skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for not attending conferences. For the record, should you change your mind, you are strictly unwelcome at anything where I have a say in the attendance.

The number of women who experience some form of rape or sexual assault is absurdly high (I believe it is 1 in 6). Even if we make the (completely unrealistic an hyperbolic) assumption that that is off by an order of magnitude. That is 1 in 60. It means that at least 2 women in the room I'm sitting in have been assaulted. Crazy.

That means that women have a pretty reasonable case to be wary. So they are bit more sensitive to certain situations, like being enclosed in a box with a stranger. How dare they be concerned for their safety right? Nope. If you have a problem with concern for personal safety, do the world a favor and demonstrate how awesome not being afraid is and stand on busy train tracks for a few hours.

So now we have rules by which a woman can report that she felt uncomfortable or concerned. Fortunately those rules also include the chance for the accused to defend himself. OK cool. If it was a situation that was a mistake, reasonable people will say "this is a mistake, stay away from the woman, she is OK with this, but if you try to contact her for the rest of the event, we'll ask you to leave". Everyone moves on - seriously it isn't even unfair, who wants to hang around someone who is uncomfortable with them anyway?

So yes, what this does is open the door for some really unbalanced person to report harassment in a false way. Fortunately this is extremely uncommon. Probably less common than people actually being creepers. But say it does happen. Someone gets kicked out for nothing. OK. That really sucks, and potentially has further consequences of a social sort for the person removed. But you know what - if someone wanted to falsely accuse a person of harassment, the existence of a policy is not going to stop them, they will still do so loudly and unfairly. That person still may be asked to leave, even without the policy - organizers have that power.

So having the policy costs what? Nothing to the hypotheical and unlikely falsely accused or hyperbolically accused person. What does it profit? Peace of mind that actual creepers will be dealt with.

So, with that in mind - the only reasonable conclusion is that the people who are terrified of a code of conduct policy are the ones who are creepers. This is why I've banned you permanently from anything I can. You must be a creeper or at least proponent for creepers. Neither ar things I find acceptable.
Charity definition in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity_%28practice%29

Nowhere does the word anonymous appear. Words are not defined by your view of them, but by common usage (in English). And charity and publicity are not mutually exclusive.
I've actually seen a lot of successful twitter campaigns. Barack Obama has had a few good runs during the campaign (with #forward2012) and recently with #my2k to push his side of the fiscal cliff issue.

Any twitter campaign will have participants who try to hijack the campaign for the opposing view. However, Obama has a strong enough base (I mean, ~50% of voters cast a ballet for him, and he does have a stronger hold on the younger, more-likely-to-tweet demographic) participating to drown out the hijackers.

The problem with this Windows campaign (I mean, besides that they tried the exact same thing before and failed) is that they specifically preclude their most devout supporters from participating. Anyone who is a die-hard Windows Phone fan has probably switched to WP when it was first available, and some probably have never touched android (I mean, they might have held onto Windows CE - anybody remember that? - until the first WP came out). In addition, anyone already using the latest WP hardware has no reason to tweet in order to win a free phone they already own.

So given this situation where MS's strong supporters have no content or reason to tweet, guess who rises up to fill the dead space? This campaign failed because it was designed to fail.
You're talking about formal declarations of war.

Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam?

Going to war might not be semantically the same as declaring war, but that doesn't change a thing, within the context at hand.
>> Not having a degree in something disallows you to "make an effort to engage with other scholars"?

> For non-trivial things? Yes, generally. Why not?

Because science rejects authority, preferring evidence. If those who are listening can't evaluate the evidence, then they're reduced to asking about degrees, but this is dangerous -- there are as many charlatans with degrees as there are without. Recent case in point:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/10/diederik-s...

A quote: "Stapel resigned in 2011 after an investigation revealed that he made up the results in many of his eye-catching social psychology studies. So far, 25 of his papers have been retracted; a commission is still investigating others."

All of his papers were published in peer-reviewed journals.
For the kind of simple contracts that could be handled by software, people already use form contracts. And remember, you don't need a lawyer at all to draft contracts.

As for more complicated contracts, wake me up when software can negotiate risk allocations for you.
for me, only "ip address" returned the public ip, search for "ip" didn't... on some national domains, both seem to work... YMMV :)
This is a good point - making fun of users of a product is a strange way to tempt them over. Samsung's advert making fun of a queue of iPhone buyers is similar in this respect. Notably, Apple adverts don't usually (ever? I have a distant memory of a failed apple campaign that did?) make fun of users of a competing product.
I recently switching to Braintree Payments and they have a Javascript client-side library for encrypting the credit card information before sending it to my servers.

As they explain it, they use a private/public key encryption in which the server has the private key and the encryption occurs with a public key. Only the private key on their servers can decrypt the file.

