skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate the idea that she's getting death threats and insults because of her gender. That's wrong. It's not because of her gender.

It's because she's a notable figure on the internet.

I challenge the reader to find any notable figure online who has held a controversial position and not been the target of death threats.

That is an Internet anonymity problem, not a gender problem!

Women are not the only targets of anonymous death threats online!

(Not to excuse the appalling behavior of anonymous cowards who point their threats at almost every notable news target. Seriously, go read the forums on a major partisan site. Vile, disgusting, hurtful and violent language aren't the exception, they're the norm).

By playing into the gender context we're playing once against into these stupid gender arguments where they don't belong.

"But they're using anti-women language"

Of course they are! If it were a crippled man being insulted, why not imagine the language they'd use. If it was a black man being insulted and threatened, guess the language they'd use.

They pick their language to troll their target. They pick it after picking their target -- the language isn't the reason!

And yet again, a non gender issue will be filed under sexism.
OTOH people smoke spliffs in bars and drink beers while bicycling. There's a strong hacker mentality here. Its anti corporate and there's a distrust of American style funding and bullshit valuations. Lots of open source people here.

Many people here work at music technology firms, and those lead the world. Ableton and Native Instruments employee 400 programmers total. Emagic was from Hamburg. Soundcloud of course. Somehow these are never mentioned in articles about Berlin.

There's a lot of activism. wiki leaks has or had many core people here. We protest and riot without permission. The squats are slowly being evicted one by one.

And yes, we jaywalk. Maybe not up in prenzlauer.
I think it would be a great resolution to the problem if all parties involved talked, apologized, and moved on. Even if no jobs are given back.
We've been thinking about a lot of the same things you mention here. Send us an email at team@heapanalytics.com, I'd love to chat some time.
We initially tried to build this on Mongo, and it was a huge pain. I'll need to elaborate on why at some point, but the very ad-hoc nature of all our querying precludes any non-relational database from being our store (at least any that I'm aware of).
Having the fines go up proportionally to the value of the car would be a hilarious idea, but unfortunately it's not true ;) Most fines have fixed values (typically starting at 10 €), but some are proportional to your income/salary, so for example you can get fined 20 days of salary (20 Tagessätze). Like that it's sure that, regardless of your income, the fine will always be financially painful to you.
This is a great post.

One issue here is that a (possibly deeply-layered) "neural network" model applies to many industrial processes, which means that there are a lot of interacting components, but in many of those the input/output relationship is almost binary-- a logistic curve close to a step function. Most companies have absolutely no need for exceptional people. They're looking for a process that can hire good-enough people at controllable volume. They have a mission to be fulfilled and want it done well enough. There's nothing wrong with that; it's just that most of them have no idea how to execute. They might over-hire and reject mediocre-but-good-enough people. They might come up with insane purple squirrel queries or HR-ish hiring policies ("we only hire NoSQL developers; it says here that you use Scala"). They might hire mediocrities (when they actually need strong people) and compensate by hiring a lot of them, which we know doesn't work.

There's also a deep, bilateral trust sparsity in the economy. Most employers aren't doing interesting work and have shit cultures. Most programmers haven't been well-trained or motivated to grow and are incompetent. It goes both ways. I'm just as elitist and network-driven in terms of the companies I'm willing to consider credibile as they are in their willingness to fairly evaluate candidates.

I can't come up with a good way to overcome this in the general case, but the OP gives a strong guide for recruiters to overcome trust sparsity and show capable developers (who can be selective) that they're not actually clueless.
> we should be wary of changing it just to stick it to some lazy good for nothings.

I agree with you there, at least insofar as any change I can think of to stick it to them would also probably hurt the people the system was designed to help. I'd rather fund a few deadbeats than a genuinely disabled person go hungry, if given no other choice.

I guess I just fail to see how reducing the number of people on disability could, taken in isolation, result in economic damage to the rest of us.
I much rather think that the observation "germans don't jaywalk" did fit into your pre-existing prejudices about germans, because obviously all germans are tidy, always on time, accurate, law-abiding and what not ;)

Three weeks looking around and always telling yourself "HA, anotherone NOT jaywalking!" is hardly substance.
The thing is that not all streets are created equal. On particularly dangerous corners there will be lights, and cars can come around the corner going maybe a bit too fast to stop, so it's important to obey them. When there is no light, that's usually indicative of a less busy street as well, where crossing at your own discretion is safer.
Yes, but the rest of the internet is in anonymity. Which reaction has been blown all out of proportion.
Or there is also "Eavesdropping on conversations that are none of your business is just bad manners."
World Water Day: 10 Projects that Exemplify Water Conservation
I don't blame Adria for going into hiding, but 2 weeks from now I doubt anyone will even remember this snafu.
Bad analogy. Government employees actually do something (at least nominally) in exchange for the money they get.
Good article overall but anecdotal evidence is anecdotal

> Standing at a street corner I was shocked that no one jaywalked. There wasn’t a car in sight, yet Germans young and old stood there obediently, waiting for the green walk signal.

