skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you'd like to get your local Scouts group to work on code within the safe measures of private repos, I'm sure you'd also find sponsors. It's not a breach of Equality when you aren't stopping other people from doing something. I'm sure Github would love sponsorship from all over the place.

A benefit of this is clever on Ada and Github's part: a lot of women don't participate in code sharing because of reasons that are discussed here enough. So women will get to find each other and work on code together and hey, the world gets software, and Github makes some happy new customers. I, for one, am signing up even though I barely have the time - I'm eager to meet other women coders in a working environment and I'd like to find a small way to pay back the massive debt I have to the open source community.
Google Fiber and the evolution of T. Goog
On Debian (and possibly Ubuntu) one can get the SBCL package from unstable (it doesn't depend on much) and go from there if installing from source is too much of a hassle.

Don't install any other Common Lisp stuff SBCL doesn't depend on from the Debian repository though, except maybe ASDF. Get everything else through Quicklisp.
When I buy music I would like to not be paying for a huge and inefficient, production, distribution, curation and marketing layer. I want the money to go as much as possible to the artist.

Wait, who are you to pronounce on the efficiency of this layer? Do you think that production and marketing don't create value? Several of the artists that pioneered the 'pay what you want' approach have come to the conclusion that they were better off with that stuff in place:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/4054634/musics-pay-what-you...
This is true, even though we would rather switch to Armadillo due to it's easier handling and better high-level behaviour.

Right now the linear algebra library we use -ublas- has the same behaviour as Eigen for BLAS1 type expressions. So it tries to generate optimal (non-SSE) code. Only for BLAS2 and 3 we fall back to the ATLAS-routines which has the same performance as Eigen on the interesting problem sizes.

//small edit
In the end it is not so interesting whether the BLAS1-type expressions are fast as they make up < 1% of run time performance. The big chunks are the data processing inside the matrix-matrix multiplications of the Neural Networks and similar entities.
I think the primary (only?) value is as a demo object for showing off 3D printing.
From the article:

>Blog. You can write in a journal or text document just for yourself, but I highly recommend blogging. Get a free account at WordPress.com or Tumblr, and just start. Why blog? Because it really helps you to write regularly, and forces you to think in different ways, when you have an audience. Even if the audience is small. It’s scary, I know, but just do it. You’ll grow comfortable with it over time, and you should never let fear stop you from doing something amazing.
True that matlab octave and R are all rubbish for performance. I use python + numpy which all delegates to BLAS for the hardcore linear algebra stuff. I don't normally find C++ gains me all that much.
You can also do GPU acceleration pretty easy using theano (e.g. http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/tutorial/using_gpu.h...)

So I reckon my GPU accelerated python still beats a C++ pthreads approach, and is alot faster to develop on.

Your mileage may vary, from what you said you probably know what you are doing, maybe GPU is not applicable. I was really replying to the initial comments that said they want to start learning machine learning on a C++ system. Training for days suggests you are doing something hardcore like MCMC/DBN/Guassian Processes, learners should not start there though....
I can't believe the whining comments here so far. GitHub can contribute to any organization it wants to.
Shut up, asshole. You're so disgusted with the Internet? Go eat a turnip. Then, study Ryan McGreal's response as the proper HN way to say what you were trying to say.
It's been sad to watch Markdown eclipse Textile http://txstyle.org in popularity. Textile provides a more complete mapping to HTML than Markdown, while remaining easy to use.

Its primary flaw is translating line breaks into HTML line breaks. Per the article's criticisms, it too lacks a formal spec and supports embedded HTML.
I get five free private repos for being a university student (for as long as I'm a student) - I don't see why we can't just extend something like this to people who are learning how to program / use github, and not just women/students
I'm pretty surprised to see this. What about men who are just starting out with learning to code and don't want their scratch-space projects visible to everyone (and potentially archived for all time)? Using demographics is the wrong approach; instead, GitHub should use one's ability to pay as a baseline (non-profit companies, individual developers, etc.)
I read this about 2 hours ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Growing up in a Latino/Black community and being of mixed heritage, it was never socially easy. My parents divorced, so I'd spend half the year with my dad - who was Jamaican - in Patterson, NJ, and I'd spend the other half with my mom - who was Italian - up in Canada.

