skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay. What is your mechanism for all this equality? I assume you're some sort of young earth creationist, right? Sure, if God made men and women absolutely equal, then we're equal. The big guy can do anything. Probably right after he got done making fake dinosaur bones.

Some of us here believe in evolution. And evolution doesn't bring about nice politically correct results. The best explanation for observed sexual behavioral dimorphism (for example, the 2009 math SATs by gender) is most parsimoniously explained by genetics.
I think 28-34 is the best time to go abroad if you're single, because this is the age when you're likely to think about settling down, and the women overseas are of higher average quality. If finding a wife is important to you (rather than something incidental that may or may not happen) you pretty much have to go overseas because, while there are great women here as well, they are few and the competition for them is intense.
A hockey-stick curve can be approximated to any desired degree of accuracy by a sum of many sigmoid curves. The question is, when, if ever, will we run out of new S-shaped curves?
No, In my heart I know she's wrong. In my youth Ayn Rand and the Rational Man ha great appeal to me, but as I grew older I learned that man is not rational. In his core man is emotional and often works against his own self interest. Being rational is hard work and most people most times are working off different motivations. Logic and reasoning are more recent inventions and used even less frequently.

I actually think civilization works better than individuals. Civilization and government are not perfect, but I think fixing the framework is better than relying solely of the best interests of individuals.

This comment is certified content free.
Is it just me or does the CEO here seem a little bit full of it? He's awfully confident about a deal that will hopefully happen in several months and will leave him, along with his investors, with a significant loss. And yet from his comments in the article you'd think the company was the next Google. A little perspective might be nice.
I don't know who will be the first, but I hope that the new video streaming services will open the eyes of the major Canadian ISPs and force them to move away from the ridiculous bandwidth caps we have up here. With caps as low as 20GB/month, you can't watch a lot of TV shows and movies before getting over the limit. Hopefully services like Hulu will help ISPs realize that.
Not directly, but through role models in movies, TV, etc.
Interesting that the article you cite seems to claim that women are far more likely to go to pieces under the pressure of "stereotype threat" than men are. What a sexist you are.
Join CIA
Why didn't you use a live demo?
I think the gender imbalance is a symptom of a larger problem that affects competent programmers of both genders: An industry that doesn't take competent women seriously, doesn't take competence seriously.

There were a lot of threads a few weeks ago about "what to do about all the incompetent programmers". The two problems are related.
You might also enjoy his nonfiction book on the subject: The Transparent Society.
if it truly is a case where the city isn't regulating but instead simply competing with the telcos and beating them that's great. I'm just paranoid because the government has the legal right to enforce whatever they can get away with.
>At CRTC hearings in March on the regulation of new media, Rogers proposed an online video platform similar to Hulu as a means of ensuring Canadian broadcasting content has a home on the internet. The proposed service would require a Rogers' cable subscription for access

Nothings going to change as long as our regulators hand off everything to Rogers or Bell. If the government decides to regulate an online video platform (HULU), Rogers will likely make MORE money and further establish their oligopoly in Canada.
Just the way it worked out. I had taken many screenshots along the way, but at the time I decided to write about my findings, I was in mid-refactor and had nothing that I could run.

In hindsight, I should have used the real deal.
Seems like a dismal life. It is trinket sales, signifying nothing. It's the kind of work that should be laid to rest at 5 o' clock sharp.
Apple and Verizon said in talks for 2010 iPhone
Mediocre for whom, exactly?
Colbert Study: Conservatives Don't Know He's Joking
speaking as someone who hasn't seen the correct side of a 70 hour work week in quite some time, I strongly disagree.

Burn out is real; I'm working 40 hour weeks as a contractor, then I come home and try to finish my book or manage my business. What has kept me going so far is that I can hire 2 guys who are smarter than I am and buy all the servers I want for what I'm getting in those 40 hours.

But my god I'm ineffective. I bet I'd get more real work done if I worked 10 hours a week. Maybe read some books or something. Do you know how long it's been since I've read a book for fun?

Sure, 'passion' can carry you for a few months. but 70 hour work weeks are just unsustainable, and many of the really good people I know really do have about 4 good hours of work in them a day.
Thank you. Got the book and read it through. Fantastic.
Using the type system for discoverability and enforcing constraints
Please, no! There is no way to turn most students off on a subject more effectively than to make it mandatory.

EDIT: Plus, most of the information given would probably be wrong.
Well, the customizations are to the C++ code and it doesn't feel particularly difficult to adjust, but then we have years of senior-level C++ coding behind us.

One of the first changes we made to sphinx was just to increase the minimum word length so that queries could be extremely long (as error messages sometimes are quite long). This was changing a define and tweaking some other areas internally.

