skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It says there's no evidence of gender-based $BAD_THING, but not that no $BAD_THINGs happened.

One could argue that allowing a non-employee so much access to a private company is an 'error of judgement.' (Referring to Horvath's comments about Tom's wife)
As I understand it Google Omega and RAFT are two different things. Google Omega is Google's answer to Apache Mesos. Omega would need a service like Raft to understand what services are currently available. In short, Google Omega is not a service discovery service.
Give it 15 minutes or so; the DNS registration just takes a minute.
Supporting politicians who share policy ideas with your organization is necessary. On the other hand, there are enemies of tech throughout the Democratic party (and friends of tech in the GOP as well), and blanket support of the party like this is irresponsible.
keep in mind Chinese people themselves start forgetting a lot of the characters after living a couple years abroad
Dude's probably incredibly rich, he can spend the rest of his life on a beach. Why bother dragging through this? Just go buy a boat or something.
And this is why you need strong/clear HR policies.
They say no evidence of illegality, but there is evidence of poor judgement. Without commenting on the specifics of this incident that's a valid reason to fire a CEO/co-founder/exec. I have no particular knowledge of what happened but if GitHub thinks he showed poor judgement then it is reasonable to ask him to resign.
Isn't lower cost reason enough ? and what about new customers(and the side effects they carry for marketing and other stuff) ?
YC is an investor in my company, and I donate about 50-100h of my time to YC every year. I agree that gives me zero ownership, but by the common definition of "stakeholder", it's reasonable to be upset.

I felt equally bad when another investor went off the deep end on anti-gun politics.
totally missed that. thank you.
No _legal_ wrongdoing.

This reads to me as "Tom royally fucked up, but not enough to break any laws."
Tower Defense Architecture
Some related services you may want to check out:

http://degreed.com/ tracks and creates a scorecard (like a FICO score) for lifelong learning

http://www.mysliderule.com/ is a pretty comprehensive list of online courses / MOOCs

http://www.coursetalk.com/ has MOOC reviews and ratings
I would guess that's it's not primarily about prestige, except perhaps for the top level competitors. A well-known marathon gives a concrete deadline for people to train toward. The fact that thousands of people are running at the same time gives a feeling of solidarity.
The hardest part about that is remaining sane as idiots cut in front and undermine this strategy
There appear to have been weirdnesses around the investigation, such as Julie Ann Horvath (and other ex-employees) remaining uncontacted until it was wrapping up: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/453298152569720832

So I don't know how much stock you can place behind the idea that the investigators GH hired, who did not contact ex-employees competently, found them blameless. The resignation probably speaks for more than the investigation does.
this is the trap with Chinese, starting is easy but once you've reached a beginner level, progression is extremely hard and slow
well, even if he did nothing wrong his position was probably untenable. He'll have lost his credibility and more will be said about this incident than any other. i.e. anything else gitbhub would do/release, would most probably be clouded by this incident
Irrespective of which scenario occurred, he made the most appropriate, and honourable decision.
What every founder fears
I doubt they are publishing the real story, there. What is a fact is that Mr. Preston-Werner is resigning. From there, we may only speculate.

If I may speculate, I'd guess that there was some truth to the story told by "the other side", that there was some kind of harassment on the part of this man's wife (who was not employed there). That is all I can really guess. And the only real way to publicly resolve this would be for this man to resign - while he perhaps didn't personally do anything wrong, maybe his wife did, so he was in a sense the fall guy for that.
Irrationality is sweeping the Tech world. I shudder to think where this will end.
Fahrenheit is not easily addable given current realisation of functionality and, if I recall correctly, somewhere in source code there’s a comment in which author explicitly states he doesn’t support units which don’t linearly correspond to SI-based unit.
boat's keep a man poor. Get a caravan ;-)
Note that the denial is couched in the terminology "there was no legal wrongdoing". Not that there was no wrongdoing, just nothing blatant enough (or which left evidence) that it broke laws.
Did you misread his comment, or was there some tricky subtext there? In this upcoming cycle, Sam supports the Democratic party. Suggesting that he support both parties to avoid some kind of PR problem is flat-out creepy. He's got the same right to support parties and policy agendas as you or I have.
Posting via a throwaway account for obvious reasons.

When the lease on my NYC apt expired 2.5 years ago, I've kept the apartment and been subletting on AirBNB 100% of the time.
A couple of months into it, I've automated this to a point where I was making ~ $1-1.5K/month after all expenses, and spending ~ 2 hours a month on it, so I considered getting some more apartments and scaling the operation.

