skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a third path here which the author ignores, but is already well underway both online and throughout the rest of the world - an increased emphasis on non-degreed training programs. Yes, the "for-profit" education model is rife with its own problems, but for much of the world, many don't have the option to attend a 4 year degree school and beyond. For those who don't (or increasingly, won't due to rising costs and lower advantages) the option to get skill specific training for their job or specific interests is becoming increasingly attractive.

Even big time universities are getting into this - witness executive programs offered by many prestigious programs. On the flip side, companies like Treehouse and more exotic options like MOOCs and "learn a language as a service" style instruction are becoming formidable, low risk options.

I think the future will see a reversion to 4 year institutions serving those students who always used to go to college, a reduction in the amenities arms race that others on this thread have pointed out, and an increasingly level playing field (and better perception) of those people who didn't go to college, but do have highly valuable (and demonstrable) skills acquired through for-profit teaching avenues.

Many here will find this distasteful. That's OK. Many who are over 40 find internet dating inherently distasteful too, but that hasn't changed the perception among younger people or stopped its explosion as a real alternative to traditional dating.

Disclosure: I work for an educational technology company who serves a lot of commercial training providers but also many four year institutions.
If you go to a strip club, and pay the $20 cover, you get to watch the show. Does that mean a company can show up with a camera, broadcast a feed on the internet, and pay $20 for each person who is logged in? It's the same thing right?
Yep... you're right. I had forgotten that the Supremes had just let the Cablevision Second Circuit case stand and didn't rule on it themselves.

Wasn't their another remote DVR case though that they ruled on that had de-duplicated the data for multiple users? The difference in the Cablevision remote DVR being that they didn't de-duplicate data.
You seem very down on smart watches and don't appear to value the opinions of those of use who are enjoying ours.

Why are you commenting on this thread beyond sharing your initial negative opinion here?

To put in Monty Python terms, "Are you here for an argument?".
>And guys, what could the nursing industry do to make it more welcoming to you? Anything? Or are you simply not interested in it?

Nursing would be among the worst professions for me. It requires a lot of simultaneous attention to wide variety of details - the cost of missing something is somebody's pain, injury, life... I can focus really deep on one thing at a time - suited me well in Math before and in programming now - while any situation requiring attention to a several different details in parallel or quick sequence just exhausts me.

Related to it is the perfection level required. Take the simplest thing - inserting needle into a vein. Doing it a 1000 times, you need to do it perfectly a 1000 times. In my mentality - it is much more efficient/faster to do something not perfectly, thus getting it right, say, 9 times out of 10 and apply additional effort to correct the 1 out of 10 mistake. The same about following a multi-item checklist (or multi-step procedures) - i immediately filter out "unnecessary/unimportant" items. Obviously, such mentality have no place in nursing :)
It really depends on the situation. Generally, if my phone is in my pocket it means I'm on the go or performing some activity where pulling it out would be less convenient (or very challenging).

Going back to my airport example, I generally put my phone in my computer bag when traveling to avoid accidentally losing it. This is a case where not having to pull out the phone right away is extremely useful.

Other activities that benefit from not taking out the phone: grocery shopping, shoveling snow, working out, cycling, riding public transportation, cooking, and I could keep going.

Constant distraction is another conversation altogether, but I generally don't find this to be an issue by configuring my notifications to only show things I probably need to know about right away.
I would like to point out that those graphs are very misleading if not carefully read.

For instance, the first is tuned to make it appear that college and high school graduates are on exactly equal footing in mid-2006, whereas in fact in 2006 the median income of a high-school graduate with no higher education is $37,000, but the median income for a bachelor degree holder with no higher education is $60,000.

It's useful for comparing the change in the two values over time, but it is not useful for comparing the values of the two at any given time. All I'm saying is, be careful not to let your intuition get in the way, and think carefully about what the graph is saying.
I think a major argument against this, in the field of programming in particular, is that most of those other field-related imbalances are culture-neutral. You'll find more male sanitation workers, construction workers, plumbers, etc. everywhere from the US, to Brazil, to China, to Russia, to Pakistan. (Controlling, of course, for the more general inequities in employment-by-gender that those cultures face.)

But the "no female programmers" thing is specific to western culture. There are plenty of female programmers in India, and in Russia. So this is likely something about western culture, that has caused this difference.
> Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what.

In some limited cases, even being a member of the group that you are accused of being biased against is not enough to save you from the accusations.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hating_Jew

" "Within the logic of the concept, those who accuse others of being self-hating Jews may themselves be self-hating Jews."[14] Gilman says "the ubiquitousness of self-hatred cannot be denied. And it has shaped the self-awareness of those treated as different perhaps more than they themselves have been aware."[5]"

That is some 'next level shit' right there.
>If you major in 'business' or 'communications' then you are majoring in 'fucking around'.