We also made some changes recommended by others in the sphinx forums and have been adjusting the weighting algorithms for our own needs.
But that's what C is.

edit: my argument can be summarized in sections 1 and 2 in an essay I wrote for a class a year ago: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/ece5530/languages.pdf
Time travel in global high score lists to make games more fun.
Since it is very difficult to rank highly in a global high score list, one might consider an alternative where you time travel to an earlier time when the list had only a few very poor scores.

This way, you will rank highly no matter how good you are at first. But as time progresses, the game replays the history of achieved scores to challenge you using real scores and nicknames.

The rate at which time progresses with respect to your version of the global high score list can be proportional to your current skill level.
Damn, I had to re-read this a couple of times. When the OP said "pretty proficient at a lot of languages", I mistakenly thought he meant programming languages =]
If you're going to tar "conservatives" with any kind of brush on HN, it better not be in an article on HuffPo that refers to "math and stuff". There are conservatives who contribute here (I'm not one of them, but still). Flagged.
It doesn't even take half the IT department. It only takes one or two rude colleagues to make your life miserable.

Part of the problem -- ironically -- is that programmers are in many ways a very tolerant bunch. We have to be, because many of our colleagues, including some of the most talented ones, have a lot of trouble reading social cues. Call it autism. Call it Asperger's. Call it "quirkiness". Blame it on a tendency to spend too much time mainlining Perl code. But you'd be lying if you claimed this correlation wasn't real. I've manifested the phenomenon myself at times.

Anyway, you won't last long in programming if you can't develop a tolerance for socially awkward people. But that tolerance is much harder to develop when those awkward people are constantly hitting on you. Especially if you are female and they are male. [1]

As a woman, what can you do to dissuade the socially awkward? Subtle social cues often don't work. Ridiculously obvious social cues, like sending a memo or writing a blog post, might help, or not: They might not get the message across to the recipient (trying to teach an autistic person to be socially appropriate can be like teaching photography to the blind) and they tend to be public, which runs the risk that you'll be labeled a "troublemaker". You could try appealing to the guy's colleagues, but they might just conclude that you're too "thin-skinned" for programming. After all, they are all highly tolerant of socially-awkward men. They have to be.

Or you could resign and find a different field.

Other fields don't seem to have this problem to the same extent. I expect that's because they're more efficient at screening out the people who aren't good at reading social cues. Given that I'm rather fond of many of my socially-awkward friends, that's not my favorite solution. I guess the only alternative is education, mutual tolerance, and careful social engineering, but nobody said that process would be easy.

---

[1] It's uncomfortable for men when they are hit on by socially-awkward women. But the potential consequences aren't the same. As a straight male engineer, the idea that I could lose my job because I rejected a co-worker's advances is kind of laughable, the thought of being groped in an elevator is absurd, and the very possibility that I could be raped without going to prison first is almost unthinkable. And, as it happens, I wasn't sexually abused as a child -- unlike an estimated 5-15% of men and 15-25% of women -- so I certainly don't have debilitating flashbacks when some guy shows me soft-core porn and invites me to laugh along with it. Lucky me.
Books about Lean Software Development
Alternately, he's trying to shift the argument away from a very legitimate discussion of "How can a community be more pleasant and welcoming?" to a tepid and difficult-to-counter "Don't censor the awesome, edgy, boundary-pushing behavior that's made us rock stars!"

I make the assumption that you can invent and refine interesting things without offending people gratuitously. Perhaps DHH does not.
Wait, shouldn't that be 1/3 x^3 + C?
Agreed... those numbers were from March 2005. PG, can we have an update, please?

Also, I was at the first Startup School at Harvard in 2005 (?). One of the speakers (PG?) noted the very high proportion of Macs in the room. Looking around I guessed about 80%. That is consistent with something PG said in that Mac essay - "If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing." I'm seeing more of my friends and coworkers using Mac, even DBAs who use MS SQL Server a lot.
I was wondering what color "antique flame-red" was.

Folks who study certain rules of grammar may tend to parse sentences differently than others. For example, assuming that adjectives modify the words they immediately precede.

I bet most people assume "antique" is modifying "racing cars", and no one wonders what an antique Italian would drive.

