skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, I never explicitly start counting either. But it was very obvious when I walked into my computer engineering classes in college, and there were two other girls out of 150 people. Then I'd walk into my English class and it would be half female. It doesn't take counting to notice disparities like that. Conferences are the same.

I also didn't think about it until I was on a team at Google that was half female. But that was my third team there, and I'd also interned at IBM, Microsoft and a startup, and I had never worked with a female engineer before.
It's not defying cultural norms to NOT hire dancing girls for your event. That's like saying refusing to smoke is defying the cultural norms of smokers.
I feel bad that his is ripped off Wufoo, with about the only difference being that the input selection is on the right side.

But, I'm still adding it to my bookmarks. It was only a matter of time before someone made a Wufoo clone for free.

[edit] ... I mean in the sense of it being a form generator... Wufoo still does some pretty awesome stuff with reports and payment gateway integration.

[edit 2] When I said "ripped off Wufoo", I didn't know they literally copied the HTML and CSS. That's obviously very wrong.
I'd been half a decade since Java hasn't been considered slow, and in clojure when you really care about speed you can always go to java's level.

As for what a real object system is... does this even mean anything?
Agreed. The Media Center is a lot better. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.
They now have a data liberation front: http://www.dataliberation.org/
Deposits could just buy treasuries, pay interest and be government guaranteed.

The question is what additional investments you want to allow. I would allow mortgages of high quality (recourse mortgages, size < 2 * earnings and size < 65% of value) when accompanied by appropriate capital.
I wonder how this compares with valgrind's helgrind tool and Microsoft's CHESS tool. AFAIK both of those attempt to find bugs due to improper use of mutex'es around shared variables.

I wonder if this tool can go beyond that to find (for example) bugs in lock-free implementations, or in general using atomic variables as communication between threads.
slow

And yet you like Perl?! ;-)
No, that's not possible without tons of code to generate codes, cross reference, generate reports. appsto.re is a turn-key service, doing it by yourself is much more work than you would expect, and isn't worth it to a single or even a small group of developers.
Along with the other reasons, I think price plays an important part of the upgrade decision as well. Several years ago I upgraded a PC from Windows 98 to XP but only after I found the upgrade for under $50. Now, in addition to my 2 XP desktops, XP laptop, and my primary Vista desktop, only the latter will I even consider upgrading. However, looking at a $120 upgrade to 7 I have to decide is it really worth it - and right now my thinking is it's not.
Looks familiar, eh? That's because parts of the CSS are straight-out copied from Wufoo. I would rather support a hard-working YC company than use a "free" tool built on the copyrighted materials of others.
Seems like a scenario worth considering since it has been the case for most modern economic history.
The Cramer Rao Bound: A Theorem that Limits Google AdSense Participants
run your own repo or distribute your own packages from your own website, no need to be centralised.
Didn't you just say above that

> Apparently this kind of thing really is pretty much a requirement for a Taiwanese event - pretty dancing girls are in attendance for all kinds of events.

If it's expected to be there, and it's not... you're acting in a manner that's inconsistent with culture.

As for your refusal to smoke comment, you'd be suprised at how strongly people will hold onto such things. I used to never drink alcohol, ever. But I had no problems with others doing so at all. I'd go out to bars with my friends all the time, and just drink a Coke, no rum. But slowly, people stopped inviting me out. They felt that I was being judgemental by not partaking in drink, that I was somehow saying that it was beneath me. This happened with several different disparate groups of people.

People don't listen when you tell them that they're wrong.
If a commission of 1.5 cents for a 99cent app is a profit channel for you, I recommend pan-handling :-)
Culturally held sexism is still sexism, and such culturally established prejudice and undue partiality is not unique to Taiwan.

We shouldn't accept sexism or racism, period.
Paul Buchheit: Consider this the chrysalis stage
This is an older paper of ours that shows how the Cramer Rao Inequality (a famous theorem of information theory and statistics) limits what Google AdSense participants can sense (and therefor what they can do). Google AdSense is, of course, an exceptional example of a market with a very clever design (or mechanism).
I wonder how many people are genuinely outraged, and how many are outraged because it is the expected response.
I'm really loving these event-driven servers.

If you'd prefer using Javascript, there's also Node (http://nodejs.org/) which is a similar effort.
This is true, and I'm not making a value judgement on this particular event at all. I'm just saying that a comment like that is projecting the poster's own morals, thoughts, and culture onto a whole separate group of people who probably don't even think like that at all.
I sort of agree with you, but just because a name is trademarked (you can't copyright a name), doesn't mean you can NEVER EVER use it. For example, Wii. There you go.
I wonder how many people are bordering on asperger's levels of social ineptitude and insensitivity due to the fact that it's really easy to be insensitive when you're on top.
Slow compared to what? Most benchmarks I've seen show that it easily beats most of the other popular dynamic languages if you care about that. In my own experience with macro hackery you can often get very close to Java (2x-3x).

