skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two cents: I worry that we run the risk of acquiring that awful trend of reddit's to append some personal relation to every post (e.g. "My Brother did this...", "My SO made me a cake", etc) which has become a terribly abused trope.

The user account of the 14 year old kid who posted the Show HN that prompted this was a brand new account. The App Author was listed under a different name than the user account seemed to suggest. It screamed 'manipulation' to me.

I'm all for encouraging younger developers, but at a certain point you have to step back and evaluate whether we're promoting things based on merit or a sense of communal nepotism.
Keep in mind that the guidelines are okay with certain kinds of off topic articles.

On the other hand, I agree.
The fact she selected the talks without looking at the gender is great, and I missed on my first read (woops, I blame HN encouraging fast replies for more karma).
There was a show in Australia called Perfect Match [1] based on another called The Dating Game [2] which is fairly similar (asking questions to 3 members of the opposite sex in a blind date format)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Match_(Australian_game_...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dating_Game
Oldie but i still laugh every time I read it. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant
Because your representatives are old and suspect email isn't a real thing, or that the same person could just email 50 times (and that somehow the same can't be done with the regular post). They are also looking for any excuse to totally ignore your ass so they can get back to abdicating power to special interests.
"But do not, under any circumstances, give anyone the satisfaction of seeing you ragequit. They don't deserve it. Play other, better moves – and consider your long game."

I agree. Do not ragequit SO. They're not worth it. Simply ignore them on SO and never ever help them anymore by posting content there.

But do "rage" everywhere else you can: on Twitter, on /., on G+, on blogs. Wherever you can. Certainly do not try to fight your case on meta: meta is the problem, not the solution. Fight your case on another medium, where they cannot silence you (nor reverse your "rage").

There are just too many issues with SO that have been unadressed.

I did "silentquit" a 7.7 K account (probably more now) gained by mostly helping others. And now everywhere the topic comes out I point out that there are seriously bad moderators issue on SO and that meta is mostly pointless.

The one thing that pissed me off were crazy mods that did "team up" on new users and refuse to see their wrongdoings on meta. This made me sick and I quit. "Silentquit" on SO. "Ragequit" on the big bad Internet.

And, no, I won't "post this meta" or "link to the discussion or it didn't happen".

The very reason I'm posting this here is because, you SO mods and (co)-founders have no say in here. Here it's other people who are voting and they're not all pom-pom girls fighting your cause.

I'm not in a hurry. Usenet is still there (slowly dying, but still here). There are others resources like Quora and EE.

And others will listen to all these high-rep users who did ragequit (or silentquit) SO and address their very real concerns and, one day, we'll have something better than SO.
Many plea bargains would be offered in those situations. What the parent is suggesting is that the jury has to come back with "fully guilty of all charges" in which case the person gets all the appropriate time, or "not fully guilty of all charges" in which case the person is ACQUITTED OF ALL CHARGES. This would provide a powerful incentive to not stack many multiple charges on solely for intimidation, even if they're completely irrelevant.
Later version of Dylan are a much better language, Algol-syntax not withstanding. Better still, is GOO: a very elegant little language that would make for a perfect Dylan or Common Lisp core.
This is literally more than a decade overdue. The very first "sucks" site I ever heard of was none other than paypalsucks.com way back in the early 2000s, and even at that time it heavily documented this and many other issues with PayPal's service.

Awesome response time guys!
Well, that was depressing. To tell the truth I couldn't finish reading the article. It feels so much as a fiction novel that the idea that it chronicles the actual events is deeply unsettling. How the fuck can this happen in our time? And how do we stop it?
datomic claims to solve the O/R impedance mismatch -- the "vietnam of computer science"[0] -- which is why datomic matters to application developers.

"... The facts the Storage Service returns never change, so Peers do extensive caching ... Once a Peer's working set is cached, there is little or no network traffic for reads ..." [1, paragraph 4]

this basically means that your reads are VERY fast -- in-memory fast -- which means you can program as if your data wasn't in a database.

[0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/06/object-relational-m...
[1] http://docs.datomic.com/architecture.html

ps video is only 14 minutes long, worth a watch
I saw an interesting situation at Google many years ago. There was a "bullpen" in which 8-10 people sat. That was for my team, a bunch of pager monkeys with a rotating on call rotation. We were operation-oriented as you would expect. Not too far away, the developers for one of our services had their desks.

At least one of the ops people on my team and at least one of the devs on the other team were, well, loud. I don't know if they had hearing issues or what, but they were significantly louder than most people. You know the type. That's just how they are.

Immediately over the cube-wall from us on the other side was a bunch of technical writers. They couldn't get any work done because of the racket from us. We got complaints. My boss used to keep a tally on one of his whiteboards. This is the thing where you go |||| and then put a slash across for the fifth for those who aren't familiar (is this a local culture thing?). I think they ultimately tried to get moved to another building, away from the people they supported.