BTW, why couldn't one say "21 green large tables" and not be understood? It suggests that the defining quality is the color, not the size (i.e., not the red large tables, but the green large tables).
I have to sign into IM at work, it is what we use to talk to each other when we are too lazy to get up :)
Try it out at http://perlcritic.com/. The feedback is usable - when the tool finds something to complain about, it provides a link to documentation explaining what it didn't like, and the way it "should be".
Narayana Murthy's success mantras for entrepreneurs
wow this is really great advice. Currently building a educational game but having a bit of trouble of how to market my software. How effective, in your opinion, is google adwords?
Thanks to everyone for all of the answers. I'll take a look at all of it!
I did not care for this comment, and will be posting my complaint on that site momentarily.
It's probably becuase many people prefer a complete, working solution rather than roll-your-own kind of thing. I would actually pay for something like mnemosyne that works well on the Web & iPhone and has the kind of content I care about.
In my uninformed opinion, I don't think we do a very good job marketing what our field is about. If the uninitiated understood the creativity and artisanship involved in software, I think there would be more women programmers. Instead, they get a feeling that programming is something vaguely geeky and uncool, and the intro Java class doesn't do a whole lot to dispel the feeling.
This isn't something you have to have an uninformed opinion about. The issue has been noticed before, people have thought it was important to understand, and actual studies have been done. Here's the authoritative one:

http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Mar...

It's not an alpha male thing, though that's some of it. It's a socialization thing. Guys had more exposure before college, are more likely to learn the material on their own rather than in a group (how women usually prefer to learn), and so appear to be far more competent earlier. Girls who make it over that initial hump do as well or better, but not many do, because there's not a lot of interest in helping them through it.
Swiss robot wants some time with you
Competing On The Basis Of Speed
I guess the South Park quote was a little obscure... B^)
Geocities: Lessons So Far
ugggh, that's gay... Some of the local Universities here in Ontario, Canada, have the opposite ratio :)
The influence of political ideology on perceptions
got this from a now dead thread, the study was interesting and so i'm submitting a direct link to the study itself because it sheds more light on the nature of our minds
Buried in the trollicious rhetorical tactics evident here there is a kernel of truth. Web sites don't need to look the same in every browser, but maybe Web apps do. So when someone advocates a particular use case (like rendering text in Flash) they should specify whether they're talking about Web sites or Web apps.
huffington post aside, the excerpt from the study discussed was interesting from a cognitive studies perspective. link to study: http://hij.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/2/212

I noticed while writing this reply (was trying to get back to the article) that this is now marked as [dead] so I submitted the direct link to the study in its own thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582610
Citations are legion.

The most obvious and direct proof is the huge variation in math scores by country. If there was no social bias against women in mathematics, you would expect girls to be equally worse than boys in every country (they way girls are shorter than boys in every country, for example).

eg see: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...

and note the significant difference in the gender gap in math between, say, Turkey and Sweden.

Arguing about mathematical skills is irrelevant to the debate anyway. I can tell you for certain that at least half the male programmers I deal with seem to possess no particular mathematical insight.

The real question is not whether more women should be in computing. The question is whether there are women who would be enthusiastically in the field if they had been encouraged to be, and whether their absence is impoverishing the field. I have no data to answer to this question and I doubt you do either.

PS. I am female, if that matters.
I hung out with Yokum on Friday and essentially went through the "how do I find and hire a lawyer" bit he refers to at the end of his essay: http://www.sachinagarwal.com/how-to-legally-incorporate-your...
This is a poorly written article, typical of rediff.

Read this recent interview of NRN by Tehelka (Apr/25 ed.)
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main41.asp?filename=Bu250409the...

instead, if you are interested in hearing what he has to say.

However, the interview does not have a "entrepreneurship" only focus.
> Is it a battered old hat used for canvas fishing?

No, that would be his battered old canvas-fishing hat.

> Does he have two battered canvas fishing hats of which this one is the older of the two?

No, that would be his old battered canvas fishing hat.
I'd guess price and compatibility with already-purchased or Windows-only software is the #1 reason, but you have a good point. Years ago my friend Nick used to use an old Dell with stickers and tape and missing keys. He ran Slackware and wrote magical code. I hate to think of it as a question of "status" but I do unconsciously and unintentionally appraise people as hacker/non-hacker at coffee shops, airports and such based on their laptops. From lowest to highest: Dell with Windows, corporate asset tag and Outlook on the screen; next, Sony Vaio playing Disney cartoon full-screen; then a Mac; and at the rare top, something like Nick's old computer with stickers and tape and syntax-highlighted terminal editor on the screen. I'm sorry, now I feel bad about judging people like that. And Nick now uses a nice black MacBook.
Agreed. If you aren't fascinated by the topic you are way better off going into medicine, law, business...
We'll have to disagree on this one.

For instance: medicine? If you have a hard time tolerating the undersocialized folks in software, you probably won't enjoy being vomited on either. Or any of the other hundreds of perils of being in the medical field. Being a doctor might be fulfilling, but it is NOT a pleasant profession.

We in the tech industry have it really good. It's very tough to find an industry with this combination of pay, flexibility, interesting work, and work/life balance.
How the Satyam fraud was pulled off
So, women have a comparative advantage at being teachers, nurses, and paralegals whereas men have a comparative advantage at being principals, doctors, and lawyers? This argument could very well be made in the 60s and 70s, but we would see it as the sexism it is today.

