skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't tell the gender of many people in opensource unless they use a username that indicates their gender. Looking at #thrift right now (a project I contribute to). I see 40 people not counting the channel bots. I count only 6 nicknames that suggest that they are likely to be men because they begin with names that are typically male names. The same is true for a lot of the github usernames I see. I wonder how of this self reporting by women who say they have trouble contributing because they are women is actual gender discrimination and how much is due to people who have grown accustomed to committing the fundamental attribution error [0] on themselves, instead of applying the rule of parsimony [1] and looking for alternative explanations that might better explain their difficulties.

It's also important to apply Hanlon's Razor [2], "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.". Sometimes that stupidity (or ignorance) is the person rejecting your contributions, but it could also be your own stupidity (or ignorance). I have found that most people who try to contribute to open-source and fail have never read esr's classic "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way" [3]

If you eliminate all identifier's of gender by using non-gendered handles and initials for your first name in your git config, you can safely look for other explanations for your difficulties contributing to open-source besides your gender. It's called applying the scientific method. If you hypothesis is "I'm having trouble contributing to open-source because of my gender", you should obfuscate your gender in your contributions to control for that variable. Once you eliminate it as a possible confounding factor, you're free to come up with alternative hypotheses for your difficulties.

Personally, I don't have my name, gender, or location on my github profile. It's a community for contributing code, so all such metadata is irrelevant. I'm genuinely curious what percentage of github users cannot be determined to be male or female (which is a figure the author did not cite).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

[3] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
I consider the Kinesis to be the keyboard that saved my career. Terrible tendinitis set in during my last year of college in 1998. Keyboards were generally terrible, and I'd started using a Microsoft Natural, which is probably the worst keyboard ever made.

At my first job out of school, I'd drive my stickshift car home and nearly cry from the pain. It was really awful. I got into physical therapy, and started looking into better keyboard options. I tried the Kinesis Maxim first, since it wasn't too "weird". It was a big step up. I later tried the Classic (same style as the current Advantage) and never looked back.

Cons: horrible rubbery function keys.

Pros: literally everything else. The layout is, in my opinion, dramatically superior to the classic 104-key layout. It makes more use of your thumbs. It places the arrow keys where you can reach them without moving your hands from the home-row position.

I always keep a spare on hand and generally loan it out to friends and coworkers to try. I'd say there's been about a 50% adoption rate. Some people just can't get over the initial hump of learning how to use the thumb keys. The ones that buy a Kinesis are extremely happy with it.

By the way, the keyboards last for years. I've had a few keyswitches go bad (most likely due to my improper 'cleaning' attempts), but they can be replaced if you know how to use a soldering iron. Kinesis has even sent me several replacement keyswitches free of charge. They've got great customer service.

Good keyboards, chairs, and monitors are expensive, but in my opinion the interface between you and your computer deserves high priority on the expenditure list.
Hey @aprilzero what was the backend stack you went with to build something like this? Just curious :)
It isn't about being untrustworthy: I don't use Facebook, I use many other things but not Facebook. If he has the code to handle Facebook logins, he has the code to handle Google logins as well.
Even the Dragon Age games had issues. The first one had "HAY BUY THE DRM" plugs in incredibly irritating spots. The second one had like three maps, which made playing a lot less fun than it should have been.
I don't have a Facebook account.
Women flocking to statistics, the newly hot, high-tech field of data science
Good Saas, but obviously not graph stylish friendly
An argument could probably be made that it worked fairly well in subduing East Germany after WWII.
Good copy takes into account who it addresses. Obviously someone who nows how to estimate what "firewall" means in an IT context will have a rough idea as to what a Dropbox is.
Sorry about that. I've updated it with a slowed down version :)
versus making native speakers an active and equal part of the actual decision-making process.

As I explained, native speakers are the primary decision makers, and not just any native speakers but whoever the native speakers choose as their own top, native experts when they establish their own national standard. For living, natural languages, you don't get characters into Unicode by buying a seat on the committee and voting for them. You do it by getting those characters into a national standard created by the native-speaking authorities.

