skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to be the pessimist out of this batch of comments, but the accelerator sounds less promising than I would have expected from AngelHack. I have to imagine they have enough money to at least provide housing and living expenses for the teams they choose so the teams can be in one centralized location. The mentorship will probably have less value when the teams cannot meet in person and there is of course the lost networking aspect as well.

Although they do provide a chance for the startups to pitch in the final two weeks in SF, it seems that this accelerator, even if not formed with this intention, will be more of a feeder to the bigger and more established ones like YC, TechStars, 500 Startups, etc.
That this kind of blog post is a response to the situation is a small glimmer of how eventually we can all 'win' from this.
The creator of a creative work does have a right to control how you reproduce his work, because the law gives him that right. Is this a wholly artificial construct? Yes. But so is any property right. In the state of nature there is no concept of "my." Animals in the state of nature don't "own" things. They merely possess subject to a bigger, stronger animal coming along and relieving them of possession. The idea that you can "own" a physical object and the state will defend that "ownership" with violence on your behalf is a wholly artificial construct as well.

As for technology changing which laws are reasonable, that is definitely true. But I don't see why technology has made it less reasonable to grant ownership rights in creative works. It has simply made it easier to violate those rights. Should the ease with which a right can be violated be a criterion for deciding which rights should be granted?
But it's not, by your logic a compiler producing machine-generated K&R C in the late 70s would also be a blob.

Only as anyone mining the web for esoteric code will attest, anything written in standard C since probably the mid 80s and using only the ANSI C standard library can still be fed to a compiler today and produce perfectly functioning code, taking advantage of every advancement in compiler technology in the 30 years that have followed.

Those C source files do not, for example, make assumptions about Harvard/von Neumann architecture, stack layout, calling conventions, the presence or absense of SIMD instructions, and so on. C is called "high level assembler" for a reason, just as "asm.js" is called "asm.js" for a reason.

Even if we had some standard binary format for describing software available since the 80s, it would almost certainly lack sufficient descriptive power to capture constructs that could be vectorized, or otherwise transformed using more modern compilation techniques that simply didn't exist at the time. Lowering to a binary form throws all that semantic information away. And the more you add back the more the binary form starts to look like a pointless transformation of the original source code.

Then there is the idea that such a format could ever have been designed in the 80s that would have lasted us to present day. Native Client proponents and similar such "VM fundamentalists" are effectively claiming that we can invent such a format, when it has never been done before in the history of computer science.

(Pre-emptively rejecting boring VM counterexamples like Java for reasons that can be extrapolated from what I just described. Every comment on this thread brings it closer to HN's "controversiality" scoring penalty, and I'd very much like for this link to stay on the front page all day)
It's not sexist. It was just a childish joke. Probably inappropriate in the setting, but it got blown way out of proportion.
we worked with greg + team on the la version of angelhack and greatly support his new endeavor! really impressive team whos bound to do great things in the startup space.
Discussions like this seem to always come back to a sense of "fairness". It's not about being fair, but about how situations make people feel.

Majority-group members tend to brush away the sensitivities of minority-group members. If you're straight, you can walk hand-in-hand with your spouse without issue. You may even be able to embrace publicly, and kiss, hug and display all kinds of PDA. Gay couples can't do that without fear of reprisal, sometimes violently.

Minority-group members are only "safe" in certain places.

At a tech conference, women are in the minority, and so crass comments about/towards women are not perceived in a safe way. It's not your buddy making a funny joke, it's the majority-group members expressing oppression.

Whether you personally agree with that is not the point; it's how minority-group members feel.

Be aware of that.
While it's true that a lot of (small) shops don't accept bank cards, this is mostly immaterial. The threat in Cyprus was that the government could seize a good percentage of all the money deposited, including whole life savings.

In that view, keeping most of your money in a non-seizable currency (Bitcoin or not) and just some "hand money" in the bank makes perfect sense. As a Portuguese, I'm considering it myself.
Ron Wyden's 'GPS Act' would make police get a warrant for phone location data
tomelders, i can agree with you but the main reason for scrum (waterFAIL or whatever metodology you take) will fail is the inital bullshit in software development, instead of hiring competent and motivated people you rather pay less and hire larger crew of idiots or even worse, out of mgmt own, complete incompetency, hire headcount.

The agile methodologies imho are comming from someone that had luck and instead of winning 7 on national lottery hired competent and motivated people by sheer luck and due to his own self centered line of thought (egocentrism, etc), he thought his "inovative" way, brought in the success and started to market it.

The mgmt is still far too stupid to realize that you cant streamline software development, you cant get revolutionary ideas on requirement and you cant JUSTIFY THEIR POSITIONS!