There's a woman I work with who was a programmer for years, but now works as a technical writer because she was tired of dealing with the cultural problems she had at multiple companies. I've worked with other women programmers who had to deal with bullshit that I'd never accept due to my white male privilege.
U.S. Plans Attack and Defense in Cyberspace Warfare
Your right. I was just trying to illustrate a point. The story of the 12 year old pulling apart a junked Pong console, may be slightly over told.
Just use the 'flag' feature.
OTOH several other OS projects have their own DSLs: Oberon, Vault, BitC, and Sing#.
owasp.org, the top ten most common vulnerabilities in particular.

Separation-of-duties among your employees.

If your ASP involves a webapp, consider a web application gateway/firewall that 'knows' your app and what the valid input should be.

If your webapp runs apache, run, do not walk, to mod_security and mod_evasive.

IPS.

Encrypt sensitive data using strong encryption (AES-256 or better for symmetric side). Guard access to the private keys: make a realistic, detailed policy about who gets access to them, and audit to be sure it's really being followed.

Take a look at the PCI DSS (google it) -- even if you're not storing credit card data, it's a way to get a good idea about realistic, solid security.
My local Walgreen's offers numerous products that are essentially knock-offs of name brand items. For example, I prefer Edge gel shaving cream; the particular one I like has an orange cap, a black can, and some colored logo lettering stuff.

The Walgreen knock-off looks damn near identical. I bought it once by mistake, and thought, hey, maybe I'm a chump paying for the brand name. But it wasn't as good. (The gel itself was possibly as good, but the packaging sucked and it wouldn't dispense correctly after a some usage).

For many items it is very easy to join the market, and having a patent may be the only way to secure a lead over poor imitations.
I'd love to see the "math and stuff" that they use to measure what qualifies as a "conservative". I would imagine that a great deal goes into the selection criteria that is subject to interpretation.

I used to identify myself as a conservative. I do not any longer for quite a number of reasons, in spite of the fact that my essential political and social views have not changed.

Incidentally, back when I did so identify myself, a number of my liberal friends insisted, "No, you're not a conservative." Mostly, I suppose, because I listened to their arguments, respected them, and did not do any huffing and puffing. In their estimation, I was too "open minded" to qualify. So, I wonder if I would fit the criteria they choose in this study. I guess I'll never know.
And by "health care stuff" don't automatically assume that means insurance. If you require prescription drugs, research the price of them. Some drugs cost hundreds, others you can pay closer to $20 for a 3 month supply. Sometimes there are alternative drugs for the same condition that aren't normally prescribed, but work just as well--dessicated thyroid for hypothyroidism instead of levothyroxine, for instance. See how much you can afford paying for out of pocket or out of HSA before thinking about what kind of benefits you want from insurance.
Intel paper about threads with a nice informal touch
I especially like the graph of user travel between pages.
You need funds. . . but that is easy, finance is not a problem.

Yeah, if you're Murthy funds are no problem at all.
Choosing The Right Domain Name Registration Service Explained
The main advantage to picking the right domain name registration service is that it can create a most affordable means of ensuring a profitable route to conducting a profitable online business.
I'd parse it as (a (little crappy) building), i.e. "little" becomes an adverb modifying "crappy" instead of an adjective modifying "building".
Trying to track swine flu across cities in real-time
I do not mind the humor if it's a good-natured Colbertesque jab. But this is clearly intended to ridicule and denigrate. In this case, it is also a misrepresentation. So three strikes.
Wait, what? You're claming that Flash renders text accurately by comparing it to Word? If we're going to create a new typesetting system, can't we at least compare it to existing typesetting systems that have had some professional design input? I hesitate to drag out TeX, but come on - Adobe InDesign, Quark Xpress, even Mac OS X's built-in CoreText/ATSUI rendering probably pays more attention to text layout and spacing than Word does.

I know Firefox's rendering engine put some effort into supporting the underlying platform's high-quality text-layout engine (for instance, Firefox will often use the 'fi' ligature if it's available), and this will only get better with time - unlike Flash, which will now have to maintain their exact layout system forever to maintain backwards compatibility.
You can not fault an entire community for the actions of a single individual.

You can when prominent members -- leaders, even -- of that community step up to defend those actions.

In any community there will be opposing opinions on definitions of moral correctness for n issues.

You can find plenty of Americans who support discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. When it comes to moral issues there are always two sides. Often, one of those sides is wrong.

If you actually want to change the community, you have a better chance of influencing the future community through education then the current community through preaching.

If you want to change inappropriate behavior, you have to call it out. Staying silent doesn't do much good. Good people do bad things all the time; they won't learn the difference unless someone explains it.
If a company charges you incorrectly, the best way to complain is to call up mastercard/visa and let them do it for you. Never fails.
Designer/Developer matching service