skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This.

Ted Dziuba has mentioned the tech industry being extremely sex negative, and him being almost afraid to criticize it because of the inevitable massive backlash he would face. And this is being reinforced by the increasing "don't even mention anything related to sex in a prrrrrofesional setting" approach being taken by a lot of popular organizations these days.

For example, just look at github's repository forking message. Before, it used to say the not-very-funny-but-would-still-bring-a-smile-to-your-face "Hardcore forking action". I'd bet good money this was changed to the unassuming dining table due to these same sex-negative, puritanical people who claimed it was somehow making them feel oppressed or uncomfortable.

Sex is a biological need of humans. A lot of the tech industry has forward, progressive views on things such as gay marriage. Why retain these puritan, intolerant, purse-lipped attitudes towards sex-positivity?
>advertising a conference

The art world has a different culture than the business world.
This makes me think of the "hypercards" in _Snow Crash,_ which "look" like business cards in the Metaverse, and are easily transferrable from one avatar to another, but can contain vast amounts of information (such as the "Babel/Infocalypse" card Juanita gives Hiro), viruses (such as the titular one), or even money (the card Uncle Enzo gives Hiro, containing HK$25M). Stephenson probably based this metaphor on the old Apple Hypercard application, but it carries forward well into the Web, and even to an explicitly _Snow Crash_ -inspired environment like Second Life ("notecards" in SL can contain, not just text, but images and even embedded objects).
So it's come to this? A society that prefers that male nerds spend their time indoors working on a computer screen from an early age is bound to end up with socially inept geeks. The real shame here is that these young (and old?) men don't realize there can be so much more to a relationship than staring.

If the parents of these young men won't do their duty (including the whole junior high blind date scenario), I'd suggest that the best course of action for teaching the resulting lepers is the smoyer social skills class. In short, you'll learn the basic syntax of male-female encounters, as well as the all-important order-of-operations as follows:

1) Looking a girl in the eyes (and don't look down)

2) Having a conversation

3) Having another conversation

4) Asking for a date (repeat as needed)

5) Staring (and maybe even touching) with permission

Our advanced course features additional materials to help when you need to meet the parents, get engaged, get married and live happily ever after. So there are scenarios where its permissible (and even flattering) to stare, but you geeks are doing it all wrong.

</humor>

Unfortunately, there's a grain of truth in a lot of what I wrote. Many of you are as dismayed as I am that this happened, but some of you laughed along without realizing you should be uncomfortable. You need help!
Well, yeah, but at TechCrunch Disrupt? There's a time and a place for this kind of thing and it's not at a generalist startups and software industry conference.
Just today, I was just searching around for a way to order my own Quest lab tests here in the US. (I'm on the East Coast, Theranos doesn't seem to have locations here)

Does anyone know of any e-doctors that will provide me with lab orders on my behalf? I've seen WellnessFX, but I want to order Quest panels for things they don't offer in their package. Who else is doing something similar to them?
The BOD (or "Board" as the company calls it) seems a little strange to me as if she runs in rarified circles. While I'm sure folks of such stature could provide some assistance, I have a hard time believing they are acting under traditional BOD-like activities. And where's the management team or is this a one-person affair?
How we got to $1,000 in recurring revenue
The problem with that comparison is that I can easily imagine some spoof "Racial Profiler!" app being showcased as a joke. Perhaps an app that allows Atherton residents to report "suspicious" behavior.

But I guess the larger lesson here is: do not try these things unless you're The Onion, SNL, or Key and Peele.
> So saying that publicly signing something "The Management" while working in a company the size of Intel is comically vague

You didn't say that.

> saying people should lighten up

You didn't say that, either. Which is good, because "lighten up" is not, has never been, and will never be a reasonable thing to say to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Your original comment wasn't unreasonable. Where you started going off the rails was initially with "May I remind you", which is patronizing.

Then "Maybe you should share that first, rather than leaving it implicit.", chiding me for failing to magically know that you lacked knowledge that is relatively common within the set of people who care about the subject at hand.

Then you characterized my statements as describing a "huge conspiracy". Being unaware of any "huge conspiracy", only a lot of wide-open politics, this is, to me, at once puzzling and insulting. "oddly paranoid" makes it even worse.

Then you accuse me of pretending to have inside knowledge of Intel, when I did no such thing, and did not intend to, and say I should "disclose" this thing I don't have, as if I'm trying to hide something.