I'm very glad that I didn't. My lease expires in a couple of weeks and I'm not renewing it. I'm deleting the listing, and my highly-ranked (consistently top 3 in searches for my neighborhood) account from the site forever.

I'm thankful to AirBNB for the opportunity to let me do this, but it's become very clear early on that AirBNB doesn't care about its hosts, only about their own company. Those people invested a ton of time, money and efforts into building a viable business model on AirBNB - and now they're royally fucked. I'm glad I'm not one of them, but this is a really shitty move by AirBNB.
Only the tech press. The political press understands that leadership of organizations often host events like this from both parties. (Technically, really, all the various parties, including Libertarian, Green, Independence, Reform (Perot), and others.)
I get the distinction, but I guess I'm just skeptical about the attempt at face saving here.
Using a linear polarizer does change the polarization. If he puts his polarizer halfway between the incident angle and the desired angle, he'll get cos⁴(theta/2) of the original intensity in the desired polarization.
Companies lobby for their own policy interests all the time -- even if they dislike the politicians or political parties. I could totally see someone in the oil industry lobbying R for Keystone XL even if they hate everything else about the party.

I'm against YC being explicitly R, D, or L (or C, or G, or whatever), as it's 1) different than a normal company 2) a company I have a somewhat closer tie to than as a customer, but less close than a place I work for or own.
That's an argument as to why the system is fundamentally flawed.

Then humans are fundamentally flawed. So are all social animals. To borrow a phrase: Politics is the worst paradigm within which sentients can settle disputes while minimizing suffering -- except all of the others.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091064/quotes

What are the alternatives to politics? Doesn't human rights come out of politics in which individuals have a small but significant agency which can be aggregated to create collective agencies of vast power?

Maybe there is a far more rational way of organizing groups of sentients completely apart from politics, and political social animals are regarded as an atavistic scourge in the galaxy. This is why the aliens don't talk to us. They can't trust us, but since we're sentient as individuals, they can't ethically kill us either. Perhaps this is the solution to the Fermi paradox.
Since there is other office space available in the valley, and event space has value in the private market (rental rate at any hotel) it is a kind of contribution in its own right (unless they are paying you, which I doubt), as well as an endorsement. Perhaps we're splitting the definition of "hosting" a little too finely to think otherwise.

YC is not obligated to be non-partisan of course. The only way to take the non-partisan line would be to allow Republicans the chance to do the same, libertards, etc. You could do so, and they probably wouldn't raise any money, or have much impact - throw a party and no one comes, kind of problem. 90% of employee donations for major tech firms are to democrats, and my read is that you'd have to be almost willfully clueless about the bay area to not realize how heavily democratic SV is.

Question - is this the first time YC has hosted a political event at its offices?

If so, I wonder if this is one of the early signs of change now that PG is letting go of the reins. I always suspected that a guy who could write something like "What You Can't Say" wasn't a kool-aid drinking, party-line kind of guy.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Stop blaming the victims.

These are not "false positives". Just because they are legal, and for some even common business practices, it's all spam and always has been.

Unethical business practices are causing the problem, not the few people that resist them.
There is always http://imagebin.org/ it's basic but has been around since the 90's. I think they get some OG cred in this, yeah?
Maybe this hostile and unprofessional environment are the "mistakes and errors" from the article. I was curious about this, myself.
This is exactly why I refer to native English speakers as "sesquilingual".

That word itself is a mongrel of a Latin root, a Latin numeric prefix, and an English adjective-forming suffix. You still knew what I meant by it. I have also tried reading news articles in different languages, or understanding what is going on in a Univision or Telemundo Spanish-language program. It is much easier than one might think.

I have been able to decipher Italian genealogically-relevant municipal records, written in the most self-indulgent cursive script I have ever seen, because English and Italian have a lot of cognates, and bureaucratic record-keeping is about the same everywhere you go.

Chinese, on the other hand, simply has no entry point. I'm with it right up until the number symbols go from 3 to 4, and then it just goes into alienese and never returns.
Also anecdotal, but as a person in the process of buying a condo, I've found that all of the condo associations I've looked at specifically state that you can't lease out your place to anyone for a period of less than 3 months (most are 6+ months, one had 3 months). The biggest reason for this seems to be insurance reasons, although personally I also don't want my building full of people short-term rentals either.
There was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate.

