skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amusing indeed. (Functional) Reactive Programming [1] [2] anyone. That's the same thing we've learned during development to be profitable and of real use. And it seems that build systems also converge towards the same lesson learned, but slowly.

––

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programming
my non-tech friends and folks I tell about this can't get it.

They get it and they don't agree with you. To understand why, make a list of all the benefits which typically accrue to a family living next door to an AirBnB rental.
I don't know why you got the downvotes. Your perspective was just different than mine, but valid.
> You're assuming he did his job badly.

No, I'm not assuming that. I am saying that's exactly what the report of the invstigation plus the actual concrete results suggests that Github determined based on the investigation.

> All I'm seeing is the investigation showing NO EVIDENCE OF WRONG DOING.

The investigation does not show "no evidence of wrong doing", instead, it found "while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment" and that finding is cited as the direct reason for Preston-Werner's resignation.
I once worked in a building that installed television sets near all elevators. Unfortunately, those televisions were almost universally tuned to ESPN or Fox News, when not simply turned off. I usually just took the stairs.
Vegetative patient says 'I'm not in pain'
Larry took over as CEO. This isn't intended as a judgment of his management, but when the company goes from being run by the triumvirate of Larry/Sergey/Eric to just Larry, the culture will necessarily change, and I think you've seen echoes of that both in their external actions and in things ex-Googlers say.

As for the wage suppression agreement - I'm not exactly happy with that, but when I read the Apple/Google e-mails uncovered by discovery, I see a stunning example of realpolitik. Make nice with the 800-lb gorilla until you're ready to compete with him, which Google did with Android. While I'm not exactly thrilled that this came at my expense, I think a world where mobile developers have a viable alternative to going through Apple's App Store is significantly less evil than one in which Apple is the sole determinant of who can launch.
> Any big, ambitious, inspirational project like fighting climate change... will do just as well

I'm curious, which of the following is the most compelling argument for "fighting climate change" with government authority?

a) The survival of the planet depends on it
b) Developing cleaner economies is necessary, even ignoring the science
c) It is a suitable project for the purpose of lowering economic inequality
d) All of the above
I think you'd also agree with this review [1] of the book, concluding

Over the course of history, capital accumulation has yielded growth in living standards that people in earlier centuries could not have imagined, let alone predicted -- and it wasn't just the owners of capital who benefited. Future capital accumulation may or may not increase the capital share of output; it may or may not widen inequality. If it does, that's a bad thing, and governments should act. But even if it does, it won't matter as much as whether and how quickly wages and living standards rise.

That is, or ought to be, the defining issue of our era, and it's one on which "Capital in the 21st Century" has almost nothing to say.

[1] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-20/the-most-im... (hat tip:Tyler Cowen)
All of these tweets I see from her account from the last ~45 minutes or so don't help her case at all.

Taking these types of things public especially before any formal investigation occurs (which kicked off this whole scenario) usually does more harm than good.
Thanks for writing this. We're also running a large HBase cluster on EC2 and frustrated with the poor suitability of instance offering (there's literally nothing cost effective for HBase in the current generation).

I am curious why you chose c1.xlarge over m1.xlarge, which is cheaper and has double the memory. In my experience HBase tends to be more memory bound than CPU bound.
That would be exactly it. We're a pretty small shop so I run both accounts and help out with media planning. Having one dashboard for everything helps me out a ton. I would actually be open to trying perfect audience actually. Shoot me an email how you compare to AdRoll?
Brazilian Bikini Wax – Long Beach CA – Skin Care by Tori
How is that even remotely similar in terms of conflict of interest on the part of the buyer?
We are currently serving the ten biggest hubs in the US, but we're adding new routes all the time. The beta routes are routes on which we are currently testing/training our pricing algorithm. You can expect to see many of them live soon.
> " I simply don't see why it matters if N=1 or N=10 (put differently, N=1 is not a special case that deserves being considered differently)."

Because there is a narrative to this story that AirBnb wants to portray, which may help them in their legal battles. It's the same reason why they call themselves part of the "sharing economy" - they're trying rub a grassroots, everyman shine all over the company, deservedly or otherwise.

Large, organized, professional operations run counter to this narrative. The story is supposed to be about helping the average Joe make ends meet, expect a lot of PR focus on working-class families, students, and the empowering effect of AirBnb income. Expect things that run counter to this narrative to be downplayed or eliminated.
Floating point has dramatic differences in semantics compared to exact numbers, not an invisible implementation detail at all.
It's his personal site...
the investigation could have classified most of them as either unprovable or terrible-but-not-provably-sexist (in particular, the behavior of the Preston-Werners).

