skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When your accusers are provided the luxury of never having to face you, how confident are you that "the law" will be carried out fairly, and that the "laws" themselves will not be arbitrary? Just as confident as you are now of the law?

This is about power differential. Imbalances of power contribute to instability. The kinds of power discussed in this equation are vast, and not to be trifled with. Errors made with the toys of modern warfare can be unforgiving to the point that submarine personnel might be the only survivors.

When you scale up conflict beyond the individual concept of arrest and imprisonment, there is a volatility to open warfare that is whithering, when compared to civil society. If you're that eager to thwart some cops in their activities, then vote a draft into law, advocate mandatory military service and then go rob a bank and shoot some tellers while you're at it. I dare you.
Useful context> http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/

Edit:
with older data included> http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/unicorn-...
Eh, only those who don't read the actual comment. It didn't equate them.
What creates a hostile environment for woman is where a sector, made of predominately men is scrutinized with a hysterical "boy who cried wolf" mentality.

It's a vicious cycle.

1. First there is a tiny group of feminists, mostly consisting of marketers, call themselves coders, but if you were look them up, they're twittering and having fun more than building. They seem very happy to stir indignation.

2. Then, people in positions of power bend toward the illegitimate trolls who cried wolf. I'm talking, the word "meritocracy" being offensive by github CEO [1], python board members referring to geekfeminism.org as a charter [2] for pycon conferences.

Pack up and go home, these are the leaders, the chiefs, the alphas of engineers - and they are cowing down to politically correct trolls on twitter, who aren't even participants to the causes.

Twitter and blogs allow anyone to claim to be anything. You used to need a degree to Marketer! Now any girl with an iPhone can be one! Twitter lets anyone call themselves a programmer.

However, Github holds people accountable for actually having to program - funny how meritocracy came up as a bad word to these people!

What is really creating a hostile work environment for woman? I can tell you, men who stay silent watching this bogus stuff happen, woman with legitimate skill and talent may be cast off as a liability.

Consider this: if you are a woman, and you would let a bad joke ruin someone's life, or abuse politically correct sympathy as a female to get benefits - is that going to help your cause? If you are a leader or boss, and you let these trolls shape you - You lack backbone. I feel this is a lack of integrity, and they're not fit to lead.

I hope leaders set an example and not feed these attention trolls and call their crap out. These are woman creating a hostile environment for woman who would otherwise feel grateful to earn their way and belong.

[1]: https://twitter.com/defunkt/statuses/426104782894284800
[2]: http://jessenoller.com/blog/2012/12/7/the-code-of-conduct
MemTrax to Track Memory
MemTrax is a short activity designed for measuring memory. Enjoy this online memory test to keep your mind active while monitoring your memory and brain health. In just three minutes, users can assess their ability to recognize repeated images and start monitoring their memory and reaction speed for any signs of trouble.
my flatmate has a boss multieffects pedal. hundreds of settings. rugged and can be stomped on.

I've heard that android is notoriously bad at audio and google aren't interested in putting resources behind that aspect of the platform, so there are latency problems and what not. There's an open issue about it on google code iirc.
Craft store Michaels may be latest mega-retailer to get hacked
Introducing WSJ’s ‘Billion-Dollar Startup Club’ Interactive
all you know is that something changed.

Or you missed something that was already there - IMO more likely, considering how little you can learn about someone from the application, and that the founders at least had the potential to become what they are today.
I am currently TAing a course which uses Blackboard and Piazza.

> Students are the only ones who want to change it

Your statement is incorrect. Students don't care about Blackboard because their interactions with it are minimal. They just submit stuff and use it to view slides, videos and grades. For this it works well enough.

I was a student user of Blackboard for a while before I saw the teaching side of it and I didn't have any negative opinions of it at all at that time. I did think the UI was a little clunky and dated but that was it. As a TA, I now realize it has lots problems. For instance, right now, I am trying to create a custom grade that is a weighted sum of other grades. And oh boy, what a fucking pain something that should be straightforward is turning out to be!

> Professors don't care. Administrators don't care.

Professors and admins very much do care about providing a good learning experience. Why do you think Piazza has taken off in such a big way? AFAICT we do our best to use the best possible software solutions. Others have already touched upon why such systems are difficult to change, but change is definitely possible and is already happening.

At my university, I am seeing more and more stuff moving away from Blackboard and into Piazza and other custom solutions. Many CS courses use a custom homework submission system that enables scriptable grading. Course material is moving from being hosted on Blackboard to Piazza. This is despite the fact that Piazza's course page function kinda sucks and provides no real way of organizing slides and handouts. But then neither does blackboard and it's helpful to have the slides on the same places as where the questions come from. There are courses where Blackboard is only used to keep track of grades. I believe this wasn't true just a few years ago and I suspect there are university regulations which necessitate this.

