skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the angry blog posts help. I think most of HN is not aware of how pervasive sexism and gender privilege assumptions are in Startuplandia. We're commenting on Hacker News, a site run by someone who's most famous essay says outright that he wouldn't want to work at an early-stage startup with a woman with small children. In other words, I think even the people pushing gender privilege aren't fully aware that they're doing it. The angry posts keep the conversation alive, and that's the only way the culture is going to change.

Women's conferences, no idea. I think the idea sounds silly, but then, I'm a guy.

My wife, also a developer, also a startup person, is probably more on your side than on my side. Ironically, we started out with the opposite conflict: I didn't buy that male privilege was a real issue, and trusted on meritocracy to sort all this shit out. Now that's become her spiel, and mine the opposite.

(Look, here's her disagreeing with me on this very thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5287829)
I agree, but you still have to read the book. Coding can not be learned by copy and pasting other people's code. All I was trying to say is for every 20 people that say they are self-taught only one of them can write a feature from scratch from a blank slate and explain the trade offs of why they used a hashset vs a list. The other 19 may be able to get something working by copy and pasting another section and spending a week shoehorning it, but the competent person would bang out in a day without looking anywhere else.
Did we even read the same article? Where are you getting that from?
Dev tool for web developers and designers
online development tool for programmers, web developers and designers.
Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?
Everyone seems to be busy building MVPs in a weekend or in few months of time, and thats great as new technologies allow us to build much faster than even 10 years ago. But I want to know with that mentality and short time spans, what kind of stuff we avoid building simply because it would take years to make and has high opportunity costs for a single developer.

So as a hacker or an entrepreneur what product would you create if you have 5 years of time if you were sure you can not fail ?
to put differently, What are the tough problems you think we need to solve but you simply don't have that much time or resources to do it?
a new Mobile OS? file system? new language? what could it be?

EDIT: From the many comments, its interesting to note that some of the ideas are borderline science fiction! Amazing to know what a mere 5 year timescale allow human mind to think up.
Wow. By all means – keep hanging yourself, this is fascinating.

Let's break down your profound false equivalence, here.

Men are an over-represented demographic in tech. Women are not. Women, in their under-representation, find comfort and camaraderie in the company of other women. The reasons for this are many but let's simplify to the most obvious one: women are the targets of sexism. By sharing company with other women, they can avoid hostility and discrimination based on their gender while still dealing with the subject of their passion: technology.

Further, the under-representation of women in technology is a problem. It limits the diversity of experience and opinions in this industry, which limits the scope of solutions that are discovered. It limits the pool of potential applicants for any given role.

Any individual who works to remedy these issues is a positive force.

Same goes for white people. The vast majority of powerful folks in any given western sphere of power are old white guys. They don't need any further help.

You've done a chilling job at justifying overt gender discrimination here. Those more classically trained in the academics of this villainy can do a much better job explaining it than I have, but boy – what a doozie.

And if you really thought you were in the right, you wouldn't be posting with a throwaway. If this were a truly defensible position, I'd encourage you to write up a hiring post on your company blog. "Why we don't hire women who care about advancing the cause of gender diversity in tech," you'd title it.

But we all know you're not going to do that.
Scared of her being litigious (e.g. if she has performance problems and gets fired (like any other employee in our company), she would accuse us of discrimination)- stuff like that.
This is how you write an engineering job req
Whatever happened to freedom of speech. This is exactly what autocrats everywhere want and even we now believe it to be good - just because of youtube comments. Comments which reflect the real us. With a real name policy it will be replaced by a few polite lines with emoticons.
Worth pointing out the video is available to stream directly from PBS at that link.
It would be nice if we were able to run the edited code for viewing purposes. Kinda like what they did here http://pinesframework.org/pnotify/#demos-simple
"Like everyone else with an internet connection and a brain"

Emphasis mine.
When we fly over New Hampshire in a commercial plane, does this mean the captain or flight attendants will be obligated to tell us not to take photos of the state from the air, if any buildings are visible or identifiable as buildings based on other landmarks? Unbelievably this has been possible for well over a century (including use of air ships), only now has it become an issue for excessive regulation.
Question for jgrahamc: how much more efficient is your binary delta algorithm than cperciva's bsdiff [1]?

I assume since you've got the preimages of compression, as well as control over the compression format, that the diff and patch operations are much more efficient in space and time than they would be with arbitrary binary data. But...by how much?

