skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to Dan, Siracusa will make appearances in the new show called "The Crossover" (http://5by5.tv/crossover), aleit irregularly. All is not lost for Hypercritical listeners.
Hmmm ... I think you're onto something great here but I have another idea to pitch to you. I think it's great to allow the restaurant's customers to purchase meals, but I'm more of a bulk purchaser (yes ... I got the 50 pound bag of popcorn kernels).

At the end of each day, a restaurant has food that is perfectly good but hasn't been sold. What if you find a donor who's willing to pay the restaurant to package the left-over food into meals for delivery the next day.

The restaurant would earn at least a "processing fee" and the food wouldn't end up in the dumpster. I'm sure this idea could be further refined with input from your advising restaurants.

In any case, I hope you end up feeding a lot of people!
I just commented on this(I didn´t see your comment before), I think you are right and he probably forced the whole matter.
Author here. Everyone can make their own choices. My 'Bitch Please' (which was perhaps an over reaction to 'Shit') is in no way addressed to Entrepreneurs, but to Mark Suster, who paints Entrepreneurship as shitty.

About VCs - they don't push anyone, but they enable it.
Facebook Starts Switching All Users to HTTPS Connections
Well, hypercritical is done now too so there goes that idea.
Hey white dudes. I see you're pretty worked up. Non-white dude here to explain.

When you're white, and you're male, technology (as a career field) is pretty accessible. And here's why. You can open up a newspaper or a tech blog or whatever, and many of the major important people in the photos staring back at you basically look like you. And that's nice, because you can be reassured that someone with your background and origins has a place in technology.

If you're not male, or not white, you have to look a bit harder. Sometimes a lot harder, indeed, to find people who both look like you and are doing what you want to be doing professionally.

Now, you'll give me an argument that looks just shouldn't matter. That we should look at people's minds and ideas, not their skin color, in evaluating their contributions.

And while I'm sure such an ideal feels reassuring – it's bunk in this context.

Diversity of "race" is really a proxy for diversity of background, experience and origins. For maximizing the varieties of life story represented.

It's useful to do this because diversity of experience leads to diversity of solutions. Diversity also breeds further diversity, as people with wildly different backgrounds feel more welcome into the fold.

So when we see people helping to lead a community, and some of those people aren't like the majority, that's encouraging. It says that even though a given person is "different" from the norm, they are welcome, they may be successful.

Star Trek is lauded for this reason. Actor Nichelle Nichols was thinking of leaving the show. None other than Dr. Martin Luther King implored her to remain – he believed a black professional woman on television would be a crucial role model for young people. (In her childhood, Whoopi Goldberg is said to have screamed, "Hey Mom! Look! There's a black woman on the TV and she ain't no maid!")

And you may argue, well, why should diversity matter? Let some people do some stuff and other people do others. And I'll tell you that position, on top of being lazy, opens us up to many missed opportunities. In technology, we want as many different sorts of humans as possible all working on our hard problems. If STEM is a country club for white guys, that leaves out a huge chunk of the population who might otherwise make great contributions.

One last thing. When you say stuff like "Wull, shucks, what were they supposed to do? Find a token [non-white-male] to fill the spot?" you make it sound like you don't believe there are any people but white guys with useful things to say on the subject of the conference. Careful with that.
I think a simple estimate of the composition of the "most merit of all candidate speakers" could be to compile statistics of the contributors to the 1000 most popular gems and rails-core, or something similar. There's more heat than light in this controversy, and for a discipline that prioritizes CS techniques as a proxy for skill the flashlight is readily at hand.
@meanJim: You've been hall-banned for almost a year... Just thought you need to know!

> meanJim 7 minutes ago | link [dead] [-] [collapse whole thread]

> He gives a quick little mention "We’ll give a quick but deep hat tip to its ferocious and now deposed champion, Scott Forstall, and leave the discussion of his own exit for a future Monday Note."
> Too much to ask for an x86-64 build?

Yes, based on the fact building Wine on x86-64 Ubuntu requires a chroot environment and using debootstrap to set the arch to i386. Wine implements the Win32 API, which apparently relies intimately on i386 and can't be done using pure x86-64 code.

http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOn64bit
I agree. Nobody said that having a small business that is making enough money to live a happy life is a bad thing. But lots of us are driven by the ambition to build something bigger. That's the driving force. Not some VC.
> 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.

First, I'd consider if it was worth it.

It seems to me that by the time you get to the point where a group has come up with the desire, the plan, and the execution of a terrorist attack, then stopping them at the airport is too late. Sure, it might work, but they could just target something easier.

I'd spend all these resources beefing up our intelligence agencies and go back to pre-9/11 air travel.

