skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Off topic -- Has anyone posted an example of how to create these "usage maps"? Essentially a world map with weighted pins. Seems like a really cool idea. Technically speaking, I know how this is done, but are there working examples of how to easily create something like this without starting from scratch.
Aydin Senkut Thesis On Frontier Tech Markets
Do I think that was her intention? No, I think that part spiraled out of control. Do I think this spawned from a PR person looking for the page views? Yes.
"It's probably not his first offense."

Even if that's true (and I've got no clue either way), it's at least in retrospect turned out to be a _spectacularly_ bad PR move for them.

If they wanted him gone - they should have fired him "privately", doing something like that as such an obvious response to "internet drama" was _always_ going to be "the wrong thing". (Even it it _was_ "the last straw", they should have waited a week or two - if only just to publicly disconnect their HR processes from being twitter/forum shitstorm driven.)
Well said. The last paragraph sums it all up perfectly:

"I imagine in an alternate future, Adria just turned around,
smiled and whispered, “Hey. No offense, but I’m not all that
interested in hearing about your dongle, you know?’. The men
would have become momentarily embarrassed, and then reflexively
defensive before letting their rational neurons fire in that
crowded room and say, “yeah, dude, no problem”. Maybe one of
them would have approached Adria later in the day and pulled her
aside to say “hey, I really didn’t mean to offend you, I’m
sorry. Hope there’s no hard feelings.” In this alternate future,
at a future conference that developer quietly steers a
conversation amongst friends away from this territory, without
making a big deal of it."
Nvidia  Face Rendering Demoed
Let's simplify the rules to basic decency. Don't Be a Dick. Oh wait, I guess I can't say that now. Well, fuck me. Whoops, can't say that either.

I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven. (At-will employment is not as simple as employers like to say it is.) At this point, he has position for something substantial, given that they discussed the termination in the public (disclosing an opinion that he is guilty) when he is a non-public employee. He should not just focus on termination (long odds) but also defamation of character and, unless they give the best of references, tortious interference. He ought to play hardball. Oh, whoops. Not sure I can say that either.

This nonsense about "offensive jokes" is ridiculous and distracts people away from the real sexism. I think we should care more about women earning 77 cents on the dollar and having an unfairly hard time recovering their career progress after maternity than about an occasional dongle joke. There are real problems and whatever Adria just tripped on is not one of them.
I doubt if there was any other case than the controversy. I doubt that the dev was any where incompetent. I say this simply because of the dev's interest in attending a conference and his company sponsoring it to him using forking and dongles in a sentence... those are simply good signals of a good developer and he being happy at his job. I feel that Pay Haven responded in a most defensive way by simply firing him and getting it out of their shoulders.
That's very well reasoned, I hadn't thought of it that way. Upvotes!
If you're going to sit in front of a computer for several years you should be happy with it.

Still, I've never seen a perfect computer... there is likely something you'll find wrong with the Dell shortly after the return window closes.
Hourly App Rankings
I built this little hack over a week and was wondering if anyone thinks it's interesting. It's basically a ranking tracker for the appstore that generates a stock chart like graph based for each app. The differentiator over things like App Annie is that it updates every hour so you can see near realtime changes in the appstore rankings to uncover trends etc. Would love your feedback!
Fucking finally!
How to find information.
I think you know what I mean and why.
This is a problem no matter what your target is.

Web apps written in 1997 do not take advantage of modern browser features.

Browsers written in 1997 can not render modern web pages.

At least with NaCL, you have the option of taking maximum advantage of the available hardware. I'd love to see NaCL grow into having actual on-chip support for NaCL-style sandboxing, the way we've seen CPU vendors add support for virtualization-specific extensions.

At the end of the day, I don't see this as a death blow for NaCL. Rather, it pushes us farther into a post-JS/HTML/CSS platform. We'll start seeing new languages take off, and the underlying platform target itself (browser, native, or otherwise) will matter less and less.

asm.js can be just another compilation target, along-side NaCL and iOS. Once you go in that direction, the HTML/JS/CSS monstrosity start to become less relevant outside of hypertext documents.
Thank you, Walter. I'll take a look.

edit: the link should be more obvious now
The interactive technology that is revolutionizing the future of retail
"In attempting to unveil casual misogyny in the tech field, Adria has accidentally revealed the actual misogyny that lies in our industry, and there's nothing casual about it."
If her role is 'developer evangelist', then she's doing her role - being an evangelist about the developer culture. Evangelists 'spread the message', which is exactly how she behaved here.

