skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So a guy who has a political degree has the same voice as a guy who votes depending on which candidate has the nicest eyes?

I have a Political Science degree, and I see no reason why this would be a problem. Could you clarify why you think this should not be the case?
Yeah, sure, that's true. Doesn't mean it's wrong when talking about newspapers. They're different bodies of work. Journalists generally aren't writing narratives laden with literary themes.
"we don't do this for the sake of diversity. We do it because we want to get the best people, whatever they're like."

But we would prefer women?

What the hell is up with YC and positive discrimination?
Nitro, to my knowledge, only optimises Javascript performance, but JS performance is not the only bottleneck. We noticed that DOM manipulation together with style and layout calculations play a big part, see http://blog.mikie.iki.fi/2014/02/some-numbers-on-mobile-safa...

It's very tough to make a quality app using HTML5 if you use gestures and animations. Coding it in native Cocoa/Objective-C is much easier at the moment than trying to polish that last 10-20% of your HTML5 app performance.
The animations are to slow for me, kills the playability.
Anybody know how to do this in nginx?
Microsoft just exposed email's ugliest secret
My ball, you didn't sing the 'Q' song.
One of my earliest memories is of Christmas eve, sharing a room at a relative's house with my younger siblings. It was some time after midnight, my siblings were asleep. I heard a rustling outside and, knowing santa was purportedly coming, I pretended to sleep and kept one eye very slightly open.

In comes Santa. I can just make out his big fat belly, red suit, white beard, and a big sack. He unloads presents in various places around the room. Then, as he's leaving, the light from the slightly open door catches his face and I realise it's my dad in a Santa outfit. I remember very distinctly feeling crushed and exhilarated at the same time. Santa wasn't real, but I'd found out what grown-ups know.

I planned to confront my dad about it the next day. When I woke up there were sooty bootprints in the fireplace, and my siblings were just so incredibly excited about the whole thing that I didn't have the heart to bring it up.

There are few things outside of fantasy that will create that feeling for a child. Reaching a level of maturity where you get that excited about the real world is a rite of passage. So that's what I'm going to do. I don't care if my kids believe in Christmas or whatever, but if there's some fantasy that enriches their lives without harming them, I'll commit to it until they grow out of it.
I'd still like to be edified. How about one example of a human being who was injured in any way while using a cheap meter, who would have been unharmed if using a precious Fluke?
Yeah I was thinking the same thing.

Social media, at it's core, glorifies groupthink, rewarding you handsomely with stars and likes when you say the right thing. In time, you start thinking of what you should be saying, and then you start wondering what you should be posting so that you're perceived as a certain type of person. And when you start down that path, it feels like you become a bit more intellectually subservient. If your concern is always how to please people, how can you be expected to explore heresies? How can you plumb the depths of the unknown to explore and discover things when you concern yourself with safety?

The immediacy of the medium rewards snark and off-the-cuff remarks instead of analysis, insight, and distance. It incentivizes heated discussion (as it garners more pageviews!) and cheap, "me too" posts. It generates a fear of missing out, which is used to manipulate visitors into consuming more and more content for less and less value, exactly like any addictive substance.
In my opinion honestly speaking-GOOGLE GLASS WILL BE RELEASED IN 2014
Details on-http://www.etunescafe.com/tech-news/google-glass-will-be-rel...
From MIT Blackjack and VC Outsider to Techstars Boston Head: Semyon Dukach
What’s Holding Back American Teenagers?
I don't see why that would have been fatal without a BRS. Shut the engine down (if it's still doing anything after that much abuse) and glide to a landing somewhere.
> Let's consider another scenario, the leadership of a country like Iran or North Korea successfully nukes a US aircraft carrier. Would the US respond by nuking a city full of civilians?

Maybe not -- if the leadership of the US thought they had a more effective way of both dealing with those directly responsible for the attack and convincing the public that a sufficient response had been made. Of course, that probably wouldn't be any better for the leadership behind the attack than a nuclear strike that had greater collateral damage.
You can't fund people who don't apply, and people can't apply if they don't decide to start startups. The goal of the Female Founders Conference was to encourage more women to do both, and as Sam points out, there is more YC can do in that department.
If you asked college admissions officers in the 1950's what kind of student would be most likely to succeed, they would probably describe someone who was white, male, and came from a middle-to-upper-class background. Not because those kinds of students are inherently superior, but only because the vast majority of college students at the time came from this very limited demographic.

There's the same danger with VC. It's probably/hopefully an unconscious bias, but it's very tempting to want to invest in a "type" of founder that has succeeded often in the past - Young, white, male, Harvard/Stanford dropout, wears a hoodie, etc.