That's if the end goal is decreasing deaths from terrorist attacks. Ideally, I'd prefer to live free and unconstrained and accept a slightly higher chance of dying in a terrorist attack.
It means that once you've been in that position, you can't stomach being an underling any more, you're too impertinent and used to making decisions rather than following them. That's my take on it at least.
I find it amusing that "but he's an artist" is being said as though it might possibly influence the powers that be. The TSA, police, judges, etc. have little tolerance for anything that doesn't conform to the ordinary and expected - including art. In earlier times in the USA anyone who questioned the political-economic system was accused of being Communist; excuses didn't work then either. With authoritarianism and polarization now on the rise in the USA, things are even worse. "Different"="bad".
Given the amount of prep he does for each show I imagine it's very time-consuming, so if that's the reason it's understandable why he wants to stop. However, it's not as though he has to either podcast every week or not at all - he could release every other week or once a month or something, and I for one would rather have that than nothing at all.
FOSSa 2012 Open Source Conference
> I hope the PPA doesn't contain MSFT code and instead downloads it on first launch from MSFT servers!

It downloads both a 32-bit Firefox for Windows and the Silverlight plugin. (The Firefox is entirely contained in its own little bottle and can't conflict with anything else.)
What nonsense. It is not a violation of some sort of "terms of use" equivalent to use a power-drill to open a safe you stole. The drill is for whatever you want to use it for, illegal uses are covered by laws that are actually about those illegal acts themselves.

What I find amusing though is people who get bent out of shape by these sorts of clauses. Certainly "evil" people and criminals wouldn't care about these clauses, the only people that are bothered are people like the Debian project. The license is therefore effectively a license that only gives you permission to use the tool if you don't particularly take the license seriously. It is a license that forbids (rather than commercial use) blowhard use (probably commercial use as well, because of that). Brilliant that.

Reminds me of the excellent "Chicken Dance License".
Except, we know that the TSA does not work.

The TSA has not actively stopped any terrorist attacks, we know this. More so, we know that the TSA has failed to stop several terrorist attacks which have only been foiled through other means. The shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the Christmas Day Detroit attack. The TSA was powerless to stop these attacks. Instead, what has worked has been police work (both in the US and abroad) and passenger vigilance. It's possible that the TSA has deterred some attacks, but given how easy it is to get a bomb on an airplane despite the TSA it raises the question of whether it's worth the expense, the hassle, and the degradation of our civil liberties.
The problem I foresee is that, by its very nature, The Crossover is intended to have on multiple hosts from other shows, and as such it's likely that he would have to share the episode with people other than Dan. While this could work for some things, I don't think it would work as well for subjects where he has deep, complex opinions or observations that he needs to impart without interruption. Still, I'll take what I can get.
You all cry foul when tsa does their job. Out in the civilian world you would never understand why this man was stopped but in the military world i would yave done the exact same thing. You only cry foul when nothing happens but when thousands of people die you point the finger and say why didnt we look at this. This guy had hallowed shoes a watch witch could use as a time bomb and clothes to apply medical treatment if he got shot. Why didnt the tsa stop this guy and arrest him than do a back ground check. The tsa did a good job and found someone oddly suspicious. Get out of your security blanket and realise peiole want you dead and they will disguise themselves in any way possible to kill you. They will also do dry runs to see if tsa is doing their job before they bring in real explosives. Liberties have to be sacrificed at times in order to prevent your children and loved ones from dying it is impossible to protect with pure one hundred percent freedom of movement with zero checks and balances. This guy would red flag every single checkpoint in a military zone and guess what they know military checks this so instead they are making their way into the civilian world coming for your family, friends and loved ones. Eceryone will stop crying foul when their loved ones die
Sorry, I'm not in a position to disclose that.

As the article already relates, it is not my story to tell anyway and the person it is about is still not in a position where they are free from potential fall-out if their identity were public knowledge.

There is no guarantee that this will ever be the case, but if and when she decides to go public is up to her, definitely not up to me or anybody else.
Firefox OS (Boot 2 Gecko) Simulator - Runs on Windows, Mac and Linux
How racist of you.
2. I was thinking in particular about this particular paragraph from the OP:

"Early on in my first company I had an employee ask if it was a good time to buy a home. We had less than 6 months’ cash in the bank. I was pretty sure we were going to raise another round of capital. But not sure, sure. I mean you never know if your investors are REALLY going to keep backing you. And you can’t go around telling all of your employees your deepest insecurities about it or you’ll soon have no more of said employees."

He never actually completes the thought (what did he actually tell the guy?), but this isn't some vague insecurity we're talking about. If the runway ends in 6 months without more funding, you owe it to your employees to be honest about it. It sounds to me like he witheld the information because he was worried his employees would leave if he didn't.

