skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find Apple Maps annoyingly slow in calculating routes and responding to my input. Google Maps worked alright for me, but I switched to Waze a couple months ago and can't go back anymore.

Waze is superior in so many ways. It knows (most) contruction sites/road closures (there are many where I live), Waze tells me about speed traps and accidents. Maybe not the best UI, but I definitely get the best results. And I enjoy submitting Road closures etc myself - hoping that I am helping others get where they want faster/without unexpected issues. It's not perfect, but it has definitely saved me a lot of time.
One of the reasons I push for very objective, fixed, and carefully selected technical interview techniques is precisely to avoid these issues.

The goal is to reach a point where either you pass the technical, or you don't. But making a fair technical assessment for levels and roles in a company takes time and is very tempting (but, I argue, futile) to contract out.

I think in a larger context: the "pipeline problem" people want to point to as a source of the gender gap in hiring will become our primary issue when we first iron out the issues with the atrittion and harassment we see for women in the workplace.

As for gender essentialism, I think this woman has every right to her opinion and I support her efforts, but I think she's approaching the problem wrong. She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter (who has almost certainly had positive modeling for a lot of other roles) isn't interested.
So is Google now a more reliable/bulletproof registrar? I think I've heard CloudFlare will not take refuse anything
> For me, her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in pressures to hire some women who couldn't do the work. This creates a perverse feedback loop that unfairly taints future women candidates who could do the work -- which ends up undermining the whole point of diversity.

Wow, that sounds terribly unfortunate! Did this happen while she worked at Google? Or while working at her startup? What are the mechanisms behind this? Do the diversity programs at Google have lower hiring standards than the normal hiring track?

(In case it's not clear, my point is that she appears to be describing a hypothetical scenario. The claim that diversity programs result in hiring unqualified women is a very strong claim (not even one that James Damore makes in his memo), and needs to be backed by actual evidence.)
On a lighter tone, here are some lessons I've learnt at !!con (a conference by Recurse Center aka Hacker School alumni): http://p.migdal.pl/2017/08/14/bangbangcon.html

tl;dr: you can get great inclusivity primarily by being welcoming, accommodating for needs (in an open-ended way, not restricting it to a few axes) and, crucially, by not shaming or bulling otherwise good-willed transgressors

Sure, not all of these things may scale, or be copy-pastable to workplace environment.
Definitely being ironic. It's a weird place we're in now - not because of any idea being discussed - but because of who is allowed to have an opinion.

But really, I'd be interested in how many women tptacek hires, and how he cultivated such a talent pool.
Mainly because those tests aren't really a good measure of aptitude, and minoriies and women tend to (at least historically, idk about now) score lower. So you would end up with a company full of white, Asian, and Indian guys. (Not making a judgement here just pointing it out)

You could also use the test as a filter mechanism, but I'd just not take the test unless you paid for it as the recruiter. Even then they require months of serious study for most people. It just doesn't work well overall. Take home "work samples" tend to be the preferred method right now and they seem ok as long as they aren't abused.
That's great, but that's a non-solution.

We've been going down the path where virtually everyone agrees people ought to be hired and promoted based on merit, yet we have an industry rife with harassment, various -isms, and discrimination.

I'm pretty sure quotas are not the answer, but offering up the tried and failed idea that we should all just stop being bad is rather pathetic, in my opinion. In any case, I think we can expect it to work as well as it ever has.

Edit: minor typo
The comments here are missing a massive use case: shared memory. Shared memory isn't just about programmer convenience. It's about using a machine's memory resources more effectively.

Yes, shared memory is available in multi-processing, but it doesn't necessarily interact well with existing codes.

I've been working on adding Python support to Legion [1], a task-based runtime system for HPC. Legion wants to manage shared memory so that multiple cores don't necessarily need multiple copies of the data, when the executing tasks don't conflict (all are read-only, or access disjoint data). Legion is C++, so this mostly "just works". Some additional work is required to support GPUs, but it's still not so difficult. But with Python, if we go with multiprocessing, we have to switch to a different mechanism. Worse, Python is an optional dependency for Legion, so we can't depend on Python's multiprocessing support either.

If you have a large existing project, and a use case that can take advantage of shared memory, being forced into Python's multiprocessing scheme for parallelism is a pain.

We've been investigating using a dlmopen approach as well, based on this proof of concept [2]. Turns out that dlmopen in every available version of libc has a critical bug that prevents it from being practically useful, if you have any desire to make use of native modules. You can build a custom libc with this patch [3] but rolling a custom libc is also a massive pain.

In all likelihood we'll end up rolling our own multiprocessing to make this work. If the GIL were truly gone though, we could potentially avoid many of these issues.

