skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its much easier to justify changes in software requirements vs changes in hardware requirements because the perceived cost of adding a few more features on your application is low. Compare that to say.. adding another register to your chip..which might add millions to the whole production process. The changes can be made while the app is live. You can not do that for hardware.
GTA 4 in VR - Cyberith Virtualizer + Oculus Rift + Wii Mote
I don't think the top comment says what you think it says. It is possible that:

1. Spike Lee did nothing wrong, AND
2. Spike Lee bears responsibility

You can complain to a CEO that one of their employees did something wrong, in the course of the employee's duties. The CEO then bears responsibility, even though they may personally have had no part in it.
A derivative work? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noSOFIJdfwM
This isn't surprising, really. MOOCs disproportionately benefit those who already have the means, the background, and most importantly the drive to learn.

The greatest challenge of education is to nurture the desire for learning in students and for students to be in a situation in life (e.g. situation at home - income, safety, etc) in order to even have a chance at becoming motivated.

MOOCs address the problem of access. But access wasn't the main problem to begin with for the vast majority of students whom people like Thurn was trying to reach.
for anyone who hate registrations for downloads ^_^
http://learn-rails.com/ebooks/learn-rails.pdf
which is why people are choked, becuase Lee is part of Big Media and rationalizing piracy at the same time. The hypocrisy is... hard to ignore
If you work in education, do you hear people telling kids to refer to an imaginary teacher as "she"? (cause kids I know do that).

I know a lot of people who work in the K-12 education sector, and I have never heard them saying that the gender ratio is unfair towards men.
I guess he's a capitalist.
Find some reliable sources and fix it, if it bothers you.
You remind me of Dr. Hofstadter's excellent essay on the subject:

"Another suggestion is that the plural pronoun "they" be used in place of the inclusive "whe." This would turn the charming proverb "Whe who laughs last, laughs best" into the bizarre concoction "They who laughs last, laughs best." As if anyone in whis right mind could have thought that the original proverb applied only to the white race! No, we don't need a new pronoun to "liberate" our minds. That's the lazy white's way of solving the pseudoproblem of racism. In any case, it's ungrammatical. The pronoun "they" is a plural pronoun, and it grates on the civilized ear to hear it used to denote only one person. Such a usage, if adopted, would merely promote illiteracy and accelerate the already scandalously rapid nosedive of the average intelligence level in our society."

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

(Worth reading through in its entirety if you have strong feelings on the subject.)
There haven’t been any real political consequences to supporting surveillance. Who’s lost an election over it? Until that happens, expect this to continue. It’s like how now one gets fired for buying IBM. The politicians are worried that if they did support rollback, and then some event happened, they’d get primaried out of office.
That's the only link there!

And like I said, it doesn't debunk anything.
You miss the point. Spike Lee's argument is that he never employed the artist, even though his film company ultimately decided on the agent who promoted the film.

If he complains about piracy, all we have to do now is state on twitter:

"I Never Heard Of This Spike Lee,If He Has A Beef It's Not With Me.I Did Not Buy Him,Do Not Know Him.Cheap Trick Writing To Me.YO"

Looks like, to me, that unless Lee backs down, he'll be being mocked for quite some time to come :-)
That's a BS comparison. Spike is an indie film-maker. The movie posters are a very visible part of the film.

I'd say it's more like the President worrying about a website.
It's long past time for Facebook to simply stop using the words "private" and "delete" on any of their pages, because they obviously don't mean it whenever they use them.
Not teaching staff. But I have seen children refer to an imaginary teacher as "she". Is that a problem? If so, it should be addressed with as much alacrity as this one.
If the CMO steals someone's logo, do you blame the CTO?
I am a heterosexual white man, but this kind of comment still makes me bristle. If you had to deal with the casual dismissal of inequity in your particular cohort on a regular basis, you might be "uptight and overly serious," too.
It's very possible the agency is Spike DDB, which was founded by Spike Lee. If so, the buck stops with Spike.
no it's pretty trivial
A lot of the examples are much more impressive when being rotated with the mouse, they produce some pretty crazy patterns. Take a look at the Dragon Spirograph and Dance for me.
So, if I hire an agent to handle something, I am not responsible for their conduct? I don't think I agree with that.
Next pull request: Convert all usages of the word "history" to "theirstory" :)

[ugh, i'm probably about to get a lot of downvotes for this, which might just prove my point.]
The author has nothing to do with the substance of the article. If you cannot see that, I'm truly sorry for you.
How affordable CNC can re-make industry
I, for one, would be very sad if you stopped posting to HN.
The CTO? No. The CEO? Hell yeah.
For sites that are not forums-first, I think the age of the online forum has pretty much come to an end, for exactly the reasons Pavlina explains.

