skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Running in the minority here but I honestly don't have a HUGE problem with the omission of "these", even though, yes it does change the meaning and intent of PG's quote.

I am more interested that in all the backlash, I haven't seen anyone trash Valleywag, which originally sensationalized the article in the first place. If Valleywag didn't add their hyperbolic rhetoric around the quotes, would we be having discussion?

Regardless whether you think PG meant these women to be those who apply to YC/choose CS as a major before hacking at 13, I think the greater point he's making (and one that is being lost here) is that STEM bias against women is systemic and starts much earlier than the YC interview process, board room or admissions desk.

Girls who are discouraged from STEM interests at 6 and 7 are less likely to pick up "hacking" at 13. This causes a ripple effect over time as fewer girls/women convert into STEM practitioners at each stage of growth, partly from additional gender bias and partly because we're starting at a lower number.

This is a real issue and I'm glad we're having a discussion about this. I just hope we don't lose sight of what matters.
> operating system releases younger than 2013ish

This seems like it depends on what kinds of OS you regularly use. On Linux the deployment situation isn't quite that dire. Python3 has been in Debian stable since Debian 6 (aka Squeeze, released February 2011), so running Python3 code isn't a problem if the machine is even close to up to date. On Ubuntu the situation is even reversed: Python3 is default, and starting in 2014 it will be the only supported version, with Python2 support being dropped. It will still be installable out of "universe", but the goal is to drop Python2 from "main" by the release of 14.04 LTS in 2014, because LTS releases promise 5 years of support, and they don't want to be supporting Python2 into 2019.
Ask HN: Best places/parties in SF for New Year's Eve?
What up, HN? My Girlfriend and I are staying in SF at the moment and are looking for something cool to do tomorrow night as we're at a bit of a loose end, any suggestions would be much appreciated. We're both 26, into gigs (more indie than EDM), good food, beer etc.

Also, is NYE big here? Does the city put on fireworks etc?

Thanks, Chris - email is in sig.
Why would terrorists need pikes on an airplane? There is no cavalry there.
yeah something is wrong. I ran the test on my lenovo x200s with an intel core 2 duo and intel GMA 4500 graphics and got 3700 "objects" and with a "tickcount" of 1400. I'm assuming objects are sprites--the test itself doesn't use the term.

If his HD4000 is getting 1250 objects, I shouldn't get 3700.
I imagine you could do even better with something like PostSharp or Fody.

public void MyFunction([InRange(0, 5)] int x, [NotNull] object y)
{
// ...
}

I just checked, and in fact Fody can do something just like this [1].

The only downside I see is contracts like this would be hard to write concisely:

if (useFirstObject == true)
Contract.AssertNotNull(firstObject);
else
Contract.AssertNotNull(secondObject);

[1] https://github.com/Fody/NullGuard
Getting offtopic, but NYC's most prolific and least dangerous train hijacker was just released again:

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/12/25/transit-impostor-arre...
Mat Honan's article was a valuable critique. And interesting. Gruber's reaction on the other hand...

> It’s a cool lab demo that they’re presenting as a finished product.

Google couldn't be any more clear that it is a beta and they've never once said that the current price is what it will hit the market at (or if it will hit the market, for that matter). So that's just flat out wrong.

> It is ugly and clunky and ridiculously expensive for what it does.

Again, assuming it's a mass market product and not the experiment in wearable computing it is.

> In the meantime, to me, Google Glass is the new Tablet PC.

And there it is. Glass is Microsoft's failed foray into tablet computing. He's not even sure that this form factor will be popular, yet he compares it to a technology that took off in spite of an initially poor execution. He's convinced it will succeed, I guess, when someone other than Google does it. I wonder who he has in mind.
Well sure, but in that case hasn't the medium shifted to the meta, and what has to work is the explanation itself?

And certainly not. What I'm saying is that a piece of software functioning correctly does not preclude it from being "utter shit". And quite a lot of "utter shit" software (based on its foundations and purpose) is currently getting loads of recognition from VC money looking to become middlemen 2.0.
"It really annoys me that this side of the industry doesn't get more exposure!"

If only more self-proclaimed "geeks" who purport to care about the future of the internet understood the value of a publicly reachable IP address.

If more folks besides the big players had these, then the potential for reaching a holy grail of "decentralization" and "end-to-end", and all the wonderful things that would make possible, would be much greater.

Instead, these "geeks" are led to believe that hyped workarounds like "the cloud", "webRTC", "IPv6", etc. will save the day.

None of these workarounds should be necessary if you "own" a small block of public IP addresses.

How does the price of these "IPs for sale" compare with what you pay AWS for an IP address you do not use?
Google could probably price the glass for just a few hundred dollars, but they don't. Why? Because Glass is not yet a polished consumer product with apps/features that create a compelling reason to wear them all the time. Google is releasing them intentionally to 'thought leaders' who will critique and come up with the ideas for features that will make Glass broadly compelling to consumers. By the time Glass is released as a mass market product it will already have app store loaded with apps. Seems like a simple strategy!
It’s a cool lab demo that they’re presenting as a finished product.

