skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programmer wage gap data: I challenge employers to prove you're fair
So, people were saying the direct link to the giant table of data was confusing, so here we are.

There is a pay gap between men and women in computer programming and software engineering. Women who are classified as "Software Developers" on average make 86 cents for every dollar their male peers make, and women classified as "Programmers" on average make 93 cents on every dollar their male peers make. Here is the data straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm and again in a nice little screenshot http://imgur.com/vMoOU (thanks heypel).

This is a challenge to companies which hire either programmers or software engineers to release statistics proving that they treat men and women equally. I understand pay-gap is not the end-all-be-all yardstick of equality so you can break down the statistics by seniority, experience, or any other metrics you like.

The idea is to compile a list of companies which do prioritize treating people equally so that employees can make informed decisions about where they would like to work.
Microsoft licenses patents "covering use of Linux-based servers in datacenters"
From Jacqui Cheng's liveblog of the call on ars:

Q: Can you talk about what your conversations are like with carriers in terms of pricing, subsidies, etc.?

Tim Cook: (laughing out loud)

I don't want to talk about specifics with carriers, but generally I'd say our role is to make the very best smartphone in the world that has an incredible user experience that's far superior than anything else, that customers want to use every day at the end of the day, carriers want to provide what customers want to buy the most important thing for Apple is to continue making the best products in the world. we are maniacally focused on it
If I say something in defense of libertarians, will I get down-voted and burn through karma? Experience says that the answer is yes.

What are the implications for the level and type of discussion here at HN?
Every professional shop that uses C++ and has been around for any time uses a subset of C++. What that particular subset is, is completely different for almost every shop.
There are no total solutions for the surveillance issue just like there are no total solutions to the piracy issue. You can't put the cat back in the bag without walking away from having an Internet.

At the end of the day, this is a social issue not a technological one. Our only hope is to hold our leaders accountable and help saner heads to prevail.
Every time the planning department has tried to increase density along the transportation corridors on the west side of the city, the neighborhood groups come out in force against it. We desperately need light rail and five story mixed-use all the way down Geary.
This has been a weird week for personal privacy.

NSA insider reveals NSA has a file on ALL us citizens.

NSA admits to warrantless wiretapping.

NYTimes admits that all news orgs allow government censorship of media.

I mean, what kind of world do people think we really live in?
I agree that that mac is six years old, but what is so different between the graphics requirements for lion and mountain lion? Seems like they didn't have the resources or inclination to upgrade the 32bit drivers to 64bit.

And yes - I'm aware that the upgrade costs $20 bucks. How much is a new macbook?
Craigslist is probably within their legal rights here

I would really call this into question for the copyright claims. The key claim is copyright infringement, and the listings on Craigslist are almost certainly unprotected, much like telephone directory listings. They are statements of fact rather than creative works.

Craigslist may attempt to claim copyright over reproduction of their database as a whole (compilation), but the Supreme Court has ruled that in order to be eligible the compilation must be "original in its selection, coordination, and arrangement", and Craigslist can hardly claim that.

The breach of contract claims may be stronger though. The pages on the Google cache presumably still contain the ToS, and if they apply (who knows?) then PadMapper's use of Craigslist would likely constitute a breach. A ruling on this would be very interesting.
The Swedish synth band Adolphson-Falk did something similar in 1984.

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js...

The sound contained Atari machine coed packed in a BASIC loader, that would display the name of the album on top of a color cycling effect.
too little to late. We could take all the smart people and fund their work and give them minions for years and we would never get back what we have already lost.
We wouldn't accept any federal agency enforcing "Printing Press Neutrality", requiring the owners of printing presses to submit to government rulemaking about what pamphlets, periodicals, and books are printed on their presses. We would understand, instinctively, that having government involved in such matters is inviting the fox into the henhouse.

For some reason, with newer media, the simple principle of "no meddling in private communications/publishing" gets lost. So we have the FCC, censoring broadcast media, and used via licensing and ownership rules to extract 'favors' for the political classes. And we have people who are ostensibly in favor of free speech inviting this censorious, political-establishment-subservient agency into Internet regulation. No, thank you.

There's no need to tame the Internet to be safe and 'neutral'/neutered like regulated broadcast TV. It's working just fine without the FCC's enlightened approach, which historically has included set-asides for certain favored classes of programming [1], moral crusades, and other benefits for the politically-connected [2].

[1] http://reason.com/blog/2008/06/17/the-fccs-obsolete-quotas

[2] http://reason.com/archives/2008/06/12/the-central-committee-...
I would've thought Z80 was a registered trademark for Zilog. Those little monsters (and their smarter/faster successors) are still kicking it everywhere.
Thanks for attaching the link. We do generate referral fee from leads (we receive the same fee regardless of the lender so we maintain financial neutrality) but we're much more concerned with getting the user experience right (ie the second part of your note).
@kevinpet -- you are spot on there. We have discussed this several times internally, and feel very strongly about including this. However, we simply tried to get the most done in the shortest period of time possible. More features (like this) are on the way shortly.

