skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are they extremely popular? Or are the users just more vocal about it?

I went through the whole emacs tutorial and still have no idea what I'm doing. It's very difficult and counter-intuitive. On the other hand notepad++ does everything I need it to do and works right out of the box.

I definitely think emacs is cooler and has more features, but you can guess which one I use day to day.
> scientific progress has really been linear. We didn't "get" physics 50 times better in 1990 compared to 1940

It's very hard to quantify scientific progress. The main reason is that we first pick the "low hanging fruits" and advancements get progressively harder. Just think of particle physics: While the first steps could be done with basic lab bench equipment, today we need to build gigantic accelerators to push the boundaries even a little bit. The same is true in other areas: The first steps are comparatively easy, but the more you know the harder it gets to solve the remaining problems, because you already got the easy ones.

So even if perceived progress is linear, considering the increasing difficulty we may have exponential scientific progress.
It's doesn't have a UI, but I wrote a command line tool called Overcast that lets you create/manage/destroy/reboot DigitalOcean and Linode VMs. Support for AWS is on the roadmap. http://andrewchilds.github.io/overcast

# Create a new Ubuntu 14.04 instance on DigitalOcean
$ overcast digitalocean create db_01 --cluster db

# Create a new Ubuntu 14.04 instance on Linode
$ overcast linode create db_02 --cluster db

# Configure both instances in parallel
$ overcast run db install/core install/redis --parallel
$ overcast expose db 22 6379 --parallel

# Interact with both instances at once over SSH
$ overcast ssh db

# Reboot, snapshot, destroy, etc
$ overcast digitalocean snapshot db_01 db_01_snapshot
$ overcast digitalocean reboot db_01
$ overcast linode destroy db_02
50ms = 50000000ns
Oh, do fuck off and take your strawman with you.

Nobody—I repeat, nobody at all—is claiming that "the Valley is dominated by racist white men who systematically exclude all outgroups." That's not a thing. Nobody's saying it, except you.

However, people are quite correctly and accurately pointing out that there is an underrepresentation of minority groups in tech. It's great the Asian tech workers aren't suffering from this - but that's not the only problem! In other words, the target of attack is not "white men", but underrepresentation of other groups!

Ignoring for the moment that this article is out-of-date, you'll see from the numbers contained in it that while Asian-American workers proliferate, a mere 4.2% of tech jobs are taken by Hispanics - despite this being a group that forms fully 25% of the population of the area. The same vastly disproportionate numbers apply to other groups. And that's without even getting started on the social and economic issues surrounding the fact that these are H1B workers.

There's no quick and easy solution to this problem, but your gross mischaracterisations do absolutely nothing to help.
> I'm glad to see the claims of sexual and gender based harassment don't seem to be true.

Not to be pedantic, but it implies there is no systemic sexual and gender based harassment. It doesn't say anything about Julie-Ann's experiences except that they're not provable.
I think this is a much stronger response than the previous one for the following reasons:
1. It is a lot less mysterious. It tells us exactly what steps they took, and why they felt the investigator was appropriate.
2. They do admit faults and weaknesses, especially on the truly bizarre part of the original claims (i.e. showing up at a company where you don't work). If that part had been denied, then something was factually missing.
3. The part where they do claim they were not at fault -- the engineer's work -- doesn't come across as defensive.

I don't know how they could have done a better job. (I am not saying they could not have done a better job, just that I can't think of it).
I actually feel that this last response is exactly how PR should work. It has placed responsibility for misconduct where it for the actual misconduct that actually happened and needs correcting and has done a pretty good job of invalidating the histrionic claims of gender discrimination.

This additional information (the identity and reputation of the investigator and the level of detail investigated including review of the commits) taken together with JAH's commits to her own public projects [0][1] and exaggerated and overly dramatic behavior, there is more than enough reasonable doubt to vindicate the male engineer being accused of misconduct. Absent a reliable witness to the claimed misconduct or other solid irrefutable evidence (not just perceptions of what happened), the principle of innocent until proven guilty should extend to this accused individual as well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7625258

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7629283
"ABS generally offers improved vehicle control and decreases stopping distances on dry and slippery surfaces for many drivers; however, on loose surfaces like gravel or snow-covered pavement, ABS can significantly increase braking distance, although still improving vehicle control." (with citations) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system
Could be using a stealthy agent-name.
I seem to recall from a long, long time ago back in the day when I had to fill out some sort of team diversity form at MSFT that Asians didn't count.

Take this anecdotal datum with a huge grain of salt, and season it further with the fact that I'm dredging up memories from ten years ago. Maybe it was Indians (yes, a subset of Asians, I realize), I don't know. I just remember asking HR about $NON_WHITE_GUY, and was told he didn't count because (paraphrasing) "successful minority group in software".
>at the time I meant "imagination" in a human context, as the ability to create new thought systems to operate in, as opposed to doing research within an existing thought framework (typically inherited from your thesis advisor, etc.).

