skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is plenty of evidence that, at least in the US, that simply thinking "black people don't do well on this test" or "women aren't good at math" lowers the test scores of both black people and women. Since these are both "common knowledge," that is a very good reason to exclude those tests. This is called "stereotype threat".

The good news is that there's also emerging research showing how test scores for blacks & women can be raised by exposing them to certain facts/examples that reduce the effect of "stereotype threat".
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06E2DB143DF...

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/19/weekinreview/ideas-trends-...

It sure is legal, but not in the direction you'd expect.
If 'successful' means 'can code an application more secure than Windows', I guess I'm in there. Self-taught ColdFusion (go ahead, laugh), PHP and Python (my favorite). My staff uses the tools I've written to do their jobs. And we're still in business. Woo hoo!
The Qu'ran is a bit different. It's one book, written by one man, in his lifetime, holds mostly direct commands and is written in stone since it's a direct copy of the Qu'ran in heaven that's written by Allah himself. It's meant to be taken literally and you do not change or interpret it. To do so is blasphemy.

What most people in the west haven't realised is that it's Osama bin Ladin that has the theological backing, not the muslims that just wants to go on with their lives.

As for your last comment I hope it's the case, but if it happens it will be despite Islam. A muslim is for example forbidden in the Qu'ran to take any friends among Jews or Christians. Unless it is a feigned friendship for benefit, in which case the Qu'ran condones it.
Being 'able' to do something is far more than technical chops. I'd think for a company the size of Walmart there's so much internal political stuff that has to be dealt with - competing departments, etc - that regardless of what people are implementing the tech, what is directed to be implemented is a poor compromise.
WTF? They don't have a 1:1 ratio in max security prisons.

I simply cannot imagine how a fortune 500 company would let a division or org get this out of whack.

Do these managers do anything but "manage?" E.g., are they also customer contact/support leads or working with sales somehow?
> And I asserted that not teaching children a language so that they can 'fit in' is a very tragic thing to do

Like, say, not teaching them English, when you also said "you need to speak English to get ahead in the US".

The emergence of (taxpayer funded) schools where English is not the primary language, supposedly so the kids can at least get an education even though they don't know English, is the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say "it's no longer true":

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/200...

I loved this comment:

I am a Swiss born, now US Citizen; in my Country of birth I had to learn 3 languages (Italian, German, French) plus latin (this was optional) and English; later I learned Spanish and Portuguese.

My wife is Latin American, we live in Florida, at home we speak spanish, english and a little italian.

When we moved to the US my children did not talk a word in english, but we would never accepted them not to learn the mother tongue of this Country.

I belive that is importat the children keep talking the language of their parents, but they need to perfectly manage first the language of the Country they live in.

Spanish is a very important language and I agree, support and encourage theaching it in every school but this as a second language.

In my personal experience learning a new language or improving one you already manage, not only helps you communicate with others, but opens your cultural horizons and help understanding and tolerance among populations.

Is that comment "nativist"?
More recently, the JailbreakMe iPhone jailbreak used the screen to store the kernel shellcode, since the framebuffer was in a known memory location in both the kernel and userland.

Here's a picture I found of it executing the screen: http://img101.imageshack.us/i/ipts.jpg/
Just says that you can emulate any NoSQL database with a SQL one, using multi-master systems etc. And that NoSQL 'wants' to use SQL.

NoSQL for me is not about scaling, it is about having a different data and query model that means creating new sorts of applications easier than with plain old SQL.

That I can build a graph database or something with xSQL is not really relevant. I can write webapps in C, but I made a conscious decision not to, I also try to select the best datastore for the job.
If you work a corporate job, you need to do these 10 things religiously
What exactly is he attacking Google for here?

Is it the fact that they're buying patents and feeding into a dysfunctional system? He seems to acknowledge that Google needs a large patent portfolio in order to defend itself from others, so it's probably not that. Or is it the fact that Google appears to be hypocritical in its stance towards patents, by taking actions which it could theoretically use to attack underdogs that can't defend themselves while claiming that they're just for their own protection? If that is indeed what he's claiming, then until that actually happens, this is just FUD.
I think there are important differences between libraries and platforms.

1. Libraries are static, with versioning and upgrades, whereas platforms are real-time.

2. Libraries are based on a one-time usage, whereas platforms depend on providing constant value to maintain users.

3. Libraries do not generally offload any work to other servers, whereas platforms can provide efficiencies.

4. Libraries are platform, language, and version specific, whereas platforms can be built through protocols like REST and JSON that are known to most stacks.

