skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I first heard that employers were doing this; this demanding of social media passwords... I remember... I-- I-- I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet. Right through my forehead. And I thought... my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they... were stronger than we.

Seriously. This whole idea was the brink of draconian tyranny. When things like this started transpiring five and ten years ago, I immediately withdrew from ALL social media websites, and vowed never to abide by real identity demands on any social website that intended to publish it publicly.

I swore to myself that I would debate any rotten hiring goon into the ground, if I was ever asked such a question during an interview. Not that I would even want to stay on at such a work place, but just to see if they were smart enough to tolerate my brand of dissent. If inflexible, I would instantly walk out, and threaten (an empty threat) to sue.

It's not just about the invasion of privacy an and employers pervasive, stifling surveillance of subordinates. What integrity is there to a Facebook account? Nothing more than an e-mail address is required to create one. E-mail addresses are free and plentiful. More e-mail addresses could potentially be created than addresses in the entire IPv6 number space, and by corollary, so too with social media accounts.

What recourse is there for me to prevent malicious individuals from continually creating fake accounts in my name? Do I have endlessly deep pockets and the spare time it takes to chase down trolls, sue for libel and slander? But how many people have the time to spam and flood the internet with anything they want? What's to stop even me for creating 10,000 fake accounts in my own name? And in doing so, would I forfeit my chances at certain jobs? What absolute twaddle.
Agreed. I've been looking at ways of communicating complex science-based or data-driven insights in compelling ways, and I think easily digestible narratives, like this one, are a great way to get broad range of people interested. I would love to ask you some questions and get your advice on how to better do this. If you're interested, please drop me an email: jake at insightdatascience.com.
How Long Until Japan Meets its Demographic Doom?
In your opinion, was he aware of the nature of his actions, and the nature of their potential consequences?
First, can we stop with the FUD about Google "banning" Acer from releasing a phone. This ArsTech article covers most of it but basically Alibaba was planning to release an OS that could run Android apps but was not certified by the OHA. And Acer as a member of OHA has to enforce Android compatibility on their devices to enforce consistency in Android. The same thing people complain about Android (fragmentation) is what they were trying to avoid.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/google-blocked-acers-...

Regarding the article, whatever Google has controlled since the beginning they have never lost, which is providing the "Google Experience" On Android.
I'm not saying the poster got the job because she was a girl (or not), but the bottom line (imo) is that you have to play the hand you're dealt.

Some people are born rich, into high society etc and some are not. I don't see people unhappy that others are saying they "got the job because their dad was powerful".

Whether or not there was a real advantage doesn't matter. If there was a real advantage, well thank you, I'd take that advantage. If not, prove it. Either way, you still don't deserve to feel upset over it.
IOS App Piracy Soars (One Click Protection Cracking)
Can you affirmative action your way into top honors or great job experience?

In the specific case that I'm thinking of, thanks to affirmative action she had academic honors until, but not including grad school. (She did get a masters though.)

I've encountered some black people in the work place who I suspect were continuing to coast on affirmative action and willingness to accuse others of discrimination. They are a clear minority of the blacks that I've worked with. Furthermore I've never seen any of that minority manage to get good referrals from anyone I'd be interested in working with.

That said, there are some dysfunctional organizations out there where managers can find it easier to promote their problem employees to be someone else's problem than they do to fire them. Someone whose success was entirely dependent on affirmative action might do well in such an organization. My last experience with such an organization was fairly brief and was about 15 years ago. (I reached the point where I had to decide between finding a better job or filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against the man I was reporting to. Yes, that happens to men as well. I chose finding a better job.)

Update: I should clarify that my opinions about the relative competency of people in that program came from knowing them for several years, and from being in classes together.
If you have way more indistinguishable applicants than positions you are paying too much.
The company that I work for provides litigation services, such as distributed document conversion tools, review platforms and such. We've actually hosted data for reviewing attorneys of some of the larger cases over the past 15 years.

This Enron dataset is one of the standard sets of data that we use and test the speed and resilience of our software against.

I always liked the Enron data because the "smoking gun" terms were disguised using Star Wars terms, like "jedi" and "wookie". It does not look like this site has embedded email attachments indexed, so you may not see any interesting searches for these terms, but I did see a few questionable ones for "jedi". :)

This set also contains some of most hilarious, typical inner-office humor emails that I've had the pleasure of being able to debug. I remember one day, while testing our distributed automated document conversion tool (basically convert any document into a PDF (not a simple task, think about all the possibilities)), we noticed one of the workers had hung up on a PowerPoint document. So, first thing I did was open the document and it was a slideshow of porn images basically with embedded sound files. The audio files are what crashed the app, but when I opened it at the office the audio played loudly and my co-workers were like "wtf?". That was a hilarious moment.
Leading causes of death utilizing mainly scientific research from the last year
Just keep your mouth shut about what you do in your own time and you'll be find.
There's more to it than confronting that you could fail; now there's an incentive not to see your own venture through if a peer's venture has a better chance of being remunerative.