The lack of an object system is a downright feature since it forces you to take a functional approach. Most of the things you would want from an object system (polymorphism, multiple inheritance) are readily available via multimethods/hierarchies.

If you really want something CLOS-like, there's a library for that, http://code.google.com/p/explorersguild/wiki/XGModelAndGF.
I think the shortest code example would be:

button.addActionListener(new ActionListener()
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
System.out.println("Button clicked");
}});

vs defining a two line function then writing:

(add-action-listener button #(println "Button clicked"))

Or maybe:

(new Thread #(println "In thread"))
I strongly disagree. While living in China I encountered horrific racism and sexism, both widely accepted as community standards. There was a human cost to those "standards", and I grew to believe that we should all be held to a certain standard of behavior, regardless of our national origin or cultural identity.

Disapproval of the current situation is how progress gets made in the world. There was a time in this country when slavery was widely accepted and women weren't allowed to vote. Those were the standards of the day, and they were only shifted because a vocal minority stood up and cried out, "This is wrong!".

Somebody always has to be the first to raise the bar.
150+ Negative Keywords for Software Selling AdWords Campaigns
Negative keywords for search marketing campaigns - specific to the software industry
> Perhaps the same percentage that care their grammar and proofreading?

I have an excuse though. This is my fourth day on the colemak keyboard layout, so every word I type is extremely painful. That particular error came from shortening the sentence from "What percent of people actually care about how they come across?" I accidentally edited out the about. Anything that has to do with typing right now is frustrating.

> Knowing proper spelling is important if only to assist in word and term recognition when reading. What is far more useful is knowing _why_ words are spelled in a particular fashion and to know the history of the word and its roots. Not only does etymology help you know how to spell a word, it assists in selecting to proper word or term to get your point across in the most efficient and least ambiguous manner possible.

Yes. You said it better than I did.
Insensitivity and oversensitivity can both be inappropriate. It's always safer to be oversensitive than insensitive, though. Wouldn't you agree that becomes a problem when it masks how people actually feel about a subject?

Side note: I move to officially recognize mentions of Asperger's when discussing social situations as HN's custom version of Godwin's law.
"Does it make sense when iCombat Lite, having been live for 3 months with 100k installs and no complaints, suffers a 40+ day delay because it is being forced to the back of the line over and over again to wait amongst what is new crapware?"

I never understand why iPhone developers seem to always think that the apps they write are so money yet apps that everyone else writes are "crapware" and are thus clogging up the app store. I agree with this author's point that you should not have to go back to the start of the queue, but that should be for all apps, and if you want a freer app store (which I do) you're going to have to put up with more "crapware" not less.
You are correct, a developer could get a linkshare url and drop it into bit.ly. Then they would have to do a lot more work to get the bit.ly click data to overlap with the linkshare data. We do some other statistcal analysis to be sure we aren't counting other app sales in your data. There is actually a substantial amount of work behind getting this to all work smoothly.

We see appsto.re as being a turn key no headache solution. We do the work of making sure things don't break, adding new analytics tools and handling all the details that it doesn't make sense for a single developer to worry about.

Shane Crawford has a great two part blog post if you really want to implement this yourself ...

http://shanecrawford.org/2009/119/tracking-appstore-conversi...

Thanks for commenting.
It's too soon: we've just begun year 3 of a roughly 5 year cycle.
Am I the only one who's Chrome crashes on this page?
The incentive structure of the marketing department is almost designed to produce short term thinking. So of course marketdroids have a bad name. They're basically incentivized to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

I wonder if there's a better way we could structure this?
Gruber Apple predictions for tomorrow (9/20/09)
How do you validate your markup like that?
Headline is bigger than Hacker News allows:

"Dan Lyons Apparently Thinks Yours Truly Hasn't Heard About the Redesigned Plastic MacBooks, Redesigned ('Impressive') iMacs, Updated Minis (Including One That Ships With Mac OS X Server), the Multi-Touch Magic Mouse, and, as the Wildcard I'm-Not-Sure-I-Really-Believe-It-Myself Out-There Rumor, Maybe Even Some Sort of Mentioned-Nowhere-Else-But-in-This-Very-Headline Multi-Touch Trackpad Gadget for Desktop Macs That Apple Might Release Tomorrow Morning"

Call me a fanboy, but I'm excited.
Wouldn't you agree that becomes a problem when it masks how people actually feel about a subject?

No -- I think the fact that it's considered culturally inappropriate to express clearly racist and sexist opinions is a benefit -- it's the first step to stemming the spread of that cultural virus.

Side note: I move to officially recognize mentions of Asperger's when discussing social situations as HN's custom version of Godwin's law.

