skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How diverse would you say your friend/acquaintance group is? Are they from the same background as you? Do they have similar life stories? If not, how can you possibly imagine that you're not just soaking in confirmation bias?

Don't like my opinion? How about someone else's opinion? https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

There are countless examples of talented people who have been ill-served by the hiring environment and tech culture we have today. For every one of them that gets lucky and finds success through non-traditional hiring practices at a great company (for example) you have to wonder how many others (others who live where there is less opportunity, etc.) are just passed by and left behind by the system.

Your attitude is very much a "let them eat cake" attitude. You look around and you say "everyone I know is successful, what are all these other people's problems?" Trust me, there are poor people out there, there are disadvantaged people out there, and partly because of unfairness built into the economy and our culture. And that extends even into the tech world. There are tons of talented people who are unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise disadvantaged simply because they don't match the traditional model of what a talented tech person looks like.
Excel is still superior to Google Sheets.
I don't think this was inflammatory or uncivil. Definitely highly controversial, definitely baseless (like every other comment on HN) but not inflammatory or uncivil.

I would have voted it down because I disagree, but I don't think censorship is justified.
"Dear Slack, resistance is futile."
How Uber Manages a Million Writes per Second
Providing APIs for third-party integration is what Microsoft is almost too good at (hence why Word and Excel are so scarey). The idea that Slack would be so dumb as to believe that Microsoft will do poorly at this is shocking.
This isn't as difficult as you think. When you know an area well, you know what species of fish are likely to be around - down to specific habitats like rocky vs sandy coastline, and even particular arrangements of rocks or sand formation. After a while you notice their behaviours and specifically behaviours distinct from other species (e.g. bottom feeding, surface hunting, swimming style etc). So it's more of a combination of inputs that gives you an educated guess as to the fish you can't see, based on what you know about the area as well as fish behaviour. Anecdotally, I have an avid fisher of an uncle (more than one actually...) who is able to tell what species of fish he's hooked before he can even see it.
The easiest way to fix "diversity in tech" would be to reduce the number of H1B visas, which in the tech sector overwhelmingly go to overwhelmingly overrepresented Asians.

But in practice, "diversity" is ~exclusively used as an anti-white & especially anti-white-male cudgel, so of course that will not happen.
> They even have their own hiring fairs and events that men aren't invited to.

That's a non sequitur; just because there are things to ease the process for them does not mean that it is easier. The job fairs would mean that it's easier, in a vacuum. It's not in a vacuum. There are other effects that the job fairs can only chip away at.
Ask HN: Desktop/Laptop within $200?
Hi HN,

I have windows 7 laptop. I want to start a side project. I thought of getting a MBP, but MBP is very expensive. I would rather build my own desktop/laptop.

Can you recommend something under $200? My primary use is going to be for coding and occasionally movies. MS Office software would be good to have and that's it!

Where can I get a laptop under $200? Or How can I build my desktop within $200?
Jio Money. Bangalore, India. Many Positions. Full time.

We launched on the 15th of Aug and are the top trending app in the Finance section in play store. Approx 12 Million downloads.

The problem scope is large, complex and fascinating problem to crack.

The potential to bring banking to 600 million un/underbanked Indians is what excited me to work on this.

We are looking to hire a good core team of full time math, physics and CS majors, UI UX and product managers, who will work of Bangalore, India.

We are open to hiring people from around the world but they will need to work out of Bangalore.

Looking for full time and in exceptional cases, consultants, welcome.

We also have our payment network baked into banks and mass transit.

In the past I have built both fast-data and big-data companies and have a few patents in this space.

If you are interested, please email me at google's email service - takenottie.

On a side note and for the readers outside India :

It also helps to note that Jio, which is our cellular telephony play, launched around the same time, now is the world's largest cellular data network (pumping 16,000 TB per day) and onboards a million customers a day!
I found the article interesting and it sync'd with my experience in one significant way. When I started doing interviews after nearly a decade at the same job I was way out of practice. I blew an interview at Google, I still feel embarrassed thinking about it. But then I upped my game, by taking Coursera classes on algorithms, hacker rank, etc. I really worked on it. I ended up getting so much better. Got a good job. As for the article, it is interesting to me that women are 7x more likely to give up after blowing an interview. Obviously they don't realize how much practice makes perfect.
Took me a while, but finally got the hang of it.
They couldn't use the shorter code space. So no, they could not do whatever they wanted. (note that making a completely new instruction encoding scheme would fail for obvious reasons)
I think it makes more sense to hire people you like who you think can do the job. Then train those individuals to be the employees you want. That is where your diversity will come in. What happened to businesses and people investing in and training other people? Sure they may walk in a dud in your eyes but there is no reason why they should stay that way.

