skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was told I'd never be a programmer because I didn't get good marks in math and physics, that was sixteen years ago. Let's kill the myth.

I can't see any reason why being genuinely good at math is more important to effective programming than being good at chemistry (layers and sequence), biology (complex systems) or languages (building meaning from abstract or incomplete signals). You do not need to be good at late high-school math to understand Big-O.

I suspect people who are good at or passionate about math are far more likely to stroke their ego with premature optimisation.

Also, there's a vast difference between aptitude for maths, and performing well in maths tests. Attention to detail, regard for the education system, interest in the topic all play a part.

> There is evidence women avoid computing because
> they are intolerant of geeks

I see a different pattern that goes in mostly the reverse direction. Young men are a strange bunch, but young nerds in particular tend to act bizarrely towards women, and are therefore undesirable to be around. It can be more effort to deal with someone bizarre (has feelings but is draining) than someone who is just a bastard (quickly tell them to get stuffed). If you sense a concentration of draining people - avoid!
Congratulations on starting out on your own. Takes courage.
How do you add yourself to the Hacker News Circle? I added the circle to my stream. Anything more I need to do?
In reading the comments it looks like I'm in the complete minority here, but I think this was impressive.

People are mentioning that there will possibly be problems with the hotel, or a story of how a similarly constructed hotel failed in one way or another.

However, once the company constructs 30 of these hotels all of these bugs will soon be worked out. It is the fast iteration and refining of the process that will eventually enable this company to create a building that is close in quality to what takes much longer to build in the US.

tldr; Construction companies in China are able to act web startups in the US. This will give them an advantage in the long term.
I strongly recommend you do something, just in case you make it to the front. Your site is crawling (extremely slow) at the moment. It is just bound to get worse.

On the topic at hand, I fully agree with you.
"The worst things humans have ever done to each other have all centered around the notion of 'meaningful group variations within the human species'."

That is an extremely strong statement to make without justification. It sounds like a forbidden knowledge-type of argument. Science should decide if there are statistically significant intergroup variations. But right now, that is strictly verboten by the type of arguments you just gave me. This strikes me as an echo of the resistance to understanding human evolution, but by a group that considers itself to be rational and scientific. It seems some people literally have taken the notion of universal human equality as a revealed truth in the religious sense. These people are hostile to inquiry into the matter because it would literally upset their entire worldview.
I don't recall the German government pursuing claims for the lands they considered their lebensraum a few short decades after WWII. I don't recall them holding rallies and strident speeches calling for their return. I don't recall them enlisting their diplomatic allies to petition for their return and grouping together to ban vehicles bearing the relevant flags from trading or passing through (in addition to all the other things that Argentina does to make the lives of the islanders difficult). Nor do I hear anyone calling for the reestablishment of the British Empire. There seems to be only one group engaged in Gorilla-style patriotism here.

This is about the right of a free people not to be bullied by large neighbours: those who would seek, and have sought, to dispossess the islanders of their land and livelihood. It's most certainly freedom at issue here, and there are those of us on this side that think the behavior of your government is shameful in the extreme. We payed a lot more than rent over the matter last time, and will do so again if necessary. Considering how clear cut the issue is, and the hundreds of deaths that were involved, it's telling how trite you are regarding this despicable campaign against the Falklands by your bully government. The British papers wouldn't be writing anything about it at all if the farcical claim over the Falklands wasn't being pushed all the time by the Argentine government in domestic speeches, regionally (Mercosur bans) and in international fora. All this from a region in receipt of foreign aid from the British government: grow up. It's relevant to the discussion because the tinpot government of "Cristina" (first name basis? or just a supporter?) is betraying totalitarian tendencies in other areas too. Democracy is pretty corrupt in the West, but take a good look in the mirror because you aren't even in the upper half http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

Your police can't be trusted with witnesses, politicians are assassinated and short decades after an unprovoked war you are banging the drums again; I don't see why you expect anyone to be friendly or not to get angry about it. You are right though, we are a bit off topic, because the Falklands already belong to the "kelpers" as you put it, and they say they are British.
ARM produces a design people incorporate into their chips. I'm not entirely certain you cannot take an ARM core and enhance it if you pay the right fees (when I worked on them, I don't think we did, but we just need a core to do management for our hardware-based video decoder).

Not sure if IBM fabricates any chips for people right now, but we used UMC and TSMC, so it's really not about ARM for the manufacturing process, it's about those two companies. I don't know what UMC and TSMC are advertising as their current process, it might be a little behind Intel, but I'm sure they'll continue to shrink processes.