They do? It seems to me that they've been looking for early adopters that can provide feedback. It'll be a finished product once it's available for order on Google Play.
Just a bit of useful criticism here.

The themes look all the same with only a slight variation on color and font use. Also it'd be nice to see them used in an example. Ie: map app, messaging app, photo, etc.

Great job though I think this space needs something like this.
Well, for those of us in the US, that's not the best case! Sheesh! Leave us to rot in our awful insular spoiled rotten hellhole? The best parts of the internet in the US are that we can interact with and engage people and culture from the rest of the world! Sorry about sending our garbage to you as a side-effect…!
Time, technology and leaping seconds (2011)
I disagree.

I own Glass. 99.9% of people who see me wearing them want to know more about them. They want to try them on and experience glass. And of course, I let them give Glass a whirl. They love it. Yes it's WAY too pricey but, it's still awesome. I don't find them that unattractive. I look at it like, "I'm at a sporting/concert event and I obviously want to take pictures, so I'm wearing this, which is more convenient." Once I explain that to people, they totally get why I'm wearing Glass.

Glass makes sense and it's a step in the right direction for wearable computing. At least for now.

My gripes:

It needs Bluetooth LE. I'm an iOS developer. I need Bluetooth LE to support notifications at least.

iOS is hamstrung until I can send iMessages. I don't see that changing.

Swiping through all the cards can be kind of a nuisance.

Battery life.

Google is a software company so, I imagine the more Apple opens up their notifications etc, the better Glass will get.
Some things are non-falsifiable. And I find it funny that you follow up that accusation with anecdotal thoughts about hormones.

Just because we haven't found a falsifiable way to test a hypothesis doesn't mean you can take "mountains" of research that make very specific conclusions and randomly apply them to whatever generalization you want to.
Stick with it! I didn't know about shell builtins like 'read' when I was 17 - you're already ahead of millions in the game out there.

Read a lot of other people's code to see how stuff is done, it helps a lot.
I like gadgets and various electronics, but for some reason Glass just rubs me the wrong way.

I'm not sure if it's because of the 'creep factor' or what. I guess I'm just not ready for a society always recording everything. I can't even imagine what high school would be like. One embarrassing thing happens, and 30 people have it recorded, uploaded to the internet, and commenting on it in minutes. I guess that could already happen with phones, but at least right now not everything is being recorded at every minute by every person.

If Glass use does become widespread, I have a feeling many private companies, such as restaurants, and malls will ban its use indoors, which would make it a pain to use (especially if it's connected to your prescription glasses!).
This is a cute PoC of how much easy it is, but with freely available forensic tools like, say, PhotoRec is possible to extract much more meaningful and diverse data (entire files, images, database files...) that by simply running strings.

So, don't take it as the maximum damage one can get.
So, I should probably point out that pg went to Harvard specifically to study Philosophy. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in 1990. Therefore your critique that he should have a degree before writing about philosophy is interesting.

All of those people are academics par execellance. I'm not talking about business-ified institutional academica. I'm talking about spending a long time on a topic, researching it and thinking deeply, clearly on it before you offer your opinion as though it were valuable.

pg spent weeks on each of his early essays. He spent a solid month writing What You Can't Say. He spent at least a couple days writing this one. They aren't opinion pieces.
>>Our first and immediate update is to ensure that a clean system is provided during creates, regardless of what method was taken for initiating a destroy. Engineers are updating the code base right now to ensure that will be the default behavior, and we will provide another notice when that code is live.
The scrub feature will remain, allowing customers to take an extra level of precaution if they choose to scrub the data after the delete.

You're seeing those comments on that blog right? http://i.imgur.com/f90Nx0V.png

I don't think everyone will be happy until you make scrubbing the default. Or I guess those direct reads with the "dd" command stop yielding data from previous VM instances, which it does kinda sound like DO is preparing to do. If scrubbing isn't going to be default, I'm kinda curious what DO will be doing to ensure clean VMs.
Practicing Our Craft
> there is not enough empirical evidence right now for anybody to create a precise model of what is happening

This we can both agree with. I'd like to leave it at that.
> Evidently you have never tried to do this before.

No I haven't tried this, I have better things to do, like working out how to use the POSIX library.

But Lucio Fontano did something very similar, and it worked.
No, it would be very difficult. But the money is there for those willing to put the effort in.
> It is ugly and clunky and ridiculously expensive for what it does. To me, that’s everything. Same thing with all existing smartwatches — the problem isn’t the idea, it’s the actual execution. There are no points for being first to market with a bad product.

