skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking of "The Unix Programming Environment":

I was reminded, by this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036920

by danso in this thread (who talked about cp and mv), that I learned, from the K&P book (IIRC), that the commands cp, mv and ln were actually all links to the same executable, which did the right thing based on what name it was invoked by, as found from looking at argv[0]. Checked just now in Linux with:

cd /usr/bin
ls -li cp mv ln

on SuSE Linux, but they seem to be different files now ...

The -i option to ls shows the inode number.
Exactly. I don't understand how people can be so naive.

The "freedom fighter" and "fighting the man" themes are going down the toilet so quickly people don't even realize.

Many people, including these self called entrepreneurs, are jumping in because they see an opportunity to make money. Plain and simple, they couldn't care less about Bitcoin, privacy, fighting the man, whatever.

People should be angry the established monetary powers are taking an interest in Bitcoin. At the end, Bitcoin will be just another currency the powers at the top manage, make money on top of it, tax, etc, and what will remain of it?
He never made that statement. He just said that the best founder-hackers start hacking around age 13, and that admitting female founders who did not do that wouldn't address what he sees as the biggest bottleneck to female founder-hackers.
> may share it with law officers as part of a criminal investigation

Isn't this a civil investigation?
Good article.

Key learnings:

1. Being an above 25y founder was viewed as advantageous and below 25y founder was viewed a disadvantageous before YC/2005. YC made being <25y old founders viewed as advantageous and >25y founders as disadvantegous.

2. YC making young founders succeed inspires the older founders, plus other young founders.

3. They tried the same for female founders. However, acquiring the skills to do a startup requires decade-long exposure to tech and business of a decade, sometimes even it requires exposure for a whole generation. For that reason, it is not as easy to what YC did with women as with young founders

4. Prgrammers here, stereotypes there, it ALL goes back to getting young girls to do their own projects in their teens to acquire the business acumen, hard programming skills and understanding of how to build a product that people will want. That is the solution and nothing else will help more than this.
The cab driver stat is really interesting, but I'd like to see the comparison between 2007 and now even more than the 1970 to now comparison.

We have a lot more degrees, but also a lot more unemployment and underemployment.
Target Breach Affected Up to 110 Million Customers
I think he went with recursion so that it would eventually terminate, when he runs out of memory.
When you see the notice saying HN is down. Type <ctrl><F5> - fixed. Think about how pages are cached...
You definitely have to phrase it kindly and explicit and be open for other options of how to proceed. Otherwise, the point of staying anonymous is to protect oneself from unnecessarily enraged admins or other responsible people.
He controls 57% of the Facebook voting stock (may be less after his secondary offering). He's one of the most powerful founder CEO's in the world. Zuck definitely got some advantage in connections and upbringing, but there have been countless other founders with the same advantage who didn't win the war PG is talking about.
> This seems to be an article of faith (and one using buzzwords with no objective meaning) for which neither evidence nor argument is offered.

What do you mean? The argument is my entire comment explaining what's happening here.

Brazil also has what would be equivalent to a basic income, it's called "Bolsa Família" and guarantees a certain income for families based on the number of members. In practice it has been used to manipulate votes, every election there are rumors the program could end so poor people keep electing the same (already proven corrupt) party that championed the program.

In theory those ideas are beautiful, but I'm not seeing it work in practice, and I'm cynical it can ever be.
Supreme Court Will Hear Aereo Case, Settling Broadcaster Battle Once & For All
A racist is less likely to have black friends than a non-racist. I'd suggest that a racist is even less likely to have black co-founders than a non-racist.

edited to add: The reason the "look at my black friends" argument is mocked is that in many cases the friends referred to are not friends in the true sense of the word. There's no such distinction possible when talking about a co-founder. One either is or is not a co-founder.
The Curious Case of a Sick Google Glass
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billi...

I often see code such as:

public Object getObject() {
return this.object;
}

I favour lazy initialization combined with self-encapsulation:

private Object getObject() {
Object o = this.object;

if( o == null ) {
o = createObject();
this.object = o;
}

return o;
}

This is thread-safe and allows injecting new behaviour via polymorphism (overriding the "create" methods in a subclass), which adheres to the Open-Closed Principle. It also eliminates the possibility of accidentally dereferencing nulls.