3. I think there's a lot of substance and humility in what you've said and I appreciate that. What I meant is more that the OP just smacks of self-congratulations. "Look at me. Look at all this bullshit I put up with. Be like me... if you dare."

x. I think it makes him sound childish rather than intense.
Yeah, it's a word used to put down females. Whereas I couldn't care less about "shit." Please edit; flagged until edited.
Browsing the web on an iPad is much better than on a PC, especially when on bed.
Firefox OS: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefoxos/

Announcement for simulator: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/announcing-the-prototype-f...

Github repo for simulator: https://github.com/mozilla/r2d2b2g
overtaking the biggest mobile OS

You're mixing up evidence here. Android has the largest share of mobile units, but the comparison being made is web traffic. Android's share of mobile web traffic share is not the largest, being only a third that of iOS. In other words: you're overlooking most mobile web traffic to reach your conclusion.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....
I interpreted angersock's question to be about diversity in general, and not specifically gender diversity.

For me, this is more of an observed relationship (with an overly-small sample size) than any kind of well-formed theory. Diversity of background seems to be correlated with diversity of ideas, which in turn seems to be correlated with fascinating discussions.
4 million is nothing considering windows market share. They beat mountain lion by 1 million and mountain lion is a minor upgrade compared to windows 8. Compare it to windows 7 and windows 8 is a big loser.

"In July 2009, in only eight hours, pre-orders of Windows 7 at amazon.co.uk surpassed the demand which Windows Vista had had in its first 17 weeks.[72] It became the highest-grossing pre-order in Amazon's history, surpassing sales of the previous record holder, the seventh Harry Potter book.[73] After 36 hours, 64-bit versions of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions sold out in Japan.[74] Two weeks after its release its market share had surpassed that of Snow Leopard, released two months previously as the most recent update to Apple's Mac OS X operating system.[75][76] "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mountain_Lion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7

Personally I tried Windows 8 when I was tasked to upgrade all the customer service machines at my company. So terrible we ended up switching over to Apple machines. Would have went Chromebooks but got vetoed since some employees need MS Office. Only our finance people are on PCs now because they don't want to relearn the Excel hotkeys.
Exactly. We can't promise you dreams, but we can keep you safe from nightmares. Of course, we need some nightmares for that.

For details, see the BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares (The Rise of the Politics of Fear)" by Adam Curtis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGo1DqmfHjY
>the PC platform had only succeeded because IBM opened it up to clones

It didn't, the team behind Project Chess used off-the-shelf parts to cut down on costs and dev times so the end product was also easier to reverse engineer.

A company did just that and made a BIOS that didn't infringe on IBM patents. Couple that with an Intel processor and a DOS copy you could buy fair and square from Microsoft and you got a Clone just as good as an official IBM PC.

On Mac clones, it wasn't a bad idea, just too little too late: by the time Apple decided to go ahead with OEMs the Mac's marketshare was a shadow of its former self and Apple was already in trouble. Windows had become the standard, nuff said.
"the problem is that most people don't like browsing the internet on a phone or even a tablet"

The analytics on every site I've had access to in the past couple years suggest otherwise. iPad web traffic has been steadily rising and accounts for a significant portion of traffic on some sites. I've seen as high as 30+% on sites that haven't even been optimized for tablets yet.
Even with "beta" tools, this is already better than Android SDK.
Triumph of His Will
Wow, impressive! I wish I had the resources to do cool stuff like this in High School. I don't think I knew anything beyond the structure of cells and some really simple compounds back in 9th grade.
> I agree with his sentiment of "integrate the tools more tightly." In practice, though, that's pretty hard to do in a way that still lets third parties integrate easily into the IDE (I guess it's fine for Apple) because it results in very complicated APIs both in terms of their interfaces and semantics.

You can have IDE's that don't have quite this problem in environments like Smalltalk. Since you can see all of the source code, and easily tweak and debug the whole system, every part of the system is your API. Unfortunately, this can also result in hard to manage dependencies when people publish extensions.

The way to have the best of both worlds, is to have an environment as described above, then also have a community process that promotes innovative extensions and rewrites them into more conventional APIs. This way, such APIs respond to actual need and no genius system designer has to foresee all the ways people will want to extend a system in the future.
Oh, totally. But I think those are separate issues.

The curious thing is it was the first serious attempt to have what I'd call a 'full scale' Ruby conference in England (other events like Ruby Manor do a great job but are unique experiences or unconference type events). Scotland Ruby Conference has done pretty well, but it's very odd that England (and London, in particularly) hasn't had any success with a large Ruby event given the huge market.
You've got to look at four probabilities:
X, probability someone wears a geeky watch with exposed toggles and electronics;
Y, probability someone wears military-style clothing;
Z, probability someone wears oversized shoes;
W, probability someone is a terrorist.

