skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would like to hear from first hand sources -- not a bunch of dudes on a software forum who claim to know what women want.

How very odd that despite all of our behaviour being so non-offensive and non-exclusionary, we don't seem to have any women who want to hang around this forum with us, and especially don't want to engage in discussions about exclusion where the immediate response to any questioning to for the questioner to be shouted down in vituperative terms.
> I left San Francisco with no savings, a wife and two kids, for a job in Ann Arbor. 4 years later I founded the company I'm at now (which we sold last year.)

Have you ever written about this period of your life? Having a family and the time/energy/freedom to play the startup game seem so mutually exclusive to me, although I do admit that's mostly my gut speaking out of fear of aging and settling down. I'd really love to hear more about how you managed it all.
If a current VC said what he said, I think that would be unquestionably relevant, given how contentious the income/wealth/etc. inequality issue is right now.

There's a vastly better argument here that he's an 80 year old former-player who is saying crazy things which are relevant to the industry but not particularly relevant because he's been out of the game so long (and is potentially not in full control of his faculties, although plenty of 80 year olds are.)
patents & high switching costs
To play devil's advocate for a moment, we should also remember that sometimes (not always, but sometimes) people do have a choice in what they're offended by, and how they react to those feelings of offence. A lot of the people in this thread aren't even saying that they find it offensive personally, but that they feel that they ought to find it offensive on behalf of other people, which is very much a conscious decision on their part. If you react to the mere fact that some people complain about something without considering whether they might be wrong, you'll self-censor unnecessarily. And that makes it more difficult for others to resist self-censorship later.

The thing is, I don't think 'bro pages' are offensive. More than that, I don't think that they should be offensive. Are we seriously saying that we should attempt to avoid using any words, even in metaphors or puns, that might ever remind someone of a person stereotypically assumed to be annoying? Really? This feels like linguistic bikeshedding from people who, having realised that words have the power to offend, have set out to find offence where not only was none intended but where it could only be found by actively construing the speech as offensive. It's a massive piece of WWIC[1], driven by an attempt to appear more sophisticated and culturally aware, which massively exaggerates the potential harm caused in order to make a case that someone else (but never the critic) should have behaved differently. Instead of accepting that no harm was meant, and acknowledging their own free choice to decide whether to interpret something as harmful, they're claiming that the words they see are simply inherently wrong and must be changed.

Now, I should attach some massive caveats to the above. Some speech is inherently offensive. We know it's offensive because we can all close our eyes and imagine the worst things we could say to someone. There's almost no innocent use of such speech, although context, intent and consent are important. Such speech has no place in civilized discourse and HN is, for the most part, civilized discourse. 'Bro' is not such speech. 'Bro' can be amusing, annoying or neutral. It can make people smile, frown or feel indifferent, as can many other words in the dictionary. Naming things[2] is hard enough without the restriction that the name can never, ever, be interpreted negatively by someone trying very hard to do so.

[1] http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html
[2] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
Cults are often quite good at getting the most out of people.
Canvas appears to be preparing for an IPO: http://gigaom.com/2013/06/05/with-30m-led-by-bessemer-educat...

We use it at my school and it's great. I also use their api as a developer at EmeraldExam.com and find it to be terrific. They're an open-source rails app: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

EDIT: should also mention lore (lore.com), which was founded by some friends of mine and fairly recently purchased by a John Katzman company.
In LiveScript there's a := operator. From the docs -- "However, unlike CoffeeScript, you must use := to modify variables in upper scopes" -- I find LiveScript overall a better alternative to CoffeeScript. If you're into CS for the sugar, then you'll love LS.
>“Python, because you do not need a compiler and it's very VERY easy to run your programs and test.”

That really depends on your definition of "compiler". If your definition is "translates a high level language into machine code" then the popular implementations don't do that. But the most popular implementation does pretty much act like a typical compiler except that it generates code for a VM, not a physical machine.

On a more on topic note, these sorts of things are pretty pointless because it's just the Emperor's nose thing really.

"Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging. "
In the off-chance that you somehow don't get the really basic implications here, let me explain it on a simple level.

"Bro Pages" associate this piece of software with bros, men. Such an association can imply that the creators and/or user of the pages will be "bros", men, as opposed to women. That could be "just a joke" if you didn't have a significant, visible people of guys who are obnoxious and immature enough to actually be hostile to women participating in programming.

When you have a hostile atmosphere, an overt (if ambiguous) statement that something is for someone else enhances, increases that hostility. A woman who is already facing hostility is certainly not "picking a fight" when she notices that naming something "bro pages" isn't a friendly gesture towards welcoming her. In fact, it is the opposite.