[1]: http://legion.stanford.edu/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844268

[3]: https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/496559/
Books and the 'Boredom Boom'
mc32 is correct. The extra price is not the product. They buy identity.

It's sad but true. There is a fear that millennials become smarter than their parents and don't need to consume to build their identity.
Wouldn't it violate US equal-opportunity laws to lower the hiring bar for women?
Maybe in some imaginary utopia. Here in the real world, being shrill or hateful is a great way to drive people away from your point of view, regardless of its merits.
> I don't think that these games were available for anyone coming from either my generation (in my 20s, now) or any of the previous ones.

S.E.U.C.K. [1] was published in 1987. RPGMaker [2] was first published in 1992 and is still going.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-%27Em-Up_Construction_Ki...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG_Maker
Why are there so few new languages built on the .NET platform ? This is a genuine question - is there something about the JVM that gives rise to such vibrant ecosystems.

Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, Groovy, JRuby : Most importantly, every one of them is in production use - not just as toy/experimental languages. And we havent even opened the Pandora's box that is Java 9+Truffle.

There's a lot of broscience that .NET is superior to the JVM - is that on sheer performance only ?
And of course there are atrocities going on right now, and the future probably holds atrocities just as bad or worse. That's true enough. I don't react to the Mongol atrocities with anger or a desire for revenge, just a terrible sadness that this is what we've done to each other, and a hope (that may be naive) that we can learn not to do it again. I don't know what else to tell you- again, if you want to study ethics I'm probably not the best teacher but I do think that not glorifying violence is a good start.
Eh, I've been playing guitar for a decade and I have no desire to perform. I largely play on my own, and occasionally with friends. So any semblance of public persona or what I look like playing guitar has zero relevance to a hobby that I greatly enjoy. But I guess I'm somewhat opposed to picking hobbies based on "how cool" they are. Hobbies should be fun.

Also, "sexy gods" generally applied to 20 year old guitarists anyways. The middle aged guitar gods didn't _start_ as middle-aged. Their fame carried them.
Would you say the Python ecosystem is stuffed to the GILs with incompatible libraries?
Well put—thank you.
Public shaming for wrongthink? I have no idea what you are talking about, nor how it relates to the article.

Can you explain a bit more?
If you want to play finger-picking in the folk style, you would be better off picking up a steel string guitar and learning on it, I think. Classical guitars have wider necks and higher action (more space between the strings and the fret board), so you would be acquainting yourself to differently configured guitar if you went with a classical. The only advantage to a beginner on a classical guitar is that there is less tension on the strings, so they are easier to press down. I think it is better to develop the finger strength on a steel string, and doing so is certainly not detrimental. With regular practice you adapt to it in a few weeks.

That said, playing any guitar is great when you are starting, as opposed to no guitar at all.

If you want a great guitar for the price, check out Monoprice.com. I have been playing for years and recently picked up a steel string cut-away for less than $100 (on sale) and it plays like a dream.
Well 'lacking energy' and 'draining energy from others' is not exactly factual...
Shapeshift is very convenient but the fees are exorbitant compared to other platforms.
I can't say that I'm a great coder, but I learned from ZZT and Megazeux back in the early-mid 1990s. No idea if something like that would work today, though, and both ZZT and Megazeux seem to be stagnant at present...
After skimming the paper, the methods used look quite basic. There seems to be no really deep new insight as far as I can tell. Let's see what experts will have to say.
Yes, I have noticed. :(
Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain
The problem is F# does not use the Roslyn compiler (but does use other components of the Roslyn tool stack in Visual Studio) and it uses things in the IL (primarily tail calls) the other .NET languages do not -- and the rest of the Microsoft teams understandably want to move fast on all the initiatives surrounding .NET Core.

This results in the Microsoft F# team and the F# community contributors playing catch-up. Eventually F# will catch-up, but it is going to take time.
Effectively, the Sims themselves are the Feng Shui analyzers, in the way that the layout and open spaces of their house and the objects in it affects the routing efficiency and creates flows and bottlenecks, which affects how much time they have for other more productive uses of time than walking across the house to the bathroom, queuing to walk through doors, navigating through crowds, which indirectly affects their overall happiness and other motives scores.

To show how happy your Sims are, the antlers of the Beaver Pelt Moosehead occasionally moves up and down to reflect the overall happiness of the family members!

http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Beaver_Pelt_Moosehead

If your Sims get really depressed, and have a Tragic Clown Painting on the wall, a real Tragic Clown arrives and performs annoying tricks that make you even more depressed, and he is very difficult to get rid of.

http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Tragic_Clown
Based on my brief exposure, Spectacles is a very polished product. Everything about it had an aura of breezy, forward-moving fun that is usually absent from tech: the purchase experience at a super-cute vending machine that displays a rendering of the glasses on your face; the yellow carrying case that doubles as extra battery for the glasses; the effortless installation experience; even the round video that invites peeking to discover hidden content at the edges.

