skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course, all thinking people are aware supply and demand doesn't apply to labor markets.
Does anyone know of a study on this that breaks down the effect between different types of leadership positions? In particular, I am wondering if positions that involve sales or otherwise interacting with the customers or general public exhibit this phenomenon more strongly than engineering or "internal" positions.

The reason I say this is that it would help identify where the problem really lies. If it affects all categories of work equally, then I would be more likely to say that organizations themselves are basing decisions on attractiveness. On the other hand, if this is affecting people who interact with the public to a greater degree than those who do not, I would point to a broader problem: that perhaps such people are simply more successful at their jobs, because their attractiveness is an asset in their work (which would make a solution pretty tricky).
I may be wrong but I think you missed the point. If "working together" is code for "we both have commit access to the same repo and the same functional test criteria and same target ship date" then it really doesn't matter at all if the person likes to work in their underwear and tell cat jokes since you're only interaction with them is going be through commits.

In a strangely wonderful way, people who have conditions that would make their 'productive' work in an office impossible have found work and even success as a remote team member on the other side of an email alias and irc channel.

That said, managers are more comfortable when the know their folks a bit more, but they generally are watching for things to go off the rails and head that off rather than whether or not the code is up to standard.
The unintended consequence I most fear from this kind of immigration law modification is the same unintended consequence I've observed from every attempt to tie real-world advantages to diplomas: watering down the diplomas. The blog post author writes, "It would be wonderful to provide foreign-born students with advanced degrees in STEM subjects from U.S. universities a clear path to permanent residency." From the lawyer's point of view, the interesting questions then follow. What is a foreign-born student? What is an advanced degree? What is a STEM subject? What is a clear path to permanent residency?

I by no means oppose expansion of skills-based grounds for legal immigration to the United States. Mindful that all of my own ancestors arrived to the United States (or to the pre-independence colonies of Britain) in an era before there were any restrictions at all on immigration here, I'm generally quite supportive of expanded immigration to the United States. That improves the local cuisine, the local music, and the local economy in general. Mindful that my wife was able to find a legal channel for immigration to the United States (based on that status of being my wife, in that case) and that many of my friends and neighbors are first-generation immigrants to the United States, I am also aware that there quite a few channels to legal immigration to the United States already, some of which already strongly favor people with STEM degrees or STEM work experience. I'd be glad to see more people like that come into the country--that would be good for my personal local business of teaching mathematics to the children of people who are aware United States K-12 education underperforms (see my user profile for more details on that). But the tricky issue will be setting detailed criteria for immigration on those grounds and perhaps (or perhaps not) an annual number of visas issued on those grounds that fit an overall sound immigration policy for the United States.

Anyone who doesn't think a simple policy proposal like that of the blog post kindly submitted here might be subject to abuse and fraud needs to think again. Immigration to the United States is very highly desired, and some people will cheat to attain it. There is no particular reason for United States voters to vote to make immigration any easier than it has to be to achieve some generally agreed national policy goal, despite own my pro-immigration opinions.
One thing I'm not quite sure what to make of is that I felt a lot of that aspect on the BBSs I started out on during high school, despite them being more local. Since there was free local calling but long-distance cost money (possibly a US-specific thing), I dialed up only local BBSs, which made for a certain location specificity. I liked that to some extent, because it made the local BBSs "special" in some way, kept the communities at a manageable size, and made it easier to develop an "audience", so to speak, in a little niche where you weren't competing with everyone on the whole planet for the same audience, like you are in the flat geography of the internet. But, at least in the circles I ended up in, nobody really tried to meet up, or wanted to know much about who you were IRL. So it had this odd feeling of both very cyberspacey, where you could be anyone you wanted online, but still a "clumpy" cyberspace where the clumps were related to RL location.
I feel like he's describing this: http://www.bamfordwatchdepartment.com/customiser.cfm but I could also be misreading the comment.
Possibly, unfortunately there's every possibility that you'd end up patching up things that broke out of the blue just as frequently that way.

Having said that I've never had problems with the having Linux automatically run the security patches for me.
Control an Arduino with Siri
Entrepreneurship on test-drive
Excellent idea if you get caught say you "misinterpreted the rules" that's what they claim when busted robo calling voters with the wrong time or polling location
In much the same way as a public park is a piece of the public infrastructure, and so no one ought be denied use/be forced to assent to a search prior to using, except for constitutional cause, public transit systems ought follow the same rules.
I think most of the others have JS sandboxing, but FF doesn't.
They had over $40 million in investment capital according to Crunchbase (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adbrite), with $5 million of it within the last 8 months.
It's not even true.[1] "American schools are under-performing" is a bit of truthiness used by demagogues on various sides to support one of the following agendas:

1) discrediting the public education model

2) demanding more public money for educators

3) demanding more public money to subsidize employee training

[1] See: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
Nothing unites like a common enemy. This anti-Microsoft schtick is FOSS' "think of the children."
Yahoo Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2012 Results
I would think that NYC's subway is vastly more important to the NYC area than BART is to the SF area.

