skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are you denying that women are being heavily discriminated against in developed countries, like Norway or the Netherlands?

Are they? That hasn't been my experience, in Norway. I'm not a woman though.

> Technology and entrepreneurship are very attractive in terms of social prestige and salary,

I don't know if they really are. Maybe entrepreneurship, but IT/programming seems pretty meh as far as prestige goes. And since wages are relatively similar across the board, someone with a Masters in computer science might not earn terribly much more than someone with qualifications in some craft, like plumbing or being a mechanic.

> , therefore if women weren't being harassed and discouraged by men from entering these fields, you would be seeing roughly 50% of female engineers and entrepreneurs.

Fallacious reasoning; you ignore all the myriads of variables that go into human motivation.

> Maybe even somewhat more, since women tend to be smarter than men on average (which is why girls tend to succeed better in school than boys).

If it were the other way around, you'd say that that was proof of heavy discrimination towards women. Come on now - tell me that I'm wrong.
Been spending all our lives
livin' in Paul Graham's Arc Paradise.
Thank you for bringing this up -- this is a HUGE point. Publishers getting 12 months exclusivity really hurts in our connected era. The fact that this provision exists suggests to me that publishers have all their value crammed into the first days, weeks and months of a paper's reporting. After that, might as well give it away.

Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.
Alternatively, someone didn't pay someone else to make their website look better than that.

I'm not sure anybody in the process looked at that and said to themselves "yup, that looks good". Which is also a problem, but one for which the "show desktop version" checkbox is a good solution.
I agree! In the same paragraph he goes from saying '[my roommate] once screamed at me, calling me “lazy”' to 'these people are, in most aspects of their lives, good people. Honestly, couldn't recommend them enough'.

He also talks about suffering from fatigue so severe that he's 'too exhausted to sleep' and then explaining that he was able to: 'work part time, attend school full time, and do freelance writing...50 or 60 hour work weeks, effectively'. It's all a bit strange.

I'm curious about HN's fascination with health posts - I've seen quite a lot pop up on the front page. Especially things about depression and unusual illness.

(I hope the points/questions I've raised don't make me sound like a douche.)
Ocupado – An Internet Connected Restroom Occupancy Detector
I think -- even if they were exposed in school, and not all working programmers are CS graduates -- that many working programmers have little current experience with FP, and many lack either experience or current awareness of any particular FP language addressed in any given article (or, if they do, don't have experience with it in the context that the article is presenting.)

Such that, even though they might be distantly familiar with FP in general, its quite likely that articles on particular FP techniques, FP languages, or applications of FP to a particular problem area can still be useful.

Sometimes, it'll be useful just by reminding you of something you've been too caught up with dealing with what is immediately useful to think much about since school, but which might be more applicable to the problems you have now than the problems you had in programming work closer to the time you were in school.
True, but Jeff Atwood left SO quite some time ago now.
Actually I didn't say his roommates were right, I said there may be an explanation for why they are behaving as they do, which is a misunderstanding of his situation based on the fact he possibly plays a lot of video games or surfs the web to blog, and yet says he doesn't have any energy to do anything. I never said he wasn't sick. But his roommates could misunderstand the nature of his illness, and hear him complaining about his condition, and then see him play video games while sitting in bed. This could easily explain why they don't believe him.

He admitted himself that they are great people, and the fact they are behaving so strangely to him indicates to me that there is some other dynamic going on that we don't have an explanation for. The examples of the roommate taking an exercise bike into the room while he's sleeping is simply bizarre and toxic, if these people are as good as he says they are there must be some other explanation. There's always two sides to every story. Is he late with his rent because he doesn't have money, but always buys the latest video games? Is he playing games all night long because it doesn't take much energy, but does he not do his dishes because he's too physically tired? There's a lot of dynamics going on and we're getting a very 1 dimensional analysis of his roommates that he chalks up to them not believe he is sick.
I think the point is that a healthy work/life balance would allow you to give 100% of yourself to the child at the particular moment you're with them. Not having to check an email when you're reading them a bedtime story. Being able to take a week off and not have an excess work-related ruminations badgering the gullet in the background of a family-holiday that detract from you're daughter saying "DAD! WATCH THIS!"

unobserved pool splashes
>01-06-17 //

What's the correct parsing of that date? Is it 2001 or 2017 or 1917 or ... is it June or January ...?
Sorry, what salient points am I not engaging? The author of the linked piece is decrying what they perceive as a lack of "OS research and innovation" -- and I'm saying that OS innovation remains alive and well, if perhaps more technical and less accessible than it once was. I can of course be more concrete and rattle these things off -- but I feel safe in leaving software systems advances since 2000 as an exercise to the reader...
> dragonwriter, you might have noticed that the "Reply" buttons are screwed up here in Mr. Graham's Arc paradise, which is why I replied to your post.