The issue with LGBT couples, or un-married partners, is simply complexity. LGBT couples, for instance, can file joint taxes in certain cities/states, but then separate federal taxes, applying or not applying various deductions, etc. It gets very messy!

Stay tuned for more... and feel free to send us any comments/suggestions you have!
if one wanted to find the 'best' converging sequence, you might go about it by brute force. Seems lots of people beat me to it. http://pastebin.com/iujCgUSu

my $lasterror = 3;
for (1..10000){ my $d = $_;
for (3..40000){ my $n = $_;
if (abs(($n/$d) - pi) < $lasterror){
$lasterror = abs(($n/$d) - pi);
print "\n $n / $d: error $lasterror";}}}

# output
# 3 / 1: error 0.141592653589793
# 13 / 4: error 0.108407346410207
...
# 355 / 113: error 2.66764189404967e-007
research of my own that'd be too risky for academia

I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business.

Edit: I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying that they still manage to do research that is too risky for industry. For example: finding the higgs boson. I don't see any examples of industry doing research that is "too risky for the university."
Go Huskies
It has a few really nice use cases (legacy one-off winxp servers running software from defunct vendors, rhel3 host for old image software aquired by adobe and shelved? perfect in both cases), but the other stuff I've seen it put to has been horrible. jboss on linux on hundreds of hosts converted into a big blob of jvms running in vms...there's no point in giving up that much hardware when the number and config of the servers remains so consistent, and thanks to balloon memory vmware keeps stealing ram from the vms. it's a lot of money to solve the "I need a virtual kvm" problem(?)
I'm still waiting for the tech world to discover the East Bay.

It has Oakland and Berkeley -- not cities on the scale of SF, but offering reasonably dense downtowns and cultural life.

BART vs. CalTrain. Readily commutable, with 4-15 minute headways and highly reliable service from 5am to midnight, rather than the often 1-hour interval schedules and mid-day lapses of CalTrain. Some of the newer CalTrain livery beats BART, but the latter is upgrading soon.

Access to a much broader (and cheaper) housing stock: Alameda and Contra Costa counties, with commutes via BART, 80, 580, 880 and 24. Granted, many of the highways are chronically congested, but less so than 101, and more useful for commutes than 280, which is largely a high-speed SF - Palo Alto/Cupertino link.

Options for much more dense infill development without the Penninsula's NIMBYs. Granted, there are the East Bay NIMBYs, but they're slightly less focused and rabid.

SF does have considerable growth opportunity available, though existing transit is stretched, and there remains resistance to growth. That said, development in the SOMA / China Basin area in the past two decades has been pretty considerable.

Edit: and of course, UC Berkeley. Not Stanford. But more than a match.
That some functions can't be well served by free markets and so there does need to be some government seemed to be the most common form of libertarianism years ago, but the impression I get nowadays based on online activity is that the "everything can be handled by the free market" form has gotten the upper hand. Or maybe they are just louder?
I don't think it's as clearcut as saying its a compilation.

Here is the relevant wikipedia section on compilation copyright

>Copyright Act allows for the protection of "compilations," provided there is a "creative" or "original" act involved in such a compilation, such as in the selection (deciding which things to include or exclude), and arrangement (how they are shown and in what order). The protection is limited only to the selection and arrangement, not to the facts themselves, which may be freely copied.

>The Supreme Court decision in Feist v. Rural..rejected what was known as the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, in ruling that no matter how much work was necessary to create a compilation, a non-selective collection of facts ordered in a non-creative way is not subject to copyright protection.

I think there is a good argument that there is no creativity on Craigslist's part in selecting postings, since they aren't selecting them--users are uploading them. If true selection wouldn't be covered.

The arrangement might be (if it can be said to be creative), but I'm assuming padmapper isn't copying their arrangement.
Twitter Is Working on a Way to Retrieve Your Old Tweets
In the past GM predates release by a few weeks - this is a little quicker than expected, I think.
Worked for me (Chrome 20 on Windows 7).
i love just about everything that comes out of Joel, but this seems like a sacrilegious blasphemy.

Speaking from a strongly typed managed environment, exceptions are a special citizen that can get across many abstractions, and provide great flexibility in who/what/where should handle them. They are not meant to be used to communicate an outcome of some task/procedure. They are meant to signal that something catastrophic has happened and current function/task/process needs to handle it or end its existence.