We ran our forums at Bonanza for about 4 years, and had millions of posts made to them. We spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours of time building tech and training moderators.

In spite of the overwhelming effort we put into making them useful and productive, we ultimately had to concede that the folks who sought to undermine our forums had 100x the time that we did, and displayed a level of resolve (creating duplicate accounts/their own forums/blogs to pick apart our decisions) that could have been a huge asset, if not for being dedicated to subterfuge.

After seeing all this firsthand for years, I am now solidly of the belief that the Internet and productive forums are hopelessly at odds. I hope Discourse can prove me wrong. But all it takes is a small handful of people to undermine the best technology and intentions.

That Paul Graham has been able to keep HN discussions civil for years (even though I've read it causes him great consternation) is an inspiring counterexample. But I can scarcely imagine the number of cycles he and his team probably have to expend to keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as it is here.
Surprise. Another purportedly "secure" application where the developers are not releasing the full sourse code.

I just don't understand what the theory is behind a closed source application that purports to be "secure". This is a very bold claim to make. How does the educated user decide whether she wants to trust the developers? She is not permitted to see their work.

Maybe there is something to be said for putting your code out in the open and letting everyone see what you've done. Letting others review your code and submit fixes (e.g. for platform specific issues). And then having numerous very determined people try to find serious flaws, and fail to find any.

Then again, maybe not. But one thing is for sure: Closed source does not allow that vetting process to happen.
The Life I Didn't Expect
I am a heterosexual man of colour, and I think this sort of artificially enforced "all right, let's remove all traces of individually identifiable references" does absolutely nothing to increase equality between different subgroups.

[side note + example: I really do not understand the term "person of colour" as used in modern American society. To me, it smacks of the old racist term "coloured". But do I still go ahead and use it to refer to myself, because the majority of people understand what I mean.]
It is still possible to respect intellectual property rights, authorship, be against piracy, support the allegedly-wronged artist, AND find Spike Lee to be an idiot.

The problem with piracy advocates is that they will seize any opportunity to justify piracy, and this is sadly no different. Too many people unfortunately see this as a black-and-white situation where you either support Spike Lee or support pirating his work.

By all means mock him, that's completely deserved.
If the CTO is the face of the company, then sure. it's not as if shaming the ad agency is going have nearly the same impact. It's Spike Lee's movie, he's the beneficiary, and he's not some fledgling director with no influence on the studio.
All language is a set of "arbitrary made-up conventions".
A small step? So what would the full step be? What would the consequences be?

Will nobody in the future be able to refer to another person as 'him', 'her', 'she' or 'he' unless they have full confirmation of that person's declared gender identity?

Will newspaper articles and blog posts have to regenerate dynamically, in the event that the person decided to change their identity, to avoid lawsuits over misidentifying a person in public resulting in emotional hurt and damage to reputation?
In the not-too-distant future, doing things on the internet that we currently consider mundane and ordinary will require using alternative identities carefully compartmentalized from our real identifies using the type of OPSEC he describes. I'm practicing this now before it becomes more critical.
Not entirely. Look at Oprah. But on a general level, yes.
I look forward to the mobile apps!
Applied Psychology in Silicon Valley
Reminds me strongly of http://reddit.com/r/vxjunkies
But their recommended workaround for writing generic containers is to use the empty interface and type-cast in and out --- which has all the drawbacks of the Java implicit boxing. And on top of that, it clutters up the code with type casts, adding injury to insult because the type-cast clutter actually costs you type safety. So, this has all the disadvantages of the Java approach and none of the advantages. Win?
It's not so much an agree or disagree thing, but more of a "how much influence does biology have, how much does social environment, nurture, upbringing, and to what degrees, and how can we be sure" kinda question to explore
I'm not saying that you should commit piracy. I'm saying that Spike Lee has put himself in an interesting position where he is now advocating piracy, and this may well be the response he starts getting if he complains his work is stolen in the future.

It's more ironic than right.

P.S. I've voted you up, I agree with you.
Precise numerics.
Whatever you might think Spike Lee is, he's certainly predictable.
Note that asm.js (and probably PNaCL as well) currently offers very little for languages like Scala that need good GC. Until that's addressed simply targeting JavaScript is going to be best approach for these languages.
... a conductivity of 50-100 milliohms per square per mil ...

That's pretty bad. Cue the video of him measuring 50 Ohms for that small scribbled line...
Canadian denied entry to the US after agent cites private medical records
Using they or their in a singular form is a very well-established form in historical and modern usage; the gender-indeterminate form in particular is known as the 'epicene they':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

For instance, there are sections on there using this form by Shakespeare, Austen, Thackeray and Bernard-Shaw.

