skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the disconnect comes from having a minority group strongly over-represented, and the disagreement over what causes representation differences. It's the inconvenient factor that doesn't get discussed a lot. Benefactors see diversity initiatives purely as eliminating discrimination on the part of privileged groups, whereas detractors see it as unfairly lobbing claims of wrongdoing on white men, calling for soft quotas - which in this case, imply fewer Asian males in tech.

I wrote more about this here - about over-represented minorities, and self selection:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088263

Fundamentally, people disagree to WHY certain groups are over-represented - is it mostly discrimination, mostly cultural, mostly self-selection? Discrimination is bad, but how bad - or not - are cultural factors and self-selection? Asians are strongly over-represented - but no one says this is because admissions officers prefer them - there is strong evidence to the contrary - and most agree it is a combination of selective immigration policy and cultural factors on the part of frequently college-educated, first-generation parents. However efforts to take race into account in college admissions no doubt will tend to work against members of this still minority group (in fact - only 5% in the US).

Finally, the attacking white males is basically a motte-and-bailey tactic [1] in which something very obviously wrong, and not defended by a majority of any group e.g. racial discrimination, is then used, strawman-like, to strike down countervailing discussion as "derailing" (no one is saying racism is good). Do white men need to make counter-adjustments in order to correct for previous sins (or sins by others in the same group - see sexual harassment by another unrelated man in the same industry)?

Is that fair to those white men to take steps - perhaps even extending privileges to other groups at their own cost, or is it fair because the discriminated-against groups have experienced injustice? This is the fundamental disagreement in the social justice debate. What makes sense on an individual level can look wrong on a collective level, and vice versa. It just depends on your sense of fairness. The voices on the collective side of this debate are the strongest in Silicon Valley, but a greater amounts of people - and Americans overall - frequently disagree on what needs to be done to address racial disparities e.g. affirmative action or no affirmative action.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word...
What you fail to recognize is that YC is funding a disproportionately large number of founders who have little to no work experience. this leads to situations where the founders have no idea how to protect their company(including their investors) from harassment and discrimination lawsuits, or the attendant PR nightmare that hurts all their fellow batchmates.

I happen to think this is not enough but at a minimum I've always found it rather surprising that the money invested in these companies didn't want to protect it from the stupidity that is inherent in most young people. To be clear, I mean this as stupidity of youth, ignorance, naivete.

At bare minimum YC needs to require its founders to be trained in some basic legal 101 stuff since they haven't yet had to learn it on the job in a corporation.

(and hey, If I'm going to make a wishlist, add some leadership training to this, too. If you want to make young people into CEOs you need to teach them how to do it. Building a great product is absolutely NOT synonymous with building a great company. If experience has no value to them in hiring, they're learning that somewhere, and it needs to be corrected by the investors--if not for the morality of responsibility to young people looking to them for guidance, but to vouchsafe their own investment.)
chrome doesn't support emoji yet.

http://blog.getemoji.com/post/73341182572/its-2014-why-doesn...
Original Yo sound leaked
Please Turn On Two Factor Authentication
Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer support emoji on all platforms. Chrome is the only browser not to support emoji.
Looks like a number of emoji will redirect you to the proper Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/🐘

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/🐕

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/💅

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/💋
FWIW, the emoji character works fine in all contexts I've seen it: status bar URL hover, location bar and on HN and the Wikipedia web pages. This with OS X/FF 31.
This is an interesting oddity such as you might expect to see on reddit's /r/mildlyinteresting or til, but I don't feel that this fits well on HN personally. I'm not saying HN is turning into reddit by having this content, just pointing out how I'd classify this content.

This is absolutely not "intellectually gratifying" in my mind. The fact that it can be trivially consumed (as opposed to a long blog post) might in part lead to it having a higher number of upvotes due to being more accessible, but that doesn't mean that it's better than a less accessible item that gets more upvotes relative to people consuming it, but fewer as an absolute.

Edit: It was 1st for about two minutes and then dropped down to 198 instantly (among items from 1-3 days ago and/or with over 20 times fewer points). I'll hazard a guess that the mods agree with me on this and nuked it down.
Things will get better in the future, as CS education is becoming accessible to more people.
On a mac, to pase without style simply hit:

Command + Shift + v
Grandpa's Photos
🐘
"like corruption, fraud, white collar crime, lying during elections, bureaucracy, human trafficking, revenue stream manipulation, buggy software sold to millions without any kind of quality guarantee, etc. etc."

We might have a lot of overlaps / synergies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8086694
There is actually something to be said for not being personally/emotionally invested in the market you're in, it can help you to see things more objectively.