Few examples: a stream gets closed by the other endpoint, database write fails, memory gets corrupt, or if you're a creator of an api and you want to signal to your future subscribers that something is missing i.e. they are trying to read data w/out opening a connection.

A lot of them can be avoided with some foresight (checking if a connection is open before calling a read, checking for null before calling methods on it, checking if enum is defined before casting to it), but not all can be avoided.

The beauty of exceptions is that they are decoupled from the rest of the code. You can put a listener at any level of abstraction, anywhere in your code.

return codes is what i'd expect from old school developers that still put their business logic in stored procedures. I suppose there are times where they are appropriate but in no way do they replace exceptions. (again, speaking from a object oriented environment)
"the west can ill afford another war in the middle-east with the current economy and gas prices"

"The west" isn't a monolith. Elites everywhere profit from war, simply because it first and foremost tightens control and keeps people busy.
I think you have that backwards: city homeowners lobby against new building permits because SF has limited space. They feel their neighborhood is plenty crowded, their views are blocked quite enough, and traffic is already congested, etc. Hundreds of developers at 5-100 units each will significantly change the density and life experience in the city.

I was referring to the will of voters as opposed to a cabal of corporations or corrupt influences. Obviously, majorities that impinge on civil rights need to be overruled. It is not a civil right that just because you want to live in the city and you have more money than a current resident, you should be allowed to do so. Nor is it a civil right for a developer to build an oversized and overcrowded building when their property zoning allows a modest residence.
Jawani K Rang Bhabhi K Sung
Maybe there is a little mystery.

Enumerate all the fractions with at most 3-digit denominator (0, 1, 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, ..., 998/999) between 0 and 1. Now what is the probability that amongst them we find an approximation to a random real that is at least as good as 355/113 is to pi?

Seems to be about 15%, so not much mystery here. But we allow denominators as large as 999 because we use the decimal system. In hexadecimal it would be at most 2-digit denominators, up to ff = 255.

In this case, the probability is about 1%. Much more mystery. So it comes down to, how large a set of denominators we think 113 is drawn from, and whether living in a 1 in 100 universe is enough to be mysterious in this case.

Sampled by this python code (takes minutes to run): https://gist.github.com/3172978
Actually you can install it on any computer that you own. Not just 5. They removed that limitation with Lion.
Please, add OpenID login.
>Personally I think it is an excuse to get people to upgrade.

Well of course it is, they're a hardware company. I don't think there's some conspiracy to deprecate 6 years old computers when the shelf life of a computer in the industry is 1-3 years - in other words, I don't think they're being unreasonable.
Not to mention Dick's burgers: College, vocational/self-improvement scholarships up to $22,000 over 4 years to employees working 20 hours per week for at least six months and continuing to work at least 20 hours per week while attending school. http://www.ddir.com/employment
The experts are generally over-conservative for a reason. The tldr reason is that they get fired for losing people's money so absolute accuracy (where misses are 50% high and 50% low) is not their incentive.
Firstly, I love the idea. Part of the reason I've stopped reading fiction is because of the unknown quantity to whether it will waste my time — amazon reviews can be hit and miss, and often missing.

http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/19-Moonwalking-With-Einstein reckons that the NYTimes review is negative, but reading it (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-m...) it appears to be positive? How do you work out which are positive and negative?

Also, could you make it possible to blacklist certain reviewers? Is that what the thumbs up and down do, personalising your result? Say, if I went to the review page of 50 shades, and downvoted all the positive reviews, will those reviewers stop counting?
Looks like apple trying to increase those profits even further.

Actually, its likely more a technical reason than a financial one. IIRC, the first generation of Core 2 Duo machines shipped with 32-bit EFI, even though the processor is 64-bit. The 64-bit kernel, which is now the default and only kernel in Mountain Lion, requires 64-bit firmware which your machine doesn't have.

They probably could have engineered the 64-bit kernel to work with the 32-bit EFI, or the probably could have shipped an EFI update for old Core 2 Duo machines, but those machines are 6 years old. I'm sure they felt their limited resources could be better spent elsewhere.
Check out: http://www.estimize.com/

Wisdom of Crowds for earnings calls.
>If they can prove that the listing owner asked them to list their property, Craigslist can't sue.

Look at the Rightshaven case. The judge ruled that Rightshaven didn't have standing to sue on behalf just because the copyright holder granted it license to.

If that theory holds up, Craigslist wouldn't have standing to sue on behalf of the copyright holders.

Additionally copyright would only apply if the listings are considered creative works. Most of them are clearly simple statements of fact that wouldn't merit copyright protection in the first place.
This is a false bargain. Spending money on overhead can make the money the charity spends on its program go much further.

http://blog.givewell.org/2007/01/16/which-of-these-boasts-is...

