skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's the risk tolerance intersecting with demand-supply. If you join a startup where you are willing to be underpaid in return for equity which could make you rich at a small probability, you're in a entertainment industry model.

However if you want a salary and comfortable living, you take a salary and don't get a shot at wealth. You could refuse to work on such terms but your company could persumably hire someone else who won't refuse since the supply of risk averse individuals significantly exceeds those who take risk..
Actually a lot of these xx Is bad for you are dubious or just well marketed fads eg lo salt as my specialised NHS dietician (for chronic kidney failure) commented they don't tell you what C$%^ the put in to replace salt
If only had scrolled down, I’d have two minutes of my life back!

I’m honestly surprised that this was published. This article is content free.
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. It seems spot on to me. People argue that Bitcoin is a great investment because it's going to go up, up, up! And people argue that it's a good store of value. But they can't both be true.

Reward and risk are strongly related. Nobody should know that better than startup people.
"A Bloom filter is a data structure that may report it contains an item that it does not (a false positive), but is guaranteed to report correctly if it contains the item (“no false negatives”)."

I'm afraid that is not how it works. A Bloom filter can tell whether an item may be in the set (false positive) but can definitely tell an item is NOT in the set (no false negative).
The thing is that's not how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs actually worked either (also Steve wasn't a programmer). This idea of the "lone, antisocial hacker" doesn't make any kind of sense in terms of the history I've read or experienced.

E.g, take a look at Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. These guys - and they were almost invariably guys - were nothing if not sociable, at least with eachother. What they were not is mainstream (there's a hipster gag in here somewhere but it's just too cheap and easy).

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had partners, and later teams. They might not have been the easiest people to deal with but "antisocial"? I don't think so.

I suppose in the 1980s it became possible to become a lone hacker simply because you actually could have an affordable computer at home in your bedroom. Even then though, there was a lot of socialising with other hackers at school (and a lot of bragging).

Programming, at least in my experience, has never been an exclusively solo pursuit (although I wouldn't go so far as to describe what a lot of what went on at my school as "collaboration").
Ask HN: Making quick cash (10-20 hours tops) as a developer
Long shot, but can someone think of place, ways to make some cash on a side as a developer? I'd be happy to work for bellow market rate in exchange for small scope and quick payout.
Maybe I'm missing the relevant nexus between Linux, Open Source, and RISC-V, but I'm pretty sure BOOM [1] was already running Linux ~2 years ago.

[1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom
What's the funniest here? Jews that were rejected from MSU went straight across the street to Institute of Oil. And were promptly admitted. Guess it helped them in post-Soviet times.
I think @marktangotango is trolling you. Best to ignore.
That's not even survivorship bias, that's a single anecdote. By that logic, you can't even argue that being blind is a disadvantage because you are blind and you were successful.
Lifting weights can increase your internal T production.
THE RISE and IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE US
Elon Musk's discussion with Rick (and Morty) on simulations and singularities
Like why the death penalty in the USA has never been applied to someone who didn't deserve it: because the alternative would be horrifying.
What does intention have to do with it? Are you saying that if you unintentionally seek people based on criteria like race or gender you're more likely to find the best candidates? Affirmative action, as you call it, is an intentional effort to overcome the sort of unintentional bias that tptacek described.

By the way, one reason people react strongly to objections like yours is that a very direct interpretation is that you believe the distribution of people in high status jobs actually does accurately reflect differences based on race and gender. Not sure if you intended that.
Some research suggests that this is due to endocrine disruptor (female hormone mimicking) pollutants.
Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ui-avatars
> Historically, he directed zero words toward the party he went on to vote for 272 times, out of 1,022 cases in this data set. He directed zero words toward the party he wound up voting against only 177 times.

So about a 60%-40% split when he has zero words. It does look like he is leaning in favor of the Wisconsin Democrats, but still far from a sure thing.
To print it to the screen for example.
For those who are interested, Edward Frenkel's book "Love and Math" chronicles his personal experience of taking such a test, and being denied entrance to Moscow State University despite superb performance in the exam. (He later got Math PhD in Harvard at age 23 and became a professor at UC Berkeley)
I think it's amazing the way we've completely sidelined physical activity - not exercise per se, but any physical activity - in our western lives. Unless you live without a car, there is no requirement for you to walk more than 1000 steps during the day. Wake up, drive to work, sit at your desk, drive to a restaurant for dinner, drive home, plop down on your couch. Rinse, repeat.

Even if you do decide to work out, it tends to be the first thing you drop when you don't have time. Or you worked late. Or you forget your gym clothes. Or you're just too exhausted to go.

We used to be active, our jobs required motion, we had to walk or cycle to work, or even take public transportation - which requires you to at least walk to the stop and back.

