skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As mentioned by Crito, the taxi medallion system exists here, and it's a terribly broken system for everyone involved except, perhaps, the Taxi companies. A NYC taxi medallion can cost millions of dollars.

That said... the Uber black car drivers are licensed, only as private limo drivers rather than taxi drivers. They're not allowed to accept street hails. (Before smartphones, this meant having an advance reservation in place.) They're perfectly qualified to drive passengers.

And unlike most regular taxis I've experienced in the SF bay, Uber drivers aren't on their cell phone during the entire drive, so they're arguably safer drivers.
> Why not blacks? Why not midgets?

Yes, those people too.

> Women are so entitled nowadays.

GODDAMN THOSE LAZY WHORES FOR WANTING EQUAL PAY FOR THE SAME WORK.
That's pretty interesting if true - do you have any evidence?
Show HN: Associative text patching in OCaml
Avoiding the backdoor does not require changing the points (and possibly getting in patent trouble). Even with malicious points, truncating enough bits out of each x coordinate is enough to thwart the attack. I don't know why this is not pointed out more often.

I'm honestly far more surprised by finding out that another factorization-based (Micali-Schnorr) DRBG standard comes with 'default' public keys.
The question is what "2.days" actually returns. IIRC, in ActiveSupport it returns an integer number of seconds. Is that a sensible convention? If you had another class representing an span of time (with or without any absolute calendar reference) that an Integer could convert into, that might be a cleaner design. But even in that case you wouldn't necessarily have a method on Integer to confer it to a TimeSpan; you'd initialize a TimeSpan with an integer argument.

In general I find it cleaner when less primitive classes can represent themselves as more or equally primitive classes, but not vice-versa. to_integer, to_float, to_list, to_boolean, etc. But on the other extreme, if your application entails establishing database connections, implementing String#to_database_connection would be ridiculous.

For me, integers are much more primitive than date and time objects. `2.days` would be equivalent to implementing `2.meters` in a CAD application, but I suppose you might be OK with that.

But even granting that an integer can transform itself into a representation of a time span, i.e. `2.days` is okay, `2.days.ago` is right out. That's not just an Integer representing itself as a span of time. Now all of a sudden Integer has to have knowledge and, even worse, opinions about the current date and time (which is one of the most hazardous boundary cases in all of software).
"what are the odds of that?"

I'm not sure, maybe we should build an unbelievably inefficient program to calculate them.
This comment bleeds hatred and bigotry, and I'm sorry, but I'm not going to allow it to go unnoticed and unchecked.

Please name one behavior by the average 'privileged white man' that is inherently exclusionary. I bet you can't.
"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities.

When that happens, it tends to happen fast, like a core going critical. The threshold for participating goes down to zero, which brings in more people. And they tend to say incendiary things, which draw more and angrier counterarguments."

http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
It is sad that an article with actual content towards the end has so much filler to start with. I think this post would be a lot more impactful if it started out as

"Hey, you want to know who else pays bloggers to link to their site? Expedia.com, here is some proof:"

I can understand the author's frustration, and he brings good points to the table, but the first quarter or so of the article is neigh unreadable.
I think you are misunderstanding this, due to poor wording.

That quote makes more sense if you replace "that investor" with "a investor". It seems plausible that founders have to deal with many founders, and it seems further plausible that many founders have had at least one bad experience.

9/10ths of founders having at least one bad experience with an investor and founders having bad experiences with 9/10 investors are obviously two very different things.

Of course we should obviously still be asking ourselves "what the fuck?!?"
Remember MySpace? They were the new hotness until they imploded. Reddit could easily turn into yet another ad-festooned wasteland, and many people are tired of the "piss off your users as much as you can get away with" business model.
Rackspace has a live chat which is 24/7 with knowledgeable support techs. Bugged them twice yesterday and they responded very quickly. My last rackspace bill was 60$.
Leaded gasoline. Using it allows you to increase the compression of your engine, which improves fuel economy.

The total cost of lead in the environment by far outweighs the economic benefits, which is why it's banned, yet for each individual person it makes economic sense to use leaded gasoline if you can.
Just so you know, your tone is extremely off-putting. It doesn't come across as genuine asking the question, but are instead whining about how you are being forced to change and you don't want to change and don't see why you should budge so much as a single hair on your head.

Also the "Why not blacks? Why not midgets?" line is a particularly poor choice. My understanding is that little people do not like being called midgets, and by slurring them in the same breath that you speak of women and blacks, you give the impression that women, blacks, and midgets are all categories of people you disrespect.

Finally, entitlement refers to the sense that you deserve what you have, not the feeling that you deserve something you ought to have but don't have.

