News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

sadfaceunread

Fully agreed. That sounds like very bad behavior.
This really isn't that surprising. It could also be explained largely by self selection. If one believes that top schools by prestige also attract the top students, and that these schools are reasonable efficient at selecting among these applicants we'd expect a strongly one sided distribution of talent.

If the top 10 institutions have the vast majority of the top 1% of grad students, I'd expect they produce the vast majority of professors.

Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses on Thursday February 12, 2015 @05:58PM (#9041918)
So what about any charitable effort that discriminates on the basis of a protected class. If you can't do something for free to help one group without excluding some others no charity would be possible. Should MIT/Harvard intentionally avoid captioning? No. Should the government force them to use CCing? Hell no.
Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses on Thursday February 12, 2015 @04:50PM (#9041621)
Penn&Teller covered the ADA in this episode of their TV Series Bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfo979TDaY . The sue first model of accessibility is sickening especially in this case.
Re:Deleting any Facebook album on Thursday February 12, 2015 @04:35PM (#9041542)
It seems like Facebook's Bug Bounty Program payment processor bugbountypayments.com is down http://isup.me/bugbountypayments.com . Anyone have any experience with that site? I haven't heard of it coming up before in security program discussions on HN or elsewhere.
Re:$500k of Azure credit for YC startups on Monday February 09, 2015 @04:04PM (#9023709)
In addition to the Azure credit I'm interested in the CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services value. Cloudflare at least reports an average for enterprise services at $5k/mo.
Re:Abusing Contributors is not OK on Thursday January 22, 2015 @03:09PM (#8931424)
I agree. This is a click bait title. The words abuse and harassment should not be used about as freely as they are in current meta-discussions of online discourse.
Re:Abusing Contributors is not OK on Thursday January 22, 2015 @01:58PM (#8930948)
Overall, I don't think this post is very good. It tries hard to ride the wave of several important, valuable, and popular sentiments but I think that the ways in which it misses the mark, mars its purpose.

I don't understand why Nick (the author) chose to group a bunch of unrelated stuff in to an otherwise pretty reasonable post on decreasing personal attacks in OSS communications.

The parts about systemic biases and asking speakers about them has essentially nothing to do with the first part of the post. Essentially the entire "What Can We Do About It" section reads like it was written for an entirely different purpose than the rest of the post. It is fine to promote those ideas but to tie the idea of increasing civility in communications as an idea of countering systematic biases against certain demographics is a faulty alignment of ideals.

Saying read a wiki on feminism as a way to reduce personal attacks in email threads is bizarre. The notion that people are "experiencing harassment over your identity rather than being critiqued solely based on the quality of your work." is not related at all to my experience in OSS communities.

You could test this hypothesis on a website and get 100x the data (with more noise) pretty easily.
This is exactly my opinion as well. We don't remove books from the library because the author had moral failings, or even if the author committed genocide. The content has value and should be preserved. The removal of the content from OCW is the step too far. Lewin absolutely should be restricted from further teaching at MIT or on MITx but the work itself should not be considered problematic.
This article is a follow up to another piece in MIT's newspaper about a "disqualification"[1] related to misrepresentation of work in presentations from MIT's student hackathon. The comments of this article and the original are the kind of local bickering and political wrangling and blame shifting that occurs all the time, but I think the broader question of what happens in hackathon presentations is interesting.

[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N53/HackMIT.html Exactly what happened and if it was a disqualification are subject of much discussion in the comment sections and this follow up article.

I don't know what to say besides kudos. Harvard will need to build a new building for CS now.
Re:Show HN: Songftware – Music Written Like Software on Saturday November 08, 2014 @11:49PM (#8579150)
Very cool. A couple questions: is the song really the right vehicle to pass around? By analogy isn't that like moving the binary instead of the code? I understand the lack of DAW cross-compatibility but it seems like you might need all of the components that make up a song along the way in order to work on a subsequent task.

It looks like this is still in the experimental/conception stage. Right now it seems more like a mental model for music than actual tools. I'd be interested in seeing what analogies besides code would be applicable or might have lessons learned. For example, I know that collaboration and sharing of mechanical engineering design software is relatively less useable/mature than sharing a git repository. For artists that collaboratively work on 3D models or images I'd imagine that the workflow is passing around .psds or whatever, rather than final images because everyone is on the same platform.

I'll be paying attention as this develops.

Terrible title.
Can we change this link to the actual source? http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp

Or the Vatican library homepage or this tweet: https://twitter.com/vaticanlibrary/status/522270002012246016

Yes the comments of the original blog post have been really interesting to read.

The domain name community looks to be all over the comment section of the original post.

I'll be following this case. I don't understand why this would be filed under seal. I'd enjoy some legal experts comments on the matter.
Out of court settlement. Microsoft and No-ip both issued press releases/updates to their original blog posts about it.

No details about the settlement were released but No-IP certainly got paid.

The amount of remote worker angst in these comments is pretty ridiculous. Yishan has seemed reasonable enough and has come to terms with the fact that some parts of Reddit's operations aren't being run how they should be.

Saying 'fuck reddit' for a reasonable business maneuver is pretty out of line. Reddit had remote people other than just developers, managing those relationships remotely may have been part of the issue.

Re:Artificial sweeteners linked to glucose intolerance on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @02:58PM (#8331725)
This is an impressive piece of work but I worry that a larger amount of work is needed in the relationship between glucose intolerance, diabetes and metabolic syndromes in general. The fact that glucose intolerance is induced by a high sugar diet and leads towards a path of clinical outcomes ending in diabetes, doesn't necessarily indicate that glucose intolerance developed via artificial sweetener consumption is indicative of being on the same clinical pathways towards metabolic syndrome and diabetes.
Re:A Neural Network for Factoid Question Answering over Paragraphs on Thursday September 11, 2014 @12:00AM (#8300810)
I just started downloading the code and training data, I'm interested in what quiz bowl packets were used as the training data. Most college level quiz bowl packets are posted publicly on the web but are copyrighted by the original authors and are unlikely to be licensed for such a purpose.
Re:YC Investment Policy and Email List on Thursday September 04, 2014 @05:54PM (#8270876)
Removing the signal of YC Partner investment is probably good for YC batches as a whole.
Re:White House Names Google’s Megan Smith the Next CTO of the US on Thursday September 04, 2014 @12:51PM (#8269302)
Having briefly met with Megan a couple years ago, I'm pleased with this appointment. She asked good questions and seemed to think through the consequences of rough conceptual ideas diligently.
Re:On Being a Female in Venture Capital on Monday August 25, 2014 @06:17PM (#8224522)
Important follow up from the same author on the ramifications of this post: http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2014/08/22/erica-swallow-t...

Older »