skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My company brought in an diversity activist to speak about improving diversity at our company. She told us that it is sexist to prefer to hire people with a college degree because more men than women graduate with degrees in CS. Instead we are told to assume that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education.

This does not pass the smell test. Sure, a certain type of "diversity activist" might say something like that, but for a company of any sort of quality to just accept it and implement it, that's unrealistic.

More realistically, what they may have implemented is something like accepting that people without CS degrees from top universities may still be perfectly capable software developers, which is true (being one, I'd like to think so, at least), but if that's the case, the article is grossly misrepresenting it.
I don't mind HN, you can get all sorts of pleasing patterns of highlight by dragging down nested comment hierarchies. Extra satisfying when you get the darker 'double highlight' and you can make it pop by wiggling your fingers a bit.

This is just heaven here: http://imgur.com/asQy8v3

Look at all those lovely lines and right angles.
Without knowing much detail all I can guess is that the 'test' was not about fixing the bug, but about testing your methodology.

This sounds like when high school students get marked down/fail for "not showing their working" in maths classes.

It doesn't matter that they can "do it in their head" the teacher is testing to see if they actually understand how to solve the problem, not if they can get the right answer.
Wow. OK. What makes you think this was the exact specific reason? Were there maybe other bugs you did not catch? Maybe there were less obvious things in the code that could have been fixed/changed? Is there any possibility of other factors?

I think the answer as to why this happened is in you. You just have to ask the right questions of yourself and answer honestly. Do some honest root cause analysis.

And then at the end of the day, there are those times where you do incredibly well and all seems as it should be and you don't get an offer. If there is absolutely nothing to learn from the experience, well then shrug and move on.
Nothing is a worse conversation than an engineer trying to rewrite all the code for no business critical reason. I definitely understand that working with crappy offshore code is a pain in the ass (doing that now!), but if it works, it works. I've worked on enough crappy code bases for successful companies (as in $100M/yoy revenue on "prototype" code) to realize that these worries we have as an engineer really don't matter. The only thing that ultimately matters for the business is having something that people want to use.
Halley VI Antarctic Research Station (2010)
Most of nodejs internals are in C++ on top of libuv. Only a thin layer of JS interfaces wrap that.

Python is also a dynamic, GCed language. uvloop is built with Cython, which uses the Python object model (and all of its overhead!), and CPython C-API extensively (so it's slower than a pure C program using libuv).
the only thing that makes it harder is lack of time. but then that problem exists in university too. with one you can work on your own schedule during limited free time, and with the other you can devote a lot of time to it but it's on someone else's timeline.
Nazi is an easy shorthand for evil. You don't need to show a Nazi kicking a puppy to say the Nazi is evil, because they're already a Nazi! We get it.

The downside of this shorthand is that it dumbs down conversation. The Nazi-accuser shunts the Nazi-accused into a digestible category that needn't be historically comparable at all to be rhetorically effective, and the accused has less incentive to cordially communicate when it is clear that they are not being taken seriously, so either reasonable people leave or inflammatory folks troll, and we're all worse off.
For small to medium changes, by reading the XML. Everything is named sanely, and the XML hierarchy matches the view hierarchy. Constraints can be a little hard to understand, because they use opaque identifiers, but it's possible. I'll occasionally have to open the storyboard/NIB in Interface Builder to confirm/disprove something.

For large changes, it can be unmanageable. But large changes are hard to code review anyway, so we try to avoid those.
I agree.

>> He [...] proposed to help us with his contacts, network, marketing and business effort.

Is there any reliable proof that he has contacts, a network or know something about marketing?

[In a more reasonable deal, I'd propose also fixing a sane vesting schedule. So if he decides to abandon the company next month, he can't walk out with the 51%. But this raises too many red flag for me. 51%!!!!!!!]
He implies that market will always grow. Lets say we have Japanese market. How do you make money here?
The obvious answer would be adding more CPU cores and surrounding circuitry. Especially on mobile it probably also makes a lot of sense to move more algorithms from software to hardware.
Hulu CEO confirms plans for a live TV streaming service in 2017
There is another post in this thread arguing that I'm speaking "partisan propaganda" (another a "mouthpiece of evil". How very theatrical) for my position. Which is a bit incredible given that I despised the Harper government, and personally lean to being a libertarian.

But at the same time I've considered the actual facts, coupled with the reality that mainstream media, when generalizing science, tends to do a really, really horrible job. The notion that the government wants to ensure the message is clear and coherent -- especially when it's given the weight of the government behind it -- given a free range of employees with their own quirks and communications issues, seems entirely rational.
You contradict yourself.

> Advertisers in turn pay Google because it makes them sell more.

