skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When Hackers & Painters came out in 2003… hacking was not cool. Computer science was not cool. Having a startup was not cool.

I'm sort of curious about this, as I was still in grade school at the time. Can someone who was, say, in college or a recent graduate in 2003 comment to this? What was the climate like?
oooh !! 8 Mill !! I'd like that ..
> Personal income taxes are about 50% in the US.

I'm not American, but every time I look at taxation levels, I come out with a number significantly smaller than that. I presume that America uses progressive taxation, so at what income level does personal income + payroll tax equate to 50% of gross?
Here are a couple:

http://med.stanford.edu/diversity/FAQ_REDE.html

http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/01/0212/7b.shtml
Why is this the case: "it does not follow that this particular gun owner is more likely"?

Doesn't this follow from assignment to the set?
What made The Information's value proposition so alluring? It seems like an opportunity for another publication to step up and eat their lunch, whatever it was.

I guess their promise of high-quality tech coverage was a welcome change. Seems like a good idea; hopefully someone else will deliver it.
If you wind up doing that, let me know. I would be willing to help if at all possible. Contact info is in my profile. Thanks.
The IRS will, effectively, value your job in the event of an audit and determine whether you paid yourself reasonably compared to your market for your skills, experience, etc.

I had prepared an example that showed you could actually pay less in FICA, while still being reasonable in the eyes of the IRS. Maybe not ideal to post it here though.
Good to see people coming out in support of this horrible editing, and I hope the trouble makers see that it is taking the discussion away from what is important.

Why attack someone like pg over this? Is the attempt to shame him into being more women hacker friendly? Isn't he already going out of his way to support women?
First, I'm feel for you that you lost a loved one in that manner. I share a similar pain because I have lost two family members to suicide, one with a gun and one without. Both succeeded on the first attempt. I suppose I should advocate the banning of personal ownership of shower curtains and shower rods.

From my perspective, the how was not a factor for me. I was more concerned over the why. To this day I have my thoughts on the why but I'll never know for sure, because they didn't talk to me beforehand. They were sudden and unexpected.

But I'm not about to advocate for the restrictions of people's rights because of what my two family members did to themselves. I appreciate the thinking behind that attitude, I simply just disagree with it.

Sometimes, people make their decisions and there's nothing to be done to change it. Despite access to a gun and your efforts, your friend still killed himself. The only thing that's different is that his pain, perceived and/or real, continued longer than he wished it to. I can't speak of how that fits into the scheme of things because I don't want to claim to know what he was thinking and/or feeling.

As you state, you are in the UK. One thing that is most often missing in these discussions are differences in attitudes from culture to culture. You may not live in a gun culture, I do. But our gun culture has deep roots in mistrust in government, sometimes well-founded and sometimes not. It's not going away anytime soon and ignoring the why's of suicide in an effort to restrict people's rights based on the how's of suicide is just wrong to me.

Yes, I know about the nets in those locations. I also know of similar locations that do not. Those nets are there just as much for the people not planning to jump as it is for people who do.
None of it should be a prerequisite for voting. I don't know what debate you think is happening here, but it's not the one you seem eager to have. This is about the reasons against requiring IDs for voting and only for voting. It has nothing to do with any of the other reasons you might have ID, nor is it an argument about what the requirements should be for having a valid ID. It is only about requiring ID for voting. That is all.

This is why I say you're derailing: You're not talking about voter ID, you're just talking about ID in general.
In Croatia (I'm a multi-national) registrations actually do happen at the police office in small-ish towns. It's a culture thing, I believe...
That's already mentioned in the article.
This is Hacker News -- you are expected not to be sloppy with your argumentation here. If you say "inanimate object" rather than gun, then we're going to assume you are making a more general statement and react accordingly. I cannot read your mind, so please do not assume I (or anyone else) knows your precise opinion on gun control without being precise with your words.
If you setup your company correctly, this is often the case for self-employed people in the US as well.
That's right. For anyone who believes trust is important to make the wheels go round it should be obvious that in order for the government to be trusted by its people, it must also demonstrate that it trusts the people. Unidirectional trust never lasts long.

If you like fairytales, I can recommend "The emperor's new clothes" by H.C. Andersen.
Backwards ecosystem compatibility is a law of nature, not an option. Guido blithely broke a law of nature and the consequences, which should have been completely obvious to him, are just as anyone with history in the industry could have predicted (and most did.)

I'm at the decision point of which one to learn for a long languishing project I want to use it for. If I could write in 3.x and use the 2.x library ecosystem there would be no glitch whatsoever in my decision process. 3.x seems sufficiently advantageous _as a language_ to make the choice easy. As is, however, since I do not yet know what within the 2.x ecosystem will prove to be important or essential, my only intelligent choice is to maximize my options and go with 2.x. The advantages of the 3.x language don't even begin to outweigh the potential disadvantages of coming up short.

