skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Can we Form a New Constitutional Congress?
Major fact : A LOT has changed in the 200+ years since this nation was founded, and lately it all seems to be shit hitting a fan -- a very large fan and a large amount of shit--we're all getting splatter from it.<p>It's allowed under the constitution for peaceful assembly, so why couldn't each state elect from it's body 25 individuals to represent that state in a new congress to re-establish what America SHOULD be for a 21st century world?<p>Presumably one w/ less bureaucracy, less waste, and less power at the center. Who knows what this could create, but if we simply gave it a shot, it couldn't be worse than what have now -- Or imagine an online continental congress that everyone could collectively participate in via comments/online-voting/etc?<p>Personally, I feel that the government should have one major purpose the protection of all states - but not at the cost of our freedoms/privacy.<p>The federal gov't should not be allowed more than 5-10% of the tax dollars. All other funds should go to State governments -- w/ states managing their own laws - what's legal/what's not/which drugs to allow, which to ban. Anyone committing a crime nationwide should be tried in the jurisdicition it was committed in by their laws.<p>There are a lot of ideas on the table, like capping CEO pay, how to pay and manage healthcare, flat sales tax vs income tax, Guaranteed Basic Income--but the only way to get them enacted isn't through changing what we already have--what we have is BROKEN w/ a CAPITAL B. We need a fresh start. We need to begin again. That is the ONLY way we can break out of this cycle.
>Even with just names discrimination has been shown to occur at places like universities

Source? Also, universities are much different than ycombinator so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
You can brow-beat, I asked nicely.
This whole thing is a fascinating demonstration of the power of contextualization to color one's perception of the facts.

When you read the whole transcript, it's pretty clear pg is NOT just talking about a subset of women. He means women as a whole are underrepresented in the founder population because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in coding.

When the valleywag expose was first published, I thought the comments were pretty damning. pg's reponse really focused my attention on the omission of "these" and persuaded me that he was only talking about women "who aren't programmers." This convinced me that The Information are egregious hacks. After all, they omitted a word without an ellipsis and that's clearly wrong.

But now, perhaps motivated by my fascination, I took the time to actually read the full transcript. And it's clear pg is talking about all female applicants to YC.

Here's a fuller excerpt that traces the complete context of exactly what group of people pg is referring to.

--------

Eric: I want to circle back to women in YC. How much do you think YC needs to be proactive, has any moral obligation to be proactive about this, or anything like that?

pg (excerpts):

There’s a couple of reasons why there are not as many female founders...

If the reason we accept few female founders is that we’re biased against them, we would be able to tell this... I’m almost certain that we don’t discriminate against female founders...

The problem with that is... the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology...

If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it own 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...

God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers...

You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like... You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon... That’s a self selected group of people. Anybody who wants to apply can go to that thing. They’re not discriminating for or against anyone.

[at this point Eric asks his question about how Y Combinator could be more proactive]

Paul: We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years.

--------

Conclusion: The entire time pg is referring "female founders" and the "pool of potential startup founders". His only reference to "programmers" is merely in describing the pool of potential startup founders. And women aren't in it because they weren't "hacking on computers at age 13".

So yes, absolutely pg made a gaffe in saying girls aren't hackers. That is in fact what he said, and is now pretending he didn't, and that it would be "absurd" for him to say it. But he did.
The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
That's the obvious next step, but it's not valid C89 and that may or may not be relevant for people doing embedded programming. Personally, I'm all for using newer standards and declaring variables locally when it makes sense. Sometimes I like to see all variables at the top of the function though.
I'm not sure if I've read all of pg's essays, I may have. At the time I read it, that one stood out as the weakest by far. Pick another one.
„Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.“
Humm... I was going to buy the new iPhone, this changed my mind. Maybe I should just get a feature phone instead.
Think everything is an icon rather than everything is a file.
It was to simplify a rather complicated system that used bots. Each bot would report home by requesting different URLs. That seemed overly complicated to me, because one URI change would break every single bot. I then created the public interface and simplified it to one URI. Then the data structure being sent to the APIs got an additional parameter. It told the public interface which API had to get that data. This was a very simple change, because the data structure was defined by the APIs and common among all. It ended up being very fast and allowed the bots to spend less time waiting for a response. Was planning to add a messaging queue but then I left the project (I was a consultant).
Individuals have agendas and are attacking people due to their ideology. Look at the thread you are in. PG was attacked by people over something he never said. They didn't do it for no reason, they did it because they saw a chance to draw blood for their twisted cause. Where's the wild conspiracy again? It's not a conspiracy. It's a group of very public, transparent, active, and vocal people who are creating divisive rifts in the tech world. They are post modernists who believe in patriarchy theory and think the only way that they can destroy all of the social constructs is by forcefully enforcing public punishment for thought-crimes. Or something. It gets kind of silly.