Every VC wants to invest in the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but the more we fixate on past successful archetypes, the more likely we are to (unconsciously) dismiss other possibilities.

It's my same gripe with the job interview process. Obviously every company wants to hire "the smartest, hardest-working people who are a good cultural fit". But how do you measure that in a way that's both accurate and efficient/scalable? You usually can't, which causes you to use certain heuristics which optimize for efficiency/scalability at the expense of considering everyone who might be a good candidate.

For example, the heuristic of using internal referrals for hiring works, because if you're a company like Google where everyone is smart, then smart people are likely to know other smart people, and since you're referring friends, it's likely they will be a good cultural fit. But obviously, in the long run internal referrals will lead to a very homogeneous culture, which can be good (everyone gets along) and bad (lack of diversity).
The accelerating pace of cool
Great! Now I can play it from my mobile browser. LOL.
Anyway I could win twice in a day, by using the same algorithm. But still challenging and fun though.
It's not bullshit, you just misunderstood the line of reasoning.

It goes like:

Assumption: There is a population of women out there who would be really capable of running a successful technology startup

Fact: Not many women do, whether this is because of VC bias, or women's own biases from social conditioning or whatever

Opportunity: encourage more women to start companies that we fund, we will have a competitive advantage by being among the first to mine this under-utilized resource while other VCs compete for the best male-run startups
"...it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male."

So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?
http://www.w3.org/TR/css-grid-1/
Hold on. They just LOST over 100 million dollars? Give me back my 5 bitcoins now!
MixRank (YC S11) is hiring ambitious, entrepreneurial people for sales
Medical stock footage doctors operating
"whatever is necessary for survival" might include not wasting a ton of time applying to a startup incubator with a demonstrated track-record of not funding women or minorities or southpaws or whatever. Doing -anything- to change that perception could tip the effort/reward analysis in favor of more of $MINORITY applying.
The modern business world is full of people like the author.

People who are asleep. People who are not actually alive. People who are threatened by those who think.

These people hate the thinker, but their dreary little lives rest directly on the foundation that the thinkers provide. For example, the radical who first looked at fire and thought, "hey, maybe I could use that".... now THAT GUY was a visionary who puts Musk to shame.

Really this type of people are just machines. And they will be the ones machines are easily able to replace.
What do you mean by "negative in intent"? Can you provide examples of comments of that nature?
EC slams Turkey for shutting down Twitter
Yeah, pilots should know what they're getting into and be aware if it exceeds their experience. I didn't mean it to be an endorsement of unsafe behavior.

If the capabilities of the airframe and the pilots skill are sufficient for the conditions, like if your plane is certified for flight into known icing conditions and you have experience doing so, then it's not a huge risk to fly into these situations.

But if your plane has pneumatic deicing boots that require engine power and your engine quits, you may be in over your head in a hurry if ice starts building up while you're trying to perform an emergency landing.

In that situation it would be nice to be able to just pop the chute.
That being said... his business advice on who to hire is probably very apt.

A predictable machine is more useful to you than an unpredictable human.
I was kind of disappointed by this article, I was expecting some information about things that women stereotypically do better than men in regards to starting a company. (If you've found something like this I'd be really interested to hear it!) Some traits that men, stereotypically, can learn from (or even vice versa). Instead it's just outreach drivel, (which is not what the title implies)
It seems pointless to encourage specific demographics that would not apply, to do so.

I think you're missing the point that there could be reasons that females (or any demographic other than white American males) do not apply to YC that are not correlated with building great companies.

For example it is plausible that woman feel alienated by the tech startup scene and avoid applying to accelerators. White males born might not have that feeling. So effectively their "bar" is lower.

If YC is trying to address that it seems like a smart business move on their part. They are reducing irrationality in the system.
Celebrating the Death of Comcast: The Case for Net Neutrality
I think it ends at 1024?
The zoomed out thing happened to me too... I was wondering if my resolution had changed, but I always have my resolution turned all the way up. Interesting effect.
The Real Dangers of Riding In an Uber Car
Seems to me that the main things keeping people away from GA flying are cost, accessibility, impracticality, and lack of interest.

Which is to say: GA is painfully expensive (how many people are going to start a hobby that costs $150/hour?) hard to find (how far away is your nearest local airport that offers basic flight training?) useless (how many people are going to get to the point where they can travel for business or vacation using their own airplane?) and not something people care about too much anyway (flying is seen as boring).

I'm not aware of many people who want to get into GA but don't because they're scared of it. I have seen a lot of people leave or simply never pursue it because of the rest, though.
I'm curious about that one. There's a very tricky balance to work there, with the risk being that any change along these lines could exacerbate an already strong tendency towards groupthink in the comments.
> If it was unsafe or something like that then I could see the point.