I always found it interesting how I felt more comfortable in white-as-the-clouds Ontario, than in Patterson, where there weren't just more black people, but a lot more mixed race people. I didn't quite like Star Wars or Dr Who, but I did read a lot of Tolkien, and science, tech, philosophy, or anything, really, wasn't just something I learned in school so I could do homework; they were actual things that I engaged with - not that school was any less boring for me; believe me, it was. It wasn't enough to read Catcher in the Rye, I had to find out about Salinger, the times he lived in. I liked to talk about things. What was mostly just school stuff to people were things I actually liked to think about or talk about or even do. This never really fit very well into Hip-Hop and girls, and "looking cool" Patterson - though I did rock this sweet leather jacket once, but I drew some blanks when I channeled my inner James Dean. Brampton, OTOH, was interesting. It wasn't that people were any more like I was, or that people automatically liked me any better - though there was a weird fascination with my hair - but the fact that I liked the things I liked wasn't something I had to hide. It wasn't that they understood everything I said, or that they were even all that interested, but very rarely did anyone ever alienate me for dropping a Hume quote, no one ever told me to "shove that nerd shit up my ass" when I mentioned the possibility of planting a radio in someone's skull; no one ever tried to make me socially handicapped for being interested in any intellectual development.

Reading this, I felt like this girl had just touched my mind. If only I could touch hers. The feelings of isolation when people who are physically like you aren't just behaviorally unlike you, but very actively alienating to you. The feeling of shame when the teacher calls you to give the answer and you don't know what to do - give the right answer, contribute to the stigma; give the wrong answer and have others spitefully mock you for "not being as smart as you think". The absolute feeling of insecurity when innocently mentioning you don't know something, a privilege available to everyone else, is met with mocking comments about how they thought you knew everything. If only I could meet this girl and let her know that it gets better in the end. Hopefully she finds her own Brampton, ON - somewhere she can be herself with other people without the feeling of being an artificial limb, rather than a part of a fully functioning body.
AOL Is Shutting Down AOL Music
very well said on all points. i have nothing to add, just wanted to say so.
Construction workers and programmers are both tradesmen, for most values of the word. I know you added a disclaimer already but I figured I'd just emphasize the point.
I agree. I don't read comic books, barely watch sci-fi, play board games. I play sports and do stuff outside. I often feel like an outcast when I'm talking to a bunch of programmers and they veer off into sci-fi talk.
Thank you so much for doing this. I knew it was only a matter of time and it's very heartwarming to see that Glass will remain useful for hackers.
indeed. again, looking at world affairs, that might be a greater motivational force than anything else.
Sole OP response in a thread full of questions.
Various kinds of Markov models are pretty interesting and have many interesting applications that are not too complicated, it's a pity this particular example is being done to death, since it doesn't give much insight into the topic. Shannon's classic paper on information theory is very readable and shows the usefulness of the concept:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...
I would love to see an actual tear-down question list from the man himself, or Gary, or Paul, or Jessica.

For now, I've printed this list of questions to hang in my office. :)
[reposting stolt45's comment that got killed]:

Hey Ricky, we've definitely had some billing related issues recently. We've just finished the initial stages of moving onto a new system which should help clear up the cause of the issues like the one you mention in your last post. Sorry about the delays. If you email me at chris [at] heroku [dot] com and I'll make sure you're taken care of.
Private repository for learning open source software. Makes perfect sense.
Not sure how Nodejs helps, I agree that Mongo helps, schemaless is easier to evolve from my experience than MySQL e.g.
So basically I can get you to advertise my club if I tweet a favorable ratio to you, right? :-)
IANAW, but this almost seems sexist in and of itself. Is Github shielding the delicate female programmers from the merciless wrath of internet trolls? I guess the assumption is that big strong male programmers don't need this kind of coddling.
>Where do you get any number?

By studying the actual quantities involved?

>It's a back of the envelope, order-of-magnitude thing.

No, that's not how you get "any number". Just some of them, the more sloppy ones.

The nearest star is like 5 light years away. With 1/10 of the speed of light that's like 50 years. Wanna make it 1/100 and 500 years?

In any case much less than the 100,000 years estimation.

>We don't have anything close to faster-than-light spacecraft and there's no reason to think we will in the near future, except for pure religious hope.

First, we don't need "faster than light" to make it to there to less than 100,000 years.

Second, we actually DO have some ideas about that, too:

http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-...
Schrödinger’s cat: for real
Height is important, but so is having a lean and muscular figure. And the latter is something the person definitely has control over.
I'm using it too and find it really nice to work with. The one reservation I have is the lack of keyboard navigation on custom form elements (e.g., checkboxes, combo boxes).
Collapsing single newlines is a love-it-or-hate-it feature. Personally I like it because it allows me to place one sentence (or clause) per line, which makes version control much easier. But a lot of people seem to hate it with a passion, and I can also understand their frustration because it just isn't intuitive to anyone who doesn't already know how HTML treats whitespace.

Things that actually do annoy me from time to time:

- In the default implementation, an underscore in the middle of a word causes the rest of the word, and everything until the next underscore, to be italic. Fortunately, most of the actual implementations have fixed this, but that ain't standard. I also don't think Reddit has fixed it yet.

