skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm curious, what do you mean by professional culture?
Snow overlay on an icon? Hacky and tacky all in one fell swoop. (slow golf clap)
I feel bad for the female children of HN. I imagine them thinking, "Why do all the adults in my life want me to be a computer programmer? I want to be a veterinarian or teacher, but daddy says that's a patriarchal stereotype."

There's nothing wrong with offering people an easier onramp to hackerdom, of course. But there is a subtext of devaluing all female-dominated lines of work.
And yet all the other major VPS/cloud server providers have engineered solutions that do not suffer from this issue (regardless of physical storage medium). Specifically, Amazon, Linode, and Rackspace all have automatic mitigations (in varying forms) that prevent this type of leak.
blind applications would make me more comfortable to consider applying

What kind of pressure are you feeling about applying to funds now?
Godwin's Law is important because it shows the cost of attaching baggage to your arguments. I think that if you can argue that something is bad by invoking Hitler, you can argue that something is bad without invoking Hitler. It's not just that going Godwin is tacky. It is, or should be, a sign of rhetorical weakness.

I don't think the problem described by Godwin's Law is that bad arguments cheapen Hitler. I think the problem is that Hitler cheapens one's arguments, unless one is arguing about genocide. Sure, you can draw lesser lessons from Hitler's lesser crimes (ie gun control), but the implication, intentional or not, is that the lesser crime you're arguing about is on par with the Holocaust.
OR, another definition: "Wantrepreneurs" do all sorts of business crap, EXCEPT useful stuff :)(http://www.appsumo.com/sumo-business-blueprint-live/)
When I was 15 my parents hated computers. However, I had hot girlfriends, where one of the best player of my basketball team and was having really too much fun.

I don't regret nothing, but I'd sure love being able to write code at that age - If that would make me a better programmer today, which means that I would have to continue writing code for another 17 years :-)

Congrats to the kid.
Is this saying "Invest in us instead of doing it yourself, as it's easier, and if you were going to do it yourself you would have done it by now"?
Ask HN:  How many women founders applied to the latest batch of YC? 
Can you provide a percentage as well as the actual number?
> as if PG can't be trusted

Just because we're in pg's house, it doesn't mean we have to treat him like a god. He's a fallible human being, just like the rest of us.

The whole point of a blind interview is to prevent implicit bias that the bearer might not even be aware of.
I don't know what the fuck makes me more sick:

1) that in the US, an electricity bill is sufficient for voting ID purposes (WTF)

or 2) that the US don't have mandatory ID cards. Even our new German ID cards only cost €20 apiece, and if you're too poor you can get benefits. Hello, ID fraud.
Maybe not malls, what about music events, sold out 300 cap venues like every week in every decently sized city. Hotels with 1000 rooms or office buildings like with the Oklahoma City bombing.
What did we miss?
What don't you agree with?
I think it's just starting to roll. Only a month ago I argued in my company's mailing list, that now is the time to finally start moving to Py3. Py3 is more stable now, most of the big libraries have finally moved. In a commercial set up it is just stupid to move forward, when the ecosystem hasn't. But now it has, so now we start. I think people should just continue to improve in that direction. Maybe it will take 10 years, not 5. But it's definitely going in the direction of Py3.
These sort of outrage inducing misquotes by the press seem to be becoming more and more common. There is no way to know if it was on purpose, but phony outrage certainly generates more clicks (or subscriptions in the case of The Information).

At what point does misquotation become libel? As much as I hate the idea of suing the press, lawsuits seem like the only defense. Real and lasting damage was done to pg's reputation here. Even with yc as his personal loudspeaker, I doubt pg will be able to set the record strait.
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them WHAT to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. -- Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
> "popularized before Microsoft's counterpart is ready"

Do you have any information on this or is it just conjecture that MS would attempt such a noble task?

I've only skimmed Rust, but it looks exactly like what I'd want, from trying to do some "systems" type coding in F#. I'm still unconvinced the CLR isn't up to the job - with some annotations for allocation handling, a lot of the performance gap could be closed.
Is this a stated intention? [ref?] It seems more to be a nice consequence of their approach - to attract great talent.
Oh sorry, I didn't realise the connotations of "legend". I just wanted to refer to other similar/related stories. Interesting story.
Getting misquoted in an interview happens to almost everyone who has given an interview ever. It is a product of the interviewer trying to put an editorial spin on a story (i.e make it interesting) and human error (based on reporter time constraints). Being misquoted is the tax for using the interviewer's platform for marketing. For most people, the benefit of the publicity outweighs the tax. So you give the interview, knowing full well that the end product is going to come out somewhere on the spectrum of slight misquote --> just made up stuff. And this isn't going to change. But it is something to keep in mind when you're pitching PR for your startup. You will get misquoted, its a matter of degree. Share your words as wisely as possible. Unfortunately, unlike PG, the rest of us don't have a platform for setting the record straight on a misquote.
Nice sketch pun.
This is particularly true in the age of Twitter, where a single sentence taken out of context can go viral. Now anything you say about a controversial topic has to be unambiguous at the level of individual sentences.

