skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe this was most extensively discussed as part of a long chat that Peter Todd was a part of, so no surprise that you've seen him talk about it. Off-chain banks stuff has been a long term pet interest of his.

In that discussion we applied a merkel-sum tree data-structure— a pet datastructure that I'd previously proposed for making compact proofs of blockchain invalidity in Bitcoin (in order to make a future bitcoin world where no one runs full nodes safe from inflation and theft by miners)— to PT's bank fraud proofing application.

You may find the log interesting: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/bitcoin-wizards-fraud-proof.lo...

Search for "auditable off-chain transactions" and "Merkle-sum-tree"

(I left in a lot of unrelated stuff since it makes the meandering conversation make a bit more sense. Though a lot of this continues a long running dialog about cryptographic-wankery that has been going on for years)

Ultimately these schemes require the use of a jamming free broadcast network of some kind... otherwise they run into the same problems certificate transparency has where you can substitute the commitment on the fly. Fortunately, Bitcoin provides a global consensus mechanism which could be used to directly attach the commitment to the coins being spoken for.
I am using an online ERP, the trust to do that came because my accountant used it.

He liked it because he have access to my data without the need to come to my office.

So you might try to get accountant/bookkeepers to like it so they can be your trustbuilders!?
I am a current UCSF medical student and I majored in statistics in undergrad. I program in R and python. In undergrad, did consider doing an internship at a tech company as a data scientist, so I feel like I understand the perspective from both sides.

That said, I feel this is entirely a false dichotomy - there are actually very few people choosing between nursing and computer science, and it is not "diverting some of these students to computer science rather than remaining in health care". They are simply very different students and workforces with different motivations, strengths, and weaknesses.

I am sure we can agree that there are many fields that are worse off than computer science. Retail, administration, and many disciplines don't have the flexibility or financial compensation. To me, in some ways, it does sound like sour grapes when one says "well, look women have nursing. They make good money." Regardless whether healthcare is a good field, that creates a false dichotomy when there are many people (both male and female) who aren't in these fields.

Even digging into this false dichotomy, it is another discussion whether healthcare is actually more flexible, has fewer hours, and is a better career choice than software development. The grass is always greener on the other side, but I would say that only in healthcare does a significant proportion of the workforce have to work overnight shifts, 30 hour workdays, and have to deal with relatively hazardous or infectious materials.

I love medicine, it's a great field, and I really enjoy having an impact on people's lives. But similarly, there are intangibles in software development like the satisfaction of creating something and doing things that can touch people far away. I think that to split these professions into "male" and "female" is a huge disservice and it brings nothing to the discussion to say some female predominant fields have good earning potential.

PS. UCSF medicine is typically between 47 - 54% female each year. Not sure where you got the 58% statistic. There are a lot of applicants, so the administrators probably have a lot of flexibility on how they want to shape the class demographics.
Long Live Vim!
3 SUNS WITNESSED BY THOUSANDS
We're using the word "modern" extremely broadly in this context. Fractional reserve banking goes back to what, the early Renaissance? Did the economies of the Middle Ages really serve people better than our economies do today?
Bummer...but also exciting, since Adhoc/Beta distributions and access could be massively improved by being handled first-party by Apple. Maybe now it will be!

I've long been using TF for adhoc beta distributions of my iOS apps. Looks like there are only two options left for that:

* Hockeyapp, starting at $10/month
* Host your own IPA on S3 or elsewhere.

The downside with the latter is where TF added value: per-build access settings, notifications, teams, and feedback. You'll have to approximate this now by mucking with which devices are listed in your provisioning profile.

I open-sourced my iOS build script recently. It'll take care of everything for you -- downloads your provisioning profile from Apple's dev center, builds, codesigns, archives, and uploads to S3. https://github.com/splinesoft/SSBuild
(sorry, ranty opiniony comment)

Why do people care about the numbers of women in Computer Science classes? Because, they say, it shows some inherent discrimination against women in the industry. (which totally exists, but mainly as a bigger cultural issue that affects everyone along gender lines) If you ask how that could be (as nobody is actually barring women from signing up for classes) the most popular theory is that gender stereotypes combined with an antagonistic male environment leaves women with little choice but to abandon the field.

So the answer has been to make more opportunity for women to join the industry by making it more attractive to them or reducing gender-related friction. Many employers are pushing to find more women in technology/computer science and give incentives to hire them, and in cases like this, change curriculum for schools to make the subject seem more "beautiful & joyful". And it seems like it might be working - more women are now in classes, and one would assume, may some day soon be evening the gender gap in tech jobs.

