skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LOL, I love this thread. Hardware is the new Software! But Hardware description languages are just that, structured languages that describe hardware. If you come from a background of programming, it will be hard for you. I am someone who comes from a background of hardware that had to learn software, but then when Verilog came along, oh man, was I in heaven. Do not think of VHDL or Verilog as a language, think of it more in terms of HTML, HTML is a mark up language for type setting, HDL is a mark up language for hardware. Hardware is not sequential, everything will happen at the same time unless you prevent that with a state machine. With sequential languages like C or Pascal etc., everything happens sequentially unless you go out of you want to try to make things happen seemingly at once. With HDL, you have the opposite problem, everything will happen at once on each clock cycle, unless you make a state maching to make things sequential. Once you see this, and the amazing power of it, you will see why I say... Hardware is the next Software.
No, I didn't make it sound like that. You are, once again, inventing a strawman, and drawing wild conclusions based on insufficient knowledge. Last week's thread is not unrelated. It shows the same pattern of inane, bad-faith behavior.
I'd like to stem a couple of obvious, but inevitable (for HN and some other tech communities) criticisms that are bound to appear:

1) Yes, this stuff is tasteless and offends the sensibilities of most decent adults. (Invariably, someone likes to point out that it offends everyone, and conclude therefore that it can't be misogynistic)

2) Yes, people differ in their tolerances for crudeness in their humor. First, I think most people can agree that none of this was actually even funny -- as in, these presentations did not successfully execute the elements of humor. Second, a hackathon is not the place to get up on stage and pretend to come on the audience. There's audacity -- which, when coupled with other necessary elements can make for a great presentation -- and there's poor taste.

3) Yes, some women will take particular offense to these presentations and they are justified.

Allowing a couple of dumbasses to get up and laugh about staring at breasts and dropping terrible puns -- even when their presentation is self-deprecating and they hint that they know how crass they are being -- sends the message that the organizers and the audience accept the premise of the presentation: that leering at women's bodies in a completely unaware manner, is acceptable. It's not -- please let there be nobody who contests that point.

(Aside: a woman in a low-cut shirt is not putting her breasts on display for public consumption. And leering is different than looking -- nobody is saying that you aren't allowed to notice the attractiveness of a woman.)

Getting up and pretending to inseminate the audience is just gross, and as an act, it is at the same level as the guy in my seventh grade class who drew a full-page phallus in my yearbook. His excuse is that he was thirteen, and assumed that everyone else was as obsessed with his genitals as he was. That people are laughing about this sends another message, and I can understand if women are more sensitive to that message than men -- who were themselves thirteen y/o males at one time.

I don't know if I've demonstrated why things like this create an environment where it's hard to say, seriously, that women should get into tech.
Please read and understand this: http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
That's just how the world works. I don't understand some parts of the middle east where men are apparently going to "overcome with lust" if they see a woman's ankle or her hair...
file this under the ever growing file of evidence that the tech industry has lost its sense of humor.
Both Haskell and LISP are in the "top-down" approach (approaching programming from an abstract angle, without concerns about the underlying machine), as opposed to the "bottom-up" approach (where you are explicitly managing I/O, memory, and the underlying machine is not abstracted away), like C or Ada.
I'm all for making money, but this seems predatory and downright evil. Under no circumstances should someone be able to foreclose on a property because they hold a lien for less than 1/1000th of the value of the property, then take all of the equity. According to the article, this is only allowed in a small handful of jurisdictions - most require the proceeds above the amount owed to be passed along to the owner.

It's no coincidence that this is happening in Washington DC, the backyard of some of the most powerful and effective lobbying firms on earth. The set of laws that allow this insanity are almost certainly the result of lobbying efforts by tax lien buyers. Lobbying rules at the local and state level range from non-existent to very lax. As a result, getting a law or ordinance passed to benefit your company or industry at the local level is a relatively inexpensive and simple affair. People need to monitor laws and ordinances in their local jurisdictions, and speak up when they see things that don't pass the smell test. Otherwise, we'll continue to drown in this type of stuff.
Offended? No. More like annoyed by the inappropriate (for the setting), lame humor.
I am a woman and I found them funny, but that is my 2 cents :)
By reasonable you mean the same taxes for the same value, ie the opposite of Prop 13, right?
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That's very different. Because there are circumstances where not knowing or applying math is a barrier to accomplishing something. Saying "Why should I learn math, I will never use it anyway." means you're banking on the odds that you will never run into those circumstances.

However when it comes to semantic HTML there is no circumstance where you are unable to move forward because you used <div> instead of <figcaption>.