> Taking the money of the advertisers and not boosting their sales doesn't pay on the long run.

Which is it, advertising on Google boosts sales or no?
I really wish SICP had been a 2nd year course (with a requisite increase in difficulty) instead of my very first course in the EECS department. Not having had a ton of background in programming beforehand, I feel that a lot of what SICP has to offer was lost on me to some degree due my not appreciating it at the time.

I suppose the same could probably be said for any intro course or just college in general...
Angular 2: Change detector performance
> Sussman admitted that the SICP curriculum was “more coherent” than what they have now and that they still don’t know what the right curriculum should be.

The article should have led with this because I believe it would have framed the rest of it more accurately.
This is all correct, but might be rude in context. You have no idea if the epidural in the story above was medically necessary (many are), so replying with a post about voluntary procedures could be interpetted as subtle victim blaming.

My wife and I could not have done more to avoid medical interventions during the birth of our child, but the baby was facing the wrong way and an epidural was necessary to allow the midwife an opportunity to turn it. Thankfully the epidural was done properly.
There is a comprehensive "motivation" section on the linked page of the project.
I genuinely did not know that was the correct spelling. Thanks! 10/10 bug report.
Giving epidurals and scheduling c-sections don't reduce mortality rates.

I'm not saying that pregnancies shouldn't benefit from advancements in disease detection to prevent potentially fatal outcomes. It's not a black or white situation.

Inducing labor to prevent a fatal outcome during birth and inducing labor because you want to be at a party/whatever the next week aren't the same.
Are there a lot of non-technical founders that do this? It would seem to me there'd be no shortage of engineers who would raise their hand and say "me, me! I'll do it!" Is that not the case? Or are these non-technical founders filtering those people out?

If I were still young, single, and childless, I'd happily give that a shot if someone approached me with a halfway interesting idea.
Most popular index funds are very diversified. 4000 companies not diversified enough for you? There is research that suggests any 50 companies picked at random will give you quite a bit of diversification.

The real lack of diversity is that it's weighted towards US companies which some people have decided they want and others don't, and apparently it's weighted towards stocks as an asset class as well.

I don't think weighting is the same as lacking diversification, although certainly you are lacking one kind of diversification.
Locke, who you dismiss with a vague handwave, made, in the Second Treatise on Government, an explicitly moral case for property rights founded upon the principal of individual autonomy. This was not a pragmatic argument. Locke, of course, greatly predates Rand; making a moral rather than pragmatic case for property rights is not an innovation of Rand's. (Locke goes on to make a pragmatic and moral case for popular government founded on the moral primacy of property.)

> I might sound like a fanatic

Quite.

> but if you actually read Rand it becomes clear how revolutionary her philosophy actually was.

I've read little of Rand and regret devoting time to doing even that; reading more isn't really something that seems worthwhile. But, certainly, nothing you've pointed to about her philosophy is revolutionary, or even novel (I'm sure there are some things in it that are at least the latter, though you haven't identified any.)

> She's a system-builder, something unknown in modern philosophy (since Kant).

Really? You can't swing a stick in a gathering of modern philosophers (and particularly those concerned with political/economic philosophy) without hitting a half-dozen system-builders. Rawls would be one notable example (from a radically different orientation than Rand.)

> Modern-day libertarianism is mostly a creation of Rothbard's, a one-time student of Rand's who later put all his energy into discrediting her while plagiarising her philosophy.

Rothbard (and Rand directly) are clearly influential in modern libertarianism, and particularly American right-libertarianism, but you have to take a pretty narrow view of what "modern libertarianism" is to see it all grounded in Rand (whether via "plagiarism" by Rothbard or not.)

> Just one example: the initiation of force as the basic social evil is an original concept of Rand's

No, actually, that's also found in (among other places) Locke's Second Treatise.
I use DuckDuckGo hash bangs - !auk nail polish
Eh, the jury's still out.

I sort of agree with Scott Aaronson on why he thinks consciousness is finite[0].

The problem, IMO, that Penrose has is that his theories border closely on mysticism - there's some quantum "magical" process whereby consciousness arises. Both pictures are incomplete, but Aaronson's is the most plausible.

[0]http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/finite.html
I run remarketing campaigns. One thing they can do is exclude people who visit job related pages. Its small but saves a few bucks (and annoyed interviewees).
Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar."

[points 2,3,4,5,6,7,9]

In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade boost.

