skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question that needs answering is not how they should have gone about selecting a diverse group of speakers, but if they should have. What's the value of diversity on a technical panel?

I'm not saying that diversity has no value, or that the speakers were the best possible speakers who just happened to be white men. I'm saying that, if you're going to claim that the speakers should be diverse, you need to justify that claim. Is it better to have diversity in speakers than the most technical accumen, or is it your argument that the best group of speakers will likely be diverse? What about when they're not? Why is diversity important?

Now, for what it's worth, I believe the best group of speakers probably would be diverse, but only by virtue of the racial and gender composition of the set of experts, not because diversity itself has any significant value in this case. That the selected speakers were white men may be evidence of a suboptimal selection process, or it may be simply a statistical anomaly. What it isn't, is a problem in its own right.
I've learned to get sleep even (especially?) in such tense situations, but every morning my first though was of this, and my last every evening...

I think part of our luck was that the more people are involved, the harder it is for corruption to succeed. India, from what I can tell, is a very corrupt society, with bribes changing hands all the time. If you can get the job done with just the police being bribed, that might cost you X. If you need to bribe the judiciary too, and that includes judges, lawyers, a reputable firm, etc... the costs would quickly mount. And, of course, the lawyers themselves are paid (and not cheaply).

Basically, one lesson from this is that if you are facing a corrupt system, enlarging the case, dragging more people, more different groups into it, makes it harder for the corruption to have its effect.
Can pure mathematics harness citizen science?
Users reporting iMessages down
Fujifilm will introduce a 1TB optical disc in 2015
> Although, one big minus that I see about this - tricking people,

Yes, that's a darned big minus. Intentionally deceiving potential customers is a serious minus indeed.

> and then actually asking them to wait

"Wait"?? You'd be the guy I tried to buy from, and then found out was a liar. I wouldn't "wait"; I'd never do business with you again.

Seriously, drop this idea like a hot potato.
Cocos2d game engine for HTML5
Yeah, this is slightly unfortunate. We became kind of stuck wit the name searching - we want to show that we are not just another photo gallery and have the story or something that describes the nature of story extraction/visualization in there. And it is hard to find any domain in this space these days.

Any ideas? :p
Yep, I'm more or less speaking from the viewpoint of the time. The received wisdom was that it was IBM's deliberate decision to allow clones that made the difference; nowadays we can see that this was only part of the story, but that original belief coloured how people saw things.

On the other hand, though, perhaps the decision to use off-the-shelf parts was also part of the wider clone-friendly decision process. So it's not an either/or, even in hindsight.
I occasionally use the omniscient debugger to debug some particularly tricky bugs, and it's always proved quite useful.

There is also a more modern-looking, commercial implementation of the same concept, but I've never used it: http://www.chrononsystems.com/
Any ideas posted here will be taken by some asshole. I say that from experience. :)
The question is: by the time they get version 2 out, will the rest of the industry have moved on?

If they miss an inflection point, they could be in deep trouble.
Airlines have also historically been the beneficiary of government subsidies and patronage, which could be withdrawn.

While I agree that they'll be reluctant to raise prices, the damage of being represented as the airline that refused to "contribute to public safety" would be worse.
I am the person of interest in this case.

I would like to thank Jacques and Daniel for everything they've done for me. They've saved me, a complete stranger, more times than I can count.
Oh yeah, is actually possible that they voluntarily omitted crucial information in their report that would make them look as the heroes they really are. /s
Is it your view that one may not express one's view without substantiating it? Because that is the premise implied by your remark, and -- guess what? -- it's an absolute statement you've failed to provide any support or reasoning for, which would make you a hypocrite. So perhaps you should clarify.
Racism and classism are often interlinked, but they are both struggles in their own right.
Well, that's what he did cause. So now he is an organiser of one conference and the ruiner (not sure English has this word) of another one.

Maybe he didn't mean to. But maybe guys at the British conference didn't mean anything either.
I was thinking about switching my sites to https-only also, because https-only is a good thing in general, but after doing some research it seems that it's unclear what will happen in terms of Google SEO. There's even a video on Youtube from Matt Cutts addressing that specific question from July or so, and his answer is basically something like, "I don't know for sure, but it I don't see why it would make a difference."

What would be helpful is some sort Google-recognized meta tag that says, "this site is https only, please index it as such." 301 redirects might work in theory, but theory isn't good enough when your business relies on how it appears in Google's results. Even a temporary demotion could mean lots of money and confidence lost.
Ask HN: How did Treehouse get 5M in funding without wanting an "Exit"?
As mentioned by user marcamillion in the PG/Ryan Carson brouhaha - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4800236, Treehouse has received 5M in VC funding, and yet Ryan Carson claims he has no interest in IPOing, and seems inclined to grow the company over the long term rather than having some other liquidity event.

