skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IE9 could do itself a favor and create some decent developer tools and it would be a lot closer to the top of my list.

Hell, even Opera has a better set of developer tools and it hovers around 2.2% of the market. I'm not even including its great mobile emulator either.
It appears to be up now, but I would expect they got a surge of traffic that might've knocked them out when you were trying.
>Can you really blame an employer for leaning towards being risk adverse in this situation?

Yes. It's called "the right thing to do", not "the easy and convenient thing to do", and for a reason.

Discriminating by race is convenient, but it puts a number of people in a dead end through no fault of their own. Had everyone done the convenient thing to do, those people would be locked out forever. For employers it's a matter convenience, for recruits it's a matter of having or not having a life. The impact is disproportionate.
I believe they let you download in a number of formats, including PDF, epub, mobi, etc.
Milestones in Airborne Astronomy: From the 1920's to the Present
What Kindle Means for Android
Here's the official site for Curiosity's weather reports.

http://cab.inta-csic.es/rems/marsweather.html
Do you have evidence that talent can be linearized in such a manner that it is possible to tell objectively within 1% how well an intern will fit at the company? Of course you can linearize on test scores or number of publications or something, but is there evidence that these values will translate precisely to job performance? In my experience, such evidence does not exist, so the zero-sum reasoning is fallacious from the start.

In my experience, when looking for people to fill a position, that we end up with some quantity who exceed our requirements, all of whom we'd be happy to hire. The correlation between that quantity and the number of available slots is not strong. Once the candidates cross the "happy to hire" threshold, the decision comes down to what, in retrospect, seem like random factors (if we vaguely think the company might need a certain type of skill later, we might bump up candidates who have that skill, if someone on the team particularly got along well with some candidate that's a plus, etc etc). Evaluating people is not very precise at all.

The line about spending a "huge" amount of effort finding more females seems a bit misogynist on its face. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that it would be a particularly huge expense. If the goal is to have an incoming ratio with 10% more females, it seems that the additional expense could reasonably be only 10%. It also is fallacious to assume that this is a zero-sum equation; that additional 10% (or 50%, or whatever) could be provided solely for that purpose, and would be unavailable otherwise.

Congratulations on successfully trolling the HR representative, though.
I hope we'll be publishing first-day membership numbers as well. My goal is to publish all our public keys. How cool would that be? Total financial transparency.
In general, insurance companies derive profit both from taking in more than they pay out and from investing what they take in. Historically speaking the idea is for the insurer to have a positive expected value on the premium alone but some companies (and possibly entire types of insurance? I'm not an expert by any means) these days are willing to lessen underwriting profits in exchange for market share and, therefore, more investment money.
Mirror here: http://i.imgur.com/hR9Mc.png
Windows 8 is not about enterprises -- it's about the next 20 years of Windows
Try this one then - an in-depth, fact-based, study by McKinsey & Company: http://www.mckinsey.com/locations/swiss/news_publications/pd...
"Statistically significant studies show that companies with a higher proportion of women on their management committees are also the companies that have the best performance."
>>It is possible that there is still some magic in there to let the NSA magically defeat DES, but we still haven't found it.

Actually the NSA s-boxes are weak against linear crypto analysis.
http://reference.kfupm.edu.sa/content/l/i/linear_cryptanalys...

If I remember Schneider's applied cryptography correctly, the NSA s-boxes were among the worst 7% possible.

I wonder what we would be saying about the NSA if we (publicly) discovered linear crypto-analysys before differential. However, I suspect the vulnerabilty to linear analysys is the result of how structured they made it to resist differential.
They talk about URLs and MD5 (binary files). Chrome, Safari and Firefox use Google Safe browsing which target malicious pages, rather than malicious files. Malicious pages (HTML, JavaScript) is typically hosted on a different domain that the malicious executable. For my experience, GSB focuses on the malicious HTML/JavaScript. If it is blocked, the user never gets to the malicious executable. if NSS feeds URLS of the malicious executable, it is possible GSB miss them. But this would not be a real world case.

I tested GSB and IE about 2 years ago which a much smaller sample set. There was very little overlap between what they block. So I would be curious how the URLs were gathered.
a female friend of mine was able to easily get interviews at Google, Microsoft and Apple every year despite lousy technical chops and a 2.5 GPA at a mediocre state university

There's more to aptitude than GPA and "technical chops". A student who started from zero (as is common for girls in CS) and had a 2.5 GPA after four years would look much more appealing to me than a student who had been programming since they were 12 and had a 3.0 GPA. They're on a steeper trajectory.