It was an intentional reference to an endemic lack of social graces in technology culture and the oft-referenced syndrome. It was not an ad hominem argument.
Design Patterns aren't like a disease so much as they're like a symptom!
> I grew to believe that we should all be held to a certain standard of behavior, regardless of our national origin or cultural identity.

I guess this is just where we differ. I don't belive that one way of living is inherently better than another; or that I have some moral imperative to make others behave in a way that I see fit. Of course, I'd love them to, and if asked the reason that I act differently, I'd be happy to explain.

I used to feel the way that you do. It's easy to get caught up in the "of course, slavery is wrong! Of course, sexism is wrong!" But then it slowly starts to bleed into "of course, we have to spread Democracy to Iraq," "of course, we have to make laws that gay people can't marry"...

Moral superiority is how wars start. By making others' ways of life into the literary Other, you're demonizing the very people you're trying to convince.
Darl McBride wasn't taking any risks. He was being compensated to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for driving SCO to bankruptcy. There was no risk involved if he was going to be rewarded regardless of the outcome.
Whenever I see this kinda stuff, I start thinking about a link that I believe got posted here a while back about education in Finland. I don't remember where it was, so I can't share it as part of this discussion, but what really stuck out to me about the whole thing is summarized by asking:

Do students get a better education by being surrounded by genius peers and mentors? Or is it better to forget about the distraction that competition for seating creates (ie: limited University seats, and other various competitive factors that we have between students in North America, starting a very early level), and instead, relax that whole thing so that students can REALLY learn by teaching their less advanced peers, thereby allowing teachers to leverage the smarter kids in the room to normalize the average at a much higher level, which is exactly what happens in Finland.

The other part of the equation, of course, stems from the fact that classes in Finland are capable of swallowing harder material because the peer-tutoring thing creates a much higher base level competence, which, in turn, can understand more challenging material. That whole thing disappears when your base level competence has an IQ north of 140 to start with.

(forgive grammarz plz, head spinning, can't be bothered to proof read)
I've attended both the London Yahoo hackday's myself and found them wonderfully well run by lovely people.

Personally, I would feel terribly uncomfortable if they had booked dancers like this for entertainment. It is a bad idea for two differing reasons.

1. I attend hackdays to build things. Not for loud bands, giant jenga or lap dancing. The intention is hacking, surprisingly. Organisers should focus their energy and resources on good wifi, nice apis, etc that appeal to the hackday audience instead of any form of auxiliary entertainment.

2. There seems to be a slight gender imbalance at hackdays. I don't think lap dancers are going to help that.

Even if this is the local 'norm', Yahoo hackday is a global brand. When people see behaviour like this, it marks the whole tech community as either misogynistic or ladish.
Paul Buchheit: There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage -- if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge :)
There has always been the minimum requirement that Micrsoft listed, but what are the real minimum requirements?
That's a fine reason, as long as you don't care about being friendly for integration/customization/embedding with external sources.
Wow! the cell phone throw and grab is really cool. That's some with quick action with real time decision making.
I have had that too, but it is not unreasonable.

The worst I have had is because I used a SIMILAR font and style to a well known tv show, in a quiz about that tv show.
I don't think Simon's argument has to do with adhering to American standards. In fact, he explicitly states that he's interested in creating an "inclusive environment" for women developers.

How quick are we on Hacker News to pass judgement on Google for censoring search results in China? Why aren't we defending their actions in the same manner that some are defending the decision to include lap dancers? I think it's because we sense that there is a greater issue at hand, and that is precisely what Simon is saying here.

Forget whether or not Yahoo has the right to hire provocative dancers for their conference or even what the norms are for other conferences in the area. Those things have no concern for the feelings of women. Even if Yahoo can and others do, it doesn't mean it was the right decision.
Number one reason to use the App store is that it is very easy to make large piles of money.
I'd been half a decade since Java hasn't been considered slow

This is precisely why snark doesn't work. Snark isn't based on substantive analysis and argument. Instead, it's the same sort of stuff that had lots of us geeks ostracized in high school. It's the hipster/school clique side of human dominance and group-think instincts.

It's the reason why such inaccurate yet ineradicable notions continue to circulate in the programming field.

If one considers oneself a thoughtful computer programming expert, leave out the snark!
You can use WHOIS or dig, e.g.

$ dig yp.to ns

; <<>> DiG 9.4.3-P3 <<>> yp.to ns
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 63068
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;yp.to.	IN	NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
yp.to.	184700	IN	NS	b.ns.yp.to.
yp.to.	184700	IN	NS	f.ns.yp.to.
No, you can program in almost any language for Android, a change that was added about 3 months ago.

Objective-c is great, much better than java or c# if you ask me.

