skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently helped organize a conference.

Since it is apparently not obvious to many people, I'd just like to point out that amongst conference organizers, it is an extremely common belief that your primary responsibility is to deliver a good conference experience to your conference-goers. This is not just a belief StrangeLoop holds -- it is a belief that many beloved tech conferences have (e.g., PyCon), and if you think this can't happen at your conference, you are likely in for a surprise when/if something rough happens to that venue.

In fact, this claim is stronger than you might think. This belief is prominently reflected in pretty much every decision every conference makes. People choose codes of conduct to deliberately exclude some people and certain behavior. They make you "apply" to go to their conferences so that they can hand-pick attendees to fit whatever criteria they have for their crowds (e.g., xoxo). People select talks and their speakers to fit profiles they want.

And so on.

I can name on my hand the number of people I've met who organize conferences, who believe their job is to provide a fair platform ideas. It's just not the way people seem to think.
You shouldn't make it sound like dumb luck. It's very easy to look up salary statistics for various university programs, and things didn't usually change drastically in the four or so years it takes to get the degree.
My approach is the following:
1. Learn to code
2. Build the prototype
3. Try to sell the prototype to verify the market
4. Bootstrap the business
5. Get the business going then people (co-founder, investor,etc...) will show up
I gave a presentation on "how to find a co-founder" several times. Guess what: by slide 2, I give away the answer: the best co-founder is someone you already worked with. Not helpful? That's the truth.

Instead of trying to find a co-founder quickly, find a good contributor to your project. They may grow into becoming a co-founder over time, or they may "just" be your first employee. No one can really tell until time passes. So give it time, resist labels, and keep making progress.

From the perspective of the potential co-founder, the co-founder title is earned. "Be so good they can't ignore you" is exactly the mantra you want to become a co-founder. Make your contribution to the startup so significant that everyone will think of you as one of the founders.

Don't be that "paper co-founder" who negotiated the title but never put in the effort.
Algorithms of the Mind
Those calling for his removal from the conference cited this six-year-old blog post about Thomas Carlyle as their only specific complaint.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car...
Indeed. This is what's led to the skyrocketing costs of college degrees, the irrational belief that without one you're financially doomed. So any degree is presumed to be better than not having a degree, which is pure bunk. So everyone "knows" you have to get a degree, no matter what.

Meanwhile kids aren't told about other options or what the reality is about degrees. Trades pay very well, different degrees have a much higher likelihood of getting you a job or a better paying job, and of course only having a degree is no guarantee of even getting a job at all.

We need to reset expectations so kids don't get sucked in by the marketing machine that is today's higher education. Your masters degree in foreign languages does not guarantee you a job. Do your research and understand, really brutally understand the field you are trying to get work in. Don't listen to the hype, ask normal people in that field how they got that job and be skeptical. Find out how many people get degrees in that field annually, and how many new hits exist in that field. You might be surprised to find out it's a small field that simply doesn't support all the graduates produced, or that a degree alone won't get you that dream job.
> There are people who are screwed by the system, and there are also people who just screw themselves.

And there are people who are neither, such as myself.

I don't think that the discussion about how crappy our system is and how to fix it should be owned by any one of these groups. Maybe the article's author is the not the poster child for financial responsibility, but that doesn't make his arguments about the broken state of our system any less valid.
A good reminder of the 2013 PyCon fiasco encrusted within some of the most polite extremely extreme reactionary conservatism that I have read in recent times. Harks back to the good old days of William F. Buckley and the old days of the National Review.

Unfortunately, the author is more interested in the manifestation/justification of his own values (arch politeness; nihilistic stoicism; the existence of a strictly bipolar culture war between noble, truthful conservatives and misguided communists who are living a lie) than the topic at hand, so we don't get to hear as much of his thinking on the matter as we might like to.

He points out that there are tactical and strategic dimensions to this sort of incident, and that there there are individuals and groups who actively pursue this kind of power; he correctly, I think, identifies this as a general problem that needs to be dealt with more determinedly and in a more professional manner than "now look, we don't want no trouble, here..."

However, he gets bogged down in a threat analysis that really only needed to go as far as the word "careers." There are indeed individuals for whom this sort of disputation is a career, or at least vocation, regardless of how cynical or innocent their intentions may be. One needs to fear professional revolutionaries; an inquiry into the nature of the revolution misses the point.