On the other hand, if you're emotionally invested in atheism, in the sense that you actively want to see religion gone (as opposed to just not believing as a personal choice), you're emotionally invested in religion by extension.
I'm on Windows 7 at the moment using Firefox (is anyone really using Windows XP and reading Hacker News at this point? ;) ). Maybe it's because I'm behind a corporate proxy at the moment; I'll try again at home (on a Linux desktop, also with Firefox).
Yea, just a square on chrome/win7
I'm not a user, so take my comments with a grain of salt. I think of this as something like an "intro to connection," a way for lonely people to bootstrap from zero friends to one or more. I'm very comfortable talking about personal stuff with pretty much anyone, but I definitely was not like that in my teens and twenties. It took me lots of experience and not a little therapy to get to the point where I'm comfortable. Perhaps this can be a shortcut for others.
I'm using Firefox 30 on Linux (Fedora 20) yet I just see a square block.
I am not anti-capitalist, so I am sure Steve and I would disagree quite profoundly on many things.

However, one thing we both do agree on is the distinction between free and open source. I do not particularly care for open source, as it is a nice way to provide unpaid work for other people to exploit and make lots of of money off of without providing compensation of any form in return. That seems extremely unethical to me. However, I provide the bulk of my public software under GPL-derived licenses: if a company wants to use it, they need to publish the source so other may benefit. That is my price. Alternatively, if that is onerous, they can give me some cash.

I strongly believe that it's improper to take others work for gratis and not provide consideration in return - its also unethical to encourage an entire industry to contribute gratis work and build off of it for large piles of cash.
Thanks :)

I've been saving up money so that I can actually take a year or so off work and try to build this. Maybe this time next year I'll have something to show!
Firefox 29 on Arch here, seeing square.
Same, I use Terminus at 8pt as my terminal font, and it's fantastic - dense yet readable.
Mac users can install https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromoji-emoji-for... Works like a charm!
(At first I thought "oh no XSS! Like the one on TweetDeck!)

Then I saw "emoji" and that reminds me the recent sushi comment on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8066226).

Yes. Now we got .tk we can add unicode character! Emoji...
If you understand all of the above technologies and skills enough to talk about them intelligently, and have real work to show that uses them, you should be able to get interviews. That said, 16 hours a day, 7 days a week is crazy. You need time to process new information. You should always end the day with something left for tomorrow. Once you're done with the 3-month sprint, narrow your focus and explore some of those technologies in greater depth.

Also, most companies don't want to have to babysit someone that's new. Get to the point that you are comfortable working on something new by reading the documentation, and you'll be in good shape.
What do people in SV plan to do once they hit 35 and are over the hill?
They charge a fee when you purchase or sell coins through them. That also means they get a cut of all payments made through them. That gives them a significant interest in making sure the large volume of coins they hold and transmit remains secure.
I can sort of understand why a cross-platform browser engine might include its own text rendering engine, but is there any justification for it not making use of the fonts on the local machine to fill in the necessarily large holes in what fonts the browser bundles?
How to Fix a Mangled Partition Table on Linux
After a few years of Java and C# (especially in finance) I came really close to leaving the software industry altogether. Ruby, and then Rails, brought me back into it.

They returned the joy and excitement I felt when I first got that ASCII eye to blink from the 250 lines of BASIC I typed in from the back of a magazine.

And I've never been happier as a developer.
There Are Officially Too Many Apps, And Nobody Is Making Money
skim the leftmost column of [1]; $160 is a little optimistic but not much; by year 2 $160k is probably at worst the 50th percentile

http://www.infirmation.com/shared/search/payscale-compare.tc...
New logo by Matt Ketchum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/💩

I'm pretty sure every Unicode character will (unless somebody missed any). There are Unicode character charts on Wikipedia too, and they're fully linkified, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_(Unicode_block)
Google Suggest Dissected (2004)
Anyone who thinks Emacs isn't modal hasn't opened a buffer on a directory.
I'm not saying that the VC-backed company is intentionally or maliciously poisoning the healthy profit of the competition.

I'm saying that it's an unintentional byproduct of the otherwise naturally healthy approach to "grow first, profit later". Just like, I'm about to release a free game in the app market, no IAP, no cost, as I'm generous. But, that can & does have unintended consequences in the ecosystem to make it harder for those who do need to profit from their similar work.
Plan Ahead:  Monitor Your Lungs This Coming Cold and Flu Season
Nice, looks good. Like a real cartoon character. :)
Yeah Ubuntu Mono is lovely. On OS X I really like Source Code Pro but it looks pretty naff on Windows I have found, shame really as I love that font!
Yea, he needs a name.
There is a much larger post you are missing. This encompasses a lot more awesome.

https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness
> You mention yescrypt as an example of a good KDF, but its main design goal is to be a password hashing function!