The lesson I learned from Piazza succeeding is that if you make your tool actually useful and really easy to get started, professors will use it. And the success of Piazza directly contradicts what you're claiming.
Essentially because it wasn't a well-thought out language, but a hack, it became used widely, but that lack of thoughtfulness shows on larger projects quite a bit. It is a hack that need to become more formalized with time, but it hasn't quite done that. Whenever I still see "needle" and "haystack" in documentation I think "Wait what is this? Oh right..."

>Facebook uses it

Not really, I mean Facebook doesn't use the PHP that a common person uses.They've made so many changes and their codebase is so huge. Facebook also uses the D programming language, HipHop, and probably more tools than I'll ever know. Wasn't chat at Facebook first written in Erlang?
This is basically a question I'd like to have answered as well, especially in a b2b setting.

Is it justifiable to use the service of a possibly great startup, knowing that there's a real possibility that it might be sold soon and just be a gear in some other company's product?
Working with data on the command line
Nope; I moved out of the US 8 years ago and my SSN remains the same. My daughters both have US SSNs and they've never lived there; the younger one hasn't even visited the US once yet. If they do live there someday, they'll still have the same SSNs.
I don't know if this can be solved without a syntax change. As long as there is variable binding and variable mutation are conflated in the syntax, there's really no good way for the compiler to distinguish between the two. It's an unfortunate design decision that we may be stuck with if we want back-compat.

LiveScript is interesting, but seems to have Too Many Features for my tastes.
Inception - Root any machine over FireWire, Thunderbolt, others
Actually, it is normal for it not to match. The majority of people have a natural cycle longer then 24 hours, and our bodies "reset the clock" each morning. This is one of the reasons certain season-sensitve stress/depression related problems exist: for some the changing day length upsets their balance more than usual. It makes sense given that we don't naturally have a fixed day length that we would evolve a system that doesn't bother to try being exact (as there isn't anything fixed to be exact in comparison to).
Given that this is a link to a personal blog, you've got to get your expectations set correctly leading up to reading a post titled "Christ, I hate Blackboard". You have to go into it knowing that you are about to read a rant, and that it's going to be pretty colorful.

It's possible that the rant was more meant for his cohorts or his social circle, which may already know why Blackboard sucks. I doubt he wrote it specifically for the HN audience.

If you don't care to do the research as to why Blackboard sucks, just enjoy the amusing rant and move on. Don't worry about why it sucks, you wouldn't appreciate how bad it sucks unless you've had to use it.
Woman in tech here. I almost skipped reading the post because I instinctively thought "bro pages", like man pages but for bros. There are lots of bad ideas out there, shame this is a great idea with a name that inadvertantly sabotages it.
It is if you're on the side with the robots.
Really nice.

I like it works with Dropbox
No, you typically get one publicly routed IP address from your ISP. The local IP address that initiated the connection is not visible to the internet from behind NAT.
Startups that exit for $1B are a rarity. So are VCs who invest in them.
> Sun execs walk into Apple’s staff meeting wearing masks of Apple execs. Scully was not amused.

That last line just does it :)
Reviewing rejected apps would be a waste of time given how many apps YC has received

Only a small number of those will have made it big since then, though (by whatever definition). So they'd only have to look at a small amount to see if there were any indicators that they might have overlooked.
Why so much 'Ask PG' lately when he never replies, let alone read them?
There will always be people who don't agree with you. Someone even said that Python can be thought of a slang for male sexual organ. In Chinese, turtle head is slang for the head of the male sexual organ. If I name it turtlehead, I can called sexist by some Chinese feminist. But in my example that's probably a bad name to start with anyway. But is bro-page in the same category as turtle head? My opinion is not.

I really don't see the name bro-page being sexist or evidence of ignoring feminist audience. It sounds genuine. It isn't like the author have a female model in the bro page documentation.

Rather than spending the first 50 comments on this gender flame war, why don't we talk about what makes man page useful and not useful. What makes sites like explainshell and bropage useful and not useful.
What is fun is that I remember this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134609
Absolutely brilliant. Love the name.
Seriously? You genuinely think that 'software tool with female name' is as 'bad' as 'software tool with male name'[0]? And you can't work out why it isn't? Here's a clue: the software industry (along with many other industries, sadly) has a certain misogynistic element that discourages women from taking part, and humanity loses out as a result. That is why perpetuating the male-centric, frat-boy atmosphere is bad on an entirely different level from the hypothetical about-turn you refer to. If it were the other way round, if women had oppressed men for thousands of years, and the software industry was dominated by women, yes, your scenario would then be bad. By all means, come back with your scenario when that's the case.