Now we literally sit on our asses, day in, day out, and wonder why so many people are obese.
And why not?

The propensity to take risk seems to be quite a low-level drive, and we definitely see strong hints that hormones can have a measurable influence[1] on risk tolerance in both men and women.

If you look past ourselves in the animal kingdom, males are far more likely to engage and risky and aggressive behaviors because males that don't take large risks by and large won't manage to reproduce.

And what is riskier than expending a lot of effort and time on individual work with 'ambiguous and unclear paths to success'?

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep11206
This type of data is going to upset the fat acceptance movement.
She "hints" at this in a couple of sentences:

> Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports (in spite of being a textbook nerd, it turned out I was good enough at rowing for a few colleges to recruit me), or to spend time buried in random books.

and

> that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure

I notice an inconsistency here: if women are "prone to perfectionism", why were "hours of debugging" a problem?

... Re fear of failure: computers are brutal. It either works or it doesn't, esp. when you're restricted to "artificial" problems as is often the case in university courses. It forces you to think in a strict and disciplined way (re. the above quote about "debugging for hours"). Yes, it can make you feel stupid because the negative feedback is immediate, and there's a lot of it, especially in the beginning.

Even for me, as a professional developer with ~20 yrs of experience, working with computers consists of mostly noticing just negative feedback. "The code works" is a non-event for 90% of the time. Of course it works, I engineered it to work. The 10% of cases when it is an event is in cases when I've used something new according to documentation and it actually worked! Yay!

However, "the code doesn't work" is an event in 100% of the cases. It requires analysis, drilling, fixing, maybe even leads to a bigger refactoring because a more fundamental issue was discovered, etc.

IMHO, and gender aside, if the person can't endure a constant stream of negative feedback, they should probably choose another field of work.
I don't understand why any comments in support of this article are being downvoted. Is it now politically incorrect to support agree with scientific studies?

Reminds me of climate change deniers.
If not for this quota, you would have much greater number of "known physicists and mathematicians from USSR with Jewish names" LOL
In some places (Moscow University math dep-t) the target was about 2%, but I heard some technical schools didn't accept anyone (after Natan Scharansky affair. Long story...)
This might be completely inaccurate, but I've always thought of the body as a machine, and it has moving parts. And as with any machine, the more its parts move and get used over time, the sooner the machine will wear out. And if you eat more, regardless of whether it's healthy or not, just the quantity itself, you are going to make the parts inside you move more to process the digestion. Eating less puts less stress on your system over time, as long as you are of course not under p-eating by an alarming amount.
Yes I think that’s a large part of it too. Our brains are so adaptable to whatever environment we live in. You know I’m still waiting for an Aaron Sorkin film on Ada Lovelace. Aaron, if you’re reading this, can you just go ahead and make that film already?
You only fail when you accept that you have failed.
Pair programming and github projects seem like it would help. And also line them up for real-world working conditions.
Thanks! :) hoping to support everything possible
What's strange here is that the 1980s and 1990s were the period of the "lone coder". This was when Microsoft advertised in recruiting that every programmer got a private office with a door they could close. That's in the past. Facebook now has one of the largest bullpens on the planet in Menlo Park, so people can collaborate. Between office layout, "agile", Slack, Github, and StackExchange, programming is more of a social activity than ever.

So why isn't female participation coming back up? It was higher in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now.
> My primary — and totally arbitrary — goal was to beat the performance of Bjoern Hoehrmann’s DFA-based decoder.

The thing is, that decoder could be already branchless. The core of the algorithm is:

*codep = (*state != UTF8_ACCEPT) ?
(byte & 0x3fu) | (*codep << 6) :
(0xff >> type) & (byte);

Which can be compiled with a conditional move (CMOV) instead of a branch. In fact:

> With GCC 6.3.0 on an i7-6700, my decoder is about 20% faster than the DFA decoder in the benchmark. With Clang 3.8.1 it’s just 1% faster.

There's a chance that when inlined into the benchmark Clang uses a CMOV while GCC uses a branch. As he correctly points out, his benchmark is the worst case for branch prediction:

> The even distribution of lengths greatly favors a branchless decoder. The random distribution inhibits branch prediction.
for mass/consumer market - the idea must be usable to me before I expect others to use it, making money is not easy thing due to long waiting time. recently hybrid platforms (digital + physical) got good success than purely digital one's. I think, passionately working on by 'watching' what customers do with the product is key to success. Usually people have passion in the idea stage, deciding based on hype is always leads to failure. mass market is a marathon race, luck plays critical role.

for enterprise - may be able to make money earlier than consumer market. I think reading "startup" books provides good insights, process to follow.

for niche: domain knowledge, few early customer are critical for success. may be able to reach customers easily, may not be able to scale.

