skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're lucky to be an Asian male... look at the black male line. It's the only one that doesn't have a single green square.

EDIT: Also, look at the response line from black females; they're all green except for the yellow square in response to black males.
Apologies for not being clearer. I believe that they agreed to the co-development
Optical data transmission speed record 15.5 Tbps (400 DVD) over 7,000 km
There really is Haskell group-think here.

I commented on this story nearly a day late, and the only people that scour through these comments downvoting everything remotely anti-Haskell are the Haskell fanatics.

These are also not my pet annoyances. These problems have been pointed out in the past (which you would have known if you even bothered to read the article).

The fact that Haskell has done nothing about them for years is damning evidence.

> You don't like Haskell or OCaml, clearly. So don't use them!

This is where you and many Haskell fanatics are wrong. Just because I am criticizing Haskell doesn't mean I don't like Haskell. I want it to be better so people will stop using languages like Java with a last generation paradigm.

Instead of taking the criticism in stride, people like you attack the person, and even managing to criticize Simon Peyton Jones, one of the designers of Haskell, for saying something bad about the language.
IT security breaches soar in 2009
Ryan,

Not interested in a flamewar but happy to follow-up and clarify.

1. I'm not a journalist.

2. The fact that Media6 Degrees, a behavorial targeter is on their site is binary. Look at the source, it's there, pretty simple.

3. See #2 for the truth.

4. Depends on your world view. For people who don't want to be targeted by behavioral ad networks this is nefarious. For those who don't care it isn't.

5. I couldn't care less about "getting publicity" for my product. It's free and I don't need the publicity.
Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them
Yahoo updates YUI tool for slick Web interfaces
Banking Trojan steals money from under your nose
Apologies for not being clearer. I believe that they agreed to this co-development project because they are getting a good deal; as in, no being charged 10x because they're chinese.

They will have ample opportunity for the technology transfer required to do the next 800 on their own. And Bombardier will have their opportunity to compete on the next project. But the pessimist in me also believes that Bombardier will do their best to prevent that technology transfer! Sad, but it seems to be the path of least resistance in business these days.
Absolutely yes. It is the same expectation when you find a security hole. You should always ask their side of the story first before going public with naked speculation.

Because you have a conflict of interest this pushes the post past merely poor form.
This is lots of fun to read, because it's good to keep a perspective on history.

That said, it's not at all clear that the next several thousand years will be analogous to the last several thousand. We have a rather different starting point. The key difference is mass production. A society without printing can come close to losing the works of Plato: every copy of Plato cost weeks, months, or years of a laborer's salary to make. [1] So, even at the height of Greek and Roman civilization, there were a limited number of copies of Plato's work. There were also a limited number of educated people who could read those works -- not because people were stupid, but because reading material was sufficiently expensive that it wasn't worthwhile for the majority of people to master its use.

Meanwhile, Plato himself was seen by perhaps only a few thousand people in his lifetime, at most. There were no planes or trains. There were no photographs or recordings. Hence, there weren't a lot of eyewitnesses to spread tales of Plato's genius. Inefficient as they were, the written books did most of that work.

Compare that to the atom bomb. I never got to see one in person, but I've seen them a hundred times in photographs and films. Literally half the people alive today have seen the atom bomb in one way or another. And the stories of those who encountered them directly can be heard by everyone, who then compose stories which mention the bomb, which themselves get mass-produced. There are probably more action figures of Godzilla in existence today than there ever were copies of Plato's works.

---

[1] I was recently listening to Brad Delong's economic history course from Berkeley, and at one point he tried to explain the value of a book in medieval times. A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars -- that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the writing by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or three personal books.
I think you're confusing P(member of particular race | member of particular religion) with P(member of particular religion | member of particular race).
While I love the number crunching ethos, and think these guys are giving it one hell of a go - I will go on the record and say that they will ultimately fail because they are operating under many false premises, a few being:

1. People do not change their minds.

By algorithmically matching based on answers to questions, you must assume that those answers are meaningful. And meaningful means CONSISTENT. And people are NOT consistent. Especially on complex issues; in fact there are whole professions (sales (insurance, real estate, car, etc) comes immediately to mind) where success is based on one's ability to get people to change their minds. (That example is offered as evidence, not proof - but proof probably isnt a complicated exercise)

2. Like Thinkers make Great Daters

Assuming you are even GETTING like thinkers, (which is tenuous at best) where is it written that like thinkers make great companions? You don't want to have absolutely nothing in common, (at least a common language is necessary) but it isn't linear and i would be surprised if there were any correlation let alone one that was non-asymptotic. Simply - more like thoughts does not entail more compatibility.

