speakers in my bucket list of possible speakers I'd take it as evidence that my network for finding good speakers is not as effective as it should be.