It could even be implemented as a language feature:

public class C {
nullsafe String name;

public void greeting() {
System.out.printf( "Hello, %s\n", getName() );
}
}

Where the "nullsafe" keyword automatically generates a private accessor and corresponding protected creation method.
Ummmmm Really? The Bank is taking the risk not you. Never heard of insured accounts? Granted, there are no guarantees in life but money in the bank is pretty solid. You may stuff a couple mill under your mattress if it makes you feel better...
If you accuse someone of a specific business misbehavior, and that person's actual behavior in the conduct of his business bucks that, it's a relevant statement. It's not Archie Bunker saying "I don't have a problem with those people".

In my professional life, of the the managers working for me was formally accused of racist conduct by an employee he supervised. The core argument was that he was unpleasant and unfair to him based on his race. A major part of his defense was his family (his wife happened to be of the same race), his children, and the extensive work that he did in that community mentoring people.

Bias is a state of mind. Facts/statistics alone do not tell the story.
If your office is poorly laid out in such a fashion, headphones would be a good addition to your desk. When I first moved into a dorm room, I had a hard time sleeping due to hearing other people moving around and talking. I learned to sleep with a fan in order to generate white noise.

You might say "I don't like working with headphones!" but the point I'm trying to make is that in offices without privacy, some amount of consideration has to be paid to mitigate the effects of other people. There's always going to be some noise that someone makes that annoys someone else. You can't stop it at their end, so you try to stop it at your end.
I thought that shenanigan was entirely the result of actions by a DD/UD and not upstream?

I really miss ffprobe, I can never get avprobe to work on the first or second attempt.
Reports of bed bugs is the giveaway to a competitor's fake review for me. Almost always such reviewer has made only 1 review.
I just found this blog on the myth of females not being allowed in STEM:
http://blastar.in/gossipgirl/?p=24

I think it addresses the issues better as being of education, certification, professionalism, skills, talents, and abilities that one needs to get started in STEM roles regardless of gender, et al. I really think GG hits the nail on the head with that post. Don't let a few jerks or douchebags who are not 99.9999% of the industry make you think that all of the industry are just like them.
How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)?

Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? The reason sexism-related stories fall down is not because of lack of interest or due to prejudice, but quite the contrary: too much interest, causing an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, and a subsequent sinking.

This is HN. Come on, we should know better.
a guy bought my old cell phone, claimed it was broken, and then mailed me back a different broken phone of the same model. That is a difficult threat to guard against.

Maybe for electronics there should be a way to record the serial number and require the buyer and seller to confirm that the serial number matches the one on record for the transaction at the time of delivery. That would at least reduce the chance that someone would try to return a different item.
>>YC made changed that into being a >25y founder disadvantegous.

Disagree with this point, unless you mean relative to pre-2005. I'd argue that it brought the age range of founders closer to the optimal spread, rather than bias against founders above 25. It just made investors admit that there's not an age at which you suddenly become "founder" material.
Can we safely assume you never use physical cash because it doesn't support "charge backs"?

Also, what do you say to the populations of the ~40 countries that credit cards don't work in because charge back requests are too common there? Do you tell them to simply never make online purchases?
Oracle set to issue 147 security patches, including 36 for Java
Sitting the whole lunch period is a bigger problem. Grab a take away, then go for a walk.
The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"

Actually by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black." And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.

And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch. The reason I didn't go into detail about it is that I'm not an expert on the topic. I wasn't going to write about something other people understand so much better than me just to send the message that I care.
Also, I must say I apologize for my Gatekeeper comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6986872). I didn't have YC's female founder numbers at the time, but being 2x the average VC's portfolio in terms of female founders is pretty darn good evidence that you aren't biased. You weren't attempting to make the point eloquently in your "The Information" piece and you didn't, but you do here.

I'm still glad I brought it up - the discussion (not from PG but from others) was revealing, but your head is screwed on straight about how to think about whether or not YC is allowing the institutional biases of others cloud its own judgement, and that's great news.
I'd probably include a photo of the serial number in the sale images
That's one positive side effect of 3G: more people can get Internet access. Data caps for pre-paid plans are low here (200MB-300MB), but at roughly $5/month, they're the only affordable option for poor families and people who live away from metro areas.
I'm from Charleston WV and live a couple miles from where the spill took place. People stormed stores for bottled water and some even resorted to stealing to avoid getting the rationed amount. About 1/6 of the state's population doesn't have access to drinking water and many don't have the money to "take a vacation" and leave the region. Businesses can't operatorate and the economic repercussions will devistate the region. The question everyone has is how long will it last? The chemical is dispersed in the water pipes spanning 8 counties and there is no easy way to get it out. We have been angered about the lack of national attention this has received and it makes us feel like no one cares about our state.
Overstock.com, had 780 Bitcoin orders that accounted for $124,000
Why is pg engaging with these trolls? Does anyone think they truly care about women succeeding in business or software? No, this is about making a stink and attention whoring. The appropriate response is to flip these weenies the bird.
This is a dangerous oversimplification of what "racist" (or any negative bias) means. There are many people who have no problem associating with individuals of [insert class here], but would be less likely to hire them, etc. Racism, like everything else, is a spectrum, and it's critical not to characterize it by its most extreme elements.
Hah, that’s delightful! And a good lint rule besides. The Haskell world has a disproportionate number of packages whose names begin with H. Apparently my own joke wasn’t appreciated, though. :(
I find the battery life on my Pebble to be much longer than the author is finding: it was still going 8 days after I misplaced it in my car. When actively being used, I find it lasts 3-4 days. It's still short enough that it's easiest to get in the habit of charging it overnight, but it easily survives one or two forgotten charges.
This is all over the local news here.

