skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, okay, so that belies the actual problem.

I know girls who have been interested in tech, who abandon it, either because of the presumption that they will not be welcome, or in response to actual behavior of their male peers (i know numerous girls who've been in CS classes, who've been in group projects, only to have one of the group members by the end of the project freak out on them, or get -really- -really- passive aggressive, after it becomes clear that said girls have no romantic interest in a particular group member).

While my personal experience is obviously anecdotal, discussions i've had and things i've read indicate to me that the experiences my friend have had are not outliers.

So, it may be that, overtly, some think that gender is irrelevant in coding, or even that coding isn't social, but gender is part of identity, just as much as much as your coding creations are part of your identity.

Also, comparing the ability to determine at your own abilities what career you would like to be in, and how you can contribute to society to playing with dolls? Trivializes the cause of gender equality a bit don't you think?

Additionally, boys are actively discouraged from playing with dolls. Society punishes such behavior, and vigorously promotes alternative behavior in it's place. So, ask yourself, why shouldn't boys be able to play w/ dolls? Why does society discourage it? :p

Don't get me wrong, proportional gender representation (or at least anything closer than what we have now) in tech isn't a unique problem. My wife is in Dietetics (what dietitians do, not what Tom Cruise does), and they've got the opposite gender distribution from what the Ruby community does. It's just as frustrating for them as to why guys don't go into their field. It's certainly not because a male perspective wouldn't be useful (since there are cultural distinctions between how guys view food, health, and the human body). It's not because they're not good at contributing to the field (i've heard some really cool things that guys in food science & nutrition have produced out of the University of Guelph for instance)

But the notion that we should just ignore it is... pretty pathetic in my opinion :( Just because some don't care, doesn't mean it's not a problem, or that it's not an injustice that should be addressed.
When you have to work, disconnect your Ethernet cable.
That's also been my experience. There is a really good book that can help you get a handle on why precisely you procrastinate: "Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It" by Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen. It was published in 1983, but I still haven't seen a better one on the psychology of why people procrastinate.

EDIT: The problem is big and complex enough to need a book to cover it. Blog posts and magazine articles usually only cover a specific, narrow aspect of the problem. This book as well as covering the field is readable enough that it doesn't take too long to read through.
Then the author is misusing the word "pornography". Etymologically speaking, pornography denotes the "depiction of prostitutes" or something like that. Thus, claiming that the Lena image is porn is implicitly insulting Lena. The author picking Lena as an example was distasteful. Of course, we could go on forever discussing what the word "porn" means these days, but I guess that's beyond the point...
Why is it ok for black people to vote for Obama because he is black? Isn't that equally racist?
1 bug: When I click sign up it says log in as the title of the box.

1 annoyance: the results page took ~10seconds to render. Mostly because you are using many copies of a fixed size image to render the bars. Why not resize a single image or just make it a html element?
I think the "premature optimization" phrase is usually used in contexts where you have to perform said optimizations by hand... (of course in some cases you'll have to consciously write a procedure as tail-recursive).
I just wanted to say that when I voted you up, I clicked really hard.

I often struggle with time management procrastination and a high level of distractibility. It really comes down to just being honest with yourself and understanding the choices you're making. The gym is a huge help too, it's good for you, it gives you energy and it helps you focus.
"Additionally, boys are actively discouraged from playing with dolls. Society punishes such behavior, and vigorously promotes alternative behavior in it's place. So, ask yourself, why shouldn't boys be able to play w/ dolls? Why does society discourage it? :p"

It doesn't. It calls them "action figures."
You know that the Democratic party lost the south because of race? I mean, Strom Thurmond, of all people, used to be a Democrat.

And Obama didn't lock up the black vote until white Iowans voted for him. Hillary was winning the national black vote 2-1 until after he won the caucuses. The evidence is pretty clear that black people don't just blindly vote for other black people - they vote in their self-interest, and until Obama seemed credible, their self-interest was to vote for Hillary.
I really hope this works good!
The headline: "China Is Not Another Ascendant Superpower, It's Just Another Nation with Structural Problems"

Why are the two concepts mutually exclusive? The US suffers from a lot of structural problems as well, but there's no denying that it's a superpower.

IMHO China is going to hit a brick wall in terms of growth unless they get corruption under control and impose proper rule of law. For a country of its industrial stature it's a surprisingly lawless land - they need to get it together if they want to see long-term success.
So given two credible candidates, they would vote based on race. This makes sense as it is based on self-interest.

But one can make a similar self-interest argument for white people voting based on race also.

