skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very touchy subject, right? I'm going to try and convey my thoughts very carefully here, so please try and be receptive.

(Context for this is for your bog-standard straight courting scenario--I do not feel qualified to comment on how courting for any other gender scenario works.)

~

In an ideal world, everybody would communicate honestly and openly. You could sit down with a girl, and have a conversation like so:

"Hi, I think you're attractive and I enjoy your company. Would you be interested in pursuing a relationship, or if not, perhaps a shorter-term physical engagement?"
"Yes/No/Not interested."

This is, needless to say, not how 99.999% of the population works--as I, and I suspect others, have found to our dismay. Negotiating these sorts of things is not just a TCP ack sequence or something.

The fact is that even were roles reversed, that is just not what we would consider a compelling user experience. Expecting explicit handshaking for every step of the relationship cycle is something only emotional robots expect.

In an ideal world, the following things would be true:

1. People know what they want in a relationship.

2. People know how to convey what they want accurately to other people, especially in terms of arousal or courting.

3. People are free to signal availability or interest without repercussion, and accept rejection just as easily.

These three things are obviously far, far from the case.

~

There are very much conflicting cultural mores about how courtship is supposed to work.

On the one hand, we have hundreds and thousands of years of precedent (and perhaps biology, though I personally hope this is not the case) suggesting that the man is the one to initiate actions, and that the woman, if disinterested, will make her rejection known. Strictly speaking, we've got a bit more barbarous history behind us than that, but let's assume decent folk here to keep life simple.

On the other hand, we've got this recent push for more explicit confirmation for consent and for the more equitable distribution of first-move-making between the man and the woman.

These two things do not go together, and even worse, trying to come to a synthesis for your average inexperienced guy is a road which easily runs to ruin.

So, instead we find ourselves in this curious place where young men who mean well want to get with young women who also mean well. Unfortunately, the women are brought up expecting that the men will do the work, initiate everything, and the men are increasingly told that hey need to--to be safe and respectful, mind you!--wait for explicit confirmation of every step.

In programming terms, we are setting up for a deadlock.

Perhaps even more troubling, the hilariously large impact of social networks and whatnot mean that gossip is worse than ever, and there is no room to make mistakes if you are one of these young men. Worse, media is constantly reinforcing some awful blend of these two mores, making both sides seek after a state of affairs that simply does not exist.

There's some more issues I've seen, but you get the gist.
He also has an interesting Doom 3 code review: http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/index.php
I had a lady next to me start to drown and grab me in a pool when I was getting my diving certification. Despite having a supply of air, wetsuit, fins and buoyancy control device on, she got that drowning sensation when her respirator came out. Once she had someone to hold onto, sanity was restored but I totally got why drowning people are dangerous from then on.
Hosted in the US. At least geocities didn't live long enough to make it into prism
Wait, I'm going to sidestep the whole book's ultra-crazy content and ask a kind of really obvious logistic question:

Why the hell was he doing a kickstarter for a book he could easily publish online for 0 money down and only cost him the time to write it and maybe get a copy editor?

The content of this book, and most similar unpopular material, is designed for the internet. That's how 50 Shades of Gray got its start, and there's been underground sex and erotica content for decades online. Doing a kickstarter just seems like a blatant scam or complete laziness, either are an indication that he won't finish the book.

So why the hell was he doing a kickstarter? Idiot.
That's great. So all you've gotta do is replace, "Try to have sex with her, and stop if she says no" with, "Find out if she wants to have sex with you, and do so if she does."

The difference that makes to whether or not she consents -- the "downer" -- is precisely the point.
>So the net cost for the trip was about $22k. I paid for the vast majority of this with one month’s consultancy beforehand.

Wow. Consultancy that pays $20k+ still eludes me.
Yes of course I have. I have also read the guides on reddit where he tells the reader to sexually assault their partner.
It's a real bummer. Most of the fertilizer/insecticide companies are focused on the corn and a few other cash crop or subsidized markets. The problem is that most of those crops self-pollinate or are pollinated by wind (like corn).

This leaves the industry at odds with the beekeeping industry which is absolutely necessary to keep pollinating quite a few of the other crops we actually want to EAT.
Make it more mobile friendly.
The whole premise of The Little Mermaid is paternalistic and problematic.
> It's a serious mistake trying to turn this into the usual one party versus the other thing.

That depends what you mean by "mistake". Historically speaking, obfuscating the real issues by slinging mud at the other guy and pretending you're enormously different and it's not your problem has proven effective in rallying the proles to fall in line, is it any surprise this would be a continuously attempted tactic in this instance also?
Well, we've always had to deal with opportunity cost. If your style involves high focus, a distraction's cost is that much higher. Most "normal" people don't really gets this.