Coincidentally, I was just listening to some talk about alternative energy [0] with some interesting arguments for solar and hydro power over coal.

Makes me wonder if we've become inured to the environmental cost/risk of coal power and processing?

Also, coal is big part of the WV economy [1]. So this would seem to have the potential for an extended impact.

First with the water problems. Second in any backlash that arises against the industry in response to the spill.

0: http://www.fiatlux.fm/pragmatic/2

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_West_Virginia#Coal
Not just mere lobbyists, they are 'insiders' who make the right people boatloads of money. They become "Board members" and/or consultants &/or get appointed to seats of power away from the cameras. Hell, they draft the laws that the puppet/script-readers introduce & vote on with much pomp & flourish... or surreptitiously, whatever suits their interests best.

I don't know any but one name on this list, but a quick check leads me to believe we're screwed.
DHS Data Privacy Board Members list from '09:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b2EYh7...

Chairman Howard Beals has no conflict of interest, I suppose:
http://www.itif.org/publications/stricter-privacy-regulation...

D. Reed Freeman, ex-CPO of Gator Networks will fight for YOUR right to privacy, I'm sure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation

I'm also pretty sure a majority of people here @ HN will defend THEIR practices of collecting metrics, too. What's the difference? USGuv was tasked to protect & they took it too far, IMO. The Corps, privates & independents with knowledge, coding skills & processing power are tracking for profit... and have taken it too far, IMO.
There are also more generic plugins, like Stylish for FireFox or Chrome, that let you add your own style to any website.
Allowing names to be exposed by court order doesn't solve this problem -- people will just sign up with throwaway email addresses and, possibly, use Tor.

The best solution is a combination of reviewer reputation and compatibility matching. First, very few people are going to go to the trouble of creating a bunch of valuable reviews just to build up enough karma to be able to smear a particular business.

Then, even if someone were that motivated, if Yelp weighted the reviews I see based on how closely my reviews matched the reviewer's past reviews[], standalone smears would have very little impact.

[] Yes, I know that sentence should be taken out and shot.
Shloka:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shloka
That's not much different from any other form of word-of-
mouth advertising. If anything, it's worse.

"Did you hear about restaurant x?"

"They suck. Don't go there."

If you've only got one friend who's been there, that's all the data you have. At least with Yelp, you can see reviews from people you've never met. The big difference between Yelp and any other form of word-of-mouth advertising is that the business owner can actually see the reviews people are giving to others.
This is a motherf*king website.
There are exceptions. Applications to top universities are booming, as employers recognize these graduates will become our society's future innovators and leaders.

How strong is the evidence to support this statement?
Are there truly that many useless philosophy/liberal arts majors? According to stats I read, most students actually go for majors that are currently in demand. What happened during depression is that majors in demand changed and the one that looked good when you started is not good anymore. Plus, some law schools exaggerated success of their students.

Not all STEM majors and not all computer related majors are in demand btw.
> Waking up to a vibrating watch on your wrist still beats by far annoying iPhone alarms blasting full volume while you are half asleep.

or you could use one of those apps that track whether you're in REM sleep or not and wake you up when most appropriate..
If a private debtor defaults and declares bankruptcy, then the money supply contracts and you get deflationary pressure. I'm curious, though, why you believe the US would see deflation if it were to default?

The Eurozone countries tended to deflate, but there are plenty of examples of countries that went the other way -- Germany, Argentina, Mexico...

I don't think the US will default any time soon, but if we were to get near that point, we would inflate our way out.
Correct - stereotype threat has been significantly discredited.
Funny you should mention about the cultural differences - a German neighbor of mine moved to Munich after a few years in New York.