(oh and btw, my cv consist of 18+ years of c/c++ software developent from world largest IT companies to startups and i think i have seen all the crap the white collars can offer, they just cant comprehend that the creativitye cant be streamlined and are always searching for a silver bullet to pay less and get the breakthrough technology for peanuts)
> Moreover, this is not due to some personal flaw on their parts: it's simply how we, as human beings, are built.

This. We just witnessed a snowball turn into an avalanch. I know I've experienced this in personal relationships more than once. Emotions make us great and they make us terrible. Which gave me an idea: A bug tracker for relationships. Addressing a problem immediately sounds good on paper, but we often need time to distance ourselves to be able to think critically. If couples started using a bug-tracker for relationship issues, you could log the issue in detail when it happens, sit on it for a few days, and address it up when both parties are level headed. I doubt I'd ever want to use this product, but if anyone else wants to..
She also said that sendgrid supported her actions.
Is Square Ruining the Starbucks Customer Experience?
That doesn't mean blacks cannot be racist against whites. Anyone can be racist or sexist no matter how oppressed they are.
Maybe one person said "hey boss, it was me saying all that, Bob was only listening, it's not his fault."

(NB: I pulled the name Bob out of thin air.)
Are you spying on us? Haha! We love the Bootstrap scaffolding, but their library is kinda boring IMO. That's why we are focusing so much on custom design and giving designers/devs the tools to do it (easily). Shoot me an email so I can understand more what you're thinking.
Ask HN: Market to ebay sellers
Hi,

First, some context:
I launched my web app a few days ago. My target market is eBay sellers. My app is a tool for them to find out which products are the most popular at the moment.

The Problem:
No one has clicked on my ad. Not 1 person! Now I'm no marketeer, but I am extremely motivated to learn! I decided that the best way to target my market is to use facebook. I've used the parameters People over 25 who have liked eBay. And I created a cliche ad trying to attract people who like making money. Here is a pic http://devcomsystems.com.au/fb_ad.png . One constraint on the ad is you are not allowed to use the word "eBay". FB have already suspended one account because of this.

The question:
How do you effectively market to eBay sellers? What are my best paths? How do you construct a good ad?

Hopefully other keen learners can pick something up from this if we treat it as a case study. Hope you can help HN!

Best Regards,

Peter
"Everyone is applauding Adria"......I think 99% of the comments are all against Adria, then you have that 1% of angry feminists. Adria got fired today.....well deserved!
I've tried to keep a pretty neutral opinion of her. It just seemed like she made a misjudgement. This is the first post (Amanda Blum post) to reasonably say something that makes me question that a bit.

Now, combine Amanda's post with this info and it's just possible that Adria hasn't suffered enough of a negative response to her past actions (and maybe even benefited from them a bit in blog traffic, etc), so she didn't really 'learn her lesson'[1] on the way she should approach these situations. Unfortunately this time the negative reaction was extreme.

[1] This doesn't imply that her reactions were malicious or self-serving. Just that there was never a reaction that caused her to question her way of responding to these things.
Already adopted is better than not already adopted.
Just like politicians wanting to appear to be "tough on crime" often leading to horrible decisions, I'm fairly sure this is the same thing at play here.

Had the complaint been private, it likely would have resulted in a warning from HR as you said.

Unfortunately, because Adria chose a public forum, it demanded a public response, right or wrong regardless.

EDIT: Not understanding the down-vote on my post. Someone please elaborate.
Faster turnaround - the people being angry are going to see it straight away, and aren't going to constantly reload an unrelated website to see if there's been a development.
About design: why is not your main text width limited to 50-80em?
You're right that it is not ideal. There are strengths which make it better than many of the alternatives. If volatility does eventually diminish, while still not a platonic ideal, it would probably be strictly better than any of the alternatives.
If you did in fact read the article, you must have missed the point.

You're right that there are more serious problems to deal with, but feigning offense isn't helping the situation.
" him using forking and dongles in a sentence... those are simply good signals of a good developer"

Pray tell, how does a plebeian joke about dongles signal that a developer is good?

"dev's interest in attending a conference and his company sponsoring it"

And as for his presence, it's not uncommon for a company to send a key developer and a friendly coworker to conferences, especially when it is far away (so he may just have been a friendly coworker of Andy Reid)
"Sexism" does not appear once in the blog post. So uhh there's that.

The concern with "offensive" discussions/jokes at developer conventions is it can give the sense that some people are not welcome there - if you don't like it, go somewhere else.
True, but I do know they have dedicated HR staff and Isaac Saldana et al don't seem to be that loosey-goosey, if you will, about decisions like this.