I am from Berlin and I jaywalk all the time :)
I think people who were actually raised in Berlin are very likely to jaywalk. Looking as to how you visited ITB I suppose many people you've seen were not originally from Berlin (also many startup founders are not originally from Berlin but from all over Germany)

/nitpick
There's a lot more to having a hit game than making a game that could be a hit.

The world will not beat a path to your door.
Well, there's merit to the idea of a gov't program even if you're kinda sorta against it. As it is now, people are defaulting to a de facto living wage from a program designed for something else because their options are few to none. Something like WPA would allow us to address the problem of our country's infrastructure and put money in people's pockets in exchange for honest work, if nothing else.

It's completely unlikely anyway. We're barely hanging on to some of the existing meager social benefits in this political climate, let alone creating new benefits.
Well, we're talking about effective marginal rates, not the listed amounts. The next dollar would be taxed at 20% or whatever the listed rate is. However, if you also lose a dollar of welfare, the tax rate is actually 120%, at least in terms of how incentives influence someone's marginal decisions.
Both things can be true at the same time.

Someone fresh out of school should expect to jump through hoops.

A company that's looking for senior developers who've Been There, Done That, should expect to have to empower, reward, and listen to them.

But senior developers really need to understand that there are Chameleons among them, who have floated from job to job, look like they have all the right skills, but can't perform.

Companies need to be able to distinguish those Chameleons from the real deal, and I have found that Cookie-Cutter Technical Interviews are a necessary step. I think I've kept out more Chameleons than I've lost good candidates. Or rather, I've determined that it's worth administering the Cookie-Cutter Technical Interview, because I've concluded that the cost of hiring a Chameleon is higher than the cost of making one of the many honestly good candidates walk away in distaste.

I also have to emphasize how empowered, rewarded, and listened-to the candidate will be, and that they'll be surrounded by other senior programmers with great skills that they'll have fun interacting with...
>But it's been my experience that people really don't like to hear that they're overreacting, especially while they're in the middle of overreacting. They dislike it so much that entire schools of thought are now dedicated quite strongly to the proposition that there is no such thing as overreaction.

>The author of this article may well have singlehandedly touched off another round of overreaction from all parties involved.

Interesting. I can see that. What sort of schools of thought are you thinking about here that talk about this sort of thing?
Are you willing to hire functionally illiterate people to do tech support? Of course not. It's not just a question of willingness to work; the overlap between people who can do intellectual work for low pay and little supervision is much, much smaller than people who can work physical jobs in a highly supervised environment.
German here: I found myself much more limited by artificial, external rules when I lived and worked in the states than here in Germany.
Isn't that even worse? Now, you have to reorder your instructions to make them more efficient and avoid exchange instructions.
Haxe anyone ? full HTML5 api support , dead-code elimination, loads of libraries and frameworks , easy integration with third party libraries ,multi-target (C++,Flash,JS,...) and open source...
Relieved to see this was about internal communication. Email marketing and announcements are still highly effective and ubiquitous amongst users.
Except that more spectrum isn't free and is a finite resource. It isn't fair to dismiss one carrier as not being viable (which is what I took from your original post) if they can compete along a different axis more efficiently when compared to another carrier.

Don't forget that over time, technology advancement tends to favor later entrants to the market versus early ones. It's entirely possible that T-mobile can operate an LTE network with triple the base-station density of AT&T because they waited until the equipment was at a cost that would make the deployment cost-efficient.
Their is a long time debate between the ideals of communitarism and the ideals of cosmopolitanism, but another term for courteous noncompete agreements with your competitors is cronyism.

When does being nice to your competitors undermine your users' best interests? When does generosity toward people within your industry community benefit your industry at the expense of other communities, and how old does your company have to be before you can call that behavior cronyism? Do you have to smoke cigars in a poorly lit room? What if you just like being more generous to people who smoke cigars in dark rooms more than people who occasionally go outside, and are active? Does that make you a crony?

Reading these comments I get the impression that people want to be nice to others in companies like their own, more than they are describing any type of universal ethical guidelines.
There's a vast difference between asking people to consider the other people within earshot, and publicly shaming them.
"Be Interesting"

As a corollary to this, I would advise companies to be OK with not being interesting. Not every business is exotic and innovative. If you aren't actually interesting, don't try to portray the company so.

"Rockstars, etc...."