On a third side, there was a bunch of project managers. This was back in 2007, so OpenSocial was the "big thing" then. So we had to deal with the blathering coming out of them most afternoons: "what if this person is friends with this person on this service, but isn't friends with this person on this other service, and then this third person shares this thing to the second person, does the first person get to see it?"

I'm surprised ANYTHING got done there. Come to think of it, that might explain a few things. Another team up in that same space was the Lively group, and everyone knows what happened with that project.
On your quest I'd recommend the following:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0134843460
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/hudak/SOE/
http://book.realworldhaskell.org
Too little too late for Paypal.

This was always the most pressing problem they've always continued to ignore and now their hubris is going to hurt them.

I hope Stripe buries them and I hope this case is taught in business schools the world over.
The Design of Everyday Things - A Summary by Chapter
"She got the ratio she wanted"

That's my issue - the ratio she wanted just perpetuates this gender discrimination. Unless the gender ratio of expert speakers in this industry is somehow exactly 50/50, she has discriminated against one gender just to satisfy her magical ratio.

Whether she did this blind to the applicants gender is of no consequence - she thinks it was a win when IMHO, is just gender more discrimination.
I'm still not convinced that any business plan or operation necessarily includes Peano axioms. Goal of business is creating value for customer, and the compensation for that is expressed in monetary terms true, but that still does not include Peano axioms formally even if you include accounting aspect of business. In particular axiom of induction is not strictly necessary to describe any business.

But all this is somewhat beside the point, since knowing a business is a formal system to which Godels theorem applies does not let you figure out on its own if it is going to make it and if you therefore should invest in it. If anything you are arguing all businesses are formal Godelian systems therefore that can't be used as a distinguishing feature.
I understand that, just feel like the ratio is getting out of hand.
Fear not, I haven't felt like that in years. (But thanks for the offer of someone to talk to.)

I did talk to people at the time until I was blue in the face. That did not help either, except for the moments in which I was talking.

Only one thing helped break the vicious cycle: Remeron. I was better within a day, and I only had to take it for a month. Brain chemistry is a bitch!
Define "best person".
This is complex if you're selling a lot of different goods/services that may be different VAT rated, or enter into complex contract. But for companies dealing only with simple uniform stuff that's sold at the full VAT rate, it is very straightforward, and thankfully that makes up a substantial proportion of businesses.

The EU-based businesses I've handled billing for have processed a few tens of millions without ever worrying following more rules than these:

* Outside the EEA? If yes, no VAT. Done.

* Got a VAT registration number? No VAT. Done

* Otherwise, apply current standard VAT rate (20% in the UK)

Of course, I have had the "luxury" of not dealing with any products that have other VAT rates applied. But even then, for a UK seller of products it's generally sufficient to mark the products with a VAT category and apply a lookup in the last case to determine which of the handful of rates applies.

There may certainly be edge-cases where this meant we ended up overcharging VAT of customers, but nobody goes to jail for that.

If you provide B2B services with complex contracts it certainly can get quite hairy, but that can get hairy in the US and elsewhere too.

Beyond this, the only extremely vital things to consider in Europe when it comes to invoicing that seems to regularly confound US developers (and some European developers too):

* Invoices don't change. Ever. No really. And that means storing a copy of the invoice as it was presented to the user rather than dynamically regenerating it from a template that might later change.

* Specific phrases or wording and rounding rules tends to apply depending on the country you provide the service in. But this is rarely harder than getting your accountant to approve a suitable template.
> In her own words: “I always end up sitting in a room listening to the same four straight white men agree with each other on some panel.”

How does she know they're straight? Does she know each and every one of them on a very personal basis?
Correcting an imbalance is not the same as unbalancing something.

Looking to increase X at Y's expense is only discriminatory against Y if Y's current state is deserved. Unless you're prepared to argue that men deserve all the slots at a tech conference, it's not discriminatory to enlarge the applicant pool to seek greater female representation.

GoGaRuCo famously achieves high female participation with blind judging of submissions, simply by making sure that the applicant pool has a large number of women through efforts to reach out to, and evangelize in, female tech communities. Is that discriminatory against men?
It's impressive that she went through all of that extra effort to solicit submissions from a particular group and then didn't give any special preference to that group when accepting submissions.
🍺 /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.2.2: 2819 files, 39M, built in 4.5 minutes
When I made this point to my stepfather as a child, he got indignant, claiming that I was saying that the jobs getting replaced 'weren't good enough' and the people who did them 'didn't deserve jobs'.