Then again, I might not have noticed that, since I keep being able to reply to the correct post, and most other people on the site appear to be able to as well (or, maybe the replies are all landing in the wrong place and the fact that the threads happen to generally be coherent comment-and-response chains is coincidence.)

If there was some general problem with the reply buttons, I'd expect there to be a lot more misplaced replies.
Does it make sense to develop a SaaS app in a saturated market?
I am working on a form-builder (SaaS) app. I have had this idea since 3 years, made some prototypes but stopped started on launching it until recently.

Today, a basic competition analysis shows that there are a lot of such form-builders available. And actually with more features than I can get develop in my first version.

USPs: Lower pricing (not too low) and couple of features that I personally wished these existing form-builders had. Maybe lower pricing is not much of an USP

Leads: I have zero-customers/leads at this point. I am still working on the landing pages and will be accepting registrations pretty soon via a few channels.

If it works out, my long term plan for this is to extend this into an app-builder and allow a smooth transition from plain form data to application-data-models.

What do you recommend? - Does it make sense to develop a SaaS app in a saturated market?
The specificity graph is quite meaningful. For example, compare the specificity graphs for Yahoo (http://cssstats.com/stats?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyahoo.com#specifi...) and Amazon (http://cssstats.com/stats?url=http%3A%2F%2Famazon.com#specif...) - selected for both being public-facing sites of similar size.

Because CSS rules are applied by specificity (http://specificity.keegan.st/) first and source order second, any property overwrites later in the document require equal or greater specificity than rules in the middle. A chart with a mountain in the middle today will probably develop more mountains on the right over time - it's a leading indicator of poor maintainability. Pairing this tool with one that tells you the line number of offenders would help in identifying areas in need of refactor.

Total vs Unique declarations reveals opportunities for reusable OOCSS-type classes (which itself can be difficult to do in a stylesheet full of specificity mountains).

The colors aren't terribly useful without a histogram and some of the other stats do seem a bit superfluous, but they may just need someone more experienced than I to draw the right conclusions.
For women who also want to have children at the same time as co-founding a startup, I think it's important not to underestimate how difficult this is.

When my wife was first breastfeeding I timed how long she spent breastfeeding and changing nappies and bathing the young baby. It was LITERALLY over 9 hours per day (timed to the minute). To think that it's possible to ALSO run a startup at the same time is in my opinion crazy. With older children it's a lot easier but still difficult.

I have several female friends who are also successful entrepreneurs. Some seem to make it work with their family life, but my experience is with most that they have a very hard time and that it often devastates their family life and relationships.

So yes there examples of women who run a company and also have young children, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule.

For women who do not want to have children, or who are not going to have children for many years in the future, no issue.
> The result is a drive that exerts an intermittent net force in one direction. [...] Nor does it violate the principle of conservation of energy, because the system requires power for its operation.

Well, you actually can't do that. In special relativity when you change of reference frame, the momentum and energy mixes. If you break the momentum conservation in one reference frame, then you break the momentum conservation and the energy conservation in almost all the other reference frames.

If you do the experiment on Earth and in that reference frame the energy is conserved, then the astronauts from the ISS will see that the energy is not conserved, if Elon go to to Mars he will see that the energy is not conserved, even the people on the other side of the Earth will see that the energy is not conserved.

If you put two of these devices in opposite orientations in the opposite sides of a spinning carrousel (and assume that the angular velocity of the carrousel is small enough to ignore it in the calculations) you will see that each of the devices gain some energy and you can harvest it.
Once you've gone through it all, it doesn't really matter too much whether you started at 12 or 18. But if you start programming when you're 18, and you get stuck, it's much easier to decide to drop out. And women drop out of tech at higher rates than men.. everywhere. Women are more likely to drop out of CS in college. Women are more likely to pursue a non-technical career even if they had spent four years working on a technical degree. Women are more likely to leave tech after they have been working in tech for an extended period of time.

It's also great for bragging and building your technical credibility so your peers will respect you. I have had classmates say to my face, "maybe computer science isn't for you because you don't understand X" and the most satisfying response I've found to that is saying something among the lines of "my mom is a software engineer and I've been building websites since I was 9"
I thought at first you were trying to say he was a meth addict :P
The most interesting entry I've found in the thread:

> Being a former employee, I took a look at the list as I know what files/documents I gave SPE regarding immigration. The filenames check out, this is absolutely not a bogus list. If there's data to go with the actual filenames, then it includes marriage certificates, school transcripts, every personal bit of information that goes into greed card appllications, scans of permanent residence cards. It may not be the biggest breach in history in terms of the number of people it affects, but for those of us with personal data in there, I can't help but think we're pretty screwed if all of those documents see the light of day.
Well, then everyone else who has gone with SO as a forum solution is SOL. Err, so to speak.
>Wow, isn't it remarkable that some people actually believe this stuff?