Secondly, many companies can take a good engineer, not use them correctly, run them off or turn them into a bad engineer for your company. There is too much emphasis on what a candidate already is and not enough emphasis on what you can mold your candidate to be after they are hired.

Training people on the job is where your diversity will come from. I noticed that many people got in the door with less skill than the people they are hiring.
Do you not understand that these are not comparable things? Your position is that no one in tech is generally ill-served by the system, which is backed up by your own personal experience. I've shared with you the fact that I've seen many examples of people ill-served by the system. That is a direct counter-example against your position, and as such invalidates your claim.

The only way it doesn't is if I'm lying. Are you calling me a liar? Or are you just too narrow-minded to imagine that there are experiences outside of the bubble you live in?

Are you claiming that my experiences and observations are too narrow and un-representative of the industry whereas yours are more general and representative? By what basis do you make that claim?

Edit: Evaluate it from a logical perspective. There are two hypotheses: that iniquity in hiring in tech don't exist, and that they do exist and are somewhat common. Then evaluate the "evidence". On the one hand we have your experience, where you've seen a lack of iniquity, on the other we have mine, where I've seen plenty of examples of iniquity. And we have the example I gave of other observations of iniquity, and the evidence from the article for this whole discussion, which also highlights examples of iniquity. If iniquity was common, we would still expect some situations where it was locally uncommon, especially among people of similar cultural/socio-economic backgrounds, so you would not expect a complete absence of perspectives like yours, you'd expect a mix of perspectives. If iniquity was uncommon, you'd expect that there would be very few perspectives with examples of iniquity. The only way the evidence in front of us makes sense under that hypothesis is if I'm a unicorn with utterly unusual and unique experiences, as are the examples from the article and from the sources I've brought up. That is a much less intellectually tenable position, to claim that all of the evidence against your favored hypothesis doesn't matter because it's all outliers or otherwise unreprestantive. Meanwhile, how do you explain the statistics which show that there are systematic iniquities in the system? How do you explain the countless stories with examples of people who have been ill-served by the system as it exists? Your claim seems to be incredibly weak and based on nothing more than a refusal to accept that anything outside of your own personal experience is real or important.
> "FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton's server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it."

Wow, that seems far more than originally reported, and certainly more damaging. Which foreign entities have confidential information now? How will they use that information?
> If somebody claims that a vegan diet is healthier and better, I would expect some facts that support that claim at least.

The links I provided show studies that support that claim. If you are interested in more, please visit nutritionfacts.org.

> Do you know somebody that became centenary following a strict vegan diet?

Google Dr. Ellsworth Wareham. 101 old, vegan for the last 50 years, retired surgeon who worked until age 95 and is still very active. I'm sure there are others, but again, this alone doesn't prove anything when it comes to which diet is healthier.

Since a very tiny percentage the world is vegan, of course you will find more centenarians who are not vegan, that's why you need to look at studies that control for this and other factors.

> This people either faked their veganism or were really very ill.

If you are thinking about b12, which is the only supplement most vegans today are advised to take, keep in mind that this vitamin is produced by bacteria. Before we washed our foods and lived in sterile environments, b12 was not a problem.

Abstinence from animal products dates as far back as Pythagoras with his Pythagorean diet, at least.

> On the other hand, reaching 100 years with a mediterranean diet or a Japanese diet based in marine food has been proved as uncommon, but perfectly possible, with dozens of cases reported at least.

The Okinawans, whose life expectancy was among the highest in the world, ate significantly less fish than the rest of Japan. Their staple was sweet potatoes (69% of their calories)[1].

[1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_diet
But, if everyone uses throwaway accounts to say what they really want to say, then it just helps perpetuate the same political correctness that they dislike.
It's all about oil, land and water. Ideology is about your country being the best. Everything else is irrelevant.
Even getting entirely away from the argument that ad networks can host malicious code, it's quite simple. I send a burst of information to a server. The server sends a burst of information back. I then decode the information to reveal a set of instructions.

Demanding that I execute all these instructions without exception is like a subscription service sending me a newsletter in the mail and demanding that if I pick it up, I've somehow agreed to read the whole thing, beginning to end, out loud. Absurdity.
It could be much worse. Simply making random changes and hoping it is an improvement rather than making things worse is not sensible.
Hah, well, that only happened once. And even so the overall lifespan of satellites was not very long back then.
You're talking about the "pop under" ad format
How Bayesian Inference Works
I think one of the big reasons that many dev tools are command line programs is that command line interfaces are just easier to code, even if you are writing all the parsing logic from scratch. You don't have to worry about designing a layout, hooking logic up across a UI thread, wrestling with a widget library, etc.
According to TFA, Vote.org is a non-profit.
How to Compile and Create Deb Installer from Source Files in Ubuntu
A big fallacy seems to be that it is meaningful to just use existing data in whatever cruddy non-normalized form it comes in, and let the 'algorithms' sort it out.

