skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for posting this link. I have wanted to help the people of North Korea for a long time. This was all I needed to prod me into providing some financial support.

I know that donating some money won't fix everything, but I would have felt very bad if later in life someone asked me what I had done to help out people who lived lives like on the one described in the story and my response had been "nothing".

Everyone who has the ability to read HN is very blessed. It is so easy to forget how so many of this world's inhabitants are forced to live their daily lives. Human's don't seem to be very good at empathizing with more than a small group of people. If we could literally feel the suffering of our brothers and sister's world wide that live under such oppressive forces, I believe that the suffering would end swiftly as nobody could resist the call to arms that would ensue.
How does a demographic become a)targeted, and b) under-represented? It comes across as arbitrary. Especially in the context of running a business to deliver value.

I think if you see all people as just people, a notion like "targeting a demographic" comes across as racist / sexist / and plain old discriminative. But that's just one opinion.
But...her grandfather clones dinosaurs. Why is so beyond belief that she'd have used Unix at some point?
Saturday’s New York Times carried an article “How to Attack the Gender Wage Gap? Speak Up”, pointing out that women earn only a fraction of what men are paid. The Times cites some numbers: “77 cents for white women; 69 cents for black women. The final dollar — so small that it can fit in a coin purse, represents 57 cents, for Latina women.”

While for the non-profit organization described in the article this is seen as a problem, a profit-minded business owner might see this as an opportunity. Why not find an industry with mostly male employees, offer jobs at 57 percent of the current wages in that industry, attract an all-Latina workforce, and crush the competition with labor costs that are a fraction of those in the rest of the industry?

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2012/12/17/profit-opportu...
I am sorry, I acted like a complete idiot throughout this entire thread.

To clarify, I had no problem with your post. It riled me up when the OP endorsed it while some of it was not valid (at the time of their post) but I responded in a ridiculous manner so please forget about the whole thing.
What you're doing is called "appeal to ridicule", but I can think of worse things than reaching out to all those communities, seeking greater participation. Ex-convicts might be at a disadvantage in expertise, and so fail to get selected in blind judging. But old grey unix neckbeards would probably be really interesting, and in every Aaron Swartz thread it gets mentioned that he was meaningfully involved in the RSS process at 14.
Yeah, it was an analogy that did not work and would lead off-topic here. Some people can willfully sell their body, while others have no choice (lack of education, drug addiction), it's those ones I am worried the most about.
Apple has the interesting distinction of having been gleefully kicked while they were down (nonstandard toy, the "beleaguered" epithet, clone or die, just build Windows boxes, Michael Dell's infamous corporate governance advice) -- and gleefully kicked since they've been up (monopolist, elitist, walled garden, destroyer of choice, market share trumps profit, law of large numbers).

While there's some truth in most of the criticisms, it's also clear that there's just something about Apple: an opinionated company, often and still conflated with the polarizing personality of Steve Jobs. To some their success is inexplicable and galling, to others a thrilling reversal. We love to love and love to hate Apple.
I am not sure but interested in what you guys come up with.

Very impressed by your responses by the way, taking notes.
> "'d definitely stick to Meetup and similar sites where you can join a singles group"

Been there. Wasn't fun.

The problem with ungated singles groups is that it turns very heavily into a gigantic sausagefest, even in cities with relatively decent dating scenes.

It reminds me of the Microsoft parties I've gone to back when I lived in Seattle. You can spot all seven women at the party by the clusters of men surrounding them.

For singles groups to work a gender ratio must be enforced, but that also gives group organizers a lot of leeway to be generally not-awesome people. It also brings out some of the uglier sides of humanity.

I was once part of an "Asian Americans" Meetup group, which like most Meetup groups is a pretty flimsy facade for a singles group. There was a major row where a white user wanted to join - IIRC the guy was raised in Asia and had a strong interest in Asian culture. The male membership of the group revolted, citing pretty much every lame reason except the real one. A vote was taken, where the female membership voted in a landslide to allow the guy in, and the male membership the opposite. The ban stood, some (thankfully some) people left the group in protest, including myself.

This was an exceptionally blatant experience, but I wouldn't put this past most Meetup groups, ethnicity or otherwise. Meetup groups with a singles slant (i.e., most of them), seems to bring out the most territorial, the least charitable, and the least human qualities in people.
Yes, very early on in my use of my Nexus 7, Google Now pointed out that there was a concert coming up for a band that I love in my city. Bought a ticket right then. Would have been disappointed to miss the show.

