skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you pick up on an interesting point - the focus on Computer Science qualifications above GCSE level. The drop-offs the article points to are between A-Levels and degrees and, to a lesser extent, between GCSEs and A-Levels. But those drop-offs can only be said to explain the gender disparity among professional developers if you accept that the vast majority of software developers working professionally today studied Computer Science at degree level. I'm not sure that's true, and I'm equally unsure that it should be true.

Given that there's a software developer shortage overall and that software development jobs don't tend to require CS degrees, wouldn't it be more prudent to make the professional end more attractive rather than concentrating on outreach for degree programmes?
I'm a massive fan of tarsnap, even though I have no need for it and probably don't have the technical competence to use it anyway. Given that using the product isn't why I'm a fan, I can only put that down to Colin - and this post, with its technical openness, easy to understand (for a layman-of-sorts) crypto and code explanation, and humility demonstrates why.

All that, plus explaining how to delete and offering a refund will probably cost only a small number of picodollars, and is worth a lot more to tarsnap's credibility.
You lost me at "performance at Maths A-Level is the best indicator of performance at degree level Computer Science". I'm a crap to mediocre mathematician, like many people I'm just not a natural. After dragging myself through the Maths part of a foundation course I got a reasonable result for it (my original Maths AS-Level was appalling).
But in comparison my Computer Science achievement has been extremely good. I think you can be a fantastic software developer without being a fantastic mathematician. I put this down to other attributes more important to programming success such as perseverance, a dogged willingness to learn and problem solving skills.
I agree mathematicians can make great algorithmic thinkers capable of solving very complex academic problems, but in terms of development, software engineering, solving business problems and shipping software, I don't think it necessarily helps.
There are 7 /8 unallocated networks. This tweet (and some followons) suggests that 2 of those will shortly be allocated to a RIR, which means that IANA will immediately share the remaining allocations across the 5 RIRs.
This is cool, but not earth shattering. It is essentially a management stack/abstraction layer/deployment tool on top of existing AWS services: EC2, CloudWatch, load balancing, route 53, autoscaling, AMIs. It is a PaaS sort of... but single-tenant and not in the same sense as a multi-tenant, higher level PaaS like AppEngine or Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk gives you flexibility (full root access - do whatever you want), but with that comes more responsibility from a management perspective, and more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot.
A quote that hit close to home for me is one by Calvin Coolidge (I think I read in a comment here on another thread):

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race"
Will, Wisdom & Resources
I wonder how we could gauge how much of this apparent "predestination" is due to the innate differences between men and women and how much is simply a consequence of the way our society works. Most people will paint a newborn girl room pink and a boy room blue.

I don't think we should ignore or even try to dim the differences between men and women (diversity is a chance), but maybe society should give more room to children when it comes to choose what they want to become, and not brainwash them since early childhood that GI Joes are for boys and baby dolls are for girls.
Download the video and play it with -12 sec delayed audio. Matches perfectly.
Thanks for trying it out.

Some providers charge you a connection fee. With vox.io you don't have to pay a connection fee or any other hidden cost.

I can't really comment on prices going down at this moment, but we will do everything we can to bring them as low as possible.
I really like the idea, and if they can bring those rates a bit down this could be the beginning of a big success.

And I also don't mind supporting a group of my countrymen in their attempt at reaching for the stars.
Sailboats that Clean Up Oil Spills
Sight: The Chrome Syntax Highlighter
Gaming is an interesting area, as it's shifting away from being male dominated. The number of female gamers has increased rapidly in the last few years, which may well result in more females being interested in the development side of it.
DogPatch company Recurly achieves PCI Level 1 status
H.264 is probably superior to webm. I don't understand video codecs, but it's the consensus opinion among people who know this stuff. However, I fail to see how its relevant in any way. The tegra2 can already decode 1080p vp8 in hardware, and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't notice the difference between a 720p video in webm and another in H.264 in terms of performance on your x86 cpu. The inefficiency, if any, would be negligible.
There's no need to take square roots. sqrt(x) is monotone increasing, so comparing squared-distances is equivalent to comparing distances.
I think the small marketshare is a more agreeable reason that the different screen ratios. If a developer can't be bother to make a "two-line config change" then surely s/he wouldn't have targeted the iPad even if it had the same screen ratio.

I don't believe that Steve Job's godhood, nor the Rapture sparked by the iPhone App Store, would have prevented some developers from taking advantage of an iPad with a similar screen ratio to pass off upscaled iPhone apps. However in addition to the carrot of robust iPad development tools, Apple was also wielding the stick of restricted access to the App Store. Don't forget that the period between the iPad's announcement and release was nadir in iOS censorship where Apple banned cross platform development tools. I'm sure Apple could have provided sufficient discouragement to developers if the iPad been the same screen ratio.