I actually wonder whether this might be an American thing, along the same lines as the Webster spelling reforms - the wikipedia page says that grammatical prescriptivism over this primarily occurs in America. Personally, I would say your quoted sentence is completely standard English.
Not completely true, you already have WebWorkers, and if you're targeting, say, JavaScriptCore on iOS and OS X Mavericks then threads are an option via running multiple JS Virtual Machines - JSValues may be passed between them.
The more I think about this issue, the more I recognise that the original github thread did take things a bit far and we all need to be careful not to dive headlong into extreme pedantry. I don't actually think there's anything wrong with using either gender-specific pronoun, but it would be nice if each were used with roughly the same frequency.

[side note: it's quite weird that the comment you're replying to felt the need to bring race into this discussion in the first place]
They are going to need giant robots to build it.
This is very very cool. I like how the triggers and logic are exposed in a dead simple UI. Also pleasantly surprised in the transitions
What if our pronouns were racial instead of gendered? I'd have a problem with the white versions being used in all my technical documentation.
Here's another question: "Why are software feature requirement estimates regularly off and changing while in progress?"
Fair point - as soon as you bring the innocence of youth into this debate, you pretty much win it :)
Spike Lee is very much the right addressee.

He posted Garcia's original comps (not the final poster) on his Facebook. The images had "©2013 Spike Lee" slapped on them. These images are not in this article, but were on JG's website yesterday.

Garcia kindly asked him for help, presenting both of themselves as victims of a shady middleman, leaving plenty of room for Lee not only to come out on top and save his face, but even to turn this into great publicity for the movie.

Apparently, Lee decided otherwise.
And that reminds me of Plato's Republic, in which children are separated from the parents and then brought up by others. The intention being to create ties to the community rather than parental lineage, so that the whole community is one big family.
Alright. You kids can't just agree to something? Fine! Everyone is now "it".
Youtube link for those who are unwilling or unable to download and compile yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFx46bAq-_E

As well, for those that don't want to use youtube, you can view/stream the raw video here:

http://lelandbatey.com/files/Obfuscated%20C%20-%20Game%20Of%...
Sinclair's FORGOTTEN Australia-only micro revealed
Right? Inequality in the workplace will be squashed just like it will everywhere else - with people being awesome to each other. It probably won't happen because of those people refusing to acknowledge differences. Saying 'him' or 'her' in documentation isn't hostile - it's anthropomorphic. I guess in this situation it's an assumption about the user, but why is it hostile?
Take a look at Kotlin (http://kotlin.jetbrains.org), it was designed to address the issues you mention.
I am totally on board with you in terms of Spike Lee coming across as a total knob, but, unfortunately, and as evidenced by this thread, there are people who will never fail to latch on to these cases and use strawmen like Spike Lee as an excuse for some eye-for-an-eye Internet justice by means of piracy.

As long as someone can get downvoted to -4 for making that very basic point on Hacker News, the point apparently still has to be made, even though it's a waste of time for people like you who see the nuance of it. :)
I'm involved in a weechat web frontend which solves some of the problems.

If anyone's curious, here it is:
http://torhve.github.io/glowing-bear/
Exactly. But if you go around and look at any tech company, the majority of people are white males. I think changing that actual situation is more important than changing documentation and making yourself feel good about having done something.

If you really want to change things, you can write to your Senator or suchlike about racial inequality you have observed, or immigration reform. That is much harder than just grepping a codebase and submitting a PR -- but if you do it, you might actually effect change (and as a person of colour, I would be much more grateful to you, if you are from a more privileged class).
Open source weechat web frontend:

http://torhve.github.io/glowing-bear/
I don't know why but I have a feeling women would be more against it than men.
>So the article tries to describe the hidden complexity of software with a hiking analogy but then it leaves a huge part missing. Let's extend the analogy somewhat... this isn't your first hiking trip. In fact, you've been on dozens and dozens of hiking trips. You're an experienced hiker. Yet, why do you continue to give meaningless as-the-crow-flies estimates of how long it will take you to get to your destination? The reason is that if you miss your estimate, it probably won't matter.

Nice try, but no.

Developers who are DIRECTLY affected from missing estimates (e.g one man shops paying out of their own pockets, people building an app while having quit work, eating ramen and maxing their credit cards etc, developers in companies who will personally pay for any delays by attrocious, unpaid overtime crunch marches, etc) underestimate the time needed to get something done just the same. Just ask Allan Odgaard (of TextMate 2 infamy).
Of course, the vision of the future you present is probably one few actually desire, but it's interesting to think about why we humans feel such a need to emphasise people's gender all the time. As another poster put it, what if personal pronouns included a reference to race (or age, religion, weight, sexual orientation, etc.) - would we really be comfortable with that? Yet we find gender such an important thing when referring to others.
You don't need biological connection to develop bonds. See adoption, step-children, etc.
The article mentions the NSA, but if you don't think this can be used by anyone (not just people with huge botnets or databases like the NSA) then you'd be wrong as well. Consider trying to find the address of a person that you only know the facebook account of, but their name isn't listed in the phonebook. If you can see their friends list then it's fairly likely that it might have familiy members or housemates on it who _are_ listed. This is just one way of using the friends list. So it's a huge privacy issue that someone's friends list is exposed because anyone can use that information to figure out things about the person.
Registering offers you the benefit of receiving an announcement when a new version is released.