That's not a very location-aware use case (at least not GPS-granular-location-aware), but I dig Google Now for that kind of thing. Also when it shows me when my wife's flight is delayed or something, all because she forwarded me a flight itinerary from her travel agent. One of those things that seems like magic--which is kinda silly because like most folks here I obviously get what the code probably looks like. But still seems like magic. I think that's what I like about Google Now--the little bits of occasional delight that it pushes down to me.
In many (most?) early pianos the colors were reversed.
"It's not discriminatory to balance out a contingent happenstance that doesn't accurately reflect essential differences."

It is when you are doing something that gives people a career boost, and being a speaker at a conference is definitely a career boost. If you keep targeting a minority in some field to speak at conferences, then the members of that minority will have an advantage in advancing their careers -- they are being given more of a voice than other people. If the imbalance in the field itself is large, which is the case in technical fields, then that minority is getting more of a boost.

In other words, what you are doing is trying to hide the fact that you are giving an advantage to a particular group. It is no different than asking GRE questions about polo.

"A bit shorter: There's nothing discriminatory about the removal of undeserved advantage."

That is not what happened here. Nobody had an undeserved advantage in the conference admissions process; the problem lies elsewhere. Conference speakers are a surface-level problem.

If you start in a field where women and men are equally represented, but where men dominate conferences, this sort of thing might make sense. You are starting in a field where that is not the case, painting a "fix" on the surface of it, and calling it a victory. It's not a victory, it is discrimination, and the effort spent on this farce should have been spent on solving the broader demographic problem (but I suspect that the author of the article has run out of ideas on how to solve that problem, and has instead chosen something easier to work on).
I expect it has a lot to do with which blogs/forums you're reading.

In my experience, the number of Apple fanboi comments vastly exceeds the number of Android fanboi comments, pretty much everywhere I've noticed.

Given that the iphone is very, very, popular, especially in English-speaking countries (and I mostly read blogs in English), this isn't entirely surprising: popularity, especially mass-market popularity, almost always comes with an associated fanboi/mouth-breather contingent...

[Actually, I'm not sure I've ever actually seen a real Android fanboi; most comments I see criticizing Apple seem to be pretty purely anti-Apple, not pro-Android per-se. AFAICT, Android is thought of as "the practical alternative," and doesn't tend to engender passion (including the sort of degenerate passion fanbois represent) the way Apple does...]
>Apple’s products are opinionated. They say, “We know what’s best for you. Here it is. Oh, that thing you want to do? We won’t let you do that because it would suck. Trust us. If you don’t like it, there’s the door.”

Problem is, Apple's acolytes won't leave you alone to go through the door - they'll follow you and keep telling you you're a wrong for wanting something different or thinking different (the irony is always lost). Some of them will even write long and detailed blog posts about how 3.5" is the perfect screen size, and and if you think differently, you're wrong. (http://dcurt.is/3-point-5-inches), or maintain popular blogs which a little more than a large collection of stupid, snide remarks (Gruber).
Sanity is having arrow buttons on your mouse.

(also Enter, ESC, space, delete, backspace, etc etc)
Gmail: please show my images
In my case I don't usually tend to receive offensive images I wouldn't like to load around others. I don't have problem loading images off the internet, I do that on almost every site I go. Having to click the show images every time got old a long time ago. I don't want to keep giving permission to every new sender I get to show my images neither. I understand why you have this feature, but I would like a way to turn it off completely.
Just to be clear: neither I nor any of these friends I talked about had real cases of depression, we would just feel depressed sometimes and it would sometimes makes us think our life wasn't worth it or something like that.
It really sounds like your trolling me but i'll bite...

> Thinks like this make me think that some is really rotten in this system. Some people think that is justified, fair and right to menace the life of an innocent baby if you got the robber mother in jail?.
There is really a need to say that this idea is a monstrosity?

Being pregnant should not, under any circumstances, give you a get out of jail free card.

I can't believe I even have to state this and I have a hard time believing that you actually think this should be the case.

> Is not so easy to fake this for much time... in the end this man or woman will reach the same place in front of a jury, but anyways is a better choice that the other option, that you _help_ to someone to be a suicidal.

I can't parse this into a coherent sentence. I'm guessing english isn't your first language. No harm done, i'll move on.
This is a question I've had as well -- but since I can't think of any examples of this happening in any country ever, despite the timelessness of the plight, my hunch has always been that it's essentially impossible for some reason that's not readily apparent. (My money's on the impossibility of mustering political will to do something so destructive that reeks so much of defeat and desperation).