3. Looks aren't EVERYTHING

Just based on sheer observation - this is not the case. It is unfortunate, and it speaks badly about human nature, but most human beings make judgments based on appearances. And this "appearance crutch" is only exacerbated when it comes to looking for someone to lay with. How many single, male, bleeding heart liberals would take a swing at Sarah Palin if given an iota of an opportunity? Again - offered as evidence, not proof.
Banned Books Week Begins
Why former criminals aren’t always the best experts
Raising a child: a non-development activity undertaken by choice.

Biking around India: a non-development activity undertaken by choice.

Therefore:

We should all support paid family biking-around-India leave.

The logic is unimpeachable!
Thank you for this. It would be valuable if you could please ask them for their side and follow up with another post explaining if they in the right or wrong.
You're right that MS won the browser wars because IE4 was simply better, but MS made a critical error by preventing OEMs from bundling Netscape. They would have won anyway, but instead they needlessly created an underdog and got pinned (rightly IMHO) for abusing their market position.

The interesting thing about the browser wars is it's one of the few occasions when history was written by the vanquished.
Some Hindu men will say they like ice cream.

Some Hindu men will say they don't.
I guess this needs repeating: Chrome Frame doesn't load unless there's a specific tag in the page telling it to.
I can only imagine what else OkCupid's data would reveal in adept hands. I could probably write a book if they sent me a spreadsheet.
I think it is highly likely that the Catholic Church will have institutional memory of nuclear weapons in 3000 AD if for no other reason than "Our theologians spent a lot of time in the mid twentieth century writing on this subject. We're obsessive compulsive about recording things, had large amounts of resources to devote to it, and keep dead languages on life-support singlehandedly for millennia just because we have interesting things written in them."

Incidentally, anyone interested in the intersection of science fiction, Catholicism, and the Church functioning as external storage for the memory of the human race should read a Canticle for Leibowitz.
Ah ok, I misread you completely. Too late to edit now, but thanks for the clarification.
Funny. Conflict of interest?

I realize FreshBooks, your company, is a 37 Signals partner but that's ok with me. I still believe you can be impartial, hope you share the same faith in me for my free "product".

I find full disclosure is best.
I used to be afraid that I didn't have that much knowledge in the domain of these types of things...

- but this seems like a knowledge of a worker, not a owner... at least at this of a level, no offense - but this seems like early optimization for most anything except for those who are getting a PHD in it; I would say there will always be lower hanging fruit in my life than these things..

: i am probably just showing my very lack of knowledge here..
I also thought the idea went as far as "If you hate Itunes; there will finally be a alternative" - at least thats what I'm interested in..
You haven't actually offered an argument for supporting any kind of paid leave. But yes, I do believe that job benefits should be decoupled from having children.

In any case, your mention of circumstances that could apply to people of any gender is a red herring. It's a workshop for women, not a workshop for people returning to the dev workforce after a 2 year hiatus.
Dell brings wireless recharging to laptops
Am I the only one who had a good chuckle at the zodiac grid?
it means that plentyoffish has nothing but fat chicks(everyone calls it Plenty of Fat), while okcupid has the hipster girls
That's pretty hypocritical of Mozilla. About a year ago, they were flaunting similar ambitions[1] and actively working on Screaming monkey[2].

Quote, "Mozilla is developing a plugin for Internet Explorer that will add support for the HTML5 Canvas element. Microsoft's attempts to stifle adoption of open web standards could soon be circumvented by plugins that bring Firefox technology to Internet Explorer."

Talk of double standards...

[1] http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/08/mozilla-drags-i...

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=280375

[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:ScreamingMonkey
> Under 3.0.1 if you record video from within the Dropbox app that video couldn't be saved to your iPhone photos directory, so if your upload was interrupted for any reason the video would be lost.
Apple Newton Easter Egg (1995)
they didn't support 3.0 because of missing capability that caused problems.
They are too young to die or retire. I think we still need both unions and GPL.
Dare I point out the staleness of imagery in your first sentence ("mired in academia") or the passive phasing of your second? ;)

Seriously, though: good bookmarks.
If you re-read the thread, I'm not offering a standalone justification for why a women's RoR workshop makes sense. Why bother? It's going to happen whether or not yummyfajitas likes the idea.

I'm offering a reason why a men-only RoR workshop would be offensive when a women-only RoR workshop isn't. A RoR workshop for people returning from long trips abroad also wouldn't be offensive, although the equivalence you imply between the two ideas is weak.
Much smaller, eh? Not, say, 50% smaller, even though they're selecting out non-developers by being a Rails workshop?
Hmm, nope, don't think so. I picked my words pretty carefully.
This is actually the _end_ of the 25th anniversary celebration, so it's the 26th anniversary. Doesn't sound nearly as impressive.
old blue collar unions = ?
Exactly my feeling. My thesis is that FSF achieved its popularity in the heyday of Microsoft monopoly serving as a counter-force, and as Microsoft's hegemony declined (thanks in part to FSF's efforts), it has become less relevant. Open source (I intentionally do not want to use Stallman's language on this) is thriving but FSF is not.