Could they be using something similar where you generate your own large (2048 bit) key and use that repeatedly for each file that you upload? Could they allow the user to supply their own cryptographic key that can be generated with local tools like openssl?

I'm no cryptography expert, I'm just curious what they could do to make it more secure.
That's not quite true. Many branches of science don't use controlled laboratory experiments.
I don't remember that comment, and I don't have access to that thread anymore.

You make one point: the people who destroyed Google's culture are not terrorists. That was a clumsy metaphor. Rather, they're saboteurs who are destroying the company for their own amusement, as I clarified in my comment below.
I've always wondered if I could buy one of those hard knee braces I've seen people wearing and attach a servo, battery and arduino to it? Could I make a really primitive walking, jumping assist device?
It really makes me sad to see on HN arguments of the form, "I cannot understand/perceive X, therefore it is unimportant."

I get that you can't fathom it. But so what? Nobody put you in charge of deciding when people should feel unsafe. Or whether I should have sympathy for those who do. Or whether we, as a community, are willing to let a lot of otherwise useful contributors walk away because they don't feel safe.

I don't want to be a hero. Heroes need villains. I want a good conference, where everybody feels safe and welcome and we can all focus on learning. And this seems like a step in the right direction.
The actual paper[1] states that their prototype has similar performance to the best commercial sensors. However it is much better than any previous optical sensor, and they claim that if they scale the device they can reduce the thermal NEA to 150 ng/rtHz with a 25KHz bandwidth, which would be commercially interesting.

1 http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.5730
The GP suggested that any conference with standards adjudicated by Valerie Auroura(1) would not be a conference worth going to, as it would involve a nonzero risk of being the victim of a witch hunt.

[1] c.f. http://adainitiative.org/2012/10/open-source-software-open-t...
I largely agree. If you're making a donation and you aren't anonymous to everyone but the people who have some control over the money being donated, your ego is involved somewhere. I wouldn't say that non-anonymous donations aren't charity, but rather that they are charity with strings attached. And this does look like a publicity stunt, despite whatever the man's intentions may be.

Also, vectorbunny has a deep philosophical and spiritual point here, as he later elaborates on, and I don't believe he deserves the downvotes simply for stating his view of true charity. Yes, in the United States, the word charity doesn't imply anonymous donations, but charity is an ancient concept going back to the dawn of civilization.
All the links on this page look they were copied from Google search results. Ironic.
Indeed--I find it works best when the person I'm talking to doesn't know anything about software, so that crucial points don't get hidden beneath a layer of shared abstract understanding.
In Europe, You Can Only Download Mature-Rated Wii U Games At Night
We are not an ICANN accredited registrar but it's something we might consider in the future. Lots of registrars started out as resellers (or still are for ccTLDs, e.g. eNom, Netsol going through a German registrar) so this is not an uncommon thing.

Most of our TLDs are registered through 1API which is a pure wholesale registrar and we're having a very close business relationship with them. I can promise you if there ever is an issue on the registrar/registry relationship part of the business, we will be able to solve it faster than many ICANN registrars.
Why Apple and GE are Bringing Manufacturing Back to the US
It's more interesting that he left Google.
No compile step. Python exists for a great many platforms.

Also true for several other "scripting" languages.
I think the worst part is that internet culture frames far too many things in terms of epic manichean struggles, when in fact it's looking at tawdry commercial rivalry.

Part of the problem is that unless we're close to a fully equipped test lab, most of us have to make a choice of device and stick with it; because phones especially are still effectively luxury items. That means most people who are most strident in their belief about the superiority of one brand or another, do not have experience with other products ( or at best, superficial experience ).

So, someone who is raging on about their favored brand is trying to justify their own choices and likely has no meaningful experience of the alternatives.

So for expert level trolling, ask them what they think of Palm, or Meego.
> But if we're going to have one universal language, it will be java. Still happy?

This is a great retort, the more I think about it. There would be huge efficiences if Java was the only language in the world...and there would be huge holes too, just as if we banned every language and insta-translated all the great foreign works to English.

I think it's safe to say that some of the great works in non-Java languages might never have been possible or thought of if everything was all-Java. Can we say that some of the great non-English works would never have existed if everything was done in English? Probably.
I've had that experience, and it's truly awesome. But I've never figured out how to make it happen on my timetable. :)
Google+ Community for Chrome Apps and Extensions
Yes, you can do that. Anyone successfully done this?
I think it's been about a year since he gave his Python talk at Dropbox. I suppose they also used that opportunity to begin to recruit him.
The context, in this case, is a recent scandal in Valencia (Spain). If you didn't follow the links: lots of New Age, Homeotherapy, Reiki and such.

I suspect TED trusted the wrong persons. I don't know if TED has revoked their licences. Maybe there're are contracts in place and it might be difficult to walk out of them.