Such as?
Sure, at their size now. Not before, as policy beyond "use good judgement" at a small company is basically pointless.

Your first dozen hires must all be good enough to write such policies...
It's interesting that everyone seems to have the impression that their language is one of the hardest to learn. Growing up for some reason I definitely thought it about English. When I lived in Germany they thought it about German.

What are the difficulties in the Dutch language? I can read a fair bit of Dutch knowing German and English and it seems reasonably straightforward to me, but I am definitely not super familiar with it (which is why I ask).

When I was learning German I found it ridiculously hard - but it only took me about 5 months to become reasonably fluent. In the end I realized it was just that things were _different_, not especially more difficult - and that certain things were actually much easier (e.g. verb conjugations, spelling, pronunciation, more consistent grammar rules).
They are definitely not saying Horvath was lying, they are saying they found no evidence of a sexist or hostile work environment - the investigation was lead by a third party, and best behaviour would have been in place at and before the moment they arrived following the claims, it's likely that many, if not most of the company hadn't experienced the same treatment that Horvath allegedly received, and they would have explained that to the investigators.
The $200 billion figure doesn't represent real money that changed hands. It's an estimate based on taking the actual profit margin of the telecom companies since deregulation in 1996, and calling everything over 9-10% to be "excess profits." The premise is that telcos "promised" to lay fiber in return for being deregulated, and that if their profit margins had been limited to rates typical of a regulated utility, they would've made a lot less money.

Of course, it's easy to play this game with any company. Google's profit margin is over 20%. According to this reasoning, every year Google is "ripping off" the public to the tune of $6 billion. Obviously it's ridiculous to just pick a number as the "right" profit margin for an industry and call everything above that number "excess profits." But that's precisely the premise underlying the $200 billion "rip off."

There was no "rip off." The premise of the 1996 reform was that deregulation of the industry would create an incentive for companies to invest private capital. And that has proven true. Over the last two decades, telecom and cable companies have been among those with the highest capital expenditures. What happened is that nobody predicted wireless would become such a big deal. So instead of going into fiber, all that money was invested in wireless instead. That's the major reason why fiber deployment never really materialized--spending that money on wireless made a lot more sense.

And from a consumer standpoint, it still mostly does. I don't even have internet service at my house--but I've got two different LTE subscriptions.
I think it's possible that Horvath was right about the poor actions of management, and at the same time, very little of what she alleged seemed to fall into the bounds of gender-based discrimination. A colleague who reverts your commits because you wouldn't date him...that's not gender-based, that's office-romance strife (though obviously, such strife can be exacerbated with a gender imbalance at the company). I'm kind of interested in what happened to that engineer.

edit:

FYI: her detailed complaint to TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...

re: The co-worker who couldn't handle being rejected by her:

> The rejection of the other employee led to something of an internal battle at GitHub. According to Horvath, the engineer, “hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation.” The employee in question, according to Horvath, is both “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.”

His “behavior towards female employees,” according to Horvath, “especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting.”

And there was one more incident that would purportedly fall under sexism:

> Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub.

The first one, of course, is bad. And there's possibly a case to be made that if management knew about this engineer and let it slide, well, that does create a hostile environment. Yet I don't think Horvath points out where she complained about this guy's commit-reverting behavior to management.

The second thing, about hula-hooping, without context, it doesn't really mean anything beyond what Horvath claims she was able to grok just by stumbling upon the scene. I think during the original HN discussion, a Githubber said that the hula-hooping happened during an in-office party. Either way, hula-hooping and watching said-hula-hooping is hard to claim, on its face, as being gender-discrimination.

The other stuff though, about the co-founder unfairly pressuring her partner to resign, and the co-founder's wife claiming to have access to Github employees' private data...Those could be things that the company frowns upon enough to merit a resignation.
> One could similarly make an argument about English speakers forgetting what words mean

The implication here seems to be that the Chinese written word gives hints as to meaning, right? How can that be so, if 10 years of studying isn't enough to read a newspaper? Your claim would imply that reading in Chinese would be easier to pick up (compared to non-character languages), while speaking would be more difficult - one seemingly immediately shown to be false.

Not to mention that a language can both give hints to meaning and have a link between writing and speaking. At the very least, English does - the example closest to hand is that I've never heard the word ethnocentrism before, but I immediately understood it.

That said - great point about possibly overemphasizing the link between spoken and written words. From an English background, that seems like something so obviously important that it hardly bears thinking about, but clearly there could be other important considerations (even if I don't know what they might be).
This is one of those distinctions that are likely to be lost on a lot of people.