So, I repeat: What national standard have your native-speaking authorities created that reflects the choices you claim all native speakers would naturally make if only the foreign oppressors would listen to them? If your answer is that the national standards differ from what you want, then you are blaming the Unicode Technical Committee for refusing to override the native speakers' chosen authorities and claiming this constitutes abuse of native Bengali speakers by a bunch of "mostly white men".
They were low status jobs because they were data entry positions. I mention this elsewhere in the thread but the definition of "programmer" changed over time from someone who enters the program into a computer (initially through punch cards) to someone who designs the actual software the computer runs.
My mother used a cold cap when undergoing chemo during treatment for breast cancer. She kept her hair, although it thinned quite a bit, throughout treatment. She read about it extensively, understood that it is not as well accepted in the US, that it could carry additional risks, but the dignity (and hair!) that she retained during treatment was tremendous. I won't go into too many details, but I will say that she went through treatment and has gone more than two years without any reappearances of anything. She both caught it early enough (of course key) and had access to some of the best doctors available at Sloan Kettering.
We're talking victimless, not harmless. With drugs, there is no victim, because the person making the purchase is making a conscious choice to buy something to put into their body. They are well aware of the effects and risks.

Contrarily, identity theft is clearly not victimless. A person's credit card or social security number is taken from them without their knowledge or consent so that it can be sold.

To go on an anti-drug tirade here when your pedantry isn't even correct does no one any good. All you're doing is parroting and reinforcing negative drug stereotypes. You wouldn't be doing so if those sentiments weren't pushed on you since before you could even comprehend them.
Wow great catch on the the fact that any system that results in necessary artists being payed less, simply won't happen if Spotify wants to continue existing. Really applies to the entire scope of the article and not just the comment you replied to.
Hmm, here's the tweet that caused the response, might be useful if you want to put pressure on a different organization in the future:
https://twitter.com/funnymonkey/status/518554007069941761
What I mean by "necessary" is "necessary to a child, for his day-to-day life." Very often kids pick up that Mom and Dad understand (at least to some extent) the local language too and then stop picking up whatever the second language is.

Anyway, at least Spanish people are speaking one of the world's most widely used languages... I think the top four are Chinese, French, Spanish, and English, but don't quote me on it.
I've been casually following the same issues for a few years and this is a good summary.
When you say personal do you mean unrelated to your work?
Bryan Sykes has written a series of popular science books about these kinds of genetic discoveries. Very interesting.
That should definitely not happen. Does that consistently happen when you click that link?
> because who would do that to their own?

Well, as far as we know, 100% of all species who can do it, will do it.
I'll make sure to tell it to my son (and my wife!) so he learns things the proper way ;-)
Why does every data science infrastructure provider want to be full stack? I really don't want to use an online IDE, I really don't want to be locked into one particular way of distributing workloads, I really don't want to move my code from GitHub. All of the individual components look great, but the all-or-nothing proposition is really off-putting.
Jordan's 'I'm back' fax, 20 years later
ah... priorities.
> I also forgot to account for daylight savings time in which a day can have 25 hours.

Fortunately, the 25-hour day is in November, which is only a 30-day month. So you're okay on that front.
British Isles mapped out by genetic ancestry
Under Legal Threat from Atari, Jeff Minter Cancels TxK
Nobody is seriously going to fork this and create their own port of MSBuild, possibly one of the most mocked and reviled parts of the .NET ecosystem. I do however congratulate the ground level MS staffers on the effort it likely took to convice the Risk and Legal departments that open sourcing something like this won't make their business fail. That must have been trying.
Four Reasons to not use try/catch
I think Simcity came around in the same era where everything EA did was online, for no reason. It's like the execs said 'online social games are killing us, we need all of our games to be online and social' and wouldn't sign off on a project without those two check boxes.

Need for Speed: Rivals was similar. It was a neat concept, but it revolved entirely around online play that was generally just completely terrible. You get dumped in a map with 1-7 other people, and then you drive around aimlessly hoping that you eventually run into them, which you don't. In the meantime, you're listening to every idiot with a Playstation Camera screaming at their moms for another PB&J, or some jackass swearing the entire time because he thinks he's alone in his room, because there's no way to turn off voice chat in the game whatsoever.

Congratulations, your game is both online (but you can't really tell) and social (but it's actually antisocial).

Simcity is the same way. What if you could play online against other people? I mean… with other people. You could build neighbouring towns. Except you're actually building neighbourhoods because realistically sized cities would take too much server resources. And then you can interact with other cities! By buying or selling resources like garbage pickup, recycling, and power.

Except that the servers didn't work, so online only meant offline always. And the social idea was cool, until some jackass dropped into your region and built a zone that was entirely coal power plants and industrial zones, and polluted the whole region. Or built a city with nothing but power plants, provided power to everyone else in the region, then one day bulldozed everything, pulling the rug out from under everyone else and sending their cities into chaos.

I really hope that Cities: Skylines is successful. It already seems like a far more interesting game than any previous Simcity was, and it has a lot more potential as well. I love the idea of being able to ease congestion by 'work from home' incentives, and it would be cool if they (or modders) could implement that.
The crime has to be committed during the present term. The right to impeach the president for crimes committed during the presidency ceases when the term ends (although this law predates the reelection amendment, it is understood a reelected president starts a new term). That's the end of it.