As a practical matter, how would this work? My impression is that VCs are never in the dividends business.

Wouldn't there have to be a fair amount of upfront and unique legal legwork to put something like this in place, in order to not only compensate the VCs, but also to attract quality employees in lieu of stock options? Would the investors and employees be guaranteed a certain percentage of any money Carson takes out of Treehouse? Do VCs who would accept this kind of deal even exist?

I'm pretty much allergic to the idea of answering to a board, shareholders, and analysts myself. 37 Signals seems to have an interesting idea about how to compensate employees in the unlikely case of an unexpected liquidity event, but some sort of structure that would allow profit sharing, without requiring a path to IPO or acquisition, would be great:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2987-an-alternative-to-employee-optionsequity-grants
Look, the creator of Ruby is non-white, and if you think any conference wouldn't welcome him then I don't know what to say.

The existing technologists are by and large under 30 at these conferences (I won't go into the ageism to go with economic problems of computing), so they are a result of the no cheap entry barrier I talked about. Fixing the current demographic is long past solving.

I think your last line is presumptuous. I didn't get a +1 because of race, far from it actually.
The approaches between the two campaigns relay the IT as a cost center vs a profit center debate. The Obama campaign used its technology to create a competitive edge while the Romney campaign minimized its internal operations and relied on outside parties which were not completely aligned with the goal of the campaign.

Also, I have a question which I would love to gain any insight on. In this article and others I've read about this , its been said that the Romney campaign could only start developing Orca after the primaries were finished. Why is this? Shouldn't the RNC have been in charge of developing something like this? Or are these applications very specific to the actual candidate?
IMessage and FaceTime suffer another significant outage
Leaked? It's a sitemap. That's being intentionally published.
This is the lesson of the professions in general. Med school has a better ROI than both law and business school, but the doctors and lawyers fall out of the income distribution around the top 1% to 0.5%. Above that, it's all bankers, most with MBAs.
That was actually the point that I was making, thanks. When white men say "we shouldn't include people just because of some identity" the reality that lies behind it is often that they've made no attempt to reach out to people who aren't white men.

It's a perfectly reasonable argument - but it is frequently made inappropriately in an attempt to counter criticism that it doesn't really offer a valuable defence against. It's an attempt to shift the terms of the debate. I don't like it.
Here are other good packaging guides for Python (by Tarek Ziade). I think Scott Torbog has joined the ranks of these greats:

http://www.aosabook.org/en/packaging.html

http://guide.python-distribute.org/
This runs as a FireFox browser extension, which is pretty neat. Once the .xpi file downloads, simply drag it into a tab of FireFox and you're off and running.
Hi Jacques - it's nice talking to you, you have some good stuff on your blog.

>external to the body of the article that is posted.

Well you see, that is EXACTLY the problem.

The way you formatted the blog, the "you should follow me on twitter" thing it is COMPLETELY indistinguishable from the body of the post. I can promise you that every single person that reads that blog post to the end also reads "you should follow me on twitter". It's even the same freaking spacing as another paragraph. I'm pretty sure this is intentional, hell, I'm doing much a similar thing on my own blog:

http://doda.co/7-python-libraries-you-should-know-about

>It would be a ton of work to get it excised for just that one posting

Really? I feel now you're just talking from the rear.

Here. I took a look at your blog. jQuery is already included. It's even simpler than what I wrote above. Just put this inside your thank-you-hn.md file:

<script>$(document).ready(function () { $('footer').remove()})</script>

I tested that script by inserting it in your blog. Took me about 45 seconds and will probably take you even less. Certainly less time than it took you to write this big response, where you agree with me but lament that what I wrote above is just too much damn work.

Really, even if you won't do it for this blog post, just change the wording to "Follow me on Twitter". Really do you care about these few percentage points of followers that only would've followed you had you had that more aggressive wording in your footer? You put some great content on your blog - I feel you should do it justice by letting it shine on its own without the personal marketing tactics at the bottom.
I don't think I've tried it with Java 7, but it works just fine with Java 6.
> I think your last line is presumptuous. I didn't get a +1 because of race, far from it actually.

It's not about you.

It's about the many people, who because of race or gender, get a -5 or worse.

> Look, the creator of Ruby is non-white

All the more damning, I think.
I am glad your friend has received a reprieve. I was born and raised in India and have spent my last 11 years in America. As such, I have great affection for both countries. In both countries one is innocent until proven guilty.

It is not unheard of, of someone having to fight the good fight against great odds and the occasional corrupt public servant causing grievance. I also assure you the average Indian is not corrupt, and since the those in public service are selected from the same average Indians, they are not as you have repeatedly in these 2 threads made them out to be.