"Advisors" to other companies also have this incentive, but that incentive is a pittance.
Oh ya, there's still a bit of ice water on the surface. Also a large quantity at both poles (primarily on the South pole, whereas frozen CO2 tends to collect more on the North pole). There's even evidence of temporary crater puddles on nice days.

But it's a very small amount of the suspected former total (perhaps 10% to 1% or much less). Assuming that the Martian canyons and valleys that appear to be carved out by water were actually carved out by water, they were absolutely torrential floods - of a scale unlike ever seen on Earth. Now? Ice glaze. Polar snow flurries. Underground ices. Hypersaline water tables, perhaps. Dusty crusty dune ice at the poles.

It's not so much that the Martian hydrosphere isn't present, it's that it doesn't resemble ours much at all. And figuring out how life might fit into the present day is tricky: Mars is essentially a much drier and colder Antarctica.
New York real estate is a system. You have to learn the system to hack it.

A lot of real estate start ups are trying to "Avoid the Broker." The system isn't as broken as we may think. Landlords enjoy minimal vacancy. Brokers get paid generously. Tenants find apartments.

Complaining about a 15% broker fee is like complaining about the gas for your Lamborghini.
I'd highly recommend Object-Oriented JavaScript by Stoyan Stefanov. Really any JS book by Stoyan is pretty high quality.

http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-JavaScript-high-qualit...
According to Ars-Technica[0] they already raised $2.5 million from VCs.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/99-ras...
Learn How To Strip Crimp + Test Network Cable
Made a tutorial that will teach you to make your own patch cables (a few people asked me how to make them).

Let me know what you guys think, and if I missed anything.
There seems to be a lot of competition these days for the coveted title of 51st state.
Ah, but remember that in this example everyone sees the posting (or, if you prefer, the recruiter only reaches out to women who see the posting) so your scenario is impossible. The recruiter's role isn't to increase visibility but rather to be a signal to women that they wouldn't be wasting their time with this company.

When programs like the one briefly mentioned in the article are done well their net effect is really signalling more than anything. As trivial as it sounds, such signalling can actually have a large impact.
That's interesting. Has your dad ever tried partnering with some sort of agent/hustler (I don't know the right term) to do business deals? A confident front-man might be able to sell your dad's expertise to businesses for a pretty penny.
Wow, that was nothing like what I was expecting from the title.
Nothing you've said contradicts my statement concerning compiling java at Google.

Go doesn't need to rely on dynamic loading because compiling a library is fast and statically linking the libraries is fast. The result is a monolithic executable true but it's still fast without dynamic loading. Go doesn't compile all the source that goes into a binary every time. Libraries get compiled into an archive and don't have to be compiled again unless they change. In that way it has the same benefit as jars for compilation speed.
Perhaps Bret Victor's ideas are comparable to something like formal methods: few doubt their enormous power, but the difficulty is in the extreme effort one needs to implement them in a project. It is tempting to believe that the level of instrumentation that Bret proposes could be achieved automatically, just as it was once dreamed that formal methods could be fully automatic. But experience with formal methods has shown us that while some of their promise can be implemented by automatic tools, and this is valuable, to realize their full potential for a complex project requires substantial effort, non-reusable effort.
I agree the browser should be involved in some way. But wouldn't it be better to have a single antivirus that integrates with your browser, email client, and also scans USB drives you connect? Browsers aren't the only vector of attack, so duplicating an antivirus seems an odd choice.

From the article, it sounds like the main benefit of SmartScreen is the quickness. But again, wouldn't it be better to have an antivirus with that performance, and then your entire system would benefit..?
Even if the population is divided into discrete tiers, the process is still rife with unfairness no matter how you dice it.

If you have 1,000 slots, 10,000 candidates in your tier, and 1,000 of them are women, you can hire any ratio of women to men that you like and all will be equally talented. Great, right? It's great for those that are hired; not so much for everyone else.

Say you make the gender ratio 50%. You hire 500 women and 500 men from the top tier. Every first-class company like Google or Facebook adopts this strategy. This means that the odds of being hired at a first-class company is 50% for women in the top tier, and only 5% for men in the top tier. For every interview a woman does, a man must do ten. Eventually all the slots in all first-class companies are filled up, leaving some top-tier men working for second class companies--but no top tier women are working for second class companies.
I think this is an extremely naive view... Devices that don't have gmail, maps, chrome and play is a huge loss for google. It's very much in google's interest to discourage these types of forks, but that's the nature of open source.
You're talking about a phishing attack and it's actually worse for OpenID http://identity.mozilla.com/post/7669886219/how-browserid-di... Once Persona is integrated into browsers it will offer better security. BTW, the iframe is always in a pop-up for this exact reason. It's never an iframe within the context of the website that initiated the login.
Thanks for clarifying. I was assuming that was the case but the login/creation page needs to have a graphic or a narrative talking about what it does and how the process works a bit more before it reaches a more public audience. As a software developer I had an idea of how the thing worked but it wasn't spelled out enough. I understand that it's beta but the whole thing is weakly documented from a user's standpoint as to why it should be trusted.
Thank you for explaining supply and demand.

I tend to believe these places become interesting due to the fact that so many people live there. There's bound to be interesting people based on sheer numbers.

Keep in mind NY and SF were founded on industrial business and immigration; not founded on interesting people.
It's strange how convenient and accepted unchecked anecdotal evidence can be around here under certain circumstances . If this was a strictly tech article I would hope more people would be saying your sample size here is two or three, that's clearly not the best predictor of the future. But you're talking about race and gender from the majority white male centered perspective so your comment is at the top.

According to you a couple black people got farther than they should have because of affirmative action and because of that you wouldn't blame an employer for considering all black people "risky" hires. Doesn't that sound a bit ridiculous? Put another way, has anyone ever said "a couple white people screwed over the team a few years back so we think twice nowadays before hiring white people". Or "we found that guys seem to slack more during work hours and now we shy away from hiring men". Of course not, because white and male are normal when it comes to jobs in tech and so they enjoy the privilege of being treated as individuals. To drive the point home your bias is obvious in your comment - "you're going to naturally think 2 and 3 times before making a similar hire" - "similar" applies to black or female because it's understandable to aggregate those individuals, their actions easy fit into a narrative that already exists in your mind. Pick two white men at your work who consistently perform poorly and I don't think you would be as comfortable attributing their behavior to their race or gender.
It's too bad he can't be his own frontman. I guess that's impostor syndrome for ya?
OK, you've made the argument that only horrid racists believe that black high school graduates are less likely than white high school graduates to have basic competency at reading, writing and arithmetic.

But have you made the argument that people who believe that are WRONG?

This is not a question of opinion. This is a question of fact. For instance http://www.betterhighschools.org/docs/nhsc_highschoolliterac... quotes the figure Only 16% of Black high school seniors and 20% of Hispanic high school seniors scored at or
above proficient on the 2005 NAEP reading test, compared to 43% of Caucasian students
(NCES, 2007).

Now what do you propose that we should do about it?
A Closed Netflix Hurts Everyone
Unfortunately for India biometric databases require electricity to operate.

Something they have had a bit of trouble with lately.

"No one could buy or sell unless he had the mark..."
Regarding the overall statistics; I agree, hence what I wrote about there being real discrimination against them. What I intended to claim (but perhaps could have been more clear about) is that women have these out-in-the-open advantages and even more hidden-behind-closed-doors disadvantages.

You seem to be attaching an argument to my statement that I did not intend to convey; I don't think that reverse discrimination is an issue. I think it is extremely visible, and gives you really lousy visible situations like the ones I mentioned that are obvious errors, that doesn't mean that it is a bad idea.
Amazon has what the others (including Google) don't have--an established digital commerce solution that people use and amazing customer support. Goggle falls flat but sort of seems to be trying to work on it, but I don't trust them the way I already trust Amazon. There's zero reason for me to purchase a book on Play instead of a Kindle as far as I can tell.
No. But politicians won't let manufactured outrage go to waste.
TC implies this is the first state to pass such a law. It's already specifically illegal in Maryland and Illinois, and laws are planned in many other states http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/telecom/employer-access-...
yea, you are now aware of the mass assignment bugs, but what about previously? even github got affected by it. are you saying that they are incompetent? what about bugs that have yet to be revealed?

what i am saying is that there may be some things that you forget about, because we are all humans. and in order to mitigate the risk from us being humans, we should not store passwords in a way that is easily recovered.
Oh, my mother tried. In her prime she was a formidable people-person, a savvy deal broker. And she pushed Dad very hard to charge more, but he really does have crippling modesty.