Therefore, ironically, YOU are the entitled one here. You feel you're entitled to carry on as you have been carrying on.
I follow some prominent feminists in technology, initially out of genuine interest but increasingly out of morbid curiosity, so I think I can respond with my honest impression of their beliefs.

The reason we need to actively encourage women (more so than men) to get into tech is that the tech industry is believed to be fundamentally and structurally sexist. So, for the same reason that victims of violence need special and deliberate treatment, the victims of the structural misogyny need special and deliberate treatment.

This isn't just for getting female children interested in technology, it is even the case for female entrepreneurs seeking funding. Regarding the low percentage of VC funds going to female entrepreneurs, a prominent tech feminist recently said that the percentage of female applicants is irrelevant, and that the men who run the industry should be seeking out and finding female entrepreneurs. https://mobile.twitter.com/shanley/status/417035978025357312... https://mobile.twitter.com/shanley/status/417036172448104448...

Interestingly, tech feminism seems to even support the idea that female entrepreneurs should not apply for VC funding, because it is so misogynistic. https://mobile.twitter.com/CynthiaSchames/status/41703807634...
Nice one! This is a much better example than my more generalized one of car emissions in general.
If you liked "Guns Germs and Steel" you'll also enjoy Diamond's latest book "The World until Yesterday". Everything I've learned about organizational dynamics can be gleaned from this book.
I don't think `2.days.ago` makes code any clearer or appreciably more concise than, for instance, `Date.today - Date.days(2)` (or even, to meet you in the middle, `Date.today - 2.days`).
I wish there were a way to delete since now i'm gonna get negged to death and I will probably need to make a new account
Someone obviously obtained their bank account wiring details. Why don't they switch accounts and/or banks? Leaving the U.S. won't seem to affect their situation.
I've been looking into buying a Chromebook for some backpacking I'll be doing in Southeast Asia this summer. The portability and battery life are a big plus, and I like that the devices are cheap enough that I wouldn't have to worry about it getting damaged. However, I've also been considering getting an iPad mini instead.

Anyone with experience traveling with these devices care to share some input? Specifically, would a Chromebook still be useful (and worth the weight) if I might only have WiFi a couple times per week?
I personally enjoy the 'squeeze page' aesthetic used.
I recently worked on a small-ish desktop app that shuttled data between a HID USB device and a web service. We targeted Windows and OSX. The UI portion of the application was very simple and I still found the Xamarin/GtkSharp combination buggy and frustrating.

We used Wix for the Windows installer and the included OSX tools to make the Mac installer (http://s.sudre.free.fr/Stuff/PackageMaker_Howto.html was helpful).

A TeamCity build system using NuGet worked fine for building both flavors, though the Mac build was really just a shell script that TeamCity launched. We used the Xamarin compiler for Mac.

In hindsight I wish we had taken (found?) the time to go all the way and write separate OSX specific UI code and not used GtkSharp. And not require the install of the Mono framework for Mac users-- that really kills the experience. Supposedly you can bundle in Mono with the Xamarin .Mac product but we haven't found the time to get that far yet.

*EDIT: I failed to mention explicitly this was C#/Mono. Also for those interested I used http://www.signal11.us/oss/hidapi/ as a wrapper around the Mac HID USB APIs and it worked fine.
I would also characterize Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality as "applied Thinking: Fast and Slow". I would strongly recommend it.
For powered (and unpowered chairs) you're looking at a modified van - I'm sorry I can't remember the company that builds them right now.

Please make sure the chair can be anchored correctly and is certified for use in a vehicle.
Barring some other external force - why would one expect they wouldn't continue as a player in a market they helped create?
In my family's case:

Word: Google Docs is more than enough for the type of documents they work on.

Photos: Photos are taken on the iPhone and shared directly via FB/etc. No need to touch a computer.
Car regulations are a great thing, and pollution levels have decreased a lot, even in LA.

Pollution is still a significant problem in LA.

> “Ozone and particle pollution contribute to thousands of hospitalizations, emergency room visits, and deaths every year,” Dr. Kari Nadeau, a Stanford Medical School professor and American Lung Association researcher, said when the State of the Air report was released. “Air pollution can stunt the lung development of children, and cause health emergencies, especially for people suffering from chronic lung disease, including asthma, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema. Both long-term and short-term exposures can result in serious health impacts.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eco-nomics/2012/08/23/los-angele...

The numbers of people dying from car pollution is weirdly high, considering we don't hear much about it.
Chromebooks' success punches Microsoft in the gut
Fake bloggers and SEO scammers
I'm commenting on the role of mass media in a contemporary society. This is important because I'm afraid that soon everyone is going to hear about PG/YC because "oh no, patriarchy!"