Under that light, this letter seems to be a public way of saying "we didn't approve what happened, next time call us if in doubt and don't say you weren't warned".
The Economist's best books of the year
"Simpsons did it!" -General Disarray
Agreed 100%. Making the hard choices is where I might stutter, but I don't think I've experienced "coders block" as described in the article.
Generator expressions are horribly slow. I agree they are prettier, and I put them where they aid readability and don't hurt performance, but in general, generators involve creating (the equivalent of) a class with methods, and calling those methods. A generator is not only a function call, but it also restores state internal to the function, which is very expensive.
It always strikes me as odd when something like this happens. Guido is still working nine-to-fives and Drew never has to work again. Can someone tell me why a brilliant person like Guido isn't worth a billion dollars? Have tons of fancy cars and a fancy house? Has to work for another company?
Sad to see Guido leave the App Engine team... But this is a selfish view :-)

Congrats to Dropbox!
The assumption is that the vast majority of conference-goers have good will and enough social skill to navigate these things adroitly. As is explained in the article, it's a scaling problem. If 99 people out of 100 are good eggs, then a conference of 2300 still has ~23 bad eggs.
31 Books For Entrepreneurs To Read This Holiday Season
Those would be useful but I guess in terms of issue-reporting, screenshots are universally valuable for showing erroneous program behavior...when would other filetypes be useful for that, except in cases of programs that are designed to output such filetypes (attaching an ODF would be useful for an ODF generator, for instance)?
With Skitch completely screwing their latest release, hosting issue related files (screenshots, doodles...) was painful to say the least. Dropbox did an ok job at it but did not let me embed pictures in the thread (the file URLs change randomly).

Pretty awesome that the guys at Github got that covered.
There's a switch to shut the offending "feature" off.

Not good enough for Stallman, but definitely gave me a sigh of relief.
The post was public.
You could always just read the (admittedly not that great) piece which precisely explained all of that.

In a sentence:

Nicholas Negroponte, who started OLPC, dropped off a bunch of Xooms that run Android in a couple of villages where the kids figured out how to enable the tablet's camera without any instruction or even literacy.
#muslimrage backfire was classy and funny and worth the read.

#[an]droidrage tweets, not so much.
I am a German guy, and I agree! Everybody in IT should know enough english to use GitHub.
The Civil War is a better example than Vietnam -- not only because public support died in the US with Nixon's "Guam doctrine", but because it wasn't a particularly existential struggle for the US -- that is, my point was that there is a "natural selection" of social institutions based on military defeats. (Also, South Vietnam was an interesting question in its own right: to what extent is a strong-man or dictator a "bureaucrat"? Chinese civilizations are a grand example of a clear bureaucracy with a central dictator, so the answer isn't trivially either "not at all" or "absolutely.")

Just to be clear: I am not arguing against agility and I think that the central agile ability -- the ability to fail cheaply -- is probably the most important feature in many areas, including some military conquests. (One of the most interesting applications of cheap failure is interface design. If you can test a new idea cheaply it allows feedback loops which make you feel like you're really "interacting with something.")

In any case, you've given me some food for thought, and thanks for that.
Exactly. I think alot of the kneejerk reactions to this post are because people don't know the context of TEDx events. The post suggests these guidelines (and they are just that, guidelines, not rules) and gives warnings about reiki and free energy and crystals because quality control has been thin to non-existent, and fraudsters giving BS presentations is a real problem.
I've worked on the Dropbox client back in 2009 and I can tell you that Dropbox has spent considerable resources optimizing Python, so there is actual python-related work to be done.

As Rian Hunter mentions they've for example implemented a custom memory allocator: http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/14/6-lessons-from-dro... and that's just one part of it.

With a few hundred million installed machines or so, having Guido on board to make python work better for Dropbox-scale apps is a huge win for them (and python)!
Taking a political angle on it: Won't the free software market decide winners and losers?

In other words, there are hundreds of Linux distributions. Choose a different one. If you really like it fork it and rebuild it without support for that feature.

Isn't the point of free software that you have the inherent right to do whatever you want to the software to make it do what you want (or not do what you don't)?
Control your Google HTML5 Presentation from your Phone
The issue that TEDx has been having is not that talks have been given that are "maybe pseudoscience-ish". Not stuff in which an unclear demarcation line is an issue. Rather the issue is that talks have been given that are plainly bullshit to anybody with a few braincells still firing. We are talking crystal and pyramid levels of bullshit here. Barely above the level of mad ravings on a street corner.

The issue with botched skepticism among TEDx organizers appears to be so severe that the guidelines to skepticism given, no matter how crude, are entirely justified.
It's too bad Ubuntu isn't open source so someone could just recompile the application without support for the feature...
Finally. Sharing tickets without an image was often inefficient.

