skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let companies avoid older programmers at their peril. The companies that do hire them will do much better by avoiding reinventing wheels, repeating the mistakes of the past, and losing valuable tribal knowledge due to high turnover rates. I firmly believe that nothing "needs to be done" about lack of diversity in work places because the penalty for avoiding candidates based on gender or ethnicity will levied slowly over time.

Interviews should be conducted online without any indication what race or gender the applicant is. Their work and expertise should speak for itself. I also think trying to find people who "fit the culture" is a terrible way to hire. On the surface it seems to make sense because interpersonal communication is half the battle, but it's usually code for "hire people like us" so even though you may try to hire more diverse people on a visual basis, you'll end up hiring less diverse people on a personality basis which can be just as bad.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ask.com

33rd globally, 63rd in the US, and I don't think anyone is twisting their arm. To a lot of less technical people, search is search is search—it doesn't matter who's providing it.
Seems like a lot of the things they're putting behind private APIs should instead/also be behind a user permission. Getting the list of installed apps, device serial number, and the users email address shouldn't be protected simply with obfuscation.
Did I miss out on some additional fallout after the article was initially published? I don't see why they're addressing this two months later.
Its called Scare Quotes, and implies a sort of disdain or sarcasm.
Right. How do we properly discern between professional bullshitters?
How to handle it? Stop doing work for them and start looking for another job.
"In a crowd the people with the most motivation to participate are those with negative views."

I'd had the ones that are paid to say good things about a product they probably never used.
If we're lucky they compensate each other ;-)
How Data Science Builds Better Products
I remember talking about the iBot with a wheelchair bound friend when it came out.

His response was "the people who designed this have obviously never been bound to a wheelchair". I think I was in 9th or 10th grade at the time, so I don't remember his reasoning, but I remember the disdain for the invention.

Any iBot users out there that could chime in?
Not to fall into "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics"[1] but I agree with posters point that the issues may need to be addressed earlier. Like how do you build really good schools with high expectations for low income areas in my mind is a much bigger bang for your buck. I'm not an expert in education but I think its a fair question... can the Ivy Leagues help with that issue (particularly with endowments near or more than $30 Billion)?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855
I'm not an iOS developer (well, not really; I don't know what I'm doing) but this seems like it would be a really easy thing for Apple to detect. Does Apple simply not care about access to these to the degree of adding in better checking or is there something fundamental about their platform that makes checking for Apple seriously difficult?
> No one seems to talk about the elephant in the room: salary.

This is not true at any company that "hires the best." If it is, they don't "hire the best." They hire the best they can con into accepting a competitive/artificially-low salary.
Well, let's put it this way:

When I compare the credibility between the NYT and Amazon's chief PR flack, who does not hesitate to share internals from personnel records in order to smear former employees then I know who gets my vote.

Most certainly not Mister Carney, who I think can be rightfully described as a paid liar.

And I don't mean to imply that even the paper of record is free from problems (remember Jayson Blair?)

[edited for clarity]
The question is: what is listening on 127.0.0.1?

For example, do you have an httpd listening on 127.0.0.1? Do you bind any other daemons to 127.0.0.1 or the broadcast address?

If you operate your own root you can reassign the authoritative nameservers for doubleclick.net to nameservers you control. You may or may not choose to return "A" records.
Is she looking now? What does she want to do? My company has lots of openings.
I guess it's a little bit of both. First PC was $3000 (80286-16) and had 1 mb ram.

What is held over from the old days is efficient code. Not just big huge blocks that are unknowns. Ability to profile and REALLY debug, particularly profiling. Each cycle counts as much today as it did then. Seems most newer programmers were never taught that. Even web code at scale need to be clean and quick.
> I usually sneak in a couple of technical questions for the interviewer and he blew those questions

That's interesting, how do you ask technical questions to interviewers without being too direct? I am genuinely curious about it.
Reminds me of when I was told years ago that the army likes to get recruits at 17, because a 17 year old will buy into the indoctrination. An 18 year old will just go through the motions.
The federal government kicks in a lot of money for big new capital projects but not much if anything for station rehabilitation. As the issuer of fiat currency, and given that we've been at the zero-bound interest rate for a while now the federal government has a lot more money to throw around than the city or state governments.

The MTA also has an arcane governance structure that makes for poor accountability. Four votes on its board are picked by the NYC mayor, 1 each by the county executives of Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester, 1/4 each by the county executives of Dutchess, Orange, Rockland, and Putnam counties and six by the Governor of the state.
If so, then Apple will add restrictions to which apps are able to make these calls, by moving them out of process and adding actual security checks. That's how everything that's actually security-critical (calls that manipulate other processes, filesystem access, hardware access, etc.) already works.