Maybe submit this to xkcd's 'what-if'?
Is this the future solution to scientific publishing?
Suicide prevention measures often aim to increase the time it takes to complete suicide by even a few minutes. "Reducing access to means and methods" is the jargon.

Thus, in the UK, pills are usually supplied in blister packs rather than bottles. This small measure helps reduce suicide. When paracetamol sales were restricted (32 tablets from a pharmacist; 16 over the counter (but actually it's 100 from a pharmacist if you can persuade them and unlimited if you have a doctors prescription)) completed suicide decreased for a while. (Numbers have since returned to near the same level.)

When people hear this they say "But if you're going to kill yourself you'll just do X". This ignores the very real fear that people have about hurting themselves. It's a big step to get over. And some people are considerate of others (in a weird way). They don't want to step in front of a train because they know the driver will be traumatised.

The Oxford Centre for Suicide Research has probably the best collection of information about attempted and completed suicide. (http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/)

(As for the article: I thought it was really good. Obviously people are different and it will be closer for some than for others.)
Why You Truly Never Leave High School
It looks like he got the "biggest standing army" from Active military + Reserve military + Paramilitary. Just sort descending by the "Total" column: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
"Citizen of the Galaxy," by Robert Heinlein, jumped to mind when I read this story.

The protagonist, Thorby, is a freed slave, and most of the people he encounters in the story are skeptical that slavery still exists.
In other words, instead of ending discrimination, we should just pile more layers of it on top -- rather than paint your white car pink, you'll load your white car into a pink 18-wheeler and just drive that to work, proudly proclaiming that you have diversity in your color choices (and then one day, someone will point out that you don't have a rainbow-colored ride, so you'll load your pink truck on a rainbow-colored train and demand that someone lay tracks from your house to your office).
It may not be a conference level problem, but diversity at the conference level can go a long way to showing girls in middle school that STEM careers are viable for them. We know that a lot of the reason girls drop out along the way just is the perception of STEM as a male dominated field (and paralleling that, in countries like China where it's not considered strictly male, we see high female participation).
UC Berkeley Course Lectures: Analyzing Big Data With Twitter
The long story follows:
It was complicated, at some point I developed this odd rational understanding that there was probably something wrong with me, that it wasn't normal to be this "moody", but I simultaneously believed that I was just being "whiny", and I had no reason to be depressed and that to ask for help would just be admitting that I'm a weak individual and it would be insulting to people that actually had problems. I've been in treatment for a while now and that second voice, it never quite went away and I still have moments of doubt, but I am now able to recognize that that is the voice of the disease. And thats the thing, at the times that I was at my "sickest", I also felt I was the healthiest, I never would have acknowledged that there was anything wrong with me, even when I was on the brink of suicide, because those were also the times I hated myself the most and I felt this was just a personal failing of mine.

It took years to come to that point when I recognized that I needed treatment and it came one evening during a period that I had been doing much better, but I had an "episode" one evening when something inconsequential had made me incredibly upset, and I was in this deep spiral of being upset, then being angry at myself for being upset (since I recongized it was inconsequential), and then being angry at myself for being angry and so on. And I was walking home from school (I was in grad school at the time) and bawling my eyes out and hyperventilating and scratching at my arms to the point that they were bleeding rather distinctly and I was crossing the street, and I saw headlights coming towards me, and I had this very distinct thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to just get hit and die? Then I wouldn't have to feel anymore". And this scared the crap out of me, because I was just healthy enough to recognize that this wasn't normal, and I was finally at the point when I couldn't really deny it anymore.

I ended calling the schools mental health services the next day and I got into therapy (which was one of the more difficult things I've ever had to do and I hated every minute of it, but I credit it with probably saving my life), and got on some drugs for a while. And I'm not really "better" in that its gone, its still something I deal with all the time, and there are still plenty of times I struggle with that internal voice but therapy taught me to be able to identify it and separate it from myself.
I've read the original article a while back so forgive me if my memory is a bit off.

His argument centered around these fortune 500 companies whom purchased big ERP systems and had custom development done for various parts of their businesses as a strategic investment (and a trade secret). It turned out that almost all of these companies built similar modules, since all of these companies on average hired smart managers that understood where inefficiencies could be eliminated via technology.

His correct conclusion was that these bits of tech were not strategic but rather simply the cost of doing business and thusly were open to commoditization.

Now here's where folks take a leap of faith and say that /all/ IT doesn't matter.

The way I look at it, all innovation can be strategic depending upon your business and its priorities. For most companies power and ping are commodities, but for Google it is a competitive advantage. Google would never outsource their operations to big blue, but for PWC that would probably be a good move.