GPL is way too dogmatic, and given the fact that most free software actually is written by people with a paycheck from those hated proprietary software companies (at any rate, companies that definitely do not buy into FSF dogma), there always has been an underlying tension between their philosophy and the vast majority of contributors to open source. Basically Stallman wants them to feel dirty getting that paycheck.

As a result, we are moving to a different phase in the open source world - focus on code, not on the politics.

I want to add an illustration of the perverse effects GPL produced in practice. MySQL - now in the hands of Larry Ellison ... there must be some irony there - perfectly shows how to use GPL in a very "interesting" way. I have dealt with MySQL salesmen on several occasions, so I know how they "use" GPL. Basically they would assert with full confidence that your use-case (whatever it may be) would violate GPL, so you have to pony up unless you want all your code to be GPL. They knew how to exploit "GPL fear" in companies, but would back down in most cases once you bring a lawyer.

That is the practical real world effect of dogma. My prediction: MySQL will be orphaned intentionally by Oracle. No one else is going to touch it because forking the MySQL code will not let anyone escape the famous Oracle salesmen.
A gorilla is the company that controls the market. The market does not have to be in the billions.

This blog post does not reference a gorilla and its not even clear there is a developed market, so he is using the term incorrectly. His competitor is just a startup with more funding then he has.
How much is a start-up actually worth?
Is it just me or is that one long sentence?
The Great VC Ice Age is Thawing (for now)
Wow, quite a wide range of available file types:

http://www.getdropbox.com/help/80
I'm not surprised. Our tech transfer office says that the vast majority of offices actually lose money applying for patents. The ones which are profitable make almost all of their profits on only a few patents.
Haha are you a THChubber? Yeah, there isn't... it sucks and I've been reduced to chatting on HN. What was your hub name?
You can be impartial, but it still was a bad post because you posted speculation without making even the basic attempt at determining the facts. They typically answer their email within two hours during business days. Just ask them.

It's not the target of the post, but the way you wrote it. I have the same issue with their last post speculating why Mint sold their company ("The next generation bends over"). I sense that Jason lost more from that exchange than he gained.

I have no qualms with the intention of holding 37 Signals to account. As now I'm holding you to account. However, it's important that I'm giving you fair the chance to state your own case.
The article is mixed - some really interesting points, some off-the-mark points. But this is one I've thought a lot about:

> Even Plato barely survived history’s guillotine—throughout medieval times, Plato was unknown in the West, living on only in Muslim countries and in footnotes to other Greek authors. Had the Muslims been worse stewards, or been conquered by marauding Christians who needed kindling or toilet paper, Socrates would have died in vain.

I wonder how many other exceptional Antiquity works we don't have? How many other masterpieces were made and destroyed due to the Dark Ages/Burning of Baghdad mix?

I've got this as one of the top 10 worst moments in human history, right up there with the Holocaust:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru...

In addition to the lost of life, cruelties, and destruction, we lost a lot of works that would've tremendously benefited humanity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom

So I wonder what else we don't have copies of? I'm marveled when I go through modern versions of some of the ancient works at how good they were. Antiquity Greece and Rome, and the Islamic Golden Age produced some really incredible science, philosophy, engineering, and literature. Sometimes I muse, wondering what other knowledge did they produce that we have no more records of?
Good software sells itself. Last night I had a bunch of musicians over and at some point they wanted to share their gig videos with some of the people there; I cracked my gf's laptop open and copied the video to My Dropbox folder, right clicked and copied the URL, then sent it to everyone. The audience had to do a double take, got of their seats and everyone leaned over the laptop to see me do it again. Instant AWE!

I must have increased dropbox membership by 8 people last night :-)
Escape From The Web - web-based terminal emulator (TornadoApp)
How do they tie this to your "social graph"?
Wars of Ants vs Worms?
Toyota plans 3.8M vehicles recall. 2007-2010 Camry, 2004-2009 Prius...
I guess I'm just not following your logic at all. Men-only RoR workshops are offensive but women-only ones are not because people of both genders sometimes leave the workforce for a year or three?
Bioinformatics AMIs and Hadoop apps on AWS
Wikipedia -> The history of laborer's unions in the United States.

Urban dictionary -> blue collar
Tsunami Hits Samoa
You should create a new plan geared toward people who use it mainly in their iphone. I can see something like this:

"Pro iPhone 16 for $3.99 per month"

I'm sure gonna be your first customer for this plan :)
Too young? Do you have any idea how old the Teamsters and the IWW are? The IWW was involved in turn-of-the-century populist anarchist agitprop and labor activism.

Fer chrissakes, do you think nothing has changed since then?

