skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The trajectory theory is interesting, if two applicants were otherwise similar you would count it against someone for having experience before college? In this case, she was actually someone who took 2 years of computer science in highschool, though her resume didn't say that so so I'm not sure how someone could assess her trajectory that way.

Honestly all of that is irrelevant. What I was actually trying to get at was at the time I was minorly irked (probably just like the guy in this story) due to a perceived unfairness against me due to gender. I've since come to the conclusion that reverse discrimination really is as huge as it seemed then, but that companies are making such big efforts because there is an even larger but less visible bias against women that simply isn't obvious to college kids or even most industry professionals.

The friend's position is totally understandable given the totally different levels of visibility of the two directions of discrimination; that doesn't make him correct.
>What you're saying is misleading. Acer were the ones who broke the rules and Google enforced them, for good reason too.

I find it interesting that you don't think it's misleading for an organization called the "Open Handset Alliance" to have rules stating they can't ship handsets using competing platforms that can run Android apps. Or that it's misleading to call Android open and then withhold key apps, the app store itself and early access which are neither free nor Free or open. So Aliyun/Alibaba is basically screwed because no major OEM can ship their devices regardless of how good their OS is. How is calling Android open not misleading? What other open project has such restrictions? Linux? Firefox? Apache? I don't think even MySQL has such restrictions.
It's the latter. For now it seems like Microsoft is doing what Apple has never considered - building a streamlined frontend interface with a certified app store so casual users can safely and easily access a wide range of software, and maintaining a fully tinker-able backend and not closing off other software distribution channels for expert users.

Unless this is all a prelude to their master plan to pull an iOS in W9, it seems like a highly prudent move. Microsoft is a company, and needs to remain competitive against Apple, and they best achieve this by simplifying the front-end. But they don't seem to be forgetting their expert-user roots.

The only question for me now is how moddable the Metro interface will be. I think it would be smart if Microsoft left it relatively open for expert users to experiment with.
Hmm...does that mean that dating sites might be able to improve the user experience of 'fit' users by banning/hellbanning the 'unfit' users? Maybe that's what OKCupid is doing with the whole "Congrats! You're attractive" feature.
Very strange.
...and wine testing and boxing sometimes happen in a nicely combined fashion :)
And just imagine if Facebook did something like acquire Pinterest. You now instantly have their wish list for birthday (and holiday) gifts.
I think of all the public crypto that we know duplicated intelligence-agency crypto, the public was only behind by a handful of years. We haven't heard of anything that was like "Oh yeah, the NSA had this twenty years ago." (Differential cryptanalysis is probably the biggest of these gaps, and its timeframe is something of an outlier.)

So either the public is doing a decent job of keeping up with the spooks, there's a massive misinformation campaign where intelligence agencies only admit to having discovered things that the public discovered soon afterwards, or there's a strange bimodal property where the public replicates private results either five years later or fifty.

Also, the NSA is not _fundamentally smarter_ than the rest of the world; they're just possibly more focused on it. So exactly how a clever idea would occur to them in the 1970s and 1980 and have occurred to nobody in academia since then needs some explanation.
Yeah, and I bet they're gunna really loathe buying certified apps from a unified marketplace with extremely streamlined install and uninstall processes.
Well stated, perhaps a quick review will help:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885975
I find the title to be a little misleading, given what he goes on to explain in his article:

"Don’t get me wrong here, the class of 2012 CS grads are full of brains and talent, they’re just mixed in with more mediocre people than the class of 1972 was. We aren’t getting less talented or smart folks, its our signal to noise ratio that’s suffering."

More clearly stated as above, I quite agree with the point that we now have a whole lot of "fake programmers" coasting through school with the help of "copypasta," as the author likes to put it. But then again this is just the diffusion of innovation in action [1], applied to careers instead of technology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
Saved Twitter Favorites Hack - PandaWhale
Almost! The blueberries are hematite, Fe2O3, an iron oxide. Goethite is FeO(OH), an iron oxyhydroxide. Both strongly indicate water went in to making them but the blueberries imply they were submerged in water whereas goethite doesn't necessary require anything but water vapor.
Why the hostility towards Notch? Minecraft will keep working on Windows 8 (just not in the Store), nothing to fear, move on.[1] It's equally unreasonable to love Microsoft as it is to hate it.

[1] Well, it probably won't work on Windows RT because only Windows Store things work there, but then that would likely require a total rewrite of the Java&OpenGL game to C++&DirectX (or another Microsoft-approved solution) anyways, and Minecraft (as opposed to Minecraft Pocket Edition[2]) is not suitable for tablet touch control anyways.

