skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And yet, as Gruber points out, they are just a rounding error in web browser usage. [1] If they're that successful, why don't Chromebooks appear in usage stats?

1. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/12/28/chromebooks
How To Travel On Less
I don't see a relevant distinction between them for the purposes of this discussion. Can you explain what you believe the relevant difference is, and why it matters?

(Express your model in maths as much as possible, for the purpose of clarity.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6530237
Unlike HN commentors, whose ability to parse the Bitcoin white paper suddenly turns them into macroeconomic experts.
So you get other sites to publish your articles, but when other sites want to do the same to you, you call that spam?
It is not a runtime in the ways that matter. After it has transferred control to the user program, it is gone completely; it never inserts itself into the program's execution. It is more like the loader or dynamic linker of the OS than like the runtime of other languages. If you have your own mechanism for transferring control to the C program you don't need the main() wrapper at all.
The most Kafkaesque paragraph from today’s NSA ruling
I don't quite understand the structure of your argument.

First you claim it will not work because you cannot imagine "Men Nurse" would succeed. And then you claim that the reason why many women is because they were not exposed to programming as a child, a trait that is shared with many males.

This implies that the reason there is a short-fall in men in nursing is the similar to why there is a short-fall of women in programming. I don't believe this is the case, especially when you consider that your stated reason for the short-fall in women is that they are not exposed to programming as a child, implying the reason that men do not get into nursing is because they were exposed to less nursing like activities as a child. Which seems frankly kinda silly.

Furthermore, if we accept your premise that the reason that many women do not code is because of lack of childhood exposure, then clearly the massive skew in demographics right now implies that there is something about how we tend to do things that skew exposure towards boys. And if we're not careful about it, then if we just did a "We Code" we could very likely just include the same skewing towards boys, and we're right back to where we began.

I wanted to post something like this the last time something like this came up, but here we go. Rising tides raise all boats. But patching the leaky ones and installing a bilge pump will certainly help the floundering ones more. And right now people are deciding that there are some boats that are having trouble, and want to fix that first.
Right, but when he had a chance to comment again to defend his statements, he instead went after the angle of saving himself rather than addressing the issue at the core.

He could have talked about the work he's doing to help girls learn to code.
He could have talked about others' work to help girls learn code.
He could have talked about how he is not biased towards men.

Instead, he just attacked journalists in general and didn't bother to address the root problem. It's all about saving oneself.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The question you ask is a good one, though you are jumping to some conclusions. I think it may very well be that there should be a "male nurse initiative", or at least that the lack of one doesn't somehow dictate the ethics and obligations of our field.
NSA Intercepts Computer Deliveries
No. People I meet on and offline ask me to write an article for them. I don't approach them.

Occasionally I have written a full blown article and suddenly realised it would be better suited for another site (eg techcrunch) and approached the editor there to ask if they would like to publish that specific article, but I don't do blanket "can I write something for you". That would be highly hypocritical!
In general, the distinction between manipulation and argumentation, is that argumentation attempts to get the reader to see your point of view. That is, if I believe X for reason Y, then I will say that in my article. Manipulation would be arguing X for whatever reason you think the reader will find convincing.

In this case, the criticism was that the Guardian argues against drone strikes (and perhaps this particular war), by using some poor arguments e.g. that drone strikes are especially likely to kill civilians.
WeChat, WhatsApp and the walkie-talkie content opportunity
If by tons, you mean 9%, then yes, there are tons of male nurses. Many are nurse anesthetists, which isn't what most people think of when they think "nurse". (Anesthetists also earn an extra hundred grand a year, on average.)

http://www.census.gov/people/io/files/Men_in_Nursing_Occupat...
A standard library is not the same as a runtime. A library you explicitly call out to, and if you do not call it you can avoid linking the library at all. A runtime inserts calls to itself in a way that cannot be reasonably avoided, and must therefore be linked/loaded by every program.
Believe it or not, it is quite conceivable that many people on HN actually took enough time to read lots of books on economics and made up their mind about which school of thought is closer to the truth.
So now a prank is also called a hack? I know it's MIT so by association everything they do is a hack but come on.

That said, awesome prank.
That's 3x as many as there were 20 years ago. What does the trendline look like for software development? (I don't know; it's a serious question).
Surely you're intelligent enough to see the distinction between Barber surgeons, grave robbers, and killing machines.

There's a whole world of applications for AI and machinery that we could be pooling our resources into, but instead we're funding a continuing war on "terror" abroad. There's no reason why the war is necessary, no reason why technological progress would be made faster in the art of killing vs anything else.

Perhaps you believe that perpetual war is unavoidable and necessary. We could argue that.

