skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had really horrible experiences with Amex, but on the opposite side, as a small business owner. In my opinion (libel zone here) they purposefully squeeze very small businesses, as a matter of policy.

American Express came very close to sinking my business, having to tell employees that their paycheck was late, even though we had crossed every T to make sure that our customers payments were on time, due to American Express causing problems that would purposefully keep large payment amounts in their own coffers for the smallest and most manufactured of "issues", was one of the worst experiences of my professional life.

You know how customers who are "king" often fume that they supposedly will "never do business again" with some company due to some perceived slight? Well, I am fully aware that I may lose business, lose money, and fail to get customers for my choice, but they hurt me, my reputation, my sanity, my employees, so badly with their selective policy enforcement that I will truly never do business with American Express again. You have to draw the line somewhere.
really? i think with today's hardware/bandwidth prices, it's perfectly reasonable to setup a fairly busy site and not worry about revenue at all. If it only sets you back a few dollars a month, it might make sense for you to build something popular for the experience and the social capital.
Sure, ellyagg, there are other reasons. And to be honest any female with half a brain doesn't go into a tech community proclaiming her gender. But there are definitely attitudes and comments that you get when people know you're female that don't really encourage you to stick around and become a member of the community.

Assuming a woman overcomes whatever other social/educational/evolutionary factors enough to start participating in the first place, it really doesn't help the balance that she's driven off due to the behaviour of apes with keyboards.

Of course, as I allude, most of us have learnt to let the gender thing stay under wraps and, when it does come out, are used to the general comments caused by JGGIFT. But there are plenty who get really upset by such things and won't hang around.
Those services were different because they were meant to provide an alternative URL for your website, not someone else's. Also, they required you to go through a signup process and I remember some of them displaying ads.

And of course, there was no Twitter back in those days to create an artificial need for short URLs.
Female here, just voted.

I just wanted to say I love Hacker News.

I'm an introvert and a nerd before I am a female, so I am of course drawn to Hacker News because it's a great place to find other over-sensitive folks who take themselves, their questions, and other peoples' questions very seriously. As others point out again and again, the quality of discourse here is just really high.

Secondarily, but still present, I like Hacker News because relative to other community sites it's very female-friendly. HN is mostly based on ideas, not status/gender/age.

I do wince and get bummed out whenever I read certain comments here (I've pretty much learned to just not even click threads about the ideal age to get married, what's more important relationships or programming, etc) but even when things make me sad, they're at least not crudely written. Basically HN keeps it pretty civil.

Anyway, you folks are great, HN is great, and I think more females will gravitate here for a variety of reasons, most having nothing to do with gender.
Sure, I'd definitely recommend it to women who are into hacking, but the number of women who are into hacking is low. Success rate is probably going to be similar to women recommending a site about fashion to male friends.

I agree with making sure people are aware what they can do, what is possible etc, but trying to make everything a 50/50 split between sexes is an unachievable waste of time IMHO. Lets embrace and celebrate the differences between the sexes rather than pretend they don't exist.
Sounds like that bad joke... the punch line being "and so modest, too!"
Yeah. Ram, disk and CPU are cheap. Now, dealing with abuse, etc... is expensive, but most of the per-customer costs are the same no matter how much ram they order, so I think it makes sense to drop the cost per gigabyte as you order more ram.

the formula I use to calculate the 1 month pricing is this: $1 for every 64M ram plus $4 per account. I think it works out reasonable; I was figuring $512/month for each 32GB / 8 core hardware, which is maybe a little high, but it is within reason.
I'd also be curious about "how many days left in May"?
Yet certain parts of the news media treat them like proper statistical polls.

Your statement is correct, and that is a regrettable fact about errors among some news media workers. The local TV station I watch most for TV news usually posts polls without any warning, but is pretty good about announcing that their results are "unscientific" after the polls close.
So if google was around in WW2, and Himmler published a map of where all the Jews lived - you would support the publishing of this map?

This is more than "cultural sensitivies", Burakumin suffer from outright racism, they cannot get jobs, they cannot marry outside their group. Any informational support for this injustice does not get my support.
The original Forbes story has more details: http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/10/billionaires-2009-riches...

In short, bad investment performance and scuttled merger plans.
a good indication of how many people read HN on Sunday afternoon

Have we established how many of us post from what time zone?
The domain name is plenty visible in the (brackets) on the right of the title... why include it again in the title?
Graph: The US-China Trade Relationship
I agree that for some people, linode and slicehost are a better value. (btw, I've heard nothing but good things about either one, I mean, aside from the pricing. Both, as far as I can tell, provide excellent service, and both are easier to use for non-sysadmins than I am.)