I think that is a good enough definition for imagination universally - and I would still not differentiate. How we do it is not known, but it is not unknowable. At least I don't think so. So stating that it will never happen is a bridge too far and I think built on shaky rafters.

>Artificial imagination would the capability to expand or modify that search space based on previous findings...

Check out some of the evolved antennas that came out of AIAA a few years ago. Would that not meet this definition? There is also some work with computer vision that modify prior outputs for new inputs in searches, so that would meet the definition you give.

That said, I won't argue that we have good examples of working imaginations in practice or research - though I bet there are some that I haven't seen - but at least there are papers on the theory. I even have a few of my own ideas that I just haven't put on paper.
Not really - bomb design has come a long way in the last ~70 years - modern bomb designs are very resilient to damage and very unlikely to detonate accidentally. And if that isn't good enough then take the parts to orbit separately and assemble in orbit.

We've had thousands of H-bombs on top of rockets for decades and a number of live fire tests where bombs delivered by missile detonated and so far there have been no accidental detonations.
I understand that it is seen as unfair, but write that off as Stockholm syndrome. It does suck that cities are constantly erecting even more traffic signals (etc), but the appropriate response is to blame the job-justifying behavior of city hall, not to go zero-sum and get mad at the people who can better skirt them.

For what it's worth, I don't even really bike that much these days and certainly encounter my share of idiotic bikers when driving/walking. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give in to blowhard legality tropes when it's clear that the real nuisance bikers are doing things that are so stupid (against traffic, on sidewalk, left turn from right lane, texting) that they don't care about even bodily harm. Meanwhile there are plenty of actions that are illegal yet affect nobody else that can be performed prudently and thoughtfully.

Also, any observably-broken traffic light can and should be treated as a stop sign. What else do you do, strictly follow the narrow part of the law that you've been told and patiently wait for the police to hold your hand?
Just out of curiosity, did anyone reduce or end a paid plan with GitHub over this controversy?
Hmm... I guess I don't understand. My view is that in natural sciences there are so many variables that can act on a given system that you could never truly do isolation testing.

However in your scenario, you're saying mutate a "piece of data"? I guess I'm wondering why a piece of data would mutate in the system if it wasn't manipulated by a user?
Maybe I am confused. What does GDP have to do with this?
I posted a comment about this to the blog, but I released a tool which will generate type-specific source code from a generic definition. Code is at https://github.com/joeshaw/gengen

The abs example could be reduced to:

import "github.com/joeshaw/gengen/generic"

func abs(x generic.T) generic.T {
if x < 0 {
return -x
}
return x
}

You could then generate different type-specific versions:

gengen abs.go int32 | gofmt -r 'abs -> absInt32' > abs_int32.go
gengen abs.go float64 | gofmt -r 'abs -> absFloat64' > abs_float64.go
...

The downside is that the API is annoyingly non-generic (a different abs variant for each type) but at least you didn't have to type it in a bunch of times.

I agree that abs() is kind of a toy example, but this approach has helped me a lot for various slice operations like indexing and deleting.
I'm glad they're flatly acknowledging the wrong doing on what compromised the majority of Julie's complaint.

As to her assertions that an engineer was keeping her out of the code if she wouldn't sleep with him, I've actually lost sleep trying to figure out how you'd handle that complaint. Where would the evidence trail be? Innocent until proven guilty but also wanting not to assume a women is lying about sexually harassed, how do you balance those two things? Given what we know about sexual harassment, it's a horrible idea to operate on the assumption the accuser is lying, but when it's just word vs. word, what do you do? Presume guilt? Can those two employees co-exist? Can you fire the accused even if there's no proof (and what proof would there be? Commit logs aren't much.)

Anyone have suggestions? Ideally you want to build a culture where this just would never come up and where nobody would tolerate it, but I just don't think that's ever going to be fool proof.
Huge fan. The old IBM SSH developerworks series is my favorite primer for folks new to SSH:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc2/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc3/
I usually just test the addition/subtraction of a class, and don't test the purely visual elements.
There are plenty of HN redesign attempts.

It seems that people like attempts to increase the size or spacing of the vote buttons which makes accidental downvotes harder.

It seems lots of people dislike the reduced information density. Some of the redesigns use a lot of whitespace which can be nice but means you only have 10 stories on the front page.

Currently the only thing I'd really like to see is some 80 character indicator for the title box on the submission page. That would mean that people could remove small unimportant parts to fit in the limit, ratherthan just chopping out perhaps important words.
Sales Team Leader as Scrum Master
DC public transportation does seem to have an ethic of space--the other week a guy moved when I sat down next to him--and reserve. That said, I haven't seen a lot scowling when one is intruded on. I will not myself initiate a conversation unless the person is next to or across from me and there is obvious reason to--reading matter or possible recognition.
Is this implemented?
Is that usually how things work? I thought we tend to believe whistleblowers over the institutions with financial interests that they speak out against?

