skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>He worked very hard, it just came natural to him. If he was lower-class he would have never had access to early computers and it would be much less likely that he would have been successful at all.

At the time you didn't have to be rich to be a computer enthusiast. Silicon Valley was full of average Joes who had breadboarded up a simple computer but couldn't figure out what to do with it. Gates may have had more trouble if his family was at the very bottom end of the income spectrum, but computer geekery was a middle class thing. Literally millions of people could have done the same.

>He was a natural leader, but you can't just start out as a CEO unless you have a product or service to offer.

That's just nonsense. Anybody can be a CEO - you just need to start a corporation. When Gates and Allen started Microsoft it was just the two of them. There was no product either. This is all on the wiki page, by the way.

>Bill Gates couldn't have had time to build his software if he had to work daily to put himself through school (to have access to the computer).

That might be true except that he dropped out of school as soon as the company was founded.

>Starting with a million dollars is no different than starting with 100 million, it all depends on how good the person is at spotting opportunity, learning from mistakes, and manipulating (not in a bad way) people to help you build your empire.

You don't need a million dollars to start a company, and lots of now-powerful companies were started with far less. Apple, for instance. If Gates was lucky it was because he came of age in a time where computers were changing so fast there were more opportunities for small, agile companies. But that was true of his entire generation.
What is sexist is that I think many people have not actually invested the energy in figuring out what the distribution of X, Y, and Z are. I think X is actually much more common in this kind of scenario than Y or Z, and honestly I think anyone who has actually gained the trust of a few women in tech and heard stories about what it is like is pretty likely to see that too.

Anyone who throws their hands up and says "well I guess X, Y, and Z are equally probable" to me clearly has not actually spent time understanding the problem.
>>> By conducting well-structured, regular performance and compensation reviews, you will ensure that pay and stock increases are as fair as possible.

Simply installing formal processes won't solve the problem if it's widely known that those processes have to be bypassed in order to get anywhere. It doesn't take long to figure out that all real career advancement activity occurs out-of-cycle.
This week's list of breaking changes seems smaller than most while total merged pull requests seems about average. One week is too small a sample to go off but hopefully it's a downward trend as things sort themselves out.
> We still have heirloom seeds - anyone who wants to can develop their own varieties and share them as freely as they like. Many thousands of people do this. However, those varieties are just extremely unlikely to be as consistently high-yielding as the latest commercial varieties.

just to chime in here. for a majority of indian farmers - partly which triggered the mass suicide by pesticide - they turned out to be not at all as high yielding as was claimed.

now you could say, ahhh, but wait a second. they didn't use as much water and pesticide as they were supposed to, and you might be right. but then it depends on your definition of yield.

their own crops had a higher yield given the conditions of the soil, and water.
> I think the hate for Monsanto is way, way, way overrated.

monsanto == agent orange
It makes the behavior worse and more inexplicable, which makes it more outlier-seeming.
Sunday Times interviews Jonathan Ive on everything design, Apple, and much more
Everyone benefits from the oppression of others in some way. Everyone who participates in consumer culture: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc. are benefiting from it. I'm not a special case.

To say there is a "shared experience" between all people of the same skin color is completely ignoring cultural and socioeconomic rifts that are present in the equation. There is common ground between subgroups, but ultimately, what you're speaking about reeks of an ethnic nationalism.

Is our society built around white people? Western society? Yes, most likely. It's hardly surprising when it has a predominantly white racial makeup.

Good to know I'm a defensive culturally erasing white dude for not buying into a narrow and binary white guilt narrative where some 80% of the world's population is under a homogenous yoke, that is inconsistent with how the world works at large. Some history lessons might do you well, I believe.

I saw the video. All I saw was an emotional man yelling out a black nationalist argument, largely as a reaction to how he may have been personally mistreated.
Patents serve the same purpose in farming as they do elsewhere: it makes it worthwhile for companies to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drive crop yields ever higher.

This rest on the assumption that the patent system is the best way to structure a market and incentivize agricultural R&D.
There is data and there are views.

Self-expression in a particular app doesn't mean that you shouldn't have control over the underlying data you publish, and easily transfer it between apps. Already, many apps such as Tinder ask for your FB account and import your photos. But the import is still limited, and hardly any information is contributed back.

Just like MVC separates data, from views, so too the "apps" should take your data from one place which you control. This place shouldn't be a centralized social network, it should be an open-source server.

In this way, people can upload and manage their own videos, photos, and more. They can then give access to others (friends, etc.) as well as to apps (via OAuth) through their own server. If some of their data streams (e.g. a blog or a video) become popular, then the person pays for more hosting.

The age of centralized services that can go down and present juicy targets to the NSA is temporary. Just like open source systems like git and mercurial disrupted centralized version control systems, so too will the centralized web services eventually be disrupted. The web was originally meant to be decentralized, and it will be again.

