skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But demand for higher education seems completely inelastic, largely perpetuated by the cultural myth that the way to improve our lot as a nation is for more education and better education.

I wouldn't say that. I would say that the problem is by thinking a if you don't have a B[AS], you're worthless. Trade schools are, and will continue to be, important.

Mike Rowe sums it up in an address to congress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NwEFVUb-u0
I had a job where people were really mean to me too. It was like constant, never ending pressure! One time I got fired, cause my boss didn't like me, although he wouldn't say it to my face. That really hurt.
Disney Animation CTO's 3-year Attempt at Going Digital
5 Lessons from a $2,000 Ebook Launch
Where are the lies? Where's the fraud? How is any of this misrepresented?

This is more of the ever-popular "eat the rich" sentiment. Frankly, until someone can show that:

a) she doesn't have a daughter, or sons for the matter.

and

b) she pockets the money instead of spending on her daughter's hobby

there is no fraud. Basically if the mother wasn't worth north of a million no one would have batted an eye at this.
I find this idea that, just because you are in a public place, you cannot act privately, rather hilarious. Granted, it would be stupid to say something secret you wouldn't want broadcast to the world, in the middle of a crowd, while someone is speaking...but is it really unreasonable to expect to be left alone when all you want to do, is to turn your head to your coworker, and say some sort of wisecrack?

I have been to many conferences, and have, many times, told something to someone that I thought might have been funny. While I don't think I have ever said something that I would think was harmful I nonetheless have said things that I would be embarrassed of they went "public", because I simply would not have wanted to be the focus of the attention.

I have read Adrian's blogpost, and she doesn't give enough detail for me to know just what it was about the comments that was offensive. Whether they were or not, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that the two developers were expecting their conversation to be quasi-private.
This is a shame. Within the frivolous details we debate
so much religion holds a wealth of wisdom and value
that anyone can apply to their lives and benefit from.

To be a little more specific, I enjoy learning about religions, but I choose not to practice any. So secular meditative practices are of interest.

I agree: there's a lot of wisdom to be learned from religions.
> If you didn't know the mother was rich, would you feel the same way? If the mother was destitute yet really creative, and wanted to teach the child certain lessons so that the child could avoid the same fate as the mother, would you be so offended?

It would still be against the TOS, so yes. There was also a KS for an artist who was invited to an art show she was being shown in, but she wanted to take her daughter with her and the artist stipend didn't even cover her own costs, no less her kid's. She used the plea that "if her daughter didn't make it, it would break her heart because everything she does is for her daughter." By pulling people's heartstrings this way, she was able to get enough money to cover not only both of their trips, but some excursions around the city and an additional large-scale art piece for her to bring to the show. Again, against the TOS.

I'm also changing my initial view that even if it were more sincere, I'd allow it. I don't believe that anymore. Indiegogo exists to fill the gaps that Kickstarter does not and allows for things like this. I think the benefit of trying to use KS over IGG is that more people know about it and are therefore more willing to put money into it.

To your point about a mother trying to give your child access to extracurricular activities, most of them have means for low-income parents to get their children into those classes.

> When I was young, I used to go around town with a stapler and a bunch of flyers. Twitter and Facebook is the digital extension of that.

Unobtrusive flyers aren't the same thing as soliciting door-to-door. The only reason this is getting so much media attention is because she's sending this story to all of the outlets she can.

> Suppose you wanted to teach your daughter the fundamentals of business.

"Please keep in mind, we started this campaign to raise about $900 because Kenzie was going to camp and her brothers were asking why she was going to RPG camp b/c it's not like she was going to be able to make a good game. Together, Kenzie and I decided to do this campaign to prove to them that she was smarter than they thought and she deserved their respect."

It wasn't to teach her anything except that her brothers are bullies and people will gladly pay to make them look like the douchebags her mother has no issue portraying them as.

> The Tim Schafer kickstarter could easily have been funded by the man, yet I don't see anyone complaining about that.