The question is when does self-interest turn into racism and whether the notion of racism even applies to voting.
It's not a question of being prudes. The definition of pornography is "sexually explicit pictures, writing or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal". I think we can all agree that Playboy fits that definition. Hence, the full Lena picture is porn by definition. Secondly, labeling it as porn can only be considered prude behaviour if you're offended by porn. Personally, I do not find porn offensive. Do you? Lastly, something can be pornography and still be artistic. I think the real prudes are those who think that there can be no overlap between art and porn.
I think the discussion bifurcates here between two camps: the pragmatic camp, which describes the best way to reach various goals, and the principles camp, which describe reality (as they see it) whether or not goals are reached or not.

Both prongs of this discussion have serious flaws. If you try to act only pragmatically (convincing your fellow citizen that a little chaos is necessary for the growth of the larger state) then progress, or the state of the argument, is completely dependent on your powers of persuasion and the current fight/mindset of your fellow citizen. That fails over time because creating limits are discussed at a much higher ratio than reducing them. I'd have to have a persuasive power of about 100:1 in order just to maintain the status quo.

If, as I do, you believe there are some fundamental biological principles at play, then it really doesn't matter anyway. Either the principles are being respected or they are not. And sadly yes, I think it probably comes down to some sort of happy mathematical ratio. However, as you point out, arguing on principles in a society that is fear and risk-obsessed is a non-starter. And it's a really difficult argument to make that, while ten million people may blow smoke in other people's face, the loss of their freedom to move and act naturally is a greater loss than the hundred million who are annoyed with second-hand smoke (I am not a smoker, btw). But at the end of the day the better argument wins. That's just reality.
The basic premise of the article is that there is a reality external to ourselves that can be known outside of our particular systems of language and culture. If there isn't a transcendent "Truth out there" that can be grasped by a particular value system (science, religion, etc) then it is perfectly understandable that two people were convinced they were living in a different world. In other words, all worlds are "fantasy worlds," or if you like, "all worlds are real within the context of their particular systems of language."
It has nothing to do with ego; I am a vegetarian. The "solution" is probably what we're doing, that is, being able to produce vaccines quickly.
Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs
On a moral level it's equally bad, but on a social level it's less bad. The reason being that there are fewer black voters than white voters, so the effect of racist black voters on the election is much less. If all of our elections were decided by black people voting for bad candidates because they were black then you'd probably hear a lot more about it.
The Portuguese Experiment: Did Drug Decriminalization Work?
The moral panic over Twitter
Well, you said you already had some ideas, but maybe these help as well.
Things that work for me:

- Tasks you really don't like doing are harder to start with. But, are the tasks you have to do really important? What happens if you don't do them? Eliminate as much as possible.

- Start working on a task as late as possible. The pressure, it helps.
(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law)

- Break it up in small steps. Working on a task "Build the next google" is not going to get you started. Split it up in smaller steps, and associate little milestones or 'victories' to completing a small step.

- Another reason for procrastination is feeling overwhelmed (decision paralysis, action paralysis). If you have so much to do that no matter what you finish, it still feels like you have a lot left, it's impossible to start. Again, try to eliminate or make a feasible schedule for yourself, such that you are able to finish your list for the day.

- Stop feeling bad about procrastination. Actually, plan in some procrastination time. Forcing yourself to work all the time and feel bad about not doing it will cause you to procrastinate more. Plan in some time for 'slacking', or even better: exercise, do some sports and get back to work afterwards.

- If you would give yourself 1 hour/day for procrastination; what would you rather do? Read digg about lolcats or sit outside in the sun, and talk with some friends? If you go at it like this, you'll notice how valuable your limited time actually is, and you'll stop reading those websites.

- Again, more sports! Clear mind == more productive.

- If you allow yourself the time to 'procrastinate' (i.e. reading websites, RSS, email, etc.), it will also make it easier to read news/mail in batches. Limit it to max. 3 times per day or so.

- If you want help to get into some new (productivity) habits, start a "Seinfeld calendar" (Google it if you haven't heard of it before)

- Do NOT, _EVER_, start your day with reading news/mail/etc (or keep it to offline news -- yes, news papers ;).

- Unplug. Information overload == bad.

- Start the day with an easy task. It's not hard to start with and it will get you in the "getting-s*-done mood". Once you start ticking of tasks - no matter how little it was - it feels like getting done more!

Hope this helps!
I got the impression that in this cases, the disease isn't spread through eating pigs. Rather, it's the fact that pigs and humans are living in close proximity to each other that allowed a flu strain to evolve that targeted both species. Hence my comment about livestock.
I think it’s the wrong way. It’s not about "how to get even more done". A sound mind in a sound body. But perhaps men have to go this route for a decade to see this.