Disclaimer: My company, Qbix, has been building the underlying (open source) platform for this exact thing in the last 3 years. And we have had to deal with a lot of issues surrounding identity, privacy, and individual control. Here are some links:

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114
I see it as "here's an interesting thing". I like it, most articles make for interesting reading.
A million dollars of Google stock is nothing my friend.
> Malls aren't dying. Some malls are, but that has nothing to do with the mall paradigm and has more to do with the local population. A mall can't get up and move. It's like a tree. It is where it is and it either thrives or dies.

I would argue this is exactly why malls are dying, that they can't keep up with more and more rapidly evolving socio-economic trends and shifting demographics across geographies. Another byproduct of globalization and technology-driven streamlining of commerce
False. There are several competitors like Dupint, Dow Chemical, and Bayer.
You refer to outdoor schools. My middle schoool was sort of like that. Of course the classrooms were indoors, but the campus was several small building not one big one. So to go to art, or music, or gym, or lunch you would walk outside to another building. It was nice to get outside four or five times a day even if just for a few minutes. Of course it kind of sucked in a heavy rain....
Of note: the Firefox vulnerabilities were all buffer overflow related.

AKA, not possible in Rust...
Indeed, it's Muphry's Law.
Nice... Anybody using cli tools like this in conjunction with a git client-side post-commit hook?
EU votes in favor of universal mobile charger
I don't pretend to have any info on what truly happened. But the story doesn't have to be 'completely accurate' for it to be disturbing. A company can't have family members browse around company offices and imposing themselves on employees with whom they have no professional or personal relationship. I find it very hard to understand how the wife's repeated presence can be favorably interpreted if it did indeed upset Horvath.
How about a standard DC wall socket?
Brackets.io http://brackets.io/
You do know that there is life beyond Linux and Windows, do you?
"202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google."

So close!
One reason is because our democratic freedom is at the verge of being overthrown by a new aristocratic system that springs out of the "free market" system we have today.

Such companies already have a tremendous influence on politics and the whole live we have. The financial system is roaming the lands for new "investments". There is not to few money around, it is way to much -- and it is in the hands of the few.

The result is, that companies, the finance sector and the big shareholders own us all! We are at the verge of a state, where it will not be possible to live without paying "life-taxes" to specific companies. So the difference of the Having (and I don't mean a million bucks or even a billion bucks -- far more!) and the Not-Having will grow. There might be some kind of new middle-class formed by the millionaires of today -- but the old middle-class will go down.

At last, there will be the new aristocrats (as in the middle ages -- max. 0.01% of the people), their handymen (~ 1%) and the rest of the pack, that will be living in rags.

I don't know, if this will come to pass, but we are at the verge of it and the neo-capitalism is going exactly that direction! Already some aristocrats are building homes for the millionaires -- secure and apart of the pack!

When you say: This is just bullshit: Look into your countries government -- who makes the laws? In the US, in the EU, in .... (where you live). Open your eyes! (if you are able to)
> My husband, who is also a developer, said I should blog about it because he didn't see any sexism at all in the story until I pointed it out to him.

I could not see any sexism in this occasion until reading this post either. The reason is that to me, (and probably to the OP's husband and many others) sexism is "Shut the f.ck up, this is men's business". Thanks a lot for this enlightening post.
Do you think it is that easy for a simple farmer to check if their seed is contaminated? I think the article makes a good point, that it is the responsibility of Monsanto to make sure that their seeds do not spread. But I am no expert.

But compare it to a corporation that has a patent on some computer code which would distribute itself as a worm and every victim with an infected PC has to pay to the corporation. Only because you have it on your PC does not make you a copyright pirate. There must be clear evidence that you downloaded patented software willingly. So it is Monsanto who has to make sure that the farmers have the tools to prevent Monsanto seeds from growing. If these tools are not freely available I would say farmers should not be liable this.
This reminds me of the windup girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl).
This is just nonsense, it is extremely easy for farmers to buy non-GMO seed. Not only are there several other huge seed producers (Bayer, BASF, Dupont, Syngenta, Pioneer, etc.) that sell high-quality non-GMO seed, but there is a huge ecosystem of regional cooperative seed producers that make decent seed.

Farmers choose GMOs because they really do get more return on their investment. They aren't idiots and they aren't being forced.
Where I am really surprised is that you have a lot of issues like that in the computer/programming world (see related issues in conferences) where, we do not have these problems in other engineering areas. I am is bio/chemical engineering, working with women in basically all the fields from very men dominated domains (oil and gas, auto industry) to mixed (pharma/food industry), the only case I know of issues was in the army provider area. This is where I am surprised, please note that my contacts are mainly in Europe.