Additionally, the freer you are from routine obligation, the harder it is to politely say no. I've long said fill up your schedule or others will fill it for you.
Yep, services that are about uncensorship generally don't do paid tiers. See: 4chan, Rizon, groups that release pirated videos, etc.
It doesn't matter where it is, or how often it is. People don't want both sides, they want to be outraged.
Fine, let's do both. I can't think a of valid reason the driver should be looking at passengers while talking (I mean, not in the mirror).

The law could really just affect swimming and driving. Both activities are common and can result in death if you're not careful.
Many HN commenters do not understand, nor want to understand, the reality of the experiences of marginalised groups.
Thanks very much for taking the time to answer this - I feel better knowing more!!
Dad Rents Out Entire Movie Theater So Son Can Play Games on Big Screen
There are 61054 web site spaces remaining.
After that, we need your help to get another server.

Does that mean he's running 61k sites on a single server? Even if each site gets one single visitor per day, that 61k visitors for the Server. There is no way the server can manage that traffic.

Sorry, but do you really want a static site? Just pay for a good one.
Good old competition.
Most of the bees were bumble bees (Bombus spp.), which have only hundreds of individuals in a hive. 25,000 honeybees could easily have been a single hive that died for any reason. 25,000 bumble bees is more alarming.
Wait, there's programs that use info? o.O
My question is fair because the author is the one that removed the context. The context which he stated, was taken wrong.

You comparing being interviewed by the police without an attorney present and what I said is ludicrous.
I am not shutting down the debate. I am not declaring anyone a monster. I am merely pointing out that if you are defending the guide, you are defending a sexual assault manual. That is the reality of the situation.
I'm guessing this happens when a designer has a bright LCD screen and thinks black on white has too much contrast.
Finally! Somebody who shares my pain! :-)
Who's benefiting from not releasing contact information until a certain threshold is met?
Lots of girlfriends of 5 years would say the answer to that question is "yes, absolutely".
And I'd guess that those 30% are disproportionally represented.
Nobody is denying Kickstarters rights and I would be the first to defend them if anybody ended up suing them over this, but actions have consequences, even for companies. If they don't cave in to the next offensive project (t-shirt with "I have a gun because I have a small dick") then they will stop being percieved as neutral and will hurt their business with some groups. As a company, they are trying to make as much money as they can, so they should consider the consequences of turning away people, even if they unquestionately have the right to do so.
NyTimes OpEd: How the Us Got Broadband right
Where are you on the sales matrix?
>And for what? To avoid the embarrassment of saying, "So do you wanna fuck?" How old are you?

I'm not the person you wrote this to, but I can answer that I am 41 years old, have been married for 11 years and have three children (including a daughter).

When I think of the little scene you've played out there occurring, I see the biggest nerd in the world getting his first chance at making out with a girl when he awkwardly stops and says, "Do you consent to fornication at this time?"

Frankly, your advice makes you sound unbelievably young and inexperienced with women. I have yet to meet a woman that wants you ask permission for every stage of a sexual relationship. In fact, every woman I've talked to about the subject has told me that it's specifically unwanted.
Keith Rabois - going from startups to VC
Correct. However, drowning is high on the list[1] of common causes of injury death for children. Vehicle accidents are the 1st for ages 5-24.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCID_Unintentional_D...
Sorry, I probably overwrote your stuff :/
The point was clearly hypothetical. I wasn't looking for a statement with 'impact', so much as a way to illustrate that there are works of art that can also be considered controversial.

There are clearly books, movies and songs being funded by Kickstarter. I want the media I consume to challenge my beliefs, and to challenge my ways of thinking.

And again, I don't dispute that this was perfectly within KickStarter's right to act the way they did, and while yeah, I don't like it, who am I? Nobody. That doesn't mean that it doesn't bother me, and that doesn't mean that it isn't somewhat ominous, at least in my opinion.
Any evidence to back up Musk's claim? Being a Senator's employee must be annoying sometimes.

"Hi, I'm calling to defend Telsa Motors because its CEO told me to. No, I do not know anything more about the topic I am calling about"
IIRC, half of the year's drowning deaths in Finland I occur during the solstice, which is happening this very instant.
Interesting, will give that a go when next I notice it happening (it's intermittent for me too which is good + bad... hard to repro :)
I'm surprised to see the NyTimes letting a Verizon PR person post an OpEd. I wonder where he draws his borders for Europe?
Meet the FISC court - it has no diversity: 14 of 14 judges are major party.

Really, after all that has happened, why are we continuing to pretend that Democrat vs. Republican actually matters here?
It's really quite remarkable how much good will a simple apology can generate. I wish more individuals and organizations recognized this.
PEOPLE. This is clearly not intended as a business. Stop asking about the "business model." It strikes me as just being a cool side project that enables people to make websites. That's it.