Because part of using Kickstarter is to get an idea of if it's something people want in the first place. No one has any issue wanting more females in STEM fields, but this is still an inappropriate way of using the site.
Being a software engineer means whatever you choose for it to mean to you. Sorry to hear your choice of analogy. Not my choice for sure.

I'm not going to try to compare my pain with your pain or anyone else's; I just want to say that I've been shit on by almost everyone important in my life from the earliest age. But I found refuge in building software. It became my escape from all the other pain. I found a way to tune out all of that and focus on only 2 things: my customers and the tools they needed. And I found a great equalizer. Not because I had anything to prove, but because I found a natural solution: build what the customer needs and nothing much else matters. Don't build what they need: same thing.

Forget about the conferences (you don't really need them anyway). Forget about Facebook, twitter, Hacker News, reddit, etc., etc., etc. They're definitely more of a distraction than a help. Learn how to separate issues from details (it's amazing how little really matters). Try to tune out the negativity. I know it's hard, but just think of it as "systems analysis applied to people". Once you focus on what's really important to your customer, block out the distractions, and build what they need, all the bullshit will fade into the background.

Please don't allow your aversion to the negativity of others overwhelm your love of building software. Let the love defeat the hate. I did and I know you can too.

Best wishes and please keep us posted.
National Geographic Live - Ed Viesturs: The Will to Climb
Eloquent Ruby is an excellent book for beginners.

http://www.amazon.com/Eloquent-Ruby-Addison-Wesley-Professio...

If you just want to learn some basics of Ruby without diving into an entire book, check out Ruby Monk. All of the tutorials are interactive:

http://rubymonk.com/
I have no mouth and I must scream, by Harlan Ellison.
This is pure fluff.
From now on, it's the only thing you'll see!! :)
Ha ha, I had the same thought and was coming to post the same excerpt. I drink a huge amount of tea... but not 100 bags a day. I already knew about the fluoride in tea. Also in some other things:

http://www.fortcollinscwa.org/pages/fluoride.htm
Sounds like a shitty work place, and she was a woman. Those guys sound like assholes. She should find another job; not everything in "tech" is like this. I don't feel this way at my current position.
We don't know the underlying family dynamic, but the storyline that is being sold here is:

- Girl proposes idea of making a game

- Brothers were skeptical: "She tried with my brothers but they weren't interested."

- Brothers challenged girl, maybe saying something like "you can't do it"

- Girl says "watch me!" and asks mother about going to this RPG camp.

So if you believe that actually happened, the $10K reward where the boys apologize is a really clever lesson. The girl gets her money and the boys lean a lesson about not being overly cynical (after all, someone would have given her $10K)

Of course we don't know what actually happened here.

So my answers are:

(assuming everything stated is true)

1) Disgusting and manipulative (I never would want to cast any of my children in a negative light)

2) Brilliant if it actually happens: no better time than now to stamp out cynicism and negativity

But of course, that assumes the story line is 100% true.

If it turns out not to be the case, then I agree that the entire situation soup-to-nuts is repulsive.
MMORPG I'm working on
JavaScript was my first language. I learned allthe basics of programming in it. I quickly got frustrated because I still did not know how to make anything complex. I switched to python and it almost was like easymode. With python I was much more able to learn how to make things. Now I'veswitched back and I hate it. I'm continually forced to go out of my way with js to make things work properly. Thought now at least I can work on html projects that I can share, python on the other hand can't do that.
> It shouldn't be so surprising that an ability to concentrate is a skill that can be improved, and that the best way to improve a skill is to directly practice it!

This is an important point that I feel many students do not understand. In my experience most people view focusing as a natural ability that you either have or you don't. I agree that one can be predisposed to getting distracted, but as with many predispositions, it can be overcome with some effort.
I couldn't get the article to load, but given that it's Bill Gates, I assume this has something to do with the spread of HIV/AIDS.

