skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true that the speakers were not limited to being British, but it's more expensive for someone outside the country to attend (even with compensation, they'd still expend more time, undergo more stress, etc.). Also, it was a new conference, not a large and established one, so it seems natural that it would have mainly a local draw. They may have even made the choice to invite more local speakers, to promote the Manchester/UK tech scene, which would be a worthwhile goal for such a conference, although it's directly at odds with the diversity goal.

It's true that Ruby is a Japanese invention (I wonder if all these racists are aware of what they're bringing into their good ol' boys' club ;)), but as you note, Japan is so far away that there are still difficulties in participating in a little new conference in Manchester. Also, Ruby got its big break with Rails, which was developed in Chicago, I think, so the Japanese community might not have gotten as much of a headstart as one would expect. Or maybe they are using Ruby for far more interesting things than web development. I don't know.
Email avi@trustable.com we can discuss
Wow, what a incredibly stupid troll. Could you paint a bigger "I parrot decade old OS stereotypes" on your forehead?

Especially when this is most likely to integrate in Linux, given that it will follow your GTK theme.
You spelled "coming" wrong. "Comming soon" on the front page.
I have very little experience. I went through 4 units of Udacity's Python "Building a Search Engine" class and loved it, but I stopped after that. I completed the first assignment for the Stanford CS193P class on iTunes U. I understand a lot of concepts, but I cannot implement them in Objective-C. Aside from some web design knowledge, that is all I possess.

So, realistically, I have barely any real experience, but I am not entirely new to the programming.
This Week in Startups and This Week in Venture Capital are my favorite podcasts -- not because of the difference in subject matter (there is overlap), but in the tone and insights.
Well if she does, I hope it has a happy ending, perhaps the movie rights give her enough to continue on with her goals. Probably worth keeping notes for contingencies (great in exposing prosecution misconduct and for recapturing the 'feel' of the moment later.)
>I bet you could put together an IT plan that would spin up an infrastructure in less then six months and have two _very_ interested parties who you would be able to sell to.

I don't know if I'd make that bet.

Without the right connections I expect you stand little/no chance of getting an audience to have your plan heard and even if you do there will be backers expecting to be handed such work along with half a dozen bigger names claiming to be able to provide identical service.

I'm sure if Nate Silver wants to start a political IT consultancy someone will pay attention to him, but without that kind of demonstrated value - that can only really be demonstrated during an election - I don't see how even the best plan gets any visibility.

It's an interesting idea for sure though.
There is a guide to dual boot Firefox OS and Android on a SGS2 here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gec...

That's probably the easiest way.

A little more information about availability from Wikipedia:

"At Mobile World Congress 2012, Mozilla and Telefónica announced that the Spanish telecommunications provider intended to deliver "open Web devices" in 2012 based on HTML5 and these APIs. Mozilla also announced support for the project from Adobe and Qualcomm, and that Deutsche Telekom’s Innovation Labs will join the project. Mozilla demonstrated a "sneak preview" of the software and apps running on Samsung Galaxy S II phones (replacing their usual Android operating system). In August 2012, a Nokia employee demonstrated the OS running on a Raspberry Pi.

Firefox OS is compatible with devices including: Otoro, PandaBoard, Emulator (ARM and x86), Desktop, Nexus S, Nexus S 4G, Samsung Galaxy S II, and Galaxy Nexus."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS#Demonstrations
Thanks, I'll definitely add that to the "See Also" section.

Can you elaborate on the places where setuptools is broken? I wanted to keep things as simple as possible for the sake of this tutorial, and I think the described constraints should avoid any setuptools bugs.
Key take-aways for "The Job your Product Does" by Clayton Christensen
Any decent bank will offer you a check scanner [1] for a business account. A few also have smartphone apps where you just take a picture of the check, but the scanner's faster. Depositing them one by one at an ATM is crazy. Even before this modern tech, you wouldn't deposit checks one at a time, you just add them all up on a deposit slip and deposit them at once in an envelope.

Don't be afraid to talk to your bank. They have people working there every day just to help you with things like this. Ask your teller and they'll sit you down with someone.

1: https://www.pnc.com/webapp/unsec/Blank.do?siteArea=/pnccorp/...
I've wondered why using a dictionary to initialize setuptools.setup() isn't more advocated in such guides. I understand this is superficial, but imho, this looks much clearer than the author's suggestion [1]:

from setuptools import setup

kw = {
'name' : 'funniest',
'version' : '0.1',
'description' : 'The funniest joke in the world',
'url' : 'http://github.com/storborg/funniest',
'author' : 'Flying Circus',
'author_email' : 'flyingcircus@example.com',
'license' : 'MIT',
'packages' : ['funniest'],
'zip_safe' : False,
}

if __name__ == '__main__':
setup(**kw)

Here are a few of my setup.py files that follow this convention [2] [3] [4].