Maybe another question could be why these issues are endemic to the computer/programming world? Is it because all the other industries are pretty conservative? We have families and kids when we go home and we are not supposed to kill our social life by working insane hours to "ship". I have no answers, but I am happy to be in a field where I can work with men and women without these sexism issues.
Monstanto's own take on Schmeiser: http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/percy-schmeiser.aspx

From the 2001 Court Decision[0]:

"[146] I find on a balance of probabilities that the growing by the defendants in 1998 of canola on nine fields, from seed saved in 1997 which was known or ought to have been known by them to be Roundup tolerant, and the harvesting and sale of that canola crop, infringed upon the plaintiffs' exclusive rights under Canadian patent number 1, 313, 830 in particular claims 1, 2, 5, 6, 22, 23, 27, 28 and 45 of the patent"

[0] http://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991/...
Yeah, that background is awful.
Even without terminator seeds, replanting seed that you harvested is not necessarily a good idea. For instance, most commercial corn seeds are hybrids, made by crossing two highly inbred plants. This means that the seeds in the bag have pretty much the same DNA as each other. Those plants produce far better than their inbred parents, and they are quite predictable in most agronomic ways.

Now, what happens when you get the next generation? When Hybrids cross with hybrids, the actual genetic makeup of the offspring will produce quite a bit more variation. With that increased variation, come less average yields. So even if a farmer didn't sign anything that would stop him from planting the seeds, chances are that a farmer would have higher profits by just buying a bag of seed anyway.

Not so much for Soybeans though, but that really is a place where Monsanto has pretty much a monopoly: Roundup protection increases yields so much that non-GMO soybeans are barely planted, because they are far less profitable for the farmer.
This is actually a pretty genius idea, but as pointed out by others this site looks old (evident by the design and inaccurate stock price). I also think the way Google shares work is that you can never truly own a meaningful share of Google via public shares.
"Sounds like maybe you should have gone college, or at least taken a stats class on Coursera..."

Sounds like maybe your commodity CS degree is a demonstration of servility rather than aptitude.
I understand that the difficulty of making this new feature is scaling the backend, but at this point wouldn't Facebook already have sort of some processes or "frameworks" to follow when making a new feature.
> It's also very tiresome to have Percy Schmeiser trotted out over and over again. What's not mentioned here is that it came out in the trial that Schmeiser had very deliberately infringed the patent by using Roundup to select the Roundup-Ready plants, saving their seed and planting them separately. Schmeiser made a very good job of rousing the media in his support, but he definitively broke the law.

I'm sorry you find his story inconvenient to your Monsanto cheerleading, but I (and I feel many others) don't think this should have violated any law. Someone contaminated his property with Roundup-Ready canola. He chose to take advantage of that, isolate it, and replant it. He never agreed with anybody to not do this, or signed contracts to control what he does with what ends up on his property.

The idea that a patent can exist on a lifeform is utter nonsense to me; I think a lot of the outrage comes in discovering that Monsanto's patent is on the actual lifeforms themselves, not on the process for turning a regular seed into a roundup-ready seed.
Is it just me, or is this kind of "science" reporting more annoying than it used to be?

1) 'Space rocks, formally known as asteroids' - actually no, they are informally also known as asteroids. You just made up the term space rocks.

2) 'Only people with telescopes can see most of these “occultations.”' Why is occultations in quotes? It's a real word and that's what these events are called in real life. You know, that science thing again.

3) 'Regulus is what’s known as a first-magnitude star.' No, it actually is a first magnitude star, not just known as one. Again, that's the real term in the real world.

I would ask "science" "reporters" to quit dumbing things down and to start writing like adults.
Tell me why we should read articles from non-scientists instead of articles from actual biotechnology scientists again?
"I see nothing wrong with the involvement of founders' wives in the business"

This is nuts.

If person A works at a company then obviously their significant other (male or female) will likely talk with them about work situations and that may be more or less helpful to A and the company. But the idea that as a general rule a female significant other's contribution will be so significant just by virtue of the "level of complexity" of the "social thinking" is just absurd.
Mozilla's post from the March Who's Hiring thread:

"Servo is a new web browser engine. It is designed to be more memory safe (far and away the #1 cause of browser engine security bugs!) through use of the new Rust programming language"

They're trying. They're on it, you know? They need more talent sent there way I suppose.
A lot of Americans, having been denied a proper geography education, consider Europe itself to be a postage stamp.