Consider the two previous needlessly dramatic tragedies caused by the SJWs:

Donglegate - humor is problematic, and worth getting a guy fired over.

Nodegate - empathy doesn't extend to having empathy over cultural differences of people who do not understand why people would care about pronouns, which drove off one of the top contributors.

There will for sure be more to come!

>Well-reasoned and supported arguments are valued here, not baseless and fragmented conspiracy theories.

My argument is that SJWs are a terrible blight on tech as well as everywhere else. They hurt everyone and help no one. If you disagree with something I stated then tell me and I'll show you examples of people who hold that belief, and actively champion it in the tech world. Unless that's not what you are after. In which case what you do think my thesis is?

>E.g. Aliens are controlling politics! Proof: http://reddit.com/r/ufos

Yeah, dude, totally all of the people linked to and discussed in http://www.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction are fake! I didn't link to it to show that there are examples of people who believe the things I listed on. Come on who would believe people were so crazy.
...but you've invented the idolatry here.

To dig into word choice here a bit. You attack someone for placing a value on "intellect", but criticize pg for being a "pseudo-intellectual". One interpretation of this is that you regard an "intellectual" to be something other than person who effectively used their intellect. Instead, you seem to regard an intellectual as a person who expresses conformity with the majority view of American academia (i.e., a modern liberal who isn't fond of markets.)
Machine Learning. I thought it was a really tough class and took more time than they say (they say workload: 5-7 hours/week -- maybe if you are perfect and your code never has bugs that you need to spend time debugging -- the course is based on programming assignments in Octave where you have to demonstrate mastery of machine learning concepts), but I put in a lot of extra time, mastered everything, finished with a 100. Andrew Ng is a top-notch teacher, even though his speaking style is very low-key. https://www.coursera.org/course/ml
I wrote this in response:
https://medium.com/glimpse-labs/5c6d2ff4ef0d

PG has done a lot for the community and I think he deserves a conversation rather than a lynching. I'm calling for a more civil discourse on sexism. We could say that I'm baised bc my cofounder was similarly attacked by Valleywag, but it's very reasonable to say that these conversations could be handled more thoughtfully.
I referenced Fontana specifically because he used to work with canvas.

At least Piero was being honest about being dishonest (a common trait in post-modernist art).
This is fantastic. I have used the same system for the last 4 years and it is the single most useful productivity "hack" in my life. The only change I use is that my reference emails usually go into Evernote.

Kudos for such a useful and comprehensive post!
A ton of upvotes for a Michael Arrington lecture about what is and is not legitimate journalism shows just how fickle the HN crowd is. You guys are silly.
Unbelievable levels of narcissistic nitpicking here, I don't even care to have any more conversation with someone possessed of your level of pedantry. I began shooting a video but decided that you can fuck yourself instead, as there's no convincing someone who can be this anal. Probably you'd bitch about the portrait orientation with which I shot it.

How do you know you're not the one generalizing from N=1? Why wouldn't I expect that all iPhones have roughly identical performance charcteristics, as one of the highlights of the Apple business model is strict hardware control. Equivalent hardware, ergo equivalent performance on that hardware.

Clearly you have been confused by a small amount of hyperbole which, according to votes, many people have had zero problem understanding so far. I imagine life for you being an expanse of loneliness punctuated by moments of extreme confusion. More so than for most, I suppose, just so you can better understand what I'm saying about you.
WebPositive is based on Webkit (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebPositive). I'm fairly sure you're right about firefox. The only version for beos (that I know of) is a port of firefox 2 (see http://haikuware.com/remository/view-details/internet-networ...).
“It’s Complicated” with Paul Graham
Agree on the creep factor and all of the inevitable places it will be banned, not to mention social situations where it'll be poor etiquette.

It just seems so unnecessary, a (lousy) solution in search of a problem. For now, people wearing Glass strike me as trying too hard to be "cutting edge" or whatever. It's the world's most pathetic conversation starter.
I had the same problem with Chrome. A confirmation screen would be cool. The newsletter and sample chapter are both great though, definitely worth checking out.
There's work being done on making WebKit work[0].

