skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was a good article.

I do think that the data structures and algorithms whiteboard exams amount to more than "trivia" and I do think there is value in them (my problem with them as I've posted on this board, is that because our industry lacks a proper exam respected widely by our peers, we have to re-take this exam over and over. It would be like an actuary having to demonstrate a knowledge of calculus and linear algebra on the whiteboard over and over, throughout a career - no wonder developers are eventually fatigued by it and stop wanting to play the game).

That said, I like his solution. Just don't do it. I'll still take the algorithm exam, but I won't do take-homes anymore, and I may have missed out on some good opportunities because of it. I just won't do this, largely because it's too large a time investment on my part without a comparable investment from the company in evaluating my application.

Here's the problem - we don't work in a free labor market. I've done my 12 rounds on HN with people about this, but here it is again - we work in a field where silicon valley employers have convinced congress that there is a "shortage" of programmers. This has led to legislation that allows employers to bestow the right to live and work in the US on employees, and the employer retains that right for the duration of the employee's tenure. It is possible to move from one job to another under limited circumstances, but by and large, the visa terms don't really allow the worker to change fields, quit and start a company, or pursue a different career path entirely.

Because it is generally difficult to immigrate to the US without family reunification or a few other insider tracks, tech visas provide one path to do this. As a result, high tech employers are in a position of amazing power over their workforce. They really can say "we will allow you into the US if you study what we say you should study, interview how we say you should interview, work on the projects we say you should work on, live where we say you should live, and accept the salary we say you should receive". Yes, there are a few requirements on salary, but without the right to quit and leave (including with no job lined up), the employee's bargaining power is greatly reduced.

Now, some of us are indeed free agents as individuals, but until all of are free to choose our own path in life, as long as substantial numbers of us are not allowed to do this by law, employers will not have to make the adjustments the market demands when all workers are free.

This is why I support general skilled immigration, but I oppose putting corporations in control over a worker's right live in the US, including determining the circumstances under which the worker is allowed to arrive initially.

Nobody owes me a job under my conditions, and I accept that when I refuse to participate in certain types of interview processes. But nobody owes a corporation a worker under their conditions, and they really seem to be having trouble with this idea.
Speaking of which, whatever happened to the COWL system? I know Google & Mozilla were involved in researching the tech. Will it ever come to Chrome and other browsers?

http://cowl.ws/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1014/061014_COWL
But it's not 77cents:

> Even after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar.

The 77 cent thing is a myth and the 92cent thing isn't even that massive a gap.

I have a hypothesis: if you could measure the confidence of both men and women and relate them to job type and income, I bet you'd have a stronger coloration than gender.

It's pretty difficult to test because things like confidence are subjective. There's an article in Salon called "The Confidence Gap" that shows women often don't ask for higher paying positions because they lack confidence in their abilities.
Whether deliberately done or accidental, the US should be MORE outraged when they do it vs the stated outrage of Russia (or anyone else) doing so. If they're supposed to set a global example (which clearly they feel they are doing by starting wars all over the world) there should be an incredibly harsh punishment for this type of "mistake" to ensure it doesn't happen, ever. Whether for world democracy or domination, this violates every possible moral and legal precedent regarding war.
I don't understand this 'gender pay gap' concept at all. Whatever figure my compensation is is, to a large extent, quite arbitrary. Sure there's a general sense of what range I should expect my salary to be in, based on my experience/location/etc, but really the final figure comes down to whatever number gets thrown out and accepted in negotiation.

So if you poll half a workforce who are male, and poll half a workforce who are female, and discover that their pay doesn't line up... why would you be surprised?
Also, some companies do do it that way and are widely decried as elitist for it. I went to a pretty elite school, and every fall, companies like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Monitor Group, Bain Capital, etc. would descend upon campus. They'd build relationships with professors, ask about who the top students in classes were, and oftentimes arrange private dinners with those students to get to know them. Rumor on campus was that if you were a top 25% student in the econ department, you had a job waiting for you on Wall Street; if you weren't, well, you had to fight for careers like everyone else.

Problem is, "building personal relationships with promising talent" doesn't scale, and so the companies that do it have to pick who the promising talent is. They usually do so through other markers of status (where you went to school, who you know, who your parents are, etc.), which just perpetuates existing inequalities. Everybody thinks that they are the beautiful unique snowflake that hot companies will want to know, but when they find out that those beautiful unique snowflakes are other people, they cry foul.

(Interestingly, 3 of the 4 companies mentioned above imploded spectacularly, while companies with noticeably impersonal and impartial application processes - like Google or YCombinator, for example - are still going strong. That might be an indication that the "treat everybody as a cog, but at least treat them fairly" approach tends to work better.)
No it's like saying most investment bankers are male and make 500k a year, most nurses are female and make 70k a year, Injustice! Look at that pay gap! Outrageous!

- It makes zero sense.

EDIT: What I meant to say is men go into different careers than woman and for different reasons. Usually men go after higher paying jobs (investment banking). When people compute the pay gap they dont take this into account, so they compare pay across industries (investment banking to nursing) which is meaningless, and likely is propaganda.
Colloquially, we don't describe behavior as 'anxious behavior' because people tend to react with 'annoyed behavior' when you describe their actions using distancing terminology like that.

But in fields like behaviorology, and psychology you can regularly see people talking about "X behavior" as generalization for "short ticks, flinching, quicker speech, pacing, etc." which will be given a fuller treatment elsewhere.
That interpretation is misleading for a few reasons.

One is that "to the point of vanishing" is still very nonzero. There's a report by Consad Corporation prepared for the Department of Labor that reaches the figure 5-7% after accounting for differences in jobs (their website is down at the moment), even though it concludes that "there may be nothing to correct." That's also the number Sommers herself writes in her HuffPo article she cites in that Time article: "After controlling for several relevant factors (though some were left out, as we shall see), they found that the wage gap narrowed to only 6.6 cents." So the Cornell claim of 8% is basically the same. I don't think there's an argument to be made that a 23% gender pay gap is a scandal but a 5-8% gap is totally fine.

The other is that occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked is affected by existing wages. I was unemployed by choice for several months last year, learning Rust and working on a few open-source projects, and I became a more valuable job candidate as a result of that. I could not have done that without the savings to take those months off. If my previous job had paid me anywhere from 8% to 23% less, I would probably not have decided to take those months off, and in return I would have been a less competitive candidate and my job would probably have been one of lower position.
> And if “usable” has any additional meaning besides “is not null”, this entire machinery is useless because one STILL has to figure out the state of the data!

That's inaccurate. In fact Optional makes this situation (having to check if data is not null and valid) even easier, because you can simply filter/map the value without having to first check that it is non-null. For example:

possibleResult.filter(res -> isValid(res))
.ifPresent(res -> doSomething(res));
Lots of people have been killed at all stages of history. We're currently living in probably the least violent times ever.
What about the fact that anal sex is now less-taboo than it used to be? Most of my straight friends are having it these days. I can only imagine what teens are doing with their backdoors these days.

Anal sex has got to be the best form of contraception, although it definitely isn't "safe".
You can't out-run the fork.
I don't know if the article says this but you don't have to "exercise" per se but you should be "active" even if it's just walking.
They mention that explicity
> after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar.

8% is still a lot.

I'd like for companies to just show the data.
Town Fines Parents If Their Kids Are Bullies
Please see today's article on HackerNews front page: http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160428-how-ai-will-solve-tr...
I've been a paid user for quite a while and really enjoying Gyroscope! Would love to get coffee and chat dataviz sometime.
Actually there are two points here:

1. The creative process
2. Archiving/documenting

The amount of paper used in 1. can be very high, but essentially the key point is to let go of all your sketches when you are done distilling them. They are material for the trashbin. This may sound hard but it makes sense when you have a separate step for archiving, which means step 2.

Step 2. means, I distill all the lump of paper into what is required for the project at hand or worth keeping. This depends on the circumstances. Sometimes it means just putting a sheet of paper next to the other bureaucratic stuff, most of the time it means writing a project documentation or "specification" document, sometimes writing an outline for a paper or an abstract. This may be grunt work and the tools may suck, but that's OK since it is separated from the creative process and for the purpose of documentation, not creation.

If you have multiple projects at the same time and find yourself switching around often, make some organized space. There are these stackable plastic things where you can put stacks of paper in, not sure how they are called in english but I do use them to have 3 or 4 separated stacks that I can just pull out or put away when needed.

Maybe the key point is to be able and let go of old stuff. Taking half a hour once a week and browsing through the notes, evaluating and rejecting old/obsolete stuff helps too. Also, the "archiving step" acts as a filter. If you find yourself not having time/incentive to archive a certain idea or sketch, it is probably not worth it and can go to the trash.

Keep in mind, that Ideas (when they are just Ideas) are worthless. They need to be realized and one can only realize so much in a finite amount of time.
I've connected my product, now what?
If you want to run their software. On your server. As root. And are happy with 3 month certificates.

Do they support just downloading a file from them and then uploading it my server, as proof that I control the domain? That should be enough.
When I was a kid my town had three blackouts caused by substation failures. Once by mylar party balloon, and twice by squirrel. Turns out having a bushy tail can be a liability.