There needs to be strong mgmt support for getting outcomes, because the production team are going to have to change to support it, and they usually like doing things their own way. Typically, without analytics, sensible logging formats or a clue as to why the outside world behaves the way it does.
Yes I agree with this. I even stated as such, that I give and prefer to get coding tests using an actual computer. I'm not talking about those.

f I ask someone the complexity of searching a binary tree, or show them a double for loop with that iterates over the same collection in each loop, and ask them the complexity of that, I expect them to say logn and n^2. Bonus points for addressing best, average, and worst case performances and what kind of data drives those.

If I ask someone to write a small program at their own laptop to parse an integer, I expect them to be able to do that. This shows the absolute bare minimum in competency at the job you'll be asked to perform.
Dishonored 2 CD-Key Generator (PC, PS3/4, Xbox One/360)
>Under the hypothesis that race/gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation/nationality/age are uncorrelated to performance/ability of the candidates, it implies bias in the selection process.

We are infinitely certain of this, which explains many things.
For NYT, just open the article in an incognito tab. They're nice about it. I ended up subscribing because I read so many of their articles and I like their coverage.
Would yarn help here? (since FB have their own CDN and registry for it?)
> Putting too many functions that are relatively complex in the where clause is a bad idea, because you lose the explicit type signature (you should always specify it for top-level functions).

You can give functions in the where clause type signatures. It isn't as common, but it might be preferable to breaking out code into separate functions, depending on how well the function makes sense outside the context of its "parent" function.
Just yammering about upcoming competition :-)
It makes "sense", until I see that a company like Lenovo sells a laptop with up to 64GB RAM [1]. The difference is that Lenovo uses Intel Xeon chips in the higher end models. Apple could make a laptop with that much RAM (and all the ports everyone wants, and a proper keyboard), they're just choosing not to. Presumably because then they couldn't say it was thinner & lighter.

[1] http://www3.lenovo.com/au/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p-ser...
So, you have no evidence that this "problem" is actually a problem. You have no evidence that your solution to this "problem" actually solves it. And in fact, the only evidence you present indicates that the thing you are blaming ("technical interviews" which you present as a strawman of puzzles) has nothing to do with the diversity "problem". But we should buy your solution anyways?
There is a line of thought that says that judges should not be elected (which most of the world follows), because being subject to election forces them to make the popular decision, instead of the legally correct one.

In this light, there is very good reason to recommend that judges be retained; as having judges be worried about retention causes real problems for our judicial system.
Wait did they actually put a big print ad in the New York Times? I hope for Slack's sake this is a joke/meme
Having worked briefly in the HIPAA compliant EMR sector, I am honestly surprised by this. Last I checked HIPAA rules were quite lackadaisical when it came to securing patient facing web portals. But I am very out of date and had never thought about applying HIPAA compliance to inter-team communications...

Glad you pointed this out! Really makes me look at Teams in a different (decidedly more positive) light.

Not that I saw it negatively...it just seemed kind of neutral, like Yet-Another-Microsoft-Product that is entering last year's exciting new market.
That would be true if we could mention a single factor that we agreed was correlated to successful software projects.

Given that is the biggest open question in the industry, who knows?

What we do know is that current hiring practices aren't inclusive & they aren't successful.

Are those things related? No idea, but I'm more willing to try inclusion than I am riddles for finding my next candidates.
Beauty for Real HI-DEF Defining, Volumizing Mascara, Just Black, 9ml
Someone has made this more idiomatic to the spec: https://github.com/tmpfs/trucks. FWIW, we are looking at decoupling Incremental DOM in a way where custom renderers can be created, so one could create a <template /> renderer.

It's not immediately obvious, but you could create a custom element with Skate that takes it's content and creates a new custom element definition from it, similar to how Polymer 1 worked. This approach was discussed as being implemented in custom elements v2, but is closed to see what frameworks come up with: https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/issues/136. This is totally something that could be done with Skate, though.
Someone gets it. Funny how people who are so "moral", actually end up being incredibly immoral and biased.

Here's a question: if there's such a demand for solutions that solve a problem that the "majority" can't see, why don't women and minorities just start their own companies to solve those problems and make piles of $$$?

Reality check: building a good team is a struggle for every race, culture, gender, and individual in every industry on the planet. I get it though, it's a lot easier to mooch off of actual engineers who build solutions and then act like they had some significant impact as the "Director of Diversity".

