skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
google already took equal measures with other companies, pretty public all of them. this story is making a lot of noise on the interwebs because its a known startup with well known investors. had it been a random blog no one would be talking about this.

google's action is only consistent with what it has done in the past with others.
You realize any Joe Schmoe can annotate what he personally believes the meaning of a particular lyric is.

If you read any Kanye West lyrics on that site, they break down every line like it's some kind of literary divine intervention of pure brilliance by grasping at every straw possible.
Of course I would have to wonder what about Japan would be worth a war with the U.S.

Logistical value perhaps, for example by denying the U.S. the bases they currently have there, but certainly not for resources?
correct on both counts. that particular dorm is called fleming. to the best of my recollection, their neighbors, the darbs, who couldn't have cared less, continued apace doing math, negotiating (only) with terrorists, wondering whether homology might somehow explain stable orbits among pyramidal neurons, and stealing the flems oranges.
This topic can be summed up as war is hell. It is brutal, bloody and evil. UAVs, nor anything else alters this.

Modern democracies know this well and try to hide the horrors of war from their citizens. To have the freedom to wage war for as long as possible (or as long as needed) before public outrage forces them to stop.

Citizens are at fault for not knowing history and not paying attention.
Yes, I agree.

Steve Jobs refused to pay dividends, he built a war chest for a rainy day. He was opinionated.

On the other hand, Tim Cook is weak. Instead of pumping money into R&D he is courting Wall Street. Dividends. Stock buy-back.

Tim Cook was hyped up as a slick operator, an operations guy who built up Apple's supply chain to be super efficient. Truth is, he is/was no better than any other operations guy using an Asian based supply chain.

Look at the problems with the iPad Mini Retina screen which have yellow streaks, or the image retention burning laptop screens, or delay in iMacs, or sneaking a couple of Mac Pro units out at Christmas.
Assuming Google can perfectly balance a general purpose and highly complex system like this is naive or just plain disingenuous. The best they can do is penalize them on certain metrics and if that has other side effects, well, too f*cking bad.
... which led to http://e-drexler.com/p/06/00/EOC_Cover.html
He actually doesn't take the middle ground. He's avoiding the drone vs anti-drone argument to make a perfectly valid and legitimate point about the Guardian article.
The NSA also got Huawei's stuff too. I highly doubt a Chinese company was cooperating with the NSA. Really,it seems like the NSA just went after market leaders and developed exploits against those systems. As far as this article suggests, they had no internal help in doing so.

Not using US equipment probably does little. The solution is to make secure equipment that is harder to exploit. Moreover, the argument can be made that if the NSA can find these issues, so can others that the US government considers a threat to national security.
I've read this article sometime ago and what struck me while I was reading it, is that the author actually describes WHY Austrian economics is superior and explains it quite good. I couldn't find an actual reason why he decided to not be an Austrian anymore. tl;dr: of that article is like "So this is what Austrian economics is all about, but I don't subscribe to that point of view anymore".
> While I fully get the the “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” thing, I just have to say there’s really not much here to be pissed about.

The "'hell hath no fury like a woman scored' thing"? That's an offensive thing to say in this context.

From PG's interview:

>Does YC discriminate against female founders?

>I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. [...]

That's not evidence, because YC boosts the success rate of those who get in.

That said, I agree with the idea that hacker culture is not something a CS major can impart, and that it helps to have an early start.
What's your takeaway from it? (I don't have a subscription to The Information.)
Google penalized BMW, arguably one of the best automobile manufacturers in the world. Very little outrage over that.

Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you're above the rules. I RapGenius was an AWFUL lyric site there would be zero sympathy from anyone over their SEO tactics.
they also take prefetching as unique hits. only chrome does prefetching by default. makes results extremely misleading
For those not aware, Caltech's dorms are called "houses" and each has its own personality. Some are more nuts than others (I dated a Page girl for long time).

Some are known for their pranks, some for their love of certain types of alcohol. It's a frat system that (almost) every student joins, rather than the typical less-cohesive dorms seen at most of universities in the US.

My outside perspective is that the house system leads to some very destructive tendencies but those within Caltech love it.
Windows latency is fine. If you use ASIO drivers.

However you can't beat real instruments for latency.
> Completed: Dynamic extraction and use of SimTower graphics, sounds, and other resources from retail EXE file.

Isn't he opening himself up to copyright takedown by using the original game assets?
This. Sometimes I feel the ppl claiming rg'S results are better aren't actually even looking for lyrics. They're just comparing the brand name, ui experience, startup culture, tech etc
It's kinda too bad in the case of IE. It has always been a sword in the side of every web developer that we must develop twice. Once regularly and again for IE. Recently I was pleasantly surprised to open up IE and not only did everything look correct and work, but everything worked faster.

