skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Think back to the time of Galileo. Why would you want to make this equation?

Science isn't an enforcement of majority opinion, and that's not the equation i'm making. I'm asserting that the scientific process is an implicit good, in that it requires claims to be provable, and that experts exist to validate them, and that forcing companies which profit from scientific endeavors to present proofs of their claims is also good.

I don't think one can draw a very strong parallel between the world of Galileo and today, anyway, if that were still the case then Charles Darwin and Edwin Hubble would have been burned at the stake. Just because a premise is unpopular and the scientific mainstream rejects it doesn't necessarily imply it has merit on the basis that the scientific establishment exists to hinder progress.

>Imagine that leaders in the software industry could prescribe what languages were "safe" and what weren't. Imagine what that would do to innovation. Isn't it better to let people decide for themselves

I believe this is, in fact, what many industries and the government do - setting rigorous coding standards which include allowing certain languages, and is one of the reasons mission critical systems are not written, for instance, in Node or PHP. I also believe the entire field of cryptography is more or less based on not blindly trusting everyone who comes up with a clever substitution cipher and just hoping for the best. Note that the parallel here between computer science and medicine is where the application directly affects human lives - nobody really cares about "innovation" in webapps, for instance (except maybe for implementations of crypto) but you're probably not likely to kickstart a new operating system for a surgical robot or spacecraft.

>Yet, what of those who are intelligent enough to know the risks and wish to try new things, knowing the possible consequences? What of the cancer patient who is sure to die in 3 months, who wants to try a new experimental drug, but is legally barred from doing so? How can you justify this tyranny?

I can justify it because your question implies that this treatment necessarily works. What if this new experimental drug is complete nonsense? What if the drug company opts to falsify its studies, or hide its side effects, or market it towards treatments for which it is ineffective or dangerous?

> And what of those who are smarter than you, who know better than you, and who you have banned from doing things to help themselves? What of the future people who would have benefited from what they could have learned, that you prevented them from learning?

People like Jenny McCarthy and Dr. Andrew Wakefield who "know better" than to vaccinate children against disease? Or people who "know" AIDS doesn't really exist? Or everyone who "knew" during the plague years that disease itself was caused by bad foul odors, so they surrounded themselves with perfumes and dropped like flies?

If and when this knowledge can be validated, verified, and reproduced then it's science. But you appear to be conflating opinion and belief with science, when those things exist in opposition to one another.
Same with C#. That language has really exploded with new features, and still code and precompiled libraries written for 1.2 compiles and runs perfectly on 5.0.
If you've ever wondered what religious people feel like in relation to God's existence, you now understand.
Hey everyone, one of the Ramen founders here. Would love to answer any questions you have!
This won't stop firmware attacks.
Agreed, thats why I said I agreed with his statement "If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself."

I understand what hes trying to say, I just find it really odd that he would go about it by labeling a group of people as if they were intrinsically different.
Gotcha. I don't use Rails and wasn't trying to rub salt in, it just seemed like there must have been a reason %G was used instead of %Y and I was curious.
There are things in the edited version of the interview that are problematic - not offensive, and PG also points this out. The very first incorrect quote - "We can't make women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years." is problematic because it says women are NOT hackers. Given the number of women who are founders of YC companies, or are engineers, this is patently false and therefore problematic.

I for one care about when problematic or false things are said not because I am offended, but because falsehoods make it harder to accurately deal with problems like the low number of women in STEM careers, including tech startups.
Ok, first of all, congratulations! I remember being 15 and hacking away (It was Turbo Pascal for me). Ignore any naysayers that complain there is no code or it was done with a simple tool. Do what you like and enjoy.

But now on a more serious note, I'm about twice your age, so not too old to be screaming 'get of my lawn', but old enough to hopefully give you some advice that will resonate.

This projects mean an average of a game every two weeks, even if they are simple, I'm sure this is taking a lot of your time. I'm extrapolating here, so if I'm wrong just ignore me, but I'm assuming you are spending a lot of time doing these and not a lot of social activities. Please please please, do some socialisation with folks within the dev community and in your school and neighbourhood. I'm not going to say these are the best times of your life or whatnot, but believe it or not, when you are older and start looking for jobs, you will start understanding that social knowledge is as much, or more important that tech knowledge, and you will regret not developing those skills at younger age when it is easier to do so.

Again, good work, keep producing, but find some balance.
Confiscation in Canada? I'm not well informed on gun laws but I know we have plenty of gun carriers (registered and illegal), most of them live in rural areas.
The problem is that high-capacity magazines can be extremely dangerous if actually used in a crime.

