skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're only looking at cash in the bank afterwards from the exit maybe.

What doing a startup does is worst case, that it accelerates your carreer a lot. If you do startups for 2 years, you can get the jobs (if you want) that people working at a corporation will get within 10 years, so it accelerates your career by the factor of around 5.

Examples? Myself and all my startup-friends who have to work for someone every now and then when the bank balance nears 0 again are offered very high-paying/high responsibility jobs.

The reason for that is that the education about business, building a product and personal growth that you get out of a startup is simply unmatched.

For that reason, it's smarter to do a startup in all cases. However, only if you want to accelerate your career of course. If you don't want to make career in your life, then doing a startup is not smarter, because it does take a toll.
What's the ONE New Thing You Have Time For in Your Life?
>> PHP has a reputation as a language that makes dead easy to write very ugly sphagetti code.

I believe that programmers ability to write poor code is quite language agnostic.
One very large problem in University costs is administration spending. Cutting that spending would go a long way towards reducing the costs back to something acceptable and makes college a better economic choice.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...
On your arm, it's much less distracting. If my phone vibrates and not my arm, I know I can ignore it. If they both vibrate, it takes half a second to glance down and decide whether it's important or not. And if it's one of those many "medium priority" type notifications that seem to form the bulk of your notifications, you're much more inclined to just ignore it rather than just answer because you've got your phone in your hand anyways...
Can you provide an example of something that you would consider to be a valid argument or piece of evidence?
I won't comment on the efficiency of the algorithm (although it is questionable).

Let's assume that it's a bad design decision. Your logic behind it being prejudiced is still faulty, as it ascribes a fallacious cause.

The algorithm merely shuffles page rankings based on two criteria: upvotes and comments, both of which are user-supplied. The algorithm does not support prejudice, it simply behaves in the fashion it is programmed to. You're completely ignoring all of the mundane stories that go down due to the same factors, and cherry picking the ones about sexism.
> Tell me what time it is. Yes, I can reach for my pants and fight my pocket to get the phone out. But the watch is just faster and easier.

Obviously this is the killer feature of it.
Okay. I'm not a fan of unattributed author blogs. It comes off as advertising.
'No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X.'

Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then.

I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.
Right, but, at least in theory, getting a college degree is a sign of having put in effort, hard work, and other qualities commonly associated with the American Dream.
Don't know where to begin since every single thing you write is false... sigh
Waaaahhh, somebody used a new term to describe tried and true marketing activities to make them sound new/sexy/novel.

People reapply the same concepts and ideas, but with new terminology all the time. It's good marketing :)

Now, I must get back to word sculpting...
PG's main - and strongest - point is this:

YC's MO is to spot value where other VCs don't. When YC started, it invested in young founders. PG is saying that YC now sees female founders in the same light: as marginalized (aka, undervalued), therefore presenting a great investment opportunity.

If the valley's smartest VCs are becoming "Bullish on Women", to use Warren Buffett's phrase [1]), PG's essay is big news for women.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/02/leadership/warren-buffett-wo...
this post could have been titled "git workflow replicating workflow in centralized VCS (like CVS, Perforce, etc..)"
> a reference to that "a fractal of bad design" article

I've seriously started using it as a unit of measurement for the level of knee-jerk anti-PHP fanaticism present in a thread.
I really like the word Technical Marketing because it does a better job of encompassing a broader use of technology to enhance your marketing.
Right now I'm browsing HN while eating at my desk.
The algorithm also uses flags. Some people flag the sexism articles once the wingnits arrive because the threads are effectively useless by then.
> Growth hacking (to me anyway) is a subset of marketing activities too.

I've always thought that it was the other way around, i.e. marketing is one of the things you can do in growth hacking, but not everything. To me growth hacking means doing/focusing on things that help grow the business, and marketing is just one of the things you can do. Other things that you can do to help growth include actually improving the product and reduce friction, which are not marketing. Maybe I've misunderstood the term "growth hacking" then.
Having Aereo handle this for me is a service. Why should I have to hook up the DDR myself? It's like web hosting: sure I could rent a cabinet and populate it with my own computer, but it sure is more convenient to have someone else do it for me.
I hope they win. It's one of the services that has helped convince my family to ditch cable. I can see them continuing to expand beyond the broadcast market to an internet version of TV. Aereo might not even need the broadcast networks in a few years but they definitely need them now.
> However, not the worst does not mean not bad.

I can see you are trying to help the subject and advance the discussion forward. I wonder if it would be more productive to instead just criticize point by point pg's post (which I think was decent), instead write what you would suggest would be an alternative.