Whereas she was accustomed to eating at her desk in NYC, she was asked to eat her "stinky tuna salad outside the office!"
Maybe you should read the rest of the essay.
Still not surprised. This is a textbook example of why Apple originally refused to allow apps to run in the background- so now that Apple finally caved and apps can background, it was just a matter of time before exactly this sort of thing came up.
It's not pg's job to equalize the gender ratio in programming, nor is it his job to get girls interested in it. Saying he thinks you need to reach girls young does not obligate him to go research what organizations are out there doing just that.

He meant the post to be a statement of his position, not a rallying cry to fix a societal problem. You seem to have wanted the latter, not the former. That's fine, but it's not a failing on his part that he didn't write the post you wanted him to write.
> Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice?

Your implicit claim is that a human can't write an algorithm that promotes prejudice. Are you interested in defending that claim? It seems very obviously false.
Put yourself in the shoes of a hypothetical progressive tech company. You receive a letter from the government asking you to copy all your network traffic to the NSA for analysis. Threatening serious jail time if you resist or reveal the existence of the letter.

Your lawyers say all that appears to be legal and legitimate, and informal discussions with other tech executives reveal that everybody in your industry does it and it's no big deal.

It takes a lot of courage to resist.

Now that the scope of the surveillance has been revealed, and it's become clear that most of the technology culture, and a big chunk of the general public, is on your side. And the risk of consequences like jail time is much less if you're no longer talking about the government's specific activities in your case, but things that have been published in major newspapers.

It suddenly becomes a lot easier to make a strong statement.

> Elsevier getting involved with supporting Open Access

That's not a fair comparison at all. Open access to scientific research would totally kill Elsevier's main revenue source. The main revenue source for e.g. Google or Verizon is customers, not the NSA. Surveillance reform wouldn't kill their primary business models.
I wouldn't recommend this unless you get written approval from your boss/legal dept/president, OR you leave the office for lunch and do your coding at a cafe/restaurant.

Many companies include language in the employee agreement stating anything you write on company time or company hardware is theirs.
The post was just put here 42 minutes ago, I think it's hard to have any serious rebuttal without some thought. PG took a long time to think this through and write it, it deserves the consideration it was given in its response.
I know how zerohedge is autobanned on hn, but they included some charts that should make people think (especially for those who have been looking away)[0][1].

Personally, I dropped out of Brown 2 years ago, and pursued other opportunities that wouldn't leave me and my family in a mound of debt upon graduation for returns that wont be monetarily or mentally satisfying (Not many interesting options for ChemE's beyond working for big oil/big pharma/big food co). Still grinding it out, but I wouldn't go back unless things change, and considering how things are now (and how they continue to be more of the same) and what I have done since, some college grads I've worked with say I'll come out ahead, but at least I know I'm not getting behind…

[0] http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303...

[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303...
Britain's Cameron accused of grandstanding over EU membership vote
If boiling and filtering is impossible to clean, well that means their water table is screwed for decades, no?

Pretty much abandon the area or risk cancer.

"Freedom Industries" indeed.
Just to be clear, when I lived in Canada, I never thought Canadian milk or cheese expensive, nor did I feel that "luxury" dairy products, mostly imported cheeses, where out of reach. With the ongoing problems that Britain has with their 'unregulated' dairy industry, perhaps how the Canadians are managing their dairy industry is better. Even the lack of regulation is a form of regulation.
I think you're reaching. Paul isn't talking about whether or not he is sexist, he's talking about whether YC is sexist. He's not saying HE has women FRIENDS he's saying YC is actually RUN in a large degree by women, one woman in particular - the co-founder of Y-Combinator Jessica Livingston. Not to minimize the other women involved, but it's just particularly relevant that the founder of YC could as much be said to be Jessica as Paul.

That's a huge distinction.
Nice try, but i'm not admitting to anything.
#2 - some people go to college for networking (BA turned politician types), I doubt you can become a senator by learning hard.
Hope these people stop criticize Paul and continue working on their stuff to make the world better. Just useless waste of energy.
Accidentally downvoted you, sorry about that. I meant to upvote it.
Selling Your Infrastructure: How to decide if it's worth it
Implementing Bret Victor's Learnable Programming Has Never Been Easier
As far as I know nothing in EVE executes in parallel in a traditional sense. Each solar system is run on one thread and one python interpreter. While stackless is used for concurrent programming it is not used for parallel programing.
The algorithm was written with an intent and it can be changed.

Its been very clear for a long time that almost all discussion about women in tech is as good as censored on hackers, which is a shame because its giving a lot of well intentions but naive people the impression that there is no problem.
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