Why didn't everyone switch away from IE ten years ago? That would have been so helpful. Now it doesn't matter.
Well put. Also, maybe RG made things worse for themselves with their "apology", which attempted to point out other misdeeds by competing lyrics sites. Had that argument prevailed, the message sent might have been "it's probably safe to game Google as long as you can find other successful-seeming sites playing the same game", which would be a very bad precedent for Google to be facing.
> What a weird comment. How would this be worse for girls than for boys?

I didn't say it was worse. I simply posted it because nobody else has mentioned it. Teaching computing these days is seen as a joke, much like learning to code.
I'm not sure the expletive was warranted, this being HN and all, but the post he referred to did start with an ad hominem by implying that a personal account of how drone operators have the same emotions as everybody else was manipulative.
One thing that came out of the discussion in the last article on this topic, was the people who support this kind of affirmative action were very interested in hearing from HN posters who opposed it (especially men), so they could understand what our reasons were, and a respectful discussion could be had. In response to this request, here is my opinion on the matter.

In fact, I think there is truth to what both sides say. On the pro AA side, it is true that women probably feel unwelcome in the tech industry. Even when men don't do anything consciously to exclude women, programming culture revolves around certain attitudes and mindsets that are associated with young men in our culture. E.g. being interested in science fiction, being obsessive about one's work and hobbies, . None of these things are strictly related to programming, and an excessive focus on them makes it harder for women (and minorities) to enter the field. The fact that male programmers are attracted to the minority of female programmers doesn't help with this feeling of unwelcomeness, in fact it adds to the awkwardness (although I think that most of this is completely innocent and could not be called harassment, and actual harassment is rarer in our industry than others).

On the anti-AA side, I think that women, due to reverse-discrimination and old fashion chivalry, are objectively advantaged in every field. Furthermore, some things that would seem to advantage men like long hours, stressful work, and being judged on results, are not bad or discriminatory in themselves. But they will tend to favor men over women because our society provides greater incentives for men to obtain money and positions of power. When people talk about work life balance, what they really mean is that the industry should stop providing people with an opportunity to advance their career by putting in extra time and effort.

Thank you for hearing my opinions on the issue, and I hope more people who oppose AA will answer the call to explain their viewpoints.
Getting your first few customers
Not if he doesn't supply the exe...
OMG de_nuke... Those maps (de_nuke, de_dust2, de_aztec, de_inferno, etc...) sometimes appear in my dreams. I feel like I know them better than my own house!
The thing about startups and bias is that if you have a multitiered informal hiring process, a little bit of biases can be invisible and can be multiplied over filtering stages.

The company may at one stage indeed "let's consider her" but unless the company's overall hiring is formally specified, unless your documenting and so keeping reasonably track of what you are doing, you may not know the way that biases are creeping your decisions.

Another thing about startups is they often involve a "join our company and our lifestyle" approach. That also means that you will windup with people like you.
Understandable, considering the founders are enormously arrogant douchebags. If you stand on a podium and exude pure arrogance, people tend to enjoy watching you get thrown off it.
Paul Graham is probably not sexist, and if he's ageist, it's a product of his sampling bias. Most qualified 40+ founders are not going to be that interested in the 6%-for-$15k type of deal that YC offers. Those terms are great for someone out of college; not as much for a seasoned 40+ entrepreneur. There are plenty of very qualified 50-year-old entrepreneurs out there, but I doubt they're applying to YC. I could be wrong; that's just my best guess.

I'm not PG's biggest fan, although I admire his Lisp chops. Still, this attack on him is ridiculous. The interview shows him as a decent guy admitting he can't solve a difficult and complicated problem. Really, my feeling is, "Nothing to see here, move along".

The truth is that even if Paul Graham were sexist, that wouldn't be such a big deal if the startup industry were healthy, because the biases of one influential individual shouldn't matter.

Rather, the VC-funded world is seriously and systemically ill-- and the rarity of female founders is a symptom of that sickness-- and PG is just being made (completely unreasonably, IMO) a lightning rod, even though he's clearly one of the more reasonable (and probably one of the less sexist/racist/classist) investors out there.
This is what he wrote about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977623
Finally, a relatively rational response.

On another note, I just realized that Medium.com is absolutely inundated with blog entries about pg's statements. Wow.
I would be remiss if I didn't reinforce a point that I make frequently that after (as Fred Wilson calls it) this "shitstorm" passes more normals will be aware of Paul Graham and YC do than before. And perhaps that will have an effect on the general conversation as far as women in tech or taking up computing (at age 13 or whatever) and actually do something useful.

Never let a good crisis go to waste as the saying goes.
For the nth time...

"We are at war with Yemen?"

How can citizens be at fault when they don't even have a representative choice in the matter?