[2] Which is developed by another firm.
How difficult is it to understand the concept of building on past human achievements? Standing on the shoulder of giants?

If people don't use slide rule as much today, is that a bad thing? Are those problems no longer getting solved?

Do you still need/want to learn how to build wheels if you want a car?

As you develop better tools, you go on solving increasingly difficult problems.
Since this thread is off-topic enough, I'll just end with, 1) didn't hear about Haier but then again, Haier is such a small player in phones so maybe Google doesn't care. 2) OPhone, no clue about compatibility or whatnot and I don't really want to spend more time reading through Chinese documentation on it so you tell me if it is truly equivalent to Ailyun.

When Amazon somehow gets denied access to AOSP by Google, then I'll care. Maybe Google is being unfair with Acer, but then again Acer is making money with Google and vice-versa so I'm not surprised Google is selectively enforcing the policy.
If you are charging per iteration, feature creep is great! (joke,joke)
The truth is that I do a lot of guiding for the customer to protect them from bad choices.

When requested to do something I think is wrong, a favorite response of mine is:

What you are asking me to do is like saying: "please hit my finger with a hammer". that said, it is your finger and your hammer , so I'll do what you decide.
To clarify the title, the site says you can download one free ebook. So a more accurate title would be "Download any one ebook free from Packt Publishing (through the end of the month)"
I want to shout it from the rooftops: Dear Internet, stop telling me to make stuff! Stop telling me to do things!

This whole "cog in the machine" notion is a myth. The world is fascinating, people are fascinating. Always has been, always will be.

I would counter this entire article with one of my favorite quotes, from the movie Adaptation:

"Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life!"
I'm not sure what I think of this. (I started programming around 1985.)

I don't think the older generation of programmers were any better than the younger generation in terms of skill. I think they were, generally, more practical -- they don't generally engage in language wars or programming evangelism, but when they do, they speak directly from a massive body of experience that's hard to argue with.

I think that the problems that they spent most of their time on were generally simpler. The most challenging bit of magic I ever worked on a mainframe was convincing COBOL to do variable interpolation on what was essentially punchcard-data-on-disk. (COBOL has no string operators or variable types, for those that are unfamiliar.) That was challenging, but it was a tiny problem in terms of scope compared to, say, building a scalable web application with a database backend.

I've worked with and hung out with greybeards, and generally prefer their company to that of hyperactive younger programmers. (For one thing, they don't talk about programming much!) They built things the same way we do -- by thinking about it and then banging it out one line at a time. They just used different tools.

Documentation was better back when. That's one thing I really don't appreciate about the Google Era; now, if I need information on some function or language feature, I usually end up reading some incomplete community-submitted documentation and a stack of opinions from people who may or may not know what they're talking about. For anybody that got to use those lovely old massive 3-ring binders (they came in sets!) with professionally-written and compiled in-depth documentation covering every single aspect of whatever you were using, there's just no modern replacement.

Otherwise, I don't really think the field of computer programming has fundamentally changed in all these years. The people are about the same. (Greenblatt was a pretty annoying, hyperactive young programmer once.) Some things are different. Some things aren't.
I had similar experiences. Some brokers don't really put much effort with rental and showed whatever they had. One broker 'forgot' our scheduled viewing since he was out in the Hamptons showing a house.

I did find a nice apartment with good view (craigslist), but ultimately decided against it due to busy street and location. Also hated the fact I did all the searching, but I still had to go through broker and pay their fees. All the buildings managed by this particular management company used a single RE and there was no way around it.
>Business is business

Funny, that reminds me of the scorn heaped on Apple for the patent lawsuits against Samsung. Or on Oracle and Microsoft. Business is business, right? Regardless of other companies getting hurt?

Also reminds me of this post by Gruber supporting Apple on in app purchases:

http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/dirty_percent

It's really ironic how people claim their favorite company is better than the others because of blah blah blah reasons, but when it comes to power plays hurting third parties like this, support it by saying "business is business".
The "big no-no" is having important information that is only displayed on hover, not hover effects in themselves.
I can't remember where I read it, but he has the same attitude about Steam. Notch feels that he has a large enough userbase that Steam (or Windows 8 App store) doesn't offer enough advantages over Mojang's homegrown distribution system.
$69 G-Box Dyno Android 4.0 mini PC with ARM Cortex-A9
Ask HN: Did 37signals really sell Sortfolio?
For over a year, 37signals attempted to sell Sortfolio.