This is just wrong. Google gains massive points in my book for putting something like Glass out there. They get points for showing the world a glimpse of what the future can be, and getting everyone else to think about it. The wearables revolution was started with Glass, and whether or not Glass ends up being the flagship product of the wearables market it doesn't matter. Google started it either way.
NSA Spyware Allegedly Gives Backdoor Access to iPhones
One can only appreciate the irony of note [3] :)

" The controversy itself is an example of something interesting I'd been meaning to write about, incidentally. I was one of the first users of Reddit, and I couldn't believe the number of times I indignantly upvoted a story about some apparent misdeed or injustice, only to discover later it wasn't as it seemed. As one of the first to be exposed to this phenomenon, I was one of the first to develop an immunity to it. Now when I see something that seems too indignation-inducing to be true, my initial reaction is usually skepticism. But even now I'm still fooled occasionally."
Ah I see what you mean.

People I respect I give the benefit of the doubt and interpret it as charitable, but I still have to verify what they say by checking other sources.

People I don't respect, I assume they are lying to screw with me and in 90% of the cases when I try to verify what they are claiming is true, ends up being untrue. The other 10% of the time I had a mistake and had misjudged them.

I have a respect for the Hacker community here, because most people are honest about their feelings and speak from experience and cite sources and stuff.

On Facebook there was this guy on a friend's group who asked me to prove what I was saying, so I cited seven peer reviewed sources. He said he didn't need to prove anything he said was true and that I was wrong for simply disagreeing with him. He then went into a rage and sent me threats via private message. I then blocked him and reported him for abusive behavior, he then accused my friend of censoring the posts to hide the truth because when I blocked him all of my comments vanished from his view. My friend explained to him that he had been blocked by me and that he could no longer see the comments of a user who blocked him. He still refused to believe it. This guy claimed to be a programmer, had no clue how math and science worked, couldn't even figure out how the block feature of Facebook works. Guys like him I have no respect for.
Fair enough, but by 'the top tax brackets' I meant those sufficient to trigger combined taxation approching 50%,

eg, $90K in California? back of the envelope

28% $87,850 to $183,250 Federal Rate

15.30%* Social Security, self employed

8.8% State-Level taxes

=======

~ 52% Aggregate tax rate (excluding 9% sales tax average).

This is not an average rate, nor does it include the provision of the healthcare mandate. In any event, this is meant to be illustrative only, and the marginal and average dynamics play out differently at higher rates (for a variety of reasons, including tax-sheltering and regressive taxes on payroll and sale/consumption taxes).
Preface: Occasionally, I disagree with pg too. But I respect him since I find most of his essays insightful and I appreciate the effortless precision of his writing style. I.e. too many bloggers beat around the bush and rarely attack the crux of their topic directly, let alone adequately support their thesis.

That said, I'm one of those who "don't see the problem". I reread his essay about inequality. I tried to imagine your thought process. I agree that money, freedom, and power are joined at the hip. I don't see how this contradicts pg's quote.

Here's how I understand things. Corruption implies power by definition. But does power necessarily imply corruption? Lord Acton believed power consistently causes corruption in practice. But it doesn't have to be that way. I think we can agree on this.

Here's where I imagine our disagreement lies (best guess, low confidence). Corruption connotates "immoral behavior". But pg's examples indicate (to me) that he wanted to address not immoral behavior per se, but the double standard society imposes between the privileged and the less fortunate.

This distinction frames the discussion in a more actionable way. Like you said, power enables people to do what they want... which isn't always moral (or fair [1]). It's inevitable. So society won't be able to prevent this consistently, lest reality resemble Minority Report. But one thing society can prevent is punishing offenders according to a double standard. Another thing society can prevent is lack of transparency. I imagine either would decrease corruption while allowing the privileged to enjoy their power (money) in more socially acceptable ways.

Personally, I'm especially upset with the U.S. lobby system. In theory, democracy is supposed to afford one vote per capita. In practice, the lobby system allows the powerful to undermine this principle.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html
I'm just laughing at the pissing match. Kinda funny that one would PAY for the lowest-quality journalism on the planet. This is like if Pitchfork started charging $200/year just to read it.
There are an unlimited number of books out there that you haven't published yourself :) Just write about something you know and enjoy the process.
I'm assuming you've looked up the definition, they are in no way related to one another.

Innovation is defined as "a new method, idea or product."
Entrepreneurship is "the act of organizing a business venture."

I'm an innovator, not an entrepreneur. I get excited by change and creation of new products and services. The act of creating needs to be unique in order for me to get excited about it. I contrast that with my brother who is an entrepreneur. He loves creating businesses, he'll sell them to you as the most innovative because of x,y,z or they are changing the world because of a,b,c, but he can then go on and list off a hundred competitors who are trying to do the same thing, and the products they are all selling are barely indistinguishable to those familiar with the market.