A prime example of this is the North Hollywood shootout where the gunmen had several 75 and 100 round drum magazines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout

These high-capacity magazines are devastating when used to commit a crime and there is zero legitimate use of them for a civilian.

Do hunters or those who enjoy shooting weapons legally NEED high-capacity magazines? The answer is no. Under no circumstances does a civilian actually need or would even benefit from a high-capacity magazine unless they were killing people, cops, or zombies.
From 2.0 -> 3.0.

Ruby doesn't follow SemVer, so expecting no breaking changes between 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 wouldn't necessarily be correct. I don't remember what the policy was at the time.
Nokia wins injunction against all HTC devices (in Germany)
You are so correct, except that some of them don't even hunt for something to be offended about, they simply log onto their favorite websites and take other people's word at what to be offended about!

"Anyone can become angry -- that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way -- this is not easy."- Aristotle
"I appreciate pg stepping up to say something about women in tech."

"Do at least one application cycle completely blind."

Sorry but this comes off as insulting (I know that wasn't your intention), you applaud and agree with him then turn around and pull a "but I still don't trust you". As if PG can't be trusted, or you think that he's secretly sexist and want him to change his successful interview process just to prove himself to you.

I'm positive that women get discriminated in many fields, I've heard my mother's own stories. There's something about seeing a strong woman succeed that makes men feel weak. But this assumption that women are absent or less represented at Y-combinator simply because they are subconsciously discriminated against by Paul and Jessica Livingston just seems absurd. Especially seeing has how politically correct everyone's trying to be now a days. Many people (especially those running Tech Crunch events) are purposely looking for that unicorn female developer to rid themselves of male guilt. The one that's worked on algorithms, programmed since a kid, and coded up numerous apps.

Rather than focus on discrimination ask yourself this: How many times have we seen a female coder's blog? How many frameworks/api/apps have we seen created by females? Is it discrimination or lack of ambition? Take a look at the 10 industries that women rule http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/01/26/10-industries-where-.... Are men being discriminated against (one can argue the day care industry) or do they lack the desire and ambition to get into these industries?
Alex Gaynor was the catalyst for pronoun-gate, and reflects a prevailing attitude among a large number of the founding and old-school Django developers. I had the privilege to meet them and spend some social time with them at a past PyCon and I saw some of the attitudes firsthand, but they were remarkably more muted and respectable in person. Online, well...
Me three. I was beginning to think that I hadn't programmed the systems I actually had.
Interesting. Could you explain more about why you do not find UML as useful? Do you use some alternative now for design and documentation?
That's a plausible hypothesis, but it'd be interesting if someone were willing to test it experimentally. Some evidence for the hypothesis could be found if a "blind" YC batch did much worse than a typical YC batch, measured say 3 or 5 years in the future. Of course, with relatively small sample sizes nothing is likely to be proved beyond doubt, but it'd be interesting to know, and the amount of money needed to test it wouldn't be huge, since YC isn't making VC-level investments. Of course, it's not free or risk-free either, so I could see if they weren't willing to test it.

I've long wanted to see in general some more experimental testing of selection variations. What if YC (or some other funder's) candidates were just selected completely randomly from the applications? What if they were selected solely according to some dumb criterion, like take everyone with the most degrees, or the longest CV, or the most GitHub LoC? What if they were selected purely based on the applications (without the dumb-criterion requirement) but without interviews? For a few tens of thousands of $$, someone willing to try those kinds of things out could get some pretty interesting information on how reliable different selection methods are.

My own hypothesis is a negative one: that beyond screening out a few obviously-bad candidates and taking a few obviously-good candidates, the bulk of the YC selection process is randomly related to outcomes, and the YC mentoring/contacts/press/etc., rather than predictive value of the selection process, is the main driver of their generally strong outcomes. But I can't prove that. :)
That's how Erlang OTP does it, IIUC.
U.S. Names Domestic Test Sites for Drone Aircraft
It is true though, women are not hackers where I live. That doesn't mean that womens are out of skills, and PG explains really nice it's just how it is and it might change in the future.

Given the way my mother cooks, I can state that when it comes to food she totally can be a called a hacker :-)
Well done for researching that.

With seatbelts and their introduction there were anecdotes about people crashing their cars into ponds, lakes etc. where their lives were saved because they were not wearing their seatbelts. I think it is human nature to want to repeat the one incident where the safety measures could have led to disaster.

Since you are so adept at research, can you find this one for me?

Recently a senior New Labour politician who was responsible for bringing in TSA style checks in the UK wise-cracked about how those that complained should be offered two lines at the airport, one with the body scanners, sniffer dogs, robocops etc. and another - to a different flight - where you could just walk straight on. He wondered which flight would be chosen to go on by those complaining types.

