skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's fascinating for a company like Google in SV is no matter how good things are, you have to constantly fight to keep folks like John from trying their hand at early stage life. Overall I think it's great for the ecosystem. This type of non-traditional churn (where employers not only have to be the best of the "Big Co.s" but better than doing something completely on your) own pushes everyone to create environments that are not only innovative and rewarding but also fulfilling.

Being a founder and now at Google (John and I started almost the same time and I know him well), I think what's notable about this post is when people usually write "Why I left Google" they are sometimes backhanded compliments or thinly veiled complaints.

What John is saying "I had a great time and learned a lot but I still think starting a company is more interesting".
Come work at Rackspace in the heart of San Francisco (2nd and Folsom), we have 14k sq feet and are expanding to another 14k sq feet within 5 months. We are hiring for many positions, full-time or interns. Rackspace focuses on building big systems to serve builders and are incredibly customer-focused dead set on building useful services that operate at scale.

We are looking for the following:

* Get stuff done, people that are motivated to make an impact
* Distributed systems experience
* Excited to build new stuff
* Passion for new technology
* Like working next to Mailgun
* Interns are welcome, h1b’s are welcome

I run the San Francisco office so please ping me directly, daniel.dispaltro@rackspace.com
That's a fair point. I think the article is assuming that, in these cases, the companies are in the wrong.

This is actually interesting. I think there's probably a huge opportunity to communicate with your customers in this case. There's got to be a way to engage while respectfully disagreeing.
Ext-RESCAL
Silverlight? You would never start a new project in it nowadays, would you?

Cocoa on the other hand is still the foundation of almost all OS X and iOS programs.
Only in Europe would a cartel of newspapers be aided by the government in extorting a foreign company without anyone crying foul.

If I were Google I would include a clause demanding positive coverage - seeing as they are paying for the damn news.
Interesting that submitters are actually asked to do a handful of editing work that could probably be automated, but prevented from performing the subjective work of summarizing or restating that a human being is actually suited to.

Seems like a rule worth changing to me.
Less than 2 years is not enough time to really soak up the skills, experience, connections, and solving enough difficult problems for it to be maximum value.

I guess I now kinda get why he's doing it, but he's taking a huge risk with only 2 year of working experience total under his belt. Wish him the best!
I find it very intellectually dishonest to compare Scandinavia and the United States, or any other large country for that matter.

* All in they are 26 million. The US is 310 million.
* The US is geographically HUGE with millions of square miles.
Nordic countries less so.
* Scandinavian populations are less diverse than the US.
* The US is a superpower and must support a large military.

I don't think we can look at Sweden or the other countries as a model society. Sure, there are good ideas in there, but the question arises -- will it scale?

* Healthcare and social services -- will it scale from 26MM to 310+?
* Infrastructure -- will it scale from 100K kilometers
of roads and railways to 10MM kilometers of roads
and rail?

Then there are issues of States' rights in the US. Getting a federal law passed is only the first part. Next, each state has to figure out how it will be implemented, added-on, or blocked.

Having said all this, I don't know who we can look to. Maybe no one.
Couldn't this be just a side effect of what he advocated a few days ago in his WSJ commentary? [1]

By putting a lot of pressure on measuring things, people use the data that is easy accessible/comparable. Consequently they put a lot of effort into constructing the argument why these factors are the most important ones. Getting unskewed data is incredibly hard, especially when there is so much to gain from subtly manipulating the data.

[1]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732353980457826...
They are un-ignorably loud, have battery life < 10 min, and are flown by line of sight. So if you tried to harm someone with it, you wouldn't get away.
Its gratifying to see Notch benefit from some really creative work. I do not believe that Minecraft, as a building game, would not have been touched by any of the 'major' studios had he proposed it to them directly. The games industry is a bit crusty in that way.
I'm in the same boat as him where I'll submit everything I write, watch 400 people read it on google analytics, and never get a comment of an upvote. It's sort of frustrating because I'm submitting my writing specifically to get feedback, but I also realize that if something is truly interesting to me, I'm more likely to hop straight to twitter to share it.
I don't think ambient temperature and humidity sensors would work very well because people usually aren't outside and when they are, phone is usually in pocket.

I love this idea too though. I'm guessing pressure is one of the least effected by being inside or in a pocket, while still being highly useful for weather prediction.
Facebook does not allow pre-teens on their site precisely because of this law. I do not think that's a bad thing. The law is not perfect, but it is intended to be a tool to stop people from exploiting kids 12 and under. The exploitation isn't necessarily from the site operator, but other users. If Facebook had a bunch of 11 year olds (and now with Graph Search it would be easy to find 11 year olds near you) the main concern would not be that Facebook would somehow take advantage, but that other people on Facebook would.

These same kids cannot go to a PG-13 rated movie without an adult either, I don't find this especially onerous.

http://www.facebook.com/help/441374602560317/
Women can be sexist towards women just as much as any other kind of person. In fact, some people have internalized misogynist feelings about women as a gender: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/10/20/internali...

Also, people do quite loudly complain about objectification in media, esp. in advertising. Jean Kilbourne does a lecture series about this very subject called Killing Us Softly (trailer is on youtube): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Kilbourne#Works
That only works for background images. Plus, the UA will send a request for the webp image even if it can't read the format. It needs the mime type to figure that out.
Whose theory are you describing in the first paragraph? Yours? In practice, the needs of society -- new freely available knowledge -- match up imperfectly with the needs of the people who can or should do the research: money, recognition by their peers, time to spend on fun problems, and general satisfaction (which can and almost always does come from a large degree from learning something new that other people will want to learn too).
Obligatory Dec 1996 Wired article by Neal Stephenson about the building of FLAG:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

(it is really worthwhile to read, especially for everyone who liked the Cryptonomicron. )
dollar sign works if you draw the vertical line all the way through.
This is probably objectively true.
Best description of Minecraft I've ever read. Watching a beautiful scene unfold, alone, the urge to share the experience; knowing your structures won't be worth anything but still doing it for fun or to share with friends; it's something very unique. Few games generate the same kind of emotional attachment that minecraft does.
Return Of The Map As Art
Could you explain more about your setup? My own daughters love Minecraft and also want to learn to code...I'd be very interested in how you're accomplishing this.

Thanks!
The currently most cited US college ranking is done by U.S News, which is heavily favored toward small private institutions from the east coast. I always find it irritating that a world renowned research power house such as UC Berkeley can't even make it into the top 20 ranking, where as schools such as Emory and Vanderbilt are ranked higher.
It ALMOST feels like an east coast old money circle-jerk. I guess with the exceptions of a few schools such as MIT and Stanford, areas such as Law/Medicine/Business/Finance/Liberal Arts are historically valued a lot more than science and engineering in this country.

That simply has to change if we want to lure more young people into going into those fields (which is what the future of this country needs). It's still unbelievable how many high school kids (remember, most people don't live in SV) think accountants are these powerful people in suits making six figures straight out of school and engineers are nerdy people who work in a basement and gets no money/respect.
Indeed, if I weren't doing an IT tech startup of my own, it would be hard not to jump at rockets, space, nuclear energy, robots, etc.
The context here is someone claiming that women are less sexist than men simply /because/ they're women. I was responding to this one comment/sentiment, rather than to the thread as a whole.

#1, while I will accept that at face value you're more likely to root for the home team - I disagree with the unspoken assumption that that translates into less sexism.

#2, right, but even with that being the case we know enough about what sexism is to blanket say that an entire gender is less likely to conduct it?

#3, some women are complaining, some men are complaining about the reverse (e.g. /r/mensrights). Therefore using identical logic I can claim that because some men have complained about sexism that men are "less likely" than women to be sexist. See how that works (or doesn't)?

#4, because women are people and people are sexist? What is it you want me to explain? If someone calls something sexist and it was produced by a women, earlier discussion not withstanding, it is.

#5, women being sexist to ANYONE is entirely relevant to this discussion. The discussion is: "women are less sexist." Therefore ANY sexism on the part of a women is fair game.
Thanks, and sorry for the snark but it's way too easy to just talk past each other about feminist issues in general.

My memory is a bit fuzzy but from interviews I've read with models, most of them (male and female) are against the "power structures" you're talking about. The only model I'm friends with is definitely not the sort of girl who believes her place is in the home etc.
Unfortunately building trust using this method is becoming increasingly difficult. The more sellers use it (up to the point that books are written about it) the more it's being washed out and abused, the more aware consumers become of the manipulation and the more they reject it. I see more and more sellers having to resort to statements like "Free something - NO questions asked, NO registration, NO strings attached...", which defeats the whole purpose.
fried!
Foiling Cross-Site Attacks, by Chris Shiflett
TIL there's a pile of poo character.
Anyway, I signed up, too.

(If it's a joke we might organize a study group ourselves^^)
No, don't think that is irony.
Startup TripThirsty wants to be the Pinterest for Travel. Monetized Groupon way.
One of those ideas that's blatantly obvious, but which most will refuse to consider until someone 'big' mainstreams it.