"During the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, BART recorded an average weekday ridership of 366,565, the highest in its history" [1]

NYC MTA average weekday ridership, 2011: 5,284,295 [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit#Ridershi...

[2] http://www.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/
I would guess (based just on observing people in the New York subway) that around 20% of people, at least in the USA, do not have education/income/some other contributing factor to provide a healthy diet for their kids. And they themselves were likely even worse off as kids.

Quick googling result:
http://frac.org/initiatives/hunger-and-obesity/are-low-incom...
What a strange claim. "Looking back", he can't help but feel discriminated against due to his height.

It couldn't possibly be because of his "no formal eduction, no experience with any big clients", could it?
Anger over Twitter porn gaffe on Vine video service
I am learning to code but to be honest, I just do not like coding. I need to focus on my strengths rather than fix the clinks in my armor.
I don't know why this is being downvoted - I don't think this comment is sardonic. It IS good that they're surfacing because that means we can patch them. Better visible than invisible.
Just to be clear, I am in favor of substantial increases in skilled immigration, as well as shortening the visa->green card->citizenship route as much as is practical for those who have a clear capacity to contribute to our society and express a desire to do so as citizens. I'm only trying to explain some of the politics as I understand them.

One other factor is the preceived threat of wage imbalances acting against U.S. non-naturalized citizens ("We'll be flooded with H1B's who will work for 25% less and undercut our sons and daughters!").

I suspect that the "keep your job or you're gone" nature of H1B visas creates much more downward pressure on wages than increasing the supply of skilled workers does. Regardless, we want growth in industries that require skilled workers. I'd rather have 5 million software engineers in this country making $80K on average than 3 million making $100K.

But there are those who argue that we should be selective and prioritize towards those who would contribute most.

I can see the other side's argument about fairness, but to me it's a slam dunk that you invite in people that are likely to produce economically a large multiple of what they consume in benefits. I'm happy to figure out what to do about unskilled labor, too, but coupling the two seems counterproductive.
Trust me, I have tried. I went to countless meetups and hackathons and its harder to find people than you think it is.
I missed that. Here's a link in case anyone else missed it: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/platafor...
That is what I was thinking (afraid of). That's like saying I am a kernel developer because I edited a kernel error message for grammar.
Rhotic vs non-rhotic accents is just a small part of the story. Listen to some rhotic British accents and it will be more obvious that General American is most likely just as different from 17th century British as contemporary British is.
I saw my first Model S driving from Marin over the Golden Gate bridge. I see a lot of them about where I live in Palo Alto -- four in one journey last weekend (two on 101, two on Oregon Expressway in Palo Alto), then one the next day at preschool (!).
Aren't drones already privatized? Every time I pass a Brookstone at the mall, they're selling the "arduino board not included" models.
Agreed, diet is a poor explanation for developed countries. What seems more likely is that the discrimination start earlier, in college or high school where athletic students have an easier time going to the best colleges simply because they are good at a sport (assuming height is correlated to being good at a sport popular in college)
Thank you for at least providing me with your reasoning this time. I will respectfully disagree with you. It's hardly a hobbyhorse, I am not the chairman of the "Stop Paris, France" society. It's the 8,345,235th most important thing in my life. I happen to think it's an interesting thing, it's certainly something that amuses countless non-American people. Several other people commented in a civil way, not all of them disagreed with me, maybe they thought it was interesting too. Perhaps I am imagining it, but just about every thread on Hacker News gets derailed to a certain extent, the side-issues and byways that get explored are one of the things that give Hacker News its charm.

Incidentally, as a non-American who happens to love America and things American I have found myself in the past trying to defend the habit in conversation with others; "Well, it makes sense, you see there is a Paris in Texas too". Eventually I realised the cause was hopeless and gave up, "No, you're right it's just a crazy habit they have".

Anyway, enough, as you say it's a tiny thing. I will move on.
'I don't know if I like the idea of a single point of failure; whatever service pushes the update would have a big, fat Wile E. Coyote target on its back.'

This is a solved problem though, right? Antivirus companies deal with this when they push out definition updates that render backdoors ineffective, and yet while they probably are targeted by the virus makers, they have been quite resilient.
> Work hard, meet the right people, and use your gut.

I've done that all, and been successful out of it. But at least in my case there was one even larger element in play: Luck. And I can't even begin to list all the different ways that I've been lucky (and unlucky), but I always keep that in the back of my mind.

I could have born in Somalia, or a Brooklyn ghetto, I could have tried to make my last career move a year earlier or later (when it would have been shot down for sure), or any of 80,000 other reasons I could have failed despite hard work, talking to the right people, and using my gut.