2 quotes:

"This winter, I spoke again with Alex, the Harvard graduate, and found that, after a break of several months, he had gone back to taking Adderall—a small dose every day. He felt that he was learning to use the drug in a more “disciplined” manner. Now, he said, it was less about staying up late to finish work he should have done earlier, and more “about staying focussed on work, which makes me want to work longer"

"Every era has its defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for our efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture."
Funny, that's exactly the opposite of what I would suggest: Work on only the most important thing and nothing else. It's helped me maintain focus no matter how crazy things get.

pg says it much better here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

"What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?"

Just goes to show you: Ask 2 hackers a question and get 3 answers. You'll just have to figure out what works best for you.
From now on I will put more thought into how hard I click.
If you google around, you can actually find the full size Lena image, in which she is definitely naked.
You wrote:

"Hence, the full Lena picture is porn by definition."

The author wrote:

"One cannot do research in image processing without an encounter with Lena (pronounced Lenna). The image of the woman with a feathered hat has become the de-facto test image for many algorithms, and appears in thousands of articles and conference papers. And it is porn."

So, the author is claiming that the image that is showed in all those scientific papers is porn. And that image is not the full Lena image. Thus, according to your definition, the author seems to get aroused by women's faces and feathered hats. I rest my case...
Live White House Briefing on Swine Flu at 12:30 EST
Better yet, get 2 computers and put them in separate rooms.
This inspired me to try with Javascript turned off, and sure enough I can choose multiple options. There was no obvious error so I assume my all-choices answer was processed.

Some sites can justify breaking if javascript is off, but not yours.

edit: Additionally it seems HTML is not escaped at all. I should have used something more obvious than just <b>ing the comments...
If all of our elections were decided by black people voting for bad candidates because they were black then you'd probably hear a lot more about it.

That's exactly what happened in a bunch of major cities ( Detroit, Newark, Baltimore, Washington DC ), and a major reason why those cities are in such bad shape. Read about Coleman Young for a taste of this history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman_Young
Ask HN: Best Python graphing and reporting libraries for web app
I'm building a web site that will include multiple graphs and printable reports. The graphs are pretty simple line graphs (perhaps with multiple data sources). Ideally, the graphic library would be able to do some smoothing of the data.

The reports are also fairly simple (lists of data with said graphs).

What do you think the best graphing and reporting libraries (for the planned usage) out there are?
How could anyone in a college physics class miss this one? They really should have failed the class if they did, because they can't even grasp basic Newtonian physics.
Oh yes. I just thought that sentence was fantastic!
oops, I meant to say presidential elections, sorry. You are correct though.

Interestingly, if there are more racist white voters than racist black voters, the racist black voters actually improve the quality of the decision because each racist black vote cancels out a racist white vote. This makes the best candidate more likely to win the election, because the best candidate has fewer votes to make up. (Unless the racism helps them, in which case it doesn't matter.)
This is a job for...

duh duh duh

Userscripts!
"No. No drugs, please. My problem are my habits. I do not have a disease."

Drugs are not just for disease.

Is it possible that your habits come (to whatever extent) from neuropharmacology?

If you have a dopamine imbalance, can will power alone overcome it?
I would argue the other way around. Every toolbar that is 10px high takes up more room than every sidebar that is 10px wide, on average.
Rapidshare Shares Uploader Info with Rights Holders
> Technically, there's no reason that organisms should reach a point where they're "no longer able to reproduce";

Women who stopped having children and instead invested in their grandchildren had more decendents than women who didn't stop having their own children.
"what do you think the IPCC reports are based on?"

If only the IPCC didn't have a political agenda...
What does "quality of the decision" mean? Does that concept even apply to a democracy?
> If you don't produce, don't fool yourself - you're not an entrepreneur just a dreamer.

I think I ought to write that down.
My maternal grandfather has certainly gotten an evolutionary advantage from living a long life. He's had nine children that I know of, including some younger than me.
Isn't that a straightforward question? Self-interest turns into racism when the candidate voted for is not the best candidate. If you vote for an inferior candidate on the basis of race, then you are not acting on your own self-interest. I use the terms "best" and "inferior" to refer to the candidate's benefits to the specific voter.
It's racist but that doesn't mean it's not ok, like affirmative action.
It depends what works for you. In my experience the first thing you need is motivation. Without you have nothing to drive you and all the will in the world will get you nowhere.

Here is something that helped me: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/03/the-cult-of-d...