Yeesh.
Oh, my reading comprehension is perfectly okay (even for an old guy). The issue that I have is that when the author claimed to have been taken out of context ("devoid of context" was the term he used), he himself removed the context surrounding his posts.
By the same reasoning, if some women do NOT want "dominance from men" then all "dominance" is sexual assault?
> with nothing backing its value except optimism.

That's not strictly true. It's also backed by the undeniable utility of having a decentralized transaction log that is virtually impossible to compromise in an economically viable way.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama...

Not exactly a major media outlet. But it's something.
Glen beck,ASKED ME TO SHOW THIS
The problem with this advice is that the majority of woman in the majority of cultures will pretty much be put off by you asking.

They do not want sex to be like that, go ahead, ask a woman. They want spontaneity, they want a man to take control, they want to feel desired.

Actually demanding that consent be explicitly verbal suggests that you're a white knight who hasn't been with a lot of woman.
Assuming you're not being sarcastic: a small vps could serve an order of magnitude more visitors per day than that when it's just static files, many orders of magnitude more on a well configured server and many many many times more than that on a powerful server. The bottleneck for this will probably be bandwidth.
Thanks for mentioning! We put a lot of effort into the private beta. Please try it out guys, it’s free during private beta and we offer unlimited repos for Git & Mercurial.
Find a reputable property management company. They can handle scheduling maintenance, bad tenants, etc.
The salt is stored in the hash itself, so it can extract the salt from any provided hash. (Neat huh?)
I agree the context matters, but there's a long history of equivocating the fictional and instructional, on the part of people who try to draw these lines with regards to speech. [1]

I simply don't think the line is as clear-cut, for many of those who were outraged at Kickstarter. I think the company may have inadvertently stepped out onto a PR tight-rope.

[1] Note the use of words like 'murder simulator'/'rape simulator' or the outrage and claims of sexism/homophobia/stereotyping whenever there's a fictional representation of a character or situation that happens to (however briefly) conform to some stereotype.
Provided HN is going to remove categories of posts, I've always advocated banning gender discussion from HN. It's just not the forum for it, and it's the same circle of discussion you see on r/politics.

HN is a "cultivated" free speech zone, which is another way to say it's an arbitrarily censored forum where some legitimately objectionable material is filtered away, some good material is lost through false positives, and we _still_ frequently have garbage content and constantly moan about it because the "cultivated" part is supposed to mean we only see gold.

To state plainly what I see in this topic: white men talking about feminism presumptuously. White knighting; "as a man, I..."; mansplaining.

They're all terms I hate because they totally box out men from participation, which is destructive and actually its own topic.

But they apply here.
Well, hopefully this works, but people theorized the same thing about Wikileaks. Its story died without any major change.
Correct, but that's been the case for a very long time. Banknotes and fractional reserve lending have been around the block many times, even under a 'gold standard'. It's a banker's world; we just live in it.

"Gold is money. Everything else is credit". - J.P. Morgan
Aside from the other evidence that this is terribly thought out, serving 61,000 static pageviews (or if average pages per visitor is more like 2: 120,000) shouldn't be a problem on even a cheap server.

Even with uneven traffic that's probably 4-5 pageviews/second at most. The cheapest linode or AWS instance can handle that for serving static files.
Did I say it was a legal issue? No, it is a PR issue, or rather, it can become a PR issue. It may be my right to tell my neighbor he is an idiot and that I hate him, but that doesn't mean it is very smart or likely to make me popular.
> when he talks about how even when she rejects your touching or rubbing her when you first meet

He suggests no such thing. He writes about having been on several dates and now you’re alone with her and you’re expected to escalate. His gives some suggestions how to do so, to make it more physical:

“Be playful. Spin her around. Pick her up. Push her away as a tease and then pull her back in. Decide that you're going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap.”

Only then does he write: “Don't ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances.”

In other words: try something, see what she will allow. She’s definitely going to tell you what she doesn’t want when you try it, but it’s very unlikely that she’s going to tell you what she wants before you try it.
This is a direct quote from a guide written by the author of the guide under discussion:

Never, ever, ever, wait for a SIGN before you escalate! You will miss out on the vast majority of chances if you sit around waiting for SIGNS. Men are notoriously bad at reading women's minds and body language. Don't think that you're any different. From now on you must ASSUME that she is attracted to you and wants to be ravished. It's a difference in mindset that makes champs champs and chumps chumps…

Decide that you're going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don't ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances

The author advises his readers to assume that their partner consents to sexual activity. This is a recipe for sexual assault. At some point one of his readers will misread the signs put out by a partner and they will sexually assault them.
$700 million dollars for 29 jobs? Thats one of the worst ratios imaginable.
House Cleaning - Whose? Mine
KS got shaken down by a mob for $25K. Well done by the mafia, indeed.
Oh please, we're now comparing touching someone's shoulder in a night club with sexual assault? If you don't want any contact at all with other human beings you probably shouldn't be in a night club.
No. It suggested aggressive tactics for communicating your interest in a girl, not sexual assault.