I agree this law has its issues, but this is what's written.

Again, I am not sure the protesters are that representative. It's much harder to generate a positive response from people who are between neutral and satisfied than it is to obtain the same response from people who are dissatisfied. While approval rates are as low as they ever were for Dilma, strong disapproval like this is not unprecedented. Add to that that the reasons for protesting were all over the spectrum: from stronger economic action in the trickle-down doctrine all the way to "we want our dictatorship back". More than 80% of the protesters declared themselves voters for the candidate who lost the election and most of the protesters were white upper urban middle-class professionals.

I live in São Paulo, and, as difficult as it may be to grasp that, I must understand what I see around me is not typical Brazil. I live in a bubble.
No bueno! Any specific PDF file? We only render a small number of pages by default to ensure browsers can handle it :)
If wealth keeps getting concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, coupled with the sexual liberation of women, perhaps we'll see something like this again. 1% of the men enjoying 99% of procreation.
It is not reasonable to talk about the existence of black markets. They existed, they exist, they will exist. I am nearly sure that as an economic and social constructs digital black markets will outlive companies/corporations.

Also your reductio ad absurdum about humans is well, absurd.
I don't think we're working from the same definition of "ad hominem".
This is pretty cool. I made a really basic example, but in doing it, I could imagine playing around with having the colors or orientation change with the data as well. And it might make for cool transitions too. That obviously get way too complicated pretty quickly, but it'd be fun to see what you could come up with that might work.

https://modeanalytics.com/benn/reports/a4515d9b9024
Then how do we evaluate musicians' claims of not being paid fairly?
Used it through an sshserver app for Android, had no troubles doing a full scp -R <phone> <backup> with it.
> We will be adding Linux and Mac support soon (perhaps with your help!) so you can use MSBuild to build the open source .NET projects on your preferred platform.

looks like it
I know both MS and Google have contracts with GH and are paying 6 figure sums annually, but I'd better keep my source confidential.
As father of one I have completely opposite experience.

Children (and sick wife) forced me to stay at home and quit my 9-5 job. Only option was to start working on OSS and turn it into paid job in a few months. We moved from expensive city center, sold car and cut our expenses by 50%.
> 99% of artists would make more money in this model.

You just shifted which number you pulled out of thin air, not the fact that you did so. Do you secretly have Spotify's streams database?
A good (content) marketer would produce content that he thinks his target audience would like.

There is no difference as to why a submitter does submit: the variable we ar talking here is the ability to estimate what is liked by the HN community.

This ability is not necessarily afflicted by the motivation behind producing and submitting content.

The original PG essays are a content marketing program for Y-combinator, for instance, but nobody in the marketed to crowd resents them. Au contraire, PG is hailed as a her (tm) and there is zero wrong with any of that, IMHO.
I spent a lot of time with this thing in my career. I wish I had some nice things to say about it. But I'm glad it is open source.
Everyone might have to be an accredited investor, which the majority would not qualify for. Another potential problem is that companies want to keep their cap tables minimal for regulatory reasons. Also, how does the 10% vote in board decisions?

Also, what if some companies held out. So now 80% of the YC companies are in this hedge fund. Wouldn't the most successful companies disproportionately come from the 20%--the ones who had enough confidence to reject the deal? Would the smart people in the 80% then defect as well, bringing the cabal down to 60%?
Here's another version, enhanced and filtered a bit more:

http://bit.ly/192NjwG
So, let's leave out the insurance question and separate it from the taxi-licence issue. Provided that all cars are insured, how am I putting other people at risk by riding a cheaper unlicensed taxi?
Great answer. Thanks for the insight.
I don't know which deal you are talking about but Buffett likes quick handshake deals because the longer he waits the more likely the seller will retain professional M&A advice and therefore raise the price (to something more fair for the seller).

One of Buffett's proudest achievements was paying pennies on the dollar for an immigrant's bootstrapped furniture business.
Bitcoin: Government to regulate cryptocurrency to avoid money laundering
I once spoke as part of a presentation on how response rates from faxes was way higher than email. (which was absolutely true at the time). Probably because of the novelty of receiving a fax vs an email, but it was something like 5% response from email and 70% response from fax.