In fact thanks to the sometimes ambiguous descriptions of which semantic tag is appropriate you may find you used the wrong semantic tag which is arguably worse than not using a semantic tag at all.

And at the end of the day after carefully cross referencing and/or memorizing which semantic tag to use throughout your markup zero real world, practical effect has been gained. Only theoretical gains and memorization for memorization's sake.
The circle jerk application had overtones that were sexual, not misogynistic.

The presentation may have been inappropriate for this venue, but it's shallow-minded to pretend sexual and sexist are the same thing.
I think I will have to disagree with you in some parts.

The fact that the majority of the coders are guys doesn't mean that it's ok to create an app which shows boobs and then present it to a few thousand people. Although, I am sure those guys did it for a laugh, they did not understand the repercussions of their actions. With your logic it would be acceptable to put porn movies on a screen, just because guys like porn.

What would you say if the app displayed "male parts"?

I am European and I am pretty sure that if that happened here the response would be more fierce. A porn app is not liberalizing sex, it's just making things worst.

Finally, a business which succumbs to the desires of its clients, when those desires are exorbitant, is simply not a business to trust.
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Yes, people are actually outraged. Because it's outrageous. This isn't "political correctness", this is "how not to shit on the fellow members of our profession".

Telling people to Lighten Up[1] is not an adequate excuse for shitty behaviour.

1. http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
I'm skeptical of the "lien holder gets the equity" claim because it doesn't work that way outside of DC or in foreclosure generally

I'm not sure I understand. Foreclosure means the lien holder takes title to the property, and the current owner, the one who owes the debt that the lien holder was unable to collect, loses title. Then the lien holder, who now has title to the property, sells it for whatever the market will bear, and pockets the sale price minus whatever costs he has to pay. That effectively means the lien holder gets whatever equity is in the property once he has foreclosed on it and sold it.

This article talks about DC tax lien sales, and doesn't mention keeping equity

Well, of course not, since it only talks about buying the tax lien and foreclosing on it; it doesn't talk about the part where once you've foreclosed, you sell the property and pocket the money.

The article does describe the foreclosure process the same way I did above:

"The District of Columbia statutes require that you file a judicial foreclosure on your lien. This means that your attorney will run title, notice all the parties on title and file a foreclosure action in the court to get a judge to issue a final judgment. Once the judge rules in your favor, you can go to the DC Office of Tax and Revenue, pay any outstanding taxes and bills that may be due, and get issued the tax deed."

So you buy the tax lien, and if the tax isn't paid, you foreclose, you pay off the outstanding taxes and bills, and you get the property. The now former property owner, whom you've just evicted, gets nothing. Then you can sell the property for whatever the market will bear. So who has the equity?
The article clearly states that the liens in DC are sold at auction.
Tax lien certificates do work (sort of) like this in Texas. This is a real thing. Bid rigging is not uncommon, sometimes though, it just isn't necessary. In rural areas there are occasionally auctions where very few qualified buyers show up. Terms are usually cash on the barrel-head. Example terms of sale follow.

http://www.co.jefferson.tx.us/taxoffice/del_tax_Sale/sale_in...
Sure, and I'm positive that you weren't alone.

I'm not saying that they shouldn't make joke apps, but TechCrunch should not have let them take the stage.
The psychology of pairing and code review at Hacker School
It's because sexism only exists in the United States.
Hey now! I was a kid in the 70's, and I'm a fan of a number of the movies made. Just not this one :)
Yes, everything is live as well. There is absolutely no screening, and definitely no pre-approval process for the deck being presented, as most people are working on it right up until they have to go on stage.
I was able to find one of my old videos by doing a quick Google search, but nothing more recent:
http://on.aol.com/video/mybill-is-demo-hackathon-ny-2011-517...
> Maybe there are commonalities between supporting Mir and Wayland that would allow Intel to create a more universal piece of software?

This still increases cost on the part of Intel.
I watched the two presentations via the valleywag page others have cited. The problem I see with TechCrunch's apology is that they are mixing up terminology. I don't think either presentation was sexist and especially not misogynstic - what they were was sexual.

Modern society has a similar problem distinguishing between racist humor and racial humor. While there certainly can be overlap between -ist and -ual humor, my general rule for distinguishing the two is that -ist humor stereotypes to get laughs while -ual humor laughs at the stereotyping.

Lots of organizations think the line between the -ist and -ual is too fine and prefer to outright ban the acknowledgment of any issues at all. If we forbid discussion of race at all then you never have to think about whether a topic is racist or racial. Same with sex, if all mention of sex is forbidden then there is no chance of someone saying something sexist.