Seriously though, find your motivation and all else will fall into place...
Beach holidays and luxury safaris
I was watching a programme the other night about "the great migration" in Tanzania and Kenya and after it finished I decided to Google it to see if I could find a travel company that would offer a holiday to the area. I came across a fabulous website called luxury-safaris.co.uk and they offered exactly what I was looking for, a 9 night safari following the route of the migration through Tanzania's Serengeti and on to the Masai Mara in Kenya. The name of this itinerary well of course "The Great Migration". fabulous!!
External deadlines and accountability. I tell people what I'm doing. Then if I fail to do it I have the guilt of disappointing them on top of my own frustration at inertia. It's more or less cured the latter. :p
It is usually not be as simple as capitalism/socialism.

China may need more rules (or better enforced rules) to eliminate corruption and establish a transparent government. Once that is achieved they can move towards a free market for the entire country - not just the ones the government decides they like.

Just making the whole country laissez-faire won't solve their deep rooted social problems. There are many examples of third world countries jumping to capitalism, in hopes it would bring prosperity, but it made the conditions worse because they didn't fix core problems such as corruption and poor social conditions.

Once a healthy infrastructure is in place then free markets can help them flourish.
Wow, I didn't know the Netherlands had never really legalized cannabis...

Also, I'm from Portugal, and although I knew being caught using some drugs would take no action from the police, I didn't know we were that liberal...

Anyway, whoever is caught selling goes to jail...
This has been submitted LOTS of times before. See

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571686

for what appears to be the first submission, by rms, one of the top-ten posters here.

Submitting the canonical form of a URL helps the HN duplicate-detection software do its job of taking you to the previous thread and upvoting that thread.
Seems to rely on forcing the user to make a request with an arbitrary "host" header. Can you do that from javascript or some other webpage embeddable thingy? If you can't then it's not such a big problem (although obviously it still shouldn't be like that)
Didn't work for me, at an initial low dose (5 mg). I found my mind "slipping off of things". It was "on to the next thing" before I'd really thought through the current thing. I "just sent" some emails and did some other things that, upon reflection, were not good choices.

I cut the low starting dose in half, and that helped; at that level, "pause and check" still has enough control to keep me from disregarding consequences.

I'm a bit hesitant to share this, but I'm curious whether anyone else here has had a similar reaction. You can email me if you don't want it out in public (pseudonymous email address, presumably).
I think you should move the "flag as spam" flag icon away from next to the category name; the current position made me think the flag was either a property of the category or a button that would let me flag it like in email, that is, save it for later.
Right now lack of press freedom is a severe problem in China,

http://www.cpj.org/2009/02/attacks-on-the-press-in-2008-chin...

because it keeps ordinary people there from knowing what problems have what causes (hint: many problems have bad governance as a main cause) and dealing with them. The submitted article makes the important point that over 1 billion people in China are still very poor indeed, and meeting their needs for better housing, health care, and education is still a crucial problem for China.
Unfortunately, that's not people, that's blogspot. I even have to do it on my own blog. Of course, it could be some individuals' blogs, but blogspot is the only place I've seen it.
Almost, there is one unstated additional qualification: all the above is only true if you don't believe in (or cannot use) boring old iterative loops and must implement an algorithm recursively.

I found it hard to believe the article went to the extent of explaining TCO (with assembly language!) and space complexity without bothering to mention this little assumption.

Since Python favours iteration over recursion I have some sympathy with GVR on this one.
It is inefficient for everybody to learn to about science.

I agree it's inefficient for everybody to learn advanced science; but basic science? Gravity for Newton's sake? Don't people spend around 10 years going through basic education? What are they learning in those 10 years if they can't even understand a tiny bit of how the world that we live in functions?

Also, if you have read the article it's not just a failure to understand gravity, there was a severe lack of ability to apply logic (even by the TA that was teaching logic!).
Well that says something about the education system.

I would argue that everyone should learn at least the basics of science, and appreciate the fact that this marvelous civilization that we are living in is shaped by the very science that they don't fully comprehend.
From pg's essay: One reason is that you may not get any reward in the forseeable future.

I find it helps to spend some time laying out a plan of attack that will yield results along the way - like an adventurer laying out a route with ports/oases/base-camps for reprovisioning - and ruthlessly cutting out nice-to-have features that don't contribute (while keeping some nice-to-have features that do contribute). A side-effect of getting results is that they act as a check on whether you are on the right track. There's still the basic fear, of "will I ever get to the end"; the cure for that is to clarify the mission. If things get confusing, step back and simplify, because that is the way to move forward.

And laying out the approach actually also begins the journey (because I think about the issues I'll encounter), without feeling like it, so it is easier to start on this than on the task itself. So this is one way to overcome procrastination, and get started: "I'll just have a little daydream about the cool little outcomes along the way"