For what it's worth, I think 'evangelist' is a stupid title and 'advocate' is better. Yeah, 'evangelist' sounds cooler, but evangelists get in your face about unprovable stuff and harass you until you comply - not something you want to evoke in your job title. The standard joke about door-to-door evangelists is that you shut the door in their face.
I built this little hack over a week and was wondering if anyone thinks it's interesting. It's basically a ranking tracker for the appstore that generates a stock chart like graph based for each app. The differentiator over things like App Annie is that it updates every hour so you can see near realtime changes in the appstore rankings to uncover trends etc. Would love your feedback!
Tell HN: Best part of the Big Ol' Python PyControvery is women saying "Dongle".
Today I've read multiple female bloggers liberally using the word "dongle" and "big dongle". This is the best controversy ever!

Dongle! Dongle! Dongle!
Safely Filed's Founders Prove Innovation Isn't Just A Young Person's Game
Well probably one could make the Dart Compiler output asm.js. Also, when you have an incompatible VM, you need to serve different content to different browsers. This, on the very least, eliminates that.
the volatility will decrease as more people start using it
It may well be the case that the controversy was the only factor in his termination, but none of us have the requisite information to confidently make that claim.
"On my CM10.1 Galaxy Nexus, it's really quite slow (3-4 seconds to do anything when I try to click on the search bar or swipe it up from the bottom of the screen)."

Try disabling "Hotword Detection" in the voice section of Google Now settings. I also run CM10.1 on my GNex (toro), and that made it open and respond almost instantly.
I don't see any indication that she didn't just shrug it off - that doesn't mean that she can't talk about it or that it isn't a problem. Indeed, it's something that she will have to "shrug off" that most male founders wouldn't even have to think about.
Claiming the UK has better individual privacy than the US is blatantly false. There are a lot of things I like about the UK, but privacy is not one of them. Some examples:

The UK has no equivalent to the Fifth Amendment. In the UK, it is a crime not to give up your encryption keys to the police when requested. The punishment for keeping secret keys secret is two years in prison if you are suspected of most crimes, and five years in prison if you are suspected of "heinous" crimes.

The UK also does not have something like the 4th amendment, which means that things like the Terrorism Act 2000 pass without challenge. Admittedly, the USA has been just as bad in this regard (with such things as the PATRIOT act), but I suppose some of the blame has to go towards the public attitude immediately following 9/11.

In the landmark United States case Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, the SCOTUS ruled 7-2 that there was an implicit right to privacy in the United States constitution, backed by Constitutional Amendments 1,3,4,5,9, and 14. This right to privacy has not yet been used to protect internet privacy, but considering that the internet as we know it has been around for only 20 or so years, this is not exactly surprising. SCOTUS judges have a history of voting for a right to privacy despite their own personal beliefs, as demonstrated in Griswold v. CT, Bowers v. Hardwick, Roe v. Wade, etc. so this should hold up when it comes to internet privacy as well.

And then, of course, there's the UK's history of egregious privacy rights violations, including widespread state-sponsored video surveillance, suspicion-less stop-and-searches, extensive usage of web-filtering system, and even deep packet inspection of and tampering with content transferred over HTTP.

So the funny thing is that the UK already has extensive monitoring of people in cities, huge cloud computers monitoring their traffic, and extensive wiretapping. What you're describing as a terrible future for the US is already a reality in the UK.
http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/

PlayHaven adressed this directly. They are blaming it on the incident at PyCon.
I do not want to bring up the (easy, simple) example of crypto software--too much wiggle room. I do not want to bring up the example of simple dual-use tools (knifemakers and so on). I do not wish to bring up the fast-food industry, nor the energy industry, nor any other industry directly responsible for putting tools of discomfort and self-destruction in the hands of people who may use them for that purpose instead of for good.

Let's use an example which is not so forgiving and ambiguous:

Handgun manufacturers know that their weapons are designed specifically to kill or wound human beings. Do we punish or fine them for their weapons use in a criminal act? If so, why?

Do we really want to establish a legal and, worse, moral norm that any illegal act will require the prosecution of every "enabler" of that act?

Do you want to wish this on society?
On Apple's Upcoming Two-Factor Authentication
Reddit discussion:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aqdxn/temple_o...

This guy has schizophrenia, and a some of things he says is really weird.
"Where do you draw the line on sexualisation at a tech conference?"

I hope that this discussion helps us get closer to a good answer to that question.
Gah, this is just an absolutely terrible succession of events. These guys definitely did not say anything that was that harmful. Their jokes may have been crude, and they may have been loud, but that only makes them annoying, not sexist. Adria has every right to post about her annoyance, but her claim for it being sexist is exaggeration. The companies reacting to this by firing the two developers is absolutely wrong, and then the community's sexist responses to Adria is just disgusting. And then Sendgrid brings the whole debacle full circle to fire Adria too? What is this, amateur hour?
That sets a rather worrying precedent though, if someone takes a dislike to me because of some perceived grievance and proceeds to DDOS my employer's website is that justifiable grounds for firing me?
You have it backwards. I don't care how racism is defined. I care about whatever the word "racism" points to in the real world. But you have to realize that a word can point to anything you want it to point to.