I have a hard time reconciling the various useful things the Gates foundation seems to do with the tendency towards obnoxiousness that defines Microsoft.
Write Sticky Copy That Gets Noticed
Google Glass passes through FCC, more details revealed
And the follow-up to that even-better article (http://ventspace.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/follow-up-on-direc...):

The message said “DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology.”
That is definitely not true in any way, shape or form.
Microsoft is actively investing in DirectX as the unified
graphics foundation for our key platforms, including Xbox
360, Windows Phone and Windows. DirectX is evolving and
will continue to evolve. For instance, right now we’re
investing in some very cool graphics code authorizing
[sic] technology in Visual Studio. We have absolutely no
intention of stopping innovation with DirectX,
and you can quote me on that.
GitHub is an exceptionally popular open-source community
where any developer can find code for pretty much
anything. But there's a problem—some of that code contains
extremely offensive racist, sexist, and homophobic,
language.

A word of caution before you proceed, because these search
results are very NSFW.

You don't have to look hard for to find hundreds of
results for controversial terms of every stripe. Simply
inputting racial slurs, misogynistic words turns up code
in several languages—Java, HTML, Python, Ruby, and so on
—casually riddled with things like bitch, slut, whore, and
worse.

Source:
http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and-sexis...

GitHub is a platform geeks and techies love because it not
only lets you manage projects but allows you to share your
code and your projects with the outside world. This kind
of transparency obviously has its perks as well as its
downsides—among the biggest is the fact that now we can
see who's coding what. And we can see exactly how mundane
racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other kinds of prejudice
are in the coding world on a granular level.

GitHub sits in the center of an Open Source community that
has been dealing with heated ongoing controversy over its
lack of diversity. In November, BritRuby, a Manchester
conference of Ruby on Rails coders, was canceled after
outrage broke out online at its all-male lineup of
panelists. Ruby coder Sean Handley took to GitHub to
criticize the online community for bringing down the well
-intentioned conference with "careless words."

"Turns out, a lot of the prominent Rubyists are white guys
and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were,
indeed, white guys," he stated. "Making an issue out of
that is, frankly, misguided."

Is it an overreaction to make an issue, likewise, out of
the words being used by GitHub coders? Perhaps. But if
anything, Morris argues that the issue strikes at the
heart of nerd culture itself:

The reason we’re seeing such vicious anti-equality
bullshit in the geek community over the BritRuby situation
and other conference type stuff is because the very
existence of societal inequalities (against women, racial
minorities, gender/sexual minorities) threatens the whole
idea that hackers got where they are because they are
super-fucking-smart.… A lot of what we call luck boils
down to us being in groups that don’t face discrimination
and other problems.

Source:
http://www.dailydot.com/society/github-code-search-racism-se...
can you think of someone more generous and more influential in philanthropy ?
Make sure to apply the same standards to all the companies and people (including half of Americans) getting away with much worse.
This rule clarification is good in that it acknowledges the participation of third parties. Yay!

But it doesn't change the fact that HIPAA is just kabuki (for show).

I worked on some of the first RHIOs (regional health information exchanges) on the market. We all had yearly HIPAA training. All platitudes and very little actionable advice. As devs, we all had full access to millions of patients.

Accidental disclosure is inevitable. So many participants, so many systems, the weakest link and all that. We all figured it was a matter of time before something bad happened.

I care about privacy. A lot. I researched what's what, legal and technical. Because I want to do a good job. And I have skin in the game (my own medical history).

The month I started on the electronic medical records project, a local hospital had just settled for allowing 100,000s of complete patient records leak. (A stolen laptop.) So I contacted the lawyers on both sides. Verdict? Try harder next time.

Pretty much nothing has changed (improved) since. Except the disclosure requirements, I guess.

This is a long topic, so I'll just skip to the conclusion:

We will not, cannot protect patient privacy until we assign a universal unique identifier for every single person. This means something something akin to RealID.

To protect patient privacy, we need to encrypt the data. But that's not feasible without globally unique identifiers. Because patient demographic data is dirty and mismatched record can be fatal. So you have matching algorithms that have to look at the original plaintext. And the heuristics are wrong enough that the process requires human oversight.

If we (the USA) had unique identifiers, then we could transition to translucent database designs. That'd be very cool.

http://www.amazon.com/Translucent-Databases-Peter-Wayner/dp/...