But what's the end result to merely bringing more women into the industry? Has the culture shifted? Are salaries evening out? Is sexism dead? The people pushing for more women in technology seem to think that by merely increasing the number of women in the field, all of these things will happen. But realistically, none of these things are accomplished just because there's more women in technology.

Compare it to when President Obama was elected, and certain people claimed "racism is dead" because we finally elected a black President. Is racism really dead? Did the culture shift to become more understanding? Did the overall quality of life for black people increase? Did they get higher salaries, or more economic or political power? My casual observation indicates these things did not happen. The culture was not affected, and so, the same institutional problems caused by problems in the culture persist.

And this is what will happen regarding women in technology. Anyone can change their experiment to fit their expected results, and then when they get those results claim they had success. But that's not a cause for celebration. What would be good is if we actually attack the cause of inequality - our cultural differences and biases - to make it so that women are not an exception to a rule, but an equal part of a common community. Merely adding more women to computer science classes is the equivalent of a misogynist saying "Sure, you can have a computer - in the kitchen." The sexism, gender stereotypes, and cultural conflicts will continue to exist until those are addressed directly.
No, I don't. I have a few guesses, but no clear picture of which you mean, since none of them is particularly close to what you said.
Hyperbole not projecting.

This video was a toned down version of SBV with a grown woman acting childish and coy, my hyperbolic statement tapped into other performers who utilize the same mechanic. It is not whimsical and youthful, it is offensive. She was selling herself rather than her art. I don't need to look at her knitted socks, watch her fluff her hair or jump on the damn couch. It is manipulative. Recognizing that manipulation is not sexist, on the contrary.

This video would have been way more mature if it showed children engaging with the content, rather than an artful selfie. We need to see how she explains ideas that lead children to a scientific mind.
Oh, I didn't know about that one. Now that seems interesting! Thanks for sharing.
There are other benefits to having GUI integration to your terminal emulator. One of which is discovery of features. I personally find it easier sometimes to discover new features that are available in a context menu as opposed to reading an entire MAN page.
> doesn't run on the JVM

https://github.com/trifork/erjang
Kafkaesque Regulation
Girl Scout Cookie Cartoon
Colorado stash: $184M in marijuana taxes
IOS 7.0.6 Released – Contains Fix for SSL Connection Verification
Ambitious. Best of luck to them--I've considered trying to do a full port to a language like Go or Rust, but I've never quite had the time (or self-hatred to try and handle quite so many corner cases as what I've seen in vim's code).
The retail markets have voted overwhelmingly for interest bearing demand deposit accounts. I'm not sure if a fee-based DDA is available anywhere but it certainly is not popular in the US where we get "free" deposit insurance.
Sam Altman for President
>no banks that offer digitally-signed attestation of account balances.

Why is this? Seriously, that alone could prevent so much fraud and misuse of funds. Every public company could have a digitally-signed bank balance, updated in real time.
6 ways to protect yourself against Android malware
Exactly, this is specifically where that feature is designed for: it makes you your own arbiter of what an exchange wants to do with your money.
I had this feeling for a while, then I notice some places it fitted into Django - for creating actions. I wrote it up.

http://colinkingswood.blogspot.com.es/2012/04/currying-to-dy...
Well, here's why.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/rumor-testflight-owner-burs...
Coinbase. They've got $31m in combined funding from Y-Combinator and Andreesen Horowitz, among others. I like to place my bets where veteran investors have some cash and reputation on the line.
In the very first part of the post: "The algorithm is mostly borrowed from Raft, however because of the premises it uses only a subset of Raft that is trivial to implement."

Maybe you only scanned the article.
Completely agree. People don't have a problem selling tickets -- that's been solved. People do have a problem growing their community. That's the problem we're solving. Events are a great way to do that and if THATs your goal, scanning a barcode is pretty robotic/off-putting. Selfie Ticket doesn't add an image into what you already show, it replaces the barcode with something a lot more friendly/welcoming.
With all the problems we're having with provisioning profiles and device limits, this could either be really good news, or really bad news...
More women than men? Gender equality has been achieved.
Pay for products. Use companies that have a real business model.
FOMC: Transcripts and Other Historical Materials, 2008
They are imported because there is a big difference between a nurse and an RN. I couldn't think of a similar distinction in the tech industry. Also I'd also venture to say that RNs are paid very well all across the US.
I wrote on this earlier: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/why-i-wiped-m...

Profile stalking with intent to discredit seems pretty damn common.

Precisely. Take start and end dates, which are often not well defined (consulting arrangements that become full-time, severance agreements). Then there is the issue of title. Sometimes you want to inflate it, but just as often you want to deflate one (to establish trend, or reduce one's role in an unsuccessful venture) and possibly to a previous title you held at that company, which few would consider dishonest. You rarely know, at the time, how you'll want to tell a story 5 years in the future.