I consider this irrevocable break with backward ecosystem compatibility (given the magnitude of the ecosystem) to be the worst, most egotistical decision I've ever seen in the computer field. Almost a death wish.
If any judges from now on will take their job serious they will not accept any computer or similar (mobile phone, tablet, etc) electronic device data / network data as evidence particularly when there might be a political background to a case.
> I had high hopes for The Information that their business model would lead to better quality reporting

The only differences between The Information and The Register [1] are that the latter acknowledges its tabloid nature, and lacks the breathtaking presumption to peddle its tripe for four hundred dollars a year.

[1] http://theregister.co.uk
A 5 Minute Introduction to ‘Proper Horsemanship’
It certainly read like an ad for IBM.
Can we lay off the cheesy deification of PG? He was called a sexist, and he responded well. He is not a paragon of society, he is simply someone who is very good at tech and making money. And he is probably a good person too, but come on, this is just silly.

On a second note I'm also curious as to what exactly you're referring to when you say he has the credibility that should make us know that he isn't sexist. I'm not saying he is sexist, I'm just saying that all of his credibility lies in making good business decisions, not gender relations.
Look you are getting credibility and trust confused with respect and other things.

Personally I don't trust anyone, I've been burned too many times. Yeah that makes me paranoid, but it comes from too many bad professional relationships were I was backstabbed by the other person to further their career goals. I must state that this does not happen in every organization, and that there are a few people I would trust if they showed some good faith and helped me out with things. But since nobody I know wants to help me out, and once I reached the age of 40 I get old I am too old for this industry.

But PG is worthy of my respect, he has paid his dues in this industry, he knows what he is talking about and has experience, he hasn't backstabbed anyone that I know of so he has credibility, yes he is one of the few that I would trust had he helped me out in some way.

Look there is a lot of jealousy in the industry for experienced people. We get called nerds, geeks, dorks, etc by all of the people in other industries. They claim they know how to use a computer, and sure maybe use a Wordprocessor and write on a blog using Wordpress, but every once in a while one of them gets a bad case of jealousy that 'hackers' or 'IT workers' know more than they do, so they lash out and do a hatchet job on someone who got some attention in the media. This is basically politics, and how one person can backstab another.

I've had my words taken out of context a lot as well. It is but just one way to backstab someone. It is not just the Internet trolls who do it but the news media and these people writing blogs that hate the startup community.

In street terms, these people are 'haters' if I used that term correctly.

My sister who got into discoranism calls such people as 'greyfaces' and here is the Urban Dictionary definition. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=greyface

You can use either the first or second definition, and it would define the person who did this to PG quite accurately.
> Personal income taxes are about 50% in the US.

No, they aren't. There are a handful of states where the top marginal rate (combining federal and state rates) is at or above 50%, but that's not the overall rate even for those top earners, and its certainly not the average overall rate in the country.
Would a retraction/apology combination be effective here? Or is this just too egregious an error?

I, in turn, feel dumb asking, as I would have liked a subscription to a service like that. I wouldn't want to encourage this sort of nonsense, either.
> "It's been my experience that when men feel like they're walking on eggshells around women in the workplace it's because they're normally comfortable making sexists/rape jokes and/or have sexist beliefs."

translated - "If you're afraid of being labeled a witch, you're probably a witch."
a huge issue i think in SSL is allowing 3rd party anything to be served from a different domain via https, there should be warnings and automatic blocks about this for the user and i don't know why there aren't.

i wonder if having a public, open-source cdn specifically for crypto libs with known sha256 signatures and having a standard way to "require" them in the html standard that differs from how regular scripts can be included/injected now. or even include them in browsers so they're auto-updated by the vendors or some central trusted authority.
Not really. Python primitives are smaller (24 bytes). Python strings are 37 + 1 byte per character. Python objects are 72 bytes. Python classes are 104 bytes. (Got these numbers playing around with sys.getsizeof in the python console.)

Primitives are a bit bigger in ruby, but they aren't really primitives anyway (everything is an object).
> Does that sound stupid? I hope so, because it is. But that's exactly the type of argument that this article is making.

Actually, it's not just making that argument, it's referencing studies to back it up: http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/lib/project/11/

> At the base of this argument is an implication that terrorist attacks are zero-sum: reduce them in one place, get an equivalent more in another. But that's not how security works.

The analogy you give certainly does sound stupid, but nobody said that the effect was necessarily zero sum, what the sum is is in fact an empirical matter and the research was about precisely this question. Unlike passwords, it would not be all that surprising for it to be approximately zero sum in this case. Terrorists don't sit down and think 'how can I attack an airplane', they sit and think 'how can I cause maximum damage for minimum investment'. Against that kind of opponent, there's no point choosing one tactic and fortifying it beyond reason while leaving a million other options for someone pursuing a strategy of terror. The effective money is spent on identifying the criminals and countering them rather than cherry picking one or two specific techniques. You can see this in most historical counter terrorism efforts.