Ugh, how depressing.
I disagree with Urban Dictionary[1] on that definition. An entrepreneur who is trying to succeed, but has not, is just an unsuccessful entrepreneur. The negative context is what embodies the "wannabe" in "wantrepreneur", like "gangsta" and "wanksta". It is an insult. The person using the term thinks you have the desire to be seen as an entrepreneur, but neither the skills, nor the inclination, to actually build anything.

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wantrepreneur
Here's the workaround: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
Haha, I like this: "Learn how to kill your inner wantrepreneur."
"I suspect there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them."

Isn't this the exact opposite of trust-building behavior? Trust defined as "a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something." So the author is arguing for more trust in our regulators and laws, because we can't trust the people we are regulating.

I don't think that you way to build trust with a person or group by creating stiff rules and penalties for cheating, you do that after they've proven they can't be trusted. I think a more convincing conclusion for the article would be something along of the lines of: we've learned our lesson that banks can't be trusted, so we need to impose heavier regulation.
It's worth noting that neither I nor anyone I know has heard of this bus bombing/mentioned it in conversation, and it's not on TV/frontpage of NYT, etc. But if we switch $Bus for $Plane, this becomes a major media event and everyone will know about it. What is it about aircraft that get the man and his propaganda machine so excited?
Just buy a HP/Compaq CQ series notebook and make sure that you aren't going to be parted with it for more than the ten hours needed to get to the hard drive. Simple.

Jesting apart, who has not had screws fall out or work loose from a Dell or HP laptop? The likelihood that the screws are in differently due to some secret spy type of person opening the machine is quite unlikely compared to the high likelihood that they have just worked loose of their own accord.
Survivable Key Compromise in Software Update Systems
See the recent post on __slots__ .
If you just use downthemall you get the advantage of mirror brain/metalink support.
1. According to MS, this campaign came out of a survey where something like 45+% of users didn't know Gmail scans their emails, and 80+% of those didn't approve of it (I think this is the survey http://www.scribd.com/doc/124257005/GfK-Email-Privacy-Report). That's a pretty significant number of users.

2. The "I'm a Mac" campaign was childish, and even though I was predominantly on Windows then and the ads were so very wrong, I laughed along at them. Similarly, I'm primarily a Gmail user, but that GmailMan character is hilarious.

3. However the campaign appears to us, apparently it's working?! http://adage.com/article/digital/microsoft-s-google-bashing-...

On the other hand, some doubt if that's really translating into commercial success: http://marketingland.com/microsoft-scroogled-campaign-61887
Citing the War on (selected) Drugs to justify the War on Democracy! Yay!
How to start unit testing in a testless environment?
Hey everyone, I am currently on a team without any good unit testing framework (crazy, i know). So the question is how to get people doing it.

Now, there is a desire from everyone to do it, but the friction seems to high. So I am looking to lessen the friction. We use Java, but languages like Groovy seem good as well.

Primary questions: Where to start testing? What is the best part of the system to attack usually to get the most traction or benefit.
I will agree not to blame corporations for the actions of their employees the moment those employees are individually liable for their actions.

Corporations always speak with one voice. If that voice says something wrong or inconsistent, it is not the public's problem, it is the corporation's. No excuses. Ever.
> lately I have been creeped out when I start getting blasted by adverts from all over the web based on something I recently searched on.

I was recently really confused as to why I was seeing so many ads for young women's clothing. I'm a 28 year old man. Then I realized I read an article on HN about Nasty Gal's great successes.

So very very creepy.
I don't know if it differs from state to state or even possibly county to county, but I got my first ID (in Florida), recently and it was 36 dollars and some change, so not to far off
"Unfortunately, you don't have an unlimited budget,"

Actually you do, if you model NASA as a jobs program and take an infinite amount of time.

Slowing time down by a factor of ten would have a huge number of economic effects aside from NASAs budget, but presumably you could take ten times as long to R+D and then launch 1/10th as often with no impact on progress per lifespan.

One problem from the SS program is it promised all things to all people so that would give the same jokers ten times as many chances to make ridiculous specification promises. So the new design constraints would have to be smaller than a Cessna 172, and HTOL instead of vert takeoff and the payload would be 100 times what it actually could carry, etc, at which point they'd probably find a way to blow it up 1 in 50 times again.
Andromeda - a simple websocket server
Check out my generic websocket server that relays data and logs connections/messages sent all in the terminal. It's part of hubble, an open source project I wrote a year or so ago which is a terminal based dashboard.
> Something needs to change about this industry's obsession with sensationalist journalism.