[1] http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/
In reading this, all I can think of is "buttbuttination" and the broader Scunthorpe problem [1] (to use Wikipedia's term). Strange that Apple is using such a crude filtration technique.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
Retargeting for email marketers: Email retargeting webinar tomorrow
Scanning and auto-deleting your email, combined with the Gatekeeper technology wich houses the possibility of Apple telling me what Apps I can or can not run makes me seriously start to wonder the direction Apple is headed...

Edit: Gatekeeper is OSX technology. It allows users to only install Apple certified Apps on your mac, not your phone. It's fairly new and possible to turn it off (for now at least).
Complete Guide to Creating a Customer Persona for Your Startup
> Since the sequester is really just a reduction of an increase and not really a cut, how is it ineffective?

It may just be a reduction of an increase if you look at the TOTAL Federal budget, but for many individual agencies it is an actual deep cut to their budgets.
PS4 and how it changes blockbuster game development
Reverse engineer how something like this was created and it is mind boggling. The initial intelligence gathering of the target systems, developing the plan of attack, recruit experts on the siemens hardware and physicists to explain the things that could go wrong, development and QA must have been grueling, since the expense of failure is so great! Never mind the deployment and monitoring to see if it was effective! They probably recreated the entire environment to test different ways to cause havoc.

Stuxnet recorded various data points while the cascades and centrifuges operated normally, in order to replay this data to operators once the sabotage began. They must have had a working system to test this on?! The budget for something like this is probably in the tens of millions if not more. The HR requirement must have been pretty large too. Analysts to gather information, managers, programmers, qa, siemens hardware experts, physicists, deployment, monitoring, etc, etc.
Your two data points don't mean much because we're talking about macro trends and whether a 'shortage' actually exists. Specifically I'm asking someone to justify the assertion that there is a shortage of good programmers with some numbers, and I pointed out that job openings is essentially just market 'bids' and therefore not a very good metric since all markets have lots of 'bids' at well below market price. For some reason in the world of programming we take those low bids more seriously than in other fields which is inconsistent. The best metric that I know of, market price, does not indicate a shortage relative to legal and medical work, since both doctors and lawyers both have higher averages, and yet you rarely hear about shortages in those fields and how we need to more aggressively train more. So your point about how you individually make a lot of money is a bit of non-sequitur.

As for legal work, the median starting salary for the top 14 schools (remember, there is a shortage of 'good' programmers) is still 160K+. How many good programmers start there? Sure lower-grade lawyers don't make much, but neither do lower-grade programmers. Facebook and Microsoft both have reasonably high hiring standards and are complaining about a shortage of people over their threshold. As for 'the rest of us', the average lawyer salary is higher than the average software engineer salary. There are a lot of low paid software engineers too, it's absurd to compare only the highest paid software engineers to all lawyers which it seems you tried to do.

The fact that you can see the average lawyer salary being higher than the average software engineer salary, and still claim there a meltdown in the former industry while the second is struggling for people, just shows how deeply ingrained our cultural perspective of what job markets and compensation for a given career 'should be', and how it skews our perspective away from the simple econ 101 supply and demand curves that tell the real story. Markets are a lot more honest than PR releases from billionare tech executives.

But on a side note I did like your blog post, I just think it's irrelevant to this conversation.
My First Startup's First Year - What I Learned
iCloud is a collection of services which includes all of things you mentioned. The web interface is horrible but it works pretty well for me syncing between the desktop and mobile apps.

>> "you can't even do standard cloud stuff like share photos"

You can, shared photo streams which came with iOS 6 I think. You can also create shared photo journals in iPhoto (on iOS) which I presume work through iCloud.
Sadly youtube is now entrenched. Everybody else is a fringe player.
Ask HN: Neural Network Project
Recently discovered a neural network implementation in javascript and am looking to experiment with it a bit. Any suggestions as to projects that might be interesting to take on and that would benefit from a neural network implementation?
This prohibition shall not apply where the image does not reveal forms identifiable as human beings or man-made objects.

Seems like a poor distinction to me - "identifiable" by what?
A human eyeball, infra-red, multi-spectral analysis?

This would allow imaging of forests, fields, and streams,
but not man-made objects like roads, bridges, dams,
or the more navigable waters (might contain humans).

Perhaps the sponsor expects image-creators to blur out
anything that might be a human or man-made object?

How would this affect the usage of self-driving cars?
You could image a deer crossing the road, but not a human?
(Note the prohibition is on image creation, not publication.)
I humbly disagree.

Lets focus on one point.

Literacy facilitated efficient information exchange.

Likewise programming facilitated efficient information exchange.

But, not everybody needed to program the Internet for this advantage.