The question is why would an x86 processor need to be put on your phone? I guess because the history of Intel so far is all x86, their other processor lines have all been phased out (I hesitate to say failed, but that might be the right word). Intel really doesn't want to compete on low-power, low-margin chips, they like making money on the desktop and server.

From my limited experience, ARM is vastly easier to work on than x86, as far as assembly programming is concerned. I personally hope this chip fails, because I'd prefer not to have x86 polluting the world anymore than it already has.
I haven't tried it but looks fairly effective: http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/nudejs/
> TL;DR ... If a normal person isn't able to properly classify something (good / bad), then a computer algorithm definitely cannot.

Technically untrue. Computers are able to correctly classify (and with good accuracy/precision) lots of things that even domain-expert humans have a tough time classifying.

One problem with those systems is that, depending on how they're trained up, humans aren't even able to pick apart how the software is making its decisions (and use that to advance the state of the relevant science, for example).

Creepy and awesome.
The answer to most of those is "911" (or your regional equivalent). The others are not time critical, read the manual, ask whoever you rented it from, or figure out how to use Bing.

I'm starting to feel old here...
I think this article is empathetic in how it has shifted focus to trying to understand the view of SOPA from "their" position. This is a good thing to do, because without understanding your opponents argument you can't fully understand your own.

However, as kpanghmc pointed out, even if Google had the capability, that doesn't mean every company does. I'll take that a step further. Even if Google had the capability, the government doesn't have the right to step in and demand that a single private entity build something to stop it, even using government (taxpayer) money. This is how you know the government has gotten too big.

Furthermore, the article while trying to empathize, omits the fact that this is censorship. The banning of web pages or websites as a whole without undue process is not constitutional and un-American.
Or a false sense of moral superiority.
And this is why there's so much dark fiber (but hooray!).
Although it's easy to become accustomed to it, it's pretty obvious the child care world has some serious issues in diversity. By this I mean that it has some notable differences in proportions of people compared to the general population. One of the most obvious differences is the low proportion of men, which is true all over the world. In the US, where I spend a good chunk of my time, the over-representation of Latinos is also obvious.

One point of view I hear fairly regularly is that these diversity imbalances are natural - because men don't have the aptitude or inclination for child care. The big flaw here is a simple one of evidence. There are (roughly) 50% men in the world, so we should expect the ratio for men in child care to be 50% - unless there's real evidence that some other ratio is natural.

This waste hurts our society, too. We need more and better child care to nurture and support the next generation. By not bringing enough men into the profession, we are handicapping ourselves. How can we say we are hiring the best people when we ignore significant chunks of our population?
It's less about individual goals than about the mismatch between talent and opportunity.

There are people out there who could make meaningful contribution to this profession. There is a demand for people who could make a meaningful contribution to this profession. There are artificial barriers, based on gender/race/class/whatever that make it marginally harder for some people to contribute.

A more concrete example: The unemployment rate in my country is very huge, and yet my organization is still having a hard time finding talent. Is it because none of the millions of people looking for work could possibly do what I need done? It seems more likely that the complex system of forces has dissuaded talented people from getting skills in this profession.
Why Samsung Is The Next Apple
Big Problem: The Worlds #1 Search Engine Is Not The Worlds #1 Social Network
Taking down Facebook would be pointless. How else will people talk about SOPA? I think disabling features with a heavy theme of "SOPA will change the internet" will get a lot of discussion / attention on Facebook.
Google's Social Strategy: (1) Destroy Google Search (2) ????? (3) Profit!!!
i don't think his intention is to move content, but rather just to make that content more easily accessible and visible to mobile users.

the problem with mobile websites is that they have to compete with the app store. if an iphone user wants a train schedule, are they more likely to open up a browser and search google for "train schedule iphone" and scroll around clicking on random sites? or would they just open the app store, search for "train schedule" and easily see all available apps, ranked and reviewed, easily added to their home screen with a single click?

i run such a mobile website for metra trains (http://metra.jcs.org/) but because i have no native app in the ios or android stores, it doesn't see much traffic. i've thought about developing an app that just embeds a browser and goes to the site, just so it can be listed in the app store.

apple does in fact have a listing of mobile web apps at https://www.apple.com/webapps/ but i doubt most iphone owners even know it exists. it's also not very easy to use from mobile devices, strangely enough.
Being purposefully vague, since my understanding is that posting job requests other than on the first of the month is frowned upon. I need a coding partner and perhaps one more contributor to help with testing, communications and general project management for the next six months, mostly .NET

Very demanding schedule and needs to be done right, coding at the speed of delivering tomorrow but of quality to last a long time.