It's called a strawman argument for a reason. No one (or, at most, a negligibly small group) believes this stuff. You're laughing at an imaginary dunce.
The best thing you've ever done, Bill! Thank you.
Why Japanese Web Design Is Not So Different
I had the same problem. Requiring users to modify their clicking habits seems excessively onerous -- especially to "prove you're not a bot." The fact that you had to explain to me why a bloody web button didn't work proves the point; it's like throwing out the baby w/ the bathwater.
Phabricator does have code hosting, and the Phabricator master repository is self-hosted on Phabricator and mirrored to GitHub.

We link to GitHub because they have more infrastructure than we do for handling heavy read loads.
By definition, a saturated market is one where the product is found everywhere in the market. I don't know if you mean to say that what you are building is already found in a lot of applications, or whether there are some major players who have a stronghold on the market you want to enter...?

And you are correct, having a lower price is not a USP.
A Persuasive Chart Showing How Persuasive Charts Are
When he's complaining about a disease with no name, it might be worthwhile to provide a bit more medical background about the progress of his illness. Like many 'woe is me' stories on the internet, this left me with a lot more questions than answers and reading it ultimately proved to be a waste of my time. I feel sorry for the author but found his account of problems too incoherent to puzzle out, apart from the fact that he feels terrible and can only work about 30 hours in a good week. Maybe he needs to apply for disability and spend his limited uptime working on small-scale games rather than big commercial ones involving massive workloads and crunch time etc.
37 Tips for Interviewing a tech company
Huh? Android uses the Linux kernel...
Bias, what about bias? I've always wondered if my software license should contain a thrid-party arbitration, and I've always chosen not to, because I have no control on the arbitration's neutrality.

They could charge customers a fee for settling "in favor of", or settle based on their membership time or random dice, and it would still be enforceable in court.

Note that my business is located in France so a US arbitrator could have a national preference for arbitraging in favor of a US citizen, and there would be nothing illegal in that.
I totally agree with this philosophy. It sounds especially great on paper. However, while in practice, adherence to the module pattern can become quite annoying for very small modules.
Small modules usage throughout a project can change very quickly, because of this one may find themselves repeatedly adding a removing utility modules at a multiple times a day. Small breaks to npm install or remove small modules throughout your day can lead to a lot of wasted time (since it breaks your programming focus). Also, remembering which small module you used can be difficult (bc there may be many).
I think there are pro's and con's to each strategy..
IMO I think the micro libraries are an exception to the rule, where grouping them together can be beneficial to developers.
But since I have a reply link available, I would like to point out that tptacek reminds me of Warren Buffet. A 0.01% er. He is at the top of his profession, and has nothing to lose by promoting such populist causes as feminism. Do you remember Ross Perot, and the "giant sucking sound"? Well, it happened.

Did it affect the very rich, such as Al Gore? No. If half of all programming jobs are given on an affirmative action basis, to women, how will Mr tptacek be affected?

Positively, of course! His distance from the hoi polloi will have increased.

Does he speak for you, the average HN reader? Of course not. You will have to put up with a flood of "me too" girlz competing for your jobs, but that's just the sacrifice you will have to make to realize the promised egalitarian utopia.

Suck it up, boys!
Yeah, fair enough. Good on you for linking your own cringey post. I think a lot of developers have those early cringe moments, especially if they were young when they started.

As far as disruption, it did occur to me later that somebody may be getting notification emails about these comments. But it's not too bad, as I assume they could just send the emails to /dev/null, since Github is not the official host of git. (As a tangential note, I sort of wish Github would handle this better. So many Github-mirrored projects end up with something like "don't submit pull requests or open issues here, they will be ignored" in their repo description.)
Government should create ISP's to encourage them to lower their prices?

I'll take Comcast's terrible pricing and service. Give me some of my taxes back. If me and a few buddies want to start an ISP then that's on us.
> We are still dismantling many of these ideas

Aside from a general political war on science from a certain faction in general (and not specifically on social science), I don't see dismantling of any of the ideas of science being applied in these domains. On the contrary, I see increased sharing of tools, mechanisms, and ideas between mathematics (including, e.g., computer sciences), the social sciences, the life sciences, the physical sciences.