And now you seek to rewrite history.
ProcrastiTracker – Spying on yourself was never this much fun
Exactly. Those two guys up on stage really did seem to think they were being funny - where has all the genuine humour in tech presentations gone?
Their promised fix, "every presentation is getting a thorough screening from this hackathon onward", destroys something that was neat about their hackathon: an essentially free minute on stage to do whatever wild/strange thing the entrants wanted.

Yes, such freedom means some embarrassments, promotional spam, offensiveness, and weak/unfunny jokes get on stage.

But no-prior-restraint errs on the side of project-inclusiveness and free speech, gets the most possible teams/ideas on stage, and avoids the endless rathole discussion of exactly what the "officially enforced content standards" should be.

Now, the extra overhead of screening (or debating corner-cases) could easily mean fewer teams on stage, simply because of the extra effort required inside an already chaotic and time-bottlenecked get-on-stage process.

Some teams will water down what would have been an interesting/memorable presentation, beyond what's strictly necessary, just knowing a content-screening filter must be passed. With screening in place, appearance-on-stage now implies a level of 'approval' from the organizers that didn't previously exist. That invites further controversies over the precisely-acceptable boundaries, and a bias toward more taboos and caution over time.

Ultimately, the people such content-policing is purported to protect may not get a net benefit out of the smaller, tamer forum that results.
No, your chances of success are extremely low whatever how you do it, so better do something you like.

And the most relevant bias here is not selection bias, it's the one that makes every driver believe they are above average drivers. The same happens with mergers too: the boss believes he will better than the other one, and forget about all the difficulties and costs of a merge.

I think that if you really need the money you probably should work in a big corp.
The point is not "N-word == Tits"

The point is that, you, the reader, obviously understand that a word, concept or type of behavior can offend others and would therefore abstain from employing it. Or at least exercise judgment in doing so, because you understand that you have a measure of responsibility when speaking publicly.

The inanity of GP's comments is staggering. He is literally saying that because he, himself, is not offended by such humor that everyone else should similarly relax their sensibilities.

If you understand that some language and behavior can offend others, even if you personally are not offended by it, then you already get the point of my argument. If you fixate on disproving the (not-claimed) equivalency between racial slurs and an app about breast obsession -- then you have missed the point.
Yes. But a lot of people seeing those ads were business people. Some had business meetings in cafeterias overlooked by those giant boob billboards. A lot of the people were elementary school kids on their way to school.

etc. etc.

It seems if somebody tried to put out a billboard like that in the US the public would be satisfied with nothing less than seppuku.
You're missing the point if you think the objection to these sort of apps is about being prudish and finding something wrong with naked people and sex. You're arguing against a strawman.
Agreed. Would be nice if the people running a hackathon like this simply put a note "Keep it family friendly" (which, with a 9 year old presenting, seems reasonable).

Context matters a ton, but don't assume people have a clue, spell it out. "Keep it G rated, this is a family friendly hackathon" ...
Tax enforcement schemes are conceived, enacted, and executed by governments because they have a monopoly over the taxing power. If private profiteers are allowed to exploit local citizens, it is strictly because the entity holding that power has deliberately chosen to set up an enforcement scheme that arms those predators with everything they need to conduct their exploitation. The vultures, despicable as they are, would be powerless to do anything to delinquent but for being armed for the task by the enabling government. Is this abusive? Yes, it is massively abusive. But the remedy needs to go to the source of the abuse and that source is a faceless, uncaring local government that has elevated cost-savings over fairness and, when caught as it has been here, is trying to pretend that it can impose a few regulations at the edges to solve the problem. The real solution is to bring the enforcement back in-house where it historically resided and then collection procedures can be controlled and made fair to citizens. But, of course, that would vitiate the cost savings to the governmental entity from which it benefits under its current system. It should do it but don't hold your breath waiting for reform. It is much easier to blame the outside vultures (who are of course eminently blameworthy), impose a few patches to pretend to deal with the abuse, and go on with business as usual. Whichever way reform is done, if it is at all, one can only hope that it will be real and meaningful but I suspect it will not. Very sad to see the tragic consequences.
Ask HN: Nomadic hacking due to immigration, suggestions for cost-effectiveness
Earlier this year I posted at (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5708206) outlining my situation. Taking a commenter's suggestion, my team has concluded it would be best for me to work remotely for the year until next visa season lets us sort something out.

My problem is that my home country has a government regulated ISP, limiting services like VoIPs (eg: Skype) and VPN tools, besides also being substandard bandwidth/speed. As such, I'm thinking of bouncing between different countries, with my first planned stop in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The concern is the cost associated, since it won't be as cheap as living in my parents' house. I am looking for suggestions to really cut down the total cost of doing something like this. All thoughts, suggestions and questions are welcome!
Ur/Web uses dependent types (Ur) to build statically checked web libraries that prevent common bugs such as malformed or stale links. The exciting part (IMO) is that the 'row types' allow encoding your database schema in the type system, so it prevents bugs common to frameworks with heavy code generation, such as the ORM in Rails or template libraries in C++.