I should add that being close to Newton, MA would be preferable as I might move the operation to a temporary space by geek offices in the area

How do you ping privately?
What's up with all of these Prezi-style Javascript presentations recently? I realize this is a jQ version of something that was posted the other day, but all of this flashy Javascript is really promoting a second coming of Flash Internet of the 90s™.

As a new presentation style, this doesn't impress me any more than a PowerPoint does. It makes me sick flipping and turning through a website, and though I realize it has some potentially cool uses, stuff like this will, for the most part, be abused.
Yeah, but you could still have pirated movies, or unlocked software on the drive, which would make you a pirate and a thought-criminal.

And you wouldn't let a pirate on a plane, would you?
> Clearly the photographer wants to be paid as a professional

Then he has to work as a professional. "Professional landscape photographer" is an oxymoron. There is essentially no commercial market for landscape photography. For all practical purposes, there are an infinite number of sufficiently high-quality images available for free.

The only thing I'm formally qualified to do is sound engineering. The development of Digital Audio Workstation software and cheap microphones meant that by the time I left college, there weren't any recording studios left to hire me. I could say exactly the same thing as the OP about how much my studio equipment costs, about how long I spent learning my craft, but the simple fact is that there are too many studio engineers willing to work for free.

Landscape photography is a hobby, like sport or music. Some people are so exceptionally good at that they can make a living doing it, but everyone else has to suck it up, act like an adult and do something that people will actually pay for. John B. Mueller shoots weddings, I write software. He shoots landscapes for fun, I record music for fun, which is exactly why nobody will pay us to do it - thousands like us will do it for free.
E. Coli Cells Turned Into 'BioPixels'
They would notice, but they wouldn't be interested. Their response would probably be something along the lines of "I hope this gets taken care of quickly so facebook can go back to normal."

The cool thing about the profile picture idea is that it makes it clear that your friends are opting in to this protest. It'll make you curious as to what's going on.
I also think they are not going to go dark. Think about how much money those companies are going to loose in a single day by doing that. And we all know corporations of that size are all about money.
I just grep'd the log and saw that in the three hours since I posted the screen grab there were 1610 unique IP's. So obviously many more people were not able to reach the site.
Five essential phone screen questions
SOPA backers can't be responsible for every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.
I wonder if Nurses, Social Workers, and Daycare teachers are writing these same articles about how there are not enough men in their fields.
These are pretty neat. I use a few of them relatively often at work, but if I ever saw

c = ((((c - 0x3f800000) >> r) + 0x3f800000) >> 23) - 127;

in production code I would be sad.
Nokia rolls out new screen reader
I am involved with a construction Company that operates in the Gulf area. The average hotel we have been involved with is about 50 stories high.

On a multinational Team from design to construction it can take a minimum of 36-50 months. Yes time can be cut -- certainly not to 15 days -- but not with the way large developments are currently build. The average rate of floor construction (with a prestressed slab) is 4-7 days, so the absolute minimum time required to get just the structure going will be >57 weeks. The average rate to get a single bath tub approved by the Consultant, Engineer, Client, Finance etc., is normally 3 months. To get a Hotel room approved down to the last fitting, carpets, access systems, IPTV, media hub, lighting, air conditioning and everything co-ordinated is anybody's guess, but again not less than six months.

On the current Project we are just finishing (5 luxury hotels), we have over 100 km of steel piping just for fire protection and chilled water for the air conditioning systems. There are over 50 systems involved, such as data, IPTV, WI-Fi etc. At peak we had over 5000 people working on the Project.

No chance in hell that an up to standard hotel can be finished in 15 days.
re: "little solid argument" - he does say that diversity means a wider variety of thinking, and /more programmers/.
Fixing piracy requires that the government officials are paid a good salary. Would a policeman need a bribe if he can get INR 1 lakh/mo legitimately (~USD 2250/mo)?
Background: I am Indian, lived there till I was 24. Moved to USA since last 6 years.

I kind of agree. It is not that corruption is socially acceptable, the problem is that common man has no choice. E.g. Until recently, Section 377 of Indian Penal Code could be used against you if you are gay. In Mumbai, there has been many cases where cops have pretended to be gay in public bathroom and try to harass other gay folks. Now if you are caught, you have two choices: either go to Jail or bribe the police officer. Guess what choice you are going to make?

Another example: Four Seasons needed 165 government permits to open their hotel in Mumbai, including a permit to use a vegetable weighing scale in kitchen. [Ref: http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/may/07mumbai.htm] Now, Four Seasons may have gone and obtained all the proper permits but if there is a business man in India who doesn't have deep pockets to wait around till all the permits come through, he has no choice but to bribe the government official and focus on the business.

