skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. A good way to increase diversity in hiring is to set a rule: your hiring process isn't done until you've received a minimum number of applications from various demographics that are underrepresented.

You still pick the best applicant from all submissions, but it forces you to make sure that news of your position spreads into more than just the usual communities.
Humans deal with it just fine.

In 2009, there were 31 countries reported in which at least 10% of children under five died.

For comparison:

In 2011, the world average was 51 (5.1%), down from 87 (8.7%) in 1990.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality
Comparing suicide to quitting a game seems kind of offensively trivializing to me; similar to comparing killing people in a video game to having to kill people in war. I guess it's just a metaphor, but still.

(Also, sad to see Jeff Atwood was also contemplating suicide at one point. If you factor in "quality of life years", suicide is an even bigger problem than a lot of other health issues, since it disproportionately affects the young, and affects other people.)
First: Praise given always is meaningless.

Second: Criticism is not always 'angry'

Third: Consider dealing with the crass criticism as a life lesson.

Fourth: Mindless praise is not going to help you grow

Fifth: How you present something will often determine the type of response you get.

You are going to leave kindergarten some day, the world isn't all gold stars. You are going to have to deal with people giving a critical analysis of what you're doing. That is what will make you better, not endless back-patting.
Are you seriously, unironically comparing PG to Rupert Murdoch? Have you hit your head on something particularly hard recently?

The facts here are simple:

1. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 startups in the current YC batch (http://ycombinator.com/w13smaller.html).

2. They are all coached by around 7 active partners (http://ycombinator.com/w13smaller.html) and perhaps some program alumni.

3. But those people also continue to support participants from past batches too.

4. This is (so far) an isolated incident -- YC hasn't even had time to change any of its procedures, even if it deems it necessary to do so.

5. Immediately after it being brought to his attention, PG followed up with the owners and they made some changes as a result...

6. ...even though they aren't in YC for IM, YC has no real influence or control over IM or even the team.

So what's your expectation here? Should YC be performing a full background check on participants? If IM wasn't mentioned during the application or interview process, how reasonable is it to expect YC to have known about it? Are we supposed to expect someone at YC to be able to glance at something like IM and sense whether it's icky or not, or are we supposed to expect them to spend hours digging into it?

A program like YC is bound to attract some bad apples eventually (and we don't even know that these guys are "bad"), especially since YC explicitly looks for people doing things that might seem questionable at first.
Aren't impulses like that relatively common? I can recall hundreds of times where I felt a sudden impulse like that since about the age of 10, all triggered by finding myself in a situation where something not normally dangerous presented a very real possibility of death. I always figured my brain was using that impulse to viscerally play out the consequences in my head so as to scare the living daylights out of me (e.g. when first getting used to traveling by subway having a sudden strong impulse to jump into the subway tracks, making me keep well away from the edge of the platform).

I always thought the difference between a suicidal person and a normal person was that a normal person would have those thoughts, but they would inspire great fear, where as a suicidal person would experience those thoughts and not experience the corresponding revulsion.
>When Haskell is pushing trillions (downloads/cash/views/ads) every year - call me.

Did you not notice how many banks are on that page?

>Source: http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.ch/

Are you seriously referencing Harrop to support your argument? You do realize he is a troll right? Not like, people disagree with him, an actual, original definition troll. He jumps from language to language as people learn to ignore him, and has gone through trolling every major functional programming language except F#, which is the one he currently says is perfect and ocaml is shit. Before that, ocaml was perfect and haskell was shit. Before that, haskell was perfect and lisp was shit. Google his name, there's literally thousands of messages from him in mailing list archives demonstrating this.
Works in Virginia.
From my interactions with AaronSw I kinda got the impression that he was raised by wolves or perhaps extremely indulgent hippies, but I'm not going to judge his family without any firsthand knowledge.
I think you have the actions to improve reversed.
Yes, this is the exact same feeling I got from reading the article.

He can't scold people for making Anti-Apple comments while he is making an extremely pro-Apple standpoint. It just does not come off as genuine. Instead of more partisan arguments (to use his analogy) we need actual discussions about each platforms respective shortcomings.