Generally, speed and assumptions decide fate for any idea. particularly "assumptions" are the #1 enemy of every idea/startup.
Hey HN can I offer some CSS to fix that
If they're so bad, why did you have 4 or 5 of them?
Nice display of typography, so much data is poorly presented nowadays.

Here's a 5 second guide: use larger fonts that are easy to read with lots of white space.
> You needed to contact 100k sites about security? Do you have more details on this?

There's a number of people out there anonymously helping others close their holes. Some holes can be easily scanned.
That's how Alumacraft got started in the US.
Let's put this in the context: the article is about problems which are supposedly killer problems because they require some hard-to-get hint to solve. Therefore, a hint is low quality, if another hint exists that is simpler, more elementary, or the problem is solved straightforward anyway.

In this case, a simpler hint is: "Do not use derivatives or anything fancy really. Only solutions are constant functions. Proof by contradiction. Use binary search".

One may only wonder what level were the problems given to regular candidates.
Many grad level algorithm courses still use Dexter C. Kozen's book The Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Springer-Verlag, 1992. It's a timeless book with clear analysis.

There's also this excellent free draft on analysis of common undergrad algorithms for parallelism http://www.parallel-algorithms-book.com/

TAOCP is more than an algorithms book, Knuth even have strategies for writing lengthy programs from scratch, how to build test libraries, how to optimize a program to make it cache memory friendly ect.
It's interesting that a lot of her experiences are similar to what the Google manifesto said - that currently, computer science is more targeted towards the way men learn and work than the way women learn and work. Although she was focusing more on the education side of things versus the work side, the core message seems to be that men and women learn and work differently, and that needs to be addressed to get more women in computer science. She is "perpetuating gender stereotypes" similar to the Google manifesto. Hopefully she doesn't get fired for it.
I can't speak for Microsoft itself, but wouldn't the effort to implement a production-ready time-traveling debugging system (as explained here by SteveJS) be at least somewhat influenced by the growing popularity of time-travel debugging in other languages?
False. If you believe that the best candidates are spread across genders/races and your current hiring practices are overlooking those not in a specific set, affirmative action policies would be raising the bar. You call it lowering the bar because you believe that all the best candidates are already being hired under the current system.
It's great to have a dog that will be walked every day on every weather. Ok if you have a cold it's not such a great thing but as a desk worker you must go out and walk at least one hour per day around.
That only addresses one minor aspect of what might be implied by "structured education".
It should be, but it isn't, and more importantly, there's lots of critical infrastructure out there that is highly vulnerable.
Ah, you're right. And it was the word regatta, not yacht, that was the problem.
Here is a recent CppCon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3389&v=l1YJTg_A9...

I'm an escalation engineer at Microsoft, and we have been using this for many, many years to solve complex customer cases. Having it go public is a pretty big deal for us.
Seems like a fun project! One thing I stumbled over:

> unsigned char *next = s + len + !len;

> Originally this expression was the return value, computed at the very end of the function. However, after inspecting the compiler’s assembly output, I decided to move it up, and the result was a solid performance boost. That’s because it spreads out dependent instructions. With the address of the next code point known so early, the instructions that decode the next code point can get started early.

If there's no change in the actual logic, I feel like the compiler should be able to move up expressions in order to make them available earlier. I wonder whether this was tested/inspected with some optimizations turned off.
Which only makes things worse, because if you are trying to create fake security camera footage, you just need to make it real enough to play back on a "security monitor" and record that with a phone camera.
You are absolutely right about Yamaha, man! Dang, even their Flutes are great.

My HS8's are interfaced via a Yamaha AG06 sound card btw. balanced outputs perfect for the monitors, stable as fuck and also I can get pretty decent latency with it (about 2-3ms @ 44100hz on a 9 year old core i7!!)

o/
irrespective of cancer being linked with being Obese, it is always better to remain active. naturally our body is not designed to have a sedentary lifestyle. So study can be taken as a reminder to stay active and not being a couch potato. take frequent breaks and have some active lifestyle.
That's an interesting way to underscore the point that these courses reinforce a kind of bias.
Yes it is hilarious. I posted the article to overwhelmingly large scientific community that acknowledges the link of saturated fats to heart disease - I have never been so downvoted. I am waiting for the bush did 911 comments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat_and_cardiovasc...
Dear Google, in Defending Me as a Woman, You've Insulted Me as a STEM worker
The fun size bags have one serving, but even so I doubt that doritos, en masse, are to blame for obesity. It's the accompanying sedentary lifestyle that is the real culprit.

If we want a food source to blame, look at high sugar content foods like soda or the slew of 'Little Debbie' type snacks (I'm preferential to Nutter Butters) that can be consumed in one or two sittings if you aren't calorie conscious.