P.S. The lack of an iPad Facebook app is a poor example, in my opinion, as I'm guessing that the development cost is something Facebook could easily afford. I believe Facebook would probably not rather an iPad app encroach on the website usage and inadvertently end up ceding control of ads and analytics compilation to Apple.

Those are some interesting observations about the Windows Tablet PC. I initially assumed they've always received bad reviews simply because the core product wasn't any good but I've recently been surprised to discover passionate adherents of the OneNote app for tablet pcs (while reading up on the One Note app released for the iPhone). Makes one wonder why none of the iPad's new competitors have incorporated a stylus...

And yes, I would like you to stick the Cydia iPad disclaimer right next to the iOS 4.2 warning instead of taking up half the screen ;). I am glad though to see some of the innovations from the Rockapp finally seeping into Cydia.
I don't buy the argument that it strengthens Flash. Flash and H.264 are both 90% YouTube, e.g. Google.

Google can, therefore, flip a switch and turn everything to WebM. They just need broad support in place first.

If Google says they will switch YouTube to WebM gradually, then all the browsers and devices will need to support it. End of story.
I was at a conference where a developer from India said that this is much less of an issue there; that the ratio of female/male developers is much more even. I thought that was pretty interesting - can anybody from (or with experience in) India comment on that?
Marvin thanks for posting vox.io on HN.

We will try to do our best in terms of pricing, but I can't promise anything at this stage.
Slovenija?
> It will certainly not be Chinese, since the world will utterly reject China’s incredibly clumsy and stupid writing system. China is the only country in the world (as far as I know) that does not use an alphabet in its writing. Instead of having to learn an alphabet of some two dozen symbols, the Chinese have to learn thousands of symbols to write their language.

Really? This just seems like bigoted drivel.
Umm, in case you haven't noticed, HN is full of FB echo-chamber fanbois who have a combined age still in the 2 digits.
Since the SAT[1] is a glorified IQ test[2]

The SAT is a wonderful test for memorization.
Also how much time you spent studying, almost as if its a... scholastic test.

It it's relationship to IQ is extremely vague.
Before going to college, my girlfriend and I hit a number of locations in Europe: Madrid, Venice, Rome, Prague and Paris.

My story doesn't quite have the same ending as yours - after all, we eventually had to leave - but looking back on my trip to Europe, I can safely say that Prague left upon me the most significant impression. The streets are clean, the people kind, and the city... just beautiful.
Are You a Secret Apple Stockholder?
When I was choosing what degree to do at university I didn't even consider computer science because I hadn't been exposed to computer science education before that so I didn't know what it was like and that I might be interested in it. I went to an all-girls school so it was probably assumed that girls would have no interest in it, in the same way that I wasn't offered courses in other typically male-oriented subjects like woodworking, mechanics etc. It wasn't until I took a computer science module as part of my business degree that I developed an interest in it and decided to do a masters in it.

So for me, the main reason I didn't study it at undergraduate level is that I simply wasn't exposed to it enough during my formative years to develop an interest in it, not through any perceived mathematical difficulty or that it is sometimes seen as a solitary activity.
I would guess the number of start-ups who got it right the first time is infinitesimal. Failure is an essential but underrated part of the development process. Perhaps instead of saying "failure" we should re-brand it as "learning opportunity."
Great idea. All the best to you moving forward.
I did that in 2007.
Cool new feature. Not too tough to see this coming though. One of the biggest barriers of entry to AWS has always been scaling/deployment. With companies like Cloudkick and Scalr helping to alleviate this, but being somewhat platform agnostic (Cloudkick supports aws, rackspace cloud, etc) Amazon would want to have an all-encompasing solution that has more of a vendor-lock in to their products. With solutions like Beanstalk and their free web tier, AWS is becoming easier to step right into each day. I predict that in a few years there will be no such thing as shared web hosting...
I think that CS is seen as a profession like medicine or law in India. Not a paid hobby for geeks like in the rest of the world.
Chemist's War: how US poisoned alcohol during prohibition
The divide between the cans and cannots of computers is wider I think than the car building industry. Most children won't build a car at school but they probably will learn how to drill a hole in a piece of metal, mould plastic, stitch upholstery or some basic electronics.

It's not harmful that someone can use amazon or google without being able to build it, but surely there is a value and even a necessity for people to be able to write "Hello, World!" in html and understand how that relates to the professional enterprises.
Strange Loop interview: Hilary Mason on bit.ly and Trending Clickstreams
>To get onto a good Computer Science degree you generally need to have a strong grade at A-Level Maths (which students study between the ages of 16-18)

I stopped maths at 16, I hated it. I did CompSci at uni. About a third of unis in the UK have stopped requiring maths A level for compsci courses. They tend to be less 'pure' compsci courses and more generalised programming/IT/'making-stuff-with-computers' degrees.