My core audience is SysAdmins who need off-site servers and hobbyists, and I think I serve those markets better than my competitors. I am trying to build systems that will allow me to better serve people who are not as familiar with Linux (or bsd)

The website still needs a lot of work. But that is consistent with my goal of serving existing customers before new customers, if there is not enough time to do both.
Yes, a straightforward case of link bait.
If you like OpenVZ, I would recommend

http://www.johncompanies.com/

Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly. The Johncompanies people, last time I tried them, were excellent.
YC may consider diversity in their portfolio a positive trait. They may also consider the PR value of female startup founders (which is worth considering...it is quite high). And, they may consider their reputation as a forward-thinking, out on the edge of progress, sort of investor. Maybe it's a trend, and maybe they want to be ahead of it.

I don't think one needs to look at what good could come of it in the future to consider investing in female-led startups a good idea.
YC should fund startups that have a chance to succeed. If women entrepreneurs come in with unique perspectives to target the under-served community of women on the intertubes, then great. Otherwise, it is a waste of money that doesn't benefit YC which hurts other startups and ultimately the startup community as a whole.
The parenting networks that I hang out on even more than I hang out on HN reliably have female majorities in their posters and their readers. Men are quite conspicuous on such groups, so much so that I tend to assume everyone is female, even if the screen name sounds very male, until I'm told otherwise.

I've asked before

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553145

if any of you know of online discussion sites with a more balanced ratio of male and female participants. I didn't get any answers the last time I asked. The most balanced site I participate on is College Confidential,

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/

which doesn't seem noticeably skewed to me one way or the other.
Ok, I agree with that. I'm sure it was a side effect of some library rather than a deliberate choice though. Not to worry, as other commenters have pointed out, this has been fixed for some time.
Live near UC Berkeley instead, and take BART to SF whenever you want.
I'm working on it. I'm trying to talk the cloudkick people into helping me out; they look like they have an awesome system.
I think something that is more simple than the ec2 api and the sun api will win. Yeah, I think cloudkick has some good ideas.
These competitors may have copied the device but they don't have the app store or itunes store.
If Alpha lives up to its hype

That is the tough issue here. The hype has been immense.
he probably uses a shortcut to speed up submission process, and the domain name is in the page title.

javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURICompon...
Indeed, much of the feature list is comically facile, "create as many documents as you like... Documents can be sorted... rename documents, delete one or many, and export a single, multiple, or all your documents". None of the features are in any way unusual.

There may be good, notable things about it, but unfortunately they haven't communicated what they are to me.
It's interesting—startups are probably a better opportunity for female hackers because, in general, markets are less sexist than hiring managers.
I do. People often ask about the number of female founders we fund. It would be interesting to know whether it's low because of something about startups, or just a reflection of the larger pool from which they're drawn.
I usually purchase CDs.

I've had hard drives fail. I've had removable (and USB) hard drives stolen. I've lost user accounts to online stores (when they tied them to email addresses I haven't used in years) so I can't reauthorize or redownload what I already paid for. When I lived in South Florida, I found that CD-Rs basically erased themselves in the heat/humidity down there (so a CD-R was good for maybe 1 year before it became unreadable).
How about switching the word "wealth" with the word "power" and looking at how power guarantees access to wealth.
Why is Microsoft helping OS X by encouraging people to buy game consoles?
I've been using OS X since mid-February and find it comparable to Win 7 if you exclude games.

With the xbox 360 Microsoft is encouraging people to play games on game consoles instead of Windows.

This only helps Apple. Why is Microsoft doing this?

Could it be that Microsoft only cares about business purchases of Windows and doesn't believe that web/Mac apps will replace Windows business apps any time soon?
There is a technical aspect of the GSM encoding that most people doesn't know: It's just 140 bytes. In most encodings (the way computers represent text as 0 and 1) one character of the english language can be seen as a byte, this is because the 8 bits of the byte are used to represent 256 numbers that are mapped to letters, since there is less than 127 characters (leters and symbols) in the english alphabet, the GSM encoding use only 7 bits (less than a byte!) to represent the letters, and taking adventaje of those bits left it finds the way to have 20 more characters than bytes.
Netherlands

Eindhoven/Den Bosch > Enschede
I think comparing me to slicehost or linode is completely fair... they are my direct competition. I think ec2 is in a different market. there is some overlap, but really if you want to leave your instance on all the time, a vps such as I sell (or linode or slicehost) is vastly superior to the instance with unmirrored disk ec2 provides you.

the opposite is true as well; if you need instant provisioning... if you need 50 servers during the day and 20 at night, I simply can't do that for you. (I hope to be able to at some point, but I can't yet.) Ec2 has been doing that for some time, and I think slicehost and linode both have similar functionality.
How do you propose we measure "power"?
This doesn't seem to jive with the generally accepted reasoning for the 160 character limit.