[1]: http://www.scotttorborg.com/python-packaging/minimal.html#cr...

[2]: https://github.com/gvalkov/harstats-graphite/blob/master/set...

[3]: https://github.com/gvalkov/jenkins-autojobs/blob/master/setu...

[4]: https://github.com/gvalkov/python-evdev/blob/master/setup.py
Like I said, in my university in America I see a majority of non-white students in CS. I really can't see them thinking "can I really do this? should I be doing this? why is my face different from all the other computer guys' faces?". Heck, a huge chunk of the professors are also non-white.
As I said, when many of "us" started, it wasn't yet the cool thing to do either. No, I don't understand what you are trying to say? What ARE you actually thinking when you make your career choices? Do you really think "I probably won't get a promotion because I am black(?), so in the long run I'll probably make more money as a garbage man? OK, garbage man it is..."?

I mean, I'll spontaneously zero in on that one argument: suppose people of race/gender x are known to make less money in a given career than people of another gender/race. Does that really explain why there would be less of those people in the given profession? Seems to me that for that to be true, there would have to be other professions where the disadvantaged people would earn more.

Is that really the case for IT? As a black(?) guy, are there other (legal) professions where you are likely to make more money than if you would go into IT? Presumably discrimination would range across all jobs (even white garbage men might make more money than black garbage men), so it should be cancelled out as a reason for choosing a career.

Sorry if I don't understand you, but when I got my first computer I was 12. I really wasn't thinking about my career. All I knew was that I liked computer games and that it was cool that I could make the computer do things (actually make things appear on the TV). How would your gender or race change your reaction in the same situation? I really don't get it. And by the way, at the time the computer games of the day were Pong and Pacman, so nothing violent that would drive away girls.

Edit: sorry for my extreme examples (garbage men), I just like to use ridiculous examples to make things clear but often people take that the wrong way. I mean I use them for the sake of logic, not to offend.
Yes, exactly. I actually never mentioned this to anyone, good to know I'm not the only one who likes to hear follow-ups ^^
Android SDK emulates the complete ARM architecture. This does not. If you test your code in the browser, it doesn't mean it will run well on the phones. I wonder how Mozilla will deal with multiple devices in the future. At least Apple uses a simulator because developers can afford to buy all the more recent models.
This article is pretty confused, it mixes together operational IT (managing desktops, etc.) with custom IT (building specialist applications, etc.). It tries to imply that Orca was built by Best Buy, but if you read the article carefully it very clearly avoids saying that. Pretty shoddy journalism.

It's perfectly sensible for companies to outsource non-core services just as desktop support to third party companies who can do it a lot better than you can. Even among enterprise level companies it's becoming pretty standard.

There may well be a story about how Orca was built on the cheap by an ineffective team, but this isn't it.
Zuck vs Wall Street
Guild Wars did this in user mode in the background while playing - it did background testing of the user's CPU, RAM, and GPU. Machines that failed the tests were flagged so that their crash reports got bucketed separately (saving us the time of trying to understand impossible crashes), and it popped up a message telling the user their computer was broken.

So even if the OS should be doing this for you, for long-running processes you could do it yourself in user mode. (I don't know if it's worth the effort, though.)
Brand new iPhone. Get an iPhone 5 now
I am Nadim Baba, Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza. Ask me anything!
ive been writing python for ages but never found a simple introduction to how to package modules - always thought it was voodoo, so thanks a lot! so simple...
I agree with you and Larry and want to elaborate. Dogmatic Bayesians often come armed with assertions that probability calculus is the "correct" way of doing inference and, further, that there is some kind of ethical maximum achieved when you make your decisions exclusively via inference.

They have strong reason to feel this way, of course. Probability calculus is a very elegant theory that can be constructed from rather sane "desiderata" a la Cox's Theorem. Furthermore, if you think of ethics as an optimization problem, which is fair, then you're likely to be attracted to decision theory as a powerful tool for being more ethical. QED?

Unfortunately, neither of these reasons have the conclusive force that they appear to. The sanity of Cox's postulates and ethics of optimization are still (arbitrary) choices which serve mostly to create a formalized world for us to live in and study with efficacy. There is no doubt that people have derived great power from similar use of powerful models, but models they are nonetheless.

Asserting that modeling the world based on these postulates is ethically mandatory is weird. Feeling confident that you can become more powerful than others by doing so is a bet.

So, assuming you're a betting type instead of a religious type, would you rather use models that are elegant but incomplete or practical and battle-tested? I believe both Sampling philosophy and Bayesian philosophy to be mathematically elegant. I also have seen them both very practically used.

And once you're interested in measuring practical performance of these methods, once you decide to pick things like loss functions and philosophies of measurement, then it's easy to find places where either framework fails.