Most of the sales team that I work with must have majored in 'fucking around' then. Somehow they manage to work just as hard as us dev guys and pull their weight anyway.
"a bunch of customers"

A single customer. One radio receiver per customer if I understand their model correctly.
>The rest of the society live in conditions of near slavery. They could ask for a car, as they are "equal", but it takes years to come, and when it comes, it is a horrible car you could not choose anything about.

Wait, you mean they have homes? As in, stable places to live that don't put them in debt peonage their whole lives?

Wow, that's a pretty big rise in their standard of living versus current-day neoliberal capitalism ;-).
Lemma: Women-led companies are desirable.

Vivek Wadhwa is doing a bunch of research into the data. I don't have his report at my fingertips but fundamentally, not investing in women is not a rational move. Here's the media headline version:

"Women-led private technology companies are more capital-efficient, achieve 35 percent higher return on investment, and, when venture-backed, bring in 12 percent higher revenue than male-owned tech companies."

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-20/women-who-ru...

Conclusion: Women earn over 50% of degrees but start fewer than 3% of companies. If we accept that women-led companies do well, as per the data -- and yes, there are certainly caveats -- then this gap clearly shows there is a problem, in terms of inefficient use of investment if nothing else.
Looks cool!

I have a somewhat related question for anyone who works on tools/frameworks (for iOS I guess)... is it a pain to deal with iOS versions, ARC/non-ARC, and anything else? I was reading the quick start guide here and I noticed it said iOS 6.0+, so I guess you just have to look at the market share and make a trade off as to how much you want to support?

I've personally only worked on apps themselves, but I've always wondered if the people making Flurry, Tapjoy, etc have to go through hell getting their framework to work for every combo of Xcode and iOS out there lol.
Very cool!

Definitely will look into this for my future apps.
>Casio Bin Laden watch

In case you are like me and didn't immediately get the reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Claimed_use_in_terr...
A good summary, I agree all around except with respect to battery life, I've had none of the problems anyone is talking about...but if I had to guess, I bet it corresponds to the amount of notifications you get and how much you're playing with the thing.

I've been able to get some of the apps to worth, but there is clearly still some slight hacking needed, which makes the whole thing more of a project than a product to me.

That being said, I commend their efforts in getting the technology out there after years of talking about smart watches, especially on an open platform for developers.

I'll continue to support it, use it, and hack on it, but is it the ipod of mp3 players for watches? Probably not, but I'm tired of waiting around for the big boys. Stop suing each other over patents and innovate for gods sake.
People do more than win and fail at startups. They mostly spend their time trying, and there are great personal rewards for that. For entrepreneurs, failing is just another step towards success.
There's education and there's education. Academic learning is only one kind of intelligence, learning physical skills is intelligence too. Which is why plumbers are so well paid. Here in the UK the Labour government told all the working class kids hey, don't bother to learn a trade like your parents, go to an ex-poly and get a degree in media studies! Now they're unemployable and all our tradesmen come from Poland, where they do still understand education and they do still respect the trades. And without them, the UK is in a lot of trouble.
Some customers take themselves too seriously.

I've worked in the service industry, and the vast majority of customers are great, but some just want to cause trouble and blame it on the business because they are in a bad mood or something. I really never understood it.

I went to go to a walk in place to get my blood drawn. They took appointments, but the vast majority were walk in patients. There were tons of people there, I could have left and came back, but I wanted to get it over with so I sat down and prepared to wait. There was one employee drawing blood. This other lady came in after me, sat down, then started FLIPPING OUT and making a scene "WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG!? THIS PLACE IS TERRIBLE, I AM LEAVING!" and stormed out in a fit after causing some trouble beforehand for a few minutes. It was a true temper tantrum. um I don't know did you see the waiting room? Did you have an appointment? No. Nobody can predict how many people are going to get blood drawn that day. The poor person drawing blood was so flustered trying to answer questions, she was like "I'm sorry, I'm not the fastest." After she left the whole waiting room just looked at each other and was like "what's with her?" Then a bunch of people appoligised to the person drawing blood, because it was out of her hands, and she didn't do anything wrong at all, and she didn't deserve to be treated like that.

Each time I've gone in there since I have been the only one there, and have been in and out in only a few minutes, so that day seemed to be an anomaly.
Certain parties like to fuel the outrage flame because they make money on clickbait. There are also just people with an axe to grind that get off on starting fights. Then you have people that will swear up and down that there is no gender problem in tech, nothing wrong with 'brogrammer' culture, etc. The reasonable people in the middle all think they are arguing against the extreme views, but just end up fighting each other because they misunderstand each others' view points. You have people that have directly experienced sexism in tech thinking they are arguing with the deniers when in actuality they are arguing with people who think their interlocutors are just the angry people looking for a fight.