And whether you to a "top tier" or a "mediocre" university I don't think says much about your aptitude. I know people who slacked off in world class courses, and I know people who Did The Work at a no-name university, and I know who I would hire.
Somewhat relevant: http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html
How about:

"Whoever told you creativity is something you're born with, lied to you."
search not working. will try again later.
Also, if they distribute the source on request, doesn't that fulfill the requirement? Maybe you just have to email them for the source.
(1) True. However, I was making an assumption for sake of the argument to take it out of the equation.

(2) Even large companies have needs that wouldn't allow them to hire 5 great individuals for a singular position.

You seem to just be complicating the argument with undue thoughts about the position and a company. My post was trying to remove the job-specific factors and think about how personality and looks affect hiring.

(3) I've interviewed a lot of people for various positions that were all capable, that when it finally came down to it we argued more over team fit than anything else. If you had a grumpy, divisive individual or a friendly, articulate individual, which would you chose? This happens in 'A' player companies as much as any.

(4) I'm not assuming anything about attractiveness of an individual. I merely presented a couple (albeit somewhat loaded) questions to invoke a conversation.
Adaptive Resampling in D3.js
SmartScreen is basically a reputation system. If not enough people have downloaded it and it's not known as a threat yet, it chooses to do the default thing and blocks it. That is probably what causes the behavior you referred to. But would you rather let a non-technical person not download a valid binary or let them download a malware?
... But that's still not really fair ...

"Fairness" as you use it should have no part in a business decision. The Microsoft HR team identified that for them to maximize their competitiveness (i.e. profit), they need more female staff members. That means that an "underqualified" woman suddenly becomes more qualified because she brings a business advantage to the table that a man does not. I have no problem with this.
Luckily, its on the web:
http://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch64/64-01.html
If the believe in an illusion makes the symptoms improve I think it is completely legitimate. Maybe the same would have been achieved by a psychologist sitting down with them for a few sessions. But if the same result can be achieved by a placebo pill, I am all for it. Ultimately I see the goal of medicine to improve the conditions of the patient and if simple psychological triggers like placebo-similar medicine can achieve this, I am all for it.
As a kid I would imagine aliens helping us pull Venus into the same orbit as Mars and combining them to form a new planet like ours.
"most people will automatically assume an attractive woman has poor skills in X (where X is anything that doesn't involve dealing with customers). "

Could you provide a source on that please? Because from the wording of your statement it seems that what you are claiming is completely anecdotal. I remember studying in one of my psychology courses that attractive people are instantly assumed to be smarter and more successful than unattractive people. It even has a name although I can't think of it right now. If I could I would provide a source.

edit: Here is a source, not really great but it's something.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201108/why...

edit2: The word I was looking for was halo effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attractiveness_stereot...
IE9 was a good jump in standards but it was only half the job. IE10 should get Microsoft almost back to competitive. Hopefully, Microsoft pushes to Win7 users as promised effectively replacing IE9 in short order.
Even still, it would be a negative expected value play for the insured, since they give up the investment returns on their premiums to the insurance company.
concur. The dev tools and plug-ins that FF has are unbeatable. But then that is not what my mom/dad care about as much. So they still use IE.
How BugHerd saw a boost in paid subscriptions after changing customer focus
Probably just friends with her because she's a girl.
From here perhaps:

> The point is to praise children's efforts, not their intelligence, she said.

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-dweck-020707.html
Stateful interactions with state machines (js)
Color accuracy is certainly not the defining aspect for the usability of a product, but it is a way better aspect than something like clock speed - which is something almost every manufacturer feels required to mention when they compare their phone to Apple's newest incarnation.
This HN. What did you expect?
I don't like this way of thinking.

Might be smart to "diversify risk" in an investor sense, but as a startup, you're more akin to a team than an investor.

It seems akin to a pitcher betting against his own team in order to make money himself. Sure, he might come out ahead, but that's not the point of the team.

If you really want to invest in other startups, put up some cash.
Facebook is not endowed with some unique magical distance busting power. Telephone, Email, IM, public websites, and postal mail all work over long distances just as well.

No, what Facebook does have is broadcasting capabilities. Rather than going through 13 tedious phone calls, I can post one status update. Unlike email, I don't have to specifically include or exclude various relations from the list of people I'm writing to. It contains its own IM service (though my fiancee and I use Skype together). It's far faster than postal mail (like everything else electronic). It costs far less than a personal website with forum software running.

It's a local optimum. Not supremely perfect, not magical, but good at what it does.
So assumptions aside, once you've vetted the person (a woman in this case) through an interview and they seem to be the real deal, what would be the deciding factor at that point?

People can exploit any number of traits to help them accomplish things, be it connections, looks, charms, etc.
Really appreciate it guys. The API is going to become like 5x better in the next half year too.
"i honestly don't understand all the hate around ie.."