---

So really, in my mind, there are Bayesian methods and Frequentist methods and Bayesians who, probably following Jaynes' hyperbolic and recommended work, feel that there is a certain theory of mind which is correct due to its elegance. Most Engineers can pick between the methods and most mathematicians can pick between the theories.

And having a favorite theory isn't so bad either. I quite like some "Likelihoodists" as well and learn from them every time we talk.

---

I think the best model of the situation is that of logic. It's like we have "First-order logicians" and "Higher-order logicians", each of which espousing a viewpoint that a particular Theory is "more true" than the other. Truly, they both have fortes and foibles, though, and the practical mathematician studies both and uses whichever one lets them prove what they need to. The problem comes into play when "higher-order logicians" suggest that "first-order logicians" are inherently wrong since their very theory prevents them from being able to conceive of a better theory and this reticence is leading to disarray. But then the "higher-order logicians" can't come to a consensus on how to fix things and also take a potentially infinite amount of time to reach a conclusion.

Really, though, our thought is neither bound to first or second order logic. Perhaps this causes us pain from time to time, but it also lets us pick and choose.
> So in this case, some people decided they were uncomfortable with the level of inclusion. That's a fair conversation to have.

Certainly. But when the conversation turns into accusations of racism and a boycott (or feared boycott?) that ends with the sponsors running away and the conference being cancelled, it's a sign that the conversation has gone astray.

In fact, it's hard to even have a rational conversation on inclusivity in CS if we're already at the point where such things happen. We really need cooler heads to have a rational debate.
Thanks, fixed :) (there is one of these deeper in the app, but I don't feel like re-compressing our JavaScript includes right now :-D).
Umm, isn't last.fm younger?
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Here's a thought - why not make the speaker selection process double blind, like medical trials. Whoever is reviewing submissions, should not have access to the authors' info. Though this is not perfect, it does provide a way for conference organizers to silence all criticism about demographics... #justathought
It's hard to differentiate between the two.
"Hey white dudes. I see you're pretty worked up. Non-white dude here to explain."

I'm a white dude whose biological parent is non-white dude who grew up in a disadvantaged socio-economic background, and I got to tell you that is probably one of the more offensive lines I have read recently. I am white and male and technology was not pretty accessible.

The only part I got lucky with was that the late 80's and early 90's had a class of entry computers that were wiped out by video game consoles and Windows. They were available and my Dad made one hell of a good decision. Schools who cannot afford vocational programs were not going to afford computer programming. If I had been born 10 years earlier or later then I would not be in a technology field.

I have seen too many people make assumptions based on race that should have been made on wealth and location. Using race as a proxy is wrong.

What opportunities does a young boy or girl from a disadvantaged background have to get into programming? Libraries and schools are not the answer. They have locked computers to keep people from being problems. There are programs to buy kids musical instruments but not computers. OLPC is basically a foreign aid program as you cannot go an buy a kid one.

You want some diversity, skip looking at what-is and look at the next generation. The C64 died in 1994, what was the replacement on ramp to programming. It sure as heck isn't the web browser. Our field is not diverse because of socio-economics. It costs almost like a young hockey player to be a good programmer.

// someone going to make that stupid inflation argument again and I would point to how the under $200 price point is still important (look at tablets)
I'm pretty excited about Firefox OS, but I think they need to lay out a clear path for developers. The "use html5, dummy!" battlecry falls short. What is html5 and where do I download it? Which frameworks do I use (there are literally hundreds of them), which toolchains work best? How do I handle multitouch?

I know I can use whatever I want, but I want them to a) obviously continue to allow me to use whatever I want, and b) tell me what way they think I _should_ do it.
Intel hasn't published much documentation on the precise architectural techniques that are used; examples 3-25 and 3-26 and the surrounding text in their optimization manual give a vague description ("In Intel microarchitecture code name Sandy Bridge, the cost of partial flag access is replaced by the insertion of a micro-op instead of a stall.") and include and example of a code sequence that would incur such a stall on earlier µarchs but is faster than a sequence that avoids the stall on Sandy Bridge.

One simple and common optimization is to perform register rename on the flags register. More often than not, the flags updated by INC or DEC are simply overwritten by a later arithmetic instruction without ever being used; simple rename can eliminate the stall in these cases.

Another simple optimization would be for the front-end perform macro-op fusion of an INC or DEC with a following branch that is known to only use the flag bits written by the INC; then the fused macro-op can issue without waiting on the other flag bits, and avoid stalling control flow.

However, I have no inside knowledge about what particular changes Intel made or didn't made to remove this particular hazard; I only know that it seems to have been nearly entirely eliminated.
I thought it was the backscatter ones that people objected to. The millimeter-wave ones are much less intrusive and there's no concern about health risks.
also: people will have come to terms with the new UI, and touchscreens will be standard on laptops
I am just making this up on the spot, but as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801900 I don't think wage discrimination can be the reason for fewer women/race x people in IT, because discrimination would range across all jobs, so the relative attractiveness of jobs would remain the same.