If an organization wants to take such a "throw the baby out with the bathwater" approach that's their prerogative, but they should be clear about it. Don't say "any type of sexism will not be allowed" say "any mention of sex will not be allowed."
I wonder if the biggest reason why things like this keep happening is because we're all on a state of "high alert" in the tech community. Hear me out.

Right now in the tech world we've got ourselves in a big damn tizzy over anything even slightly sexual in nature.

By contrast, almost every single other medium we encounter on a day to day basis (TV, movies, magazines) is HIGHLY sexualised and makes absolutely no apologies for it. I've seen TV ads on primetime more offensive than some of these presentations.

I wonder if we're just going to keep running in to this issue again and again in the tech world simply because our standards are so out of whack with what the average person deems appropriate?
This is my experience of oDesk, from someone who has spent 6 figures with them.

A few years ago I contracted a developer from the largest agency on oDesk at the time, based in India.

This developer had a masters degree, tons of experience, and had a daily rate significantly higher than the average. Things worked out so well that I increased the team to 7 people total from this same company.

After about 8 months, the quality of work fell dramatically.

I ended up cancelling the contracts a few months after that, and found out something shocking from the ex project manager:

The developers I had hired had been switched out for junior level devs. Some of the developers I hired didn't even work for that company anymore. I had none of my original hires, and didn't know it.

They had been communicating with me under the previous names and email addresses. I had wondered why they so often "forgot" things that I had told them 6 months ago.

I was told this was a common practice in large agencies.

The problem: Inadequate accountability, even with screenshots or videos.

Is this problem specific to oDesk? No, not at all. But it's turned me off "per-hour" contracts altogether, and now I only outsource very small, highly scoped, pay-on-delivery projects.
Titstare, joke or not, is wildly misogynist; no debate here.

Circle Shake is inappropriate for the audience and setting and everyone involved should have known better. But it's not misogynist. It's a joke about masturbation, which is a normal, healthy thing that people of both sexes generally do. Casting it as an attack on women is absurd, and gets into "women can't handle sex talk!" territory.
Jesus christ bro he's promoting your software, relax.
"If a female made an app... would people have the same reaction?"

Probably not, but that is because men aren't trying to release themselves from the clutches of institutional harassment and marginalization in tech. It isn't like you can just swap the pronouns for your argument - because in doing so, you also swap the historical context and culture, and when you do that then you come to different conclusions.
Nissan launching gorgeous smartwatch with driving, car, and social apps
there's a difference between appropriate consideration of minorities and over-the-top political correctness.

simply put, intent matters and people need to accept that a reflexive hostility towards puerile male humor does not advance the cause of women.
Shown HN: Measure / Improve Your Response Time
I smell an edit war. I wonder how many times it has been changed.

edit: I checked, looks like none, someone go change it and let's watch the fireworks.
It's more direct and clear to state the real problem. The real problem isn't the AGPL or the GPLv3, as both of those licenses can be very good in the right context. The real problem is copyright assignment to companies like Canonical, as in practice that is equivalent to dual licensing where the second license is "let this company do whatever the fuck they want".
We do have quite a few front-end developers. In fact, I've been surprised at how many designer/developers (that is, designers who can implement their own designs) have signed up. That combination of skills was always in short supply when I've tried to hire for in-house teams. I guess they tend to prefer freelancing :)

Please send me an email at andrew [at] getlambda.com and we'll see what we can do!
The moment you can't pay your WoW bill its too late, imagine how fucked up you must be not to be able to pay $15 a month? Hell, Comcast is more expensive.
I'd totally be ok with a DickStare app - or a porn movie. What's wrong with naked people and sex?

Let's grow up. Sex isn't bad, and liking sex and liking girls are both natural and non-harmful. No one ever died from watching a porn movie or having their tits stared at.
Hear, hear. The sooner brogramming culture slinks back into the slimy, pus-covered hole out of which it originally crawled, the better.

I'd like to think that, as technical people, we take pride in the quality of our work - its beauty, its innovation, its capability to make people's lives better in big or small ways (e.g. "meaningful hacks and projects"). Even if you set aside the misogyny (not that you should), is this something that the developer would be comfortable serving as a reflection of the sort of work that he does? Was his point presenting this to showcase innovation, cleverness, or execution, or was it to make people think he's a funny person? Stand-up comedy this certainly isn't.
There's another one: that this kind of thing might be crude and distasteful, but it isn't specifically sexist.