Keep riding those coat-tails, maybe one day you will invent something on your own that isn't pseudo-scientific bullshit and actually improves people's lives. Go on, I DARE you to run your own startup and actually try to hire good help. You'll quickly find you have no time for such nonsense and only care about getting $*!@& done.
Yeah, this was not great. I worry Google might do something similar with email and their attempt to curate it with Inbox and the growth of ads in Gmail.

They have the ability to control access and marketers currently pay a known fixed or tiered price for sending email to somewhat reliably reach their full target list (minus bounces). I'm sure Google is salivating over turning that into a dynamic auction based model with them as the gate keeper of one of the most widespread and valuable email clients out there.
dupe, please check before submitting!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12855291
> Data caps/tiers/metering is basically the only fair way to provide data service. "Unlimited" is inherently flawed as a product concept.

It was proven time and again that data caps are driven by greed, not by necessity. That's clear in wireline networks where congestion isn't a problem at all, and can be as well demonstrated in mobile ones, where spectrum limit can be an issue. Caps don't prevent network congestion in mobile networks. I.e. don't pretend it's a network management tool, it's not. It's just money gouging tool. So it has nothing to do with fairness.

ISPs already have tiers for bandwidth. There is no need to use caps as well.
Not covered in this article, some people simply never transitioned to new technology because they are older, unfamiliar/inclined with tech and didn't have to.

A colleague who was at a fairly known investment company told me of a senior exec whose PA left printed emails and left them on his desk. He would then write replies on the paper version and the PA would type and send them.

Nothing to do with secrecy. He was just older and never adapted to computers. I feel this logic fits occam's razor nicely rather than being over conspiratorial. It's not like you can't use email for efficiency, and do the 'lets take this offline' response when going somewhere sensitive/secretive.
A Scientifically Proven Pep-Talk for Winning
This is disappointing to read, given I love what 18F has done. No matter whether we think they should be breaking even or not, they shouldn't be creating wildly inaccurate revenue projections and then falling drastically short of them. That looks like something is going drastically wrong with management there, especially considering greater macroeconomic conditions have not changed drastically enough in a way that would cause something like this. I'd hope there is something other explanation though.
Assuming theres no Android app?

Any ETA?
As if people would go through the trouble of opening Facebook in a mobile browser instead of just using the app.
I don't get that explanation:

> Many mite make the argument that apple could have used the LPDDR3 version, but how would they look if they did that for the 15 inch MBP only?

I don't know... compromising, reasonable, and responding to what customers expect?
MyTrustedWill – Live a bit longer
Yea, the Plasma Mobile home page doesn't really make a strong pitch towards a potential user.

For mobile developers, the biggest difference is that they'd be using the Qt framework instead of the Android framework.

So the pitch at least for mobile developers, should be why it's a more pleasant and better (and more productive) experience to develop mobile apps with Qt vs the Android frameworks.

I'm not how much better Qt is going to be since I haven't used it. But I've been a long-time desktop Linux KDE user, and one of the biggest gripes I have with KDE is that its quite unstable and buggy compared to Mac and Windows.

KDE 4 became almost very-stable with 4.13+, but the early version of KDE 4 were horribly unstable. With Plasma 5, from what I hear, things got worse again.

This is the biggest problem, I think. To the people who have actually used KDE on deskotp Linux for a long time, how many of you have enough confidence in the stability and reliability of a mobile Qt/KDE environment to use it everyday?
That makes absolutely no sense. By definition, giving up is failure. So the options are "100% chance of failure" vs "less than 100% chance of failure", and you think they are more likely to pick "100% chance of failure" because failure is scary?
> Trust me, there are poor people out there, there are disadvantaged people out there, and partly because of unfairness built into the economy and our culture.

What makes you think that I'm not one of those people? Did you ever think the reason I don't feel there's a problem is because I come from a disadvantage non-majority background and haven't had it used against me?

Real talent excels period. Yes, I've seen it and it's been from a diverse background. If you write great code, you will do well. I see a ton of people wanting success handed to them without the hard work, but no one owes them that.
> can be gamed heavily by just memorizing a dynamic-programming solution to the longest-common-subsequence problem;

Funny, I actually implemented this about a month ago but I can't remember how it works now.
It would be a welcome addition. Reputation is huge though. Customer must have confidence they are going to be able to cancel and not be charged for other things. Businesses need to know the company is going to be around and pay out in a timely and reliable manner. iBill was a company that stole a bunch of people's money a little over a decade ago and lots of people in the biz are extremely cautious because of it.
> By what basis do you make that claim?

What basis do you have? We're both just throwing around observations. Mine aren't the same as yours.
Failure being scary is exactly why I hustle so hard though. I don't deliver? People will stop caring about me within a year.

Let's not confuse scary with bad.

e.g. Paris Hilton is not scared of being homeless.