Have you actually developed any front-end software? I think not...
You have a budget of one hundred identical recruiters and need to get 1000 female applicants and 500 male applicants to apply for up to 100 internship slots to meet your goal of hiring twice the percentage of women in CS programs. In your country, all of the colleges are segregated; there are 100 all-male and 100 all-female colleges. All of them are having job fairs next week. For each job fair you attend, you know you will get 10 applicants. How do you assign your recruiters?
I apologize that it came off as harsh; it is good, technically, but I also think it's very important to stress what something like this can't do. There's a big mentality right now that "single page apps" are the hotness - and they ARE - if done right.

> do you still make your site accessible for IE3? No...

I subscribe to the ideas behind progressive enhancement, so I don't have to make that choice. An application can be built that works everywhere, for every technology, with little development overhead (and in my experience, the lowest-experience-first PE approach generally leads to better code anyway.) This isn't just theory - I've done it with apps large and small, and it works. I highly suggest http://filamentgroup.com/dwpe/ to find out more.

> best-case you're only talking about first-page speed

I'd also argue that that's what matters most to visitors - numerous studies show that there's a dropoff as that first page takes longer to load. Here we have the difference between loading a page, being useful, and then loading scripts vs loading an (empty, so faster) page, load libraries, load templates, then load data, then push the template to the screen. Additionally, if you're doing server rendering, you can probably cache that first hit at the web server level and avoid even hitting the web application at all.

The difference won't matter if you have a tiny app, so you don't have much js to download - but it will make a big difference if you have anything reasonably-sized.
Cue up a lot of people who are going to use rhetoric to take make a "reasonable", "non-dogmatic" issue about this topic, while only barely acknowledging sub-conscious prejudice for or against.

I don't have a solution here, I'm sorry. But whenever I read a comment that sounds too cool, even-headed, and rhetorical, I know I'm going to be hit with some contrived hypotheticals and not much supporting data.

I don't know how to address the issue of prejudice. I just dislike it when people engage in discussion and pat themselves on the back for having taken a "reasonable" position. Not that I think arguments should be unreasonable, I simply see in practice that most "reasonable" arguments don't actually illuminate and are simply exercises in rhetoric.
New maps deal to get you up to 9/13.
He is trying to point out that unfair bias is everywhere.
I'd definitely like to work somewhere where 'Imagination Specialist' is a real job title :)
You can have an encryption system that can only be broken by the 'right' people. We already have crypto systems where any 1 of n people can decrypt the message. If you embed a public key into the algorithm, then only the algorithm's designers would know the private key needed for decryption.

Doing this in a non-obvious way seems much more difficult, but if the NSA did have a weakness to DES, it could very possibly require knowing a secret key.
Anecdotally it may exist; statistically, however, it does not.

Let's think about your "female friend" who has lousy technical chops and a 2.5 gpa at a mediocre state university. Is every woman with a 2.5 GPA at a lousy state university getting an interview at all three companies? No? Hmm. I suspect there's something much more to her resume than what you're telling her. These companies are not all simultaneously saying, hey, let's go interview this one woman who happens to have a 2.5 gpa at a crappy school. You're just seeing it that way because you think reverse discrimination is an issue.

Fortunately, this has been studied. And guess what? Equally qualified women have a harder time having their resume selected for technical positions. A similar study was done for black people vs. white people (or, technically, black-sounding names vs. white-sounding names).

It turns out that the conscious thought people have of wanting to hire more women is secondary to their more subconscious bias.
It is not politically correct to say that women are riskier hires than men. But given biology and current culture, women of child-bearing age clearly are riskier hires. Women have non-trivial odds of getting pregnant, sometimes unexpectedly. In the event of pregnancy, moms usually require more time off than fathers, and are more likely to never return to their jobs.

That said, I am sympathetic to the position that employers tend to unfairly overestimate that risk. And furthermore US law is very clear that discriminating against women based on that risk is illegal. (But, laws notwithstanding, I've seen it happen in practice. Both directly in my workplace, and indirectly in my wife's.)
It's still pretty magical to see an actual picture of actual alluvium on the surface.
I've reached the number of friends on Facebook where at least ONE person is having a birthday every day.

I probably only post 10-15 "happy birthday!" posts a year. So every day I check to see who's birthday it is. If it's someone I'm close to, then I post something.