But the way I see it, war isn't necessary, and the technological progress we make by funding war is a slim silver lining at best on a double edged sword with no handle. So you see, I find this thread ridiculous. I think you guys are psychopaths. And you're outnumbered by the rest of us.
Sweet baby jesus, I loved SimTower as a youngster.
> write related blog posts about the vertical market, about the topics that your potential customers will be interested in, and keep engaging with them

That's some pretty tactical advice for a strategic conversation.

Writing blog posts is one way of engaging with the market, the goal being to understand the people in the market better as well as establishing yourself as a participant in it.
Where did this happen? This article is a blog by Fred Wilson.
Hey Avenger123. "I especially enjoyed your notion that the Guardian is "serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion." You are so right. I always fell that the White House and the American military are always providing really insightful information that is really backed up substantiated by information." Two thoughts there. It feels like you're arguing "two wrongs make a right" And secondly I spent time pointing out that there are pro war (Fox News) equivalents that I/we find equally objectionable. I don't like either. It's just unlikely that a pro war/drone piece would ever make it to the top of HN so I'm here objecting to a Guardian piece.
US Government secretly sprayed radioactive particles on US Citizens
Maxis ceased to innovate when EA purchased them.
How would intervening in Rawanda have saved lives exactly? Go in and arm the Tutsi's? Start killing Hutus? It is probable that intervention would have caused more casualties (including to US forces).

Kosovo is also disputed even in terms of actual casualties, let alone projected casualties, and is probably not a good case for intervention.

I fully agree there is not a good answer either way (syria included)... Just pointing out that your examples don't really predict the past or future either. Prediction in any case seems like a waste of time. (Unless you're The Doctor that is.)
This is effectively a weapons system, and any country with budget can build the same system or better. To stop the NSA would be unilateral disarmament, without reason to expect others to cut back on their infowar programs.
The commenter plies the same trade as the original poster: https://gitlab.com/gwenbell/gwenbell-node/blob/0d8e432851b5d...
It is not helpful that "nursing" is an explicitly gendered term. And despite that, the fraction of nurses who are male is climbing steadily.
Leave something beautiful: Josh Allan Dykstra, Cofounder of Work Revolution
Because the stat is unreliable.
Managing your manager: how to repair an imperfect relationship
...in "commercial markets". As far as I can tell, that does not include consumer and would make the headline extremely misleading.

So a bunch of companies decided to buy ChromeBooks, presumably without asking their employees.
If anything Gruber points out that Chrome OS isn't being counted.
Why must we make sure we're not being deceived? Why isn't the burden of proof on the people taking money out of my paycheck and using it to brutalize people on the other side of the globe?

And this "war is hell" stuff is just so tiring and intellectually barren. If someone told me "x is hell," and I know that x is entirely optional, I would say "okay then, don't do x." I will never understand how the mantra "war is hell" is used to justify or excuse war.
Depends on definition of "notebook".

I would assume it is different from laptop, netbook, ultabook and tablet.
Because economists are paid to push a point of view by their employer. Eg the Bank or the Fed.
Banks aren't actually that secure.

Financial services generally aren't in the business of security. They're in the business of risk management. Once you understand that distinction, much of what they do makes sense.

Unfortunately, some unhappy conclusions for the customers of these services do logically follow, starting with the fact that if you're not a huge customer, the financial services have little natural incentive to care about the safety of any assets/investments they handle for you. If something very bad happens, you might be an acceptable loss relative to the cost of mitigation, right up to the point of fighting you in court and then losing anyway. You personally might suffer greatly for any losses, and even if it's ultimately put right you might suffer months or years being dragged through the system, but no employee at any financial service is personally going to lose any sleep over your case.

This is why it is necessary to have regulators with teeth in financial industries. Any lapse that could cause significant harm to a customer should also potentially cause significant harm to the financial service. An ongoing pattern of such lapses should cause severe damage to the service's bottom line and eventually it should become an existential threat to the financial service itself, preferably with safeguards to ensure that the management and/or shareholders can't just escape using the technicalities of incorporation. Without this sort of counter-balance, the numbers will always be in favour of trampling on the little guy, and if there's one industry that runs on the numbers more than anything else, it's financial services.
I've made similar mistakes (classifying a launch as failed). The key is to keep at it so long as you have some set of enthusiastic users. They will help you mature the product, and when that happens you can grow big quickly (Pinterest and Airbnb come to mind).
Excellent article. I wrote a simple SDIO driver for the STM32F4 and have three different MicroSD cards to test it with (they all behave slightly differently) and its clear that such systems "working" is a small miracle in itself :-) All the vagaries of implementation.
> If you can get every user to invite one other user, you'll have a huge site in no time.