If there are any security implications to making a private API call then this implies that Apple's sandboxing system is broken. If so then the solution is to fix the sandbox. Better detection of private API usage might be good for them, but is neither necessary nor sufficient nor particularly useful for security.
No, Algorithms Do Not Hijack Elections
Victim of state spying? Facebook will tell you
I'm not endorsing or accepting discrimination, I simply offered up a meek rationalization as I see it.

Honestly, if you find and older person that wants to work at a startup, there is a good chance that they could be doing a few things right to have that energy and drive. You want to know how they live and what they do.
Visualizing Where Cities Are Too Loud
Disabling drones with a Raspberry rifle
Right now there are prep schools that send more than the top 5% of their students to Ivy League schools.

I'm suggesting that you have to be within the top 5% class GPA to get in. So, some students may actually have a lower GPA, but still have a chance to get in, because they were in the top 5% of their class.

I'm also saying that students don't have to have the resources to take SAT prep courses, because they would only have to do well at their own schools.

If the public or private school was not accredited for possible acceptance into an Ivy League school, parents should know that and be able to do something about it, and so should the state or county.
The motivation you speculate on seems, uh, awfully complicated compared to "Newspaper airs dirty laundry of Fortune 29 company."
Yes it is sir.. And so are the laws put in place to control psycho active substances
How heroes can be toxic to a company
Building a Robust WYSIWYG Editor [video]
> keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.)

I hate to say it, but this kind of direction is also pushed frequently by inexperienced developers. It is also frequently made worse when they feel they have to prove their ability to developers with more experience.

Just the other night I was having a conversation with colleagues from a side project - one is the CTO (he made the position a stipulation of employment when the founder was starting this side project), the other the founder, and I was trying to convince them both why deep inheritance and "shaking the tree" with every code commit creates code maintenance problems down the road.

Unfortunately, the inheritance model was the CTO's design (after all, the data has very strict hierarchical relations, right?), and the only real answer I got to justify his plan was "so there's nothing technically wrong with it, your objection is purely fear based; keep tabs on that fear and let me know how it goes". I was concurrently scolded by the founder that "I'll never make deadlines, so you'll always have plenty of time to refactor the codebase". Needless to say, they decided that it was best for the development group to go forward with the deep inheritance hierarchy.

So yeah, the lack of experience definitely inhibits communication, particularly when you disagree with them based on your experience.
When black people do it they're seen as aggressive.

Aggressive or "Angry". It takes a bit of conversational judo to avoid such an appearance. I'm a big black guy. (6'2", 255 pounds) It rarely goes well for men like me if we're perceived as angry or aggressive.

When someone starts talking over me, I become not only quiet but still. As close to motionless as possible. I even slow down my rate of blinking. Remaining silent and motionless forces all attention in the room onto the person who is speaking.

It makes them and anyone else in the room acutely aware that this person just cut you off and has breached standard etiquette. At that point, the pressure to be polite usually kicks in "Oh, I'm sorry. You were saying?"
Super cool. However I can't look at this thing and not think Wall-E
I would probably have to side with Amazon's account since it would be pretty easy for the person who resigned to sue for libel if it were not true. Don't think Amazon would want to expose themselves like that.
dlopen() can be used to call a C function by a string name.

More ambitious programmers can scan executable regions of memory for the instruction stream of the target function and call the address directly without any help from symbolic names at all.
Minor nitpick:

MPEG-LA did charge for distribution of H.264 content, though only certain classes, e.g. pay-per-view content above 10 minutes length was one of them I think, as was broadcast TV.

They did reserve the right to start charging for any online distribution, right up until VP8 was released, whereupon they announced that they definitely would never charge for distribution over the internet.
Hehe awesome thanks
I'd argue that a vast majority of students—particularly on the lower end of the income scale—don't have a choice in the school they attend.
I can recall finding a text mode www on the ITU's gopher server and thinking interesting :-)

And I can remember when you could quickly skim the whats interesting on the www today.
I read it the same way. Tremendously bad!
Exactly my thoughts. You don't see a lot of twenty-something hipster types writing memory allocators, device drivers, kernels and critical middleware. Yet, the industry nowadays is dominated by people who believe that cobbling together a single-page application using the latest, shiniest framework is at the edge of tech excellence.
Actually, the original point of standardized testing was not to "level the playing field", but rather to identify the academically talented. The job of Ivy Admissions Officers is to identify students that will enrich the environment of the universities by which they are employed. These are two separate problems.