From Wikipedia:

The key idea for SMS was to use this telephony-optimized system and to transport messages on the signalling paths needed to control the telephony traffic during time periods when no signaling traffic existed. In this way unused resources in the system could be used to transport messages without additional cost. However, it was necessary to limit the length of the messages to 128 bytes (later improved to 160 characters), so that the messages could fit into the existing signaling formats. Therefore the service was named "Short Message Service"
If you need more than 4gb ram, buying your own server is usually a better deal than anything else. parts for a core2quad with 8gb unbuffered ecc and 2 hard drives usually set me back around $700-$800. 1u co-lo runs from $50-$100 a month.
Add the on: [root_hn_url] link to comment metadata when viewing a single comment.

Rational: when viewing a single commment for whatever reason, you often want to see all comments. Currently you have to click through the chain of parents, which is annoying.
Yeah I find this article meaningless as well. An exceedingly wealthy person lost half of his wealth and in relative terms to everyone else is still incredibly wealthy. I'm sure that billionaries in Russia, USA, and Middle East had similar experiences last year--who cares if the billionaires were from India?
Agreed - it's been immense, and (unfortunately) I think I can predict what will happen upon launch - someone will find a witty "search" or question that WA should have no problem with (or they think it should have no problem with), and WA will spit out some nonsensical answer, and it will get posted to every site under the headline "Wolfram Alpha can't even answer this simple question, how is it going to take on Google?". It will become a joke, and only those who understand it will continue to use it, while the rest will dismiss it because they likely won't understand it. I'm hopeful, but not too hopeful.
Nobody will shout you down for iterating SHA1 or for using one of the bcrypt/scrypt/PBKDF.

In actual fact, I won't even shout at you for using salted single-pass SHA1, as long as you don't brag about it, or talk about how your "salt" construction improves security.
>> "We've had some excellent gender articles on here in the last few days"

Please stop :( The whole "women in tech", Rails porn thing, please just end it now.
I found its the sugar in coke/soft drinks that really makes it unpleasant. I am sure tea is lots better - the general health benefits and some caffeine, and not the toxic amounts of sugar (and if in the US, its high fructose corn syrup which is really much worse then just sugar).
well said. i initially avoided hacker news because i still viewed "hacker" in the "old school" basement programmer meaning, which i associated with immature, ego-centric aggression. also, even knowing lambda calculus, the 'y' in y-combinator still struck my as rather male-oriented.

don't not read a book because of it's cover. the emphasis on intellectually interesting articles and discussion, as well as culturally and directly moderated civil discourse, is awesome. it makes anyone's presence here more about content than gender or immaturity.

there are certainly comments that make me cringe, but i doubt that is primarily a gender thing.
Your quote claims the effects of the parents' income persist, but in doing so it claims correlation is causation and neglects to consider other familial effects, such as genetics and upbringing.

An alternative explanation is that wealth doesn't beget wealth, but rather those with the characteristics which lead to the acquisition of wealth also beget offspring with the same properties. This isn't necessarily unjust, as Yglesias states, but rather an artifact of the reality of genetics, upbringing and their effects on productivity. If so, to achieve the "equal opportunity" you seek, you must wipe away these differences in both genetics and upbringing, in which case, just call me Harrison Bergeron.
True, though it probably doesn't apply here.

Off-topic, I asked the same question on another thread without a response. Other then generic attitude issues, have you ever seen a case of a woman programmer being discriminated against? In my experience, due to their rarity and the environment they tend to be treated very well, both professionally and socially.
Again saying something exists is not a rebuttal to why it exists.

Of course those abstractions exists. An abstraction can't not exist.

What you actually mean to disagree with is the application of the abstraction to life or to the cosmos or to whatever you are worked up about here.

But, I never said you need to apply these abstractions to anything. I'm not interested in explaining the world to you in a internet comment.

I'm simply observing you do not understand the idea of spontaneous order and suggesting you take the time to think about it.
Looking for an Idea? Build this: An App that Tells Users What to Tweet at Idea Tagging
That is an awful analogy. Aside from those in the oil industry or envirmentalists who want to discourage use, everyone likes low gasoline prices because energy prices are only a cost. The money you spend on gas it lost forever.

The money you spend on a home is money you will some day get back. Whether it grows or not, most people expect its nominal value to at least stay constant. More likely the real dollar value will be constant and the nominal value will rise.

When home prices fall precipatously it is a drag on the economy. Suddenly anyone under water on their mortgage or at a loss on their home can no longer sell, and are effectively locked into their home. This is inefficient because the best labor can not fluently move the most appropriate jobs. The money tied up in a falling home can not be reinvested. An over extended house can not be reversed mortgaged to fund a small business.