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/09/why-ranking-charities...
You are an optimist. In a perfect world it would take you 100++ hours to read and research all HN comments per day.
Goodreads is nothing like this site.
Don't forget "NSA dude is going to speak at DEFCON".

http://defcon.org/html/defcon-20/dc-20-speakers.html#Alexand...

I mean, the nerve.
Ah, I knew it! I was sure it was a slightly pinkish red.
Crossposting from the other thread, I thought this was the best part of the earnings call...

From Jacqui Cheng's liveblog of the call on ars:

Q: Can you talk about what your conversations are like with carriers in terms of pricing, subsidies, etc.?

Tim Cook: (laughing out loud)

I don't want to talk about specifics with carriers, but generally I'd say our role is to make the very best smartphone in the world that has an incredible user experience that's far superior than anything else, that customers want to use every day at the end of the day, carriers want to provide what customers want to buy the most important thing for Apple is to continue making the best products in the world. we are maniacally focused on it
limited resources, ha!

in other news: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results: $35B/$8B profit
That's the point, but the reality of job, training, and funding structures today is that almost no one in academia can do anything that is not an incremental step on the research who has already managed to become politically established.
(The title doesn't let you write a lot)

I'd like to challenge Silicon Valley companies in particular to release data proving they are not contributing to this problem. You can break down data by experience or seniority level if that explains discrepencies, but I would like to make this a call to action for companies to prove their stance on equality for women. The resulting list will be compiled so that people concerned about these issues will make informed decisions when selecting what companies to work at.
Does anyone believe that?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-nsa-secrecy-...
Cómo emitir factura electrónica a partir de julio 2012 (CFD y CFDI)
Off hand, does anyone know what the current rate limit is for making searches through the API? A quick Google search didn't find an answer, although it's late here, and perhaps my Google-fu is on the blink.

Added in edit: I may have found it - does 150 calls/hr seem right?
That doesn't necessarily mean that Craigslist has standing to sue on it's users behalf however. Also most of those listings don't merit copyright protection, because they are statements of fact not creative works.
What is the probability of Congress actually doing something regarding this? Close to zero! Remember, these are the same fools that brought the US Government within days of not being able to pay its bills. These are the same fools who thought is was okay to have laws that banned trading off of insider information while effectively carving out a loophole for themselves. These are the same fools who will stand amongst union workers in a GM plant and villianize the banking system for taking bailout money so that the financial system doesn't fall apart but never mention that GM is one of those who also took money but has yet to pay it back. These people are nothing but self-serving swine. Don't expect them to do what is in the best interest of the American public.

EDIT: I am aware that certain provisions regarding Congressional insider trading have been closed; however, this did not occur until 60 Minutes raised the issue nationally.
Phusion Passenger Enterprise with annual subscriptions
Also worth noting that even the newest Core 2 Duo's (not that old!) are left out of Mountain Lion's best feature: AirPlay.
That's not a converging series. That's just a sequence of ratios that have successively smaller errors. But there's nothing to relate each ration to the next one.
Business is perfectly willing to fund 10 ideas if one success will produce an outsized profit. Academia is not so kind.
You talk about law. American law to be precise. I talk about physics. They can't even prove it was I that checked the checkbox.
In response to your "only helped": on one of the other Padmapper stories here on HN, someone wrote that after their item sold and they cancelled the Craigslist ad, they continued to get contacted about the item because third parties had scraped the ad and did not stop displaying their copy when the ad disappeared from Craigslist.
As a physics PhD with two postdocs, this highlights almost perfectly my decision to leave for industry. When I defended the plan was to become faculty, but my first postdoc made it clear to me that goal was never going to make me happy, or allow for a balanced life.

I would add to the list one other important factor: getting papers accepted at desirable journals feels less like success for me now than it did when I was younger. The 14th edit of a paper just feels like pointless tedium and is time not spent making or testing something. And once you get a faculty appointment all the hands on time vanishes, and you're more of a professional writer/editor. I still need to be working with my hands.

That said, I'm finding it somewhat more difficult than I expected to transition to industry. I find that a lot of companies don't understand that graduate school and postdoc level research are not like college. I am also frequently treated with skepticism (from the CEO level to HR) that I really want to leave academia after developing such a strong academic CV. There still seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about the differences in environment from both sides.
San Francisco is the second most densely populated major city in the US after NYC, situated on a 7X7 mile peninsula surrounded by water, with significant numbers of historic buildings and neighborhoods that can't be reasonably torn down and replaced by high density housing.

Blaming high rents solely on city officials and rent control overlooks these realities which shape the economics of real estate in the city.
See my answer to mikeryan's post above for information on why that is not necessarily the case. An individual phone number is worthless as well, the collection is valuable. But case law says a phonebook isn't covered by copyright.