Messy. And no women are persuaded to learn programming, and no one wins but those websites making money on advertising. Everyone comes away angry.
Have the identities reviewed by a third party against your client list.

The issue here is that they claim the reviewers aren't legitimate customers, so the reviews are fake. If this is true, just verifying them would solve the problem without revealing who they are. If they turned out to be fake, then the business should be able to take some action at that point.
>Passing DOMDocumentFragment to DOMDocument::saveHTML() Produces invalid Markup

Of the few things PHP should be great at, parsing and generating html markup is close to the top of the list. Yet DOMDocument has given me so many headaches...
Embedded applications use bitwise ops all the time. Particularly for performing changes to registers.

Example, a microcontroller has an 8 bit status register. Each bit controls some hardware function. You wish to change bit 5, but you can't change anything else because it would cause unwanted side effects. So this rules out simply saying myregister = 0b00001000.

Common solution is to make a macro like:

#define setbit(BYTE,BIT) BYTE |= (1 << BIT)

Thus you can say I want to set bit 5 in my register by calling setbit(foo, 5) while keeping the rest of the byte intact. There are analogous macros for clearing and toggling bits.

Or you might want to perform an operation based on a particular bit in a byte, e.g. byte 5 is a status flag that tells you when a timer has overflowed.

#define getbit(BYTE, BIT) !!(BYTE & ~(1 << BIT))

Then you can say:

if( getbit(myregister, 5)){
// do something
}

Fun fun :)
Grayed out means down voted, right? But why?! First good comment on the thread: no bitching, no need to click the link to find ~20 fixes, here's the alternative, never look back. Period.
I buy this. In fact IMO the opportunity for other folks to make rapid, very widely felt, and profitable changes to the fabric of society is probably more available than ever before.

(Technology diffuses over punctuated equilibria. And the ability to which an individual can innovate, the amount of upside leverage they retain to financial performance, and the speed at which innovations diffuse have all increased since the mid-90s.)
If we're generalizing from fictional examples, I'm sure I can find a great novel about a communist utopia somewhere.
The broadcast networks paying the cable networks would all but guarantee they go bankrupt. So the most likely answer here is that NBC, ABC, etc. just shut off their antenna broadcasts. Which would be a real shame.

They don't have a right to a revenue stream just because it is there.

True. But I'd argue that Aereo's $7 a month charge to rebroadcast content they have nothing to do with is a dubious revenue stream, too.
Depends on the course. An intro-level lecture course like Econ 101 is very labor-efficient: one professor teaches 500 students in a huge lecture hall, with the help of a few very poorly paid TAs.

Also, colleges are increasingly hiring adjunct faculty who receive no healthcare or other benefits.
> Aereo is doing almost exactly what cable television once did, putting a radio receiver on one end of a cable and a bunch of customers on the other.

No, Aereo is putting a radio receiver on one end and one customer on the other. Each customer has their own antenna. It's exactly the same as having an antenna on your home TV, only you're renting the antenna and it comes with a DVR.
dividend stocks seem great if you use dollar-cost averaging, DRIP investing, and you do the research necessary; they also seem like they take a very long time to build up a sizeable portfolio.

I really like Rob Walling's description of what he does with software businesses [1] though, and my plan is to do something like that.

[1] http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/06/24/websites-as-investme...
Yelp might be the most special-snowflake place on the internet.

I tend to ignore the negative reviews since 9 times out of 10 the people leaving them have a ridiculous sense of their self-importance.

It's more useful to focus on the positive reviews and if they're telling you the place has what you're looking for.
Cable companies also usually pay re-transmission fees to the local affiliates. That's probably the main reason. The affiliates have some power over the networks, so the networks would want to make sure that the locals are still getting something from iOS users.

This is actually the main business model that Aereo threatens... not because Aereo is all that threatening to re-transmission fees, but that if they are successful, then all cable companies could just use multiple antennas to capture the over-the-air signal and avoid paying the (large) retransmission fees.

(Then you get into cable companies owning networks that own broadcasters, and you see that it's all a big mess)
Funny you should say that. I got my first real programming job from a puzzle in MENSA magazine.
New Relic, Docker Showcase the Coming Devops Disruption
I dunno, I thought I was being direct. The tech sector has sexism problems, and YC, as part of that sector, is not going to be immune to them.

This piece does nothing but puff up YC in an effort to distance YC from the tech sector's sexism, which will only work to a point.

The target audience is the section of moderate feminists that are inherently sympathetic to YC; the concerns of those outside that layer, even the valid ones, are simply not important to PG.