Then they made an ultimadium, someone buy it July 1st or they shut it down. A lot of HN people felt this was a bluff.

They then announced [1] on July 2nd they sold the site but never gave details as to who acquired the site.

It's now been 3 full months later and Sortfolio still indicates it's a 37signal property [2]

So what really happened? Did 37signals really sell Sortfolio or not?

[1] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3196-sortfolio-lives

[2] http://sortfolio.com/about
I like what Amazon is doing with book reviews these days. They trawl all the reviews for common statements and present those statements above the reviews. "44 people said something similar." It's nice. I would like search engines to be smarter in terms of summarising lots of data sources like this.
Samsung didn't violate a contract it signed with Apple. The situations really aren't very similar.
One thing I think is important to keep in mind is that standards were also a lot lower back then. Seeing a Lisp Machine in person, when you hit the bottom of the interactive terminal it would just start overwriting the top of the screen. For me, it was a surprising reminder that a lot of things we really take for granted today were considered superfluous in the past.

For as much as things are easier today, what non-programmers consider acceptable ("the bar," if you will) has been raised more. The idea of full-time user experience people in the 1980s would have been ridiculous. Today we have "front end engineers" who are mainly there to inform and realize the interactions designed by full-time user experience people. For a significant amount of time, networking meant network filesystems and email. Today it means multi-million lines of code browsers running thousands to hundreds of thousands of lines of front-end code with just as much or more in the backend.

Programmers before us did more with less, true. But they also were more willing to accept compromises. I think things would probably be a lot better today if people's expectations were lower. But Plan 9 and Haiku are evidence that people actually care quite a bit more about usability than stability. It's a bummer. But I'm glad we enthusiasts can at least continue these traditions outside the mainstream.
Why Polyglot Programming is a Fad
Can you cite the relevant Texas statute? I don't believe you are correct.

It is very common for confused employers to claim it is illegal, but as eli described this is an oversimplification and is not actually true.
My google calendar reminds me of birthdays. Is it google who cares and not me?
It's easy to see how one could get caught up in a web of paranoid implications, each one less likely to be true than the one before.
How large an organization? There are big differences between what a 10-person startup needs and what a 20,000 person mega-corp needs.

(FWIW, I would pay much more attention to individual performance differences if I were hiring for my own startup than I would when interviewing for Google. But I thought the context of this discussion was organizations large enough for gender quotas to matter, i.e. the Microsofts and Googles of this world. If it were my own startup, I'd try to hire from the population I've personally worked with, avoiding this whole discussion anyway. And I have never worked in an organization with a hiring quota - the companies I've worked for will all take you if you meet the hiring bar, and hold cash in reserve so they can scoop up a suitably-qualified employee if one presents herself. For that matter, I've been given offers at several places that were "not hiring", so I'm guessing quotas are just guidelines in many other places as well.)
It should be more than adequate for strategy or turn based games. Perhaps I should have been more clear that I was talking about latency sensitive MMOs, like shooters or anything where your position and movement in time are critical to the gameplay.
According to Wikipedia, that version was released last month.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#section_6
I'll admit I pretty much only use it when I must for comparability. Otherwise my preference is plain text (vim) over word processors, awk for Excel, with lighter utilities (abiword, numeric, koffice) or specialized tool (lyx) standing in for more specific tasks.
Megabox is a legal minefield
Cubic mile of oil
You clearly have never experienced Symbian or Nokia development efforts. Both places where complete blood-baths, at least from my perspective as an outsider working pretty closely with teams inside of both companies.
Three words: "Shoulders of Giants." I'm sorry you had to forge the way, but the present is still the frontier. We would do well to learn from the past as always.
A Deadly Sense of Euphoria
What is he even complaining about? Sounds like he's upset that other people aren't completely absorbed by the coverage about one app of many on a brand new product which is other wise really sweet. I don't think light shining through a jack, or rattling, or scuffing on a few phones is really a big deal, and Apple said the would replace them, period, done. The purple haze will be fixed in the next software update.

We are talk about millions and millions of phones and a fever of blood thirsty bloggers looking for anything, ANYTHING wrong. No company can live up to this kind of scrutiny. The same thing happen when the iPhone 4 came out, and the iPhone 4s, and these are very very nice phones, even today. Now this guy is upset because a few bloggers looked past "maps" for one second to see the rest of the product, and it's really beautiful! It's really sweet, and you know what? Maps in the 3D in NYC is really nice! Easy to use, fast, vector graphics, etc, and the phone has turn by turn now, because Apple dumped Google. So Maps database will take some work, but it's crowdsource by a huge population.
It is just hard to get freelance work from large employers, IMHO is just not on their comfort area.