I did do a Computing A-level though, which is quite rare. It was better-taught and more educational than a lot of my degree. And it was free. Goddammit.
I looked into RDF pretty heavily a few years ago. The biggest takeaway is that it was naive in its level of trust.

If I make a new RDF document in a repo, claim it was written by Shakespeare, and then somebody does the search on "Complete works of Shakespeare", I'd show up. And there was no real way to police that.

And unfortunately, we get into web of trust type issues, which in itself is ugly. I really do wish that RDF was usable for search engines, and google, and that they could trust sites. But it's just not feasible, and I don't see any scalable solution to it.
when i was trying to signup, the session 'expired' and you managed ot save my phone number but nothing else. Perhaps you can email / connect with me so i can enter my actual phone number?

thanks.
w3c copied SuperMan, where is that damn sue button :|
The documentation for Backbone looks good and includes examples. Much (all?) of the SproutCore documentation does not include examples, leaving you to rely on their IRC channel for help. At least for me, quality documentation is very important!
Most of Antwerp's parks are a bit disappointing for such an otherwise marvellous city, I'm afraid.
Fair enough. Mind dropping me a line? I have a couple other questions -- brad@thenextweb.com
Canonical has and pays UI design experts. I don't know if they're the best, but I remember going to a conference given by one of them a few years ago at the FOSDEM.
> Only because Microsoft and Apple choose not to support WebM.

When they made their choice WebM wasn't an option because it didn't even exist yet.

Microsoft might be a different issue, but Apple has now shipped almost 150M devices with hardware h.264 support and no webm support at all.

> You completely miss the point. GIF is a lesson, and we should learn from it.

GIF is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand (or, if you want to reach for it, WebM is actually more at risk of a GIF-type scenario than h.264)
Certainly among graduate employers CS degrees are the dominant source of developers (although you do get a number of Maths/Physics/Engineers as well). Unfortunately I don't think there's any good data on it. I wrote to the minister for universities a few weeks back trying to persuade him that HESA should be collecting this data, but I haven't heard back.

The problem for companies taking people without programming experience is that it's very high-risk. If you hire someone and after training find they can't program it's very hard to fire them.
The intersection point of two moving 2D objects is equivalent to the intersection of a moving point with the Minkowski sum of the two objects -- the shape you get when you "inflate" one object by the other's shape. So, for instance, the intersection point of two moving circles of radius r is equivalent to the intersection of a moving point and a circle of 2r. If you reformulate the problem this way, you can sweep the moving point into a line segment (of length equal to the objects' relative movement) and find the exact intersection point.

Essentially this makes the intersection calculation easier at the expense of computing the Minkowski sum. However, computing the Minkowski sum is trivial in certain cases, and the axis-aligned square "grenade" intersecting with a line segment is one of them:

You can treat the grenade as a point and inflate the line segment by the grenade's dimensions in x and y to make a rectangle. Then you can sweep the point to make a line segment representing the grenade's movement and intersect it with the rectangle. This gives you the exact intersection point, much as in the case of the bullet/bin intersection, without needing to incrementally search along the grenade's path.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_addition
Post by the inventor of JavaScript, on the future direction of the language, nice.
please send us an email at support@vox.io with the details. sorry about the inconvenience.
Poll: How many hours do you work each week?
>60
<30
> Suppose we are both businessmen, and we want to see who is better, I start with $100 and manage to grow it to $200, my friend started with $300 and grew it to $450. Who did better? I earned $100, but he earned $150 - clearly he did better right? But if you notice while I doubled my money, he only 1.5'd it. I'm clearly the better businessman, yet I earned less money.

Sorry, that doesn't follow over, at least not at scale.

It's far more common for a given mom and pop restaurant to double its sales than it is for mcdonald's the chain to do so. (It's also more common for a said restaurant to fail than it is for mcdonald's the chain to fail.) That doesn't imply that the folks running said restaurant are better biz folks than the folks running mcdonalds and would eventually overtake mcdonalds.

Exponentials don't persist.
Enabling real-time notifications in Cloudboard with Node.js
> I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage
> collection, snow plowing, roadkill removal, framing, or
> masonry.

Was going to say something similar. Is nobody afraid that "by neglecting female adoption we're creating the potential for huge disenfranchisement issues in the future."

I also saw a comment on reddit stating, that while being 54% of the workforce
males account for more than 90% of work-related deaths. Chocking on billions must be the most likely cause then :(
That's a nice idea. The grid stuff is actually done by the Render Engine. If I remember correctly, it's a spatial grid implemented as an array of arrays where the indexes are the row/column numbers of the nodes.
I once tried to comment with a thought (not mine, don't remember the source) that men are more into "stuff" and women are more into relationships, but was downvoted instantly.
Nobody ever says maybe our brains are wired differently. Maybe there's some innate differences between the sexes.