I don't think there is anything wrong with this industry. This seems to be how most 'news' is made these days. I'm guessing that people who closely follow a non-technical industry have seen similar sensationalism on other issues.
Agreed. The people on Rust's IRC channel are very helpful but are flabbergasted if you are using anything other than HEAD (even the most recent official release is considered ancient history). I'm glad they're willing to make big changes to get everything right, but it seems like things still need a little time to settle before freezing things.

When is the target for 1.0? That wasn't mentioned in the linked message.
As the article says, using an airplane as a weapon is nearly impossible.

You cannot get to the pilots anymore using the plans used last time, so thus the exigent danger you are speaking of is gone.
Chinese rover hibernating to survive frigid lunar night
No that's not what we're thinking. We're not just giving software startups a place to raise capital. That's just the first bit. Once you hit your goal, we're building a whole bunch of tools to help you collaborate with your early customers.

Anyone that's built a startup has done that initial back and forth with the first customers. It's done with surveys and one-off emails and shared google docs. It's a mess.

We've looked at these processes, and we're building these features into Ramen (in "The Kitchen") that help founders collaborate with their early customers while the MVP is being built. That's the value we're creating.
We don't have a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to own cell-phones, for one.
lol.....25+ is considered old? This is why most of the big startups of this year are social like snapchat, tumblr, etc. The opportunities where customers are willing to spend shitloads of money like enterprise, hardware are not funded anywhere near as well as social. This is beacuse 19yr olds dont know much about HR or disrupting the Investment Banking software industry. This requires some exposure to the problems firsthand, which require being around the block. We are totally overextended on social, techcrunch is like replaying the same movie over and over.

The truly break-out companies founded in markets where customers are willing to pay, are started by entrepreneurs over 28. Age is not a hard rule but we talking about averages here. Steve blanks spoke well about how he started up his companies while still managing family life. Check quora for famous tech founders over 30 and their take on it.

An example about how a person over 30 starts a business from Quora:

Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners

We did it by starting with a profitable service line.

I was 34 when I founded Arcstone. We had three young kids (we now have four). I was coming off a VC salary of ~$250K, and yet didn't have much savings to speak of. I started Arcstone with $18K borrowed from my brother-in-law, and a couple credit cards to service revolving debt.

We started a service business targeting a specific, relevant pain point, which has a quick sales cycle. We became profitable immediately; with our profits we both fed ourselves and invested in technology and infrastructure. We were careful not to overbuild on our way up, though some expenditures (like our 5-year lease) were taken with a leap of faith.

Three+ years on, we are a nationally respected financial services firm (primarily in the valuation niche) with a healthy top (and bottom) line, and a very happy and dedicated team of seven.

Getting out of the Silicon Valley mindset -- Seed/A/B/C/Exit -- has been incredibly liberating.
Many home burglaries are in effort to steal guns. Let's assume that most of those criminals are not the brightest people in the world, let's say half don't bother removing the GPS, those low-hanging fruit are quickly arrested and deserving go to prison. A good percentage of thieves would simply not risk stealing the weapon, especially if the GPS was difficult to remove (like a sticker GPS that was either internal or very difficult to remove).

Some would steal an entire safe or lock box and as soon as it's open the GPS would track where that lock box is located, those people would be caught.

The point is not to stop all gun crimes, just to lower the amount of burglaries looking for firearms and to try to minimize the amount of firearms in the hands of criminals.

No, my proposed bill isn't perfect, but it would undoubtedly save lives. It's not even a serious suggestion, more of a thought experiment, people who NEVER allow such a law to be in place.
> The talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. Somehow critics have grown in power to be able to extract punishment and concessions from people actually on the ground.

Agreed, although I don't think it's the talkers vs. the doers; it's the talkers' audiences vs. the doers.

Here's your "somehow": The lack of critical thinking skills in the general population (not new), combined with the power of instant global communication (new).

The lack of critical thinking skills leads people to seek absolutes, simplicity, and swift action in areas where shades of gray, nuance, and care should be called for. Again, nothing new here: mob justice is a well-understood, if regrettable, characteristic of human society.

Instant global communication much more swiftly connects 1) the easily-manipulated with 2) those who lack experience and maturity but who nevertheless possess the gift of persuasion.

In short, I blame the listeners, not the talkers. It would be a Good Thing(tm) if people were generally more skeptical of everything they heard and read, and even better if they knew how to ask the right questions to resolve that skepticism. It would make it harder for unworthy critics to hold power, and easier for worthy ones to be heard.

Here's another quote, from Joseph de Maistre: "Every nation gets the government it deserves." A similar thing could be said for culture and civil society.
I really wish I didn't default to reading the word "legend" as implausible. I don't use it in spoken conversation that way, at least.

I like another poster's point that even if it's not real, it's still useful as a parable, so your link to more is appreciated!
You seem to be saying: since coding is a valuable activity, any group not coding is a waste.