I came from years as a contractor for large Fortune 100's who pretty much beg me to come back as a contractor but won't/can't send me projects as a remote freelancer. It is to radical for their business culture.
If we aren't going to mars to destroy life on mars. Why should we expect that the super intelligent species will try to destroy us?
There are a lot of mediocre and flat bad programmers out there because we’re knocking down the barriers and letting everyone in, plus they have all sorts of crutches they can lean on now.

This is an incredibly good sign. Jeremy's statement translates to two things.

1. Factor productivity in programming is so high that even "mediocre and bad programmers" can make a net positive contribution to the economy.

2. Barriers to entry are low.

Would we want to change either of these things? Surely no one is going to argue that we should prefer lower factor productivity.

So, what about barriers to entry? If you look at industries that have '1' but not '2', you have a small set of very rich people keeping people out of the industry in order to protect their riches. This makes everyone else in the world poorer, because the service is artificially expensive, and it's especially bad for the "bad and mediocre" people who could have otherwise made it in the industry. The main benefit of creating high barriers to entry would be to make people who are already rich by the standard of the one of the richest countries in the world, in the most prosperous time in human history, even richer. Why should we want that?

It's great that some people think of programming as a craft and continually do everything they can to improve their skills; I can completely understand the attitude, since it's one I have myself. But, not everyone is like that. Some people would rather spend time doing other things. What's really amazing is that we're so rich and productive that someone can put almost no effort into learning how to program and still be a productive member of society. I love it that we live in a country where people can work 1/100th as hard as an employee in a Foxconn factory and produce more value. I hope that my kids will be able to be ten times richer than me while working one-tenth as hard. I pray that they'll choose to work harder than that, but I want it to be a choice.

It is a wondrous and amazing thing that total factor productivity[1] is so high in the U.S. that unskilled Mexican laborers become three times more productive when they cross the border; keep in mind that Mexico is, on a global scale, one of the more productive nations in the world.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity
May be Facebook will open it's Gift market place to finely-tested eCommerce businesses through an API!!

This is more meaningful, because Facebook doesn't want to be an eCommerce company. It's vision is connecting the world. And it makes more sense to open the platform to external businesses which are tested for 'great experience'. In this way Facebook itself will not have to be another eCommerce company and it can have just enough control, share and work over the platform.
>Now what do you propose that we should do about it?

Asians (Chinese and Japanese Americans were severely discriminated against in the US --to the point it was illegal for them to own property in some states (till '46). Yet, in a few decades, they were able to overcome the discrimination and even best whites as a whole.

Much of that appears to me culture based, not even ethnicity based. Now, not all Asians do well and have the same aptitude toward education and sacrifice. Compare East Asians with SouthEast Asians with Island Asians. Still, from my exposure, there is a large percentage whose parents inculcate learning and education and sacrifice (ex. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother as modern example). On the other hand look at Appalachian whites. Education is made fun of and they are some of the poorest people in America.

Essentially, make education and learning something held dear and worthwhile. Many other white kinds I went to school with were apathetic towards education (these guys are now laying carpets and driving trucks and so on). It's totally different mindset comapred to say, ABCs. They might not "like" school, but they know it's a means to and end rather than an obstacle to having fun.
There's a reason Minecraft was created on the PC and ported to the Xbox, and not the other way around.

The issue here isn't "death to all closed systems", but rather taking one of the few open ones left and making steps towards closing it.
You were pro-active and took steps to remember the birthdays by sticking them on your calendar. It's different from clicking on a link because Facebook remembered someone's birthday.
Yet those other regimes don't get the scrutiny the US does.

For better or worse, the US puts itself in that position by acting as the world police. The most visible nation will, of course, be under more scrutiny, and rightfully so. The more power one has, the more safeguards need to be available to ensure that power is used for good.

Also, Wikileaks posts leaks from countries other than the US.
Highest killstreaks in Black ops with just asp
Even MacOS Lion does not support ECDSA.
Yes, I can see how giving an employee time off to perpetuate the species might be inconvenient. How dare she! I need her to work on my social networking website, not make more people.

People quit their jobs, frequently, for a wide variety of reasons. Women have a potential reason that men don't have. Cry me a river.