This has been hashed over so many times, especially here on HN, but I do want to point out that there is a YC company (that has been trying to hire for A LONG TIME, here and on SF Craigslist) who uses this kind of lingo. In fact, they were the YC company that implied to me that the YC partners don't actually try to control their companies too much. This company will be allowed to create their own business (or not) via their own philosophy, which is a point in YC's favor.
You think it's hard to find programmers, at any given level of skill?

Maybe I've been fortunate enough to work for companies that had enough gravitational pull that we attract good candidates without trying very hard.
They pick their language to troll their target. They pick it after picking their target -- the language isn't the reason!

Nailed it.
I do not come to HN for political discussions, so I'd prefer less of them. When a techie is involved, it's worth a mention here, but I'd much rather read about startup related issues on hn.
[Ask HN] Design Patterns
Recently I started going deeper into design patterns and how/where to use them but books are books and they don't really present a real-life scenario/use case so my question is this:
Can you provide a best use case for X design patterns and why? (replace X with any design patter you like most)
I personally have no problem with rejection per se. However, I find it particularly annoying when companies don't send any kind of response back.
MongoDB 2.4 Critical Advisory
In fact, you are looked at kinda funny if you don't jaywalk in most parts of Berlin.
I wrote a similar script that changed iPhone, iPad etc with bat phone, bat pad etc.
Hey, Kim Dotcom(megaupload) is actually German and he surely did risk (and managed) to get in trouble with the law for his startup, so not all Germans are completely risk-averse ;)
Do you seriously not understand that the problem is not that she "posted a photo of someone", but the context?
Please explain how this situation would have worked if, instead of Adria, the original tweeter/picture-poster had been a white, heterosexual, Protestant man.
I think we germans are doing alright actually
Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
Hey all,

I recently got a Raspberry Pi as a gift. For those of you that have one, I'm curious what you've done with it. I'm contemplating a media server but I'm open to more interesting ideas.
Show HN: Multi-user web bash terminal built in Ruby
It got reversed, then b spent too much time looking at a mirror pond.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around that one too. It seems that the conference organizers did an excellent job of not over-reacting. They followed their procedures, defused the initial incident discreetly (as much as they could since it was already public knowledge), and updated their Code of Conduct to include a clause to explicitly say not to "name and shame" people.
Ember.js is as close to being finished as it can. We have a really large app under development, using Ember.js. It works so well. Better than anything I've ever used (and I've made single page Javascript apps since way before it was cool). Development is fast and fun. Often I sit back with a feeling like "Was that all that I had to do to make this work??". The performance is good, if not great. Ember cleans up everything it creates itself, which makes it very simple to make advanced apps that are easy on browser memory consumption.

It seems like Ember Data (and documentation, which is an easy problem to solve) is currently the only achilles heel of the whole Ember. But PLEASE don't judge Ember.js based on a pre-alpha version of an add-on library. There is no sense in that. Ember Data will receive its glory once it's done. Anybody who's every implemented a data persistence layer can tell you that it's not a trivial problem to solve.

Conclusion: Ember.js IS awesome. I love it. A lot of people love it. If you don't like it, then fine. Don't hate on it for no reason. I don't like cauliflower (I hate it), but I don't hate on people who eat it. I admire that they want to be healthy.
Why does Chrome replace 208074/maxsize: with blockquote?
Also nobody with the sense of history to design proper lexical scoping of variables.
MUCH more accurate picture of Berlin.
Probably not to any significant degree. Using the word "fork" as a pun on certain other terms has been going on at least as long as these terms have existed in English. The term's use in the software world predates git (and, by extension, github) by years, and the puns were not far behind then either.

It is true that the concept of software forking once had a much more negative connotation than it has taken on since the advent of git. One might say that the open-source software world has generally become more fork-positive, and the pun's use has likewise been altered. Both became more prevalent; that's for sure. But I don't think any particular instance of the term, or even in aggregate, can really be said to have contributed meaningfully to this incident.
There is a lot of vitriol on pages with identities both pseudonymous, e.g. disqus, and real... did you see the conversation on Facebook? People use their real names and identities to be "dickwads".
I've been listening to the 4HR WorkWeek by Tim Ferriss (because 580 is so much better with an audiobook.) In it he describes getting comfortable with rejection. One of his exercises is to ask 3 attractive people for their number. Hmrph...might try that. :)
I recently got the question, "explains what happens when you type a URL into a browser."
Thank you! Everyone is getting down on the PyCon folks, when all they did was follow their own rules. No one was kicked out, there was no over-reaction.
That's an interesting conundrum that I've grappled with myself. Telling myself counter-productive things like "outrage is a perfectly normal reaction to an outrageous situation".