The whole "war is hell" thing is trite as all get out. As a metaphorical answer: "If war is hell... Don't court the Devil."
That's because you have AdBlock running. This is what I got: http://i.imgur.com/R0wOh3R.png

Oh, there was also a big pop up page: http://www.azlyrics.com/eyeblaster/addineyeV2.html http://i.imgur.com/RwiGpdq.png
Which are the laws for which Congress must explicitly create an avenue for recourse?
Great to see this insight coming from MIT:

"The solution to all hacking problems? Social engineering."
About the sexism issue? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980805

About the interview as a whole? Sadly, I think the whole interview was pretty boring, and the discrimination stuff was the most interesting part of it. Everything else Graham had to say, it seemed like he had said elsewhere before. I'm not criticizing Paul Graham here: I think he made the rest of his points effectively and was well-tuned to the audience.

Ironically, Graham spends some time later in the interview talking about "reputation as potential energy" (which rings true to me), and how that energy is part of what makes people "attack" him and YC --- presumably, he means that the energy he has captured is threatening to people. I wonder if he had fielded that question first, before the discrimination thing, if he might have said something different about women in tech.
Indeed, and its ironic that the same people who seek to expose anyone who says something un-PC, are so quick to accuse anyone who criticizes their movement of harassment.
No you're not reading it correctly. The question is: what is the basis for the challenge? The quote in the article is in response to an argument that there was a statutory basis for the challenge. It says that its inconsistent to find that the statute creates a basis for the challenge in this case. It does not say the conduct cannot be challenged on another basis.
Please tell us in which cases NSA exercised restraint when it could, instead, take every opportunity?
Just so I know I'm not misunderstanding: the fact that they fund religious schools alone justifies bombings, invasions, etc.?

We're through the looking glass here, people.
My point is that the engineering organization has to care in an effective way; a build policy like that is great, but you have to back it up with intent.

Before Microsoft's big security push (whatever else you want to say about it, they made a huge effort) most of the above attitudes existed. Now you can't turn around without going through a security review . . . some more effective than others, but at least they're trying.

Armoring a system that will accept only signed updates isn't that hard (just check signatures and refuse updates that fail). This is different from armoring a system against hardware-level attacks, which Bunny and the NSA and a LOT of other people are good at.

Armoring a system against intentional holes is not an engineering problem, it's a people slash attitude problem.

Armoring a system against bugs (buffer overruns, etc.) requires that you solve the people / attitude problem first, and then do meaningful security engineering. This might be really easy for a flash drive, which should have a really simple surface area.
It's not evidence that YC isn't discriminatory, that's true, but it's also not evidence that YC is.

I think Graham would have been better off saying "I don't think we discriminate, here's why, and I don't know why the gender imbalance exists". Instead, he overexplained.
Thank you. Precisely right.
I used to work at Big Blue and got very used to the 'no discrimination' thing they had. So much so that now I'm outside it and working for smaller companies I've really noticed how horrible some of the attitudes towards women are in some of the smaller workplaces here (UK). It's really sickening and while a lot of it is from the older generation (50+) the younger folks aren't blameless either.
Maybe someone would espouse this opinion if they were in the military?
There has been no evidence that the USA is falling behind in any spy related activities, and the article starts with examples of how they were disrupting residential garage door openers and then goes on to things like exploiting individuals at a belgium based corp, or the mexican government, a supposed ally.

Why does this make you reassured?

The potential for misuse when it comes to nukes and chemical weapons also have the distinct and likely possibility that someone would catch them, this means that they generally will only use those weapons when it is actually needful.

This technology is very likely impossible to detect by all but the biggest actors, and therefore has a HUGE potential for abuse. I am NOT reassured.
That said, I agree with the idea that hacker culture is not something a CS major can impart, and that it helps to have an early start.

Hacker culture isn't ageist. Hacker culture doesn't give a shit whether you're male, female, 86 or 15.

Technology didn't develop an ageism problem on its own. It inherited the narcissism and chickenhawking of the old-style MBA culture that colonized it. I get into it in this blog post: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-t...

Age discrimination didn't come from us, not originally. It was imposed on us by a bunch of clueless, uncultured moneymen who somehow decided it shouldn't be socially acceptable to be old and a full-time programmer. That age discrimination works immensely to the benefit of the leading VCs, as well, because of the time pressure that an artificially shortened career imposes.
"50-year-old entrepreneurs"

Are also less likely to need what YC offers. I know this because I am one of the people that help those younger people because of what I know already that they don't.