Just as an illustration, consider one of the "goals" of Admissions Officers at one of the Ivies. This particular Ivy, some time ago, set itself a goal of admitting one male, and one female, from every state in the union. Simply selecting the top candidates via "demonstrated ability" will not allow them to meet this goal. It would be difficult to find elite students in Arkansas, Alabama and Montana who would compare favorably to elite students from Massachusetts, New Jersey or Minnesota. So it's plain that this goal had to be satisfied via other means. Programs like those the article talks about are a part of achieving these lesser known admissions goals.
This claim might be right or wrong (I've seen cases where it's true and cases where situation (1) is portrayed as (2)), but the point is it's not analogous to non-Asian minorities or women.

People complain that old guys program like they never left the 90's. No one complains that an ethnically Mexican person never left Mexico, or that someone "programs like a girl".

The only code related ethnic stereotype I've ever heard is about Russians/Ukrainians/other slavs; a lone wolf writing efficient, high quality, extremely monolithic code, usually in a non-trendy language (PHP, C, C++, sometimes Erlang or old school Lisp).
What about everything that is expected to be private, can be made private, has security implications for not being private, and has no gains for being public other than "it's slightly less expensive"?

Why shouldn't my password reset urls be private? They are... in the password database I use.

Why shouldn't my database entry names be private? They are... in the password database I use.

Are you saying that these things are metadata in 1Password by virtue of the fact that they weren't secured? Because that would seem like circular reasoning - that you can never leak data, because leaked data is metadata. I don't share your definition of metadata in such a case.

Are you saying that these things are metadata in 1Password because they shouldn't be private? I just plain strongly disagree if so.

Are you saying that these things are metadata because users shouldn't expect a password database to secure them properly? Then I could at least see where you're coming from. But I don't think it makes sense to tie the definition of metadata to that - among other complaints, I think it lets off companies/software that leak your (meta)data off far too easily, and that such word games absolve them of too much responsibility.
I understand it wasn't needed after the fact. But the entire point of the original post/resolution was to understand what was causing the problem (page time outs) - yet when faced with a second problem, he chose the 'easy' route of just uninstalling it (unalike his resilience to pay for his IP change or wiping the server).
Interview with PCH Founder Liam Casey
One of my friends commented on this like this:

My friend: "You know, majority of actresses in porn are young so it make sense that it same for Silicon Valley start ups".

Me: "Start ups are not porn"

My friend: "Yes they are"

Me: ... thinking... "Yes..."
I run a design/development agency in Europe. I'm the only male (of <10 employees).

We had an applicant for a development job who said he was 50+ and had been self-employed several times. In the end we decided not to hire him.

The age was a factor, but not in the way you'd think. The primary reason was that he proved himself to be a very bad fit for the team and the kind of clients we work with. He attempted to dominate every conversation to prove his seniority (or assert his potential if it was on a subject he had no prior experience with).

I'd like to think his age wasn't a factor at all and most of his behaviour can instead be attributed to his prior experience being self-employed, but I'm not sure whether this is true or not.

I don't think age is a valid argument any more than race or gender but I'd like to think that these are just unfortunate proxies for the actual reasons companies don't want to hire candidates. I've turned down a lot of "foreigners" because their language skills were insufficient for the requirements of the job. I've turned down "men" because of their macho-like behaviour towards the women on the team and I've turned down "old people" because they treated younger team members less respectfully.

None of these traits are representative of all potential candidates in each group, but they tend to be common enough that you tend to become more sensitive to them, especially when hiring people from that group. This leads to unfair bias, but short of anonymizing CVs (which can be extremely difficult) I don't see any fool-proof way of avoiding that.

There's a very thin line between due dilligence and unfair bias.
Culture is based as much by the outliers as it is the core group. Also experiences/opinions offered by those outliers can be quite useful to avoid the herd mentality.

I've seen too many folks rejected as "cultural mis-matches" not because they don't get along with everyone else, but because they have different interests outside of work. That's just silly.
If we were to rewrite history, that'd probably happen. Now count the number of languages that wouldn't reconsider something if we were able to..

I understand your frustration with js, but let's not pretend it's objectively worse to learn to deal with its pitfalls instead of other languages'.
A CISO Perspective on the Ashley Madison Breach
What can a U2 do that a drone can't do?
Anyone have an opinion on http://quilljs.com ? Haven't seen it mentioned in this thread yet.
This is not new. Check out "Microsoft AARD code" -- an inverted example of surreptitious analytics, in 1992. TL;DR: the beta version of Windows 3.1 showed a warning if user was using DR-DOS, a competing OS. The payload was encrypted and could be triggered in the production version of Win 3.1 by changing a flag.
It would be deliciously ironic if the apology also came from the PR department.
Yeah, that's definitely a problem. I kind of miss the wall of books, though. Though I came in at the tail end of that era (more while I was still in school than after). I get a better understanding for things when I have a physical resource to go to. It helps that I (apparently) have an above average memory, but it works mostly by associating the physical act with the information I learned (I remember notes by recalling literally writing them on the page, for instance). So books seem to be more effective for conveying information to me in a retainable way, and I imagine that I'm not unique. That many of my colleagues with "terrible" memories are really just suffering from using the wrong resources to learn subjects, something about the computer screen as information source seems to stick less for people.