Not to say that they can't, I knew a girl who was taking non-linear differential crypto-analysis at as a junior in high school.
Graduates from higher-ranking universities are much more likely to get tech jobs (we're talking 2-3x more likely), so the top universities (which require maths) are supplying a disproportionately large number of the software developers.
My sister started out in the same Computing program that I am currently in, she managed around half a year until she switched to a law program.

She was doing quite well, better than most she was told when she left.

She left saying that computing was boring for girls, she had no outside interest in the subject and struggle to get into the right frame of mind for computing.

Look at this, computing is boring for girls. Her words not mine, if you look into the social stigma behind computing studies. I get called a nerd or a geek when people find out about my degree, it is even less cool for most girls to get into the subject. I honestly think there is a much stronger social side, where woman and young girls just do not want to get into this field.
It may just be me, but I will never try a service that requires me to hook into my email, Facebook or Twitter account. I'm sure you're great guys, but I have been on the receiving end of startups' contact list spam too many times to ever give up that kind of info. It sounds neat though, good luck.
Seems like Yahoo is giving up on competing with Facebook the same way MySpace did, and we all know how well that worked out.
Ten Myths about Wintertime Driving
For Prague it's "create". Everyone I knew was in some form or stage of the creative process, whether film, music, play writing, painting, starting a company, etc. It may a Czech or expat, it may have been on the side or what they did full-time, but everyone was doing something creative and new.
But other fields which involve making things like Fashion and Design do have more female participation.
Search Tired? New way to "Locate" debuting at SXSW
>Graduates from higher-ranking universities are much more likely to get tech jobs (we're talking 2-3x more likely)

Sweet. Apparently having arsed around at a non 'top' university and still having got a tech job means I am in a statistically small cohort of awesomeness.
Not sure why you got hit with the down votes, I always assumed it used "real" ajax.
I agree with you, the W3C mainly wrote specifications for implementors (which is why as a front end person you must read the spec and 'read' the implementation of it in the browser) and the role of talking to authors was left to those who write books. But the W3C has made efforts with the HTML5 specs to speak directly to web authors [1] and is now engaged in this badge outreach. So, while I find most of the original post to be a bit garbled and unfocused I think that if the W3C is now going to be speaking to authors it does need a little bit of a tidy up, perhaps a small garden of documents for authors that easily navigable with some more verbose explanations of what and where these documents sit in the master plan. Also a little bit of history wouldn't go amiss, the W3C didn't write the HTML5 spec, it co-opted it from the WHATWG after admitting that XHML2 wasn't going to fly. I think it's important to understand the history and understand the relationship between bodies like the W3C and WHATWG etc, browsers vendors and the author. The W3C has it's place, but it's not as important as most authors think it to be.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/
Don't, the 'rewards' are ridiculously low for both the effort they demand and the money you could make out of it if you actually solved these problems.
Oh wow! They leaked screenshots of Twitter, only 5 years late!

Seriously though, does anyone care about leaked screenshots of a startup? Anyone at all?
So it seems like yet another social thingy, with quesions? And it's "hyper-local"? Twitter + Quora + Everyblock?
> The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it.

Assuming that women are every bit as intelligent as men, our field is missing out on roughly half the population of brilliant minds that could be inventing the Next Big Thing. No?

Edit: OK. Summary of the answers so far. A) Cannot necessarily make the above assumption. B) Women on average may be as intelligent as men but they will never be geniuses like Einstein (or likely to go to prison). and C) We don't need that many engineers anyways.

Conclusion: they should stay in the kitchen
Ehh, all of a sudden the pro-WebM side got really lame now that the FSF joined the party.
More or less probably yes (or Launch48, or 24 Hour Business Camp, or many other similar programs). None of us organizers have been to any of other events, so hard to compare. We have set it up so it works well in our region. We're also looking to do 5-6 Garage48 events in Africa this year.
ugh self promotion, and it wasn't even worth reading!
14 year-old's Bubble Ball is #1 iTunes app; shoots down Angry Birds
Microsoft releases first (major) app for iphone (OneNote)
Two Major Privacy Violations You Probably Didn't Notice
Strangely enough, the czech people have very low self esteem (or patriotism) - they mostly believe that the life is better basically everywhere and that the expats in cz are bothered by a lot of issues.

Anyway, great to hear you like it there.
I can answer any questions anyone has about this: we've done a lot of work this year to make pycon even more attractive to startups, sponsors and entrepreneurs, and this is one big piece.
If a guy you knew dropped out of CS (about 10-15% of them do in the first year) saying it was boring, would you be saying that computing is boring for guys ?

It seems hard to argue that there's a social stigma associated with computing that doesn't exist with IT, given that most people outside the field generally don't know the difference. So would you explain the difference in take up between the two fields ?