I don't think Snap deserved their IPO valuation, and the company is uninvestable anyway because of the share structure that locks voting power forever away from common stock holders. But I'll be sad if Snap goes away because they're so different from everybody else in this space.
Really? Multiple carrier groups, plus ground contingents from the Army and Marines, plus the Air Force are unable to "control" Iraq or Afghanistan...
I wasn't aware .NET Core 2.0 had anything to do with desktop apps?
Is anyone aware of how many female engineers come out of Iran? This has everything to do with education quality. Our math education is an absolute joke in the US, even mine and I went to a supposedly amazing public school. Add in cultural biases such as parents and teachers pushing bright girls to "girly" fields instead of math and you end up like this. Then in typical American fashion we try to impose quotas or other bandages at the endpoint rather than fixing the system itself.
Awesome, thank you for sharing, I will check it out!
turn of the century, think 1900-1910 ships, suffered severely from lack of development in boiler technology. Four, five, and even six, in a row could be found. One or two even had parallel rows. For many ships, mostly battleships, which went under modernization programs after WW1 the most common noticeable change was reduction in the number of funnels as boiler count was halved or reduced by two thirds. It wasn't uncommon to take a battleship or even a cruiser apart as it was still cheaper to do let alone easier to get the budget for.

with regards to this new carrier it probably was a good idea to not go nuclear when your experience with it at this scale is not sufficient plus just the inherent costs of doing that.

one would think the age of CVs has passed similar to how the age of BBs passed even prior to WW2 but naval commands are very loathe to acknowledge a shift in tactics until half their fleet is sunk
Google Code Jam has the same problem. I'm honestly surprised that Google hasn't yet tried to intervene with some sort diversity enchantment...
If I run N versions of program that occupies 8mb of memory the memory footprint of the code is much less than N*8mb due to shared libraries/memory pages.

It's a factor, sure. But, one you should weigh with other factors to determine what is best.
Typographical Printing-Surfaces (1916)
Can you use these without uploading to Snapchat? I wouldn't mind getting one just for making videos. (Or is there a better glasses product for that?)
there is a reason why there are so many battery cleaner & anti virus apps with almost-god permissions.
Right, would make actual cross platform harder, but potentially transitioning a .NET Framework app to Core would be easier as you could do it in phases with less dev effort. Something my work should probably look at at some point since we're currently a Framework shop (still using 4.5.2 I believe).
Ask HN: What app or service should I use to write a technical ebook?
Requirements: Export to Markdown, PDF, ePub, HTML. Internal and external hyperlinks. Embeded code snippets. Support for tables. Simple editor (Markdown or similar).
Platform: Web or MacOS. No need for mobile access.

Any suggestions?
Every technology has it's problems, and you should be careful what you use as your source of information. Always do your own research when choosing a new technology to fit your needs best, and talk to other people/consultants who have experience in this area and can point out problems before you commit to anything.
Right. Super interesting. This lends anecdotal creedence to my post on another comment: "I only listen to music that was made today" could be an amazing guiding principal for SoundCloud that differentiates it from Spotify et al.
They may need to have better marketing, like have an ad that mentions it in the app. I didn't know that Spectacles are selling on Amazon now and I don't believe many people know either. I think most assume that they're still being sold at those exclusive kiosks.
7 Traits of a Great CTO
The trend for multi-platform software is to build it on web technologies. There's nothing for the user to install and they can access the software from anywhere there's an internet connection.

If you need it to be offline and integrate into the operating system, then electron would be the next logical step in that direction.

If you want deep, and award winning support, you're going to have to write your product natively for each OS using native APIs. There's just no way around that requirement unfortunately.
Visual Studio 2017 15.3 Preview
Come on! They can't be expected to keep working on it can they? I mean, they already sold you it. What fool would do that??
Oddly The Book of Ruth and the word "gleaning" are some of my most vivid memories from high school English.
It's crazy considering even if Apple switched default search engines I'm sure a lot of users would switch back to Google.

You are sure...but Google is placing a $3,000,000,000 bet against your word. Maybe they're losing money the deal to moat their castle, but who knows.

As a side note: If the government worked correctly, Google would not have been allowed to buy market share, monopoly and all.
Also for fsharp interactive support
Also for type providers support

Things are very hit or miss in F#-land with .NET Core.
> WARNING: This Standards-Track document is Experimental. Publication as an XMPP Extension Protocol does not imply approval of this proposal by the XMPP Standards Foundation. Implementation of the protocol described herein is encouraged in exploratory implementations, but production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft.