You pointed to What about Girls Who Code? (http://www.girlswhocode.com/) and another one and mentioned how he has done no research. Alright, what about CWC? What is your research? Instead of just shutting down point after point in the original post, maybe explain why you think GWC or BGC is a better alternative.

> I don't think he should have written this post.

Then we would have seen comments complaining about "PG has has this incident in a while and hasn't followed up, that is so typical of such and such ...".
But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.

Depends what you define as productive programming. Not every problem requires intimate knowledge of the whole stack. Besides, I found that the most important skills for me are not in trying to memorise all the details, but to get good at using reference materials and to look for the structures rather than the nouns.
Not for a desktop computer for programming purposes. Access to google, stack overflow, github, hosting, etc.
I also still can't reconcile how a month and a half ago pg apparently believed that Silicon Valley is a near perfect meritocracy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6795606) and now he's been working hard(er than average) to address systemic inequalities.

For the record though; I thoroughly applaud his efforts on improving gender equality and I very much appreciate the first baby steps he's taking here on behalf of the industry. I really hope though that one day he'll be able to look back on this essay and realise this was really only just the start of it.
How then, might one prove that one is not bigoted?
Knowing it came from a throw away would give the plaintiff evidence that is fake, which will pressure yelp to take it down.
'But it does feel tbat a person must be deliberately trollin when they trot out the same tired bullshit that other idiots spout, especially when that bullshit has been debunked on the same forum that they're posting to and when it is so easy to debunk with a simple websearch. It feels as if some people like living their lives with the blinkers on.'

Well then, since I'm spouting "bullshit" (your words):

Educate me. Let me play the "Citation Needed" card.
One thing I have noticed is female journalists, who chose not to do CS themselves, but feel very strongly that other women should go into CS. Not even that they wish they themselves could go back in time and get into BBC Micros. It's a curious phenomenon and I wonder if it's really driven by anything other bandwagoneering.
You have a remarkably sexist friend.
I don't mean to sound unsympathetic, because this is truly an unpleasant, if not dangerous, situation, but don't more people keep a supply of water somewhere in their home? I don't really consider myself THAT well-prepared a survivalist, but I've got about 40 gallons of drinking water stored up. I would highly recommend that everybody do the same. Drinking water is vital, and so many things can interrupt your supply that you really need to look into storing several days worth.

Again - I don't mean to sound unsympathetic - I wish everyone in your area a speedy resolution to this situation.
(On behalf of the same friend)

"That's good to know - I wasn't aware of that. I'm happy to hear this isn't the case, but I've heard this from YC founders many times which is why it was my perception."
That was my first thought too. According to http://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/1uunyw/4methylcyc... however:
"The material is lighter than water, so it's going to float on top."
Did I say it is? I said it could be.

And given the influence of mining companies in the region, I say there is a high probability that is the case.
To pick up my local ATSC-TV lineup would require me to have an 8+ft antenna on my roof. Not really practical seeing as how I live in an apartment.

That's the use case Aereo fills.

Their monthly subscription fee is also lower than the upcharge for buying HDTV from Comcast (who started encrypting their HD local channels because the FCC started letting them).
Interesting believable factoids about PHP:

1. PHP supports goto since version 5.3.0; people speculated that term "troll driven development" in announcement was not a joke.

2. $ variable prefix in Perl was a joke about Hungarian notation and first BASIC dialects. PHP take that joke seriously.
Economy is driven by consumers so making sure consumers have more money is surefire way to improve economy. Giving the money to business owners (or not taking it away) doesn't improve anything beacuse their investments are not limited by money owned but by their customer base which does not change. At best they'll spend additional money on advertisment which will just steal some customers from their competition at almost no benefit to the economy apart from increased activity in advertisment agencies.
Okay now you have me interested... I might have to try this place.

Man $2.95 in Vancouver that's unheard of! lol.
Colored Coins Vs Mastercoin Vs Open Transactions Vs Protoshares
this is why Java exploded in the enterprise backend niche
I strongly disagree with the way you're using Aaron Swartz / his memory here.
As danh and drcode said, Hiccup is basically edn->text and server side only but there are a number of implementations of the same concept in ClojureScript:

https://github.com/teropa/hiccups - Basically a straight port of hiccup to ClojureScript.

https://github.com/ibdknox/crate - Returns dom nodes instead of strings.

https://github.com/lynaghk/singult - Works in Clojure or ClojureScript and offers live merging of nodes into the dom.

https://github.com/Prismatic/dommy - Dommy is more than just templating but offers a hiccup style templating language too.

And I'm sure there are others.
My wife is a founder and a programmer. I help her all I can, as a hacker. Watching it from up close I am more pessimistic about quick leveling of the playing field near term.