That being said, open source libraries aren't always free when it comes to support and technical costs, and not all platforms are closed-source.
At the core I am a developer. It is possible for me to become knowledgeable in change management and make the switch to management, but I would rather leave the company before doing so. Thanks for the suggestion though, anything helps.
Skype 2.2 beta for Linux with Skype Access and improved audio/video quality
Ahh sorry - I am usually totally against shortened links but:

1. Didn't know that HN would trim the long links

2. Remember the shortcodes/aliases used at xrl.us (such as the MIT course names), although browser smart address bars and Google is just as easy.

Thanks for putting the links up, I don't need to update my comment.
The hardest part working from home is telling your kids work is why you can give them attention they need. My kids are in HS now so are out of the house most of the day which makes it easier. Its still a challenge to maintain the separation between working time and not working time (though even when i went to an office, i was always working). Its important to get some time out of the home even just to maintain your own sanity. As long as you don't have to be on the phone, working at a local libraries or starbucks can be a good change of pace.
RSA detailing SecurID hack to customers sworn to secrecy
Hello from a fellow self-taught, PHP-on-Windows developer. And I'm a girl, which automatically makes me special ;)
That's just too funny. And to answer your question, no all they do is manage.
I first read about it in Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational".
Need to come with instructions for washing so as to achieve that worn with age look to go along with holes in the blue jeans...
That's a good question, actually. I've never used OpenID so I have no idea what's involved in that, but I'll make a (mental?) note to look into seeing if it works (and probably fixing it) soon.
You can't login to an OpenID account through the app at present, but this is pretty easy to add. I may submit a patch for this some time soon.
Our company uses a mix of both. The author mentions that one of the perceived benefits is the "Flexibility of schema definition". We actually ended up needing a NoSQL database for exactly that. We have one part of our system that needed to store schema-less data in a way that still let us query it using the custom data fields.

I wish we could have found a way to make it work within our SQL database but none of the solutions that I could find felt right. Schema-less data and complex queries (Group Bys, Distinct, etc) just don't seem to mix well with most systems. I'd love to know if others have any experience in this area.
Richard Branson Announces Virgin Oceanic Submarine
I would like to have the term NoSQL come to mean 'manipulate data as you naturally would in your language of choice, irrespective of the persistent storage system.'

The tone of the current debate reflects poorly on everyone involved.
Huh. Depending on what they do with the audio input, that might be illegal in Massachusetts. (Our wiretap law requires all parties to consent, and it applies to any covert audio recording, not just phone conversations.)
Downvoted for the use of the term "protip". The arrogance conveyed in that single word drives my heartrate up 20%.
I wouldn't say it's technologically inferiot. I'd say it's less mature.

Making desing choices is OK. The authors admits that relational databases have different design goals and thus comaring them directly is necessarily comparing apples to oranges.

What is true and wise is that non-relational databases have been around for much less time, have less theoretical background, the development teams and DBAs are less experienced with them, etc.
I understand. I recently made a similar decision to depart from the company I'm with now for familiar reasons. Not that we had entirely too much human overhead, but because projects were never getting done, planning was a mess and...well I got a much better offer :)

Good luck, friend.
Yep, I can reproduce the problem but I'm not aware what triggers it. Maybe the JS changing the iframe's src makes a new history record in Chrome.

I'll have to investigate this further.
I really appreciate the idea of having a career path that doesn't involve moving "up" to management. I'm a developer because I love development, and my own personal hell is managing a team and never getting to code.
This is awesome! Is there anyway to mix more than one video in one mashup? That would be really useful to me right now.
How does Google deciding to hold back on releasing the source code for a tablet version of android until they merge it with the phone version have anything to do with Google building up a larger patent portfolio, other than that they're both things that people are getting irritated at Google about? Really, I can't understand how you're connecting them, much less reaching the conclusion that the former means that everyone needs to agree with a statement about the latter.
Lessons learned in startup limbo
Hard to kill something you can make yourself already with an Arduino. Sure not trivial but it's already 'out there'.
An Engineer's Explanation of the Fukushima Incident
Probably the clearest technical explanation of what occurred at Fukushima after the recent earthquake and resulting tsunami.
The a-ha answer still works, but the orignal answer given has you sum 2^(d-k) from k =0 to d, so in this example would be 2^1 + 2^0, suggesting that you would need 3 games to determine the winner.
British bank shuts website until April 2012
Not necessarily, if I understand the situation correctly. In this notation, -> represents communication between components, and | represents the boundary between local and remote communication, which we assume is encrypted/decrypted appropriately.

On account creation,

password -> hash -> | -> stored

Upon account creation, I provide my password, which is hashed locally. The hashed version of my password is passed over the network and stored on the other end.

Logging in,

password -> | -> hash -> compare

Upon logging in, I provide my password and send it to the remote server. The remove server hashes my password and compares it to what it stored previously.

Hence, if someone intercepted my hash, it's the same situation as if they looked in /etc/passwd on a multi-user Unix system. That is, it's more information than nothing, but it's non-trivial to use that information to figure out my password.

Is there a flaw in my reasoning?
Small regional conferences lead to deeper communities in tech-oriented people
How MealSnap Works
You sounded like you were extolling the virtue of immigrants who fit in by not speaking their native language around their children, apologies if I misunderstood your argument.

> (they still call it home)

Of course they do, because it is and always will be home, just as Oregon will always be "home" to me in some sense even though I wouldn't wish to live there, and indeed live on the other side of the world. I doubt it's "home" to their US born children in the same way, though.

> I'm thrilled to have been raised among a smattering of languages and cultures.

Is that a Freudian slip? :-) It actually sounds like you were raised amidst a fairly large variety of languages and cultures, rather than a 'smattering'.

As to 'hostility' at adapting, that's a very long and complex discussion, but suffice it to say it takes time and probably several generations for families to adapt completely.

I guess I just have a fairly laissez faire attitude about the whole thing. People who are rigid and don't adapt will have fewer opportunities than those who do. Their children will likely adapt in any case, whether they want it or not. I mean, English is the dominant global language right now, if people want to plug into that, they'll do so, if not, their loss.
I think the ability to combine C code in Obj-C allows for the usage of a huge legacy code base. However, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a design decision at some point that deliberately made it harder to port NextStep (NS) objects back to C. Creates lock-in...
The Lisp keyboards
While I totally buy what this espouses, I think it is probably incredibly hard to scale. They are doing well if they keep things flat(ish) for 26 employees. I can't really see it working at all for > 50.

And while they may not have anyone with the job title CTO, I'd be very surprised if DHH was anything other than the de facto CTO.
GNOME 3.0 released: better for users, developers
Gallery: Microscopic Art Hides Inside Computer Chips
Quoting odds is not proof.
If you did not tell me that SICP was actually made for something else, I would think that it was custom-designed for self-taught programmers to fill in their gaps, at least the ones that matter. If you actually finish that book you'll be ahead of the vast bulk of programmers who graduated with computer science degrees in terms of practical software engineering.
So, is that were we are? We have robot birds now? I'm convinced that pretty soon all privacy will end, because we'll have self-controlled fly (as in the animal) robot drones that will be able to record their journeys. I'm not so much afraid of governments dping this, but of creepy guys.

That said, it looks like this bird can't really fly very well. It doesn't stop flapping its wings to glide, and it looks like it can't control its angle of ascent very well.

However, I'm sure it'll look and fly exactly like a real bird (even flocking, perhaps) within a few years.
The simplest way to do it is to open a browser view to the login page, then let the user do whatever and just watch the cookie store for the appropriate key. As soon as it shows up, close the browser and use that key in the app. This works for all the login methods.
Android Music 3.0 app with cloud streaming leaked
So Why Did Dish Really Buy Blockbuster?
Suppliers delivered 2.4M-2.6M iPad 2 units to Apple in March
So what he is essentially saying is, they're an anarcho-syndicalist commune, taking it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, and all the decision of that officer must be approved at a bi-weekly meeting by a two-thirds majority.
I forgot the password to my credit union account. I clicked on the 'get password' link and they e-mailed my original password back to me, in plain text. Lame! I still need to move my funds though, doh!
Twitter Redesigns Homepage Yet Again
I guess, these things sort themselves out in a capitalist society. I guess, there is nothing really to worry about :)

Indian higher educational institutes and their ratings correlate well on a log graph. This is the way it should ideally be (it is a well designed filter). Only problem is that the highest rated institutes are few and far between. The students admitted in these top-tier universities have cleared entrance examinations with a standard deviation of less than 5% (this is a guess, it is likely even less). A lot of potentially good students are therefore left out of an opportunity for better education (rather a better starting job, due to the hiring culture).

It is true that the 'education' in India sucks - it is outdated, and often not worth the 4 years spent in acquiring it. However, the log correlation ensures that top-tier universities are damn hard to get into, and those few than do get into them (for example, the IITs) are by far the best in the world (compared to anywhere).

Given some more economic pressure, more top-tier universities should popup soon. As for finding customer service workforce, I think, its about time India starts offshoring it elsewhere ;)
Yahoo Unhappy Over Italian Court's Ruling on Search
Web-based HR systems that require filling in web forms to stitch your CV together are the worst. You instantly go from "cool infographic resume" to .nfo/ASCII-art resume. Whatever happened to simple e-mail attachments...
Special Report : Bullying On Facebook & In Social Games
I think this article is a bit sensationalist. Yes, there are niche techniques in biology, but many -- Western blots, qPCR, cell culture, transfection -- are transferable to almost any other biology lab.

The article's core advice -- make sure to acquire transferable skills -- is certainly a good idea, though.

As a bioinformatics PhD student, life is great: I get to learn those programming and math skills specifically mentioned by the article as being transferable, along with some of the other more esoteric skills. (Moral of the story: choose bioinformatics! :)
I don't know your use cases, so pardon me if this is naive, but couldn't you create a token that is unique for each user, and is consumed after use?
You're right, and I have no idea why a thread like this still makes it to the frontpage. It is unfortunate that you need x karma to downvote threads because even us who have been here for a while still don't have the ability to assist with content control.
There is a lot wrong with GSM, and I didn't even know about this particular attack (thanks!), but you still have to be reasonably close to the victim - it's harder than "attack from anywhere on the internet".
I believe some sociologists found that personal relationships begin to break down at about 150. Beyond that it is very difficult to maintain meaningful interaction in person. Online relationship numbers are much higher so maybe a distributed team like 37Signals can get away with this for a while longer.
Reminds me of the classic Hemingway vs Faulkner discussion: http://www.guilford.edu/about_guilford/services_and_administ...

Hemingway: Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited.

Faulkner: He did not feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which it its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course.
The school question is a complex one.

I think that English ought to be taught in all schools in order to give everyone an opportunity to get ahead.

That said, I can see there being a case to take some kids and teach them in another language for a limited period of time in order to make sure they don't fall so far behind because of their lack of English that they fall off the treadmill. If that happens, they will have both not learned English and will also likely drop out of school, with a corresponding lack of future prospects, increase in crime potential, and so on.
The ABA Shared Memory Problem
>to think a small subset of paying users will have any affect on the up-time of a major site is just a pipe dream

You seem to rely on the assumption that every major site's budget is so lush that a small portion of the userbase paying would be unable to solve any of their technical or employee needs.

Look at reddit, their recent donation effort has gotten them servers and staff: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/help-us-help-you-help-us.html

You'd be crazy to say that those additional resources will have no affect at all on their uptime.
Surely someone still owns the trademarks to many of these? Get 'em while they last.
At the previous school I was at, trying to find some sort of synergy between the CS department's game-design program, and anything in the art department, also ran into some of those problems, more from faculty/department disinterest than student disinterest. There were actually quite a few students who were 3dsMax or Illustrator wizards, learned on their own time, but the art departments didn't see that sort of thing as in their scope at all.

Although to be fair CS departments sometimes get those complaints as well. We want to teach people fundamentals of computer science, but what a lot of other departments really wish we'd teach is practical programming/script-slinging, often in languages that none of our courses focus on (Fortran, Matlab, Perl).
You seem to have a bit of understanding of what happened internally at walmart with walmart.com in the early days. Walmart.com is still based out of California (Menlo Park I believe) even though the company was brought back into the Walmart Inc. many years ago.

The original "walmart online" folks weren't web developers (Visual Basic coders) and really had a tough time understanding the request/response nature of the web (although they had no UX or QA people either, which led to other issues).

The Arkansas/California issues you talked about also stemmed from jealousy. There were stories of the associates in CA having pool tables, foosball tables, catered food, etc. Meanwhile, in AR the associates had extremely old PCs, old software, required to work long hours, etc.
What a disappointing piece of writing. Having worked with BigTable for several years at my previous gig I find the whole premise of NoSQL hilarious. BigTable really is a very specific solution to a very specific problem, creating a datastore that can feed massive mapreduces efficiently. Basically you have a design problem that nobody else is solving and you have the monetary resources and knowledge to solve it yourself.

I'll be extremely delighted when the discussion starts revolving around how well a solution fits a specific problem as opposed to declaring one or the other solution inferior or superior. A single grading scale is not what a real engineer uses.

For the record we use a "NoSQL" technology called flat files. Because our challenge is making sure the right workers have the right data in memory, not on disk.
In working with thousands of small businesses I've found many more exceptions than rules. I think the key to checkout is for businesses to optimize for the most common customer of their store. This may go against common wisdom for general stores but if you optimize for your customers you'll reduce the checkout workload. Less work during checkout has a direct correlation to higher completion/conversion.