-- And that's not even touching the way "bro" has become synonymous lately with snicker, immature, sexist guys. Even "guy pages", "dude pages" or "pages of men" would be bad.
There are good reasons to think that they really are separate products.
I think what you did is the best way to build features for paid apps - by giving a discount or other advantage by pre-paying. For open source projects, it makes sence for a donation to gauge interest, but I think I would still like a "contribution" or other way to recognize people that paid for features.
The GPL doesn't work against the imbalance of power created by copyrights. It works to strengthen it by reducing the options for individual creators to make money from their efforts, and buttressing the power of established interests.

But - you make a good point - a good reason to be against copyright is because abolishing it would defeat the GPL.
Desire2Learn [0]

0:http://desire2learn.com/
Sorry need an app : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.nick.crypt...

Discussion about the issue : https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=29468
Yale does have the right to decide if she attends or not, and here's why:

Every individual has the right of free association. If you're hosting a party, you have the right to tell one or all of your guests to go home, whenever you want, for any reason (and they have the right to never come back if you mistreat them). The same applies to larger groups of people: the right of free association doesn't disappear when they form a group such as Yale university. Whatever rights a group has are ultimately no more or less than the rights of its individual members.

Some people say that rights entail certain responsibilities. On that view, however, rights are indistinguishable from gifts. If rights entail responsibilities, you don't actually have the right to choose your friends; society merely tolerates your choices, so long as you follow parameters set by others. Your own judgement and preferences become a secondary concern, to be overridden by the group. (If this sounds farfetched, recall that eugenicists employed this type of thinking in their calls for forced sterilization: the rights of the "unfit" be damned, they said, for the good of the group hangs in the balance.)

I want to clarify my general point on rights entailing responsibilities just a little further: my view of rights is not a sanction of wanton irresponsibility. No one has the right to push a person off a cliff (excepting situations of self-defense). Nor do they have the right to smash people's windows, steal car stereos, etc. Put another way, no one has the right to violate another's rights.

I'm out of time, so I'm going to stop here, even though there is obviously a lot more to cover on this topic.
A few thoughts on this from my own life, after spending 11 years writing a video game and failing to finish a dozen others:

* The one time I used agile methodologies in the workplace, we had a team (implementation is more expensive than idea so add workers)

* I have over 200 column ideas for my upcoming blog, but will have to let 90% of them go and find peace with that (can't do everything)

* Profit, in fact income itself, generally comes from finishing things so I have to decide between optimization and eating (good, fast, cheap - pick any two)

* Consider looking at your ideas from a meta level, see if you can project out where the ideas will finally fall (see the forest for the trees)

* If it's troubling that you form a solution that invalidates the current problem, perhaps try to see that as a positive (work at your level)

There are probably a bunch more but I don't want to get quippy. I struggle with a preponderance of ideas to the point where I alienate people and am bad with time management and money. It's a bizarre first world problem that most people don't seem to understand. That's why I love Hacker News! And kind of a P.S: I'm realizing as I get older that my short game is terrible, for example, I struggle with the timed skills tests on freelancing sites but throw around esoteric computer science concepts easily, so a big part of my inability to finish anything is that it's hard to communicate what I see to other people and I get outvoted. Then when my heart isn't in what I'm working on, I procrastinate. I'm trying to find projects that I'm passionate about because challenge isn't the problem, it's my own attitude.
It's a subway, so it's in underground tunnels :)

However, there are some above ground sections, and I think the stations there don't have walls. It's been ten years since I've been there, so things might have changed...
From what I understand, many schools allow this with some required provisional courses to prove that you are competent with CS fundamentals. That said, you'll want a solid math background and you'll want to be at least decent at writing code. For this reason, people who do this typically come from math, stats, or engineering backgrounds.
It's so obvious you haven't read the full bible, or even any of the links I gave. The very first link is where "The angel of the LORD" said to go back into slavery. So you blame that on men.

This is why it is pointless to discuss anything with zealots. Your brains turn off for this topic.
Night Lego
Lego at night
Blackboard is still around because it was early to the game and higher education values tenure.

No one who has power really wants to change it. Professors don't care. Administrators don't care. Students are the only ones who want to change it, but they aren't even close to being powerful enough.

Using a good online learning software is not on any high school students list of why they want to go to a college.

Reputation is #1. If taking an action doesn't add to the reputation of the school, then they don't take the action.

There are 1,000 things Uni. admins care about before the UI of their online learning software.
From 2006-2008 i worked on a Blackboard compeditor. While back then, people ranging from administrators, teachers to students all hated the system, capturing their market share was a rough ride.