- Using one asterisk OR one underscore for <em> and two asterisks OR two underscores for <strong> feels redundant. There is no need for two different syntaxes to achieve the same effect. I would prefer one underscore for <em> and one asterisk for <strong> (email clients have been doing this for plain-text emails for a long time), but maybe that's just me.

- AFAIK there is no built-in syntax for underline, strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. Maybe we should repurpose some symbols to handle such cases.

On the other hand, there are things the article complains about that I absolutely don't think need to be "fixed":

- HTML filtering/escaping. Seriously? There are plenty of excellent HTML filters in every language. No need to reinvent the wheel. Just pipe the stdout of your Markdown parser to the stdin of your HTML filtering library. In addition, some of us use Markdown to write our own blogs, where we have every right to insert an occasional <script> or <iframe>. You know, like embedding a YouTube video. Different people should have different rights to use one or another HTML feature, and managing such rights should be the job of your app, not your Markdown parser.

- Any sort of Wiki markup, like Creole. The distinguishing feature of a Wiki markup is that it makes it easy for users to cross-reference documents. But in order to cross-reference documents, we need to agree upon some sort of document organization system. But given the very diverse situations in which Markdown is used, is it even feasible to agree upon a single such system? It would seem that the only cross-reference mechanism that is compatible with all the things we use Markdown for is the good old URL, and Markdown can already handle URLs pretty well. Converting URLs to something that references another place within your app should be the job of a pre-processor/post-processor. Don't be afraid to write one.
If you are wondering if you should pursue an MBA:

"In the consumer Internet world, [an MBA] is a major disadvantage because of the opportunity cost of 2 years during the prime of your career." –Keith Rabois

Shameless plug: [redacted]
What are the rules for religion? My understanding was that the UK had special protections for criticisms of religion, so that freedom of speech was particularly constrained around (e.g.) Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins's criticisms of religious belief or practice.

Is this true or was I misinformed?
Right, or a coherent logical basis that we would understand.
I'm not sure it is - in the same way the battle for the word >hacker< has been lost, I know that in New Zealand >IT< is a catch all that means someone does computer stuff.
If you don't understand enough to know that the extremely small probabilities that have been argued for abiogenesis can completely overwhelm the large number of planets in the universe--so much that you dismiss it out of hand--this is a bad sign of the author's competence on this topic.
Strutting. We All Know When You Are Doing It. So Stop.
I see your point, yet I have a really hard time associating something like memset() with "awesome". I think if anyone would actually respond "wow, cool!" to a story like that, the message to me is that this person finds everything (s)he doesn't understand cool.
I know, right? P.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydia
These are crucial: How much better is your solution?
Why would they switch to your solution?

Switching costs are often underestimated and it's hard to come up with a solid answer for this in many businesses. And even if you do have people who would switch, it's hard to get the distribution to implement a way of getting those users who want to switch.

"Did you know Airbnb thought the “breakfast” in Airbed & Breakfast was a crucial part of their product experience at one time?"

I did not! Interesting.
Oh how I wish if Bootstrap had something like that!
Irony: how do you pronounce that? IPA isn't exactly readable.
There is often a disjoint set of expectations between F/LOSS culture and women (besides occasional outright misogyny). Providing a system where women can be eased into the coding experience is, IMO, a very kind thing to do.

I visited a church recently and some college students spoke about why they chose that church. Uniformly, the kindness of the church community was a common thread through their comments. It's a human thing: we lean towards people who show kindness to us, especially in forms we can relate to. These bridging activities such as what Github and the Ada Initiative are doing provide a great deal of value in my opinion.
Echoing some other commentators, I'm a backend guy and this can be fun work. Yeah, you're inheriting technical debt (that phrase sounds so much better than "a mess" :-), and you've got to not only figure out B but how you'll get from A to B---and people issues can make the job impossible---but there's a set of us who really love these challenges and then the pleasure of looking at a new system that's handling the load without problems.
>Barring severe budget issues or personal lawlessness, I could not be fired or demoted. But, I'm also at the top of my scale, which means I can't be promoted either. It doesn't matter much what I do (or don't), I can't go up, I can't go down. I'm just "here".

>In some sense, that's supremely freeing. I can put in exactly as much effort as I feel comfortable with, learn new technologies and techniques right up until I don't feel like it anymore, and so on.

>On the other hand, I'm kind of a lazy guy who works better when there is a boot up my rear. I know in the private sector I would learn a lot more, and grow professionally a lot more, because there is always that "up or out" mentality.

Spot on. Personally, I have thought about this a lot and came to the conclusion that I would rather have the flexibility and breathing space to work on side projects rather than having a high pressure, long hours job be the only thing I can focus on.
Why would I even need a device that is supposed to become part of my mind but that I don't have root on?

Come on.

UPD: I already have my mind where I don't have "root" on. It's kind of a black box. And it is counterproductive.
"Fixing" WWDC
Doctors Denounce Cancer Drug Prices of $100,000 a Year
Thanks for the post. Interviewing on Sunday.