I'm betting X * Y * Z is still much larger than W.
Response to edit:

> you argue a false dichotomy that has nothing to do with my comment

I'm not really sure what dichotomy you think I'm arguing. I'm not saying we can only do one of (a) make people safer and (b) make people feel safer, I'm saying that only one of those is a good use of public resources.

> Besides, that would be similar to asking the public about the next chess move for Kasparov; most people are not qualified to answer.

If you're asking people what should be done to make them safer, that is outside their area of expertise, and I'm happy with not asking them about that (they'd probably answer stupid things like a Transport Security Administration or more scanners, or fewer liquids on planes or racially segregated flights, with only English being allowed to be spoken).

If on the other hand the question is 'how much are you prepared to pay to feel safer (while not actually being safer)', that is definitely within the competence (and right) of the public to decide.

To decide that people's money should be spent 'for their own good' on making them feeling safer and not even being prepared to ask them if that is true is arrogant, patronising and the opposite of safeguarding freedom.
Tellers will simply check the math on the deposit slip, make sure the checks are endorsed, they use a scanner to actually process the checks.

Check with your bank. Many have policies designed to increase revenue and do things like charge you if you use teller more than n times per month.

Why are you only depositing once per month (that is what it sounds like you are doing)?

Are you in the USA?
Here's my question: How many of the top 10 Ruby speakers in the UK are white males? What about the top 20? Top 50?
44 million attempts to hack Israeli sites but only one successful breach
Sorry about that. I'm not a native english speaker. To my ear, 'Shit' and 'Bitch' has about the same potential offense.
Cheer up. It's only depressing for idealists.
There is http://rublacklist.net/about, a site dedicated to workarounds of the blacklist. The Russian Pirate Party was involved in that project :) They have a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/RuBlackList
"monochromatic"? Har har.
At the same time you should not be penalized for actively cleaning cruft from the URL before posting.

Had the exact same thing happen to me, took the time to clean up the URL, next submission a few minutes later got approved and you could see both links to the article next to each other under new.
How To Package Your Python Code
It's already in the cost of our ticket, one of many surcharges.
Twinter, the Twitter hashtag printer #hpmprinter on a raspberry pi
Just 1 mil spent on IT for the most important career move in his life. Considering 510 people were involved ($1960 per person per 6 months, on average), you can only imagine the quality of work they delivered.
Because they evidently were unable to make an unconscious effort?

This is why I (sadly) consider myself a feminist -- we're still far away from equal opportunity -- where making an effort to overcome cultural bias in the form of sexism isn't needed. The number of commenters here and on the linked article that assume that a selection that includes only white males, clearly must be the correct one filled with all the most qualified speakers from England illustrates this point.

I'm not really supporting the idea of shutting down the conference over this -- I do see why someone might have raised the issue on Twitter. I don't quite see how it could (reasonably) go from there to cancellation of the event.

This sounds a lot like a tempest in a teapot to me -- the real issue seems to be that their sponsors were spineless twats. But then again, that seems to be what you get for trusting the invisible hand to help you get things done.
I wouldn't want to go up against Eliezer Yudkowsky casually, but here goes: the guy is basically correct. (Although I also didn't follow his statement that Bayes Theorem != Bayes Rule.)

You can see my essay here, where I express a similar view: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-Bayesian...

Confidence intervals and credibility intervals are both mathematical objects that have well-specified (and different) properties. Confidence intervals are a worst-case technique and posterior probabilities are a sort of average-case technique. It's not "wrong" to say that the worst-case runtime of QuickSort is O(n^2) and it's not wrong to say that, given a uniform probability distribution over inputs, the expected runtime is O(n log n).

Which statement is useful to make depends on your requirements. They're both true.

In my "100 independent robots" example, for instance, the credibility interval or posterior probability produces answers that are not helpful for the application (and not particularly intuitive either -- the 70% credibility interval is "wrong" 80% of the time, given a certain value of the parameter). This can be a question of engineering and there's no need to be dogmatic about it.

It is perverse and incorrect to say that "Only frequentists think in terms of toolboxes"! All mathematicians and engineers have access to the whole world of theorems and algorithms and techniques, all of them true, or meeting their specifications. No mathematician would argue that the Chinese remainder theorem is wrong because they are a Galois theorist! And no practitioner of Bayesian methods should argue that confidence intervals that meet their worst-case coverage guarantee are "wrong" because the person uses posterior probabilities.

(My quibble here is with dogmatism, not with Bayesians, because the dogmatic frequentists are just as bad. They just don't hang out on Hacker News.)
Very true. I'll miss the Siracusian-length rants.
N.B. - For anyone wanting to look at their site's Win 8 traffic stats in Google Analytics, it's being listed as NT. The user agent substring is "Windows NT 6.2".