We landed one major university and several private training organizations,however ultimately got squeezed out and decided to move onto bigger and better things.

The issues people entering this market face range from Patents, that in my opinion should never have been issued, (http://www.google.com/patents/US6988138) to their insane license agreements that cost education providers a lot to walk away from.
"Tom Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years."

Really now? Apparently he's still listed as a Partner Emeritus:

http://www.kpcb.com/partner/tom-perkins

To quote from KPCB's own linking page to the above:

By continuing their relationship with KPCB long after leaving, they bring our portfolio companies the benefit of decades of deep experience.
4 years is a long time imho. 15 years with no stocks or multiple promotions is a time wasted.
Magnus Carlsen playing chess vs Bill Gates
Oracle Killed Java
> are the creators actually not aware that the term is used to represent the worst (most misogynistic, most crass, least mature, least dependable) people currently flocking to the industry?

They are. They were making a joke. One of the traits of a mature adult is being able to step one meta-layer up about any issue and be able to joke about it.
"Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance"
Regarding (a), the news contains lots of Stupid Celebrity Stories, but that's the kind of thing I look at HN to get away from.
> My one regret was agreeing to stay on for four years. I wound up leaving after a year.

This could use some elaboration. Was Google OK with it? Did he have to give up something, such as stock options, for not staying the agreed term?
the legitimacy of your concerns is based in how women (in this case) feel. If you can't find a person who thinks he/she is being discriminated against here, you're obviously tilting at windmills.

Now what you're presenting me with is a proposition that if "X" is false, then I should reconsider my belief that "Y" is true. So before I give this further thought, let me call your bet:

Will you in turn agree that if "X" turns out to be true, will you reconsider your belief that "Y" is false?

I would hate to go to a lot of work to show you that there are offended women, only to hear you mansplain to me that well, there aren't enough women, or they're the wrong sorts of women, or even if they're offended that they shouldn't be offended, or some other such weaselling out.
Learning a Programming Language via Test Driven Development
Music Video Gives Lead Singer a Photoshop Makeover as She Sings
> 2) It is actually surprisingly difficult to teach object oriented programming in Python, since most simple problems are much more easily solved in a functional manner than with classes.

That's actually a good thing. I'm afraid too many people learn programming early on with e.g. Java and end believing programming equates defining classes and mutating objects. I've worked with people with such background (actually, I routinely do), and it's not pretty. I notice a difficulty in these people to grasp fundamentals, like data structures, idempotency and high-order functions, which leads to awful bad practices.
Those are exceptionally poor choices for a beginner's class.
Yeah, except for Primer's funding model, which was based on ethically-questionable securities trading practices involving a time machine, it was just like an SV startup.

Betas probably hits a little close to home for some people around here, I imagine.
Man Pleads Guilty in Plot to Build Mobile Death Ray
A chapter from the O'Reilly book covers this subject pretty well. With Clojure's java interop, you can still use Spring. Thanks to the homoiconicity of the language, support for higher order functions, and with some clever use of Clojure's load-file function in core, you kind of get DI baked into the language for free.
Primer is fantastic if only because it shows how new breakthroughs are really achieved. Much less glamorous and a lot scarier than Hollywood always presents.
one more.. https://piazza.com/
It's hard to imagine Mike Judge failing at anything. I'll be anxiously awaiting this.
wow.

It's a tv show. Not a reality show.
Yeah, but this puts us closer than ever to the brink of a nuclear exchange.

For the purposes of a thought experiment, consider the false dichotomy of "America" and "NotAmerica" as two hypothetical opposing forces, where America has nukes and killer robots and NotAmerica has only nukes.

If you find yourself living in NotAmerica, your motivation to pre-emptively nuke America, simply to avoid the threat of a horrific death dispensed by killer robots, presents itself as an absurdly simple choice. Even if it means suicide.
Please read this blog post, "Lighten Up": http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/

In it, Katie Cunningham explains the problem with the "it's just a joke" sentiment. Specifically, the cumulative effect.
While I think Julia is great, for children I have to say Python is better, especially in various subcategories that might keep a teenager interested: Games, 3D Animation (blender), Websites and Mobile Apps.
Blackboard is more than that. Last time I checked (a year ago) Piazza is just a discussion and a place to release announcement.
Ah, that makes sense. Now I understand why Julia is created and used mainly by women, and men who work in majority women environments find /sys so intimidating.
How come most discussions about the merits of Python devolve into praising Julia?
As far as I know there was one main patent -- 6,988,138 -- which was utter garbage and was invalidated in 2009.