I vaguely recall the name Mencius Moldbug as being that of an absolute loon; he may well believe a great many things that are directly or by consequence very ugly. The author is likewise someone I would (having read a few of his essays) personally describe as deluded. However, I think that someone needs to make the argument that this sort of influence-leveraging is ethically wrong. It is disappointing that the author explicitly shrugs off the notion... the truth, or ethics, or whatever is just and good in his mind: these are matters internal to conservatism, it would seem.

I am not sure that it is, in fact ethically wrong. I don't know. But I think it needs explicit, public justification on the part of at least a few of those "large number of current and former speakers" who allegedly put such widespread pressure on the conference organizers. Such a thing requires justification in every case, as does all public censure, for the same reasons that (for instance) a system of laws ought require justification for a penalty: otherwise, the ability to coordinate and provoke censure becomes a means to power and an end in itself.
Analogies, to be useful, should reveal internal consistencies between the things being related by analogy. If there are no consistencies between the items in the analogy then the analogy is worse than useless.
Personally I think the keyboard, and how people are often trained to type, has a lot to do with it. I've seen many who type with what looks like far more force than necessary, and it could be related to the fact that a lot of keyboards require high actuation forces and have a sharp force-profile. That makes the hands tense, which reduces accuracy and speed, and the instinctive reaction is to stiffen the hands even more, making it worse. If you want to type faster, you should relax.

Typing shouldn't hurt, and even when I'm typing really quickly (I average in the 140-150wpm range, with bursts over 200) my fingers feel like they're bouncing over the keys instead of being forced into pecking at them. Use the lowest amount of force that just actuates the keys, and let the key push the finger back up. Try finding a keyboard with a lighter, bouncier/softer force profile.
How so? It sounds to me like it would incentivize going to university and choosing a degree regardless of the likelihood of that degree being a financially wise decision in the long term.
You're not going to find a better way than founderdating (already established), LinkedIn (already established), and networking events in person.

You're not going to tick off some company-optimized checklist and magically fall into the lap of your perfect co founder.

People work for months or even years with a co founder only to realize they aren't a match.

You even said it yourself:

>I want to meet a CTO. However, instead of rushing the process I am simply looking to meet people as determined to build a company as myself.

Networking events, Linkedin, Founderdating, Angel.co etc. Your facebook group is tiers worse than the above listings so I'm not sure why you posted at all if your "solution" is a facebook group.

Sorry to be a dick but this doesn't remotely solve the problem. You just made Facebook group #1857126126.
The credits makes people think 'Is this article worth sending to my kindle? It costs money to do so. Maybe I should just read it?', that adds loads of friction and poor UX.

But the OP was experimenting, so I guess that's all good :)
But what does any of that have to do with a talk on urbit?
There is no such a thing as "technical co-founder". A developer can start and test a project faster alone. Smart "business" guys with money sometimes meet with someone that could do it alone and find a way to share the ride. If you want to develop something, I'd suggest you to learn how to develop. Or spend enough money to hire someone to do so. But for free, as a "co-founder", it'll always be hard and when it happens, usually it don't last long. And the fault is on the "business" side. Technology is not about business. If you start a free/open source project with a great purpose, you'll find tons of developers willing to help your endeavour.
Similarly, if Jessitron (singling her out solely because she wrote a really good blog post today [1]) wants to talk about microservices in clojure, and folks want to keep her out because of her views on women in technology, you are ok with that also?

Let me also emphasize that no one disputes that strangeloop has the legal right to do this. The discussion is simply over whether the strangeloop organizers are a bunch of anti-intellectuals who deserve to be in the spotlight for their decisions.

[1] http://blog.jessitron.com/2015/06/ultratestable-coding-style...
I am not suggesting that racists (however defined) be invited to advocate racism to people who find that repugnant. I'm suggesting that that racism not disqualify them in other matters.