From the commments I can discern that one concern is reducing pleasure. I'd imagine the condoms used in third-world country are not high-end super thin condoms which make the experience a bit better, but the really rubbery thick ones you can get for free at a high school sex class.

That said, is this really about building a better condom? Or just building a better condom, cheaper?

Also, I'm not sure this is the primary problem. You'd probably be better of spending $100,000 on fighting the catholic church to make sure condoms, even the cheap kind, are widely available.
" I’ve had people claim minority-only safe spaces are sexist. "

What is a minority-only safe space? Is it just a segregated area that implies safety in homogeneity, or is there some other mechanism to ensure "safety"?

I can imagine segregating all of a particular minority into their own area of the office for their own "safety". Hopefully that's not what this is.
But am I dreaming big enough?
> What does "go absolutely apeshit" mean?

1. Criminal complaint that results in arrest. Youthful folly can be forgiven, but being caught in a calculated adult deception is pretty much nonrecoverable.

2. Audits of everything he touched, with a view towards uncovering a repeat of his earlier deceptions. Even if he is innocent, there is a good chance that the security consultants and forensic accountants will find something interesting. Something that the detective investigating the case will not understand.
If we add a woman, does it really double the likelihood of a harassment suit? Why would it? Either one of the nine men harasses women, or he doesn't, why would adding a second women change his behaviour?

He might not harass all women. He might only harass women in his general vicinity, either a social, work related or geographic.

Lets consider only correct accusations, and further suppose a given individual only interacts with K coworkers (for K < N, with N the company size). Harassment will occur if one of the K coworkers a given harasser H interacts with is a woman (assuming he always harasses). The probability of that not occurring is (1-P(coworker is woman))^K. The number of harassers is beta x (1-P(coworker is woman)) x N, with beta the probability of an individual man being a harasser. So the probability of a no correct harassment accusations is (1-P(woman))^(K x beta x (1-P(woman)) x N).

Provided P(coworker is woman) is small (as is the case in most tech companies), this number decreases as P(woman) increases. I.e., more women raises the probability of a harassment lawsuit.

And this is all in a model which assumes women never ever make this stuff up.
Maybe you should pay to have built a batch of a thousand custom boards that are similar to, but not exactly the same as, the standard Raspberry Pi, so that they have a proper serial port etc.

You could also consider putting more than one ARM computer on each board (at which point maybe you want fewer than a thousand boards) and building an ethernet switch into that board, etc, and maybe you could even hardwire all the serial lines within the board, etc.
Sure. I did say "more" rather than "all"; others have noted the absence of American in China. It'd make sense to prioritise some key ones before launching.

Information for Australians is at Smart Traveller FWIW, under Entry/Exit info. e.g.,

http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/Advice/China
Reminds me of the old Ontario Hydro logo a bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Hydro

The D with the E looks like a power plug.
How I became a password cracker
Javascript's secret weapon[1] -- especially for beginning programmers -- is its dev tools. If you learn JS' debugging toolkit early on, it will accelerate your learning in general. I recommend Code School's "Discover DevTools" course [2] for beginning devs, but I'm not aware of a high-quality introduction for experienced devs.

Shameless plug: I teach at a school for JS devs named Hack Reactor. If rewriting Underscore as a learning tool sounds like fun, you should apply. http://hackreactor.com

[1] until now.
[2] Chapters 3-4. http://discover-devtools.codeschool.com/chapters/3
"this is still an inappropriate way of using the site."
"It would still be against the TOS, so yes."

Ultimately that's a question to be directed to kickstarter who, as far as I can tell, has to sign off on the projects before they show up on the site. Regardless of the scruples of the mother, the site still approved this project.

"It wasn't to teach her anything except that her brothers are bullies and people will gladly pay to make them look like the douchebags her mother has no issue portraying them as."

... or to teach her the importance of putting together a really compelling story to attract investors.