Even at the micro scale you can see this in github repos where large companies will open source core modules but keep their competitive code proprietary.
>Apple’s products say “no” a lot.

Which is why it's so depressing that so many wallets say "yes" to apple.
Yeah, on that set of benchmarks (the one that everyone is targeting hence not doing anything obviously stupid on), they are.

The problem is that all of the JS engines involved have various failure modes in which they end up way slower than the others, though... We're talking 10x-1000x slower. And the problem with performance is it only takes your script hitting one serious performance bottleneck to make the speed of the rest of it not really matter. :(

Hence my interest in testcases that point out such performance cliffs, so they can be removed.
I feel like we've heard this all before countless times. Paypal has been poorly managed for a very long time. Their dictator like ways of, "We're freezing your account and keeping your money unless you send us all of your receipts proving all transactions are legitimate" have screwed so many over the years. I think it's a little too late to repair Paypal's image, the customer support staff are the least human like support staff I've ever dealt with. All responses from Paypal customer support are copied and pasted, 99% of the time ignoring what you've actually typed out. Maybe they should fix that problem while they're there.

I seriously doubt these aggressive changes will change anything, if they do it will probably only reduce the number of incorrectly frozen accounts by a small percentage. Paypal will always be brought down by their uneducated, non-compassionate customer support staff and their horrible policies. While my experience with them on a business level has been somewhat limited (I do have a business premier pro account) and I myself haven't had any serious issues, I've been through the frozen funds thing before but came out unscathed although after digging through the crappy support and finally getting someone with enough drive and compassionate to ensure my problems were resolved.

The number one problem isn't the policies, because a lot of people have nothing but good experiences with Paypal it's their staff, the people on the front-line who ensure your queries are appropriately directed and brought to the attention of the right people internally to solve your problem, these staff are misinterpreting policies and not listening. Another tolerable problem is Paypal's API: it feels archaic and pretty poor in comparison to other payment competitors with much nicer JSON API's and support for Javascript payments processing like Square. Paypal really need to step up their game, they've still got a chance considering the deep integration into Gumtree and eBay.
It's a lending library for businesses. I've sold it as in-house solution to two game companies (who apparently often manage a huge library of games/books for employees), but was planning on moving it to a SaaS model.

Since it's not at all a consumer app, I didn't think Facebook was the best choice. I figure I would throw up a landing page while I worked on it and my best chance is to target someone searching for a solution... but that's not allowed on adwords.

My only other thought it producing content/starting a blog. Could work with a lot of time and effort. But everyone always treats this landing page deal as something you throw together and gather emails easily.... maybe I've being naive.

Here's the page in case anyone wants to have a look (warning: hosting is acting wonky right now): http://vulgat.com/?toggle_vars
Probably not, since I've never seen clean prostitution (or participated in any), I don't feel experienced enough to make a statement either way, I'll admit to that. Since it is not legal here, most of the people getting into it are either being abused/exploited/drug-addicted.

I'm generally under the thought that person B is always being exploited in some way or another, but there are always other cases out there.
> How is disproportionate representation fair?

Disproportionate representation is fair (only) if the criteria of discrimination is justifiable.

An obtuse example: Gifted & hardworking athletes are disproportionally over-represented at the olympics, vice gifted + lazy, non-gifted + lazy, and non-gifted + hardworking ones.
Good job guys! This is pretty cool!
> Planetary's approach to microsatellites is VERY daring.

> Who cares about reliability, it's just a robot and there are many more where it came from...

Well, the whole reason governments and corporations spend so much to ensure reliability is that the cost per kg to get to LEO is exorbitant. It doesn't make any sense for you to say that PR's major insight is moving in what has always been a non-optimal direction along the production possibility frontier unless you also include what advancement has made that direction now a good place to go.

It seems much more likely that PR's advantage, if they have one, is in miniaturization technology (to pack more in per kg, as they claim) or some sort of launch economy of scale.
See, the difference there is that the kids parents are already half men, half women. Professional technology workers are not half women, and unlike a child's birthday party, being invited to speak at a conference is a career-boosting event.

If disproportionate representation is not discriminatory, what exactly is it?
This seems like it would be a big part of the reason why there is little demand for this feature. There's no recall function with snail mail. We tend to think of email as being like mail so take it as a given that it has the same limitations.
Indeed, great catch (this is why I use things like QFlags now, as it has a simple "testFlag" method)
We "deal with it" in the sense that we can survive and even thrive in such an environment. But we don't "deal with it just fine" in terms of accepting it when we could easily change it by e.g. avoiding a particular area.