It bugs me now that I can't find the quote or remember whether it was Gordon Brown or some other politician.
> Anyway, it took years for numpy support;

Python 3.0 release date: December 3rd, 2008.
Numpy 1.5 (Full 3.0 support) release date: August 31st 2010.

It took 21 months.
I think it's meant to be "I was explaining the distinction between a _mere_ CS major and a hacker".

Wasn't Mark Zuckerberg a CS major, and Graham praises him.
It is undeniably the case that men are more...cautious about what they say and how they behave around women, particularly in the workplace. As a man, I'd have to say that such caution has precedent - you may be an exception, but (this incident being a great example) in my experience women are much more easily offended.

And I could see how that could make things less enjoyable for women who aren't so up tight; women who are easy going and just want to get along with their co-workers and share a laugh and get good work done.

It is unfortunate.
I think what most people are forgetting is the reason for such measures on flights. An hijacked flight is very different from other hijaking/terrorist situations. It leaves you with almost no options except maybe to shoot it down. There is absolutely no other tactical moves that can be made. The same cannot be said for similar attacks on theaters/schools etc. A flight is also a moving threat that requires swift response, and it can strike (when used as a weapon) over quite a large area (In terms of targets it may choose).

Now, if we as this article suggests remove all security to get on flights. As someone planning such an incident, i.e. pull out a gun or other random acts of terror; It would follow that getting on a flight to do such a thing would be the best move. You literally have access to 200+ people with no where to run in a confined area, with no security. The reason flights are given security vs other places such as theaters etc is not some random act. It is cause of the specific threats that are posed by hijacked flights/weapons on flights that are fundamentally different from other locations.

(How fast would the cops get to someone who starts firing at people in any city with such high population density?, now compare that with what happens in a flight, you have no options, and once it starts you practically write off the people who are on the flight because you have no chance of saving them)
I shopped at Target
I think you're not considering the human condition. I'm not against robots, in fact, I am a huge fan of automation, but I think it's hard to ignore the fact that "astronaut" regularly appears on the top of "when I grow up" achievements. Not a coincidence.
This seems naive. There are those with power, who not only make decisions based on their own work but also by setting precedent. If you look at other accelerators and how many of them follow the practicies and forms put down first by YC then its obvious that the impact from YC is large, both in the large number of startups they directly touch (especially in the last several years) and the number of industry wide practicies they influence from the use of convertible notes and now SAFES, to the preference for coder-founders.
As mentioned in the article: before logging into a VPN, make sure your laptop hasn't been tampered with. You just downgraded the consequences of tampering from a security breach to an inconvenience (wiping / replacing your machine).
They'd claim to have a bomb not a gun. And yes they were believed after security checks were implemented.
I blame it on universal college education. At least I ran into this stuff in college for the first time. SJW stuff is too alien and strange for most people to believe without indoctrination. But now there is an audience demanding burning of sexists and racists, the definitions of which have been expanded to include any person of a non-protected class that mentions sex or race.
Erica, genuine question: Did you reach out to any female founders who went through YC to ask about their experience?
Others have also mentioned that many times the PreCheck line is closed, forcing background-checked passengers to go through normal security lines anyway.
How Machine Learning Can Transform Online Dating: Kang Zhao Interview
Bad example, tickets are a direct thing.

Ads are usually not considered a direct part of the website. For instance while most online comic sites have ads, ads are not the point. From the user perspective ads aren't the point of www.google.com, but from Google's perspective it is.
I have a problem that is best solved by encrypting data in the browser - because the server should not be trusted with seeing the information in the clear.

This is much like the exception the OP mentions at LivingSocial. Can anyone weigh in on whether that's safe?
That's exactly why we want to live forever, so a Sunday afternoon spent lazily listening to the rain on the window and dozing doesn't feel like a waste.
"if you're competing for resources"

A lot of techno-utopia assumptions come into play, such as a culture powerful enough to extend life to 500 years probably has no resources left to compete for other than the momentary attraction of a fertile member of the opposite sex, although even that could probably be worked around in a lab (cloning or something?). If we discover something tomorrow I'd have to eat my words but I'm assuming it would require "star trek era" tech to pull this off.
Can you elaborate why you need to use a version shipped with the distro instead of simply using virtualenv+pip to install all third party dependencies?
nice post - also #fmc says hi ;)
My response elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985366

From an economic perspective, having any group not participate in a valuable activity is a waste.
Engineers make this mistake all the time, but it's important to remember that for everyone outside our field, the fact that you can explain why something is happening does not make it ok. Things that are wrong with this communication:

* There are contradictions in claim

* There are misstatements of fact

* They are offering a poorly qualified apology

> Fighting them with blaming statements is just going to make the people who actually fixed it for you sad and disappointed.