Is that correct?
I can already imagine US border officer asking "Why do you keep a bottle of nail polish? Are you a terrorist?"
My last two jobs were at fortune 100 companies, and both had IT supported macs and a lot of them. A work with a lot of people from other large enterprises and the same is true. This is anecdotal, but more evidence than the guy claiming they don't have a presence
> Always be learning. Say “I don’t know”, “I don’t understand” and “I need help” EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

Jesus, I feel like that all the time on HackerNews and StackOverflow... Okay, I don't cry out I need help, but I get the I don't understand and I need help feeling more often than not.
It may be childish but Apple's similar childish campaign completely destroyed Microsoft's brand.
I think we're talking here about problems that can be fed to a digital computer and hence can be represented by a finite number of bits. I believe that would exclude non-rational weights.
4 ideas for a fruitful life - Frank Oppenheimer
That is an excellent point, although lets say an average grad is remains employable for the same 1/4 of his working years, thats still in absolute terms more years for the unemployable 3/4 of his working life. Assuming we'd continue working the same fraction of our lives, and not continue to retire at 60-something and then remain retired for the next 440 years.
Paul talked to the reporter about me (for the profile being written) before The Information had launched. Neither of us knew it would be behind a paywall.
Not to mention, a lot of marketing is childish. The Mac vs. PC ads were childish. They worked ( to the extent anyone can say TV ads work)
Sure, but there's a lot of handwaving about this new error model. If there were code examples it would be a lot easier to form a solid opinion one way or the other.
I kind of agree. But I think it's accidental, not intentional.

Stupidity, not malice.
I can see how that quote would be problematic.

That's a quote that, when I read it the first time, I tried to interpret charitably. It's one that I read as, 'Women generally (but with exceptions) don't start hacking at the age of 13, and there's nothing we can do to make these women see the world through hacker eyes.'

Rather than, 'There's no such thing as a woman who's hacked since she was 13, and thus no woman can see the world through hacker eyes.'

Saying the quote is 'problematic' and that it needs clarifying -- I have no problem with that, and in fact I totally agree. What I don't like is how large swaths of the blog-o-sphere didn't even consider the first interpretation; they talk as if the second interpretation is just clearly without qualifiers what he must have meant.
The rates at which bitcoin holders sell them won't be 'exorbitant' because they'll be irrelevant for peopel using them as a transfer mechanism. if you want to send a thousand bucks, and there are many bitcoin holders just sittign on them, the market rate of btc won't matter and you'll be able to quickly sell them whenever you've sent the btc where you wanted to.

those 'unproductive' people holding incredibly valuable bitcoins will enable bitcoin to work as a dirt cheap payment processing system.
No, not really. If a car is barreling toward my son, and I can only push him out of the way by jumping in front of the car and getting hit myself (but pushing him free of it), I'd do it, and wouldn't consider such a sacrifice silly at all if I witnessed another doing it.

Now think about the reverse: Several people see you watch somebody you know and personally love get hit by a car, and notice you could have saved them and one of them asks you about it. Would you feel bad at all saying "Yeah, I could have jumped out and saved him, but I would have died and that would be silly?"
c) there is flamewar detector on HN

and the correct option is c)
See http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4862.
Threading in cPython is like recursion, it kind of works but is not the canonical way to write it.

I dare to say that in Python you should always convert a recursive algorithm to the iterative form, because cPython lacks tail call optimization common in functional languages and the default recursion dept is only 999; the same way you should also look for other patterns related to multitasking if the task is CPU bound (or look for GIL-free implementation).

I agree with you that these (and other) Python "gotchas" need more visibility; I don't think the language is broken - one could say the default implementation is broken, IMHO it is just not optimized for a couple classic software patterns. Once you start swimming with the current (using alternative patterns), you probably will find some of the design decisions very pragmatic.
We could also implement Israeli style security, namely profiling (not racial but terrorist), when you go through Ben Gurion, you go from car to gate in about 30 min, and at no point do yo have to remove your shoes, or even remove your laptop from it's bag, no matter what type of bag it is.

Now I'll grant you if you're coming from Ramallah and you're flying to Pakistan through Turkey and Dubai you should probably give yourself and extra hour or two, but as long as have no nefarious motives and tell the truth you will be on your way. But this is true regardless of the color of your skin or religious beliefs. I have a friend who was doing something like that and he's white, very clearly Jewish and religious. (Often those stories you hear of the 3 hour long interrogations are because the dude was/is an active participant on the rock throwing attacks and they have pictures of him that he is unaware of...)
Now anything you say about a controversial topic has to be unambiguous at the level of individual sentences.

This has been true in academia for years.
To avoid these kinds of problems, why don't journalists just post the entire interview transcript instead of, or in addition to, editing it for brevity and thus injecting their own biases?