To repeat, look at engineering circa 1990s -- nearly entirely male-populated field, moderate prestige. Now look at engineering circa 2010s -- slightly more diverse field, significantly higher prestige. If you start with a 90+%-male base and you achieve moderate, growing success via entirely word-of-mouth advertising and by absorbing people from that base, you are setting yourself up for a situation where your organization reflects the base it grew out of (i.e. male engineers). And yet the media is not going to pay attention to you until your field is large and successful enough for spoils to be had from throwing rocks at you, at which point obviously they are going to criticize you for being "exclusionary". So what you have is a nearly entirely media-manufactured controversy. Why didn't the media focus on getting more women into engineering in the 1990s? Because it wasn't a prestigious enough field at the time for organized entryist action to exist.

Why is there a problem with this controversy? Because entryism exists. Entryists are interested in entering any high-prestige field and taking it over for themselves. They are not below taking up social justice banners to accomplish their goals. In fact, the most successful entryists utilize those banners to the highest effect. The whole controversy is pure manufactured evil. This is not about women's rights or social justice. It's about entryism.
That everything is baited with stuff like the all "white/male bro" tech industry is really what gets me. You're not inviting anyone to change anything with that mindset. I was eager to read and consider their suggestions up until that last bit, when I immediately backed off and just shrugged.

How many gender-blind software architects were out there through this entire technology boom we've seen in the last 40 years? Just tinkering away at platforms and code and programs, not really thinking about anything other than their craft. Someone will jump in and say that it was their privilege to be able to just focus, unlike X minority trying to do the same, and I'll agree with you there. To think that there's some odorous force emanating from these privileged folks, working to keep others out, strikes me as strange. The "bros" in tech are hardly the ones that built or stand near the entry-gates.
First, I'll say, tptacek, virtually everything you write on HN is spot on, but it's most on when you're talking about issues of sexism, racism, power, and privilege. The tech industry suffers from a collective privilege-blindness and I appreciate anyone who spends any amount of their time and energy talking about it coherently and persuasively.

When I was in seventh grade, we were assigned to write a little speech about what we'd do if we were in charge of the school. One of my classmates, Dan, gave a speech about how he'd use computers to more rightly integrate school and home-life. After I was done, I asked, "What about people who don't have computers at home?" He responded with a look of confusion on his face, "What? You mean like poor people or something?"

My family didn't have enough money to afford a computer growing up. I got my first computer in 10th grade: a 486 running Windows 3.1 that my mother's boss was going to simply throw away. Dan's words felt like a slap in the face, even in 7th grade.

If I had read pg's words in 7th grade, they would have felt like a slap in the face, too. Getting my face slapped does not make me or anyone else more interested. It makes people think, "This thing isn't for me."

People in technology, especially men, are utterly blind to privilege. It's astounding. It's also frustrating because explaining privilege to someone who has never seriously experienced the lack of it is like trying to explain to a fish what it's like to breath without water.

Here's another story. I recently mentored a 13-year-old kid through an after-school non-profit. I taught him the basics of programming. He had all the affinity in the world, but it was still hard even with my guidance. Why? There was one laptop shared among all the members of the family — mother, father, 3 brothers, 2 sisters — and he'd only show up to our sessions with the laptop maybe 50% of the time. Any work he'd do between session would often be lost because other people would tinker with it. Everyone around him teased him for playing with computers so much and being so "nerdy" and "gay." Neither of his parents spoke much English — a Spanish translator had to be present when I was having an extended conversation with either.

But obviously my student just didn't want it bad enough.

Blagh.
If you have decided to put 50% of the population into a single box, I find that to simplistic.

Would you accept a similarly general negative statement about men? All men are lazy? All men put women down? Or would you consider any such statement too generalising?
A fact that you can gain no end of entertainment from, if you keep reminding your surgeon friends of it.
The irony is that there is an immense amount of money being left on the table by this whole "startup world" ignoring women and people of color.
I didn't find his comments sexist in the least. If anything, they were almost purely observational, and I tend to agree with him. But they were also quite discouraging in regards to picking up programming later in life and how it correlated with success. As someone who was interested in computers at 13, but never had the opportunities or support to pursue that interest until much, much later in life, it's a bit sad to be told that it may be too late. To deliver that message when referring to an entire gender, I can imagine, can be doubly as discouraging.
Barry Schwartz on TED, same title as the book you mention:

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...
Most of the higher-paid administrators, etc., are women though.

That said, most of the (invariably obscenely overcompensated) superintendents I've heard of have been male.
Audiobooks are a godsend. Driving around went from being a chore to being a way to relax with a good book.
> The total cost of lead in the environment by far outweighs the economic benefits

Evidence?
You perhaps are not aware of absentee voting.
If there's one thing gawker sites do well, it's nerd baiting.