The point is that not everyone will understand that the shifts are gradual, and that we're not going to sack thousands of convenience store clerks and simultaneously hire thousands of vending machine technicians because the technicians 'deserve' jobs and the clerks don't.
Algorithmic Creativity
That’s a nice trick, making the battery last longer by not using the phone. I’ll try it myself.
Probably not when the movie came out in '93 tho. The easiest Linux install was a sad chore until at least '95 or '96.
Not the market you need to be playing in, something enormously frequently overlooked when a localised problem arises here I have found, is all.
This seems like a good time to turn an old saw over so that the sharp edge faces the other way:

Sometimes "good" people get done wrong in the pursuit of justice. Real life is messy and things don't always work out they way we'd like. But its the system we have. There's room for improvement, sure, but its the best we've got right now. Its no one's fault in particular, sometimes things just turn out badly and the prosecutor loses her job along with her assistants.
Her blind judging produced an even gender split. How are men discriminated against?
I think I agree with you.

It'd be great if people could ignore age, sex, etc. It'd be great if people could just provide constructive criticism. (Of course, if someone is suggesting something dumb ("I'm going to run this exploit scanner against my school network.") we need firm words to explain just how serious the effects on their future might be.

I agree that mentioning age in the title does drag the threads off-topic. But part of that is people being jerks to anyone who mentions their age.

"I'm 14; I made X" means "I'm 14. emacs is about twice my age. The Matrix was released when I was born. And Fight Club. And Sixth Sense. And Star Wars. (No, not the ancient Star Wars, Star Wars Episode I the Phantom Menace.)"

It means "I'm 14. OS X was released a couple of years after I was born." or "Windows 95 was obsoleted a couple of years after I was born." or "You've heard all those programming jokes about cars and programming languages or planes and programming languages and you've read all those papers about GOTO considered harmful and watched as people incremented their programming languages or moved to new platforms or introduced new ideas." or "You talk about 8 bit gaming or 16 bit gaming. I was born when the SNES was made obsolete. N64 had already been out a few years when I was born." or "Ubuntu got a first release when I was about 6."

There's just so much that kids don't know.
The problem is not elitism, but that there is virtually only one "elite" brand and that is Apple. Sony at least gets points for trying. Everyone else is just flailing. This is an anomaly in any other industry, and many industries are the polar opposite.

Can you imagine a world where there are hundreds of varieties of wine, but only several that are any good? Where you can pick between dozens of $2 bottles and several at $50 or more?

Apple's perceived elitism comes from people that produce something they truly care about, that are opinionated and uncompromising. That this is shockingly rare in the technology industry is fundamentally worrying.
If one want to enforce a policy to include demographics in ones recruitment process, the following large demographics should also be considered:

People of color.

Immigrants.

Those of young age.

Those of old age.

While women is clearly the largest demographic in that group, each listed group is commonly put in an disadvantage when applying for work. Outreaching to each of those groups is also the only way to get a work place that includes a fair portion from each demographic, as they are used to being denied and thus do not apply for as much work as white middle aged men.

One should also want to consider people previously convicted of a crime, as that is a very large demographic in the US and is one which also have a very hard time finding jobs. Many have given up on ever finding a good job, and do not apply for higher paying jobs even if they got a higher education that would qualify them for hire.
That these camps exist today is a giant pockmark on all of humanity.
"Would you want your fate to be determined by some people who read things on the Internet or even in the New York Times or on the nightly network news? When you say "evidence" are you privy to something that has been specifically vetted and proven to be a fact?"

The problem is that many people have a profound distrust of and disillusionment in the legal system and the government.

Most people who are outraged at Ortiz's handling of the Swartz case, her ass covering, and business as usual attitude after Swartz's suicide have little faith that the very system that put the likes of Ortiz in power in the first place would deal with her abuse of that power properly.
To be honest, it comes of as a bit miffed.
Investing time to target a certain demographic seems discriminative to the excluded demographics. If equality is the goal, this seems hypocritical.
In a lot of communities, the "this is my first post" is often celebrated. On HN it definitely is not, which is kind of strange. Glad you put this out there danilo.
Which isn't a problem if you have blind judging of submissions--just make sure that your submission pool is diverse, and pick the best papers without reference to race, orientation, or gender.
>“The delusion consisted of the patient’s absolute conviction she was already dead and waiting to be buried, that she had no teeth or hair, and that her uterus was malformed.”

How did the researchers know this? Did the patient somehow believe she was dead but that she was still able to speak with the living?
That's incredibly short sighted of you. We should be encouraging the next generation to develop this skills in a supportive and constructive way. They're our future employees (and/or bosses).
I've also experienced this. I'd curl up on the shower floor and sit until I couldn't stand the now-cold water coming out of the shower head. I spent consecutive days close to catatonia, dragging myself into work, shutting the door, coming out eight hours later.

I don't think this fact has a lot of bearing on this article, though. I feel like these criticisms are just an unfortunate manifestation of HN's tendancy to be contrarian. They're not effective rebuttals; they're just "Wait, I have feelings, too!"

Furthermore, being sad/depressed/suicidal really shouldn't be a contest, and the way I experience isn't necessarily going to be the same as the way you experience it. This article articulates a lot of my own experience. I'm sorry/glad that it doesn't match your experience.
Technical issues aside, the way AOL implemented poses some issues from SPAM I think.

With AOL I could check and if I can't unsend I know they opened the email. If this worked across all email and I wanted to use email for nefarious purposes I could use this to see, with great accuracy, exactly which email address that I've sent to were active and opened the message. I can then target these accounts more.

I feel like this could be a horrible idea.
YC already is associated, by their own will, with companies that innovate, work on crazy new ideas, build the future, disrupt markets, solve problems. Not sleazy marketing schemes.
Thank you for that link, much appreciated.
The font was hard on my eyes. Black text on a white background is not the best. Offwhite or other pale shades tend to work better.

The site map has a lot of things in it which look like they are supposed to be hyperlinks but there is no link.

I knew of the site back when I had a pet dinosaur and was homeschooling my own kids. I knew it to be a gold standard site. Even at the time, I found it frustrating to navigate. That aspect certainly has room for improvement.

What sorts of resources are you looking for? The last time I asked around, certain older items were still the gold standard with apparently no newer competitors. Though there are also a lot of new resources which did not exist back when I began homeschooling.

I am thinking on how to revive my own parenting/homeschooling site. I have been thinking on how to use HN as a resource for doing that. I can share my tentative thoughts in that regard if you are interested.

I am really glad to hear you wish to revive it.
"ragequitting" is a (bogus) term used to describe a user trying to break havoc by removing all the content he created from the sites he's quitting. Or even performing vandalism by modifying questions / answers (eg randomly adding or removing not to sentences, changing their meaning to say the opposite of what was meant).

But it is indeed an intimidation tactic when stackexchange says: "Don't even think about ragequitting, you can't do it, we'll revert your rage changes".

Because real ragequitting ain't about vandalism. Real ragequitting is about spreading the word out, on sites / blogs / forums they don't control about their unacceptable behavior.
Using HTML5 Data Attributes to Write Clean Code
>How is "we need more $x" any less discriminating than "we need less $y"?

If $x already experiences discrimination that is beyond the control of the organizer, the organizer discriminating against $y merely helps to balance things out.

Also, in this case gender was not considered in candidate selection.
In a word, money.
> She knew the issue was the lack of submissions, so she worked hard to get lots of talk submissions from women.

This is a complex issue, there isn't a single root cause. Lack of submissions is just one factor among many.
That was a good catch! Serves me right for testing with the small file for correctness and testing for speed with the larger one.
Actually, this title was edited from my original. Thanks to whoever did that!
It's a place for designers to show off their current work and projects by posting 400x300px shots. You can only post and comment however if you have been "drafted" (invited) by another player and those invites are pretty hard to come by - a good thing considering the quality of work that's on display. There's no member restriction on downloading any of the PSD's that the designers have posted - this site just scrapes those freebies into one location.
Not when the targeted demographic is historically under-represented. Making an effort to include those who wouldn't be is not the same as reducing submissions from those who are normally included.
Additionally, I'll bet that none of them have experienced the special horror of maintaining a traditional merchant account and dealing with that kind of inflexibility. That's not even bringing PCI compliance issues into it.
Believe me there's a reason PayPal got as popular as they are. The alternatives (minus the new services like Stripe) are far, far worse.
This is so true. I know that band since i was 14. Homework from Daft Punk was absolutely great.

But... This soundtrack, fits so perfect, and i still listen often to it while chilling or coding. So. Awesome.
> > which I have timed to usually clock in at 8-9 seconds, but which can take as long as 20 seconds

> This is definitely not normal.

Big consolation to users experiencing this! That's a Linux-level response to user concerns.
Really alarmed & surprised (I know I shouldn't be) to hear of Jeff Atwood's - apparently recent - struggles with depression & suicidal thoughts... he appears (to me, observing from afar, via podcasts, blogs) to have a robust, upbeat personality... never would guessed he'd be susceptible to any kind of unshakeable mental or emotional gloom. Scary that people can look like they have it together in every respect, when they are secretly researching their suicide. So glad Jeff was able to pull himself back from the brink.
I was a cofounder and we went through an accelerator this past summer. I met a lot of people, learned a ton, but in the end I wasn't the right fit with the other cofounders and we were in a very niche space I didn't have a lot of domain knowledge in, so for lack of a better term, we parted ways. There are of course more details but that's the gist. It definitely taught me a few lessons and established relationships that are now funding the new company.