[points 1,8]

edit: and about "open source" contributions; ethnic minorities and women are far more likely to have worked in large corporations rather than in open source or startups, because those companies are held to a higher standard in their behavior towards minorities than the kind of self-assembling social clubs that this article (and site) are focused on.

edit 2: I know (very closely) a woman who has been in IT for 40 years. She was an English major, and has absolutely no involvement with open source. She doesn't know people in startups. Why would someone presume that she doesn't know the job?
My undergraduate degree is in nuclear engineering.

I really don't know how I would have learned to use radiation detectors or export-controlled nuclear reactor modeling software without institutional access to those things.
I am a former pharmacist who has moved into technology consulting. I'm in the UK so forgive the UK focus of my response.

It is in fact the role of a pharmacist to reduce medication errors - and this is achieved through a series of checks - largely focussed on asking 'is this the right medicine and dosage for this patient and the condition to be treated?' and 'has the correct medicine, dosage and dosage form been dispensed?'

Errors tended to occur outside of pharmacy's area of control; in theatres to where pharmacists often have little access, in ward settings where medicines are administered in sometimes noisy and chaotic environments, in clinical teams where pharmacists are not allowed to have a presence, and indeed in the modern NHS where pharmacy staffing levels are severely reduced.

A technological solution is possible - based on the concept of checklistbundles, patient medical and medication record systems and image scanning technology - but it is usually hard to sell clinicians on the idea of a check-list never mind anything else.

Until there is a true incentive to change practices around medication administration (i.e. unlimited fines) this will always be a hard thing to change.
In college I wrote a (miserable) Modula-2 compiler. Its funny seeing Oberon-2 being used in the wild but brings back a touch of nostalgia.
while there are many phones around, there aren't hundred thousands different soc to support.

if the linux kernel driver model wouldn't be so hostile to driver backward compatibility, it'd be trivial for soc provider to have a single device driver delivered with the soc and cut the certification costs by orders of magnitude.

this is something google could fix, btw, creating something like FUSE but for wireless chipset integration and keeping that backward compatible.
I don't know if it's the best way, but having young children and joining a day care co-op worked for me.
Except it's not really.

Releases are always additive, and (to my knowledge) have never removed anything (even when they really really should have).

The only reason to target a newer version is if you need things that were actually added to the OS (like fingerprint scanning). And even there it's pretty easy to gate functionality. The vast majority of apps don't need to care in the slightest and with appcompat almost everything useful is available.

It's not like you have to make completely separate apps for Lollipop and Marshmallow the way you used to for IE and everything else.
I know, this is true for more languages; just makes for a bad branding choice/planning.
I disagree. If you're a technical co-founder, go sell customers on your vision and get them to buy.

Then you have a lot more leverage when going to "business guys" and saying: "Hey, look, I've sold 30k of ARR in the last few months, but I don't see myself as amazing on the business side and I'm curious how you think you'd be able to accelerate this growth."
I'm talking about this part of your post:

> Women have given birth for a long time without medical intervention, using competent mid-wives[.]

My dad works in international development and has spent a better part of his career working on programs in Bangladesh to get people to use hospitals instead of mid-wives. Now rich people in the United States are using mid-wives instead of hospitals. It's pure insanity.
From the motivation section:

Too many hypervisor projects out there are either extremely complicated (Xen, KVM, VirtualBox) and/or closed-source (VMware, Hyper-V), as well as heavily focused toward Linux-based development or system. Additionally, most (other than Hyper-V) of them are expressly built for the purpose of enabling the execution of virtual machines, and not the virtualization of a live, running system, in order to perform introspection or other security-related tasks on it.
What aren't you doing while you are going off and being a super hero?

Are you disobeying your manager's direction? (And thereby undercutting their creditability/authority - and how does that make the manager appear to their supers/peers?)

Why can't you go to your manager and ask for permission? If not, why not?

How would you feel if your "great" rewrite is rejected - because someone else was already doing the rewrite; or because the system is going to be redesign entirely? (For example, the code will be ported from .NET to Java - and all the .NET code will be discarded)

If you haven't yet, try being a manager for a while and then see if you still think that this sort of troublemaker.
Right, the first line of the post.
Scrapy Cloud 2.0: run your web crawlers in the cloud
My university used to have an Engineering Fundamentals class that all Engineering students were required to take their first year. Among several other things, it taught how to use Excel and more importantly, programming using Fortran. It wasn't in-depth, but you learned what programming was in a pretty easy environment.
i'm curious to know what the argument is for quantum computers doing supertasks.
I wasn't considering the extreme pedantry that I'm apparently receiving when I made the post. I was using the phrase "buy itself back" as going private. The ownership structure after which point that it is no longer a public company was irrelevant to me at the time I made that comment.
For sure, I still think there are definite benefits from learning to code. Especially, if your company is heavily tech focused. But, in the context of finding a tech co-founder, I think there are more optimal things you can do with limited time and resources.
> The government demanded that government employees get approval for any direct communications with media, etc.