[0] I'm using your term 'name' here for simplicity, when - of course - this isn't really about 'names', as such, but silly little words such as 'bro'; I can't think of a good 'female' equivalent, probably because there isn't one for very good reasons.
On a quick glance claim 1 appears to be anticipated by any networked file sharing system that includes user permissions you'd possibly need to have 3 users with differing credentials for a novelty citation but there certainly doesn't appear to be an inventive step beyond mere citation of, say, a unix box with files with read/write flags and user:group credentials.

Claims 2-7 are just messages sent to a particular group.

Claim 8 refers to a "dropbox" file which, certainly in the UK, as a trademark wouldn't be allowed as it's inherently unclear.

Many of the claims are distinct only in non-technical details, eg the name attached to a specific role or the textual contents of a file. Such claims don't define the invention.

This strikes me as a very poor quality set of claims.

The clumsy wording of claim 39 "An method for providing online education method for a community of users in a network based system comprising the steps of:" suggests that no one at the USPTO read it.

As a B1 this is supposedly the patent "as granted".
I don't think HNs timestamps are all that accurate from what I have noticed.

User pages are certainly not updated instantly. That much I am sure of.
> Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?

Literally no-one said anything of the sort; the fact that this is where your mind went speaks volumes about your attitude towards women.
The Threat of Wikipedia Zero
As soon as I saw the title I knew there'd be this brouhaha. For over twenty years my circle of male friends have been calling each other "bro", my female pals call their brothers "bro". All this was way before "bro" was misappropriated as a term of offence just because of one word - "brogrammer". This thread has seriously deviated into the twilight zone of reductio ad absurdum.
Seriously. I guess for him these kinds of posts have, overall, low signal vs. noise.
Canvas is amazing. I cannot say enough good things about it (and no, I don't work for them). Love their SpeedGrader feature (allows you to quickly flip through your students assignments).
Every time I made a request to Softlayer it ended up in disaster.

For instance, I requested an upgrade in the port speed on my machine and somehow the trouble ticket system got screwed up so I couldn't make any more requests.

Later on I added a hard drive and they didn't make a partition table on it and somehow when the machine rebooted the superblock got overwritten and then I couldn't read the file system.

Once I was able to reconstruct the superblock I moved the contents of that hard drive to S3 and didn't look back.
I would suggest that it seems the more legitimate the less one knows about the Weimar Republic. The US has never been through a catastrophe such as WW I and its immediate aftermath were in Germany; and for all the lively efforts here and there, the US government is generally perceived in the US as the legitimate government, as the Weimar government was not perceived by large portions of the governing classes--the courts and the military, notably.
It's a shame the Web Audio API still hasn't been updated to allow glitch-free audio in emulators like this. Playback seems really smooth!
>Make no mistake, these "jokes" have consequences.

What's your evidence? Anecdotal evidence cuts both ways: every time this issue is discussed on HN there are real women in comments saying that they personally don't feel discriminated at their tech workplaces and find the claims of GeekFeminism et al about the pervasively misogynistic tech culture laughable. Do you actually know that there's an "unrelenting deluge that makes life miserable" for a typical woman in tech? Do you have real evidence that's not coming from self-appointed experts or members of outrage brigades? How do you know that you're not exaggerating and it is not, just to pick a possibility, a regrettable annoyance that we'd be much better without, but not an "unrelenting deluge that makes life miserable"?

>We look around and we wonder why there are so few women in tech. A big reason is that so few women have the passion to don raingear they'll have to wear for the rest of their lives.

How do you know that this is a big reason? What's your evidence?

In the U.S., the percentage of women in tech and CS has been steadily going down since mid-80s, while the society has been getting less sexist since that time by most evidence I can think of: for example, think of the number of women in Congress, representation in the media, jokes that have become too crass, gender pay gap that's been shrinking... If you're right about the reason women don't go into tech, wouldn't you expect the numbers to go up and not down since the 80s?

>Most rational folks will just choose to go somewhere it's not raining as much or as often

What are other occupations in which, like you're claiming for tech, a misogynistic culture drives women out? E.g. take the law. Anecdotally, the culture in law firms is often said to be dominated by very aggressive male partners, with abundant misogynistic jokes. I googled for sexism in law firms and found this article:
http://ms-jd.org/what-no-one-tells-you-you-go-law-school-you...
by a woman who says that before law school she "spent the several years in a heavily male-dominated profession (software), and never had any issues", but was shocked by the amount of sexism and sexual harassment in law school and law firms.

If she's right, and this is a real problem, would you expect such sexism to be "a big reason" for women leaving law as well? But ever since the 1970s there's been only an up trend in female representation in law. How do you explain that?
if you want a true lean browser then dillo is the only way to go: http://www.dillo.org
From my personal experience I would suggest working with PDO. It is easy to implement, supports multiple drivers if needed and has named parameters in your prepared statements. The difference in terms of performance should be insignificant - although I think in some cases mysqli tends to execute faster.
Tom Perkins pulls the the Nazi card on anti-tech activists
You rang? I normally avoid commenting on crap like this because people like you are a pain to talk to, but since you seem to want to take advantage of me not engaging with people like you to argue that I don't exist... hi, I exist. Now please stop it with that terrible argument.
My institution uses Moodle, and it mostly works. Except for the first week of term. Except if you pick up a course mid-term. Except if your course uses online quizzes.
The title is still ultra link-bait.