The connection to formal verification is that dependent types (depending on how you do them) let you stuff custom computations into the type checking phase. The two coolest uses of dependent types (IMO) are to verify your code and, surprisingly, synthesize boilerplate.

(Btw, the guy making Ur/Web is quite important in the Coq community and Ur is one of his research vehicles for these ideas.)
> should be working 70 hrs a week perfecting his skills

I already work 60-80hrs/week, should I be working more? Would 100hrs/week make you happy?

> I can only imagine what he will be doing 7 years from now

6 years from now if I continue on this road keep my head down and work hard I'll be making 300-400k/year as an attending physician. I can work 4 days per week and make 200k. I don't care too much about money as long as I can pay my loans off and eat out once in awhile. That's all nice and dandy but I'd rather spend some of my free time building something that helps the healthcare system.
I would've read the entire article if it weren't for the gimmicky bullshit of the background changing colors for no god damn reason. What, is this 1996? Are there <blink> tags further down in the page? Save that shit for your wanna-be-geocities site.
As I read it the company kept the money from the house after seizing it.
I think everyone needs to lighten up.

Men will have to soon stare at the floor when talking to a woman in the work place as prolonged eye contact could be interpreted as sexual harassment. Also, even glancing at her chest will cause immediate dismissal.

C'mon....
Hmm, check out 'Autopilot' by Andrew Smart. It has some sections about equilibrium etc. And 'On Intelligence' by Jeff Hawkins (very under-rated book imho). Good luck!
>> No, because we have judgement.

Oh right, I forgot that we all have a one, shared judgement and that material that is offensive to one person is equally offensive to everyone else.

>> any given conference has its own rules regarding inclusivity and anti-discrimination

It appears that in this case they did not have these rules, the article says that they failed to "establish clear guidelines for these submissions".

P.S. I find your comment extremely offensive, could you please remove it? Thanks.
In a population overshoot scenario, the greater the population overshoot, the harder the crash.

So, dark or not, yes, peaking world population well below present levels would put us in a much better position. Allowing more people to live endangers the future of technological civilization, if not the species.

Sometimes a really long term vision is useful to contemplate:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-next-ten-...
You're right that it was "sexual". However, I'm not sure that the industry has enough average maturity to handle frank discussions of sexuality, especially in big, diverse groups.

Given the demographics of the industry, I don't think it was an accident that it was "TitStare" rather than "DongStare" or "CockStare". I'm sure you could imagine that the nature of the app might make the women in the audience feel a bit odd, that the big punchline was an app about looking at their breasts. Especially since a lot of women feel like they are already struggling for legitimacy in this industry, which is considered by many to be dealing with a sexism problem
What makes you think the public tax sale took place without due process of law?

Straight from the article:

* Homeowners receive several warnings before their liens are put up at annual auctions.

* Once a lien is sold, owners have six months to repay the investor with interest. If that does not happen, the investor can move to foreclose.

The article even mentions the families getting their day in court over the post-tax-sale foreclosure.

I just realized I'm serial rage-replying on this article. You know that annoyed feeling you get when the news covers a subject you're familiar with? Well.
> Generally speaking, once it was up and running, it was pretty low overhead and easy to automate.

This unfortunately has not been my experience with off-the-shelf CI solutions (open source or otherwise). Of course in all instances, we were writing a lot of new code and continuously enhancing old code so the projects under CI were very active. We dealt with CI systems being overloaded, builds breaking for cryptic environment setup reasons, and just an overall slowness due to memory leaks that were hard to diagnose and only occurred in the CI environments.

In the smaller teams, one engineer would essentially become "the build guy" that would babysit the CI system. In larger teams, this became a function of a Configuration/Release management team. In all cases, CI was a regular pain point unless there a lot of customization done over a long period of time.

At the surface level, a custom CI solution wouldn't take long to write. A simple poller to check version control, a script to build, and some basic notifications could probably be hacked together quickly and iterated on over time.
I've worked as a remote (U.S. based) independent freelancer through Elance and Odesk. I've had positive and negative experiences on both. They both do a decent job of minimizing the risk of non-payment on fixed-price projects, but, as you point out, one of the biggest challenges is nailing down the requirements. I understand that requirements can and will change but there have been times when I've spent an inordinate amount of time going back and forth with my point of contact (who often doesn't really know what the primary customer wants). There have been times when I've pulled the plug and just told the client we weren't a good fit.