"Unobtrusive flyers aren't the same thing as soliciting door-to-door. "

Wait, are you saying that twitter and facebook are door-to-door solicitations? It's far closer to putting up flyers everywhere.
My apologies. 23andme does provide the raw data from the genotyping. What I think I meant to say was I wish they could do sequencing and give that data. Obviously I understand it's prohibitively costly though.
They must have been some pretty nasty tea bags for that to be affordable. 100 half decent teabags each day would be barely cheaper than smoking.
Here are detailed descriptions with photographs of the rice cultivation method described in this amazing and interesting (and previously submitted) article.

http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/countries/bhutan/bhExtManual08...

http://www.worlp.com/images/casestudies/SRI-PHOTO_final%20FO...
Git Paid - The Programmers Time Tracker (2011)
The possible purpose or benefit could be another "outside" view of the world. I know that after I used magic mushrooms with some close friends, some perceptions changed for me, I also learned to appreciate different kinds of music. I guess meditation might achieve the same effects.

Steve Jobs' view on mind expanding drugs might be of interest as well: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/steve-jobs-lsd-ha...
His intuitions are simply basic mathematical intuitions ("natural functions are differentiable") and have nothing whatsoever to do with any prejudices. He isn't "making shit up", he just isn't justifying it with as much mathematical rigor as I did.

It really does not help discussions like this to simply assume and accuse those you disagree with are prejudiced and unthinking.
Need advice
I have no idea if Hacker News is any good for this type of a post but I'll give it a shot.

I'm working with a travel group here in the US. Huge company with direct relationships with over 300,000 hotels. They're wanting to leverage those relationships into a handful of travel platforms. In a nutshell, I'm in charge of design, finding coders, managing the project, etc. I believe in their vision and they also have funding. At least enough funding to get us rolling but who knows after that.

Here comes the part where I need help. There's someone in charge of marketing who, in my opinion, has NO CLUE what they're doing. I just got a 30-slide PowerPoint with a "marketing strategy" filled with social media and marketing buzzwords. I know from experience that this person's strategy can't differentiate the product from competitors, especially when travel is so muddled as it is and since our competitors are going to be Orbitz, Kayak, Hotels.com, Expedia, etc. I don't want this company to waste their time and money building mediocre products, especially since I have a lot of time I'm putting in as well. How do I go about showing the CEO that this person's marketing strategy is going to lead us into an iceberg? How do I go about showing the CEO that he's about to sink a ton of money into the wrong marketing strategy?
Is anyone else sick of fedoras?
Thanks so much for responding. My worry when reading articles like these is that I know I don't have the background to evaluate the technology, but I don't often know where to go to find people who do.

This was a really useful perspective to hear.
I remember a mythbusters episode where they stuck a half a ton of clay on a regular car, and it didn't affect fuel economy. So there's that.
How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web
Just because you are moving to other services doesn't mean that those services will be around forever either. Short of running your own servers, you really can't be sure any service you subscribe to will be around indefinitely. That is the nature of online services.
Nice work! I like it.

One small bug: on the iPhone Google Chrome view of the green button group, there is a strange difference in appearance when compared to the rendering in desktop Google Chrome. http://i.imgur.com/KBCepbX.png
It may not be pleasant, but it just isn't possible to have any sort of real freedom without also having the freedom to discriminate.

The moment one person is prohibited from discriminating against another, freedom is lost.
This is a fantastic article. Of course, I'm disappointed (though not surprised) that commenters here continue to deny this person's experience.
In a very narrow sense, you are correct. PyCon and tech conferences are explicitly not contemplated by Title VII because Title VII only talks about workplaces. In everything else, you are incorrect in your understanding. Quoting from the EEOC:

The court held that the proliferation of pornography and demeaning comments, if sufficiently continuous and pervasive "may be found to create an atmosphere in which women are viewed as men's sexual playthings rather than as their equal coworkers." Barbetta, 669 F. Supp. At 573. The Commission agrees that, depending on the totality of circumstances, such an atmosphere may violate Title VII. See also Waltman v. International Paper Co., 875 F.2d 468, 50 EPD ¶ 39,106 (5th Cir. 1989), in which the 5th Circuit endorsed the Commission's position in its amicus brief that evidence of ongoing sexual graffiti in the workplace, not all of which was directed at the plaintiff, was relevant to her claim of harassment. Bennett v. Coroon & Black Corp., 845 F.2d 104, 46 EPD ¶ 37,955 (5th Cir. 1988) (the posting of obscene cartoons in an office men's room bearing the plaintiff's name and depicting her engaged in crude and deviant sexual activities could create a hostile work environment).

I use this to show that the bar needed to show a hostile environment is a lot lower than you likely think it is.

It's even low enough to include sexual jokes. While sexual jokes in the workplace are not prohibited under Title VII:

"In Commission Decision No. 84-1, CCH Employment Practices Guide ¶ 6839, the Commission found that active participation in sexual conduct at the workplace, e.g., by "using dirty remarks and telling dirty jokes," may indicate that the sexual advances complained of were not unwelcome. Thus, the Commission found that no harassment occurred with respect to an employee who had joined in the telling of bawdy jokes and the use of vulgar language during her first two months on the job, and failed to provide subsequent notice that the conduct was no longer welcome."

I interpret this to mean that someone who finds that "dirty remarks and telling dirty jokes" are not (or no longer) welcome can provide notice under Title VII. (And Title VII is quite broad about what constitutes 'provide notice.') If those jokes continue, then it may be a sign of sexual harassment.

But the very first step is to provide notice. Which is what happened here.

How do you conclude, based on the body of court cases and EEOC decisions on this topic, that complaining about dick jokes "is a slap in the face to all the men and women who actually have to endure sexual harassment" when the EEOC says that someone who doesn't like dick jokes should complain about it, and that continued exposure to unwanted dirty jokes can be an indication of sexual harassment?
Several comments layed out some alternatives, and it's usually fairly easy to figure out where you can go, my personal favorite are the Wikipedia pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_St...

However, there is one edge-case that I do not see covered:

I am a permanent resident of Germany, citizen of Vietnam and hold a valid visa for the US. Sometimes these qualifications allow for entry (for example Mexico). I'd love to see an overview of what other countries I can visit without a visa given my residency and other visas.
Wow looks great! One little piece of advice: the "disabled" button doesn't look quite inactive enough to me; if I saw it on a webpage I might try to click on it. Maybe make it a bit lighter/more transparent?
I was alluding to groups (in person or online) that are limited to only a specific minority audience, usually with the intent of creating a space where those people will feel safe to speak freely. For example, the Devchix mailing list is only open to women-identified people.
Dropboxes subscription model
I understand exactly where he is coming from. One of my fathers cousin decided the farm needed a firetruck and decided to pick up two. It was the first on the scene when one of our barns burnt down. Pumps didn't work so great and did a little spurt by the time the fire department came. Great memories.
Along the same lines, Google wants to update shit I don't use and never will use (Gmail, Youtube, I don't know what all -9 apps recently)

Starting with ICS, you can uninstall the updates for those apps, and then disable them in the Settings -> Applications menu.

That said, Android works a lot better overall if you use Gmail at least.

As soon as someone figures out how to make it reliably easy to unlock phones and put another OS works with your phone company's system, the handset becomes a commodity

Oh how I wish this was possible. Unfortunately, at the hardware level, there is soooooo much support needed for each processor chip. Even among chips that share the same processor core (such as a ARM Cortex A9), all the peripherals and especially the power maagement is different. This prevents the building of a common hardware code base like we have in the PC world.
They even made sure to include the arrow in their Arabic translation (including having it point in an appropriate direction if you read right to left):

http://i.imgur.com/8PTzYjW.jpg
I don't think that "my wife doesn't understand why I like technology" is a sexist comment. Substitute husband and it would read just the same.