To execute an arrest in India requires the police to file a FIR (First information report) and for a judge to approve an arrest warrant on the basis of information in the FIR. Much like in the US, there are jurisdictional rules governing state and federal oversight. Your friend was arrested in the state of Maharashtra and taken to the state of Delhi. Given these facts, you are claiming collusion among multiple state and federal agencies and judiciary, acting out on blatantly false information in an FIR.

From having spent 24 years in India in a upper middle class family, I can assure you from anecdotal evidence that I never crossed paths with anyone in a position so powerful to exert such clout. It quite simply is the case that people with such clout rarely if ever socialize in places that most people do.

All of this begs the question why and how did your friend come to be involved with such people and why her support structure is so poor as for having you to make a public request for help. More over all information in this matter is in the public domain the moment a FIR was filed and can be obtained by anyone with a request under the auspices of right to information act.

The very fact that you received help from the very people raised in the same society that you claim to be corrupt should make you reevaluate you belief in the account of events you have received.

In summary, I'm sorry I don't believe your account of corruption and discrimination without basis against your friend. They is likely an element of truth in what you say but your account is almost certainly skewed. I also do believe that your friend is innocent until proven guilty.

I request you to immediate STOP your innuendo on account of hearsay against a country I hold dear
For MVC3 apps how does this compare to appharbor?
Um.

At the top, however, Romney's campaign brought back old hands and paid them well. Kevin Rewkowski, a tech deputy during Romney's primary run in 2008, returned to serve as the campaign's Technology Director and pushed a lot of tech business through his company, Minuteman Strategies (that's in addition to Rewkowski's six-figure salary). His CFO also double-dipped, with money going to his financial compliance software company.

This is why the business of politics makes me throw up in my mouth a little.
A quick search of google returns this http://www.webupd8.org/2012/09/everpad-integrates-evernote-w...
These are some talented kids. "Anin Sayana from Bellarmine College Preparatory in Cupertino, Calif., received third place for his innovation that selectively targets chemotherapy-resistant cancer stem cells." Only 3rd place!
Unless I'm forced to, I don't plan on going public with my story. I plan on saving it for those who need to hear it.
500 million public profiles.

Must we go through the phonebook analogy again?!
The Power Of The Follow Up
This is just amazing. I'm almost at a complete loss for words. Just bravo to everyone at Mozilla.

Google must be kicking themselves.
Apple patents page-turn animation
There is no need to ask people to share with their friends. If the content is valuable, it will get shared.
As of this writing: ~225 upvotes for artcle and only 25 comments. Just something to note. A 9:1 ratio signals a pretty strong submission, IMHO.
Thanks for the report! Yeah the bugs that break the user flow are the worst, we are looking into it.

If you use the Close button or the back arrow on the top, that should work in the meantime.
Although setuptools is capable of that kind of scenario, sometimes it's not worth the overhead.

A good rule of thumb is that if you have defined access points for others to consume your code with (command line tools, Python modules, or Setuptools entry points), it's a good idea to make a Python package like this. Otherwise, skip it.
Ah, but you've said 'robber barons'. This is exactly the thing - robber barons. Being a robber - a bandit or baron, no difference - is a bad thing. It's where the problem is. "Robber barons" use money and violence - rather, they use money to "rent" violence from its providers - to create barriers to entry - as you've said, "could barely get by". This is not even close to what libertarian stand for.

As for it being easy to make money if you start with a lot - why, this totally depends on the rules of the game in question! And if the game is fair and open, then it will be equally easy for the rich starter to squander all their wealth - since they don't actually produce wealth, but only consume what was inherited.

Libertarians are, first and foremost, about a free and honest game.
Could anyone shed light on why the police act like they do. Is it to get ahead in their career graph, is it to augment their salary, is it out of fear ? Is it just because everybody else is doing it and there are lack of role models ?

If it is more than speculation that would be better, like insider stories.

Do people aspire to join the civil services because it opens up this wide possibility to be corrupt and wield power ? I have seen that many do, sometimes by the dormfull.

I am Indian, but it is as inpenetrable to me as it is to anybody else.
You forgot to add investigation; that would be really easy checking his website and seeing that he has been an artist for many years and that he always dress wierd.

And lets not forget that they could have easily break his shoes and see if he was actually hiding something inside those.
> From having spent 24 years in India in a upper middle class family, I can assure you from anecdotal evidence that I never crossed paths with anyone in a position so powerful to exert such clout.

Well, that's really good for you then. I highly doubt you and our friend have much in common.

> All of this begs the question why and how did your friend come to be involved with such people and why her support structure is so poor as for having you to make a public request for help.

Yes, this strikes to the heart of this case, but frankly it is none of your business. The only thing that matters is that it did.