I mentioned I'd heard it was a good KDF (not a good password storage function). I didn't know that was its main purpose. Thanks, will need to read more about it.

Still, there's marginal returns on how much w can be increased while keeping the KDF useful, right? There's only so much magic they can do for a weak password.

The article on scrypt being a poor candidate for password storage stuck out in my memory. I haven't seen or heard of the practice of strong hash function + random salt for password storage falling out of favor, so I didn't look into using other KDFs for that purpose.

EDIT: it does seem like a trade off. This article seems to have a good explanation of it: https://crackstation.net/hashing-security.htm

If you use a key stretching hash in a web application, be aware that you
will need extra computational resources to process large volumes of
authentication requests, and that key stretching may make it easier to run
a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on your website. I still recommend using
key stretching, but with a lower iteration count. You should calculate the
iteration count based on your computational resources and the expected
maximum authentication request rate. The denial of service threat can be
eliminated by making the user solve a CAPTCHA every time they log in.
Always design your system so that the iteration count can be increased or
decreased in the future.

I do stand corrected about KDFs not being OK for password storage. Seems like they can be overkill in some situations, but in general do a good job of protecting passwords.
That would be true if everybody concerned interprets that specific law exactly the same. One problem is there can and is ambiguity in natural language, and another is you cannot cover all possibilities in a single bill.

In short there are a lot unsaid, and what is said is not always clear.
I wonder if you can sue them, or if there is other legal recourse. Probably.
Just curious, couldn't you open source it but have a license that doesn't allow commercial usage of it?
Good question! Aptible's Docker containers are fundamentally similar to Heroku's dynos in terms of the Linux kernel features on which both are built.

Most of the performance advantage comes from 2 facts:

1. An Aptible production customer shares NO resources with other customers, from the load balancing layer down to the app container layer. So, performance is never going to be degraded as a result of resource contention from other customers.

2. Container CPU and RAM constraints are flexible on Aptible. While we set defaults for both of these container constraints, we can adjust them for specific customer applications that may be more CPU- or RAM-intensive.
"Would humans say" is also subtly different from "do humans actually think". The Williamsburg bridge in NY has a particularly odd pattern where pictures showing steelwork have particularly "safe" ratings and pictures showing river panoramas have extremely low ratings. Maybe HNers other than me have an idea of why that might be, but I find it hard to believe the steelwork is incredibly reassuring and the view of Manhattan behind utterly terrifying as the polarized figures would have you believe
This weekend's project: ed mode for Emacs.
By the end of day, it's all about delivering substance, not style.
My friend Matt Ketchum redesigned the logo for http://www.sososwift.com. I wrote a little blog post about it and the thought behind it. Would love to hear any feedback. Thanks!
I am aware of that. But considering how google has acted in recent years it wouldn't surprise me if they would reinstate that policy and try to force it to everyone because it worked with facebook etc.

Google has this bad habit of deciding something and then forcing it. Real name policy. OpenCL on mobile. The list goes on. If they don't get any traction initially they will at the very least attempt to force it.
From the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ):

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

...

The sentiment 'religion is bad' is neither civil nor genuinely new/enlightening/informative. Please refrain from making such comments in the future.
Anyone can make a redirect to anything, generally they don't face much scrutiny because "redirects are cheap" [0]. Though there has been some discussion about deleting those that are just emojis e.g. [1-2]. Here's a category of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Redirect...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_are_cheap

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discus...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discus...
I've said that dozens of times and got quite tired of repeating, so briefly speaking, it's because it takes only ~5 votes within first 30-60min to make the front page.

The best thing you can do about it is to go to /newest and help to bring good content to the homepage :)

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with it as long as it's once in a few days. Was it a regular trend, then it would be worth flagging.
This argument dodges the thrust of Sam's essay, which centered on gender disparities. Your argument doesn't work for gender disparities.

For example, MIT is ~46% female. Stanford is 47% female. (I won't be pedantic about the Ivy League thing.) These numbers look absolutely nothing like the small end of the VC funnel.
I'm not a security guru, but the most common scenario (even today, that big data and NoSQL/Graph dbs thrive) is a website running on a SQL (with some additional memcached/Redis or Mongo?).

Say I encrypt the entries... Since the database runs in local host, if the host is compromised and subsequently 'rooted', what exactly does database encryption offer?

The intruder will sniff/find the encryption key(s) since the key must be somewhere inside the application or in memory (don't know how, but I'm sure it's possible) in order to be able to decrypt data on the fly. The way I see it it's just added complexity for the admin with no gain.