However, to the Clueless, any whiff of inconsistency suggests poor integrity, while such people still get demolished by real unethical people and their long cons. Actual unethical people don't fudge their titles or dates or references, they extort their managers and companies into giving them accolades "legitimately".

I would rather hire the guy who lied about his executive title/role on his resume than the (more common) one who actually had it but got it (as most corporate executives do) through extortion.
This is common enough that there's a blog devoted to it: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
Artist reverse engineers Google Street View to illustrate gentrification
the author has posted at least two different patches to vim dev google group. I dont think Bram even commented in any of them. Many others did.
I’m very excited about this. YC is the smartest group of people I’ve ever worked with, and I believe that startups are going to be the major driver for innovation and economic growth going forward.

I was thinking this morning about what it was like to start a startup in early 2005 and how much it’s changed now. PG has done a remarkable amount to improve the startup ecosystem for founders—in fact, it’s hard to think of anyone who has done more.

(Also, maybe someday soon we’ll make Hacker News work well on mobile :) )
You're right. Apples and oranges are basically the same thing. That book holds about the same scientific weight as 50 Shades of Grey. If you don't think there are inherent psychological differences between men and women, then you're just delusional.
Crypto weaknesses in WhatsApp “the kind of stuff the NSA would love”
Book seems nice, but its discussion on the German Tank problem sets up code to calculate posteriors from priors that are more detailed than the Bayesian argument in the Wikipedia article. That is useful, but you don't get the problem intuition that the answer is the maximum ID you saw inflated by a factor depending on the expect ID-gap. There are some assumptions in the Wikipedia Bayesian analysis, but they are less determining than the ones in the book.
Como Ganar Dinero Trabajando En Casa Por Internet | Comprobado
You don't see anything like this in female-dominated professions.

His post directly contradicts that statement, period. The supposed reputability of those sites are irrelevant, especially considering the basis for your own statement is the HN tech bubble.
Do you realize that this talks more about yourself than about other people?

I watched the entire video and not a single sexual thought came out out it, far from it, just the thought that it could be useful for my kids.

I found also very interesting how she frame adding publicity of her cause in HN as useful advice, because it is useful advice!!. I have a company on my own so I know a little about marketting.
LinkedIn Finally Lets You Block Other Members
As a coder, never work for a startup without founders who can code.
Sounds nice, though I hope they keep support for more esoteric platforms. My only real choices on z/OS are vim, emacs, and the ISPF environment.
Congratulations Sam! Can you share a little bit about how you plan on growing YC?
Coding4Fun tutorial: creating a 3D WebGL procedural QRCode maze
Learn how to create a 3D Maze using Babylon.js/WebGL based on a dynamically generated QR Code.

Test the demo here: http://david.blob.core.windows.net/techdays2014/lovemaze/index.html

Useless but fun. :)
The Empathy Vacuum
There is a huge difference between finding someone attractive and reducing them to nothing more than a sex object. Funding this because you're horny is disrespectful to everyone.
For whatever reason, if cooking the food yourself is what you're stuck on, there are services for that too. I know of Blue Apron, which will deliver the ingredients and recipe to you (I think this is where I say that I do not use or work for Blue Apron, I've only heard of it). Of course, this goes against what Gobble provides, which appears to be targeting people who don't want or don't have the time to do this themselves.

Also, it should be noted that people are perfectly capable of cooking low quality food themselves.
A distributed exchange would have even more value if USD to BTC transactions were criminalized since there would be no central agency or person to strike at and shut the exchange down.
Sam Altman Taking Over As President Of Y Combinator
That's some cool software. It would be cool is they applied their deep understanding of Ruby code to a code browser.

Often times to understand how a piece of Ruby code works it's not enough to just look at the source of that specific method. For example if I type in 'ActiveRecord.find', the second result is the one I want, ActiveRecord::FinderMethods.find, and I click it. The documentation is a bit long, so I click 'view source'. The code is short and sweet, but not very enlightening, it's just a wrapper around 'find_by_ids'.

Now luckily 'find_by_ids' is a public method so that's documented and I can search for it. But almost guaranteed at some point the code is going into private api's and I can't use the documentation anymore to understand it.

This is why I always have a local checkout of the Rails code and any other big gems, so I can just 'ack' my way through the source from identifier to identifier.

It would be super awesome if omniref in that 'view source' block would find identifiers, and try to guess what they refer to, and make them clickable so we could really just browse through the source. The user interface is perfect too for fuzzy search, as it shows the item its most confident in in the main window, but has the rest of the results in the bar on the left side, can't go wrong with that!
My point is that its silly to hold the UDHR as some evidence of social consensus given how many on this board alone would disagree with many of its provisions, especially libertarians.