FUCK that.

If my tax money is going to pay for your research work, and you want to speak to the public, I'm part of the public and I have a right to hear it. I will be the judge of whether your work is my money well spent, and I will be the judge of whether your public communications are time well spent, not some dipshit party hack.
Plugin Framework for Java (PF4J)-Izou Version, 1.7.8 Released
Mobile MVPs done by lone developers on a contract basis should be about getting something palatable and pleasant that works

Truth be told, something palatable and pleasant that works can be a very, very high bar from a UX perspective. When software collides with the real world, you get a lot of complexity. Even organizations the size of Google and Apple can't produce a Maps app that doesn't do wacky stuff that seems designed to frustrate the user while trying to get someone killed. By comparison, how something looks is dirt cheap. (As usual, it's far cheaper to signal quality than it is to build it.)

When it has to deal with the "real world," mobile QA and UX is hard, and doing it to a high level is probably greatly underestimated in cost while being quite expensive. They say a picture is a thousand words, and seeing it yourself is a few more orders of magnitude. If your only feedback is logging/callbacks/snippets of text from users, you're only getting a small sliver of the true picture.
The Catastrophic Success of the U.S. Air Force
Which, once again, none of that is up front. It's not until you get done clicking through the slide show that you can see that.
You just made a textbook strawman. It doesn't do anyone any good to theorize about what the dumbest possible reason might be for Google to do this. It is infinitely more useful to think about what rational, informed reasons they might have for doing it (regardless of whether you agree with those reason). People reflexively jumping to strawman arguments is probably #2 or #3 on the top ten list of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, in tech, politics, and just about anything else in the world where different groups of people have imperfect knowledge about each other's activities and motivations.
Mysterious Nvidia  marketing trick
I think the author underestimates the inherent complexity in large scale systems.

Yes, incidental complexity makes us skip tests that might have been good, but it is the inherent complexity that explodes in our face when totaly apparently unrelated issues causes emergent behaviour.

It has nothing to do with that it's a young field, it's just that we can create complexity that is not bound by laws of physics.

I usually show 'business people' Conway's game of life, and they are always fascinated, and then I ask them how many rules WE have.
The tragedy here is that checklists where invented for dealing with complex common situations under stress (iirc they where popularised not sure if invented in the modern form as a way to allow pilots to fly a much more complex aircraft than preceeding models[1]).

http://www.atchistory.org/History/checklst.htm
Twitter shares just fell to their lowest closing price ever
> Quality of life is a completely different topic, in my opinion, and I am sure we would find more common ground in that discussion.

You don't understand why bradleyjg brought up QALYs.
Some companies will rate applicants in a series of categories. Education and experience are the usual. Lately, "fit" has become extremely important to HR departments. It usually means people with the same culture, race, age, music and sports tastes, etc.

If your company thinks it has a diversity problem, it's probably related to "fit". My suggestion is to continue to filter people out based on education and experience equally and give a boost in the "fit" category to categories of people that are minorities in your company. I think that's perfectly fair to offset internal biases.

EDIT: I get it some people are arguing that, by filtering on education/experience, there won't be any minorities left to be "boosted" in the "fit" category. If it is THAT bad, the company can try to expand who it's reaching out to but I understand that's a bigger problem (e.g. company in SV cannot afford relocation costs and thus has to look for local candidates only will not help with the diversity issue).
I interpreted it not as 'knowing versus not knowing' but as 'knowing about Native Americans and covalent bonds' versus 'knowing whatever people would end up knowing if they didn't go to College'.

Maybe they will acquire work experience, life experience, pragmatical knowledge about how real world works, that kind of thing. Why is knowledge about covalent bonds intrinsically more important than that?
Friends of friends, meetups, apps like Weave or FounderDating...
The hard-coding of the length of the "aff" string and/or re-use of the "s" (size) variable does indeed look odd:

s := SIZE(String);
aff := "Affirmative, Dave";
(...)
s := 17;
n := Unix.Write(sock, S.ADR(aff), s);

As far as I can gather from: https://github.com/norayr/voc/blob/master/src/lib/v4/Strings... this implementation uses some kind of c strings (not familiar with Oberon in general, but I thought that the norm was something like Pascal strings?): "Strings provides a set of operations on strings (i.e., on string constants and character
arrays, both of which contain the character 0X as a terminator). All positions in
strings start at 0.
Strings.Length(s)
returns the number of characters in s up to and excluding the first 0X."

It would seem that:

s := String.Length(arr);

should be the sane equivalent to "s := 17;"