But many people are not qualified to have an objective discussion about these platforms because in many cases naysayers have only used the platform they prefer.
BBC's headline is completely misleading; the researchers state that a solar-flare is a much likelier cause. There needs to be a science journalism bar exam.
It's spotty for me (southeastern US).
That is very true. But that's on us for being disingenuous and watering ourselves down; not on the kids for revealing their age.
I'm sorry, but there was nothing "well-reasoned and well-crafted" about that article. He does come off as an Apple elitist, that's true. But how can he explain the chasm between Apple 'fanboys' and 'haters' when he clearly does not understand and perhaps has never used the other platforms? This to me is Apple elitism at it's worst. It may be a bit more polished but, ultimately, it's no different than the thousands of other Apple fanboy posts that fill the internet.
Supercell generating $1M a day from 2 iOS titles
Down from NZ
Average Android user I would be skeptical about, but ones that frequent the forums generally know their own devices fairly well (many are former iPhone owners at some point or switch back and forth). However, I would say that many of them also take cheapshots at Apple to defend their own positions better by claiming things that are absolutely not true (e.g. Android gets similar battery life with the same battery capacity, Android performance with Dalvik/Java is as good as native performance on iOS, a 5+ inch phone is easy to hold [Note 2]).

Perhaps the most amusing thing I have heard are users that claim Android phones 2 years ago are as good as the iphone 5 is now. Perhaps if you rooted and installed Cyanogenmod[1] you got around a lot of the crap Android used to have or lacked and improved performance somewhat, but no way was the hardware or software of the Galaxy S or HTC Desire anywhere as good as the iPhone of today when it was stock.

Galaxy S for one had that horrible RFS proprietary filesystem that Samsung stuck on it and was a mess to try to use stock. The rooting/modding community would later fix that by formatting it to ext4 after some extensive work. One thing I can say about the Galaxy S though is its testament to stand up to time and still running the latest version of Android. You can grab a Galaxy S off ebay for well under $100 in great condition, root/unlock it and flash Cyanogenmod 10.1 on it (Android 4.2.1) and it runs quite well for 2.5 year old hardware. Part of that is due to it sharing near identical hardware to the Nexus S, but it's still quite amazing.

[1] http://www.cyanogenmod.org/
>admittedly this guy seems to have some personal grievances with people in the Haskell community

No, he's a troll. He trolled lisp, then haskell, then ocaml. 2010 fell into his haskell phase, that's the entire reason for that particular pile of bullshit.
More of these amazing photos are on Flickr: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tjintjelaar/
Definitely is down in CA.
It's time to see the range of the load balancer that's down!
You score very high on one of two most salient first cut criteria for women on dating sites. If you also have a high status and/or high paying job then the correct response to your post is -- duh you found it easy.
Has been down at least 1 hour for me (Denver)
Maybe I should clarify: The french university system is abysmal. The grande ecole recruits all the best minds, and these schools make for very good members of society, but it comes at the cost of specialisation. These people get maybe 1 or 2 years at most of actual specialisation.

Basically people getting out of these schools are very smart and know a bit about very many domains. It's just that, for having spent 5 years in the school system, they'll know a lot less about their domain than others having spent 5 years in an american university (for example).

In 99% of cases this is not important. You learn everything on the job anyways, and people going through the grande ecole system makes you very good at learning quickly and effectively. It's just that while in school you might be a bit useless, and when you get into the workforce, you'll end up with a pretty cushy job anyways.
I think partly this is because Clojure programmers already understand the ideas behind Datomic's data model, since it is somewhat of a natural extension of Clojure's model of state.

Rich has given talks on the architecture and talks on the data model, and at the Conj Stuart gave a talk on the testing infrastructure. You might poke around for a different talk if you haven't found one that touches on it yet.
ShowHN: Randomly open a Chrome bookmark from select folders
It was also on in the UK as "Blind Date," with Cilla Black.

"We're gonna have a lorra lorra laughs!"
I'm a designer, and I agree with you.
I call this attitude "I'm only single because I'm not picky enough". Kind of how people interviewing for programming jobs are self-selected to have a real problem with FizzBuzz, this seems to be a very common issue with online dating. I haven't seen any sites that try to address it, and don't really have any idea as to how they would.
This problem is extremely culturally localised, look at the rash of mail order bride sites, not in isolation but as to what it suggests. Just because the market works one way within one culture is absolutely not a global indicator that this must always be so.

And to immunise myself from potential responses of "ewww, mail order brides are creepy", I'm not actually suggesting using those services, merely pointing out that if markets exist where women happily engage in such practices, consider what it implies about normal dating locally in some instances.

The western cultural experience is not the only option on the table.
working here in asheville, nc
You are absolutely correct.

In fact, it is this (the elitism), that makes me hate Apple and their products more than any lack of feature in iOS ever could.
This is why men should Fedex engagement rings to their prospective fiancées. After all, it's the thought that counts not whether the act involves a romantic evening culminating in a bent-knee proposal vs. tearing open a delivery box alone in her apartment.
Thanks for your hard work. This is indeed a problem in every corner of the internet (Android forums included).
It's up in San Francisco.
I'm not sure why you characterise this as a straw man argument. GP post suggests that investing in viruses is unethical on a similar scale to investing in deceptive crapware installers.