On the other hand, there seems to be little other than a few messages about status updates. Even if it seems uncharacteristic, it's looking more and more to be true that she was terminated in a very ugly and public manner.
Two people fired. Wow. what happened to just saying sorry to each other and accepting it?
This is useful. Stock charts for apps.
It's not 'very public' on their behalf, it's just publicly announced, if it's true. They haven't gone into details, they've just said that she's been terminated.
Like others, I was at the talk and really enjoyed it. Thanks!

We've been storing json as a text blob, and now we realize we should do a lot more. Postgres continues to impress, and also Heroku's postgres service is awesome. https://postgres.heroku.com/
Apologies for the identity mixup. I've lived under socialized health care elsewhere and it was fine. The US government seems to take the attitude of, "Government doesn't work, let us demonstrate." I think it ends up as a self-perpetuating cycle, rather than anything that's inherent to the idea itself.
I'm not advocating this position, but the best answer to your question would be something like, "The tradition of legal history and interpretation that holds that 'the Constitution is not a suicide pact' and so that anything implying the termination of the United States as a government that can secure those rights generally gets leeway" (though of course the government routinely exaggerates the extent of all these supposed threats).
> I'm frankly saddened that the discussion about the employment circles her and not the employer.

This definitely shows that PlayHaven does not have their employees backs, but for me at least:

1. PlayHaven is in a tough spot. If they defended their employee, it might look as if they're not being tough on sexism, which the industry is heavily focusing on right now. Perhaps they figured it would be safer to be heavy-handed. Perhaps some form of light punishment (suspension? demotion?) would've been the best approach, but too late for that now.

2. I don't know about others, but I don't expect employers to have my back. The upside of this is that I owe them no loyalty either. In a way, this is already the case. Most employees will leave when a better job comes along. It's certainly to some employers' credit that they protect their own, but it's not expected. (At least not in America. In Japan, this use to be the case, but even so, it's becoming less and less so).

I think the negativity has focused on Adria because she turned a minor complaint into a witch hunt.
If someone makes sexist jokes which offend their co-workers to the point that they're unable to work together, then yes, they should be fired.

Certainly if someone working in public relations posted sexist jokes to their twitter feed I'd expect them to be fired.
That could be interpreted to mean women are not individuals, which is probably not what you meant :-)

Fortunately, individuality is not like fire - it won't flicker out and die just because you turn it down a bit sometimes. I'm a guy too, and I find dick jokes annoying sometimes. Depending on the context, I might ask someone to settle down or indicate that I was finding such humor tedious.
I was one of the 4 finalists from AngelHack Silicon Valley in fall 2012 and I just gotta say, it was awesome! The AngelHack hackathon had a great focus on building (not as much biz/dev/designer)

It's an opportunity that keeps giving. I don't think I would have been able to get a tour at Facebook and network with a lot of people had it not been for winning/attending AngelHack.

Being from the bay area it's easy to forget how much opportunities there are here in respect to other cities. I can't really think of many opportunities that enable builders from around the world to come to the bay area and pitch their ideas to VCs and see what life is like here (they get flown out here for free if they win their city hackathon).

AngelHack++
I have it on good authority that many tech news sources draw material from comments on this and other sites like reddit.
Or even better -- I want this to be "Beginning Of Thread". I want to skip over all the rampant speculation and name-calling of the last 24 hours and have the discussion begin here, with this. If only we could, then maybe the next sexism brouhaha might lead to something other than repeating history.
Only if it took one week for another shopowner to start up again, and they gave 3 months notice. There was never even a cut in functionality; I'm already using Feedly instead of Google Reader, and Reader's still going to be around for another few months yet.
tldr; YES !

You have to recognise the Go was spearheaded by folks who were there from the earliest days of Unix and Plan9 (used by IBM supercomputers). They know how not do do things. With all that experience you can accept that they have the experience to make good decisions. And those decisions are clearly documented and explained in the various documents.

From a technical side, Go is statically linked. So can cross-compile and not have to face DLL nor shared library hells. Whilst the resulting binaries are larger than those that use shared libraries you can have many goroutines running at once. Each goroutine uses only a small amount of stack space. So for any production sized project the ease of deployment outweighs any incremental memory usage. After all, these days 32G or more memory is not unusual.

On Google AppEngine - Go programs run faster and consume less resources than comparable programs written in Python and Java. Google is run by some very smart folks. They are unlikely to be going down a unviable path.
Hence my reference to: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs240/readings/worse-is-better...
My impression is that a lot of people who had nothing to do with this conference decided, on both sides, to make this An Issue without caring about the facts on the ground.