I think you are confusing a personal advantage and societal advantage. Certainly, we need programers but I am uncertain if everybody needs to be a programmer.

I work a full-time software job, and I can say that the software is the easiest part. I do big data HPC, C, C++, learning models and physics simulation. I need people to come up with models, Ontology and even vision. I think at the Hacker News Ivory Tower of software-for-software or software-for-programers, we often underestimates the value of domain specific knowledge.

Teaching kids is certainly rewarding and a CS degree is a bright future, but I am more worried about the lack of US PhD's then the lack of user facing javascript.
Do you really need a CS degree to make that kind of judgement? Even before I was college-aged I knew (and so did several of my programming friends) about hash tables and how much faster they were than just iterating through something and checking. I didn't know Big-O but I did have a loose understanding that told me iterating through EVERYTHING is slow, and that there are smarter ways to look up values.

This sounds like a case of a programmer using the wrong datatype, realizing it, and then being too lazy to fix it.
If the trackpad counts, then virtually every Windows device supports multitouch too. So why is this a reason for Apple to stop supporting Safari on Windows? I don't think it has anything to do with gestures.
Well you're right, but we can only watch. The world is slipping out of the hand with this technology and we can already tell where it is heading. So this isn't really a "problem" anymore, as much as it is a reality.
Another good remedy is an oral appliance for sleep apnea. I use one to position my lower jaw forward while I sleep so I can breathe more easily. The appliance is also a lot easier to maintain than the CPAP (an occasional brushing will do it good). The downside is that it can cost a lot more than the CPAP, as in several thousand dollars.

Edit: I used to use CPAP, but I found fitting it on my face to get a good airtight seal was finicky. It was only after using the CPAP that my insurance let me consider the oral appliance.
Gotta say... for all the flack the US Government takes around here, this illustrates there are no perfect systems. That is ridiculous.
Is there a spam folder for outgoing mail?
What benefits does this service have over the API provided by TheTVDB, which is your stated data source? I haven't interacted with theirs extensively, but it appears to offer the same functionality.
Well, the title is "Nginx Vs Apache in AWS", not "Nginx from apt-get Vs Apache from apt-get in AWS". If you can't install the latest stable releases, then don't write a comparison about them.
Opera's co-founder expresses disappointment with current direction
I think having the retail stores would have forced the support issue very quickly. Not responding to e-mail is one thing, but having an unhappy customer standing in your store is quite another.
I tested this on my @me.com account, and it's exactly how it works. Email containing the words "barely legal teens" is simply dropped.

I find it obscene to an Orwellian extent that Apple actually seems to think that no valid email would ever contain the words "barely legal teens". I wonder what other things Apple thinks are not worth talking about?

I have no trust in Apple's email services any more.
Alas, enough of them pass with serious enough consequences that we do have to watch for and actively oppose them. Prime example is NY's recent passage of the "SAFE Act".
This is far too simplistic a view. Being a good operator requires different skills from being an effective investor. Also, a lot of VCs are ex-operators who wanted a saner pace of life after being in the trenches for 10+ years.
Best entrepreneur-enabling practices you see or want to see?
What are the best VC industry practices you've seen that help entrepreneurs (i.e. First Round's shopping site during the 2012 holidays: http://gifts.firstround.com/)?

What else could be built to help entrepreneurs, VC or elsewhere? What are the biggest pain points?
If you use jquery, I wrote this really simple snippet that I use for quick down and dirty debugging.

var logit = function(x){$('body').append('<div id=logit></div>');$('#logit').css({'background':'#000','position':'fixed','bottom':0,'right':0,'color':'#fff','padding':5,'font-family':'arial','font-size':'9px','z-index':9999});$('#logit').append(x+'<br>');};

It could very easily be adjusted for non-jquery too.

Then just call it like: logit(whateverYouWantToDisplay);
>You can, shared photo streams which came with iOS 6 I think. You can also create shared photo journals in iPhoto (on iOS) which I presume work through iCloud.

Thanks for letting me know. I tried to do a mobileme style photo album about six months ago and was amazed that they had removed such a useful feature. Glad to hear it's back, even if it's in a slightly different form.
Wow that David Beazley presentation is annoying. He spends the first 10 minutes in the introduction, complaining about how he won't have enough time to go through his presentation.
civil disobedience means deliberately breaking immoral laws because the legal means for changing those laws are not available or are corrupted and not functional. an act of civil disobedience must be evaluated on moral grounds, not legal ones.
I would agree if it wasn't for the recent report that FBI agents have illegally accessed the bureau's DB to look for dirt on famous/important people, either to sell that info to others or to blackmail them.