If challenged they'd probably assert the whole thing was smaller than Texas.
Most of the malls I've seen are closer to postmodern architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_architecture
GeekHack has lots of resources and knowledgeable folks re: all aspects of keyboard building:

http://geekhack.org/index.php?board=117.0

I built my board (http://technomancy.us/173) primarily building on knowledge from geekhack.org and the #geekhack channel on freenode.
FYI, in many European countries periods and commas in numbers are the reverse of how we use them in English- 405.413,19 is actually 405,413.19
Actually, it applies equally to private hosting too.
As a grain farmer myself, I don't know this to be true. In fact, the only GMO crop we do grow is field corn because there is no advantage of non-GMO varieties in that crop. Perhaps you could elaborate some more?
Am I the only person tired of seeing complaints as the first comment on every post ? Especially the ones with the form "<vaguely nice comment> BUT <trashing the whole thing>".
Woo click fraud!
You're doing exactly the thing people-who-are-oft-scapegoated are afraid of: equating "extremely probable" with "incontrovertibly proven."

In an actual trial, for a conviction to take place, evidence would have to be presented that leaves no room for reasonable doubt--which is to say, the evidence would have to effectively take Y/Z/etc. out of consideration.

We chose this standard because we, as a society, decided that there was something more important than making sure "justice is served" in all cases: making sure nobody has the power to condemn innocents at a whim by making up an "extremely probable" accusation.

But the court of public opinion has no such strict standard, even though the punishments it hands out can be far worse.
Cuckoo cycle, a memory access heavy proof of work
This is a pretty genius idea. Use Google to buy Google stock. With the current share price, buying shares isn't exactly cheap. But collecting cash from their service is an effective way to reap the benefits of corporate growth in another way.

Similarly: buying Tesla (TSLA) stock when it was cheap because you couldn't afford the Model S....and now you can afford it.

That being said, it would seem that there would need to be a rather large network of sites and AdSense links to earn enough money to buy a share. Reminds me of the cost-benefit ratio of mining bitcoin.
Not insulting, just stating an engineering degree is more likely to be in demand and pay living wages vs. a liberal arts degree in an esoteric subject with little demand.
Military strategy: War games
It's like eating at McDonald's in Tokyo. What's the point?

Shaka Shaka Chicken, of course.
Or that the TechCrunch reporter is writing the story at a certain angle, and asked for anything that could fit into that narrative. I think that, in the context of a certain sort of modern journalism, a version of Hanlon's razor is called for: "Never attribute to ideological slant that which is adequately explained as linkbait and sensationalism."
Ehhh... it really depends on where the mall is located. Back home (podunk Rockford IL) malls are indeed dying. They are dilapidated and/or ghost towns. Ten years ago this was not the case.

Where I currently live (La Jolla CA) the opposite is true. Of course, the malls are filled with stores like Saks, Nordstrom, a Tesla show floor, etc. These places are packed. I know I'm not going to buy a $1200+ jacket online any time soon, so I go to the mall for high end stuff.
To be fair, a search and replace for "dialog" would also match patterns like, y'know, "dialogue" too, at least in all the naive replace-all algos I've seen in IDEs.

So, the traditional CTRL+F, or :%s/dialog/dialogue/g would have resulted in at least some instances of 'dialoguegue' as a result. Yeah, the obvious remedy there is :%s/guegue/gue/g, but that too could lead to unintended results, etc.

Not that I don't agree with the intent of your statement, search and replace across 20k lines of code, over however many files, is likely a more involved process than it sounds like.
It is really old, I think the first time that I saw it was in mid 2001
Great, if the GMO yields less, the farmer doesn't buy it again, and then the market deals with the problem.

Definition of yield? Bushels per acre, or kg per hectare. There's not much of an issue there. The same plant might yield very differently in different fields, just like it yields differently each year. If you are conducting trials, you have to plant a bunch of stuff together vs well known controls. Something that yields 140 bushels per acre on average might give you just 58 in the wrong year. Just look at what happened to most of the US fall crop in 2012.

Now, if you plant a variety of plant that does well in X conditions, and you actually plant it in Y conditions, then yeah, pick between changing the condition or using a different variety.
Just want to clarify that my response here is not related to the GitHub story. I have no knowledge of the circumstances that aren't in the story.

> No, they are crazy.

That may be.

> Reverting someone else's changes without explaining why is crazy.

Not necessarily. There are times when you are so wrong you aren't even wrong.

> If any of these people has a disagreement with a co-worker over the co-worker's changes, it's their duty as a fellow employee to explain to the co-worker why they disagree, or at least explain to the manager why they disagree with the change, so that the manager can explain it to the co-worker.

Let's imagine a scenario where they had done this, and yet nothing had corrected the problem. At that point, it would be quite reasonable to revert someone's changes without explaining why, and threatening to quit if one wasn't allowed to.
A real-life door handle is not comparable to a CG "3D" interface - a more sensible comparison would be a photo of a door handle that you have to poke in the right way to get the door to open...
Genulyrics 1: No church in the wild
Why pick on Monsanto though? Dupont, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, just to name a few, all have seed patents of their own.
Didn't the founder bring his love affair into the company? I assume he loves his wife?