[0]: https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2013-12-20_webkit_w...
really? "all women"? should all Muslims be embarrassed for 9/11?
Because it's one or the other. Very nuanced.
> MINOR: Increase at each December 25th; may be API incompatible

Well now, that's not exactly semver, is it…?
I don't know your age, but what works for you now may not work for you as you get older. And many people exercise not because of how it makes them look but because of how it makes them feel; in fact, for many people who exercise, their appearance changes very little, if at all. And some people find that exercise helps mitigate chronic illnesses such as MS, hypertension, depression, asthma. . .or at least the symptoms thereof.
I got to thinking about this after reading this short article on the creation of postit notes. I have a feeling that most of us on HN are innovators and not entrepreneurs.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-note...
Anyone else disagree with the initial assumption that the Word doc looks worse?

I fully support alternatives to proprietary formats used by Pages and Office but this just looks bad.
You know, Ceol, maybe you are right.
I actually had a pretty weird situation happen last time I traveled. I was in the regular lane and the guy who checked my ticket and id read my ticket wrong and sent me through the TSA precheck line. Once in that line, there seemed to be a further mixup and I literally went through security without my bag or myself being scanned. It was pretty weird, but again, no one died, and it actually gave less of a chance for my stuff to get stolen and took less time. It's almost as though this is a superior system...
> but I think we potential users need to start seeing something more definite.

Why? A potential user isn't owed anything; Mozilla hasn't done a marketing push to capture you, gotten you to sign up for a developer program, or offered Rust up as the solution to any given problem you have. They haven't promised you anything. They're just tinkering with Rust like you'd tinker with a custom car in your garage. Also, unlike Perl 6, there's nothing that's laying fallow in an increasingly-desperate way while they work on Rust.

On the other hand, a programming language is forever. I'd rather have a programming language a decade late, that I can use for 40 years, than a programming language right now that gets outmoded after four.
There are still systems descended from this architecture being produced, the Unisys Libra servers, that can still run the MCP OS and programs.
How do you get the todo list on the right side of the screen?
If "objective" and "merit" are defined as "upper-middle class white men" then don't talk about IQ tests, just say what you mean.

My point is that you can couch what goes on in whatever language you like, but if you don't care about social justice, then just say so and stop pretending that what you are doing is actually the "real" social justice or is somehow "natural" (for some weird, pseudo-genetic definition of "natural").

This is the same complaint I have about a lot of "capitalists". They like to talk about how the market will yield these socially optimal outcomes, but to listen to them tell the story, the market ALWAYS yields whatever is PC at the time. The truth is that the market is devoid of morality or values, and maybe that's fine, but don't lie about it. If the system you support has property X, but not property Y, don't pretend it has property Y just because property Y is easier to advocate for, be proud and stand up for your belief in property X!

Hiring is biased toward white men for a variety of reasons. If you are OK with that, then fine, say so. You didn't cause the historical problems women and minorities have had, so there's a reasonable argument to be made that you shouldn't have to pay for them. I, personally, would rather make less money but help equalize historical inequities, but that's just me. I also buy single-fly toilet paper because I think it is less wasteful, but I don't go around yelling at people who buy two-ply, that's their business. But don't pretend that by some weird contortion of logic and the rules of the universe hiring white men is "right". It's just more profitable because of the historical oppression of people who weren't white men. So say so. End of story.
This is what I believe you call derailing. Like the other person, I'm also still waiting for substantive points to be made rather than shaming and cherry picking.
In C, variables have function-level storage. I don't recall the actual term from the C standard, but the storage for _all_ variables declared in any blocks inside a function is allocated at the beginning of the function, when the stack frame is set up. So there is 'no way' to create 'temp' only inside the if block.
Technology makes things more efficient, in general. That means those in power have a heightened ability to abuse that power. The idea that technology is a democratizing force is based on wishful thinking.

Technology is not, and has never been, a solution to the concentration of power.

I say that as someone who would absolutely love for this not to be true by the way.
I'm not meaning to gripe, and netflix is still worth the few bucks a month... but it seems like the service is declining. From content losses to constant buffering issues it often leaves me wondering if i should continue to subscribe or just use other means of getting content.
Too bad for Canada. They are losing a Wacko
>I don't know why but Netflix on my PS3 is lag free, and looks DVD-like. But on my PC or Mac or phone or ipad it's very laggy and takes a long time to buffer and pauses to buffer during the video.

If you don't mind the reduced quality, you can manually force a lower quality setting. Just hold Shift+Alt (Shift+Option on Mac) and left click the screen. This will allow you to set the bit rate. I'm not sure if this can be done on your iPad and phone.
Different devices can get different streams from Netflix (to support different encoding/decoding and bitrates/capabilities, I expect).