Are you sure you actually program for Android, you seem to be missing quite a bit of knowledge.
They did the same thing last year: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/09/taiwan_open...

To quote: "The evening entertainment (Hack Girls) was an interesting contrast to Girltalk at Sunnyvale Open Hack Day the weekend before."

Also on FlickR, from 2008: http://www.flickr.com/photos/myhsu/sets/72157607394199935/?p...

And: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hackgirl/

I can't find any kind of confirmation anywhere that this kind of thing is considered normal for a business conference in Taiwan. Perhaps people are confusing car shows (or arguably computer games shows) with a hack day?
Quarter:

Macintosh sales: 3.05 up 17%
Ipod sales: 10.2 down 8%
Iphone Sales: 7.4 up 7%
Revenue: $9.87b (up from $7.9b)
Profit: $1.67b (up from $1.26b)
I'd be quite interested to see what the International breakdown of those 7 million iPhones are. Because the iPhone is available on a lot more than 1 carrier. (And it is available for the other 5.7 billion people in the world.
Why don't we just throw up some Council of Conservative Citizens links as well. Perhaps a link to Stormfront?
Bullshit. We have a machine here with Vista we use for testing, it is torture to try to get anyone to use that machine. I won't, unless I have to.

Vista is a piece of shit. I can't belive that any reasonable person would say otherwise. Maybe 7 ain't so shit, but that is not high praise.
Ya know, I've never walked into a conference, office or classroom and started counting up the number of men versus women in the room.

Did you go to a university with a good CS program that you were in? Were you ever single while attending university? Did you ever think it might be nice to date a woman who shared your abilities and interests? It's not exactly unheard-of for men to tally up the male/female ratio at gatherings where they spend the majority of their time if it seems out of whack.
Don't start a restaurant - lots of startup parallels
So, Bill Gates.
I'm still new here, so thank you for taking the time to respond.
Some of the disturbing arguments here demonstrate just how far we have to go before women are celebrated as equals in technology.

Here's one techtalk I found to be quite enlightening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmROmy5jT80

Google TechTalks - Dr. Cornelia Brunner Associate Director, Center for Children & Technology Education Development

Anyone have others they would recommend?
I guess those kids with ADD were not problem kids after all.
The move from mainstream OO, cast in a mediocre language like C++ or Java, to having some way to talk about higher level combinations [which the language cannot express] is quite an improvement.

After a positive experience with GoF patterns its hard to convince people that these patterns are just a natural part of working in lisp [or clojure] : Not only can you talk in patterns, but your code can be written in patterns in a direct way.

The same of UML and other formal diagramming systems - you get more expressive power much more directly via a 'domain specific language' in lisp. All the big fads are subsumed with a wave of the hand.

Unfortunately some universities take what they think is a pragmatic path of least resistance and teach popular languages such as Java in place of a much more subtle and powerful language.

I wonder at the sheer human waste in leagues of emasculated coders churning out verbose Java/XML/SQL 'business' apps in cubicles, forced by convention to work in an ugly way - those businesses would be much better served in terms of efficiency, quality and innovation by using a good language, and their staff much happier.

Thank Gods and the lords of Kobol for giving us Python, Ruby and Clojure that they might seep through the cracks and weaken the stranglehold of obfuscation and verbosity!
Yeah, I'd like to upgrade my brain with more and faster memory as well.
Save money to start a company that will create goods for export to improve our trade deficit.
I am a woman, in case that wasn't clear. I'm fine with the level of stuff that goes on and is acceptable in my culture. And I worked in gaming, covering booth-babe laden expos, for several years.

Guys don't need to get outraged for us. We can do that ourselves.
I disagree.

Unless by OS you mean OSX/ARM, Android, WM7, etc

I see there being 3 computer systems people will use in the future.
The small screen / communication device (Think iPhone/Android. fine for email, facebook, communication)
The Big screen device. PVR/Set-top box/xbox/Apple TV. Consuming major media content/games/video
The workstation. This is for content creation. Writing essays. Editing Videos. Recording Music. Photoshop. etc.

Number 1 and 2 run OS's - but you don't really see them. Number 3 is the computer as we know it - but most people don't need that! I think the computer market / OS's will exist - but they will/are declining in popularity. I don't see them being taken over by webOS etc, because I don't need a computer for that - I need an iphone.
And no business should ever get a loan?
That's way, way, way more complicated than:

1) Build a binary, put it on a DMG

2) User clicks download link, drags to any directory they want.

Trying to build packages that continue to work across releases and as libraries get updated and packages change -- and operate in a compatible manner with the built-in packages -- is surprisingly difficult.

Why don't more people do it? The only 3rd-party packages I come across are RedHat RPMs, and half the time, they're broken. I almost never come across 3rd party apt/yum repositories run by corporations, and the few times I have, they've been very broken (remember Ximian? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximian)