skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 2015 demographic supports your claim. %36 White (non-hispanic), %31 Asian (non-hispanic)

[https://www.jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2015.pd...]
Evaluating Property-Based Testing Through a Random Walk
Why would you think that? You believe there is less than 4 years of material in all of CS?
In 1990? Likely.

In 2010? This article is supposed to be about US, not a third-world country, right?
Love the use of Prolog, hate the mirror-world EULA. If they haven't updated the license from the last time I looked, it's a non-starter for any reasonably-sized commercial entity with contract controls; there's no way in hell it would pass review with legal, which is odd for a company that's looking to make money off its product.
I found it really shocking as well. Not sure how much of it is due to segregation and how much - due to the inability of the person to socialise… which is not uncommon among technical people from all races.
I rarely say that, but this article really does not belong here, on HN. The title is a clickbait (there's no evidence that Putin ordered or even knew about the murder neither in the linked article, nor anywhere else so far) and it only starts political flame wars not a constructive, intellectual discussion.
This is an interesting question, and probably related to
"why doesn't Silicon Valley hire female coders?" and "Why doesn't Silicon Valley hire coders over 30?"
I suspect it won't - even if AVR started to disappear the Arduino guys have already got a handful of boards out using ARM Cortex M0 and Intel Curie chips. They're quite cleanly integrated with the same IDE and the boards are in roughly similar form factor, so from a dev's perspective if they moved to ARM/Curie completely it wouldn't be too tough I reckon. Not sure if there's any supply chain or manufacturing issues that could complicate things though.
Standard deviation explained
That is true, but it doesn't mean they should be given a job they don't have the skills for. Or would you like to have "Affirmative Action" doctors?
I have the latest 15 inch MBP.
I don't know about 'SV material', but I certainly didn't see a lot of "10x" software engineers who were not writing code by the time they were 13-15.

Clarification: I'm not saying that it's a necessary requirement; I'm just saying that I certainly see a correlation.
To be honest, your occasional comment promoting Intercooler.js became rather annoying to me, to the extent that I even thought about doing another 'HN Comments parody' just so I could feature you prominently (among others).

But this comment somehow is the first time I have a better perspective on what it is exactly you're pushing, and whether it's my fault for dismissing you earlier or not, I just wanted to let you know that while I don't have a use for your tool right now, I feel like I get it and I even agree with your reasoning.

Furthermore, I applaud anyone who build something and seems passionate about it, and I hate falling into the trap of being negative. My apologies thinking that way.

(that said, if I were to do a comment parody, you'd be featured. just with a more friendly thought behind it.)
That is what is so hard about it. Everybody gets treated unfairly from time to time, feels awkward, etc. When you are "black" you don't know the line between racism and man's general inhumanity towards man.
Oh yes, that homogeneous Asian culture, comprising 4 billion people who all speak the same language and eat the same food and watch the same TV shows. They're all the same!
50 LESSONS LEARNED WHILE BUILDING BEEWITS
Reading this is thread is making my ears itch.
Wasn't the hero of the last Star Wars movies black?
I thought I was the only one that felt better after using a q-tip to clear my ears. It's a weird sensation to be sure.
I've only been to SF twice, but I have to agree that it is pretty white. Not as white as Colorado, but still. I also toured Medium and was blown away by the lack of black folks working there.

It's tough to describe the feeling, but when you're the only black person in the room, you do feel different--a little uncomfortable. However, I don't think this reflects a conscious effort to not hire blacks, rather there are institutional and socioeconomic barriers that leave us underrepresented in tech and many other fields.
I think they're more looking for a sign that you had an early and therefore natural curiosity to tinker with the mechanisms in the world. Not "CS" per se, but just... computer tinkering. If your family couldn't afford a computer, IMHO, if you at least, say, took a clock or motor apart or something, that would be a good indicator, too.

By the way, this has been brought up as the reason for the dropoff in the women who enter CS curricula in college. Ever since home PC's became affordable, freshman CS classes have basically assumed prior (and thorough) computer experience, and many women who might otherwise become good programmers, for whatever reason (society influence, etc.) have had waaaay less hands-on time with computers than boys, when they become freshmen.

That said, I have met some excellent programmers who started out doing something that is superficially completely different (musicians, for example).
Formal CS study no, but I would think having some exposure to programming concepts would help. Sort of like how one would expect a music major to have had at least some curiosity about music, or an art student to have picked up a pencil or some paint.
How so? Many of the classic Valley proto-entrepreneurs (Gates, Jobs, etc) famously dropped out of college. From my own experience, I probably learned about 75% of what I needed to know about programming before I went to university. I'm not sure how easy it is to gain that valuable bedrock experience in an academic environment.
Coworkers: a RabbitMQ microservice framework in Node.js
You have a very good point, in that the stock market's current phase ultimately affects the health of all its constituent companies (in both a symbiotic and parasitic relationship).

But like you said, I don't consider it helpful to pay attention on a day to day basis, and I find it to be a more useful indicator for macrotrends than microtrends. In other words, my understanding of the stock market will influence my opinions about the angel investing and startup market en masse, but it would not be anything more than one factor in my opinion about a single company I could invest in.

While it's true that companies with strong fundamentals do fail in a downturn, companies with strong fundamentals can fail for any number of reasons. Just as I'm not all that concerned with my Vanguard funds going down for a while because they'll be back up in 10 years, I'm not too worried about a single company with strong fundamentals getting caught with its shorts down when the tide goes out. If it happens, it happens; in the absence of other poignant data, however, I find it much more important to focus on the company itself and pay attention to macrotrends more infrequently.

Besides, a market downturn is an excellent time to hedge long bets with shorts :)
Of course they are. Indians remain Indians no matter how successful they are. Same with Germans, Frenchmen, or Asian/African Americans, for that matter. They are still part of the respective minority, which is not something bad to begin with by the way…
(fair warning, didn't edit this)

> Are the advances in the ACH system going to do away with fees that include a percentage component?

See my answer to @hannan below. (Short answer: yes)

> I would be very surprised if banks simply decided to voluntarily step back from a system that will enable them to have more control over the US economy than the federal government.

I don't think I've ever heard this more accurately or succinctly put. In this megathread, here on HN, everyone thinks it's about banks wanting money. From working with banks on this for nearly 5 years, this isn't true. They're fighting for relevancy, the status quo. They've had control over this system since the 70s and have built fortification after fortification (through regulation, technology, etc.) to protect themselves from the whims of trending market forces.

But you remember in Rocky 4, when Rocky made Ivan Drago (the invincible super-soldier) bleed? (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VefZwIhCdqI) It showed Balboa that Ivan was human, had vulnerabilities. The match shifted after that.

The fear Ivan felt is exactly how financial institutions feel now. New market entrants (see: Apple, Stripe, BTC, Dwolla), regulatory uncertainty (CFPB, Dodd-Frank, etc), and changing customer expectations (real-time communication, uberization, etc) have shown banks that they're no longer unaffected to the whims and trends of consumer innovation.

This is why they're at the table (despite torpedoing Same-Day ACH in 2011). They're choosing the least worst of two options: have the Fed step-in with a mandate (could get from congress in the next 2 years) or inform the next infrastructure of the US economy.

The good news is that this time, unlike in the 70s, it's not just banks designing the system. Fed Fast Task Force is comprised of consumer groups, retailers, innovative tech companies (including Dwolla, Ripple, and many more), regulators, academics, and many more. We may not have as many cards as we think, but we've been able to influence some pretty key decisions.

Also, banks aren't always the villians we make'em out to be. Behind those logos are real people that really want a better payment system, not just to protect their bottom-line but because they want something better for their families, neighbors, and (selfishly) themselves. We'll get lapped by other economies if we don't (See: 37 other nations with or creating a real-time system). They're fighting hard to make the best system possible, given their constraints (fraud, liability, existing regulation, and, yes, their P&L).
Drop a React component in the middle of a legacy project is IMO less fussy then jQuery code. I say that because components are standalone, so you won't mix logic for that piece.
If this was a real non gimmick thing it would absolutely the thing that got me to buy a VR setup. I can't say I like the drawn out conclusion of nobody ever attending in person though. I wouldn't want to see a world where nobody ever showed up to hockey games in real life, that just seems sad and dystopian to me.
This kind of attitude is exactly why I tend to avoid recruiting out in the west coast. There is nothing about "SV material" that translates directly into productive output. It's all ego, with no substance to back it up. And in our company, I certainly have the data to prove it. Although it pains me that I can't share it, especially with the "community" at HN.

And yes, we offer extremely competitive salaries not typical of the east coast.
If it were a game, it would be called "Whiteness unlocked."

An Indian- or Chinese-American can attain "no longer considered minority" (aka whiteness) but African-Americans don't get that achievement.
> and the product was objectively worse in every meaningful category.

Except marketing and sales. You forgot marketing and sales. Most developers do. Even if you're releasing your project free and open source, there is still a marketing and "sales" cycle you have to engage, to convince people to spend their time on your project.

If you really care about your projects, you'll stop neglecting marketing and sales.

Regardless, you've not proven that people steal "ideas". You've proven that companies see competitors as market signals. Smart business people don't just jump on whatever some rando in a bar is jabbering on about, even if you're that rando and you're not insane.
I've got https://github.com/magnific0/FitBit.py working (with a minor tweak - the refresh token path is missing a "return", it seems) for downloading my heart rate data. Works great.

https://rjp.is/experiments/heartrate/buckets5.html
https://rjp.is/experiments/heartrate/minsum.html

Drop me a note (contacts in profile) if you want a copy before I get around to github'ing the changes.
I love failure testing, this is a great article. Molly looks pretty interesting. Netflix is remarkably bold for enabling their failure tests in production.

Shameless plug for libfaultinj [1], a fault injection library. It's remarkably simple (and still not quite as feature-rich as I'd like). You can use it in a unit-testing context to make sure you do something sane for things like file-not-found, disk-full, or extraordinary-delay-on-open. Or you can use it in a larger-scale integration style testing with random likelihood of failures popping up.

https://github.com/androm3da/libfaultinj
so the facebook and google diversity managers realised that they lacked diversity when the papers published the figures. sounds more like PR management than diversity management
I didn't find it surprising. I'm white, and I've been on all-white teams where everyone else watched the same TV shows or went to the same movies or played the same video games, and I didn't. Those common interests would feel like the only thing they ever talked about, and it would feel very unwelcoming.

Part of the problem is just luck of the draw in terms of the team you get placed on. If that team is all into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and you aren't, you're going to feel like an outsider, no matter what races are involved. If the team has a broader set of interests, it's far more likely the new person will be able to feel like they fit in.

The other part, too, is of course that lots of engineer types are essentially introverted, and have a really hard time actively welcoming people with varied interests into their social circle. Part of it is just a matter of time, but if you go in with the expectation of feeling like an outsider and your first few weeks fit that expectation, it's a bad situation.
I commented in the other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576:

>People in this thread keep talking like this is the "death" of Atmel. I don't see it changing much other than being guided by Microchip management to meet higher profit margins. If you think that Atmel's compilers and IDE's are going to be dropped overnight in favor of MPLAB X and Microchip compilers, you are almost surely mistaken; there's a big gap between architectures so it would be a lot of work to get Microchip tools to support Atmel parts.
It often seems like the people writing this articles don't realize that preferring your own race is racism, no matter what race that is. If she feels that she doesn't fit in because there aren't enough people like her (black), that's just as racist as white people not wanting to hang out with blacks because they're not white.
“There are not a lot of people of color in the Valley—and that, by itself, makes it kind of unwelcoming”

i dont like this attitude, i am not sure what is should be called, but you should feel relaxed in your own skin, accept diversity, and dont mind it when most of the people around you, are not the same color

why is it unwelcoming ...
maybe not what you hope for, but why call it so negatively
They don't listen (hear) because their ears are clogged would be the punny second meaning.
Wireless, pff. Give me a wire any day.

At any given technology stage a wired connection will be faster than wireless. Not to mention you don't have to worry about interference, and losing the signal.

If wireless is so great, tell me this, how come wireless routers have wires _inside_ them! :-)
QWERTY is maybe more efficient (for english), but it is not as efficient as it could be. Unfortunately more efficient keyboard layouts are hard to establish.
Silicon Valley would rather hire foreigners than hire black Americans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/technology/silicon-valley-... ...

"Google revealed that its tech work force was 1 percent black, compared with 60 percent white. Yahoo disclosed in July that African-Americans made up 1 percent of its tech workers while Hispanics were 3 percent."

Affirmative Action has worked in other industries.

Why does it fail in Silicon Valley?
Linux distros like Ubuntu and Debian address this issue by offering different update streams so you can choose whether you want all the latest stuff or a more stable experience. Microsoft could do something similar, but they're lacking the "stable" option since the big push to Windows 8 and 10.
I came here to say that, but in a slightly different way:

True:

> no discussion of how one might interpret this model, what its assumptions are, and how to assess validity or fit?

Quoting OP from the comments in his blog:

> Hey Victor, thanks for reading! You’re absolutely right, I should have taken some time to talk about the assumptions of linear regression. I tried to mention them in passing, but I’ll try to be more explicit next time. I should have brought up the pearson correlation coefficient. I tried to write this from a more machine learning point of view, not as much statistics.

Either way it was a decently written post and would read more in the future (though I would like to see more statistics side of things rather than just me thinking Alex here is waving his hands saying 'you see nothing!' when we look at the mathematical assumptions / 'pure' statistics).

In other thoughts:

I'm currently in the process of writing a blog series on the analytics of Firearm projectiles (What ammo is most accurate from a Ruger American 308 Win.). Seeing other statistical posts like this help me figure out how to make mine better. So thanks Alex!
Tinder for Car rentals
Maybe it's not a huge factor and I don't know how this comes into the picture, but when I visited Switzerland the cost of food was insanely high.
There's a lot of caveats to that statement.

Within the Bay Area itself there's plenty of segregation: anecdotally, I noticed relatively few Indians living in Palo Alto and working at startups; most live in MV/Sunnyvale/Fremont and worked in larger companies like Cisco and Oracle. I'm not making the claim that this segregation is externally-driven, it's just that there "are people all over the world" doesn't tell the full story. Having worked in both Toronto and New York, both cities have noticeably more diverse workplaces and neighbourhoods.

That said, while in the Bay Area I never felt my skills as an engineer were questioned because of my background. I really appreciated that.

note: edited for grammar
Lack of smalltalk topics is hardly an "inhumanity".
I never liked the ('orthodox') RESTful approach when building web apps and I didn't understand why so many codebases I've worked with seemed to bend over backwards to be as RESTful as possible with (seemingly) no benefit. I feel like I now have a slightly better understanding of why I felt this way (and some more 'authoritative' support, I guess).
I wouldn't consider an innovative algorithm to be "an idea." It's as much an invention or a trade secret as anything else.

Ideas are cheap (approaching worthless but not quite) - trade secrets are incredibly valuable.
I think it depends on what part of Silicon Valley you're aiming for. A lot of the big-name places seem to be weird and incredibly theory/algorithms-heavy, whereas most other places being good at organizing systems is more important. But go too far down the scale and you'll find lot of the small startups need you to have context across the entire stack - you might be doing Ruby one moment, CSS the next, then BGP configuration for your cloud gateway after that. Places that are medium-small to large-but-unsexy can provide more of the entry-level experience. (Not a lot of them are really good, though, so you can't always expect to stay working there forever.)
Did you not realize that US education is on par with a third world country in a lot of regions?
It's closer to SU than W, F, & P.
Irony considering the author starts with her experience at OneNote.
OneNote (desktop) possibly is the worst designed software in Microsoft Office suite.

I find the following quote from Chris Pratley (creator of OneNote) interesting "You know you have a good design when you show it to people and they say, “oh, yeah, of course,” like the solution was obvious.".
No wonder OneNote is so heavily into literal metaphor of a notebook, which frankly does look and feel clumsy inspite they attempting to polish it up a bit off late (it used to look plain ugly till couple of years back).

From official Microsoft document:
The user interface is specifically designed to look like a 3-ring binder, complete with tab dividers. Users can divide the notebook into multiple topics and subtopics for the various types of information they want to record and save. Workers have all the advantages of an old fashioned notebook binder with the additional advantages of being able to copy information from one section to another...

Document link: https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web...
Unikernel Systems Joins Docker
I found it shocking too. If she didn't have much in common with her colleagues, is that really because she was a black woman and they were white males? It makes me think I don't understand the importance of race in US.

I mean, I have more or less things in common with my work colleagues but only because we work in the same field not because we're white males (actually I am Spanish and they're British, and the age range in the team goes from early 20s to late 30s).
I'm not 100% positive on this so please take my comment with a grain of salt.

In the same paragraph, Friedland says "It would also tell us there has to be some new physics at very, very high energy scales—that there is something new in addition to the Standard Model we know and love."

Since the Higgs was discovered by using more and more power to power the particle, I believe they're implying that there is something above that level. Since energy and mass are intertwined, if they can generate different particles at higher energy collisions, there could more to it then just the Higgs field.

Hopefully, someone can explain better then I.
This link 404s for me, at least on mobile, huh.
Also, like, have you noticed the president of the United States?
May be because it's much harder for startups to sponsor visas, and they don't have oversea offices to transfer people from?
Freedom in My Heart and Everywhere: Lessons from a Cyborg Lawyer
Things like this can really vary on a company to company basis. Back-to-back, I worked for two companies that had drastically different social environments.

At the first one, the other programmers were the kind of "dudes" where if you don't like to hunt or talk about sports every day they didn't want to talk to you. It was a really rough place to work, felt like I was walking on eggshells just so I could be one of their peers.

The next company I worked for had a completely different environment. I got along with everyone. They all had a good sense of humor.

So, I guess my point is, even software engineers can differ greatly from one place to the next.
Let's assume there is this black guy / girl sitting in the interview room with you. You (white) are asking interview questions and you soon realise that the person you are interviewing is excellent. But something is off, you can't really put your finger on it. What do you do?
Thats actually a pretty popular prediction. I remember back in 2008 talking about virtual reality seats at the 50 yard line of the super bowl. It's probably right. I would love to put on VR and play the last set at Wimbledon. I am a dreamer...
The original Java date and time API was probably one of the worst APIs ever invented, as I describe in my answer on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1969651

However the new javax.time APIs (created by Stephen Colebourne) are excellent and probably one of the best designed APIs. It's funny what twenty years difference can make :)
Agreed :), Will Do.
Would it be shocking if the roles were reversed? There's just as many racist black people as there are racist white people.

edit: Am I wrong?