The implementations behave differently, that's for sure. For example I know my Apple TV buffers at the top resolution it can before playing video so it starts in HD. My older TiVo (and my PS3?) start playing instantly but you can notice when it switches over to the higher bitrate streams.

For fun, on the PS3 you can press a button (select?) which will display the current video and audio data rates from Netflix in the corner in a small font. You can watch it adjust as network conditions change.
I have a problem with the term "pseudo-intellectual". What's an intellectual, and what's a psuedo-intellectual? Please define your terms.
As another old person, I blame the shift from "mea culpa" to "my bad."

One is used when genuinely accepting responsibility and the other is used like a wave after cutting someone off in traffic.

The answer is to reintroduce the classics into the educational system. Cursive, too.
> Well sure, but in that case hasn't the medium shifted to the meta, and what has to work is the explanation itself?

Who cares, the artist is getting off on the fact he just sold a blank canvas. That's the real meta (or mark), the art of the con (this is where the black arts have infiltrated the traditional arts).

> What I'm saying is that a piece of software functioning correctly does not preclude it from being "utter shit".

OK, so software that functions correctly can still be "utter shit", yeah I can roll with that. On many levels modern art is considered not to have a function, it is art for its own sake. This "utter shit" software that we are talking about still does something (useful I presume), whereas a blank canvas just takes up space.
Doesn't the second one still say it's a problem of gender? I'm not seeing how the introduction of the word "these" adds all of that additional stuff you're saying. All it does is take the statement from "all women" to "all women who we could recruit to be founders." But in the context of the discussion, he meant the same thing: He feels women do not want to be founders.
The easiest place to start testing is likely to be in the code you are touching now. It is fresh in your head, you know what it does. Write a test for that, it shouldn't take you too long.

If you are doing a targeted bugfix (i.e. not with a shotgun) you already know the test you have to write: a test for the bug. Try to first write the test and then make it pass (also know as fixing the bug), so you know that the test will spot a regression on future runs.

If you are working on a new feature, try to isolate the core logic of the feature and test that. If you can, test it in isolation from the rest of the system and integrate it after you have achieved some semblance of correctness.

If your code base has parts that you only touch rarely and you know (or hope) are reasonably solid, leave them for later. The highest risk for breakage tends to be near the spots with the most code churn, so put your tests there.

Also remember that tests are code and they must be maintained as you would maintain the rest of your code. Writing tests for implementation details that have no real impact on program correctness won't yield you much value when weighted against the cost of their maintenance.

If you are after the most "value per test" think about it this way: The most valuable test you can write today is the one that will catch breakage tomorrow. So, think of the code most likely to break (or the one that will hurt you the most when it breaks) and test that. The first time that test unexpectedly goes red, it will have paid for itself.
pg is being disingenuous.

He did only refer to programmers. That's true.

But what he left out is that, he defined programmers as the "pool of potential startup founders". (You have to read the full transcript to notice that.)

So he is not actually referring to a subset of women. He very clearly says women as a whole are underrepresented as founders because they haven't been hacking since age 13 like the attendees of PyCon and open source committers, because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking.

It's completely clear when you read the transcript.
As do private screening services. How is the TSA better?
Most SJW's go with the "you're either part of the problem or part of the solution" formulation rather than explicitly invoking Mussolini.
To Protect and Infect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA
Body Atlas Reveals Where We Feel Happiness and Shame
NSA Was Able to Capture Live Data From Compromised iPhones in 2008
Figured it out: enabled multiple inboxes in Labs.
Settings > Multiple Inboxes > in the bottom

I added an additional note to the explanations. hope it helps
Judging by what we know of the kinds of errors that they're talking about having be uncatchable, I think you might be overstating the worry a bit. Sounds like the list is constrained to failures that really do mean a bug in the code such that something is seriously wrong, let's get the heck out of here is probably the only appropriate response if you're trying to build a robust system.

Take the null reference example: A NullReferenceException means that a value's null in a spot where the programmer either didn't believe or didn't consider that null would be a possible value at that point in the program. So when it happens, there are two things you can be sure of: First, things have strayed off into the weeds. Second, there's nobody around to check everything out and make sure we can get steered safely back on track, because the developer's been out of the picture since the start of compile time. These two facts imply that letting execution continue would be A Roll of the Dice, and therefore Not a Good Idea.

If having the module crash in this situation isn't acceptable, no worries. There are still ways around it short of splitting the component in two. One much easier option would be:

if (x == null) { /* handle null case */ }
Are you living in the U.S? If so, what about health insurance and other benefits you had to provide for yourself? I'd really like to see how it compares to your old job after everything.
Nice! I like the evernote idea.

What are reference email?