Not sure if it will still be freely downloadable by then though.
Show HN: Elf powered gift suggestions.
Of course, doing something to effect greater change is 'better' than doing something that effects lesser change, but that doesn't invalidate doing the thing that effects lesser change. Lesser change is better than no change.
Fundamental Incertitudes Behind Bitcoin Mining
Null pointer bugs, anyone?
it's quite weird that the comment you're
replying to felt the need to bring race
into this discussion in the first place

I don't think it's weird at all. I belong to a group given a significant amount of privilege based upon nothing more than the color of my skin, sexual preferences and gender. There are many facets to American cultural normativity, with three of the most important being the ones I listed.

Since we're having a conversation about "uptight" feminists, I thought it was worth establishing that I didn't belong to any group one might normally associate with being "uptight" about that and similar issues.
Why we're only accepting bitcoin for pre-releases
Hardware engineers have more clearly defined requirements, It's also well understood by everyone that you can't just change the design halfway through production with no additional cost. Hardware engineers clients are mostly other engineers who know their shit very well. Hardware engineering is also more formalized with a larger percentage of engineers actually possessing relevant degrees with common well established means of communicating and thoroughly clear phases of development for a project.

People hiring consultants to build them software are generally non-technical. On most projects the following problems may occur:

Problems With Clients:

1) They don't konw what they really want.

2) They are bad at communicating what they really want.

3) Not enough people from the organization are brought in to weigh in on their needs / actual duties.

4) Too many people are brought in, many with conflicting interests. (bike shedding). [1]

5) Critical omissions are made regarding idiosyncrasies of their infrastructure that are never brought to light until far too late in the project.

6) people trying to change the direction of a project late into development

7) complicated/redundant policies or procedures which are incompatible or inefficient to implement using the tools the client requires you to implement them in.

Problems with Consultants / Contractors:

1) Over confident estimates

2) They are bad at estimations / unfamiliar with the tools required to do the job

3) They are bad at communication / rooting out the the real problem early

4) Unable to detect confusion/bullshitting from a client or are unwilling to investigate it.

5) PMs who make promises they are unable to keep

6) PMs who do not understand the details and make decisions without consulting those who do

7) Developers who avoid asking the client for clarification

8) spineless developers/PMs who screw themselves to avoid confrontation

9) Procrastination

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality
Here's why I ask you to register to download the book:

1) After working on the book for six months, I'd like to be able to follow up and ask you to contribute to the Kickstarter campaign if you like the book.

2) You are downloading an advance edition of a book that contains code that is likely to change. Within the next week or two, I will release an updated version. I'd like to be able to notify you when the update is available.

3) I am only giving the book away for free for one day, to promote the Kickstarter campaign. If you are willing to provide your email address in exchange for a free copy of the book I am grateful. If you are not, Michael Hartl offers an excellent introduction to Rails that does not require registration or an email address:

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/
I have seen the opposite cases as well:

The one born into a rich family tends to get spoiled, become wasteful and when the money exhausts becomes poor.

The one born into a poor family develops a hard-working attitude, becomes more careful about money, and eventually becomes rich.
FWIW, the use of singular they as a gender indeterminate pronoun is very well-established, in fact the revisionism is in the movement to cast the form as ungrammatical:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they

This isn't really anything like 'theirstory', which is an artificial construction.
Here's the thing. Software is profitable at much lower quality levels than the hardware market will tolerate. As a result, most hardware is designed through a process that could accurately be called engineering, even though most software is not. So hardware engineers get to make estimates with the benefit of having fairly reliable engineering outputs to use as estimating inputs. Further, the business side of hardware is more culturally attuned to the realities of engineering and is therefore less likely to challenge estimates coming out of mature engineering processes.

In short, on both sides of the old one-two punch, the hardware guys have got advantages.
What's "bmw" doing on the top of his head ?
So, if I — hypothetically — see Spike Lee driving my stolen car, I should stay quiet because it's not Spike's issue?
Fun obfuscated version in ruby.

https://github.com/stefanpenner/obfcuscatedLife.rb/blob/mast...

and for those crazy people who ever far to trusting:

curl https://raw.github.com/stefanpenner/obfcuscatedLife.rb/master/game_of_life.rb | ruby
Homage to the Idols of Idleness