If Facebook didn't have them displayed, I would probably have those 15 birthdays written down on a real world calendar, and I'd just check that.
Just a note: when you have one citation and it's at the end, don't bother formalizing it with the fancy footnoting. It's especially obnoxious appended to snark.
Ah, the long-storied September announcement. Pretty good idea overall. I'd be happiest seeing a set of security best-practices agreed upon and some sort of mechanism for organizations and businesses to elect for auditing.
Any good recommendations for a book to choose? I browsed the 'new eBooks' section, and the only one that looked any interesting was on balsamiq mockups...
4 Simple Philosophies to live by
Years ago when offered a raise at a previous job I asked for less working hours instead. So nowadays I get paid to work 32 hours a week, but still work a normal 40-hour work week. That gives me 8 hours / week at the office for hobby software projects, and more than enough time in the evenings and weekends to spend time with family and friends.
Parent meant "fairness" to apply on the individual level, rather than on a collective level, I believe. That is, resources expended per candidate would be comparable, rather than having the total sum of resources expended on female candidates be equal to those spent on male candidates (mutatis mutandis: hires, members of the public, etc.). Which is presumably what you mean.
It depends. If the non-technical person is so frustrated by SmartScreen being wrong all the time that they simply turn it off, or are instructed to turn it off by sites distributing legitimate binaries slandered by SmartScreen, then it's not a net win for security.
Anecdotally, I know that myself and most of my friends deal with the impostor syndrome.

But, I also think it's important not to fall prey to what I think is the opposite problem: the narrative fallacy. It's easy to feel that you were "fated" for many positions. Or, if not some form of predestination, then some notion that things were "bound" to happen. I know that there was an enormous amount of luck in how I ended up where I am today. While your abilities may have enabled you to be in an elite pool of candidates, there may still be some random chance that landed you the position instead of one of your fellow elite candidates. I can think of three instances that afforded me opportunities that have made enormous impact on my career that were essentially luck.

What you can control is that when you are lucky, make sure you make the most of it. When fellow grad students would ask me for advice on finding jobs, the best I could do was reply, "Be lucky and be good."
Seems like there's an adverse selection problem here. (And, relatedly, a signaling problem.) This is not an attractive option for companies at the head of the distribution or anyone aspiring to be there, and to the extent that you talk about it, VCs are going to read that as "You're a loser planning on losing."

From a practical perspective, one largely buys insurance to smooth out either cash shocks or future decreases in earning potential rather than for diversification. Having a startup fail is not going to be a cash shock. Your earning potential if your startup fails should go up, because you're worth six figures on the open market trivially, and you probably were not paying yourself that previously.
Erm, do you have anything to say about the article or the general subject matter? And are you saying that anybody who would have nits to pick with this article is immediately discredited by your lurking suspicion that they are driven by prejudice? Further, "sub-conscious [sic] prejudice", which by definition the accused cannot refute?
As I recall being told by one of my professors as an MBA student, attractive people -- both men and women -- are generally assumed to be more competent. This effect is stronger for women than men. However, attractive women in "masculine" fields, like engineering, technology, or construction, are generally seen as being less competent.
The way android is used by Amazon is essentially how apple used unix core to get the basics right when creating a new software platform. A smart move obviously. What surprises me is how none of the big android players have not seen an opportunity here and created their own experience on top of it. That is the easiest way to differentiate yourself from the myriad of other cheap android device makers.

Im sure there is a lot of hand wringing going on behind the scenes for this to not have happened yet but its inevitable.
Agreed. It sort of defeats the point of starting a startup doesn't it?

Isn't being "all-in" part fo the reason a startup needs to stick together - especially at the outset?
You got the job because you're a girl. You kept it because you're competent. It's annoying how women refuse to acknowledge their gender opens certain doors for them. I want to work as a bartender, which means more than half of the places I apply will never even look at my resume because I'm not a girl.

I'm all for giving disadvantaged people a chance over advantaged ones, but it's offensive when you pretend "Oh no, the odds are totally even!" No. They're not. You're lying to protect your ego.
This is so counter-intuitive that I'm having trouble understanding if this is a logical fallacy.
The Navy Wants to Use Seawater For Fuel
tried ordering an e-book & it asked for payment. i assume there a special promo code that needs to applied?
resources expended per candidate

That doesn't make any sense. Recruitment happens before candidates even exist. Candidates are the result of recruitment.
In case anyone else was frustrated by the content-free front page, here's a pretty good, if biased, treatment of Workflowy: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/...
At quick glance, spotted a few typos. Suggest running it through a spell checker. Paragraphs jumps from left justification to full justification - use just 1 (left is my suggestion). And you can afford to turn off hyphenation with so much sentence space.

Stick to letter/A4 document size - easier to read/scroll through and print for those that want a physical copy.

Those blue lines (in all caps), they seem so random. Sometimes they are of their own paragraph. Sometimes they appear at the start, sometimes at the end and sometimes they're in quotation marks. Avoid using all caps if the sentence is long, it really reduces readability.

Either you're pressing enter twice to break the paragraphs or the spacing is too much. Try decreasing it.

Good typography really help. So thought I'd throw those suggestions at ya.