I saw the MRAs-vs-feminists going at it in at least two places on the Internet, one of them being HN. This issue was a microcosm of all their old fights and they were going to take us down with them.
The reference bitcoin client is actually implemented with 64-bit integers, with a bitcoin defined as starting 8 decimal places to the left. But your point stands, which is that bitcoins are highly divisible. In fact, a "satoshi" is the unit name for one hundredth-millionth of a bitcoin.
friendly reminder that google's dart dev team has made claims that dart is already 30% faster than js, and they plan to release VMs capable of surpassing 100% faster than js, so yeah.

keep in mind that if asm.js is half of native speed, dart is capable of bridging the gaps of js.
The link to the WordCamp XKCD comic, and Adria's reaction to it, told me more than all the rest of the comments and articles over the past day.

I perceived the comic as two women:

Allegedly offensive comic: http://jenmylo.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/screen-shot-2011-...

Deep link to Adria's comment: http://jenmylo.com/2011/08/03/wcsf-shirt/comment-page-1/#com...

I would be curious to learn Adria's rationale for the presumption of gender she made. Seems as though she'd find Rorschach tests offensive too.
Well, the pretty simple asterisk is that it says "Congress" and the Secret Service is in the Executive branch.
> Show me an office that has that kind of theft and I'll happily recommend monitoring there too.

Wouldn't be hard to find a lot of white collar workers who steal 20% of their employers time 'screwing around on the internet'.
And even earlier by Polaroid!
But on a more serious note... As the woman did not even work at the same company as the guys she complained about, she really had no recourse except to get up and move. That sounds very inconsiderate but it's actually the law. In a legal sense, anybody in a public place, whether it's a bar or a programming convention, has a constitutional right to say what they want.

Every employer is responsible for knowing various workplace regulations, including sexual harassment laws. There are only two types of sexual harassment, both of which require working with the alleged offender, "quid pro quo" and "hostile environment": http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/types-of-sexua...

If the woman had worked for the same company as the allegedly offensive guys, she absolutely would have a claim based on them creating a hostile work environment. However, the woman at PyCon didn't work for the same company as the people she complained about. And therefore she had absolutely no claim. Her only right if she was bothered was to get up and move. The only legal claim that may exist now is a wrongful termination suit by the guys that got fired.
I agree - there were multiple factors. But...

PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation. The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go.

Notice the result of this investigation part. Maybe this guy has had issues in the past, or maybe they just didn't like his code, but by all appearances, he would not be jobless if this investigation had not been started.
I assume you mean better for others? I'm afraid that anyone trying to jump on the bandwagon now will lose. If people on Cyprus can really affect the price there will be another price jump next week. And then many will sell, expecting a crash... people who are new to bitcoin will lose money on Tuesday unless the crazy prices continue for a couple more days. Casino may be more safe soon ;-)
In my opinon, problem is cowardice. People would rather give up their freedom than take any risk of harm.
Shameless plug here as well, I'm developing something that will sort of solve that problem for channels you own: http://www.getinstabot.com
Good job SendGrid, they fired her right away!
I hesitate to call a random teenager that reads reddit, 4chan and knows how to download LOIC an "activist", even with the quotes around it.
I think firing Adria was appropriate because her actions compromised her ability to function as a developer evangelist. Her irresponsibility in handling the situation has a direct impact on her ability to perform her job. Developer evangelist is largely a PR job, if you are generating incredibly negative PR for your company from that position you should be fired.
I wasn't convinced of it either at first. You can get around a 5% speed increase with compiled code (because it uses typed arrays and other things which are heavily optimized), and I played around with it for a game, comparing it to emscripten and raw js: https://github.com/jlongster/js-lljs-c-benchmarks/

When I heard of asm.js I immediately realized that I wanted LLJS though. You're absolutely right that it could turn into something which helps you write only parts of your app in asm.js.

Everyone should note, however, that you usually don't need this. Javascript is still highly performant. This is just helpful for things like incredibly complex 3d games, number crunching, etc.
See: http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-test...
Or perhaps there wasn't a large enough subset of that subset who work at Google. They don't have a use for it internally so there's no way they can dogfood it.
Responsive design is out #1 goal. On the playground.webflow.com you can either resize your browser or select the device on the left. Then all you have to do is design. All the responsive code is generated for you.
Similarly, I've personally been seeing this a lot lately... the idea that "Done is Better than Perfect." And although I know it will never be perfect, the problem isn't perfection it's that this idea, fails to mention where the bar is set, or that it is set very low.

"Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call 'vocation.' But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves...to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life." -- Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The web is a very viscous place with all kinds of competition. Philosophically speaking, that form of competition can rob one of a chance at true mastery.