I've actually run into people that I've helped that pay my bill by using a bookeeping service that they hire and outsource. While I am sure there are many reasons to do this (investors demand etc.) that was something that when you are bootstrapping (with the amount of bills you have to pay) you can just do in a few hours on the side generally. (This is separate from a payroll service which is something that is time consuming and a pain for sure.)
This response should be exhibit A as to why HN was better when PG was enforcing the no-politics rule.

It's phenomenally rude, emotionally charged, wildly unfocused, and somehow actively advocating being loud and uninformed. It's hard to engage with a post like this in any sort of rational way.

Posts like this crowd out people like me from participating at all on HN by creating an unhealthy environment for discourse.
Unfortunately, that quote applies far to often. I'm hesitant to comment on threads like this for the same reason; I don't want to encourage such behavior with my attention
An interesting side effect of this is the phenomenon of less sophisticated users who use Google as their address bar. If you run a decently well-known website you see this in your analytics reports (at least back when you could see Google search keywords)--repeat visitors coming to your site from Google after searching for your site by name. This is why "facebook" is the top Google search.

Since you can't find RapGenius by searching for it there is a decent sized audience of people who are under the assumption that RapGenius does not exist anymore. It's bizarre to the HN crowd, but very real. Check out their twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/RapGenius
Honestly I never heard about rapgenius before and never seen it in top 3 in google when searching for lyrics (using google from Europe, logged out). Almost always azlyrics is the top match for me.
I'm working on my own userspace concurrency framework (early draft intro: http://team.s4y.us/) and having fun with this stuff.

> A lot of 3rd party code doesn't work great with userspace threads.

Agreed, especially since third-party code often calls standard library functions (`connect()`, `read()`, etc.) instead of the magic ones that are aware of your concurrency model. At OkCupid, we have our own database driver and RPC implementations that know how to use events for networking, and it sucks to have them in our codebase.

> The final nail in the coffin for me was disk IO.

Why not make it "somebody else's problem"? My thing uses libuv, which provides a common API and uses a thread pool or new async APIs under the hood. At OkC most filesystem access transparently goes through a separate process — it's just network access from the app's point of view.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you can solve the problem once, you can make a nice abstraction on top of it and never think about it again (unlike dealing w/ third-party code and scheduling).

Either way, I'd love your input on what I'm doing so far, you have way more experience.
And that's one reason why people go to war; they can't understand the arguments of both sides of a conflict, so it escalates to something that even unintelligent people can do: fight. If more people would take the time to discover the root of their conflicts, they wouldn't just take the easy way out and start name calling or throwing punches.

Very few people want to be evil or wrong for the sake of being evil or wrong - they believe they are right and they just have a different perspective on how to be right.

Truth is just the perception of fact. Depending on one's values, the truth can be viewed differently by different people. That's why it's very difficult to find "one right answer".
Not to mention that it's about as sophisticated a response as you'd expect from a scalded 6 year old. "But Mummy, all the other boys were doing it too!!"
That's because every Kanye West line literally is a literary divine intervention of pure brilliance, of course. Anyway, there is a verification system in place and you can also discuss the line through a commenting system. I usually find their annotations to be precise and correct.
> The startups have not emphasized hiring diversity. The startups tend to emphasize culture fit

Basically, "culture fit" is the same thing that the characters of Mad Men look for when they hire, just modulo a different culture. We can't get rid of this aspect of human nature, but we can make it more about rational and objective subjects and less about arbitrary cultural baggage. Basically, less smarmyness/arrogance, more humility, and more insight.

Smarmy and arrogant Ivy-leaguers from the Mad Men days couldn't see their own arbitrary bullshit. It's hard to see one's own arrogant bullshit, especially when you're constantly telling yourself how you're an elite in a meritocracy. Take it from a formerly smarmy and arrogant Ivy-leaguer. If you're a 20-something and think you're immune, you're a prime suspect.
"Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?"

I would be interested in the statistics you base this on. How many strikes are fire support strikes vs. "lone" drone strikes? My impression up to your comment was that most drone strikes are not fire support strikes.
Great for destroying user experience that uses these for valid reasons.

Use throw away virtual machines if you must, otherwise there is no easy workaround
Let me build your iOS app affordably.
I would like to take on side projects in iOS. I just graduated with a B.A. in Computer Technology(networks,security,unix, plus programming coursework), and want to move into the programming side a bit more. I have some experience with Java, C, Ruby, Objective-C, HTML, CSS. In the proceeding examples, I have worked with them for small projects, or university coursework. Very fast learner, and eager to advance my skills.

I can make you an app with Objective-C or Rubymotion. I am better with Rubymotion, but am steadily gaining momentum with Objective-C again.

Costs will be no less than $500USD and not more than $1000 total.Understand, I am not an expert and can not do some advanced things. This deal would be prime for a rapid prototype, or a small niche app. Email is in profile, so let's chop it up and see if I can be of service to you. Thanks!