Much as I regret it things happened exactly as related.

And if you keep rejecting evidence that does not support your hypothesis on how things really are out of hand then you'll never be able to change your point of view.

So the fact that you can not imagine something or that it has not happened to you or is not something you have heard about happening does not preclude such a thing from being real. Merely quite unlikely, and given what I know about this case I highly doubt another one exactly like it will happen, but at the same time the general case of it is probably repeated several times per year with various outcomes depending on the actors.

> Much like in the US, there are jurisdictional rules governing state and federal oversight. Your friend was arrested in the state of Maharashtra and taken to the state of Delhi. Given these facts, you are claiming collusion among multiple state and federal agencies and judiciary, acting out on blatantly false information in an FIR.

Indeed.

And what's even more interesting here is that the police pursued this folly knowing it full well to be false after having been informed of that very fact by a large number of individuals and organizations.

Of course it hurts that in a country that you hold dear there is corruption.

But keep in mind that I have not railed against India or against Indians in general. Only against those particular Indians that have in this case bent the law to suit their purpose, to unjustly pursue one that need their protection and not their persecution.

> In summary, I'm sorry I don't believe your account of corruption and discrimination without basis against your friend.

Your beliefs are of no concern to me, all that matters is that which is real and that which isn't. This is about as real as it gets.

It's not hearsay if you're in the middle of it... and what you have or have not experienced has 0 bearing on what we are experiencing right now.
Such an advanced debugger would make me miss the hours spent debugging a bug just to jump over and/or press the wrong key on the line of code revealing the real problem. That'd be unacceptable.
This seems like confirmation bias, mixed with a healthy dose of overestimating the importance of your profession.

If a similar story came out about Obama's campaign, would you have really written that it's crazy that he got elected?

I'm not a Romney fan, and I think this story should be embarrassing for him, but let's not get carried away. Running a software project (even if not directly) is notoriously hard. Make it a prerequisite to be a presidential candidate at your peril.
The biggest problems I personally have with switching to HTTPS only for my sites:

1. I simply don't have enough IPv4 addresses to put each SSL site on its own IP address, IPv6, sure, bring it on ... but generally if someone has IPv6 connectivity, then they have SNI (see 3)

2. I don't have the money to get a certificate with X amount of domains on it

3. SNI is still not a good idea simply because there exist still a lot of Windows XP clients that are unable to use it.

I am not too worried about the extra CPU cycles for the encryption decryption of connections...

Currently on my sites I don't have any reason to use SSL, other than that I would like to protect certain resources such that my account username/password for my personal blog don't go across the ether in plain-text. For that I currently use self-signed SSL certs from a personal root that I can trust in the computers I want to trust them in.
Oh absolutely. As you said, procfile (or similar) support would be amazing.
Are you sure that's an answer from NadimBabaAJE?
There's also "Cabel car" instead of "Cable car" in the Hammetschwand demo page.
Most of these are blank G+ profiles (at most a name and gender) -- other then possibly gleaning some insight into how well G+ is doing and how engaged their userbase really is, what can you derive from this, really?

If you really wanted to crawl these you could do so pretty easily regardless, this is just making it trivially easily.
I said 'of this form'. They didn't say it literally, but look at the values implied by their claim.

Why don't they quantify who 'the best' that they reached out to where?

Here's my point: frequently, people say 'the best people just happen to be white males' or 'we can only hire white males'. In reality, this is often because there's been no effort made to reach out to other segments of society.

The tokenism excuse is then deployed - but that isn't the point. No-one likes tokenism. The argument we're making is that there are talented people who get overlooked or are made to feel excluded (often accidentally) because they aren't white men.

I find it incredibly offensive when people deploy the tokenism argument against this criticism because the implicit claim is that there aren't enough talented members of minority groups. This isn't the case.

Moreover, it's part of the continuous passing the buck you see in sectors like tech. Businesses say they don't hire more women because there aren't many women with CompSci degrees. CompSci programs say they don't get more women because women aren't interested. And yet companies and faculties are still willing to have woman-unfriendly cultures, because women don't want to work there.

To be specific to conferences - if every conference says "we reached out to good speakers but there weren't many women" then there never will be - because women won't get their shot.

To be fair, I don't know the specifics. Maybe this conference did make efforts. But given that they haven't quantified what effort they did make, their defence is extremely weak.
Elaboration would be welcome. I always thought they wanted to get rid of the plug-compatible manufacturers but couldn't because of anti-trust litigation and because software copyright was much less vigorously enforced by the courts than it came to be in the early 1980s.

Note that after they realized the importance of the PC,
IBM did try to exclude competitors by pushing their own OS and making sure Microchannel and other parts of PS/2 were heavily patented.