I've been trying to figure out how much time I might be able to get to explain what we do before the first interruption. 15 seconds? 10? Basically, I get a verbal twitter post, right?
Strikingly (YC W13) raises $1.5M from SV Angel, Index Ventures, FundersClub
There's a screenshot I've seen from an early version of Airbnb where the listing page was divided into thirds, with a photo of the apartment, a photo of the host, and a photo of the breakfast (!!) all the same size. They really thought a good breakfast was important for listing your unit.
I actually didn't understand the question when that came up. I kinda got the wrong impression of the young girls demeanor.
One of my favorite concepts from Kurt Vonnegut was "Granfalloons" in Cats Cradle ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon )

The idea is that people love to be part of a club-- not only for the feeling of belonging but for the feeling of being able to exclude others. Political parties, churches, etc. It's so fundamentally human to do this, and it's unsurprising that it should extend into the professional realm (though we should keep trying to rise above it).
> It's a back of the envelope, order-of-magnitude thing.

You... need to work on that.

There are plenty of stars within 14 light years.
https://www.google.ca/search?client=ubuntu&hs=HNq&ch...

If you took 100,000 years that would be a speed of 0.00014c. That is pretty pessimistic - we have put objects into space that are travelling away from earth faster than that already! (Yada yada accleration :).)

At 0.1c you can go 14 lightyears in 140 years. There are stars closer than this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars#Map_of_ne...
I know nothing about this, but I wonder if core temp would have any impact on the habitability of a planet. We know there is the habitable zone around a star, I wonder if that body in that zone would also need a certain core temp to support life.
"I get a verbal twitter post, right?"

That's a good way to look at it.
This is correct. If there are no Heroku Postgres DBs, the test is skipped. If there are any, the test only passes if there is at least 1 production-tier database.
Quite the contrary, I think Facebook is great and is only getting better. But as someone who builds a lot of stuff on their APIs I can say it's easily the shakiest component of our architecture.
This reply is exactly why this initiative is needed. Can't you just say 'hey, more people contributing to open source!'
Like most things, it depends. The opportunity cost is large but I mitigated this by doing a part-time MBA.
Is it really possible to trademark a sentence where the plain meaning of the sentence is something that people would ordinarily say?
Cheating? Or making strategic business decisions?
Many women not being interested in the field is not a _cause_ of the male-oriented tech culture; it's a symptom (although it is self-perpetuating)

The idea that 'most women just aren't interested in the field' because they're women, and not because the male-dominated culture _makes_ most women uninterested in the field, is harmful. Making that statement on a male-dominated community site perpetuates and constructs that culture that makes women uncomfortable in the field.

Comments like that are _the reason why_ many women 'just aren't interested in the field'.

The only way that this culture can change is if individual people work to stop perpetuating it. The first step is to stop making comments like that. (Would a woman feel comfortable on this site if they read that statement?)
Nope, just giving support to a demographic that they'd like to see growth in. It's what smart companies do.
For those crying sexism, go take a look at the amount of women in the business, now THAT's what sexism looks like.
So, if after one year, they introduce a new car (technically better) and you wanted to upgrade to that newer car, how much would that cost? Let's say that car is given to you as a loaner and you had 8k miles on your car. Is the value of your car considered almost equal to that car even though it's technically inferior?
I noticed something on their jobs section.

All the descriptions on the left are about coding, and yet 5/7 open jobs have nothing to do with programming at all.

I've actually started to notice this a lot; companies focus on engineering to the exclusion of other sections.

I know, he's having engineering problems. But he's also having physical issues and clearly problems with the business plan and expansion model.

In this specific case there doesn't seem to be a working triage model. Find the things that are simplest to fix and do them first. Someone needs to keep organized and make sure the problems are being worked on in the right order and keep everyone motivated, without losing any ground in the day to day operations of the company.
#/g/tracker on p2p-net Bunch of great funny guise on there
The White House, Tumbling Things
Windshield Cracks Hold Secrets of Impact
How is pushing code to a private repository 'contributing to open source'?
> Feminism split off from Marxism in the 2nd wave of the 60's/70's when it was decided that class based oppression is a derivative product of patriarchy. Gender took the center stage to class, race, and other forms of marginalization.

No, it didn't. Feminism predates Marxism ; certainly, some strands of feminism were informed by Marxism in some way, and certainly there is a school of Feminist criticism that largely follows the same dialectic model as Marxist criticism (with the same understanding of the label but replaces the central struggle of the classes with one of the sexes), which split off from Marxist criticism as you describe, and which suffers from the same problem as Marxist criticism in that it is essentially takes the preeminence of a certain struggle as revealed unquestioned truth and reinterprets the world in light of that revelation.