'Cloud', an App, has been a decent workaround for this problem but in-ticket file uploads is better yet.
Git is not well received at Google either.
Ubuntu Community Manager Says FSF's Stallman Spreads FUD
When I was there, everyone I knew used it and sang its praises.

But it is a large company with a lot of teams. I am sure there were people somewhere who thought it was awful.
For the kind of simple contracts that could be handled by
software, people already use form contracts. And remember,
you don't need a lawyer at all to draft contracts.

I actually think this market is far bigger than one might think. Legalzoom is doing a $500M IPO and I only heard of them recently. Rocketlawyer is similar.

A high quality, heavily marketed site that had forms for the top 100 or so legal issues (with endorsements from top lawyers stating that they reviewed the contracts) would IMO be quite disruptive. Prenups, startup incorporation, wills, employment agreements, things like that.
Gold has a number of internal checks to massive price swings that Bitcoin does not, however. First, and most notably, it is a fully developed market that has been around for thousands of years. As such, it is easier to get a handle on for investors. Currently, gold is seen as a fantastic investment, primarily because of the economic emergence of India, where gold is seen as a marker of social status and is one of the most sought after products. Generally gold, as a luxury item, runs essentially concurrent with overall market trends. People buy it when they have the money, and don't when they don't. As such, it isn't all that difficult to predict in the long term, although you also don't get much increase in value, even over the long term. Gold will always have value in markets that have a base layer of wealth, and time has confirmed that you can be pretty certain that places like the US and Europe will have that base layer. Gold also, as a physical object, is not subject to the same extent that Bitcoin is to fraud, an important point considering its history. In a purely theoretical sense, no Bitcoin is not any worse then gold as a means of investment, although Bitcoin being a currency, and notably one that is only narrowly used, does hurt it, due to the ability for sellers to turn on and off their acceptance of it.

One last thing to remember. Even with gold's predictability and high price (assuming the US doesn't dump its cache on the market at some point) the US decided in the early 70's it wasn't secure enough of a product to base the US currency on. Bitcoin is significantly less stable then gold by a factor of thousands, and that's not even including its susceptibility to hacking (or, more precisely, to hacking its marketplaces). Bitcoin is also to small to ever have the amount of liquidity necessary to assuage the rest of the financial markets. Again, the issue with Bitcoin isn't internal. The issue is with it being strong enough economically to not scare off the rest of the world's financial system.
I think the company that you're describing is LegalZoom.
Yes, but all legitimate sciences (a) put forth falsifiable theories, and (b) abandon those theories that fail comparison with reality.

The fact that cosmologists don't perform laboratory experiments with miniature black holes doesn't reduce the scientific standing of cosmology, as long as there are equally persuasive sources of evidence to support the theories.
Interesting! This is a less cut-and-dry debate than the one that's been going on throughout the rest of the thread. At the very least, Ts'o's comment was voiced in an inappropriate forum and I'd expect him to at least acknowledge he was wrong. I'd feel uncomfortable asking him to speak at a conference myself, if I was the conference-organizing sort.

The "insensitive"/"social suicide" thing is tricky. Thing is, there are places and contexts for those discussions to take place, and simply bringing them up because you have an opinion on them that you'd like to voice isn't exactly appropriate. In some ways, it can be a very offensive behavior: the term "mansplaining", which I'm sure is controversial around these parts, is useful to describe how some men think their opinion on things (like rape) ought to be important and listened-to, simply because, well, their opinion deserves to be respected! And in some cases they'll voice this opinion, however half-heartedly thought out, to people who have given this topic much more consideration and who are considerably more well-versed in both the statistics and the opinions that revolve around the subject.
That's another great point. From what I've observed, failing seems to be a natural part of the entrepreneurial process. As you said, anyone who has had any success, has also tasted failure. When I face this harsh lesson someday, I will do my best to remember that it happens. Statistics was my favorite class in high school, so I tend to think of every outcome as a result of odds.
Show HN: We're building a home for subjective programming topics
Well, we used to successfully dynamically stitch a JPEG onto the front or back or middle of a video to make a VOD have an unskippable ad regardless of target device. We did that back in the Windows Media (.wmv) days, haven't tried it with H.264. But this should be easier.

We use a similar principle to generate dynamic thumbnails. Our VOD hosting customers can call a video URL with a query string specifying time offset and size and we generate a JPEG thumbnail on the fly from the closest keyframe of the H.264 file, storing the thumbnails in an intermediate cache layer. Works great, and beats keeping a bazillion thumbs managed when the source media is changed or deleted.

Generating an ad should be no harder than that. Easier, I'd think, since most of our time is spent seeking to the keyframe of a 2 hour movie.