There might be a rejection that Marx's work is good (or even methodologically valid) science -- but there was plenty of that from Marx's contemporaries, too. But there certainly is not a general rejection that the subject matter that Marx studied is amenable to scientific investigation.
"publishers should work for free. plonk"

We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free.

As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced, not that the prices should be zero, as you somehow concluded.

"Go publish it on your blog."

See, I've actually done that. I can tell you what happens. A large subset of people don't believe something has been published unless it's in the scientific literature. People end up writing papers which say things like "the first comparison between X and Y". I write to them pointing out several previous blog publications which report the analysis, to be told that they knew about one of them, but didn't consider it sufficiently academic to count as a real publication.

Publishers make their profits because a lot of people, including those who hire or fund academics, believe that a publisher's imprimatur is essential to being a publication.

This is not completely invalid. Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals.

So if you publish on your blog, it's not likely that people will know about your work.

If you want to advance career in science that has a strong academic orientation, then it's very hard to do so by only publishing blog posts.

Therefore, if you don't like it, change the system. Which is what this debate has been about for the last 15+ years.
This looks great. In case anyone missed it, there is a link in the sidebar to download the book for free.
I've failed to pass the Google phone screen three times.Could I get blacklisted?
I've had three interviews with google, and I've never made it past the phone screen stage. My problem is I always get really psyched out when I'm talking to google- I really want the job, and it makes me behave in an visibly nervous manner over the phone. Socially, I'm not the best at interviewing for jobs I really want - its something I'm working on.

Does google blacklist people for repeated failure? I know they keep files on people because a strong interview can help you get re-interviewed. Can repeated failure to pass the first phone screen rule me out forever?
No, I think only the masters of the ivory towers and those with an eye for the lucrative should decide what is printed.
There's a lot that's wrong in here, but one thing that absolutely needs to be called out:

...things like Xen and VMware are not really new. IBM invented virtualization back in the middle ages

Actually and in fact, what VMware did was new -- to the point that prior to this work, many reasonable people believed that x86 couldn't be virtualized without unacceptable performance penalty. Please read Keith and Ole's excellent ASPLOS paper[1] for an in-depth discussion of the novelty -- and the citation for this technology when it won the ACM Software Systems Award[2]. If you insist that VMware's binary translation work wasn't novel, please be specific about how these peer-reviewed bodies got it wrong.

[1] https://www.vmware.com/pdf/asplos235_adams.pdf

[2] http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/bugnion_3886645.cfm
I enjoy reading what and how you write. Which is why I enjoy HN.

<< I should be largely invisible to the enforcer class.

The genie is out of the bottle. My health suffers if I think and express myself like you just did, although very eloquently. My roots are academic but my current state is prole. (ever read Fussell's Class?" [1] It is WONDERFUL!)

<< far more threatening to me than individual criminals.

I disagree. If you ever lose a relative to a gun or a drunk or cocaine, then storing a googol of data on me is never as threatening.

<< Any tool that can be used for legitimate police work can also be used for political oppression.

Maybe because I am political only one day of the year (or 2, depending), the day I vote, I do not feel oppressed.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/d...
Vladimir Voevodsky may feel that way, but we were talking about Keith Devlin.

To answer gre's question, 1994 is the year Devlin cites a major breakthrough in the four color problem, in the very link that gre cited as an example of Devlin's lack of enthusiasm about machine checked proofs.

There are plenty of good reasons to mistrust machines when it comes to mathematical proofs, and mathematicians have been correct in their skepticism. Most of the work in Univalent Foundations has been directly aimed at addressing that skepticism. Optimism from its proponents in the 2010s is just as valid as the skepticism in the 70s and 90s.

And I mean just as valid in a very specific way; specifically in the spirit of the originally linked Devlin post published today.
Amazon might not be the best example - loading http://cssstats.com/stats?url=http%3A%2F%2Famazon.com#specif... multiple times has generated multiple, very different graphs. I wonder if the CSSStats bot has been thrown into more than one A/B experiments.
Thanks, huge improvement! Was using Chrome in Windows 7, on a rather old Dell monitor at work. After working on WCAG 2.0 compliance on my own sites I have ironically gotten more sensitive to poor contrast ratios everywhere.
Wearable Ads
Interesting. What I don't get from this analysis or the one by Symantec is how this rootkit is able to install kernel drivers on 64-bit Windows with driver signing enabled. Is this using a new vulnerability to do so? An existing one? Did the GCHQ/NSA managed to get their hands on the keys necessary to sign Windows drivers? Each scenario has implications for code signing as a security technique...