Yet here is what we can do that pg did not mention. I shall tech my daughters. Thank you code.org.

Unlike me most of the crowd here don't have kids yet, I guess. But day will come and you will. Half will be girls. They'll see you from up close. They will hear your battle stories. There will be no better role model than you.

Yes one generation is a lot in internet years. But status quo never changes quickly. At least we can personally can see to it that it does change
Well, a couple thoughts.

1. It is possible that men and women do think differently and therefore have different career preferences, so the optimal gender ratio is not 1:1.

2. Just because the optimal gender ratio may not be 1:1 does not mean that the current expression is the optimal one.

I think we absolutely need to make this field more friendly to women. I don't think we'll ever see 50% participation, but I don't want to see any person (man, woman, or anyone identifying otherwise) turn away from this field because they found it hostile. I do believe that this happens, and that sucks.
Haskell's GHC is working on it [1]. It's not primetime (not even close, really), but it does work with modified libraries and compiling to llvm.

There is also Intel Lab's HRC (Haskell Research Compiler) that does have SIMD capabilities [2]. Unfortunately, there isn't a public release of HRC yet.

---

[1]: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/SIMD

[2]: http://dorchard.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/automatic-simd-vect...
> Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then.

I think the problem has nothing to do with the word "friend" but the word "prejudice".

> I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.

So what? The fact that people in group X can earn any given position with you doesn't mean that they don't, just by the fact of being members of group X, start out in a worse position in your view. So, that people in group X may have earned the designation "friend" from you does not in any way prove that you don't have a prejudice, even potentially a very strong one, against group X.
They just have to go to central places (cafes, libraries). It's not easy. Also, not everything we do needs internet -- we tear apart and rebuild desktops -- that's actually a fairly easy thing to teach even a young kid.
> And you can say, with a straight face, that YC is not sexist?

I don't think he could have made that any clearer.
I drank Red's 4G flavor-aid early and gave up my unlimited plan. The map said I was in 4G range but my pricey modem disagreed. I switched to Tmo two years ago and love it...better than expected coverage in metro areas, 1/2 price and unlimited everything.
This is the heart of the dispute: should we view Aereo as an unlicensed streaming service or an outsourced personal DVR?

Certainly Aereo would not exist without broadcast TV. But the service adds a lot of value compared to, e.g. setting up a DIY streaming PVR with MythTV and an antenna.
Just because you agree to do N doesn't mean you agree to do N+1 or N+2, etc. The networks do broadcast content, that's very expensive to produce, for free, in return for use of the public spectrum. That's the bargain. But the bargain doesn't mean that they agree to let other people do whatever "they see fit" with the broadcasted content. One part of that bargain, embodied in the copyright rules, is that you can't take the broadcast video and perform it publicly. I.e. I can't tape NBC shows and then open up a movie theater playing them. That's not part of the bundle of rights NBC agreed to give up in the process of broadcasting the show over the air.

All Aereo does is take advantage of a loophole. They couldn't record the shows and stream them, because that would violate the networks' copyright. So they try to shoehorn effectively the same service into the exception for time-shifting.
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. (I assume that cable companies probably have direct physical links to local stations by now, but it's not relevant). The fact that their transmission medium is the web rather than coax seems inconsequential to me.

That seems to fall on the `movie theater' end of the dichotomy, but it's legal.
Oppressed minorities have historically been excluded from highly desirable fields. As a consequence even today you see few black people in, say, Princeton or investment banking. This is most certainly not because black people (or women) think differently. The status quo just takes a long time to improve, especially when people pigheadedly deny there's a societal problem.
My favorite on this vein is: "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't."
Writing to /dev/null is even faster I bet.
Not all users. I primarily use Foursquare for tracking where I've been, not for discovery. If I try to remember that great place I ate at last time I was in Boston I can search my history. Invasive continuous tracking adds no value for me.
Acupuncture Whac-a-Mole
> "Hey babe, need you to stop buying expensive items under company's funds"
> "fine, since you don't love me you can marry someone else"

Phew! Sounds like you dodged a bullet there (marrying someone lacking basic moral integrity).
For realtime playback locally sure. I don't think there are many/any public-facing systems backed by VLC. Presumably VLC prioritizes speed over security.
It's a cup half-empty/half-full thing. I'm happy that more people can access the Internet, but I wish they could have uncapped broadband. Until we get there, hacker spaces for the poor will remain a necessity.
You wouldn't characterize education as a commonly discussed component of upward mobility? It seems to me that an education is exactly how you'd expect your children to do well, as opposed to the "effort" and "hard work" of a mostly-unskilled job with an obvious ceiling on wages, etc.
We've been inured to the environmental cost of coal since roughly forever. Coal is horrendous, but it's cheap and plentiful and heavily used so everybody just kind of averts their eyes.