Including the politicians. The distinction is for show, the message is clear.
> These are all pronounced "ding"

Sort of.

The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write.

Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
I was providing advice as to how YC the company might have interests that are separate from his. Or not.

Guess it's his call.
Are we still on this?
Why is it that every discussion like this has to have somebody pointing out that "that's their right" to do whatever thing is being discussed? Do you really think that is being disputed?

To pull from last Friday's xkcd, it's really the ultimate concession in an argument: you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say about this activity is that it's not literally illegal.
>Memrise

Cheers, I'm using that right now. The real teaching power is in apps.
If you have two perpendicular polarizers, no light will pass through both. But, if you insert a polarizer at a 45 degree angle to both of them inbetween, some light will pass through. Am I wrong?
The post is PR-speak for:

> "We found lots of ugly stuff but would rather not mention any of it in public, so move along, nothing to see"
I love the ease and simplicity: I've got 3 suggestions.

1) Next to the View Count ("3 Views") impliment a feature that keeps track of the number of different IPs that generate those views ("by 2 People"). This is important because it lets you know how many other people have seen the image, not just how many times the page has been reloaded.

2) Make it so users can drag and drop an image into whatever page they're on. Even if it's the user page, front page, photo page. Don't make me have to go back to the home page.

3) Instead of calling it JollyShot.com you should grab TempShot.com before anyone else does. I think the new name would fit better with the service.
The best part of Shredder is that it is good at being bad. Many strong programs, when asked to play at a weaker level so as to give a human an even game do a terrible job at this. They will play like a grandmaster for a few moves, then make a beginner level blunder, and then defend like a grandmaster. It's very unrealistic.

Shredder, when asked to play weaker, seems to do a good job of doing it in a human-like way. It feels very much like I'm playing someone of about my skill, instead of playing a genius who occasionally makes idiotic moves.
It sounds like Mrs. Preston-Werner was a regular presence at the GitHub office and, according to Horvath, had extensive access to private information throughout GitHub's systems despite the fact that she wasn't an employee. If true, that should certainly be a privacy and security concern to any GitHub customer or user.
.... or you could get involved with local politics, and convince your friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc. that the law needs to be changed.

"building a viable business model on AirBNB"
Well that's kind of a grey area. It's viable as long as the city government doesn't get wind of it (there's a reason you're posting anonymously). It's viable as long as a landlord doesn't get wind of it, or a condo association. That's about as viable as any other "legal grey area" business is.
To me it sounds more like...

We dont have enough evidence to take legal action in this case, but our investigation found out something worse so we would like Tom to resign before it comes out publicly.
Switching lanes in dense traffic does reduce flow and increase everyone's commute time. Cutting across a couple of lanes, exiting the road and then merging back in a few blocks later is even worse. If more people thought of driving as team-work rather than a race we'd all spend less time in traffic. This fellow argues that behavior that slows traffic down is a good idea because if makes him feel good. I'm sorry buddy, but you're an idiot. You're taking actions that do not benefit you and harm me because you lack the mental discipline to relax and stop treating traffic like a race.

Here is a suggestion for those of you who are currently like this guy but are willing to try driving smart for a change: Don't alternate days. Get into one lane and stay there and continue to do so for a couple of weeks. Listen to the radio. Think about stuff you need to think about. Zen the #$%^ out. Once you unlearn your moron-driver habits you'll arrive at your destination a lot less stressed out and you'll have the peace of mind that you're not one of the morons adding to the problem.
"the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment."
It feels unconvincing, and unapologetic.
See my related comment on the Tower Defense approach to software reliability: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7599717
Built-in database appliances are a big part of what Flynn will offer in the next few months (right now it's only Postgres).
Deliberately. I think Settlers has too much luck involved - the other games I listed primarily depend on the actions of the other players with only a little bit of randomness added to spice things up, but in Settlers you can easily get screwed even if you build in the best spot because your number never comes up. It's a good gateway-game though.
Hernando Cadet Technology
ProFlowers did this to me. I ordered a condolence package for my manager who had a passing in the family. I immediately started receiving emails from ProFlowers and several of its brands.

It was spam, plain and simple. I purchased flowers because someone passed away and suddenly I was on the list of people who are just on the verge of buying chocolate covered strawberries, but just waiting for the right discount.

Thinking about it now, do chocolate covered strawberries and price conscious consumers even go hand in hand?