Ultimately, a right is more than an aspiration. Its a social norm so established that other people will defend it on your behalf. At the global scale, pretty much the only thing that meets that standard is the right of groups of people not to be exterminated by genocide. That's the only thing that will get the international community to take up arms.
It's not clear that day traders are willing to pay the fees to put their transactions on the blockchain.
But the performance doesn't degrade quite as much.
Huh, I once visited a military base where people on the trip wanted to be photographed with a tank. The soldiers said it was OK, as long as somebody obscured the tank's serial number by standing in front of it. I wonder if their training in this respect was inspired by this history!

(But if so, why not print the serial numbers inside the tank, not outside? Or maybe encrypt or HMAC them?)
Unless you've got an employer that's enforcing very specific hours, what's the difference? It you'd rather get up earlier, work earlier, and leave when it's still light, what's stopping you?

The number that we assign to a time of day doesn't have any intrinsic meaning, it's just a symbol.
Can't all of this information be found in the block chain if you know the addresses the exchanges are using?
Yes, but the 1940's, and before, were different:[0]

""So you used to work in the morning at one job. Then it was necessary to stop to rest. And then there was another job in the late afternoon and evening — in order to earn enough money to survive," she says. "It's said to be the origin of our way of life now.""

[0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/11/30/244995264/spai...
Sounds like you're confusing Semantic HTML with Semantic Web. "Semantic" HTML is a style of writing HTML where the document exposes the meaningful structure and data in the document instead of the visual layout. The idea is that HTML is just a structured data representation, a la XML, and CSS is then used to transform it into a particular layout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML
Neo Vi Improved. We suck at naming things :)

Yeah, I have mixed feelings as well. I love my Vim, don't touch it.
And yet, vimscript does suck and better separation from core and UI could allow for very interesting things.
Also, no one really cares about Vi compatibility anymore and cleaning the scary old C code base could make it much more accessible.

I guess we'll see.
> Does anyone know of a language or operating system that uses Reed–Solomon error correction on every file?

A while back, after losing some personal photographs to bit rot, I became curious about this and did some experimentation with RS. The biggest drawback I found was that even with a relatively fast processor it is slow compared to typical disk read/write speeds. I concluded that the ZFS approach of RAID + checksums would be preferable.
We're currently focusing our efforts on medium-sized retailers. Think 5+ stores, 15k orders per month.

As far as actionable insight goes, we tell retailers things like:

- Which product categories are driving their sales

- Which customer segment they should be focusing on

- What are some of the trends in their data

I'd love to ask you a few questions about your POS data analytics experience. If you don't mind, could you send me an email so I can get your contact info? My email is: nick@42debut.com
Fist bumps or black cars? Uber and Lyft attract users for different reasons
Sam, you already know this, but I just want to say publicly how happy we are to have you leading YC.
I think it's pretty clear that Facebook didn't buy WhatsApp for the technology itself but rather the large market penetration/installed user base. Whether that was stupid or not is up for debate.
Huh, I only hear of them as they're shutting down; I've wanted something like this in the past. Interestingly the German and Danish postal services have been offering such a service for a while, partly out of a desire to reduce their delivery costs (it reduces the number of packages that have to be lugged out to individual doors).

Germany: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation

Denmark: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...
Wow, awesome news! I've noticed a lot more Sam Altman posts on HN recently, and I have to say I'm a fan, at least of his writing.

What does this mean for your role at YCombinator, PG? Will you still be spending most of your time helping out with companies there, or are you going to work on other projects?
If you don't want to learn haskell then don't. It is the weird insistence on making up ridiculous excuses that I have a problem with. Making up a strawman version of "the haskell community" is entirely unnecessary. Once again, a web designer with no CS education of any sort can do it without any problems at all. Your excuse is obviously baloney.
Re 3: A nit, it's not weakly typed, it's dynamically typed. The type of a variable X may be an integer or a list. But you can't ask for the head of an integer or multiply a list by 3. That said, I half-agree with you. I find static typing or tools which can perform static analysis to be a great benefit in working with larger projects or other coding with other people. Tools for static analysis exist for erlang and come with the standard install, dialyzer.
Co-founder of vessel.io - We have Android and iOS beta distribution service for free. Happy to help you setup your account.
> the resources currently available for would-be Erlang adopters require an unrealistic level of interest and time to get them over the hump.

The person who can't be bothered to even find 'Learn You Some Erlang' also won't have the motivation to learn Erlang. It does take effort, but there now are many good resources available (unlike the situation just a few years ago).
It also helps if there are no boring bring-lunch-from-home types.
Congrats Sam. I love your thoughtful writing style and think you're the natural choice for the job.
Why Data Strategy Matters