Is there any way of defending an SQL database even when the host is compromised?
First protection is against laptop being stolen and the hazmat is exposed.

Separate vaults are useful if you have multiple clients, say, and you are doing pen tests. While you are working on one, the others are not unlocked.
Demonstrably and comically false (except on the running costs front - you're spot on there). Not only are UK motorway speed limits 70mph (and traffic speeds higher still), 70mph is also the limit on most dual carriageways, and major undivided roads have a 60mph limit. In the US you'll rarely find a road with no central divider with a limit above 45, and only major multilane highways go to 65 and higher limits (depending on state).
I've been toying with the idea of learning OCaml for a little while, so when I saw this, I thought "what better time than now?".

Then I went to the repo and saw basically the same thing I would get if I just googled it. This looks like a great place to reference things when getting started, but not the best to actually start.

The first thing I see is community, ok that seems fair, probably a good place to start. But then Algorithms and Data Structures, whoa there, maybe I should try some simple things first? What's next, application libraries? Probably helpful if I already knew how to use the language.

I understand that it's in alphabetical order, and maybe I "just don't get it" but this doesn't help me actually get started. I'm still looking at a bunch of material that I don't really understand and I'm not sure exactly where to start. However the repo itself doesn't actually present itself as a way to get started, so this might just be a long winded comment about the title.
I don't think choosing a permissive license and considering yourself a member of the free software movement are mutually exclusive.
How to make introductions like a gentleman
Ask HN: Best books/articles/etc on creativity?
What are the best sources (books, blogs, articles) of information on creativity you've come across?

By best I mean likely based on academic research and devoid of fluff/fillers/shallowness?
> What innovation's being hindered here? Beats didn't do anything new.

Novelty is being removed from the marketplace.

Beats products look good and many people prefer them to Bose. The technology itself has been independently developed by Beats.

The funny thing is Chinese manufacturer & tech firms don't strictly adhere to patent laws and are making progress by leaps & bounds. It's a matter of evolution. Patent law "chivalry" is dead. It's a quaint game from a time long gone.
I have observed crows doing this with chestnuts on a crossing. And also a crow burying a chestnut, noticing that it was observed by another crow, then pretending that it buried the nut in another spot and vigorously defending the fake location from the other crow.
A good read - I work with managers who don't like being 'held to ransom' by the senior experienced devs. One of the managers thinks that a pair of hands is a pair of hands - and prefers younger enthusiastic devs to 'fat old men with beards'. Sigh.
Who uses Galera successfully? Every DBA I've ever spoken to about it has advised me to avoid it because it's incredibly deadlock-prone.
what?

the Bose noise cancelling in ear plugs already do the processing in a "dongle" which is at the end of the plug that goes into the phone. nothing is stopping Apple/Samsung/whatever to put this piece of hardware into the phone.

and remember the new Beats headphones that are supposed to hook into the Lightning port instead of the audio jack? THIS is the use case right there.
Microsoft unleashes 'Settlers of Catan' on the web
No sarcasm. The Loggly Hoover shirts are loved by their owners. I'm biased because I invented Hoover (did not draw him however) but still, people love beavers and the funny shirts we did. I find it ironic that the guy was offended by being offered a shirt that basically takes nothing seriously and pretty much brings a smile to people's faces, and then puts it a the top of a rant post.

BTW, I do appreciate his pain, I've had people steal my designs (and name to boot) before and it sucks.
This is an anomaly that your explanation doesn't apply to though.

Notice that it has 50 points and is half an hour old. I count 12 items on the front page currently that have 50 or fewer points and are 1 or more hours old and yet remain there. These items are generally quality content (such as the tinfoil security post -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8086834 -- which sits at 37 points / 3 hours).

Your explanation of "5 votes within the first 30 minutes" completely disregards that this has as many votes as many other items on the front page, but in a fraction of the time period.
Cost isn't what's preventing Apple or anyone else from doing this. The patents are. They have titles like "Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems".
Watch this CartoDB time-lapse heat map of Israeli-Palestinian conflict online
I'm confident that incorporating pictures of the same place at different times/days (like Google Map's wayback machine) would boost the accuracy, but I'm not too sure how you would need to change the model.
Chrome Beta for Android updated with Material Design
.... source?
Good to know the author intends to add Greek characters. Until then, for me it's a no-no :-(. Since VIM is my default editor, I need Greek chars in terminal.
For most people, business expenses are paid by the employer and profit==income, but for some (the self-employed in particular) their business expenses come out of pocket and are deductible. Individuals actually end up paying taxes on profit, we're just used to wording it as income.