Very occasionally, it's effective to identify point fixes for things that are low hanging fruit for terrorists. Reinforced cockpit doors almost certainly were part of that. Almost everything else that's been done on air travel since? Not so much.

> Second, it's pulling a subtle slight of hand--the goal of airport security is NOT to reduce terrorist casualties overall. It is to reduce violent attacks of any kind on airplanes, specifically.

That's the job of the personnel at the airports. However, we want to know whether the TSA is a program that should be funded, funded at the level it currently is, or given the powers it currently is. That is a question about the most effective way to reduce terrorist casualties overall (or arguably limited to US citizens anyway). It's no sleight of hand to be concerned about efficiency in the measures we take as a society to combat terrorism.

> First, you cannot draw such a causal conclusion from statistical data alone.

It's not clear to me why you think that the burden of proof lies in that direction. We have a problem - terrorism. We take some expensive measures - over the top checks at airports. It's not "data wonky" to demand that the programs we've put in place are able to produce real evidence of effectiveness.
Actually, I didn't even read the comment to which you left "[citation needed]", and I'm not interested in trying to wriggle out of anything. Thanks, though, and I wish you best of luck finding someone to fight with over your perspective.
nooo !! that's why research into the hover-skateboard stopped !!
You'd need to combine a very very high income level (well above $450k/yr with lots of money getting taxed in the highest federal nominal bracket), live in a state with high income tax and have a bad accountant.

In short, if anyone is paying that much in taxes they are very much doing it wrong... and I kind of doubt people are.
My point is that you'd be hard pressed to make awk, sed, and find simpler without removing functionality. In the same way, I think git is really compact considering its feature set. The issues like the one you point to in the article occur once in a blue moon.
Recently in Africa a suicidal pilot crashed a regional jet[1], killing all aboard, after sending the co-pilot back to check something in the cabin. Due to the locks nobody could re-enter the flight deck (might not have mattered, but who knows). "[The] cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder revealed, that the captain was alone on the flight deck, banging on the flight deck door could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder"

Passenger aircraft are supposed to NEVER operate with only one person on the flight deck, but rules are not always followed.

We don't know how many hijackings have been prevented by the locking doors. Are there any documented cases? We do know of a few cases where they have caused deaths, or at least prevented any chance to try to avert a disaster.

1: http://avherald.com/h?article=46c3abde&opt=0
A Large New Tax on Small Business
That comparison is valid only if you have data demonstrating that the TSA has successfully deterred/foiled aviation terror plots.

If you have that data (which I'd love to see), there are still powerful arguments that TSA funding would have been better spent in many other ways (better training budgets for security/investigative personnel, more "soft" layers at airports, fewer kneejerk infrastructure upgrades).
Then why do so many people argue about how it is hard for minorities and the poor to get an ID? If that is not what this is about then it has no place in the argument against requiring an ID to vote. Your original comment was almost entirely about how hard it is for those people to get an ID. So again... no derailment from me. You brought it up.
But you've just missed Alex's whole point.

You're fine. 98% of PyPI downloads are not. That's a startling statistic, and argues that something IS necessary, rather than the status quo of shaming the top 1000 Python packages sans 3K support and telling people "it's really not that bad."

It is that bad, in terms of adoption of the first 5 years of 3K's release. And unless we want to spend the next decade trying to get to 50% mindshare with 3K, the community needs to suck it up and change tacks.

The definition of insanity is trying the same solution twice and expecting different results.
Those little commuter planes are decidedly less safe in bad weather, and the pilots operating them tend to be younger/less experienced. It's not a perfect trade-off.
That doesn't make sense to me, where would they deport you to? You'd be a citizen of the US, not the country you were coming from. What if your visa in that country was expired? Would the two countries just deport you back and forth until one got bored?

It doesn't make sense to me that a US citizen, in the US not at any sort of border, could be deported under any circumstances.
Paul Graham Writing About Women On His Website
> using that metaphor to describe some tweets is very insensitive and softens the absolute horror of people killed in real witch hunting

I'll start using this metaphor from now on, just to annoy PC-nazis like you.
I'll agree with you partially. This sort of thing is definitely going down based on race/orientation as well, but I see less of that and more men vs women sorts of discussions.

It's not just a tech problem either. This stuff is going on all around the world. I don't claim to have solutions to these problems, but I would appreciate it if the public shaming and witch hunts would stop. I'm tired, SV. So very tired.