The ironic thing about this is that you have to have product/market fit for people to recommend the product to other people. Consider every case (there aren't many) where this strategy was successful.

This does seem to work sometimes in the case of e.g. Kickstarter, but less than half of kickstarter projects reach their funding goals so it's not a great example.
Alternative to Kiva, there is lending club. I wonder if there are any startups that could aggregate all these investment opportunities...
Good point. I studied social psychology and communications, and in both fields I found the difficulty, and motivation/engagement levels shockingly low. Observing friends of mine who studied philosophy, engineering or physics painted a completely different story.
> don't see too many dull kids winning selling bees

Assuming for the moment all people who win spelling bees have high IQs that doesn't mean all people with high IQs spell well. That's just inappropriate generalization[1] on your part.

I think you're also failing to consider people leaving comments on forums are often more concerned with the content getting their point across than making errors (e.g. you wrote selling bees instead of spelling bees).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_example
So all we ask is for some proof. That's all. If there is proof, even if it is the second hop or the tenth hop, it doesn't matter.
Awesome. Thanks for letting me know about this campaign! Best wishes, Brooklyn person.
Using Python + pandas to munge and analyze college basketball data
In that case I don't get it... do I basically get a random name when I mine a namecoin? And then I try to buy names I actually want from someone who has the name I want? And if no one has the name yet then I have to wait until someone mines it?
I think Harvey Mudd's approach is fantastic. I love the idea of two separate tracks for getting people to code. It allows people to take an academic risk which they normally wouldn't be able to take for fear of destroying their GPA.

I think this is a fundamental problem with STEM programs in general. Why have grades and tracks at all? The important thing is to learn the material, and not what grade you got on a test at some arbitrary point in time. This is what is so brilliant about MOOCs like Khan Academy. No grades, and you can repeat the material until you know it.
> But how often in web engineering do you see postings for junior employees? Everyone wants someone who already has experience, the more senior the better. How do we get more people of any diversity to work at our companies if there are no entry-level positions in the field?

Unfortunately, it's true in most field, it's extremely rare to find an ads that doesn't ask for a diploma and job experience (it didn't ask for experience, but I saw an ads where they asked for a diploma in a call center position...)
He is still a writer for the NYT and taken seriously by the mainstream audience. Proof that talk is cheap, especially dismissiveness is not punished if it turns out that it was unwarranted.

Just something to keep in mind when reading dismissive opinions.
Perhaps its your self consciousness at play here, but you haven't told us what any of your products were...
Author here. This was my first foray into PyMC. I'd love feedback (good or bad).
He disagreed with the grandparent's skewed analysis, and explained why.

Why don't you do the same rather than conflating "things I don't agree with" and "not really constructive discussion"?
As someone who went to Harvey Mudd I can attest that the program is very well designed. All Mudd students (CS/Eng/Math/Physics/Bio/Chem) are required to take some computer science courses. And theyve done a tremendous job at gearing those courses for people who have never coded in their life, and people who have been coding since they were 5.
1) It is clearly labeled as an opinion piece (First person abounds: I saw, I wish, I knew)... If you are looking for informative, unbiased, hard hitting journalism in an opinion piece you may be looking in the wrong place.
2) Decisions are always hard, even with perfect resolution/clarity, but adding additional handicaps (pixelation) seems like relevant information... I don't see how that is 'counterpoint' in any way?
Do you realis that the US presence in the Midle East is fundamental for the empowering of the Taliban, don't you?

Of course, if not for the US, some other bully would be there, I perfectly understand that. Thus, no need of answering anything along those lines.
I would imagine robot warfare is / will be much more politically feasable as "our" human cost goes way down.
Maybe we should be asking why so many boys are being pressured into hacking?
Paul Graham & Sexism: Just One More Distraction From Real Work
1) seems like the pertinent disagreement, here. OK, fine, it's an opinion piece, and we shouldn't expect any sort of actual information from such a thing. Why, then, are we posting and upvoting such crap? Why is anybody defending it?
It is indeed. There are (albeit not micro) SD cards with built-in wireless and an embedded webserver. hackable of course[1]

[1] http://haxit.blogspot.com/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-...
[2] HN Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195627
Google Tax? The Birth of an Indirect Tax on Internet Advertising Companies
I am working in a football app that will hit the market on the eve of Football World Cup 2014.
Want to get to know the history of nuclear power, spiced with interesting anecdotes? Then these two books are the right thing for you:

Atomic Awakening by James Mahaffey

and

Atomic by Jim Baggott

It's of course only one technology, but a technology from which very broad uses have sprung.
I don't think we've come anywhere close to rejecting the hypothesis of some kind of innate personality and ability differences between male and female. Men are higher represented in diseases like autism, which involve lower social functioning/higher affinity for the abstract. Men score higher on Math SAT[1], despite the school system being tilted more and more in favor of female.