To reiterate: this is a posturing move, in the most neutral sense possible.
Recreating iOS 7's blur with CSS
SOPA Was the biggest misstep for me, and was the breaking point for me to migrate all my domains elsewhere. I ended up at Namecheap because I liked the way they addressed the situation.
And too principled! :)
Didn't you hear? Oakland was the most peaceful city in the country before about 2004 when Googlers started dispersing that far.
Hey, that's the BBB we are talking about here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw

Watch the whole video if you haven't seen it before.
And men are under-represented in nursing (at 6%). Human beings bias themselves in addition to the biases that society puts on them.

http://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-nursing

As long as the ratio isn't much worse than 3:1 (men or women are at least 25% of the workforce) either way I'd argue that it's a pretty balanced work environment all things considered. Shooting for 50/50 equality would potentially make more inequality problems than it solves, just for a different subset of the population.

In other words in nursing if you paid men 2x what women make you'd sort that shit out it quite a hurry and get a bunch of dudes helping take care of people. I'm not sure you could find anyone who would agree that it's an equitable or desirable way to achieve the "right" outcome, though.
I find that a very strange definition for cynicism. Usually cynics tend to assume that people are, more often than not, consequentialists: pursuing means for their ends.

PG's ends, in this case, are his business; he wants to make more money. This piece, seen as a consequentialist act, would be a gambit played to calm a possible negative tide in feminist circles toward YC, that might have resulted in YC getting fewer (qualified!) female applicants... which would be bad for business.

I think your problem might be in assuming PG cares about his personal reputation, rather than about YC's reputation. Only one of those two things will make him money.

In other words: this is part of "working on what's important to him." Playing the politics of business brand-image is just as much a part of "business" as building your product, as far as profitability goes.
Saying what Airbnb isn't growth hacking doesn't mean it wasn't. There were no protocols into Craigslist for cross-posting and they had to hack them together to get growth - that's growth hacking.
This is a real concern. I held the same view for awhile. In the end, however, I decide the small risk was outweighed by the importance of the issue.

The more people that voice their opinions, the more impossible it becomes to punish that group (i.e. safety in numbers). Join in!
Lenin would be proud of you Comrade! We are all equal after all.
Minimum Viable Painting
If you put money in a bank, and get interest, it is a store of value just as much as a bond is. It's not a permanent store of value (inflation, etc) but nothing is. Houses can get taken away in floods, bonds can also get wiped out by inflation, and companies can go kaput.
Would you like a cookie for coming to the realization that you're an adult and can make adult choices about your daily behavior?

...why of course, you can eat that cookie wherever you like
I don't think that's a scalable analogy. Programmers aren't an elite, really, among professionals. Anyone smart enough to be an accountant or a doctor or a civil engineer is smart enough for 99% of programming jobs, and many of them, for any programming job. Even someone who ended up as a journalist could probably handle the helpdesk or doing QA or websites.
> The pebble demands your attention. That is all.

Almost everyone I've heard from -- in person and online -- that has had a Pebble or similar smartwatch has said that getting notifications on it reduced their gadget-focussed attention compared to having only a smartphone, and cited that as the primary benefit.

So, while I think it could be, for some people, a new distraction, I don't think that's generally the case, and is, in fact, the opposite of what it normally is and what is motivating people to buy it.
Maybe this is Pebble's marketing, I don't know, the fact is most people don't need a Pebble, but it still serves a highly usefil niche for some. If you work with your hands a lot (as a chef, wood worker, contractor, whatever) it can be highly useful. If you work closely coordinated with a small team where you might consider using radios to keep in touch then used correctly a smartwatch might be able to fill that role.

If you don't have a practical use for a smartwatch as with the above examples then it might not be useful for you. Not everyone needs a multi-meter or a torque wrench either, they are tools for jobs and not necessarily universally needed.
That content is broadcast for $0. It's logically similar to renting an antenna on your roof and a cable connecting that to the TV. Considering that antennas are ugly, and not the cheapest... antenna-invisibility services are a reasonable thing to pay money for.
"...childish vendettas..."

Michael, you have a lot of insightful comments, but you of all people should never, ever point out someone else's childish vendetta.
Half Of A Drug's Power Comes From Thinking It Will Work
That would work if the `>>>` operator worked as expected, but actually it just looks at the first 5 bits of the second variable so that `a>>>b` is effectively equivalent to `a>>>(b&31)`. His description of it is wrong.

http://jsfiddle.net/Ayzkt/2/
I'm not judging particular people (I have no opinion on the individuals mentioned), and I honestly haven't kept up with this whole narrative so there are certainly no statistics I can cite. I'm saying that stating that someone belongs to a class is entirely insufficient to demonstrate the assertion that they are not biased against that class, particularly in a context where that class is systemically biased against.