The innovator concerns themselves with novelty, the entrepreneur, with business. It might help to compare it to a Chef and a Restaurateur. The Chef is the creator and hopefully an innovator, but definitely an artist in the creation of food. The Restaurateur wants his restaurant to be full of happy people spending their money and making x% profit on each sale.

Entrepreneurship can be driven by Innovation, and vice-versa, but they certainly don't have to be related at all.
I believe cookiecaper is right for the foreseen future, there is more demand for Python Data-Scientists than Ruby Developers.

But we ignore one important thing here and that is the lesson! People need to learn something from the Python story!

Moving forward with an evolving concept, requires the (mathematical) coherence of all ideas. You cannot invent a spoken language, then break it and say now we speak a different dialect, because we use 2 words less this way. Nobody will adopt, not because the feature of reducing verbosity and increasing expressiveness is actually bad, but because the new concept branches out and technically seen it's "noise", because it adds more without integrating it. You can throw a second motor into a car, but without integrating the second motor, you will have no benefit. Python has to learn this the hard way, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson made a decision for the C programming language about 40 years ago and all of the C code written back then can still be compiled, albeit some things have changed and require minor changes. But this is something you can introduce in a timespan of 40 years. You cannot make a new present every 5 years and say, that all many of the old presents you've made back then, have to be given back, when you accept the new present. Coherence and Evolution are powers that's use should unify and only diversify when required or requested by the diffusion of technology into the userbase.
I had no idea Gmail had multiple "stars". Thank you for this!
I agree. I work at a small mobile dev shop. At least 10 people there own Glass. No one cares.
Up until the last paragraph I thought you were going to say that your opinion of Paul Graham had become much more negative.

To be fair most of the people directly involved in this ruckus don't come out of it looking all that well; but The Information did say the interview was on the record and did tell Graham that it was getting published and didn't get pushback. The fact that Valleywag was able to stir up a controversy and garner a massive amount of traffic off the back of PG's somewhat inept handling of a sensitive question ( that he knew was sensitive ) does no credit to Valleywag, even if it is their business model.

Those people who slotted this into their preexisting models of reality and tried to use it as a teaching opportunity may feel rather threatening to some. which may mean they need to rethink their tactics; but may just mean that some people feel threatened whenever the topic of gender equity is brought up.

Now I get that what PG was saying was not nearly as inflammatory as it was made out to be by Valleywag. However, it did bring to light some unconscious bias on his part; and I get that that is very hard to acknowledge and correct, especially when you have to do so in the full glare of hostile publicity. I do hope the PG can take some time to reflect and to reach out to some of the people who have substantive criticisms of his thinking on this topic.

note: I'm not saying that he needs to turn ycombinator into a feminist reeducation camp, just that he needs to _listen_ to what some of his critics are trying to point out to him.

note the second: I've been participating in HN for 6 years or so; and I have to say that the level of reflexive sexism I've seen in the comments this past week is making me think I should abandon my account.
Exactly.

Full disclosure does this. Before full disclosure was the norm, researchers would discover vulnerabilities in software and send details to the software companies -- who would ignore them, trusting in the security of secrecy. Some would go so far as to threaten the researchers with legal action if they disclosed the vulnerabilities.
https://www.schneier.com/essay-146.html

If the code is public, just fixing the code without CVE or similar is considered bad because diffing the code will yield the vulnerability.

You don't go around and tell people you found a vulnerability until it is fixed (in the case of vendor ignoring alert it is ethical to tell the public).
I think the Godwin rule is good for stuff that is extreme hyperbole, and typically just examples of attacks on character. The 'Soup Nazi' from Seinfeld being a good example: it was one of my favorite episodes, but really, the soup restaurant guy is Hitler?

But I am literally making a point about something that I think is truly key to preserving democratic society in America, or whatever is left of it, and I would view the removal of private gun ownership in the United States as actually being a prelude to something as bad as Nazi Germany. I think the Second Amendment is the keystone to all of the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Basically, calling your boss Hitler because he made you work on the weekend is absurd, but making comparisons between Hitler and somebody like Pol-Pot is quite legitimate.
It is not absurd, it is plain dishonest.
The Entertainment Business
But... is it a tradition for Rwandans??

I thought similarly, why would they need to be circumcised, but apparently it does help quell the spread of HIV.

http://www.who.int/hiv/topics/malecircumcision/en/
Very few things are as black and white as pregnancy.

When solving a problem starts by blaming someone, it can distract the conversation and attention to become about personalities, positions, politics, arguing over perceptions, & interpretations, instead of the problem itself.

If, after something like the 5 why exercise, all roads keep leading to someone, one can probably look at having a positive supportive intervention.

If that person doesn't want it or feel they need it? That's more of a culture thing than just about one person.
hmm great question. I don't know the answer, but to me they would still be hand made, but not originally hand made.