The sexism is in knowing that it will make most women somewhat uncomfortable, and some women very uncomfortable, and not caring.
Agree. 1B rows is big. 100B rows is huge. 100M rows is large, but totally doable.
Thanks for posting this! Was looking for it but couldn't find the link. Josh Rehman's comment there is also pretty good:

> This is a great example of what I call "petty injustice". The sheer volume of petty injustice causes far more net harm than "great injustice" but because it happens incrementally it is incredibly hard to combat for precisely the reasons you anecdotally state.

> When someone tells you to lighten up, have a script ready. Something like, "What you just said was one small example in a long-standing pattern of subtle discrimination that I've had to endure for years. In that context, it is not okay for you to tell me to lighten up."
> app called TitStare, which allows you to view, upload, and share softcore photos of.. use your imagination

I don't see the problem. Pornography is perfectly legal and big business.
It's not the tax that's the problem. It's a law which lets them seize the land for a few dollars in unpaid tax. That's just a heinous law. What's the next step? Repossessing kidneys for small unpaid medical bills?

Many countries have land taxes which work reasonably well. There can be some proscribed formula (based on a regression on nearby property). Or they can do valuations. There'll always be problems, but it's not more evil than many other taxes (unless they enforce it by stealing property).

Maybe the government will send in SWAT teams to collect unpaid land tax bills from poor people, and a friendly note to rich people; but that's not because it's a land tax. How do you think they treat unpaid parking tickets?

The advantage of taxing the use or consumption of a scare resource (land) instead of income should be obvious. If Bill Gates wants a mansion, he's making it harder for normal people to buy a home. If Bill Gates makes a billion dollars selling some operation system, he's presumably creating jobs, and making a lot of people happy (since they can get on the internet without buying an expensive Mac, or having to figure out how to configure their modem using Linux). (Note - some rich people make their money by being parasites, but capitalism works because this usually isn't the case).

Finally, there's the stabilising effect that a land tax has. Property is a huge investment, driven by unsophisticated retail investors (who may be putting most of their life's savings into a single home), prone to stupid fluctuations, which can destroy the lives of normal people when it does something funny. Taxing it helps keep it a little rational (as the taxes will encourage people to avoid it when it starts heating up).
So saying that publicly signing something "The Management" while working in a company the size of Intel is comically vague, and saying people should lighten up a bit without additional info and perspective, that is acting in bad faith? I am not trying to offend anyone with this commentary, it is my own opinion.
>Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI

They like to say they do, but they very frequently don't. I'd say easily 80% of the software and hardware purchases I've seen corporate clients make are based on things other than ROI. Things like "the sales person for product X always takes me to nice lunches" or "everyone else is using Y so we need to use Y too".
Presenting it at a conference like this reinforces the image of the industry as dominated by white men, and being exactly the sort of really uncomfortable app that can put women off of being a part of the industry.

Even if all things were equal, Tits and Sixpack apps would still be all about objectification, and I for one would be fine with that not being encouraged either.
Although I strongly agree with the basic premise -- namely, that many of us could benefit from some reflection on our screen-gazing habits -- after the Brief History of Drugs portion of this piece, it drifts off into speculation that could be attributed to a William Gibson story. The comparison here might be valid, but this piece could use some more info on how technology measurably affects quality of life, quality of social health, and other factors.
>Judging by TechCrunch's reaction, they wholeheartedly agree.

Don't be so sure about that. Could have sworn I saw a few hosts on stage laughing when the presenters were finished.
TC just wants the aura of being politically correct about it while they bath in the increased viewership/hits to the site.
I don't read it as "say no to databases," but "stop putting square pegs in round holes."

Too many programmers find a Next Greatest Thing and then try to reconfigure problems to fit the newfound solution. Too many managers "need" solutions that are buzzword-compliant. Combine these and you get projects that are "written in C++ and use databases" and are thus a success regardless of whether they work.
Ninsh new singel. better than avicii??
ninsh - Stars Collide, new singel , described as better than avicii
There's something to note about this film which, once you know it, detracts from it in a significant way. Since it's a bit of a spoiler, if anyone want's to know drop me a mail.
Why trust climate models? It’s a matter of simple science
Call Percona first. $10K well spent.

Then (probably, and assuming you have the basics right) just throw hardware at it.
Joke's on you: Silicon Valley localities like Palo Alto are passing laws that make it illegal to live in your car.
I especially like how the people who made the laws are in no way to blame... Nope once again, it's the lobbyists and the evil corporations, never the people who actually made the rule that allowed it to happen...made the rule to retain power.. No they are the good guys.
Ur/Web has nothing to do with formal verification does it?
No, because we have judgement. (And any given conference has its own rules regarding inclusivity and anti-discrimination).