You are quite correct that people can boycott or pressure for no-platform if they want to. Who on earth would benefit from forced contact? What I'm suggesting is that people decide not to do that. Further, that when that does happen, those who disagree speak up about it.
He has multiple accounts. I don't think that's his main.
Why is a co-founder needed? What are you expecting a co-founder to bring that an employee won't? Is the real question here "how do I find someone with the needed skills, willing to work for peanuts in exchange for shares in the new business?"
You're taxed on the balance as income. It's easier to negotiate with the IRS, though.
I'm tempted to just for laughs, but I'm not sure they ship to Canada.
The advocatus diaboli is obliged no apology (nor the promotor fidei for that matter), being (ideally) merely hypothetical, to be spun-up and shut down as dialectic requires. However, do note that there is a difference between political divisions existing, and political divisions having effects beyond the groups of their self-identified constituents. The former, like the poor, will always be with us [0], differing only in visibilty. But, if visibility is a no-op, meaningless to the res publica's execution of policy, then is not the venom neutralized? We currently live in a world of political polarization, but worse, one's affinity towards those poles has material impact on one's life. Surrender Voice, NVFE claims, let like associate with like via Exit, and never be troubled by politics again.

[0] Until humans are so radically different that neither remains.
Search for "Mencius Moldbug", but be warned: Moldbug, his supporters, and his detractors are all sorely in need of aggressive editing. If you can find a TL;DR less than a single-spaced page, please link it because I can't even...
Then we will use a different random string!
"In the nineteen-nineties, during the media panic over “crack babies,” he was among a number of scientists who questioned whether the danger of cocaine exposure in utero was being overstated. (Levitt spent two decades examining the brains of rabbit mothers and their offspring that were dosed with the drug, and says that the alarm was “an exaggeration.”"

I been telling people that for years, but people get super defensive and wont even consider that's a possibility.
I wonder how many people get that reference ...

import md5
answer = '...'
h=md5.new(answer)
h.hexdigest()

'0c9fc7b0723925183380b55e348462a9'
Umm, he was quoting "and free massages after lunch?"
Not a typo :-)
This is very true. As much as I understand that people need to be responsible for their own decisions, there are also unknown unknowns. If the message one receives is constantly: get a degree, it doesn't matter what, employers like to see the stick to it ness, etc. (the messages I got growing up) how are you supposed to know you are REALLY supposed to discard that bombardment and everyone has it wrong about plumbing? Some are reckless, some are just following the instructions despite their reservations.
Why is that more annoying? Do you really expect people to give out what they themselves believe to be bad advice, and is so, is that really desirable?
The IEEE-CS/ACM jointly publish one: http://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics

It doesn't seem that different from other professional codes.
Ask HN: How big does my portfolio have to be to get a job?
Currently I am applying for a job, I am curious as to how big my portfolio have to be to get a programming job. I am hoping to get a job as a front end developer. In my portfolio I have two games, one canvas application and a website. The website is a text editor. You create an account, then you can edit and create text document, and view them. My question is, are these good enough to get use as my portfolio and will they get me a job?
Predictions on JavaScript in the next 12 months
Absolutely. I was devastated when I realized my life-long expectation of an academic career would have to be deferred or cancelled for financial reasons. I was furious that others around me seemed subject to no such restriction - including those I felt were less suited to or deserving of such a position. We do set kids up for failure by focusing so much on the benefits of college, while shrugging off the costs and risks. It's easy to understand how someone in an emotional turmoil like mine might see all of this and convince themselves that they owe nothing to a fraud.

We do need to address the ways in which government supports lenders' predatory behaviors, while educational institutions at all levels push unprepared barely-adults into the trap. Education prior to college must include education about student loans and the dangers thereof. After all, there are minimum educational requirements for all other subjects. Why not this one?
There are extremely good game-theoretic reasons to support a policy of allowing full debate on ideas and zero tolerance on attacking the person holding the idea.

Specifically, I'm imagining a degenerate case where there's a norm of killing people who do X, as well as people who don't kill people who do X, as well as people who advocate making the anti-X policy more lenient.

My point is that we can end up in a bad situation that nobody is better off trying to fix. We're arguably in this situation right now with excessive punishment of "sex crimes".
>For me, I want to meet a CTO.

You have to realize that it's harder for a "business" guy to attract a technical cofounder rather than for a programmer whiz to attract a business guy. It's definitely a handicap. The programmer can build something and that can jumpstart the cascade of people (including business people) to join the cause.

As a non-tech person, what do you offer potential tech cofounders? If you give off vibes that "I'm the idea man!" or "I'm the guy with the big vision!", it will not impress quality programmers.