Yes, there are problems women face in STEM fields. No, getting everyone angry at pg isn't gonna help.
Don't be. These kinds of problems are algorithmic problems and have very little bearing on your capabilities as a developer from an engineering perspective.

For me, its like saying someone who is poor at physics makes a poor accountant.

While a fun exercise, I feel that it doesn't actually test for actual programming ability as it actually requires the programmer to be familiar with this particular subset of algorithms first (something that isn't entirely fundamental imho). I do not believe many jobs require the skillset that this problem tests for.

For example, I had very little idea how to approach this problem in an optimal way. But once I read the comment above I figured out a pretty brute force method. You can get 34 by just joining contiguous segments in each column with segments in their neighbouring columns if they have the same row and height. With some trimming I managed to get 30... not really sure if 29 is actually possible actually, I can't find where I can cut down on 1 more.

Edit: found it. Very tricky edge case with my algorithm. Happy with 30.
IMO, folks on HN need to do much less discussing on this topic and a lot more listening. For the most part, HN is collectively blind to issues of power and privilege.

For those interested in learning more about privilege, read these two essays by John Scalzi, Being Poor (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/) and Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...).

Try to read them without being reflexive or poking holes in them. If you find yourself getting riled up or defensive stop and ask yourself why you're feeling the need to respond that way.
> Thankfully, that idea perished in the crypto wars of the '90s

Did Lotus Notes ever get rid of key escrow? IIRC they used BSAFE.
It highly depends on the metro area.
It's weird when you realize how much stuff that seems organic is really just a massive ploy/effort by a company or PR firm. I think even Paul Graham had an article about PR firms related to the comeback of the 'suit' haha.

One wonders how safe HN will be from this. Inevitably if something can generate views or $$ then someone will have an interest in gaming it.
In the Medium essay you link to they are calling out women who deny the existence of sexism in tech:

"The white privilege that benefits many white women in tech plays a huge role in allowing them to occupy a position denying gender oppression, supporting the patriarchy, and undermining feminist activism."

This "female team" is doing the exact opposite. I think they're safe from the feminist horde.

Also, you might get something from this comic: http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341 You seem to be experiencing similar terrors.
"ask any female founder who has dealt with investors - 9 times out of 10, that investor has used his power to sexually harass the founder"

I'd like to see some stats to back that up, i.e. police reports. Sounds like a generalization that's probably not based in reality. Every investor isn't a rapist waiting for a shot at a female CEO.
Therefore, ironically, YOU are the entitled one here. You feel you're entitled to carry on as you have been carrying on.

By not paying extra attention to females?

Buddy, I'm here to get a job done, if my applicant is a woman and she is good, I will hire her. Move on with your bullshit.
He's concerned about being misconstrued because feminist activists love bullying people with waves of hateful, outrageously uncharitable, deliberately damaging messages at the slightest trigger.

For example, here's what PG recently said on Twitter (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/416994260995416064):

> Will write about female founders, but traveling all day so it will have to wait. Reserve judgment? Prob too much to hope for, alas.

The responses are typical of feminist activists:

1. > pg translated: "Shut up. All I did in the last decade is not what I believe in, I will graciously explain it to you when I see fit"

2. > Obviously not an important enough issue to deal with now.

3. > please DO NOT write about women founders until you have a better fucking grasp on the issue.

4. > oh don't you even try to equate being a douchebag "startup" founder with being a hacker

The privilege topic has been discussed to death.

If someone were to use "privilege" to mean "unearned benefits for individuals in specific contexts", then no one could have a problem with it. We could talk about:

- female privileges in the workplace

- male privileges in the workplace

- white privileges at university

- black privileges at university

- gay privileges at bars

- straight privileges at bars

- American-born privileges regarding medical care

- Canadian-born privileges regarding medical care

- etc.

Instead, third-wave feminists have transformed the notion of "privilege" into a targeted weapon for belittling and denigrating the specific demographics they deem hostile to their goals.

When a "friendly" demographic does well, it's a result of hard work and determination. For example, when young women earn more than young men, or when young women graduate from college at far higher rates than young men, it's a result of hard work and determination.

Another example: Have you ever seen tptacek complain about the Asian tech problem, the Indian tech problem, or the Jewish tech problem? Nope. Those people worked hard! That is why they're wildly overrepresented. No need to scold them. No need to demand flagellation from them.

But men doing well? White men? Oh god, it's just their privilege. We need to fix this, and we'll know the problem isn't fixed as long as there is any disparity.