Yet another case of "who watches the watchmen?"
What most schools don't teach (Code)
Great, now I'm tempted to spend way too much time experimenting to find other banned phrases. :-P But sure enough, whether it's buried in a bunch of lorem ipsum or standing alone, that phrase will send your mail to the ether. It never showed in Junk, it just never came across the wire at all. Edit: this behavior goes in both directions, BTW; receive or send.

I'd be willing to write it off as a one-time error on the part of some individual contributor, but what else will get your mail deleted? Since there are no checks in place for "rogue" ICs adding phrases on server-side, what will cause stuff to go missing tomorrow?
I'm always curious as to why more people don't go with a hybrid approach. For a lot of my projects, it ends up being the simplest and cleanest solution. Maybe it doesn't really scale well when you have a lot of people working on the codebase that may or may not be familiar with both the backend and frontend, but when it's a one or two person project, I don't see the issue with it. It certainly keeps things simple and prevents duplicated logic.
Wasn't aware the two were distinct.
I'm not sure if Facebook hacked can be any more of a privacy violation than Facebook working as designed.
It is mashed up with Guidebox to provide information on where an episode can be watched online. In addition, it has a better selection of TV artwork and episode thumbnails.

I envisioned this as "in addition to" TheTVDB to help round out their selection and provide additional API calls.
"not all spam messages make it to your spam folder with any provider - the worst offenders are often just thrown out"

This is news to me. Citation needed?
CallMom BASIC - A secure virtual assistant
> This would allow imaging of forests, fields, and streams, but not man-made objects like roads, bridges, dams, or the more navigable waters (might contain humans).

I wonder how much of a stretch it would be to imagine some court ruling that trees could be considered man-made objects if they were planted by humans.
This is yet another example of bad science journalism. The fact is: Different sleep patterns correlates to different gene expression patterns.

From that, wild conjecture.

How do we know "great sleepers" express only more of the better proteins? I could just as much theorize that better sleep leads to more proteins which could lead to more deposits.

Did they control for cognitive function? We know that different people need different amounts of sleep to function properly. How do the patterns shift for a long sleeper vs a short sleeper.

My general approach is to tease out the facts and go to the original source. As an ex-neurosceintist, I often get irritated at the "sciencey press" that follows.
Again, we need laws that stipulate three new Techno-age rights

* right to awareness of surveillance
Surveillance is just sooo pervasive that trying to ban it is useless. Just require that any time anyone is able to identify or track an individual through video, data mining, or any other process, they are required to publish this within $time period - publish the date time location means and data used, along with the identifying data.

* ?

* ?
Disclaimer: I work at AWS, I'm not speaking for my employer. I also helped write Apache httpd, and I'm not speaking for Apache either. Just on my own behalf.

The Apache configuration in the benchmark isn't great, using values of;

MaxClients 400
MinSpareThreads 25
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadsPerChild 25

means that Apache will be doing extra work to spin up and spin down threads in response to the load. It's best to keep everything static, e.g.

MaxClients 1000
MinSpareThreads 1000
MaxSpareThreads 1000
ThreadsPerChild 25

That way there aren't additional clone() calls when under load (when you least need it), the maximum concurrency is the same. For a fairer fight still, the event mpm could be used.

Apache has nearly 20 year old configuration defaults - because it's best not to break things on users who rely on them. Properly configured, and sanely built, Apache can easily perform as well as nginx or lighttpd. These days 99% of web-server performance is in the kernel and the SSL/TLS libraries. The user-space code is almost completely irrelevant (and those configuration knobs I mentioned really just control how often certain system calls are called).

But it hardly matters; "apt-get install nginx" just works, and you really don't have to worry about it; you get a relatively small binary with some sane defaults. Apache is awesome, but I run nginx on my own EC2 micro instance. It's less hassle.
he wasn't guilty of the crimes he was accused of. an innocent man shouldn't accept a plea. that is a coerced confession and one of the worst forms of tyranny.
Thomas did no such thing. You are way out of line. I appreciated his observation because the piece in question gave me the impression "I can say this authoritatively because I am a very successful female founder." I mostly don't agree with the piece and was relieved to have it pointed out that she isn't any such thing.
Hell, it would have been great if they had used a real closed testbed on a local network instead of AWS. That would give you reproducible test results that aren't influenced by things like communal server resources and a communal network.

Regardless, they put zero thought into what makes each application work to its peak performance and just picked two random configurations, probably based on defaults that we know to be poor on Apache and advantageous on nginx. Using worker instead of event just adds insult to injury.