How should you tell someone that they're overreacting?
It exists, but if you read past where you clipped the quote, you notice that all he's saying is that in the valley demand is extremely high. Demand in other places is significantly lower. (Speaking partly from personal experience, as I do not live in Silicon Valley.)
Completely agree with you - I frequently used to ask experienced candidates questions of the form, "tell me about one very difficult bug or performance issue encountered during your two years working on X."

Unfortunately, the number of flat-out liars on resumes is extremely large. Heck, I've even seen resumes from people I worked alongside at Microsoft who now claim to have done things that I did while there. <shrug>

Sussing that out is part of the interviewer's job, at least if you care about 1) whether you're hiring a liar 2) the skills that should have been gained if they actually spent two years working on X.
So what? A thousands other details of politics, culture, and economic structure are vastly different. Soviets also had police and military and schools: should we automatically not do those things either?
I think Singapore is not the best example of a totalitarian dictatorship. Its an elected democracy, low coorruption, high standards of living. But yes it is "partly free" according to EIU its ranked with Hong Kong and Banglesh and a long way above Russia.

So I would still say yes, freedom does bring economic benefits. One assumes the more freedom the more benefits.

We ought to remember that at the polling stations
fascinating piece, i'll have a deeper look later. i came here to say it's gorgeous and presented beautifully and functionally. the designers should be proud.
> No wonder women have trouble getting into this industry and getting ahead, with this kind of macho superior attitude from interviewers

Calm down, no on one is having any kind of "macho superior attitude" :)

All I said was many interviewers start the interview this way so the interviewee has a softball question that they can use to clam themselves and make a point of anything they want the interviewer to know.

And I stand behind what I said, where if a person has a question perfectly teed up for them and they can't tell you why they should be hired then they probably won't do well with any kind of technical interview.
One of the best features of the RPI is integration with other hardware (i2c, SPI, GPIO). It's neat to toggle a motor from a bash prompt. When that goes away, it's just a linux box. It looks like you are having fun though, so I applaud that. Edit: I guess the joke was lost on me.
white men are never sent death threats, are you sure?
The original tweeter made it about gender, so it wouldn't have worked the same if it were a man.

The posters point is that if a man had been the forefront of a lot of news then death threats would have been thrown at him too.
What version? I'm running 25.0.1364.172m on Win7 and I see nothing unusual. Edit: "Dev" and "Canary" builds are v27 and both have this problem. "Stable" and "beta" are v25 and don't have this problem. Sounds like a job for git --bisect :)
Telefonía Entel
Personally, I'm vaguely aware that JS does ASI, but rather than waste brain space trying to understand it, I just use semicolons with everything.

And anyway, what better test of language facility is there than having the person code something? Or looking at code they've written? Whiteboarding is a weird, artificial environment that's not going to represent the coder's natural behavior in the wild.
ITB was for the first week, the second two weeks I was working in the same environment most other berlin startups work in.

But yes, it's anecdotal evidence, observed continuously over 3 weeks. And it's an impression, that's all, never claimed to have done exhaustive research :) Like I mentioned in other comments, I obviously realize there are plenty of people who probably jaywalk, in a city of millions that much is certain. But I thought that particular observation reflected a lot of what I had heard from Germans themselves.
Anyone who has read up on Adria Richards' past, knows she's an attentions starved cry-baby. Can we please stop feeding her ego, and stop upvoting these posts about her. She failed miserably at her job of developer relations and has no more business in Technology. Lets move on and stop talking about her.
How to create a color picker with HTML5 Canvas
Creating canvas apps is the new thing, we can even create games with it, it’s supported in all major browsers both desktop and mobile, and that makes it a more viable solution than using Flash.
I can speak to this a little bit, actually.

Chartbeat has never supported IE, which as you say sounds like cutting off a major part of your market. Even moreso when you consider our customers which include pretty much every major publisher in the US. However what we've learned is that if your product provides enough value, people have no problem installing Chrome or Firefox or whatever.

To this day we receive pretty much no requests for IE support at all, which enabled us to build a product with heavy HTML5 (mostly canvas) and CSS3 usage.
4 different people on Chrome 27 confirmed it gets replaced by 'blockquote'
Interesting. What happens when you plug a regular SD card into a imp slot? And what happens when you plug an imp into a standard SD slot?
I'm still amazed there are journalists reporting that the developers made sexist jokes, and furthermore embarrassed at America's inability to be comfortable with sexuality. The dongle joke was 5th grade humor and the forking comment had 0 implied innuendo. Somehow these privately-told jokes, somewhat sexual in nature, were inferred as sexist, and people lost their jobs because of it!

This whole situation sickens me--the threats against Adria especially--but the only thing truly surprising at this point is that Adria did not envision her attempt to summon pitchforks would backfire, with pitchforks being turned on herself. This is the kind of naivety that you would expect from someone unfamiliar with the internet; not someone who works with programmers for a living.