It was this patent which BlackBoard used to try to shut down a competitor named Desire2Learn in 2006. The invalidation forced Blackboard to retreat, and they've since been much quieter on the legal front.
Wow. Very pebble. Such watch face
I read your comment as a joke, but it hints at a serious matter. I'm a TA at TAU EE, and my students really don't have enough time to sleep. Every deadline is a mix of mails begging for an extra day, and submissions at 5 AM. Talking with my students, it appears this is a faculty-wide problem - the coursework is simply too much (and this isn't simply students whining - in 4 years in CS/math I didn't hear of a single person cramming through the night for a deadline, something here is very different). I hear Technion is the same, for CS too.

Now, you take young people, pressurize them to excel or it will have lasting effects on their career, and deprive them of sleep. No wonder people have mental difficulties - it's actually a wonder this doesn't appear to happen here. Maybe it's a bit more maturity coming from the army service.
Such comments has a high potential to create a hostile environment for discussion. You don't get to decide if people will interpret your post as you putting "bro" and "nigger" in same category. Now some will be offended and hurt.
"Using "bro" is offensive because it excludes others by their gender."

You must have a huge problem with "him" then.
Beyond SSL client cert authentication: authorization
How about failing at producing his content for a company that will make it available to people who use streaming rather than cable?
Why do you have to move on? The one disadvantage to Python as a beginning language is that there are few strong motivations to move elsewhere...
I don't think it's possible to evaluate the mindset of the individual attempting the rescue from the side line. All rational thought may have fled his mind and he was acting on pure impulse.

The only reason I speculate that might be the case was when I was held at gunpoint (long story), my mind immediately switched to a "detached observer" point of view. No fear or heroism, just observation of events.
They seem to mostly skip 1 and 2 and move directly to the killing part. Which is rational I guess, why waste resource on something you intend to kill.
Sure, and Ruby squeezes out Python as a starter language because it's closer to English and the identation doesn't have to be strict.

That said, I find both Ruby and Python considerably user-friendly and extremely powerful. JS of course is today's hot stuff and if you want to be on-top of the game, you have to know and understand JS. But once you've become comfortable with any other OO language JS is easy.
Massive freight trains with hundreds of fully-loaded cars take miles to come to a complete stop. Small passenger trains are a different story.
My kids' school district just switched from Blackboard to Schoology. Major improvement.

Blackboard is so poorly designed that they couldn't force teachers to use it.
I think the original meaning of that quote is more "I don't need an intermediate compiling/linking step before I run my program," not "Python doesn't need a compiler because it doesn't lex/parse/generate code." I agree it's an ambiguous and confusing statement though.
Great discussion here. I particularly like the debate over whether of not there is merit to the notion of conservation of mental energy. I did a side project https://github.com/gengstrand/clojure-news-feed over the winter holiday. It was not exhausting to me because it was a learning project so I found it to be fun instead of tiring.
I make plugins that works with Blackboard as part of my undergraduate research, specifically making SCORM modules. The only thing that Blackboard is useful is that it does the authentication and authorization bit for us. We could easily roll out our own Django service and have students run code instad of having to log in BB and click on assignment to start coding.

The other thing is BB does have tincan API but only newer version does. I think the BB we use now has been upgraded and does have TINCAN API so I am going play with it.

BB is horrible in terms of support and user interface. It has so many functionality but hardly anyone use most of them and that's where I think BB engineers need to re think. They should slim BB. And there is a BB mobile app? Fuck that shit (excuse my Chinese). Useless piece of shit.

There is an open source version called Moodle but the interface is even worse. It tries to solve all the problems BB is solving... I have played with it for a few years and the interface just hasn't improved.
I made something similar a few months ago, also using Django: https://github.com/equirio/movide . It's really hard to get teachers on board in a bottom-up way. There are a couple of classes using it, but it took a lot of work to get there. I am interested in talking more if you are still working on your project.
4 years is quite a while to work some place in tech nowadays.
I hope you see the irony in that statement...

For people outside the US, "reality shows" in the US are even crazier and are even more hyper-stereotypical than normal scripted TV shows.
No, you don't.

Whether or not you choose to go ahead with something that will offend people is up to you, but you don't get to choose whether it will or won't affect people.
No, I understood the question. My answer stays the same.
Yes, sounds like a serious dilemma - try to get help, and you risk being committed. I have a feeling that private psychiatrists know they face a repeat game with a patient they shipped to such horrendous treatment at a ward, and thus have their finger resting much easier on the trigger. But as you said, nothing here is foolproof.