Edit: OK I have to clarify, I think there are certainly situations where you are fucked up. I am glad that I am not living in some dictatorship in the 3rd world, where my best option would be trying to flee the country with a 20% chance of survival.

I don't think circumstances in the western world are quite so bad, though. I think there are certainly a lot of jerks, but the place is big enough to avoid them and there are enough non-jerks to do business with. Just my guess, though, obviously I haven't done any studies on it. Also I only know Europe, not the US - but it's supposed to be a free country?

I am 100% sure that if you are a woman who can code, you can find employment in this economy.
If things are this bad, how exactly does having a lawyer help? Wouldn't the judges be in the rich person's pocket too?
> If I were pg, I would close this thread

Why is it that those who scream discrimination and the like are also first off the rank when it comes to shutting down free speech?
Be warned, The Nexus S / SGS11 'support' is partial, there are known bugs with both that arent actively being worked on. If you are happy testing out the bleeding edge then these are good to play with. If you want something that guarantees to work (and is high priority when bugs are visible) then I would use the simulator for now until there is some form of more official support for a publically available phone.
Think web, it's exactly like the web.

To see a example workflow for developing a application: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Tutorials/Weat...
Britain has 51% women. Women are underrepresented in the Ruby community, but there is no reason why it should stay like that. Is not anyone's job to increase the percentage of female coders. It is everyone's.

To my knowledge, it has never been established that women and men share identical dispositions towards all things. In fact, to me it seems unlikely that it should be so.

Given this, I'm not sure how you can claim that it's everybody's responsibility to push for more female coders. How would we know what the 'natural' split should be?
https://gist.github.com/4106776#gistcomment-602103 is relevant, and everyone involved in this discussion should read it. The argument so far has been presented as a false dichotomy - either take the best speakers (who all happen to be white men) or accept lower quality proposals in order to ensure some token degree of representation. Those aren't the only options. It's entirely possible to obtain a larger number of speakers from minority groups in your community without compromising your conference's quality. You just need to care about things like outreach, the way you write your CFP and the presence of policies to reassure people that harassment won't be tolerated. Do that, and you'll suddenly find that you have a high quality conference with a more diverse panel of speakers.
Even better, albeit more expensive, would be to start using ECC memory more frequently. It seems crazy to me that we're storing billions of bits of often important data in relatively dumb storage that can't even detect if it gets corrupted.
Just tried the map application in the simulator and it's smooth even if my little netbook barely handle Google.com without some lag. Impressive I'll say.
There's lots of news organizations that believe in these standards. It is difficult to meet them. It might be incredibly boring as well.
I agree that it is easier to envision yourself in a role if you have role models to look up to, but I don't agree that its mandatory. The counter example is sports, it stayed white until the strictures were removed and then became talent driven. The goal of a sports team is to win games which is a wonderfully crisp way of prioritizing recruiting.

The goal of startups (and a lot of companies) is to ship code and so talented people get hired regardless of their race, religion, or sexual orientation. In fact tech has something of a reputation for hiring "weirdos" as really talented technical folks are valued even if society at large discriminates against them. Just as true for the LGBT folks as it is for the non-white folks.

So the barrier to entry for becoming a Ruby star is essentially zero, laptop and a free AWS instance. And the market is demonstrably talent driven not 'class' driven.

You will have a hard time trying to convince me that the lack of non-white guy talent/leadership in the Ruby community has anything to do with race.
Your comment implies that you think that content/experience is orthogonal to a diverse speaker group.

I strongly disagree. I think a diverse speaker group leads to overwhelmingly better content and experience.

I think this extends much further than gender or race, however. I think this extends to the totality of human experience. I have a great interest in seeing the technical community encompass as wide a range of people as possible.

I want this partly for reasons of equality and fairness, and partly for purely selfish motivations (plainly that I want to work in an industry made up of people with a wider range of experiences, it makes me happier).

I think conflating a desire to see a diverse population of speakers to people's t-shirts probably means that you and I aren't going to see eye to eye on this subject. Which is fine, as I don't think you're a racist, or sexist, or a terrible person.

I do feel pretty confident betting that in 200 years, we'll see a much more heterogeneous makeup of both speakers and conference attendees, regardless of whether an active effort is made to make that so (it'll happen eventually).

Some might say if that's the case eventually, than shouldn't people just pretend that it's the case now (in which case drawing attention to gender and race is actually doing more harm than good).

I'd argue that if people agree that that's what the future is going to look like, and by most accounts, that seems like a better future, than why the hell aren't we doing more to turn the present into that future.
Bank of America set to enter mobile payment space