Later I was reminded of this when I was reading a biography of Tesla, who was doing the calculations for the arcing distance on his equipment and was building the largest coils that could safely be placed into his workshop(s). One day he accidentally turned on the equipment while he was on the wrong end of the room and he had to army crawl across the floor to get to the shutoff switch without turning into one of those squirrels.

[Edit] The point: Maybe we're designing the safety margins on these systems a little too tightly. Maybe a Squirrel radius should be added to these things.
Basic for loops:

for(x in 0 ... 5) {
// increment by +1 only
}

More verbose JSON:

var t = Json.parse("{ x: 1 }");
var tx = t.x; // just might be undefined
// vs working
var tx2 = Reflect.getProperty(t, "x")

Tricky array sorts:

myArr.sort(function(a, b) {
// just might crash
});

// vs stable
haxe.ds.ArraySort.sort(myArr, function(a, b) {
});

More verbose everything:

var v1 = 0;
var v2 = 0;
var v3 = 0;

var v4 = function(a, b) {
// also no 'arguments', that's more verbose too
};

Different syntax for familiar libs (if supported):

https://github.com/andyli/jQueryExternForHaxe

new JQuery("li").hide(); // $("li").hide()

If you're not targeting JS your HTTP requests are probably going to be synchronous and block the main thread.

If your target is only JavaScript / NodeJS you can get a lot of the benefits of Haxe by using TypeScript, with a much larger ecosystem to help you achieve your goals quickly.
women aren't slotted into lower positions. they slot themselves into lower positions. how many women carpenters or welders or electricians or plumbers do you know? These are relatively high paying jobs. How many women do you know that studied gender studies? This 'field' of 'study' amounts to little more than indoctrination into an ideology and doesn't lead to the generation of future revenue.
If they're not saying, I assume it's something really terrible. If it's not something really terrible, then all the advance notice advertising is perhaps cry-wolf overkill.
Great Questions. This is a huge paradigm shift that will cause a ton of growing pains for the tech industry and governments. A simple case study would that of Uber and their adoption of non-government based background checks. Is it in our best interest for the government to perform the background checks for drivers? Who knows...but problems like these need answers.
From the article: "Cornell professors Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that..."

Here you go, I Googled that for you: http://inequality.stanford.edu/_media/pdf/key_issues/gender_...

Now, the study in question is cited.
Building a Ray-Tracing 3D Renderer from Scratch
And anyone who has a cat knows that the definitely have the emotions of love, hate, spite, fear and excitement.
You diet to lose weight. You exercise to get in shape.
If not, why should they do it? What is in it for them?
What we do is a "take home test" that's pretty open ended (depending on which role we're hiring for). We basically give the candidate the requirements and they have 48 hours to send us something. Currently for our data science roles, we give them some instructions regarding where to find a specific dataset, and basically say "use data science tools, visualization, etc., to tell a meaningful story about something in this data." We don't dictate language, libraries, or anything. So you can use R, Python, Scala, Octave, Fortran, or whatever floats your boat. Then what we look for are things like:

1. Is it documented well enough that we can deploy and run the code ourselves?

2. Is the code clean, well structured, documented, etc.?

3. Does it run with no errors?

4. Does the output do a reasonable job of satisfying the requirements?

It's pretty open ended, which is itself a mixed blessing. Some people will look at it as an opportunity to really show off and show what they can do, and "flex their muscles" so to speak. Others may be intimidated by the lack of more detailed requirements. It's not a perfect test, but it works pretty well for us.

The one other risk is that the candidate will use a language that nobody here is qualified to evaluate (like FORTRAN), but in practice that hasn't been an issue.
Inflate your current salary by $20,000 if this question is asked.
We all attribute different initial meanings to common words. When I read "weasel" I at first thought politician. (No, I'm not making a joke).
Resumes with male names are ranked higher than identical resumes with female names.
Employer Refuses to Allow Python
Whatever your feelings on the existence (or not) of the "gender pay gap" the process the article describes seems perfectly fair. I think people are getting hung up on the gender part and not seeing the "fair pay" system they've apparently setup.
And I first saw it as Weasley and thought sorcery was involved...
Isn't the question kind of pointless?

I'd imagine most people would exaggerate their current pay
> Cornell professors Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that women were paid 79 cents for each dollar a man was paid. Even after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar.

What do they mean "even" after controlling for those factors? Why wouldn't you control for those factors -- the comparison is meaningless otherwise.
As an aside, isn't that question inherently just flat out wrong?

Q: 'What's your current salary?'

A: 'Why does it matter? What am I worth to you?'
A Type III civ is probably going to take the long view. The really long view. And in the long run, efficiency is everything.