I've never worked at AT&T but I'd wager the same stuff went on. Perhaps you experienced the same sort of thing I did where people assumed you wouldn't appreciate their words/actions and elected to avoid you?
At least you tried to live the dream...
Makes me want to write a book! Have to wonder what I know that isn't already out there in published form.
Technically, you are correct. But you're missing the underlying comment that anyone can find fault with what you say if they use sufficient semantic boxing rather than granting a bit of slack.

What's amazing is how many people continue to do this, even though they have many times felt the aggravation of others doing it to their public posts.
This reminds me of 1984, where Winston placed a speck of dust on the corner of his diary. He knew he couldn't prevent the authorities from reading it, he just wanted to know if they had or not. However (spoiler alert) he learns at the end of the book that they were careful to put the speck of dust back just where he left it.

This is like that, except it (hopefully) would actually work.
pg mentioned in the article that he wants to increase the number of female founders.
Linux is the new Windows XP. "We can't install that web app, we are standardized on IE6 and WinXP until 2035 or the Second Coming, whichever comes first".
2014 is going to be the Year of Python 3. All the pieces of the puzzle and now here: six, django 1.6, python 3.3, etc.
No, it does not.

The statistics show that firearms are the most popular choice. If it is a contributor then people shoot themselves BECAUSE they own the gun. I fail to follow that sort of logic.

The only connection I can agree with is that firearms allow for snap decisions and fatal first-attempts. Owning a gun does not lead you to a suicide risk, but it doesn't help if you have suicidal tendencies.

That's not enough of a reason to restrict people's rights.

The argument that all guns have only one purpose, which is to kill things, is naive and ignorant. Anyone who states that is being lazy with their arguments, or simply doesn't know anything about guns, because it is easily disproved. There are many guns that are designed for a very specific target and would be incredibly bad to use to kill any living thing.
Those are all accurate statements.

In 2003, I was entering my senior year of CS. When I was taking classes that weren't really my cup of tea (operating systems, networking, processor architecture), I was constantly hearing news about offshoring, Indian IT grads, how dumb startups/Silicon Valley/tech were, how the tech boom had robbed and ruined America, etc.

I finished the CS degree but rather than try to find a job (which I assumed would be unstable and at risk of company collapse or outsourcing), I went to grad school for Urban Planning. Found out that there's plenty of programming work, plenty of tech fields outside of the C systems programming that I didn't enjoy, and that even bad programming jobs are way better than good jobs in other fields, wrt pay, benefits, flexibility, hours, etc.
I disagree. There's a reason that the term "witch hunt" has the connotation that it does.
You'd need their SSN.
If they weren't cool in 2003, it was only as a short-term aftereffect of the dot-com collapse. Those were certainly cool things when I graduated in 1998 and shortly afterwards.
Paul Graham Responds To Critics, Says YC is Planning Event For Female Founders
Ask HN: Best tech product or technology of 2013?
What are, in your opinion, the best tech products or technologies (hardware and/or software) that came out this year? No self-promotion please...
2014: A Year in Review from the Future
Bored? Spend your summer building ML algos on top of $250M in transactional data
21 were executed, 6 male. Regardless, in common use, when someone uses the term 'witch hunt', it's gender-neutral.
You can fix an SKS with a 30 round magazine, which is reloaded via 10 round stripper clips (don't do it though, they're unreliable).

In the case of the M1 and the SKS, the magazine, eg the device that holds the ammunition inside the gun, is the restricted item. The only difference is the magazine is not removed in the field, like with most other guns where that's how you reload.
I hear so many developers jumping in on the mobile platforms but this seems to be the norm....
Lyft not raising prices on NYE
I suppose the best way to handle this sort of situation would be to refuse the search, turn back away from the border, figure out somebody to hold onto your computer (mail it to a friend in the US? It would cross customs, but maybe you could hope it wouldn't be randomly searched. Alternatively just copy the drive to the internet, then trash or sell the hardware), then approach the border again without the computer. They cannot turn you away for refusing to let them search a computer if you do not have a computer.
I would assume it's because ML is just in the public's mind right now, particularly with the advancement in technology that is occurring (sensationalized by Kurzweil & other futurists of course)... Also, debate always seems to pop up regarding the Turing test and whether it is an accurate assessment of intelligence - with technology like voice recognition & siri (& siri-like) software approaching (broaching) Turing's declarations & theory of AI, I can understand a general curiosity from the masses from a philosophical POV. It does seem that the Turing test could soon be passed by a computer, but what that means (if AI is realized, or if Searle really defeated the logic of Turing...IMO, he did not) is something people will want to understand.... if they get bogged down by stats & CS, it seems apt; but the sign up rates & drop rates would merely indicate a demand for the philosophy regarding ML, AI, & current state of CS...if the courses offered are limited & people want to learn, they are going to get attention...