I've also learned when to recognize that the clients are looking for speed/volume vs. quality. I know there are often tradeoffs but some clients just really don't seem to care about quality; they are middlemen who just want to throw something over the fence to the client.
Yeah because banks have no experience with things called Impound or Escrow accounts...
>Heroin brought euphoria reading Wikipedia has made me knowledgeable on many diverse subjects

Or rather gave a lot of people a shallow understanding of some topic and a false sense of entitlement to be equal to an expert that actually studied the field in question.

>and those video games might have increased my focus and problem solving skills.

Judging by teaching young people very adept at video games, no it really hasn't. If anything it has destroyed their focus for anything that's not a constant blaze of motion and sound. As for problem solving skills, the only ones that wee boosted was those most alike solving video game problems.
On Ansible
Coaching Billionaires: How to coach the uber-successful
It's pretty clear at this point that the only thing propping the hollow US economy up is this massive spying apparatus. You can only front-run the market for so long, though, before the whole thing comes crashing down in a heap.
What would be your solution? To not sell the liens to private investors and instead and have the government try to collect on them? I.e., is your alternative bigger government?
And the fuel and energy use don't end with transportation. You've got food processing (canning, drying, milling, and other processing), refrigeration, and packaging as well. I suppose you could toss grocery store and restaurant operations into the mix as well.

And the real multiplier for inputs: raising livestock takes vast inputs. Even if you don't eat soy directly, if you're eating beef, pork, poultry, or dairy, you're eating food very likely raised in large part based on soy protein. (And just for the record: I'm an omnivore).
I think the difference here though is conferences like this are intentionally positioned at being more casual and less formal/professional. I doubt lawyers even have similarly casual conferences of this nature. In the tech world, we've intentionally positioned our conferences to be this way. I honestly think therefore that people will be more likely to bring their normal set of standards to bear in situations like this.

Now, I have a question for you. Imagine that you're a woman and you're walking to the restroom, past a line of 40 or 50 men. And now imagine those men have any time recently walked past a magazine store where upon they saw hundreds of magazines depicting women naked (ie. every single magazine store anywhere).

Or imagine those men are discussing the latest episode of Boston Legal, a typical TV show depicting a professional setting (legal firm) which contains highly sexualised themes (like, again, pretty much every show on TV today).

I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm simply making the point that the standards people seem to be applying in the tech world seem to me to be completely out of whack with what society in general deems appropriate.
The point of the post was not to try to give you examples of discriminatory behaviour (and if you think that's the point of the blog post, you've missed the point entirely).

When we, as an industry, create an atmosphere that degrades members of our community, it's not adequate to say "lighten up, it's just a joke, get over it".

You seem bothered about who is getting outraged. In my case, I'm a programmer who talks to high school children about careers in technology. Several times I've been in a position where I've told young women: "this attitude exists, I'm sorry, we're trying to change it", and to the young men: "this attitude exists, it's up to you to change it". The 9 year old who presented next to those idiots got a real world taste of the industry she's entering, and I sincerely hope she manages to navigate the waters. In the meantime, I'm vocal because I'm fighting the "lighten up" attitude - your attitude - in a younger generation.
> My programs absolutely reeked of programming no-nos. Hundred-line functions and even thousand-line classes, magic numbers, unreachable blocks of code, ridiculous code comments, a complete disregard for sensible object orientation, negligence of nearly all logic, and type-coercion that would make your skin crawl.

It probably would have been easier to start on a language that's procedural and maybe dynamically-typed. There are fewer traps to fall into.
> I really don’t want to need a post-processing
> phase which massages the resulting tree.

Weird, it was much easier for me to simplify the tree after the fact. As for anything else this is pretty much how I feel about yacc/bison as well. You have to invest way too much time to understand their internal workings to do anything non-trivial and it's just not worth it.
To be clear, this wouldn't be my primary income earner. I have a lot of experience with languages like ColdFusion, PHP, etc, but really want to get some Rails work in. Of course, my "low" rate might be too high (I was thinking in the $15-30 range, where I'd normally bill $50-75 for work I have experience in)
Parser generators are useful to explore the problem space. It allows for a higher-level thinking. I always ended up rewriting the parser by hand but I'm not sure I could achieve the same result without the first prototype.
I'm not sure it's clear what we should discount "joke" apps as not being serious business. After all, they built a place where users upload offensive photos and allow folks to vote and share ... just like 9Gag, Reddit, and countless other legitimate, funded, businesses.