Let me stress this:

> production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft

That's from XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload.
Awesome game!

I'm guessing game theorists have these kind of tools, albeit more complex ones. DO you know of any of them?

I'm sure this has been studied a lot so I'm guessing there are graphs about the different rules and outcomes and such?
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
Very excited to be one of the top trending projects over on Github - https://github.com/trending/go
You just described 90% of online merchants.

...and you're right, plenty of online merchants rip people off. This is one reason that large trusted merchants dominate the space (overstock, amazon, newegg, etc..).

If a shapeshift clone exit scam [0] hasn't happened yet it will happen soon. People should do careful research on these sites before using them, just like people should do research on online merchants.

That being said I don't think evercoin is a scam. I'm glad to see competitors to shapeshift and innovation in this space. The website looks great! I wish evercoin all the best.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_scam
That would be a meaningful statement if there actually were quota hiring.

Alas, there is mostly lazy hiring. Her point that 98% of the candidates are male? I have a long list of colleges right here on my desk that she could reach out to that have a wider pool.

By all means, hire by quality. And I'm not aware of a single company actually doing quota hiring. It's a silly proposal. But look at a wider range. It's not as hard as the author makes it out to be.[1]

But all that bringing in of candidates doesn't help if your culture is crap. If you let people behave like it's a frat-house, guess what? The few minority people you'll find and hire will leave, because they'll be made to feel unwelcome.

I'm sick of tired of the hiring strawman. The reason there's a scarcity of women and other minorities is that many companies have a culture that's full of toxic sewage.

New hires aren't judged "by character". I wish more companies did, because we'd see less problems. But we're all desperately clinging to the ludicrous idea that reciting some algorithms from memory in front of the whiteboard is the one indicator for job fitness.

If you actually want diversity (and quality!), start right there. Test how people actually behave in a group setting. Have them solve real problems, together with other people.

[1] Of course, if you pay your recruiters by quantity, they'll be happy to let people self-select. And if your company's culture skews exclusive, guess what, minorities won't self select. It's not a problem of the candidate pool, though.
I don't understand the target audience. The reason smartphones are so popular, is because they do basically EVERYTHING for the common person. They aren't going to carry around another silly device to take pics, that was called a camera, and we see how popular those are now. For anyone that is serious, they are already carrying separates.
Sorry, which goalpost am I aiming for? This one seems to be moving...

Although not quoting until now (my mistake), my reply was specifically in response to your previous point:

I don't think that's a reasonable comparison [...] it doesn't give insight into competitors metrics unless those competitors choose to share that information

The lines begin to blur especially when discussing means of accessing the internet (especially most efficiently/safely) and/or core (semi-artificially-required) mobile phone operating system components!

If nothing else they offer the path of least resistance. Any best-of-breed solution (GMail, Google Docs, Chrome - all somehwat a matter of opinion) or de facto monopoly-ish position (search, free analytics, Google Play Services?) by Google offers the potential for them to gain info on competitors in much the same way Amazon can take over succesful verticals originally occupied by a third party.
This kills me. I uninstalled Apple maps and I have to manually copy locations into Google Maps from the mail app. Clicking location links prompts me to reinstall Apple Maps. Obviously a very intentional decision.
Maybe Vancouver didn’t fix its housing bubble, after all
Try looking at the technology used by the software you enjoy using the most. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Gotcha!

FWIW, serde_json makes it very easy; if you were doing it yourself, I can see how it'd be harder :)

The second edition of the book's ownership and borrowing chapters go into String vs &str in great detail, if you want to become super sharp :)

(and yeah, we agree that the lifetime annotation isn't very nice looking, but every alternative we tried looked worse.)
"In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech."

Precisely. This goes directly to the core of the issue and what I had brought up on the thread recently about the Google employee who got fired. Specifically, if companies were truly interested in fairness, the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions. By doing this you treat both sexes fairly and give everyone an equal chance. Otherwise, you end up with "reverse sexism", which the author does not explicitly say, however she does essentially admit to in her description of the hiring loop:

"After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire women just because we have to"

The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that is she hired at least a few women over men which she thought were better candidates simply because "we have to". That's a problem.

Overall, though, I thought her piece was well written and she seems to get at the real issue and even has a possible solution that doesn't involve just hiring women for purposes of optics only - fighting the battle far earlier and getting girls interested young so that they choose to enter these fields at a higher rate than they currently are doing.
It's literally the only consequence groups without any (economic/political) power have.

To me it seems it is more used by resourceful people.