Therefore, you have to play up your strengths if you have notable ones. For example, perhaps you can call up some friends & family and raise $750,000 in cash to launch your product idea. A lot of programmers don't have the contacts to raise funds like that. Or maybe you want to create a digital music distribution website and you have Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Lady Gaga's personal cell phone #s on your speed dial as potential first wave of customers. Again, the typical programmer isn't going to have social connections like that.
That’s how it is for dictators, too. They look at the world and make decisions designed to to optimize for the outcomes the desire, without compromising their values.

Let’s say that people on HN decide that they don’t want to attend any conference that has a Code of Conduct, because that interferes with their “right to free speech.”

If a conference organizer decides that HN is enough of a market that they tear up their CoC, that’s their decision. We don’t say that somehow, they have less free will because of the actions of HN. Their options aren’t limited. They chose to do something that involved HN.

If Alex doesn’t like this kind of controversy, Alex can stop running conferences. Sure there are actions by all sorts of players in a complex world, but the buck for every decision stops somewhere, and in this case, it stops with Alex.
Depending, JSBlock is another one.
A good standardized relational model format would be cool, and I'm sure such formats exist. Feels like we could do better than spitting out randomly (I.e per- tool) formatted data with so-so encoding support!

A sequence of tables in csv with decent encoding support would go a long way towards a good machine parseable relational text output.

It's really two separate discussions though: what is s good input/output format for Unix-like tools, and what makes a good format for a config file.
I think articles discuses reactivity and Virtual DOM based implementations. Didn't blaze move away from virtual-dom diffing?
There are regulations that say the public service forgiveness (10 year) is not taxable income. The ordinary forgiveness (20 year) is taxable under current law, but IBR/PAYE hasn't been around long enough for anyone to have triggered it yet. There are proposals to exempt it.
I loved the dual sense of "markup" here.
The great thing about technology is you can always make your own space. You can have a niche website — or other technological forum — that is a bastion of iconoclastic freethinkers.

The problem that you're experiencing is that the mainstream public is now very much using technology. That means the average opinions expressed on the web on the internet have become much more mainstream. Which, pretty much by definition, means the average opinion has become much more hostile to iconoclastic thoughts.
Saturday is still the day on which God rested in the Christian calendar. The significance of Sunday comes from Jesus' resurrection. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that Sunday came to be treated as a "rest day" and therefore conflated with the idea of a "Sabbath" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%27s_Day ). Even then, Sunday was generally termed the "first day" -- note that "Seventh Day Adventists" hold their religious services on Saturday.
Regarding 'the selfish gene', I still think that the concept that the gene is the unit of evolution and the resulting organism is just its proxy, is one of the greatest insights since Darwin.
I'd be really interested by a good rain hat : something that protects my glasses from rain (the one to invent really efficient anti-rain / fog glasses will be rich) and that dampen the noise of the rain when it falls on the hat.

It should not look like an alien spaceship though and I should be able to buy it on a website that was not made with Frontpage 97 ;-)
It's also interesting to note that access to even "financial sense" for the poor, doesn't exist.
Stanford speed dating research finds what makes couples 'click'
But he doesn't just make an argument about how broken the system is. He also makes an argument for what people should do in response. It's an illegal, questionably moral, and quite often risky response. That's the part that's wrong, and in advocating for the second part he undermines any effort to do anything about the first part.
It would be fine to ban Curtis if his talk was about his politics. It would be fine to ban him if he did not agree to abide by the code of conduct. The conference obviously does not owe him a platform to discuss his politics.

But his talk was about Urbit, not about his politics, and Urbit is a genuinely fascinating piece of technology. Even if the project fails, by studying it, I have learned a lot of ideas that I have applied to my own programming.

So there are two big issues with the ban. First, Alex made the conference worse for all those who cared about technology and not politics. Second, he's given the PC-police a scalp. This will make it much harder for anyone to write good-faith but politically incorrect critiques even under a pseudonym, for fear that it could harm career prospects in the future. And how are we supposed to correct problems in society if we cannot talk honestly about them? Most solutions to our problems are outside the Overton window - if they weren't we would have solved the problems already.

Now maybe Alex wishes to cater to the more thin-skinned in his audience, rather than the technologists. That his prerogative.

But I hope that other conference organizers do not follow suit, and I hope that true technologists in turn shun StrangeLoop for conferences that care about technology first, and instead attend conferences that refuse to ban innovators who haven't violated the code of conduct.