About once a year, I go to a "future of healthcare IT" event. I desperately want to hear that patient privacy is being addressed. Hope springs eternal. Mostly, no one knows what I'm talking about. Until you've worked on the systems and tried to actually implement privacy safeguards, people just don't grok the problem domain, and continue to believe it's a trivially solvable problem.
They aren't banned from the internet. They're banned from disclosing personal information (e.g. social networking) without parental consent, which at their age is probably not a bad thing. Wikipedia, Google and the rest of the internet are all fair game. So is any site that goes through with the parental consent part. Sites that do not tailor to kids typically do not go through the hassle because under-13 also means they aren't going to spend any money.
Come on... it IS an east coast old money circle-jerk. And everyone knows it.
Well, the company in question was totally OK with objectifying women, so I would say that this is both a problem of sexism in tech and marketing. The advertising a company puts out or endorses is a part of the company's culture, even to the people working at that company.
Ask HN: How much non-disclosure agreements limit you in the future?
I am a programmer who is thinking about getting involved with a certain early stage startup. For our meeting I am required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which is I'm guessing a standard procedure. I have no problem with it, as I have no intention of stealing their idea. However, I noticed there is no time expiration on the contract. Does this mean that by signing this I would never be able to work for a different similar company, or do my own related thing?
You're probably best off writing your own software so you can diagnose issues as they arise.. but I had people use http://sharedcount.com/documentation.php at my employer before we wrote our own processes to do it for us
This is one of those things that really highlights the disruptive power of ubiquitous computing + sensors. I expect to see more of it in the future.

I wonder if we could get Randall Munroe to do a "What if" treatment of a million people taking a picture at the same time with their camera phones pointed toward Sirius. Given EXIF data of time and GPS location, could you use that data set to create high resolution images of astronomical entitites? If they were all 5Mp cameras and you had a million participants, that is a 5terapixel image with an image surface across thousands of miles.
I'm surprised no-one has taken note of the assertion in the title and at the end of the article, that "a good apology is better than no mistakes". Yes sure not making stupid, sexist decisions and never get all the publicity. However when a [person/group/company (delete as appropriate)] does something bigoted, even the best apology still leaves them several notches below where they started beforehand.
What are your alternatives? OSX, where Apple has no qualms about abandoning technology, hardware or software, within a matter of years (the iPad 1 was EOL'ed just shy of two years old, I believe).

XCode and (Snow) Leopard? No such luck.

Now, you do mention the Linux alternatives, which seem to be the most stable... if you can get around any infighting of QT... Gnome/KDE... etc et al.

But it doesn't seem particularly "fair" to imply that this is something of a risk when you choose Microsoft.
This entire question is political, not computational.
> Rather than explain exactly why the display was sexist

It should be obvious. I'm not sure, but I think that pretending not to know why people could be offended by this display in this day and age is just willful ignorance. Note: I'm not claiming that everyone has to agree that the display is offensive, but you must at least know why some people think it is.

At any rate, it is not true that every article on gender politics should have to re-explain the basics to people who haven't been paying attention for the last few decades.

> You have no right not to be offended.

I think you mean, "You have no right to be offended," and you're wrong. Of course, it's awful hard to force people to stop offending you, but you absolutely have a right to be offended.
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I'm not sure I like that explanation. If the laptop batteries were sold using women's brains, we'd be celebrating how far women's rights have come, despite completely ignoring that women are human and also have bodies.

The real issue here seems to just be a puritanical view of nakedness/sexiness.

Women most certainly do deal with problems in the workplace, but having the ability to choose to stand mostly naked to sell batteries doesn't seem like one of them.
> with the knowledge and consent of their parents/guardians.

Not coincidently that's all COPPA requires. You can run web services tailored to the under-13 set, you just need to collect parental approval for your young users. Facebook and Google don't bother with it because it's a hassle.
Any info or thoughts about supporting Green Button exports?
Energy density of that solution must be ridiculously low. It's pretty much equivalent to raising water to a certain height.
Yeah, many banks gave out loans and then couldn't pay their other debts. America's answer? The home owners are evil and banks should be propped up and shielded from the risks they took.

It doesn't really teach responsibility.
It's undermining a countries sovern rights. Most countries don't like this
So glad GoDaddy has risen above their previous ad campaigns of hawking sex to sell domain registrations.
Are you saying I shouldn't write this post because some women work in fashion? Honestly, I don't understand.
> "When Gunnar Mogensen says 'We can't afford it' I think he is really saying 'we can't afford to feed, house and care for 100% of our people'."

I think a more generous interpretation would be along the lines of: as demographics shift, they won't be able to afford their policies unless they can do something about costs, economic growth or both.

More and more countries are going to start finding themselves in Japanese-style economic situations: where GDP per worker may continue to grow, but the net workforce begins shrinking. And it becomes increasingly difficult to support the elderly and disabled as the workforce shrinks, unless you have sufficient economic growth to cover the gap, and/or are free to adjust costs/benefits when it isn't.

There are clearly better and worse ways to confront this problem. But it's very real and not just a boogeyman invented by those who would take from the needy to line their own pockets.