What would it benefit Github or the P-W husband/wife for the investigation report to have published such a thing? Why air your dirty laundry in public?

It's most likely that the company and its co-founder are on the same page, if only for damage control purposes. (Why break ranks and threaten your brand and stock price, after all?)

There may have been awkward and/or angry discussions in camera. Non-insiders are very unlikely to ever hear what went on in said discussions.
Sorry, I just noticed that I didn't really properly respond there. "Reading" can mean "pronouncing" or "comprehending" - I'm arguing that overall comprehension (including both word identification and reading speed) is easier in languages like Chinese or Japanese than in English. Just from personal anecdote, I feel that many English speakers learning Japanese that have trouble with reading comprehension have issues not because of the language itself, but because they try to study vocabulary as if it's a phonetic language, as many classes are taught that way - memorization focus is on how characters or words sound, rather than the meaning of the characters or radicals they're composed from. The situation may be worse with Chinese if it's as common as the author implies for students to still have trouble reading newspapers after 10 years of study.
What about de-facto board members? Tom was on GitHub's board, it was/is a small company, I don't get how "founder's wife" is not a suitably trusted position. I mean, clearly a bad call in this case, but hindsight is 20/20, and in my small business the husbands of my co-founders are de-facto employees (And in fact board members with significant proxy voting power, simply by state law of common property).

Edit: I looked it up; California, too, is a community property state. Theresa was absolutely an effective board member.
Why not OpenTLS?
To raise prices when apps like popcorn time come around and threaten your very existence seems like the height of stupidity to me.
I wouldn't say it is amoral for them to attempt to protect themselves from anyone who was truly engaging in illegal activity which NYC might try to foist the liability for those Host's choices onto AirBnb. They need to create a narrative that it is just a few bad apples and they are empowering 'average people'.

Selfish? Sure. So is every other corporation on the planet.

I do think AirBnb should have been screening things better in the first place to prevent things from getting to this point. However, I'm sure that would have really slammed the breaks on their business model's growth.
This just seems very short-sighted of Sam to do this so soon after being handed the keys to the YC kingdom. There is definitely, some brand damage being done here. And what's the upside? Sam gets to hang with his social betters?
> Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool.

Pardon? Russian spelling isn't "truly phonetic". Why is the common -ого ending not spelled -ово? Why is the first в of здравствуйте not pronounced? Not to mention the phonological rules that must be memorised, like how the ending of words are always devoiced (giving us fun conflicting transliterations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonoff%27s_theorem ).

To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness. I've found Hungarian spelling to be more regular, for example.
Authorial credit conveniently withheld.
> we are prepared to fight any further false claims on this matter to the full extent of the law.

You'll "strive to do better"? Maybe cut down on the legal threats against subordinates who speak out against you...

> The results of GitHub's independent investigation unequivocally confirm this

Do bosses know how employees with critical-thinking skills perceive such claims? (In my experience: with contempt.)

> I'm also insanely excited about the future.

Like Tom Cruise? Pathologically happy in situations where sane people would be rather bummed, perhaps self-critical or contemplative?
Disappointing, but a good reminder to not trust 3rd party services with sensitive data regardless.
Looks much easier to deploy than Gitlab.
Much of it happens with different objectives, or at different levels, in the context of computing, storage and power management. See Akaros for example: http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu/akaros-web/overview.php .
"Please don't slander me further as I try to move on with my life" ?
There's nothing logically inconsistent here. They believe strongly that you should be able to do what you want with the properties you own (actually, the properties you rent), as long as it doesn't get them in trouble!
It's probably aimed more at reminding GitHub employees of the possible legal ramifications of publicly supporting the allegations and dampening further discussion in general.

I don't see how that's less dramatic though, especially since the meaning of that statement is pretty obvious.

Whether you interpret it as normal, like you do, or inappropriate and/or sad, like I would, is a different matter.
A fair, mathematical approach to equity programs for pre-IPO companies
The pragmatic programmer elixir book is excellent http://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir .

The elixir-lang getting started guide covers a ton as well.

I'd also highly suggest working through http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ as almost all of the concepts apply to elixir.

If you are having trouble hop onto irc freenode #elixir-lang and ask for help! Always someone willing to offer guidance, including the creators and some of the Erlang contributors!
Because Tom didn't demand they go balls-to-the-wall fighting what may be an inevitably losing battle to disprove something that isn't disprovable?

I don't know what happened, but this outcome might be very much in Tom's well-considered best interests. You are making a no-win situation.