This is exactly the argument I've seen from EEs so far -- that Fluke meters are much safer than the knockoffs, and that the grey-with-yellow-trim color scheme is distinctive to Fluke.

The EEs' safety concerns seem overblown to me, but they know a lot more about their field than I do, so I'm not inclined to dismiss them.

Fluke had other options here. I doubt that the "Maker community" is really even a significant part of Fluke's sales, and the internet has the attention span of a cracked-out gnat. They could've easily ignored the whole thing altogether and been no worse for wear. Before anyone objects: pop quiz time, how many of you are at all aware of Autodesk's licensing policies?

Fluke is as bound by the law as everyone else; as they explained in their post, they can't ignore trademark infringements, and they weren't even aware of the customs' seizure, they didn't make that decision.

So, yeah, donating a pile of units to Sparkfun is generous of them and I really don't think it was primarily motivated by PR.

As far as the wastefulness of the action goes ... I don't disagree, but I also find it peculiar that people are even mentioning that, especially in a forum like this one, in this age of ubiquitous disposable electronics. My little shop has been having to tell a lot of folks recently that they should replace their otherwise perfectly good computer just because XP support is about over. Nobody seems to think that's wasteful, though.
YC is clearly not necessary for survival, especially for someone who has already had an exit (and thus has some capital and contacts), or someone who is 50 and has run a 30 person lab, with some savings and other personal contacts. YC can probably help in both of those cases, but the company is capable of being successful without it.

I'd sure rather have an Elon Musk or a Mara Aspinall in YC than a randomly-selected person who already believes YC is the best (or only) way to do a startup.

There are two parts to this -- making YC as useful as possible to the best founders, and making sure the best founders know that and apply.
Don't the downvotes already handle that? I wouldn't touch that topic with a 10-foot pole at this point.
Perhaps have a separate url for "proper" video? Or an option to turn off the mute by default (as opposed to having it turn off automatically the first time you unmute a video.)

Or just require videos with sound to click to play. It's the combination of sound and autoplay that is annoying.
Please do note that I put "health care system" in quotes. That was not an accident.

I worked in insurance for over five years. They are not in the business of taking care of people. They are more like some version of Las Vegas but all the "winners" first have to lose an arm or get run over by a car. I am not a huge fan of insurance.

I was a homemaker for many years. I also was studying to go into urban planning when my life got derailed by divorce and health issues. Urban planners used to plan pedestrian-friendly spaces in part with an eye towards health of the community members. I have also read a fair amount about the differences between how Europe handles things and how the U.S. does. Europe is generally more family-friendly and people friendly, which is good for the health of it's people.

Medicine is not about making people healthy. Eating right, exercising and living right are what foster good health. Medicine is crisis management when things go wrong. Viewing medicine as "health care" is fundamentally fubarred. You cannot crisis manage your way to good health. It simply cannot be done. Good health is built over a long period of time, with every bite you put in your mouth, every time you fail to become a drug addict or alcoholic, every time you find a way to get your sexual needs met that does not expose you to high risk of infection from strangers with unknown personal habits, etc.

So when the U.S. reduces discussions of "fixing our health care system" to the question of "who should pay for it?", the situation is already essentially hopeless. It cannot be fixed from that starting point.

As for who should pay for medical care (which is not, in my mind, "health care"): The government. Insurance is not in the business of taking care of people. It is a numbers game and, like Las Vegas, in order for the house to even keep it's doors open, much less make the occasional big payout, there have to be a great many more losers than winners. It's simple math in that regard and the actuaries look out for that end of it like vigilant hawks. And when the actuaries decide the company is paying customers too much money for X benefit on X policy, the policy gets sent to the legal department and they "clarify" what the paragraph in question means and the claims department gets retrained to "pay this benefit correctly" and we start sending denial notices to the customer for things we used to cover. That will never, ever, ever, ever, ever make this country healthier.

And I worked for a good insurance company with a very ethical reputation. From what I gather, a lot of other insurance companies are far more gruesome.
As someone foolish enough to build a production-grade tool with arc back in the day, I'd say that Clojure has taken most of the best ideas from arc already.

I think arc still had few good tricks related to code brevity though that never got adopted by Clojurists (they would require a custom sexp reader to be bolted into Clojure to port them) but almost all of the other good stuff from arc made it into Clojure, and Clojure had many fantastic ideas that greatly improved on arc.
"To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power."
I haven't, but I can if you're interested. "Best results" in this case is pretty subjective so I didn't perform any rigorous experiments about the relative quality of each method, that was just a general observation that I had.