Obviously I'm not saying everything that comes out of a whisteblower's mouth is absolute truth, but if you take GitHub's words at face value without considering their financial interests, etc, you're thinking very uncritically.
There is an interesting observation about Asian cultures made by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers [1]. He argues that one of the reasons why Asians are _statistically_ better at math than others is because of the language and cultural legacy. More precisely, it is a lot easier to remember numbers in Chinese (and other Asian languages, apparently) than in English, giving Chinese children a head start in mathematics. This turns into quite an advantage by the time they reach college.
He also argues that societies that were developed on rice farming tend to be more diligent as it is a lot more labor intensive work than ,for example, wheat farming. Also Chinese feudalism had more of a "hands off" approach, where the landlords were always taking a fixed amount of their earnings. So while Europeans were making pretty much the same amount of money during all their harvests, Asians had an income which was more proportional to their efforts.
There is a lot more to it for sure, and I don't know if he is right, but its certainly a nice read.

[1] - http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/
Well, LIDAR doesn't have that differentiation problem - it has a resolution problem for small (sub half meter) things at range.

Stereo LIDAR would just add more points - you can correlate the two, but you'll still have resolution issues.
On a similar theme, can anyone recommend a good Skype headset that also function as noise cancelling headphones?
I'm in a similar situation. I built a music site for a uni project, and have over 100,000 monthly page views but no real time to work on it.

Would love some funding, or for someone to take it over and help out with student loans.

Have you had any luck trying to sell it?
The people calling for Github's head were asking for a response like this.

Ideally they'd also apologise for accidentally enabling a work-environment that led to Julie-Ann feeling unsafe in the first place but, as even Julie-Ann herself acknowledges, this response is largely satisfactory.

It's just sad that it took so much to get there; but I guess that's how progress happens.
Michel Lotito: The Man Who Ate an Airplane
Is Android's future fragmented?
I think your reading is correct.

I haven't lived in a lot of states but they've always said "one car can enter the intersection and wait to turn left." Implicit is the assumption that they have some place to be when the opposing traffic clears.
"Google now suggests placing CSS links AFTER the closing HTML tag?"
Infamous Hacker Went to Prison for Trolling AT&T. Now He Wants to Troll Wall St.
Angry Birds publisher Rovio reveals its growth stalled in 2013
Why are apps still stored in iTunes?
I understand there can be a developer pulling out an app (think: Flappy Bird) but since latest version of an app is generally in App Store, why bother having a local (and often obsolete) copy on HDD? I think Apple could greatly simplify this process! What do you think?
Here I say a better model for the Universe is not matter but information, an information architecture of the universe. Matter is buggy, less elegant, event-driven (whereas emergence (acausality) might help).

We're investigating exponentially more if we remain vigilant in preserving the materialist's conceptual scheme.
I did move to a self-hosted git server (http://git.devlinzed.com) for a number of reasons. This is one, but the server: costs less to run than the smallest paid GitHub account; supports unlimited private repositories at sizes up to 20GB; has never ever went down; is considerably faster (due to geography and SSD); and doesn't allow GitHub to harvest information about who (including myself) is using my code.

Realistically, whether you're offended by GitHub's sexism or data collection policies or not, it doesn't make any sense to use them strictly from a pragmatic cost-to-benefit perspective. They simply charge far too much for far too little.
How to deal with assholes
It's amazing to see how many people here are commenting and voting on emotion.

The facts are:

1) We have an ex-employee who is very disgruntled.

2) Said employee has laid some serious allegations regarding genderism

3) No allegation is provable nor has been proven

4) Other female employees interviewed have countered the allegations

5) Independent audit found no proof whatsoever, yet commented that some things in the company could use improvement (as with all companies, especially large ones)

This is not a sexism issue here guys. It's a typical case of an upset ex-employee -- it happens all the time, just with much less media.

Other Github employees even said she was really not good at her work, difficult to work with, didn't except criticisms, etc.
> In other words, the target of attack is not "white men"

Have you read Shanley Kane?
Heh, this is odd. France used to be a place where you best work for a large corporation, and keep your job for the rest of your life. Maybe they're eagerly looking at the Berlin scene... Which in itself hasn't been performing as good as it should have. Meh.
Horvath's response: I'm pretty satisfied with @Defunkt's blog post. I disagree about the objectiveness of the "investigation," as well as the toxic workplace.

https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore
Indeed it doesn't, but Github's point with these releases is to exonerate their company and their culture, not Tom Preston-Warner. So showing that there isn't systemic harassment is what they want.