Finally, my own personal story: when I was applying for my green card, I needed to get transcripts from my university because I misplaced the original ones which I had. The clerk at University said it would take a month. It was clear to me that he wanted me to bribe him to speed up the process. Once again, I can stand up to the principle and wait for a month to get my transcript. [And I am sure he would give another excuse to delay giving me the transcript]. As my immigration was important to me, I bribed him and got the transcript the next day. [And I can't complain about him at the University because he did not directly ask me for money.]

There are lots of honest people in India and no one wants to bribe but there is no recourse for them if they don't bribe [law enforcement is a big problem.]

I read govind201's goal with this site and I applaud the effort (anything we can do to fight corruption must be done), I think we need a more radical approach to solve this very difficult problem. Something like a 'Lokpal Bill' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Lokpal_Bill] but not before removing the critical flaws present in the bill. Also, working on to reduce government regulation will go a long way towards reducing corruption.
Me too. 29, no MBA and not even half of that :-)
What about objects who are referenced by more than one object, and which are linked to resources? try... finally blocks are just a different way of freeing your resources at the end of a block, and won't help with objects which outlive the block they are guarding.

Actually, here is your choice: either you'll have to manage every kind of resource except memory (garbage collected languages), or you'll have to manage only memory (C++).
You should consider offering a free version that serves your ads. You'll get more people using it, and then you can monetize off the ads. If enough people are using the free version, you might discover it's an even bigger revenue generator than the paid version.
Open Letter to Mechanical Turk: Please add externalSubmit debugging console.
When in doubt: compare the resulting assembly for the two versions.

gcc -S foo.c
Did you take the website down or did it just crash? If it just crashed and they are past due on an invoice, then that is their issue and I agree it's not your worry if you are not getting paid. Payment is a huge issue in our industry and a lot of it is due to ignorance or inexperience on the clients part. That does not excuse the issue but it is a real issue. If you are inclined you can try to educate the client or you can look to broaden your client base so that you are not at the whims of political decision making on their part. Either way, if you did not take the site down, and you had an agreement as to the terms of payment and they are not meeting that agreement then you are under no obligation to support them. Doing so just deepens the hole you are in with them. Any client that cannot see this is being unreasonable and you should look to find new reasonable clients.
Hmm. Does Android have fat binaries for the NDK? I can see Motorola et al getting a lot of complaints about games not working...
Does anybody have any experience in creating a 3D interface for a business application? It seems that what video games do really well has never transferred over into the "real work" category of software.

Secondly, are impress & jmpress going to cause more 3D interface innovation?
For those unfamiliar with scientific publishing, Michael Eisen, the author of this Op-Ed is the founder of the PLoS series of open access journals, which are generally considered first-class publications in each of their fields. Michael Eisen has been leading the way in open access for the past decade.
I would argue that they aren't destroying Google Search. They are merely adding another option for search.
No.

However, in the blender, I'd first try to detach the blades somehow. If I couldn't, I'd then try to jam them somehow (perhaps my shoe, or belt). Failing those, I'd swing the blade a bit to see where I'd best be positioned. Certainly theres a bit of room under or to the side of blades where I could lay until the blender was shut off. Maybe even could ride the blades; it'd be like an awesome merry-go-round.

Providing I survived, I'd immediately thank them for their time and insist I'd never in a million years work for some company that'd shrink me down and put me in a blender [and please un-shrink me NAO thank you very much].
That's why I said that without hard science it's a scary and dangerous place.

With hard science, you can do things like determine that some ethnic groups are more likely to develop particular kinds of illnesses or respond differently to some kinds of medications. That's great!

But looking at the status quo and saying "I guess women just aren't any good at this whole programming business" isn't hard science, it's ex-post-facto rationalization.
Absurd. I accept that the journals will fight against open access. But it's bizarre to me that there are members of Congress who apparently think that the first priority of goverment-funded research is to support a bunch of businesses.

It reminds me of when then-Senator Santorum proposed a bill that would prohibit the National Weather Service to disseminate their forecasts for free as they do now and instead would only sell them to commercial outlets. He apparently also thinks that the purpose of government is to give money to corporations.

I generally am a believer in government being a force for good. But stuff like this taxes this belief.

The funny thing is that you never hear stuff like this happening in Sweden. The US government is apparently wholly subjugated by corporations. I don't understand how there isn't more of an uproar about this. You'd think that both small-goverment libertarian types and "socialists" (in the US use of the word) would agree that whatever the size of government, it shouldn't be beholden to commercial interests...
Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish
Drive-by Tweeting
A good idea to help prioritize which leads to pursue!