I imagine you're familiar with the recommendation that children and pregnant women should limit their fish intake, due to mercury present in seafood. The largest part of that mercury comes from emissions from burning coal.

Similarly, there is much more worry about the safety of nuclear power than coal power. But guess which one emits more radioactivity into the environment? You guessed it: coal. I believe this is true even if you account for nuclear accidents, although I admit that I'm going by memory on this one.

Coal accounts for something like a million deaths a year worldwide. That's a significant chunk of overall human mortality. Coal kills more people each year than nukes have ever killed, even if you count the atomic bombs.
Very fair point. I wrote the post and I'll look at modding our blog template to make sure author is visible.
'I think we absolutely need to make this field more friendly to women.'

And I completely agree. I guess my point is: how much of this outrage is manufactured? Is the gender imbalance truly a "crisis" or is it an artifact of something else entirely?
Programmers are people, but how many python programmers run into double-free bugs?

Language has a lot to do with what sort of issues programmers will have to tackle.
i have 2880x1800 on the mbp, and 4-6x 1440x900/1280x0124 or whatever on the others (depending on which i find).
"I find it funny that restrictions that in practice prevent people from monetizing software"

No! The GPL and it's ilk are not and never have been about restrictions that in practice prevent people from monetizing software. When are people going to get that? The source code has to be supplied. You can still charge for access to it. I could make $KILLERAPP and charge $1000 for it, and not allow it to be public, but as long as when a customer buys it, I give them access to the source, I'm still GPL compliant.

Yeah yeah, this is where you go off about "in practice". Still wrong. In practice it doesn't prevent anything, in fact is is the practices used by companies (and people) that prevent them from using GPL, not the other way around.
I wish github had better syntax highlighting for Clojure. Different colors for matching parentheses.
> why do we programmers always feel we need to apologize for something that we did quickly, but has been running without incident for a number of years.

The script is only treating the symptom, not the problem.

It would be better to detect the files before they waste an hour of time, so you could tell the user instead of having them silently disappear. Maybe there is something you could do to fix the files. The programmer part of me says there is a real fix that needs writing.

It's obviously a great script if it's worked that long. Who knows how long it would take to track down and fix the bug(s) causing the issue. If they haven't needed to fix the bug in all these years just writing that script was obviously a good decision.
Ya, it's definitely a language issue; barring super-intelligent compilers that can vectorize things on their own (which GCC does for certain cases), you need a means to express vectorizable operations.

You don't need to work at the assembly level for this; you just need a language that can express vector operations in a way that doesn't require a compiler to solve the halting problem, and you need a compiler that knows how to compile such operations to SIMD.

Yes, ANSI C doesn't have such a construct, but GNU C (which I'd bet 95% of open-source code uses anyway) does.
Probably because they want to keep the FISA Court. I would at the very least replace every single judge in that Court, and make their election a lot more democratic and open, and we'd need to see annual statistics about their rulings. If they rubber-stamp NSA's requests 99.999 percent of the time, we should know about it.

Then again, isn't the whole purpose of the FISA Court to rubber stamp and give "general warrants" to the NSA? (which are unconstitutional). So maybe we should get rid of it for good, and let NSA get normal warrants from normal Courts.
That's because they are United States who will offer each other aid, but also maintain some sovereignty.
In many cases, it appears to be same way one proves that one is not a witch.
Jessica is the reason Steve + I got into Y Combinator. It was her decision to give us a second chance after we were rejected (reddit would end up being one of the first breakout hits from YC).

I wouldn't have just told Charlie Rose "All Hail Jessica Livingston" if her role were just "founder relations" -- without going into the roles all the partners (male and female alike) play in YC, that simplification is way off.

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-without-their-permission-cha...
I have strong opinions about the whole college bubble issue. In my opinion, the single biggest reason for this mess in America is the whole "student loan" scam. Let me explain. Colleges don't really care about what their actual cost is because whatever they bill, they get paid by the govt. (aka student loans) for the most part. Yes, the students have no choice but to get those loans and get enrolled. Imagine if the easy supply of these loans was stopped AND the colleges were actually demanded to justify their tuition costs, I bet the student enrollment will not go down while the costs will go down significantly.

Imagine this. Lets say a good private college costs $40,000/yr (making up but pretty close) on paper. The actual amount that a student pays out of pocket is wayyyyy less say $10,000. The rest is covered by student loans/grants etc. So the student still ends up with a huge debt of $40,000 while the college makes a profit from the govt. This is true for both private/public colleges.
This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent and Here’s What Happened