I make $20 an hour to code, and a guy I know makes $80/hour (he started at that wage!) to tape drywall and carry out garbage.

If I could take his job, I would. I mean ffs.

And that's in NYC.
Thanks for the tip!

I'm definitely interested in how best to solve the privacy problem. I'm not really interested in the majority of location services because they tend to track you all the time, my thought was that making it more of a on demand thing would help to alleviate the fears but it may not be enough.
Scalr - Self-Scaling Hosting Environment utilizing Amazon's EC2
Very nice! One feature request to add to the pile - it would be great if you could remember which page of a PDF I was last on.
We use MySQL at work. After a major infrastructural change I think I'll be able to get us to move to Postgres. It might depends on whether or not we have any fires to put out at that point but we'll see. Postgres is better supported by the framework we're moving to. shrugs

I'm not sure what, if any, contributions I can make to this cause. When I have anything worth releasing, I try to release BSD, but I'd really like to be able to contribute to llvm. I don't know that I necessarily have any skills that would be useful to them.

GPLv3 is horridly dogmatic. A great number of the old hackers are on some kind of corporate payroll, frequently Red Hat.

I'm not certain I'm 100% comfortable with the current corporate patronage system because it has allowed people like Ulrich Drepper to dig out his private little Hell with glibc and torment anyone who begs a moment of his time.
Wow, I was a hubber too ('bird').
If 90% of RoR coders are men, I'd expect the set {good AND girl} to be about 90% smaller than the set {good}.

But suppose you are right. Simple thought experiment: take a workshop, and throw away half the good people. Is the workshop just as good as before?
I believe that to be skewed based on developers downloading that add on for testing purposes (albeit a lazy way around the test)
Although you might be able to make friends that think it's funny to get a young kid drunk...definitely a different atmosphere.
It may have to do with the ad network they are founders of- thedeck
we're not all non-profits; its a relevant pitch at least. ;0)
Depends, if you mean to say that it's going to be replaced by things like the BSD or Apache license, then that's plausible.

But a full-on death for OSS is not going to happen.

The Creative Commons / Free Culture movement is fairly recent and only growing in popularity and it's easy to see how it dovetails with a lot of the FSFs work in software.

People (and very large corporations alike) are clearly still seeing the value in liberally licensing their works so that lots of people can enjoy them.
Pyrogon Postmortem (death of an indie game developer)
I will ponder using that disclaimer the next time I let Adeo post any sample documents. :)
I wonder how much those spammers make per bogus listing. If it's more than what legit advertisers make per listing then charging per listing will only drive out the good guys or, at best, do nothing. If it's not, charge somewhere in the middle and, voila, problem solved.

I guess the reality is, you can only have a spamerless site when all your users are more lucrative than spammers.

Anyway, even if it would result in higher profits, CL would not be interested. Because they're not interested in driving up their profits.
I think X gives you the social skills you need for X.
Finding Your New Life With Credit Repair
go jews!
The vast majority of computer users, I would suppose, have no concept whatsoever of software freedom. A lot of software is still proprietary, and people are still running into problems just like RMS did years ago with being unable to fix the printer driver software.

The software landscape has changed, but software freedom remains essential. The FSF has been perhaps a bit slow to respond to some of the changes (e.g., the AGPL probably should have been developed years earlier), but the underlying message stays the same, and, I believe, is increasingly important as software usage continues to waft into every conceivable facet of our lives.
1. You should have stated that you have a conflict of interest (37 Signals Partner) like I did mine (author of Ghostery).

2. The fact that Media6 Degrees, a behavorial targeter is on their site is binary. Look at the source, it's there, pretty simple. That is a fact and not a rumor or a guess.

3. 37 Signals has the best possible platform to state their case, their blog.

4. This is the reason I created Ghostery, transparency and user education. Every tracker it identifies has a page explaining what it purports it does, who owns it and contact info for that company. After reading all that, you the end-user, can selectively block trackers.

5. The belief that an average user should track down what trackers are on every site they visit and then contact each one of those sites for their side of the story before saying or doing anything on their end is flawed IMO. That should fall at least equally on the publisher to disclose.
Boy would I like to believe that. What is the evidence from China that this is true? Perhaps their history of paternalism meshes well with tolerating the yoke.

We'll see what happens when there is a real hiccup in the system. They've enjoyed huge growth for so many years.

Note that I'm saying you're wrong, and people will tolerate political oppression while they have increasing material wealth. When things go bad, they might go really bad.
That may all be true but we still have a valuable code base to fork off of if we so please and plenty of independent companies and people who will provide professional support for it independently of Oracle.

What happened to MySQL happens to plenty of smaller projects whose original devs / maintainers get snapped up by companies to work on a commercial closed-source version.

There is no license which will insure the future of a project but if the code is popular enough you will always find someone to pick up the mantle.