You drew a separate distinction between those scenarios (whether or not there is a legal difference between deceptively installing crapware and promulgating viruses). I would suggest that you are re-stating and seriously misrepresenting GP's argument, rather than pointing out any genuine fault with that argument.

On a related note, in my view tying your ethical standards to whether or not a given activity is currently illegal is both lazy and far from optimal.
>Not enough <insert "oppressed" group>, therefore DISCRIMINATION! Demand government action to correct this injustice!
You know, I'd written a lengthy response to this, but there is absolutely no point. I'll say this: The type of praise we're pushing for here is of a very different type than the one in the article, and additionally, we're not raising one kid that's receiving and endless amount of "oh you're so smart!" We're saying that when a kid comes along, mentions their age and cares to show off something they've built, we should recognize their achievement, offer advice, and encourage them to move forward, not turn into a bunch of cynical assholes.

The fact that you linked that article as a way to refute such a call for decency and kindness is so damn disingenuous. Take a second and think about what you're arguing against. It's not that radical of an idea, y'know, to foster their creativity, motivate them, give them a sense of accomplishment.

Kids out there: Stay naive and optimistic and offer your help to people who want it, and never assume the worst in people. Searching for the Truth is good, but don't let it come in the way of you treating others nicely. Most of all, don't waste your time on HN.
This is awesome.

Not yet an organization here, but I've used scikit-learn for my internship project and thesis.

Something I implemented during that work (barely working) was the EM algorithm. I was wondering if EM is of any interest of the library.
This is not the same story, but this book is worth reading...

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag [by Chol-hwan Kang]

http://www.amazon.com/Aquariums-Pyongyang-Years-North-Korean...

Author was nine years old when imprisoned at the Yodok camp in 1977. Inexplicably released in 1987, he states that the only lesson his imprisonment had "pounded into me was about man's limitless capacity to be vicious."
Polytechnique is one school that takes in 200 people a year. And they're definitely a different beast, mainly by the fact of being some of the smartest people in the country.

But people going to Polytechnique are going there to become businessmen, rarely (if ever) to get their hands dirty in technical stuff. Their life is pretty well set from that school.
I've had very good experiences with it as well, and while I thought the matches were pretty good, I'm very curious as to how much of its success is due to the matching algorithm and how much is the process it uses. The somewhat high price barrier helps ensure people are serious, and the metered-out matching process helps prevent people from sending or being overwhelmed by mass spam. It's a more "relaxing" experience to leisurely read through a few profiles a day and send some of the quick questions out to find out if there's mutual interest (though I often skipped past the second or third steps to get straight to direct messaging).
“get as many women on stage as I possibly could.”

Isn't enforcing a gender ratio just more gender discrimination? How is "we need more $x" any less discriminating than "we need less $y"? You are just discriminating against the other gender.

Counting a 50/50 gender split as a win is silly if you have put together a shitty conference just to satisfy some ratio. Why not have the best person for the job? I don't care if you are male/female, black/white/pink/purple/transparent, straight/gay/transgender, human/animal/robot/script, able bodied/disabled or anything in between....put the best person in the job - that is real gender equality.
It's hard to beat patio11's great blog post on the subject:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

I'll also add this for inspiration; it's the story of one woman's success at the negotiating table after going outside of her own comfort zone:
http://www.women2.com/getting-hired-as-a-new-female-develope...
Show HN: chalkflow.com - Version control for design
>We know that Ortiz asked for disproportionate penalties and piled-on charges to try to force a plea bargain.

That's how every prosecution works. It's not misconduct. It should be, but it's not.
This might not be the appropriate thread for a job post, but if you are the kind of programmer who likes library voices, quiet concentration, and no interruptions, this is something we're trying to cultivate for ourselves at CircleCi. Job post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993738
Twitter Is Having Connectivity Issues Again, But Why?
Up in Ireland!
Was down in Pennsylvania and Michigan an hour or so ago, but it's back up.
Cryptome opens access to many cyberwar and crypto papers
Those banks do not have significant Haskell investment or units - so your point is void.
> They spent hours cleaning up mountains of crap from their relatives' and friends' computers.

In my case (by extension, my business), the appropriate units here would be "months" (assuming 720 hrs/month).

Yet I still don't see this as a YC issue, I don't see anything more justifiable than a quibble over PG's response to it, and I'm a little stunned at the vitriol here.
I describe it as scary, but that's looking back on it. At the time I visualized it, I committed to doing it, and I was starting to change direction before I realized what was even going on. It's difficult to convey, but it kind of fit with the description the author gives; for a time, that was 'the future'.
Now we need one woman, one black and one homosexual getting 50% speakers of each group at a tech conference.
I'm not sure how Dribbble works, can you please clarify it for me?

I guess you need an invite to be a designer that posts work but do you need an invite to download the PSD or can you sign up on your own to download them?
Twitter is very shy in posting status updates:
http://status.twitter.com/

while heroku floods their status page with automated updates almost daily:
https://status.heroku.com/
I am not the person you replied to, just another sufferer.

So, for me, depression feels very similar to what both darius and the original article were saying. It's like an erupting storm. It starts with something small -- some tiny failure which a normal person might say "okay, no biggie, I can deal with that." My problem was the multiplication. We have associative memories, and I as a depressed person immediately associated this failure with other recent failures, which associated with others, and others, until there was a deluge of connections. It feels like a literal suffocation by failure -- I mean it becomes hard to breathe and there is often an ache across my chest.

There was often a growing sense of paranoia -- that they would all find out. What they would all find out was not terribly clear, but it was something as simple as "I am useless" or "I'll never live up to any of their expectations." (If you've never suffered from depression you might even wonder why this is a bad thing -- but that sort of metanarrative doesn't happen when you're depressed because it's just obviously bad, it's rejection, and rejection is painful emotionally, and there is no reflection.)

And so each thing triggers other things, until I am just left with this deep feeling that I have failed as a human, like everyone else has this thing going for them and I simply do not, and my only normalcy comes from the lucky fact that most of them are not paying any attention to me, which is also sad in its own way.

I live a much less stressful life now, and that helps. I try not to commit myself to any futures -- I tell people that I don't make plans per se but only resolves, so that I am sure of the direction that I'm sailing, but not what I will find. That helps with avoiding that seed of failure from which the storm starts.

As for the storm itself, I've found that deep breathing does more good than you'd expect, because if you're focused on your breathing then you're not associating those thoughts so much; the thoughts still swim around your head but they don't breed new ones so much, and you can kind of quietly nod at them without indulging them. This gives me a better sense of the objects around me, which actually seem to totally disappear as I disappear into myself.

But sometimes, I will confess, I feel duty-bound to be honest to my younger self. And so sometimes when those seeds start, even these days when I can cope, I do just let them expand and expand until I cry myself to sleep. I feel oddly at home there, as if this is some permanent part of myself which I'm oddly glad I haven't lost. But because this is now a choice, and it's voluntary, I no longer feel suicidal during these periods -- just awful.
She knew the issue was the lack of submissions, so she worked hard to get lots of talk submissions from women. When she actually selected the talks, she did so without knowledge of the person's gender. She got the ratio she wanted by encouraging submissions, not by enforcing a quota.
Lots of people use "partner" for different reasons:

* solidarity with homosexual couples
* no plans for getting married, but plan to be together for years
* not monogamous
* 'girlfriend' sounds very high school

Of course, each couple will have a different reason, these are just the ones I've seen.
I agree. However, the majority of speakers end up being male, white, able bodied. The question is, are these the best people for the job, or just the easiest to get to fill your slots?

It is unfortunately hard to know the answer to that question. Possibly the only way to find out is to get more speakers outside this group and see how well they are received.
Palo Alto?

I'd rather win a 7-day trip to New Calendonia, all expenses paid.
Not sure I get how the example relates to the point your making. But agree 100% that Western culture is not the be all and end all.

It is the market we're playing in though...
North Korea is unique in the sheer brutality and scale of the system, but Myanmar/Burma has remote prison camps and the Russia's present-day version of the Gulag is no picnic either.

Myanmar: http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID...

Russia: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/ins...
I'm sorry. I disagree that you are "institutionalizing a gap" by not going out of your way to get women because research says they are less likely to apply. There is no "institution" presented by simply opening up public applications and sorting through the responses.

I have respect for the lengths this person went to in order to increase gender representation at her event. However, I disagree fundamentally with that statement.
Thankfully, I don't see it too often except around release dates and the month or so after. It sort of erupts around then and settles afterwards. I try to avoid most places online that get into such disputes, but I would assume it's generally the same elsewhere?
Oh, in that case, yeah, it is using a fair amount for me too -- don't get me wrong, I'm still at 85% after charging it this morning, but maps is showing about 30% of that.
I'm horrible about remembering specialized commands, so I "ps | grep" all the time. Sometimes grep shows up in the output, sometimes it doesn't, and yet life goes on... :-)
Atari goes Bankrupt
The most interesting part of the article for me was this:

To keep the selection process fair, Courtney chose applicants
based on their pitches only, without looking at the speaker’s identity or gender.

Based on this it doesn't look like she was discriminating.
The "we" in that context is clearly the readers of his magazine or blog.

You clearly need to train Reading Comprehension to V.