EDIT: Heck, I don't even know if you are mad at GitHub for insufficiently defending Tom or insufficiently crucifying him
I really don't care about how it's published in the media, I mean, this last episode at least. It was clear since the very beginning when it broke out that it would be dirty, really dirty. It's a shame not only for the people involved but more specially for Github as an ecosystem. Such incredible company bleeding in the media... sad times... and when I say incredible company I don't mean incredibly owned or well run company, you know what I mean. I lost a bit of faith in them today anyway. Sad times...
First of all, I'd like to state that I am in the same position as you are, but I think you got some facts wrong.

1. Green Card
The green card wait list is actually really only for citizens of China and India. I believe every other country has 0 wait time. I could be wrong with the statement "every", but it definitely is the case for the majority of countries. There is an allotted amount of green cards for each country. As long as this is not surpassed for your country, you should be good.

Let's talk about the 401k. It totally depends on how much matching you get from your employer. Does your employer match your contributions 1 to 1 or with a lesser ratio? If it is a lesser ratio, I would do the math. Assuming you are in the State of California, there is a penalty of roughly 50% for early withdrawal of the funds. So you will definitely get at least your own money back, in case you do go back to your original country. But if you do end up making it here for a until after a certain age, it might be worth considering.

Hope this kind of helps.
That being the case, perhaps he should have chosen the words of such a high profile message more carefully.
Yeah it's always easy to argue that one's wrong because his opinion doesn't work in the actual world.

I find it to be the worst, most myopic and misleading argument kind. That's like telling a cow is a bad cow because it's not like the other cows.
I can guarantee that Netflix's primary demographic will not think "oh, Netflix raised its prices by a dollar, let's do piracy!"
So "women" and "best talent" are mutually exclusive? Classy.
Even something as trivial-seeming as gender causes trouble. I know a lot of Chinese speakers who I'd happily describe as fluent in English, and just about all of them routinely mix up he/she, him/her, and the like.

It's like the trouble that English speakers have with noun genders in Romance languages, but taken to an extreme.
ClassTags were always thread-safe - they are simple wrappers over j.l.Class. TypeTags however were not, and that's supposed to be fixed in 2.11.0.
Your comment about ignoring the considerable power you wield over other people and expecting them to hits home for me.

I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it, but I think there's something there in general applicable to the current round of companies which have 'flat' organizational structures, but still aren't hardly employee-owned democratically-managed enterprises. [1] There are owners and bosses, there are people with ultimate decision-making powers (including hiring and firing) and those without, some who have a heck of a lot more salary/equity than others -- but at the same time, the 'flat structure' somehow seems as if everyone's expected to ignore that and act like it's not true.

It's of course not a coincidence that Github is one of the most famous examples of such a 'flat structured' (not not actually democratically-managed) companies.

And I think it's a shame that people will use this as an example of why hieararchy and authority is neccessary. I think it's more about the dangers of trying to make hieararchy and authority invisible when it actually still exists.

Thanks for your comment which helped me start thinking about this, sorry my response is much less coherent. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
From TFA: "Netflix now has [..] 48.35 million streaming subscribers worldwide"

"Netflix generated revenue of $1.07 billion in Q1 of 2014, compared to 1.02 billion in Q1 of 2013"

Don't think they have any short-term threat to their existence at this point.
This is incredibly troubling. How can anyone trust ${CLOUD_OR_HOSTING_COMPANY}, knowing that ${PERSONS_OR_SOFTWARE} regularly had access to private information?

Be paranoid. Encrypt it if you don't want people to snoop.
Sounds more likely to shock the pranker than the prankee.
This data point shows that AT&T spent about $1 billion on R&D in 2010: http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/print-edition/2010/11/19/f.... Yes, it's a "drop in the bucket" compared to their $20 billion in capital expenditures, as noted in your article ([1]), but it's hardly "basically none." Also, a lot of sophisticated engineering goes into building out infrastructure, even if it's accounted to capital expenditures and not R&D.

Water companies and power companies are generally, true monopolies, in that they're protected from competition and guaranteed a rate of return on their investment. AT&T and the other telecoms are very different. They might have certain geographic advantages, but AT&T is rarely the only wireless or telecom provider in any given market, and its capital expenditures come out of it's own pocket. It can't turn to a rate setting board like a power company or water company to guarantee cash flow to cover investment.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to develop telecom as a regulated monopoly, which worked just fine in the U.S. for the better part of a century, then you need to give companies monopoly protections. If you want to have a market, then you can't regulate rates of return. When you pretend to have a market, then encumber it with excessive regulation, you can't complain when companies don't invest private money into expanding infrastructure.
> Green Card The green card wait list is actually really only for citizens of China and India.