The program itself is just a quick HN scrapper combined with a naive bayes classifier which periodically runs and sends selected article titles to an IRC channel.
Why don't we got one step deeper and blame media for publishing and making a big deal of Snowden revelations or even a step further and blame people for believing media.

When put that way it is quite clear that Snowden is not anymore at fault than media or people.
CoreOS experience designer here. I'm looking for testers to check out the general platform and test some of our new features. All skill levels are fine – new to docker & CoreOS, new to CoreOS only, etc. I'm happy to work with your schedule and make it as quick or involved as you're comfortable with. Anything from emailing a few thoughts to Skype to hanging out in our office in SF for the day.

Email: rob.szumski@coreos.com
I don't really understand this article. What is the point of an empirical approach to taboo. I was a student of philosophy for years, and ethics is essentially a top-down way of finding the exact things he's looking for. Whether it be Kant's categorical imperative or Singer's expanding circle, it seems to me this taboo chasing is missing the bigger picture of finding a justifiable ethical framework, and then everything he's asking about falls out simply, and easily.
This is also what we did with our kids. In fact, while they no longer believe (they are 13 and 18), we actually still do it.

I've never thought about why we continue to do it, but even gifts exchanged between my wife and myself get labeled "from: santa" in many cases.
>Phillip K Dick was a anphetamine abuser (which no one advocates), but incredible writer. I would never dare suggest someone limit their potential if there are options they can reasonably try.

This is very telling and I believe that it defines pretty clearly the rift between our convictions on this.

In the near future, we will have the ability to augment our brains via drugs and implants to make us many more times smarter and more productive. We are starting down this path already. Where does our humanity end up after all of this. There will certainly be a tradeoff.

I believe the present and future of humanity is better off letting us reason with out own natural brains vs enhanced/inhibited (enhanced/inhibited always go together because there is always a tradeoff, even if eventually the only side effect is an imbalance of abilities). I am not saying that I never condone the use of ADHD drugs and Antidepressants, but when they are handed out like candy - I see that as being a problem. Clearly you do not, but that is the difference between us.
> Several Linux distributions are now using Py3 as their main python

Only Arch Linux does it.
Error reduction hardware for pianists
I always wondered if there were a sociological commentary in the fact that yank is defined as jerk * mass.
>"Any problems you've experienced with it?"

Politics.

Technical hurdles (getting / massaging data) might be challenging or time-consuming but they're straightforward problems.

Dealing with people who feel possessive of their data or fear having their laundry aired are the real challenge - I want to say 90% of the problem even.

This might be a non-issue in a small company, but it has been consistent death in the places I've dealt with it (10,000+ employees).

For example...

Company 1:

The public is clamoring for access to data that the company has been holding tight to its chest and disseminating sporadically on paper and later through a painful website that only returns one "result" at a time.

We track down the data sources, create some shims to get it in an easier format and even write some code that will make the output more useful to the public.

First, the director in charge of 70 or so people who deal with the traditional entirely manual system of handling this data freaks out.

The director claims that what we're presenting must be wrong because it doesn't match the stats that someone has been delivering to him manually. We demonstrate that our stats are actually more accurate - he doesn't care - we try to move forward with the raw stats as he likes them.

Next, It comes out that certain external agreements are based on juked stats. If we present the data as is the company is afraid that they will end up having to deal with very difficult questions or a lawsuit.

The project gets killed.

Later, we're asked to come up something in the same area, but purely for internal use. As requested, data is combined and averaged down to a short list of half a dozen percentage based metrics and a single "traffic light" for overall health.

Again, someone in the chain has been lying about their 100% stats and flips out when their numbers only add up to 97% and they get a "yellow". We refuse to fake the stats so they ended up tasking some administrative person with cleaning up our data to the liking of the management before every meeting in which it would be reviewed.

Company 1 - Situation 2:

Generally similar to Situation 1, except this time to jilted director goes for the trump card - says revealing his data would be a threat to national security.

Discussion over.

Company 2:

Major public-facing failure. Executives think a dashboard will help them spot trends and keep the rest of the company honest.

Departments directly responsible for the failure simply refuse to allow access to their data (actually just make the process so slow and bureaucratic as to be pointless). The project dies on the the vine when the pain of the failure has sufficiently faded from the executive memories.

-----

In the end, dashboards are just information, they can reveal problems directly or indirectly, but they won't solve them.
There is a whole lot of interesting material about clothoid curves in Raph Levien’s PhD thesis http://www.levien.com/phd/phd.html

Don’t be put off by the fact it’s a PhD thesis, a genre not generally noted for good clear writing. The tone is scholarly, but unusually readable, and there’s a surprising amount of well-researched historical material (chapters 5 and 6).

He used a design tool based on these curves to design the popular open source monospaced font Inconsolata.