Another anecdote. He applied to work in Antarctica, a lifelong dream of his, for ANARE (now the Australian Antarctic Division). His CV listed at that point nearly 40 years of experience working on every major class of communication known to man -- radio, microwave, telephone, fibre optic -- and throughout South East Asia and Russia.

So which position did he apply for?

The junior communications officer.
I don't think it was ever widespread, but sure, it happened in a handful of places.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/want-job-pas...

http://www.govtech.com/policy-management/Montana-City-Asks-J...
Brokers are compensated for their market knowledge, not just opening doors. The fast that he was "in" with the management company is hugely valuable, and you were able to take advantage of that. 15% is a lot of money, but brokers meet tens of clients each week that don't rent with them, so they are compensated for that low hit rate as well.

And yes, many apartments are exclusive so you have to pay a full 15% fee (split between the broker who has the listing and your broker).

You could have the greatest collection of listings in NYC and still not solve the "rental issue" because you'll always have landlords that only work with certain brokers, exclusives and apartments that are rented on the spot (with no real-time updates). It is nearly impossible to get a real-time feed of data. I've been in the business a year now and I've seen apartments get rented as I was showing my [interested] client the gym. I've showed up to apartments with clients and, embarrassingly, found out that they've been rented between the time I called to make the appointment and the time I showed up.

The entire system is outdated, and the real fix is one that incorporates brokers to make it easiest for clients to rent.
I don't deny that a lawyer could try to make hay out of those out of context. But every one of those quotes are statements of provable fact. That's the problem when you try to bring nuance to an emotionally charged issue. You wind up saying things that cause people to have a knee-jerk response, and their brains turn off.

Pondering http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html may be worthwhile.
Some data is more valuable than kitten photos and chat logs.
I'm sorry, I'm confused. If she was the deal-broker, why didn't she dictate the prices?
Since you're familiar with the studies, please cite them. As it stands your comment is just "RTFM!!" without even saying which manual.
As someone who would take such a preservationist position, I think this is my best argument: It is morally inconsistent to think that super-intelligent life should leave us intact if we were found, and at the same time be willing to interfere with vastly less advanced life, for our own gain.
Those are the only ones I can think of (and likely the only ones).
But since this last pivot, year over year growth is ~10x! You guys are an example of sticking around long enough and trying enough things that one's finally catching good traction. Congrats Lee, well deserved :)
github didn't seem to like that. I gave it my 16k pub-key. It gave me a 500 error :(
Sometimes you can't get someone to do something they don't want to do.

One of the things about my father that I most admire is his inviolable integrity. He felt that he couldn't morally charge for a lot of what he did and no force on earth, even my mother, could change his decision.

He was wrong, in my opinion. But that's how it was.
I'm pretty sure that go's compile speed is significantly faster than java. It's hard to compare though because java compilation is not the same thing. There is the bytecode in the class files and on the fly compilation in the vm. As well as some stuff that happens when the bytecode is loaded and run.

A lot of go's compile speed comes from how simple it's syntax is besides the gains it gets from avoiding C++ dependency issues. Java's syntax while less complex than C++ is still complex compared to go's. And it won't have go's parse time savings.
While I agree with your general sentiment, I think the terminology "lost" only makes sense if they "had" it in the first place. Bringing a new device to the market that doesn't pander to Google hardly qualifies as Google "losing" something (Except perhaps in the MPAA sense of the term).
...that will never get built into everything if everybody has to pay to use it.
I took 2) to mean, 'When I submit prior art, must I do so to challenge a particular patent? Or can I submit prior art for general consideration, in case anyone happens to submit a patent application to which the prior art applies?'
What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance.

Why? Just on topic that leaves out two very, very important things:

1. The process is already inherently unfairly biased towards men and it will take a nontrivial investment of resources to counter that.

2. Although it wouldn't affect an individual's performance, diversity (and other things that don't affect individual performance) can affect team performance and thus need to be considered.
The only monetary policy that isn't broken, is one that doesn't exist.
IANAL, but it's actually not illegal to ask about marital status. It's just illegal to discriminate based on martial status and if you ever landed in court, you might have a tough time explaining why you asked that question if it didn't affect the hiring decision.

Likewise asking for social media password is pretty dangerous even if it's not specifically illegal because it opens you up to claims that you found something on the account that revealed some protected class status.

(And, sadly, Title VII, the federal anti-discrimination law, does not protect against sexual orientation. In many states it is perfectly legal to fire people for being gay. A bill to fix this situation has been stalled in Congress for nearly two decades.)