Stars are just so wasteful; all that energy going into convection currents, and you have to build this big damned sphere to capture all the energy. Better to lift the damned thing and, at the very least, make a dwarf star out of the larger ones. Now you're talking trillions of years of burning (it's still a trash fire, but at least it's manageable).
Being able to throw good parties
Saying things were uniform when your entire interface is "bytes to and from a file descriptor" is just editing the past to me.

For most of these p9fs interactions, each one had a different format / API that you had to know in advance before reading or writing to the file. This meant many things just had custom ascii, others were binary. Some pushed elements into different file locations, some piled them all into a blob under the same file.

It makes oauth2 look decent.

Saying that you managed to push everything through a file interface is interesting, but it's no more or less connected than a world of http://
Obviously the framework I use is targeted to games

Which one is that, and how well does it do cross-platform?
Aside from arguing about whether there is some kind of feminist misinformation campaign regarding the size of the pay gap, does anyone want to talk about the effect of "what's your current salary" on the pay gap?
Combining Typefaces: Free guide to great typography
Right, that's not surprising, if you do that poll once. There's a 50% chance of that.

If you do that poll repeatedly, over many groups and many industries and many times and many subsets, and in every case the men are paid more (whether 5% or 23%), there is either an actual statistical difference, or Maxwell's social justice demon is out to get you.

And if there is an actual statistical difference, the question is why. Are men more valuable to the market?
Show HN: How lucky is your birthday when playing the lottery?
Good luck showing that in many cases. Especially if it is an encrypted external drive. I think in most cases they aren't going to be able to show "beyond reasonable doubt" that a person definitely still knows the password.
I think Haseeb wants to offer genuine help to women. If this woman doesn't want to take the advice, it's OK. Just ignore it. But please don't write a blog post about how he communicates instead of what's important: the message. For Engineers communication style was always secondary, and although it's getting more important, it should be staying secondary to the content and the real meaning behind the message.
Which is exactly how some people drive - an ex- used to make me car sick with the way she drove - rather than maintaing a constant speed, she'd speed up 'till she got too close to the car in front of her (dangerously close), then let off on the gas (or even tap the brakes) to slow down.

Annoying and led to no end of arguments "Why are you always criticizing my driving!?".
Without controlling for job title, how much does the average man make, and the average woman make?

I'm under the impression that the 77c figure is related to this "total" disparity, that better accounts for the separate, but related, issue of "predominantly female" fields paying less than male ones.
Is there something about the male gender that makes one a better investment banker? If not, how do you explain why that is in the first place?
It is part of trying to bargain people down, so it isn't pointless for the recruiter.
It is outrageous if a similarly-qualified woman would have a lot more trouble getting the $500k investment banker job. In that case, society is getting lower-quality investment bankers despite spending $500k/year on them.
I interviewed at Rackspace a few years back on the ops engineering side. It was part of a bigger recruiting push they were doing across the metroplex area I live in.

It involved a similar schedule of interviews across multiple teams in one day. Only 11 people apparently passed the tech pre-screening to get to that point out of the whole area. Interview process went great. It included a number of different fields at varying depths, yet didn't feel over the top at all. It was a very fair and positive experience. There seemed to be real interest from several of the interview teams.

Then the offer came. They wanted me to relocate for a swing shift chat support position at half my current pay even after shift bonuses. I don't know how you go from discussing Openstack production implementations (back in the Essex/Folsom days when you couldn't find anyone that knew that stuff) to basic Linux chat support.
I feel a little bit better now.
The operations themselves may only impose a performance hit of 10% or less, but the optimizations that those checks inhibit can easily cascade into a 2x slowdown, which isn't acceptable if Rust wants to compete with C++.

As for your correlation, I care a lot about safety, but I also recognize that the safest language in the world isn't going to pose any real-world improvement if it's not capable of competing with less-safe languages in their entrenched domains.
They also don't ask because when they do they are more likely to be shot down, just like they are less likely to be hired in the first place. When women ask for something they are seen as complaining, when men ask for the same thing, it's seen as confidence.
I have eaten 4000 calories of fat in an afternoon, mostly in cream and butter as part of a giant poundcake trifle [0]. I didn't throw up but I really regretted it all evening. This was at a time when I was very active and eating around 7000 calories a day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifle
Microsoft Closes Fable Developer Lionhead Studios
Who wants to catch a falling knife [1] ?

[1] http://wiki.fool.com/Falling_knife
Looking at the factors quoted they didn't include hours worked per week. Men typically work more overtime.
I should note I spent the first month ramping up from 20 min of jogging to 45 min of jogging which is why I put 6-7 months. If anyone decides to start jogging based on what I wrote, please don't go from nothing to 45 min a day. I didn't do that.