And not only that, but words have denotations and connotations. "Ugly", in common usage, denotes and points to a set of subjective physical characteristics. "Ugly" also connotes and points to a negative affect that isn't explicit in its denotation.

I'm not simply saying that racism is "something that connotes immorality", but that is what we're connotating when we use that word in its various denotations (although, it's not necessarily the case). Racism's denotation can be literally anything. I can say, for example, that it's racist to call Canadians effusive pushovers even though "Canadian" is a nationality rather than a race.

And people do exactly that. In the U.K., for example, it's common for people to call people that insult the French "racist."

Language is fluid.

So, I think you can see why people are affronted when someone says "black people cannot be racist" without putting it within a certain context. The implication is that it's not immoral for black people to act denotatively common-usage-racist.
Yes, you should.

a) it's very easy to pick up (not an exaggeration). If it's not a good fit for you, you'll probably know within a week or two.

b) it's fun, especially if you've been knee-deep in script languages for a while like me and suffered from quirky implementations and buggy code with too many run-time errors

c) the community is extremely friendly and helpful (OK, anyone could claim that, but just go look at the google group or the IRC channel and see for yourself)

d) people actually seem to get stuff done with it, I'm amazed at the quality of available libraries.
Huh? WTF?

My impression is that inappropriate jokes were specifically targeted at a woman seated nearby. In an all male company (of 13-year old youths) it just does not happen.

The people that did this deserved to be reminded that it was not acceptable (although not by firing).

Now, firing Adria Richards is entirely beyond my understanding. Seriously, WTF? Well, this whole story is sad. Blame the messenger now?
This is a perfect size team for using HipChat. We tried HipChat at Gilt with around 40 engineers and it was too cumbersome because of the number of groups.

I hope they finally allowed users to edit their comments. That was one notable issue I had. Also, there was no such thing as a "private" group because admins had access to all groups.
But correlation does not imply causation: Maybe teams that have a lot of praise going around were getting praised because they were already performing well.
To what extend is it two factor when one of the factors is the device you are working on?
One of the biggest risks I see with iCloud is someone finding/stealing my phone, and using it to erase other devices. A code send to my phone won't prevent that.
For online services, a code to your phone makes lots of sense (something you have part). For phone services, I'm less sure.
There have been a number of highly publicized Bitcoin thefts from various exchanges. Repudiation is something that is made harder by its design (not saying it isn't possible, just harder). So if you get inside access to the computers in that bank and you can effect legitimate transactions out, I've heard (but not witnessed) that it takes about 30 seconds to get enough confirmations back to make a transaction durable. (if this is not the case then I'd love to add that to my understanding of the protocol). A centrally managed currency like the dollar (as an example) doesn't have that issue because transferring assets from federal reserve might make you a trillionaire briefly but they would turn around and transfer them right back. Stealing gold (as a reference standard for currency) does have that issue, except that physics made such a theft much harder to pull off.

Offline storage of an encrypted wallet is fine, although in a functioning economy there will be pretty constant transactions flowing in and out of the depository bank but that is one of the cool things about doing the exercise, you can walk through the scenarios and say "Ok, if this were the case you would need maybe a 'fractional' offline wallet where you could bring a portion online and leave the bulk offline.

I'd love to read about a design for that. When you consider the steps that folks went to in order to penetrate Iran's nuclear facilities, there are similarly challenging places like banks, and depository banks are especially juicy targets.
"You are making a quantifiable assertion. If you'd really like to back up the claim, go grab some of the threads on this subject, and spider the account pages of the people posting to the threads."

My problem is simply that you demanded this of guy who disagreed with you, but you did not demand it from anyone who agreed with you. Its about the most biased/unfair way of making an argument possible.
you've now left the conference, you on the bus/tram/whatever on the way back to the hotel with your friends joking around. You make an inappropriate remark/joke and she overhears. She overreacts, snaps a pic of you wearing your badge/company shirt and tweets it.

Where does the line get drawn?
3 Hurdles Twitter Has To Clear To Last Another 7 Years
Psychology. It could crash tomorrow: industrial gold consumption isn't driving the price.
So, you say keep the Air?
The problem is that people talking about it on a geeky news aggregator won't change the tech culture, and that similar incidents are to be expected in the future.
I would buy gold before I invested in bitcoin. At least I could use gold to make something. The value in the end lies in utility I suppose.
Point: She singled out two guys at a conference, provided no evidence/proof while burning them at the stake online, and was fired for it.
Perhaps the one that was fired was on probation or already on a performance plan for other issues. This may have been the "not gonna work here" moment.
Making EmberJS Easier
Luckily she got fired today! +1 SendGrid, -1000 PlayHaven! I am a big fan of SmartGrid now that they got rid of her. I don't know who would hire Adria as "Evangelist" now, since she is probably the most hated person among developers now! I also hope that all the best developers stay 1,000 miles away from PlayHaven!
Apple has done a great job walking users through this process.