Both Java applets and Java desktop apps are completely irrelevant to Java on the server-side.

A case could be made that Java is also an amazing success in countless devices, from Java smartcards to smartphones / tablets (with, for example, use Java source code compiled to bytecode run on something looking very much like a JVM on Android devices).

Java is an amazing success and neither Java applets nor Java desktop have anything to do with it: on the contrary, these two Java technologies hardly did anything besides giving the Java brand bad reputation.

Both Java applets and Java desktop apps could disappear overnight and the millions (!) of Java devs out there would still have a job. Granted, they'd still need one Java desktop app: the IDE they're using to develop Java apps).

Note that I'm not saying that Oracle is playing nice when, apparently, they're using spammy techniques when you install desktop Java...

All I'm saying is:

"Java applets + Java desktop apps" != Java
This is my favourite Connection Machine story:

The Connection Machine began as Hillis's Ph.D. thesis
at MIT. "There was a point when Danny was getting
serious about the design," recalls Minsky. "And I said
to him, 'I hope you don't make the ILLIAC IV mistake.'
And he said, 'Oh, what's the ILLIAC IV mistake?' And
I told him."
.
.
.
"About a month later," Minsky recalls, "Danny came
back to me and said, 'Well, I've decided to make the
ILLIAC IV mistake." [1, pp. 203--204]

[1] From the book Archimedes' Revenge: The Joys and Perils of Mathematics by Paul Hoffman (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988).
VC Compares Fight Against Inequality To Kristallnacht
I do not think that is a real possibility unless there is a deliberate sabotage or engineering control interface left open. I mean tanks, planes, and drones already contain large amount of "hackable" hardware. Has not happened yet.
This is hugely valuable advice. Ignore the parent post at your peril! You need to be constantly vigilant about who your users are versus who your customers are. If there's a divergence, you need to make sure it's accounted for & benefiting you.

Many companies think "let's build the best thing we can, and the users will love it and win over the IT department, who will write the checks." Microsoft's ongoing record revenues, in a time when the PC market has shrunk and WIndows 8 sales are tanking, proves that theory wrong.

Having lived through this myself, my advice to to come up with price points that middle managers can expense without institutional review. But if you don't plan for this from the start, it can be a frightening to go from a sales forecast of 20-odd $100,000 sales to one that forecasts 100,000 $20-ish sales...with the same sales team.
How Imgur Became a Photo-Sharing Hit
> Ruby is hilarious slow, for example.

[citation needed]. Also, relevant Stack Overflow debate is available. [1] TL;DR: yes, of course Ruby is slower than, say, C, but today's bottleneck isn't hardware, it's developer productivity. (Developer time costs way more than hardware.)

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2529852/why-do-people-sa...
Furthermore, the only reason Facebook stuck with php and made massive changes to make it somewhat usable is because of its huge legacy codebase. They would have much rather be working in a different language these days.
I can think of a number of my colleagues who specifically avoid HN because of that very reason, so, yes.
I could write something here. But someone has already written a pretty comprehensive post on what's wrong with PHP. So I'm going to refer you to that.

PHP a fractal of bad design: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
Virtualenv without the wrapper
PHP does what it does relatively well, but it's a quirky muddle of a language and its design is very tightly bound to a CGI-style model of web development.

Anything can be hacked around, of course, as Facebook has proven. But you could write Facebook in Bash or DOS Batch Language if you were willing to. But newer frameworks and languages that were designed with modern web development in mind are more to a lot of people's liking than PHP's style.

Really, the best way for you to answer your question is to dig in and learn how to develop a webapp using Ruby or Node.js or Python and the amazing frameworks that are built on those languages. Dig in for a couple of years and then on the other side you'll understand better. You may still prefer PHP, but even if you do, I'll bet the PHP code you write will be better for having learned how the "other guys" do things.
Rename GOAWAY to GTFO. · 23639de · http2/http2-spec
There are a lot of reasons already discussed, this one is especially famous: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

PHP is not a exceptionally bad platform from a technical perspective, it usually gets the job done, is reliable, easy to operate and performant.
But i guess the real reason why so many developers - including me - hate PHP is that plain PHP is pretty boring. It doesn't have opinions on anything and no exciting concepts or language features. Now you can use great frameworks that implement great ideas in PHP, but because PHP has been around for a long time, much of the code out there and still in production is spaghetti code that is no fun to work with and the only option to change that is often a complete rewrite.