Depends on which visa category, for some its China and India, for others its the Phillipines and Mexico that have really long wait times. I think there are a few others that have short but non-zero wait times for some categories, but that changes more frequently.
What Every Founder Fears
"There is no conclusive evidence that rising inequality will have bad consequences on say growth". Lets say economy is an organism like a human and money is the blood. Would you say that this organism is healthy and grows normally, if up to 90% of the blood would flow to the brain and only 10% would flow to the other organs, despite of a 1:40 brain to body proportion ? No one denies that the brain should receive more blood flow than the liver or pancreas but when the disproportion is so extreme and the only organ that "grows" is the brain, there should be no surprise when the liver is not able to sustain the functioning of the organism with the disproportionate head.
Right. Make is mostly a kludge around the nonexistent module system in C and C++.

It's so bad (specifically due to the way file preprocessing works), that you need to have large parts of a compiler to accurately determine what the dependencies of a source file are.

This is why a decent module system should be the top priority for C++17, though it doesn't look likely so far.
I think this has been a long time coming. $8 a month is very, very cheap for legal streaming video. Single episodes cost $2 or $3 when bought outright, and Hulu Plus exists at the same price point but with a tremendous amount of ads (getting near to broadcast-level). It has been an absolute bargain for a while, and will remain so at $10/m, in my mind.
You know a company hire another companies to perform a check. They usually expect everything ok. Audit comes, it turns out there is a security hole in the software, or your books are off or you threat employees badly. Nobody wants these, yet everybody hires external companies. You think that you can bribe a legal firm to give you a green flag on harassing employees and they gonna risk their reputation on 50K USD? I don't think so...
Glad you like the illustrations! They are a combination of stock images and ones we did ourselves.

One of our goals here was to launch something beautiful, as quickly as possible. So it was a no brainer to pay < $100 for beautiful line drawings that are prettier (and several hours' less effort) than what we could have done ourselves.

Once we had the basic visual style established with stock drawings, I riffed to make some custom illustrations in the same style, including the logo and the instructions on the order page.
Exactly. As you may know, the general phenomenon is called [hypercorrection](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection).
Yes, definitely, the most boring conclusion is that it's a calculated plot to suppress the opinions of Github employees.
"[D]irect and testable assertion" sounds scientific, certainly. It would be interesting to hear how you would flesh that out, though. For example, when they say "no evidence exists," don't we immediately run into the question of whether the claims of Ms. Horvath don't actually constitute evidence? What does constitutes "evidence"? Is that question testable? If Ms. Horvath's claims don't count as evidence, then why does Github's claim that "no evidence exists" count? What test or tests do you propose?

Criminal and civil investigations are not scientific investigations. They may make use of science, but they are not scientific. To import the language of science--actually neo-Popperian pop-cultural language about science--into a discussion of an internal investigation into harassment claims is highly suspect.

Your claim aside, these are weasel words. The way to discover the fact that they are is to appropriately apply language akin to that of jurisprudence, rather than inappropriately apply that of science.
In fact I agree. I would be really glad if somebody explained me persuasively which one build-tools is the best one ever, so I could use it always and for everything, even when a shell-script would be enough. Yeah, it would be nice. But then, don't we have the same thing with about every class of software? Tens of text-editors and no perfect one. Many OSes and nothing sane. So many programming languages with overlapping functionality! And we won't even talk about such thing as linux distributions (and their packaging tools), pepsi&coca-cola… oh, it's not even software.

So, yeah, there are too many build-tools. Whatever.
totally correct. disgruntled employees should just keep their mouth shut and quit.
How did you get from "the term 'glasshole' isn't as prominent as 'selfie' and 'twerk'" to "glass is successful"? Please fill me in on the rest of your argument.
> the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment.

GitHub isn't denying that there were problems and isn't claiming that her story is a complete fabrication. They merely said they don't believe they will lose a lawsuit over it. If anything, they validated that her opinion was fair
"We should hire more women", when said to a person of the female sex, does not necessarily or automatically mean, "we should hire you".
I don't understand why people in these situations feel compelled respond. Why defend yourself? Why say anything publicly at all? Curious if any PR-knowledgable folks around here know if there is any benefit to such statements.
True. Chances are also that our collective estimate of how great a place it is to work at are now more accurate.

That probably says more about the mythological status they had before than about the reality now, but it of course will have an impact on their ability to hire though.

It also should have, and it's normal, and it's how startups turn into big-corps, and that's just the way things are.

The sad truth about culture is that a sustainable culture will feel much more like your parents home than your college dorm; and that will never change... because it's a good thing.
I'm bearish on Netflix because...

a) Everyone and their sister seems to have the technology for a streaming video service.

b) They have no shortage of big name competitors like Amazon, Hulu, and Vudu.

c) Content companies that provide the bulk of value to Netflix subscribers can keep raising their licensing fees until Netflix is left with zero profit.