Disagree 100%. If the management team can't get their head around the "right" decisions from an engineering perspective, the engineers are in for a world of sadness and disappointment. The management at DO need to hear every one of the criticisms being leveled here and on their own communications channels.
The Exploration and Exploitation of an SD Memory Card: http://youtu.be/r3GDPwIuRKI

Fast Internet-wide Scanning and its Security Applications: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5533_-_en_-_...

A lot of people also recommended 'Seeing The Secret State: Six Landscapes', but I haven't seen that one myself so far: http://youtu.be/j56s46e97Lo
Uhm, well that's another level of paranoia all together. The more solutions the better, even to problems that we (me at least) most probably will never have (or at least, I hope so!).
His behavior was perfectly fine unless you assume that the "interview" as published was wrong. We now know it isn't and the facts have changed.

I doubt he would have tweeted any of it, if he had known this.
Http://topinfopost.com/2013/12/26/fukushima-radiation-hits-san-francisco
http://topinfopost.com/2013/12/26/fukushima-radiation-hits-san-francisco
On the upside, due to the $8M contract, lots of people were able to work and earn a living. The story also mentions how the team had a great time, and probably lots of useful connections between people were made, and tacit knowledge exchanged.

This sort of reasoning could also justify the TSA.
Either that or armored cockpit doors have rendered the other practices entirely worthless.
plus -999,999 times this
"He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved."
Something needs to change about this industry's obsession with sensationalist journalism. If this industry is truly as forward-thinking and progressive as it is, and hopes to make strides in issues like gender/minority equality, then we need to build defenses against severely twisted, unfounded, and intentionally heinous hit-pieces by nobody bloggers who are trying to break into the industry by being edgy and aggressively opinionated.

The discussion about women in startups has completely come to a halt now and has shifted to discussing whether Paul Graham is a sexist.

The most sickening part of this whole ordeal? That these shit-stirring "journalists" are praised and said to have some sort of talent by their respective circles for knowing how to "shake things up," and their higher-ups want nothing more but for them to continue.
I want to echo what tptacek is saying here, though I didn't write much here on HN about the issue. I have been talking with colleagues and friends and the comments in the article seemed well intentioned but a little tone deaf. I am relieved to hear not only that they were false, but also that PG and YC are actively working at some of the misgivings I share concerning our industry.
How horrifying must it be to have every word dissected by a linkbait culture? Then when the mob hears something in their pre-determined wheelhouse, the pitchforks come out with a vengeance.

Moreover, anyone who has read pg knows this kerfuffle was likely spam. I'm just sad our culture has degenerated to convict first, ask questions later.

Shameless has supplanted shameful.
By extension, I would love it if my tax forms clarified what fraction of my salary went to funding the NSA.
Or:
300,000,000 / 7,000,000,000 = 0.04285714285

4.28%
Sorry, you are completely right. There is a proper website, which isn't linked up to the app yet: http://headspace.io/
IIRC Google made a honeypot link and got it to show up on Bing without allowing it to be spidered directly (since nothing linked to it).

However Microsoft responded that they used Internet Explorer or some other client side tech with the "use my searches" options turned on to go to the honeypot on google.com, leading to Microsoft to get a hold of it.

So less of a "Microsoft steals Google results" and more of a "Microsoft follows Google results when you use their browser and don't tell it not to".
Beatifying personal & professional public links using your own domain
I know tons of CS majors who are terrible hackers. It's a non-necessary, insufficient condition. However, the best hackers often have a CS background. This is reality, and it is in line with what pg said. There is a distinction, ie, when I hear "CS major" I do not think "hacker", and when I hear "hacker" I do not think "CS major".

To think that pg of all people fails to see the value in a CS degree is pretty hilarious though.
Innovative use of Go, I must say.
Thanks never the less.
> The bate car scenario eliminates the possibility that the officers involved talked the person into it

It also doesn't make much sense; what's the difference between a "bate car" and a regular car? Do we need bate cars and people watching those, or regular police officers patrolling the streets and protecting ordinary cars from getting stolen?

The whole sting concept lies on the idea that there are inherently bad people and that society just needs to somehow flush them out with clever traps.

But that concept is at odds with the fundamental humanist idea of "punishment" and human perfectibility; the purpose of punishment is to help people improve and amend their behavior. If some people are just "bad" then punishment won't help them.
All of it. All of the mad science.
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