More women than men graduate from college and women have flooded into traditionally male majors in the sciences. There are plenty of female biologists and doctors. But they have not penetrated the most mathy majors, like engineering or Math itself.

Maybe men and women aren't interchangeable cogs, and some combination of difference in interest and average ability will always mean that the way to get females into your tech company is by having a big non-software department.

[1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
Seconded. His imagination of a computer-like workstation, cobbled together from 1940's technology, was the most fascinating thing I've read all year.
I have no idea if 21% is correct, but on Amazon Chromebooks are 4 of the 5 top selling laptops. Something is going on.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Comput...
I'm not sure this is a fair assessment. The (admittedly likely butchered at this point) quote:

> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us.

In the very next sentence pg states that the lack of interest in young girls at age 13 is an actual problem. If he had some inherent belief that "girls just don't like computers" thing (ie, the great "male tech misogyny" strawman) he wouldn't cast it as a problem to be solved.
Should You Go Straight From Paper To HTML/CSS, or via Photoshop First?
If this is a legitimate concern and it's not being addressed after some reasonable initial contact, maybe you can get a mountain of retweets going with some unfortunate hash tag about the bank and a link to some reputable source about this issue. For better or worse, Twitter campaigns do seem to be somewhat effective against the PR machines of big businesses, as sooner or later someone important at the business often hears about them and starts damage limitation.
What about jury duty
Bought Chromebooks (and Chromecasts) for all my tech-illiterate family members in order to cut down on having to provide tech support, and it's been amazing. No issues so far, and everything just works.

I think that actually is just fine for most companies -- less tech support, and does everything they need (collaborative documents, email, web searches, etc).
The book Daily Rituals, from which most of these seem to be excerpted, is a great read into the daily routines of lots of "creative" people of all stripes -- writers, artists, scientists, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/0307...
How is it unreliable, and how is the margin of error so bad that these are a no-show?
If I understand this correctly, it is the simultaneously the most absurd and scary thing I have read in a very long time. So now crimes committed by the government cannot be challenged because the government never intended anyone to find out about it - thats a horrid peace of law.
This is interesting:
Of the 100 top academic authors in computer science today, per Microsoft, 96 are male: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=2...

The owner of this site appears to be a woman. Again, 20 males: http://www.bestcomputersciencedegrees.com/author/2admin/

And there is a preponderance of white males in the annals of computer history: http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm

Even among software professionals, there is divergence in the types of roles women take vs. men. Search LinkedIn (3rd & everyone else) for SQA, and you get about 25% women. Search "Full Stack" and you get about 10% women.

Is this really YC's problem to solve?
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes covers both the history of nuclear power and the rise of the US research complex (NSF, NIH, universities like MIT and Stanford). One of the best books I've ever read.
What company has Fred Wilson ever started?
Possibly I am jumping to conclusions. I have nothing against females in tech. I strongly believe anyone should be able to pursue whatever they want.

My local hacker's space hosts coding dojos to teach children how to code. There is no special treatment given to girls in these. Everyone is welcome and encouraged. The dojo organizers are conscious of making sure there is a good representation of female teachers/mentors in the program. That is a different -- and more effective -- approach to this issue. The difference seems subtle, yet it's key.

I'm male and I knit. It's something my Mom taught me when I was young and it's stuck with me. Yet I hate when my gender is made such a big deal here. I'm not a male knitter, I'm just a knitter. I don't want to talk about my gender and how great it is I have pursued this hobby, I want to talk about the hobby. I can't help but think females would feel similar to programs like this.
[Show NH] Desktop notifications from your Github dashboard
FWIW, the startup I was at seemed to have a soft affirmative action for females. They would reject males that didn't do much outside of college work, but would be willing to consider females with the same resume because "it would be nice to have more female coders".

Culture fit was about a modicum of friendliness. You could get rejected for culture fit by, say, looking away from your interviewer and mumbling to yourself. There could have been some great (and disadvantaged!) candidates with Eyeball Avoidance Syndrome + Tourette's that were rejected unfairly by the process, but so it goes.

The company was still 90% men in engineering, because that's what your talent pipeline looks like. I'm sure they were secret sexists, or something. Valleywag would write a scathing article about them.

In your example, I bet IBM was still predominantly male despite the anecdotal hiring of a few women that you mention.
Pyli: Python to Lisp Compiler