But, just to reiterate what's important, if we all just got a solid hour of exercise each day the rate of cancer and heart disease would drop appreciably.
Consider the word "regatta". Someone affluent may have been to such a boating event, or at least heard of it. Someone poor, unless they were extremely well read, would not have had the same opportunity to know the word as someone affluent.
Because the workforce is the wrong place to try to fix gender diversity - don't get me wrong, we should put efforts in place to make sure don't discriminate, but the workforce is composed of people already interested (and at least partially trained) to do the work.

The reason female participation isn't larger is because of the education / training part of the pipeline. Having a welcoming workplace doesn't suddenly spawn people with skills wanting to work there.
The actual title was "Dear Google, in Defending Me as a Woman, You’ve Insulted Me as Someone Who Works in STEM", but it was 8 characters too long.
Obese people probably produce elevated levels of insulin-like growth factors over time due to their dietary choices. IGF-1 is already understood to increase cancer rates.

Intermittent fasting studies tend to focus on IGF-1 levels in the interests of slowing aging, which is of course strongly related to cancer prevention.
What were the impossible questions? (You're not really expected to keep them secret, so it's fine to list them.)

To your point, it's strange that there's a common set of knowledge we're expected to know which we don't use, ever. Not just "in 99% of cases," but literally ever: If it ever comes up in the field, you can look up what you need to know in a few minutes.

Few would think that's a sensible way to hire someone, so I've spent a long time wondering why this is the case. I think it's because the hiring process implicitly selects for whoever makes it through. Meaning, if someone is giving you a test, they're biased into thinking it's a good test: After all, they passed it. That's why they're in a position to give it to you.

So it almost doesn't matter whether it's a good test or a bad test. Just that it's a test that the interviewer happens to like. There's enough talent floating around that people are willing to do whatever strange rituals you demand they do, regardless of whether it's efficient for them to know that knowledge. Since it's ambiguous whether the knowledge actually helps anyone, you get the present situation.
I have nothing interesting to say about the topic itself, but this struck me: "fed to you by the powers that be". One of the things that's most bizarre to me about rhetoric around culture war topics in America right now is that both sides want to take as an assumption that the other side is in charge. I'm not sure if this is more because, as a practical matter, existential threats tend to produce more alarm and action, or if it's more about the American love of the come-from-behind-to-win underdog trope.
Parables are a good way to get a message across to lots of people if you're God, or pretending to speak for God. They are a religious form of communication that relies on analogous thinking and appeals to authority, the wisdom of the speaker. But Bostrom and Tegmark don't know any more about the future than you or me, and I could write a parable about sparrows and Omegas that spins a different narrative. It would be just as powerful, and mean just as little. Bostrom and Tegmark have chosen to promote fear. They have chosen to disseminate a powerful feeling in a discussion that would benefit from facts. That is, like fake news and Donald Trump, they opted for asymmetric appeals to emotion, which should be an indication to all of us that a) they don't know what's really going on with AI and b) they don't care. They just want us to operate on fear.
A language agnostic tool for rapid prototyping
Weird to talk so much about branch prediction for branchless code.
Others pointed out doing it with css works fine.

You could also just generate inline SVG in the html, something like this: https://jsfiddle.net/8tfjqjmy/
I really enjoyed Udi Manber's /Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach/ when I was starting out. It is not the place for sexy new stuff, but it's a great resource for learning the fundamentals and developing a taste for the subject.
The limit can be hassle sometimes, can't it? Perhaps a better interpretation would be:

"Dear Google, in Defending Me as a Woman, You've Insulted Me as a STEM worker"

Not happy with that last phrasing, but I think the author is going for the contrast of woman and STEM, which the current rendering loses.
Sorry, I tend not to read hn in places I can watch a video. Maybe I'll remember to check it later.
Changed Forever
The key word in that sentence is "lone". The author uses "lone" six times. Look at the rest of the paragraph:

> "It was a manner of work utterly unsuited to everything we know about how women thrive and excel."

> "(Does the idea of being a lone hacker appeal to some women? Sure. [...] Population-level differences cannot be used to judge the abilities or inclinations of any individual.)" [Emphasis mine.]

The author's implication is that women (in general) are not as amenable to a lone environment as men are. I did find it frustrating that the author was not explicit about this. The piece concludes with:

> "Women succeed when they are in learning and working environments that address the biological realities about how women operate best. But, clearly, there’s a lot of misunderstanding around what this means."

But then the closest the piece gets to helping with the misunderstanding is to link to https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/
You know what? I might actually do just that; I just need to collect my thoughts and outline some examples.
How is struct function different from c++ class member function?
An introduction to North Korean graphic design