It is nothing like gas prices. Low home prices are only good for those (like me) first entering market. But the number of those first entering the market will by definition be much smaller than the number already entrenched in it. Aside from a small percentage of speculative investors the popping of the bubble simply hammers anyone who bought a home in the last 5 years out of necessity and will continue to be a huge problem for our economy for years to come.
The same article could have been written about the iPod, which was also not first to market, and also competing at feature parity with products from consumer electronics giants. We all know how that worked out.
In the US we exclude energy costs as well, so the giant inflation in gas prices was completely excluded from the inflation numbers of the last 10 years.
Ask HN: What do I need to know before registering a 2 person LLC on Legal Zoom?
What do I need to know before registering a 2 person LLC on Legal Zoom?
...when, later this month, the first wave of British users are freed from the contracts they had to sign to grab one of the early iPhones and start contemplating a replacement, they will be faced with a range of remarkably similar devices.

I don't mean to troll, and I mean this as a serious question, since I'm not very familiar with the mobile market - but can anyone name even 5 devices available today that are "remarkably similar" to the iPhone?
YouTube - Microsoft Silverlight & Facebook Demo
So you would not want to use any service that uses XML for any purpose, even if it could output its results in JSON?

That seems irrational.
Android phones have capable versions of both (Amazon for music and their own app-store). If Google continues to evolve the Android software and focus on further refining the experience... your going to see it overtake the iPhone rather quickly.

A big if... their decision to bow before Apple's multi-touch claims is a bit of a disaster for them.
> IT decisions made by upper management of a large company are almost always terrible.

Yeah, that's called power. They have it, so they make the decisions with the money. If you want to make the decisions, figure out a way to get into power.

That's Reality with a capital R, folks.
I am not saying they should. I am saying if it happens.
It's also rather comical that the author seems to think the iPhone was the first to target the high-end market. Nokia's had a whole series of Series 60 phones targetted directly at the same market (N80/N95 spring to mind). Those things where selling for more than 400 Euro's at one point.

The S60 interface was (and is) awful, which limited their success. It wasn't, however, for the lack of trying.
What exactly is "forward thinking" about funding startups based on biological traits of the founders instead of their skills, aptitudes, and achievements?
Ease of programming isn't the issue, at least not when it comes to writing libraries that must interface with C code (as a robot-interfacing library is likely to). Most Schemes and Lisps can interface to C by means of a few simple declarations, while Python requires the C code to accept and return Python's internal data structures (and convert them to a form that can be used by C code), and requires it to register those functions that are to be made visible to Python.

Scheme (PLT)

(require scheme/foreign)
(unsafe!)
(define my-c-lib (ffi-lib "libmylib")) ;; loads libmylib.so
(define my-c-func (get-ffi-obj 'my_c_func my-c-lib (_fun _long -> _long)))
;; The C code does not need to take Scheme into account--
;; Existing C libraries can be interfaced with Scheme
;; with a trivial amount of effort.

C (to be linked against Python code-- Python can load the resulting shared library as if it was written in Python). Notice that all this code does is interface Linux's htonl function to Python:

#include <Python.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>

static PyObject *
py_htonl(PyObject *self, PyObject *args) {
long my_arg;

if(!PyArgParseTuple(args, "l", &my_arg))
return NULL;
return PyBuildValue("l", htonl(my_arg));
}

static PyMethodDef methods[] = {
{"htonl", py_htonl, METH_VARARGS,
"Demonstrate Python's C interface\n"}
};

static char module_doc[] = "Demonstration";

PyMODINIT_FUNC
initfunc(void) {
PyInitModule3("mylib", methods, module_doc);
}
To remove formatting, indent 4 spaces:

javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title)
The one fact in the article is the # of iPhones sold vs the total number of all phones sold last year. That is complete apples to oranges. Compare the # of iPhones sold to the # of Blackberries sold, possible some of the other high end phones as well. But I think you generally have super high end with Blackberry and iPhone, high end where you at least have a full keyboard and web browing, mid level which are "normal" cell phones, and low end which are just phone/texting.

I'd like to see sales numbers for RIM vs Apple.
I'm sure you mean $100k inflation adjusted. Otherwise $100k 1oo years ago would purchase a lot more wealth, you just wouldn't have access to modern technology.

Still, the Feds do print money, and wealth is added (not necessarily related), which goes against the article's premise, regardless of how you define money.
Out of interest, how many female founders applied in the last round? That seems like far more useful+reliable data than this poll.

>> "People often ask about the number of female founders we fund."

Do they ask how many black people get funding? How many Christians? How many blind people?

Asking such questions seems a bit irrelevant at best, and accusatory at worst to me.
And to annoy everyone, add a really long non-wrapping line to throw of the formatting of the whole page.

Add some spaces in there, till it fits on one 1024 screen.