Setting up "trusted devices" (iPhone, iPad, etc.) works really well: Apple already knows which devices you own, so all you have to do is select the device and you get an instant push notification to unlock to see the verification code.

Apple gives you a backup recovery code with very clear instructions to print/write it somewhere safe. They require you to re-enter it as part of the setup process to make sure you got it right.

When you need a code, you pick the device you want it sent to and Apple pushes it out instantly via some feature baked into iOS. You can also set up any phone to have a code delivered via SMS, but presumably this is less secure because it could be read even if your phone is locked.

Overall this is a great experience for the user -- much more friendly than Google Authenticator.

In fact I wish this process was open a la Google Authenticator so that other applications could use it (this will happen when hell freezes over).
What was the diff if you don't mind me asking?
Talk is cheap. If you know exactly what was said then present it for people to form their own opinions. Arguing that you're right adn they're wrong because of something that you know (but won't reveal) is the definition of an argument from authority.

It would be as if I responded to you by saying 'You're wrong. I'm an expert in these matters.'

And it's not ad hominem to say there's no point to the conversation based on missing context.

Just because a person disagrees with you does not mean they lack empathy or are incapable of getting the context. On the contrary, I think that person has been at pains to explore the idea in an even-handed fashion, even if s/he has not come to the same conclusions as you. I don't fully agree with that person's viewpoint either, but I don't think it justifies launching personal attacks upon them.

For reasons I won't speculate upon, OP seems to believe it's impossible Adria knows anything about github

I am at a loss as to how you arrived at that interpretation. Clearly we are not going to agree about this.
Looks great - congrats! I'll definitely share with some peeps I know.
Is the EU financial crisis a boon for Bitcoin?
Keep in mind that PlayHaven probably sponsored his participation in PyCon and he would have been treated as a representative of the company.

If they have standards of conduct (probably codified in some employee manual) there are probably contingencies for this exact circumstance which allow them to fire him.
>> Facebook isn't a novelty anymore, it has become something much worse. It has become a necessity.

-- Well, not really. I don't have an account open with them and never have.

Since I'm out of the loop entirely, what have people really gained from using Facebook? The only thing I've heard was reconnecting with old friends (why would I want that?) and mindless browsing. I guess the other thing is that people prefer to use their chat service instead of using text on their phone.

I've of course seen Facebook pages and I've seen some truly amazing social media marketing campaigns on it that are worth studying, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what the appeal is for a person, thus I don't get the quote about it being a necessity. I don't want people holding data about me and I don't want people stalking me. I don't want to have a bunch of "friends" I never met and I don't want to live a life where I "deleted 200 friends." That's nuts and downright frightening.
I think it will unless they can break your passcode.
I'd like to see a python->asm.js compiler. Then I throw that in my resource generation pipeline and I am a happy programmer.
>We value and protect the privacy of our employees, both past and present, and we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways.

All I get from that is that it played a role. In fact, their statement is tacit support of the argument that the controversy wasn't the only factor in their decision.
I've been using Minitest, Mocha, and RR lately after using Rspec for many years, and find myself really missing Rspec.

At a high level, I would say that Rspec is just much more thought out. The other libraries all seem to be written by someone who looked at Rspec and though "Ugh, this is too much. I just need X."

But I find, if I'm doing serious TDD, I'm gonna need pretty all of Rspec. And what happens is that the other libs just don't integrate that well.

For example, you may be using one test runner (minitest) with a mock from some other library (mocha) and assertions from a third (test::unit). The question is: are those things all meant to work well together? Are your mocks scoped correctly within your test runner? Is your database cleaner working properly with your before and after hooks?

The answer is sometimes "no". But with Rspec, everything works well together. It just fits. Generally I'm a big fan of focused libraries, loosely coupled. But the state of things with testing is that I don't think we've yet found that good loose coupling.

The second issue is that Rspec just seems to have much richer assertions. I can do things like:

expect {
delete_zombie_users
}.to change(User, :count).by(-1)

Or:

thingy.length.should < 4

And mocking is also underdeveloped in other libs. Mocha, for example, can't stub constants. In Rspec I can do:

User.stub(:all => [fred, betty, sue])

Or

stub_const("File::MAX_SIZE", 10**10)

And it works great. I find I can easily stub out parts of ActiveRecord and write good targetted unit tests. With Mocha I find myself using any_instance all the time because I can't target things on the structure I really want to target them to.

Some of these are available in other expectation libraries, but I've found Rspec to have a really nice, comprehensive set of them.

All in all, I just feel like David Chelimsky and the Rspec folks have really thought about testing in a way the other libs' authors haven't. I keep learning things about TDD and finding out that Rspec has already considered them. With other libs the opposite often seems true.