My pet theory: The lack of other senses involved. A book has smell, texture, and then the physical act of turning pages. A lecturer versus a video, the lecture hall at least has a smell and feel to it, and there's more variation, less polish, on a live lecture compared to a video that's been thoroughly edited.
And this is still happening. Someone among the powers that be, budget crunches and old equipment be damned, is still prioritizing the creation of beautiful things underground, with no less personality than what came before.

http://nyclovesnyc.blogspot.de/2012/12/new-years-eve-themed-...

I'm not currently living in NYC, but a big perk of my yearly visit is being surprised and delighted with the new things that have popped up.
In regards to point #1, this is my favourite article about engineers and the autism spectrum. Between a (perhaps) higher incidence of autism spectrum disorders and a focus on systemizing thought, this article would argue that you're onto something:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/engineers-an...

It makes me wonder if daycares tuned specifically to the needs of children with two engineers for parents. Maybe a slightly earlier intervention would prevent some of the expected kindergarten issues.
Doomsday Vault in Norway opens to give seeds to Syria
Amazon sues over 1000 people for posting fake reviews
Wrong URL: http://localhost:4000/blog/2015/10/19/First-Day-Working-From...
Yes, of course you need your IDE to play well with the reader macros. That's why I use PEGs to construct such macros and to provide a feedback for the IDE while parsing (e.g., token locations, definitions, etc.).
First Firms Blocked Porn. Now They Scan for Child Sex Images
I know that there are various random churches and/or pastors who continue to advocate the use of the KJV, usually because of some (so far as I can tell) imaginary belief in the superiority of the Textus Receptus. But I would have thought that they were very much in the minority these days.

Still, you seem to have a point about its popularity. According to this list, it's #2 (behind the NIV) in sales. That's a lot higher than I would have expected, given how rarely I see it used or quoted in my circles.

http://thomrainer.com/2014/12/top-ten-bible-translations-201...
Oslo moves to ban cars from city centre within four years
I've noticed young people are very biased when interviewing older candidates. It's kind of sad. On the other hand, older interviewers are used to hiring college grads.
Inverted funnel: suppose there are ten programmers to every VP. As the programmers age, what happens to this ratio?
To be or not to be a douche? A giant guide on mobile apps and games monetization
"we promoted Bob because he's assertive. We didn't promote Ann because she's shrill."
Seems like the problem is vulnerable by default options in software, not experimenting with it. More people have hosted malware by just running Windows than anyone has by experimenting with Apache, then fixing it and learning something useful that can now help other newbies.
Antarctica: McMurdo research station is looking for a Systemadministrator
> Doesn't that set the bar a little high?

What kind of argument is it that an employer has the bar 'set too high'? Put yourself in their shoes; obviously you're going to hire a photographer/contractor/programmer who can show off a portfolio over one who just talks about it. It's silly to suggest otherwise.
They also wash the platforms with water and bleach in NYC, while people are waiting for the train.

The times I've watched it, they do an incredibly lazy job, so the net result is not much cleaning. If the goal was "clean the platform" instead of "look like you're cleaning the platform", the system would probably be a lot cleaner.

The MTA has a large number of labor relations problems they need to fix. That's what's really holding them back.

(I also watched an interesting exchange recently. Someone jumps the turnstile. Someone reports that to the station agent, who just watched it happen. She replies "are you sure, I didn't see that", and went back to playing with her phone. This attitude of neglect completely kills the "if you see something, say something" culture the MTA tries to instill. If I see something, I'll keep it to myself to avoid the ridicule I'd receive from the employees or police.)
Statistically, what's the chance you'll become one of the very best programmers in the world? It's about the same as becoming a professional footballer.

That's the wrong question. The right question is "What are the chances that you'll make a good living in your chosen field?"

As a programmer the chances are relatively high. Even an average developer makes a decent living, and a good one can make a lot of money.

As a footballer the chance of even getting to be a professional where you're paid to do it are very low. If you get to the top you'll be making a very good living, but probably not as much as a early employee at Facebook/Google/etc if you include stock (although that has little to do with programming really).

That doesn't mean everyone should become developers though. People should have careers they enjoy. But if you're looking at statistics, even considering everything other than talent, trying to become a sports star is still a stupid idea.
As to why one would set the MTU low, see http://blog.geeky-boy.com/2015/10/windows-corrupting-udp-dat...

I also made a long-winded answer to your question submitted to the blog, if you're interested.