Defining culpability would never come from them. A labour law suit would be the ticket, although I'm not sure under what umbrella it falls under in the US.
A brief and cursory glance at the twitter history of @shanley demonstrates quite clearly that people, specifically visible and influential people, are indeed saying exactly this.
"Here's another hypothesis: It's the finance industry culture."

I have been on boards in the valley and in NYC, and I can see this very directly. The NY VCs were far more transactional, and more aggressively willing to drop a company and take the loss early.

Not that it's rainbows and unicorns in the valley! The VCs, after all, work for their customers (err, "LPs"). I've noticed that as the valley VCs are more and more frequently finance rather than former operating guys that they are more like this. I saw it in the dot-com boom, and guess which VCs got shellacked? Mostly the finance guys.
U.S. Tells Users To Stop Using Internet Explorer
I have to say, towing giant space-rocks around and getting them to follow a planned trajectory also sounds like a damn impressive weapon, if someone wants to use it that way.

I'm not saying it's not worth doing; I'm just saying when humans see ___ can be done, enough of them get the idea of weaponizing ___ and we should keep that in mind.

Perhaps we should simultaneously consider what defenses could be put in place ... this has the benefit of being useful planetary defense against "natural" earth-impacting rocks, too.
Relevant link: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh
A lot of people are complaining about not having the time/budget. Checkout getstarted2014, you can win about £50k development, marketing, and rackspace hosting for your web/mobile app idea. - http://getstarted2014.co.uk/
What fascinates me the most about this and related issues is that there is a relentless drive towards reducing the rights and compensation for salaried workers, while increasing the rights and powers of entrenched, powerful, wealthy elites.

It is no secret that the tech industry is furious with the salaries it is forced to pay engineers. This drives billionaires batshit crazy, enough so that they're willing to pay lobbyists millions to constantly increase the number of impoverished foreign engineers imported on tenuous "work visas".

A cursory glance at history puts this in perspective. Oligarchs and feudal lords went to considerable lengths to ensure the average artisan received little more than a subsistence wage. Furthermore, taxes were for the little people, not the elites. "Government" has historically been a protection racket made for the elite, by the elite. Any delusions to the contrary have been put to rest quite conclusively [1].

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/opinion/capitalism-vs-demo...
As a resident of Brooklyn, I see cars that do those things more often than bicycles that do those things. (granted, the car driving the wrong way on a one way is usually one going in reverse at 30mph, or a police radio car with or without sirens on)
That motherboard looks good, but is rather expensive. The motherboards I'm using (see [0] for spec) plus the power supply is only a tiny bit more expensive than that. (And the central aim of this project is to get as many cores and as much RAM for as little money as possible)

[0] http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/caseless-virtualization...
Service businesses spin off and absorb blocks of customers all the time. If I sell someone else my paper delivery route, is that an indictment of American capitalism?

Really, the title should be "everything that's wrong with state and local politics in one headline."

If you want to blame someone for the situation in "such cities as Long Beach, Malibu" (that often, there's only one guy delivering papers), start here: http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/Information+for+providing+s.... The state of California grants cable franchises,[1] and not with just an eye towards creating competition. Read the four bullet points on that page. Only the first has to do with competition. The other three are priorities that necessitate policies that discourage investment and competition.
Why? The message format is relatively simple to compose, and every language has at least one library to make the process easier. The connections to Apple/Google are free, and you've probably already got a database of some sort, so why not just do it yourself?
The source of the gender and sexism angle is that Julie Anne Horvath has stated in tweets and comments to the press that her gender was a central factor in this issue. As Valleywag quoted her saying: "Would this happen to a man in the same situation? No."
Spinne: a python 3.x micro web framework
As you can see from the comments on the current HN thread about Github's second statement (which I think is a significant improvement on their first one), making specific statements typically only makes this worse for women in tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7662190
You can't handle that retrospectively. That's what you need HR policies in place for pre-emptively; so that these frustrations can be channeled into a productive resolution.

It's like an airplane crash; it virtually always involves several failures along several points and only when all failures come together do you get into an irreparable situation.

Keep in mind that the irreparable situation in this case is Julie-Ann leaving, because even with the abuse clear HR support could still have easily prevented the issue from escalating.
Is the best use case for a checklist in code review security?
I'll answer. I keep getting annoying notification numbers in the top right corner of every Google page.

If it were Gmail, that would be really useful. But it's not. It's "Bobby Noname added you to a circle!" and "Joe I'veNeverHeardOf invited you to a hangout!" and "Spammy McSpammer liked a your video on YouTube!"

I don't need or want any of that nonsense. G+ isn't useful to me, but I don't have any way of turning off the notifications.

Oh, and as a bonus, the G+ API isn't working. Doubly annoying. http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/extracting-your-own-location...