This was a mailing list of paying members of a professional association, btw, not junk mail.
Prince of Pseudoscience
And now I can see it, since it was explicitly pointed out. That doesn't make me think it's anything other than visual artifacts as you suggest, or a random bit of coloring.
While I agree, having access to the source of your build tool can be invaluable for debugging odd issues. So while no one will ever want to fork this they may use it as reference and/or for debugging.
"Cropped with contrast added" == "imaged processed until I got to see something I wanted"
The problem with Simcity is that 'traffic' would basically take absolutely any turn that would get them to where they wanted to go. This meant that if you had a gridded layout of large, wide avenues, four-lane primary streets, and two-lane side streets, your traffic will gladly back up for miles outside of town because everyone entering your city is trying to take a two-lane side street to get to their destination, even if it's on an avenue, just because turning onto that side street is the first available option.

They later updated the algorithm, apparently, to do path cost routing, making it far more preferable to take avenues over dirt roads, but until then the only way your city could work at all was to create it entirely out of cul-de-sacs.

There was also an issue with the train service, where, when a commuter train came to an intersection, it would randomly choose which direction to take. This meant that if you had a grid of avenues, some of your sims would be waiting for hours for a train, because the train is bouncing randomly around your downtown instead of dropping anyone off.

Moving to a system where there were literally no intersections at all for your trains was the only way to make your mass transit system a benefit and not a liability.
> So "should not be taken seriously" doesn't sit right with me.

If you're a Japanese citizen, of course you should take them seriously. However, none of us are Japanese citizens. We can afford to not take them seriously because there is quite literally nothing we can do about it.

My claim that they should not be taken seriously is more in the context of our own media. They tend to take what those fringe right-wingers say as representative of the entire country. They do it all the time in fact. You'll hear things like "Japan is racist", they haven't apologized for WW2, or that they're trying to rewrite their history.

No, they're not. None of those things are even remotely true. Their right-wing fringe would like some of those things to happen but they're not even close to being successful in their attempts.

See here for how Japan is actually one of the top 20 least racist countries in the world: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...

And as far as ignoring their war crimes go, their history text books actually the least nationalistic in Asia, and even less nationalistic than Americas. For proof, see this study done by Stanford University: http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a00703/

All that history revisionism nonsense is just that, nonsense. But the fact remains that you have major news organizations reporting the views of these right wingers and portraying them as something that's common in Japan. It's not remotely close to reality. In my experience (from living in Japan for a brief stint), it would be like the BBC interviewing and taking the KKK seriously, then trying to portray America as racist.

It's actually a pretty huge issue that I think needs to be addressed (the way western media portrays "wacky Japan") and I've been thinking about doing a piece on it myself.
Ivy League Admissions Are a Sham: Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper
mods that cannot initiate network connections or the local filesystem are not that much of a concern, but running an arbitrary C# program as your local user to me is a significantly different use-case, I think the steam workshop should integrate a checksum approval process where a user can decide for each individual update if they want to install or not.

I personally have bought skylines and find it great, but I am really wary about downloading mods for it as things stand now unfortunately.
>Lots of people just don't think of financial modeling as a particularly interesting or beautiful area of math

I kind of surprised how those things are frequently mixed together. The math is a science while various industry modelling is an application of the known/established tools/skills. It is like designing a drill vs. actually drilling a hole. (note: i have an MS in Math (3.8 GPA) from one of the top Russian schools)
Warren Buffett Explains His Cozy Embrace
the open command and pbcopy/pbpaste are great tools if you're going to use the terminal for a lot of stuff
I thought of a kind of a 'structural explotation', i.e a big corporation & customer vs. an individual driver. He/she has almost no defence if e.g. the rating is bad. If you need the money, you don't have the option to just jump ship. Of course I like people do their work well but this immediate consequences is not good and not social, there should be some shelter, like e.g. unions, a taxi company with collegues etc.

Government regulates a lot of things and if sensibly done, this is imho a good thing and protects the citiziens. A completely deregulated taxi industry would probably bring a lot of overcrowding, put a lot of stress to the drivers and their salaries would fall even lower (they are not high (in Berlin)).

I hope that I'm not wrong, but I've never heard that here in Germany we have something like $700 000 taxi medaillons as in New York. With such conditions a deregulation is probably a good thing, but here?
Having your stupid choices being pointed out to you is a good thing.

Having this done in an encouraging, positive fashion which will keep you contributing in the future is a good thing.

Having this done in a way which is going to make you feel bad, feel bad about the project, and write off the leadership as a bunch of a-holes is a bad thing, because then you'll stop contributing.
Ellen Pao's lawyer just served Facebook with a gender discrimination suit
I have to configure ssh servers so that putty is able to connect, so I can't follow best practices. Why don't the people working in this area help the putty project with support for the latest stuff?