Doesn't seem to have slowed down the twitter / tumblr hysteria at all, though.
It appears now people have caught on quick - and are replacing sites that people actually worked on with "SITE HACKED" messages.

That is pretty frigging mean to exploit such an obvious problem!
Thanks for taking the time to give out this information - I feel much better having read it. I especially appreciate that you mentioned throwing something to the victim and that you gave me some advice in case I can't control a him/her!

Finally, I agree that CPR and lifeguard training was more common, or even mandatory. I felt sick reading that article and realizing that, in certain emergency situations, I'd have absolutely no idea what to do.
Right, I'm not saying the all-free-speech route is the right answer for Kickstarter; in fact, in my personal opinion, it probably isn't. I'm just saying it's a reasonable question to ask, reasonable people can disagree about the answer, and the whole discussion is orthogonal to whether or not the first amendment obligates them to do anything in particular (since it doesn't).
What really gets me about this, beyond the tragedy itself, is the amount of bullshit I have had to go through to get IRB approval for completely insignificant projects (monitoring decibel levels in public spaces, for example, which is NOT even subject to IRB exemption but I still was forced by the funding source to pursue). Ugh.
TFA's author really needs to state what correlation coefficient [1] they're using if they're going to throw out numbers. Primary research like this, apparently done without a solid knowledge of statistics, always sets off my alarm bells.

> The predictive nature of USD for bitcoin may surprise some, but the underlying fundamentals of their high correlation may make sense, at least for the time being. Historically, the US dollar has served as a risk-averse asset, gaining value as traders pull out of other financial products during periods of uncertainty and doubt. Bitcoin seems to be following the same path.

A far more likely hypothesis is that the vast majority of bitcoin users simply want a proxy for USD for doing business on e.g. the silk road.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence
Well now I want to get preferred access ;)
Yes, pesticides and packaging are thought to be possible factors too.
More fun: http://login.neocities.org/
That's a great point. Whether that's his intent or not, it seems to be how it's progressing. An alternative explanation: he's obviously been following the news about the whole thing very closely, and so he knows what questions the media and/or general public are asking. He can just release whichever documents answer those questions as the questions arise, and thus avoid leaking any more info than he feels is necessary (since that seems to be a goal of his).

Maybe it's a bit of both.
2013 Social Login Best Practices
Insects are not all the same, some are hundreds of millions of years evolutionarily distant from one another. This leads to quite specialised biology in different insect groups, and many insecticides have highly specific action that targets only a subset of insect species by interfering with molecular pathways specific to them. So actually, we really don't want to jump to conclusions. Just because something is an insecticide, doesn't mean it kills or harms all insects.

A further relevant fact is that bee decline is related to many factors, possibly including pesticide use, but almost certainly including the modern practise of intensive bee farming and transport for pollination services, which leads to rapid spread of diseases.
Check out his tweet that started this: https://twitter.com/kyledrake/statuses/337706291801763841

He started a month ago. The 'Just Ship It' mantra basically declares that crappy bugs like this are A-OK. I don't know why you're surprised.
There is obviously a world of difference between verbal aggressing and physical aggressing. Verbally, different situations call for different things: when people need to know that what they're arguing for is unacceptable in a very bad way, you speak to them with contempt. The hardcore PUA crowd will shake it off, but people at its periphery better understand that it's a bad thing. But physically, aggressing against someone's physical boundaries is wrong, and it's always wrong.

Nearly that exact scenario has happened to me. Multiple times: in bars, people hounding me playing a non-consensual game of grabass. In a crowded bus, a guy continually rubbed his hand against my hand despite my trying to move away and escape him.

That's bad, and you're a bad person if you think it's acceptable. Comparing "being mean to people online" to sexual assault is ridiculous and offensive.
National defense is great, right? Nobody can go on record and say otherwise.

But how much does the NSA protect us vs. support a system that generates the dangers in the first place? Bin Laden's attack on the United States was a direct response to our military presence in Saudi Arabia.

The Military Industrial Complex manufactures conflict and perpetuates the madness. They're not heros, they're just doing their job.

How much protecting would the U.S. need from the modern world if we weren't such greedy oppressors to the rest of the planet?
And since nobody is mentioning this, women should be very afraid of the 800 or so individuals who purchased this vile piece of crap.
"virtually impossible to compromise in an economically viable way."

Just like the enigma cipher...
It's an option you can choose at compilation time, I believe.
Thanks for your answer - I felt sick when I read that article and realized that in some emergency situations, I'd have absolutely no idea what to do. Having a drowning person climb on me sounds like a nightmare...not as big of a nightmare as watching someone I care about drown, but still, it sounds very scary...
Happy 20th Anniversary Amy