It's easy to say you won't get screwed if you're careful, but be very sure that it isn't just that you've been lucky to interact with good people.
Just wondering if this guy got paid to do this. Not that I dislike fun, but... I'm glad it wasn't my dime.
> Of course! There are multiple birds/sensors with SAR, IR, and multispectral capabilities

I don't mean just taking pictures of them all. I mean to do the equivalent of Argus -- real-time 12 frames/second surveillance of the entirety of the borders and coasts of the continental United States of America. Just having the birds with the cameras is only a fraction of that task.
400 cars per week is 20,800 in a year. That is nearly twice as many as GM made Chevy Corvettes in 2012, just as an interesting perspective. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Corvette#Production
This is an argument that there's no discrimination in tech? Or less discrimination than in other industries?
Google shifts focus of hacking competition
The Power of Selling Out: Your Customers as Political Capital
Silicon Valley has a strange fixation on age which waffles between discrimination and fetishisation.

I started working as a trader at a Swiss bank in New York when I was 20. There were lots of jokes cracked about "traders south of the drinking age" and the number mattered more to some than others, but in the end it was meritocratic.

When I was 21 (after leaving the bank), I interviewed at a well-regarded Palo Alto-based tech firm and painfully remember every round of the interview bringing up that I didn't go to a prestigious enough university and that I looked "baby-faced". Granted, I look older in a suit, but it's a curiously consistent cultural artefact. You don't find anyone lauding over 22-year old hedge fund or energy venture founders as VCs do over over their 19-year old "rock stars".
As a beginning ruby on rails programmer this site was really helpful. It makes expert knowledge from stack overflow easily accessible.

Keep up the good work.
If you "drop" the 1/2, you can use Z(sqrt(5)) and work with only a pair of integers. Also, the two parts of the formula are "conjugates" so it's possible to get the exact result with only one half.

Define: Im5(a+b * sqrt(5)) =b

Fib(n)= Im5 ((1+1* sqrt(5))^n) / 2^(n-1)
This is not about you, this is about what is good for the country.

Is it good for the country to disincentivize graduate work for people who are born here?

Is it good for the country for every STEM lecturer to have bad english language skills?

This is already the norm at many state schools, and makes people drop those subjects because they can't understand or relate to their teachers.

Of course it is hard for immigrants to relate to the spoiled "fat" americans, but the social and cultural realities exist and are not trivial.
I doubt it. Maybe employers are getting more specific with their postings:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=big+data%2C+mobile+apps%2C...
Although, you should notice that the bug specifies "only free software".
I've frequently discussed this, most often in dejected frustration among friends and colleagues. My wife went through a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering and 90% of her research group were foreign born. As native US citizens ourselves, we did not suffer the desperate living conditions to which Ph.D. students on a half- or quarter-RA subject themselves and their nascent families. But we observed it plenty.

Many of her research colleagues were effectively deported (forced out of the United States) after graduation if they could not find a firm willing to sponsor them. Sponsorship is itself an exploitative and extremely costly endeavor. Many small companies cannot afford it.

The situation seems to me a travesty from every angle I can conceive.

The author of this article paints the situation adequately, but I want to add a few more points:

1. Since many of the more xenophobic among us Americans are strongly motivated by national defense, I find it especially important to paint the following picture for their consumption: educating these bright minds in the United States and then sending them packing may in fact exacerbate national defense. Considering how many engineering students arrive to our universities from nations we are fearful of (rightly or not) such as Iran and China, it seems especially naive to educate their brightest to the pinnacle of our ability and then send them home--especially since they want to stay here.

Similarly, if your aim is to keep your enemies weak (and again, I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, just that it may be what the more xenophobic among us desire), then certainly creating a brain drain within their society serves us at their expense.

2. A commonplace misguided belief that economics is a zero-sum game may also explain some xenophobia. This colloquially takes the flavor of, "they are taking our jobs." The only way to combat this is through repeating the point that immigration creates jobs. We as Americans are better off having these highly-educated job-makers in America than overseas creating and enriching companies that may end up competing with our own.

As a free-marketer, I am not all that motivated by such an "America over everyone else" point of view, but if that IS your point of view, then again you should want these bright people staying here and creating jobs or bettering our firms rather than overseas in the hands of our competition.

3. It's quite frankly inhumane in many cases to send these students packing. Even in the relative squalor that they endure living, for example in Los Angeles on mere hundreds of dollars a month, they still want to live here and create a family here. The American dream exists in their eyes. Sometimes I think of those who were sent back and wonder whatever became of them, but I cut those thoughts short because no happiness comes from that.

4. Just as a minor point, can you imagine the feeling of being kicked out of the US after earning your Ph.D. here? I imagine it might breed a tinge of America hatred when they get back home.
I had a similar experience when I bought my first new car. I was 23 at the time, but could have passed for younger.

I went into the dealership and waited around until FINALLY someone came and talked to me. I talked a little, asked some questions and eventually got to do some test drives. I was already pretty sold on a certain car, but they didn't have any on the lot in the color I wanted. So I ask about it, the salesman tells me that what they have on the lot is all that's available (shipments were delayed by the tsunami in Japan) and that was that. I didn't buy a car that day.

Now, at that point I was borrowing my parents car, and would need to return them the car at some point. Luckily the dealership in my parents town had the car in the right color (according to their website) so I called them up and said I wanted it.

Unfortunately for me, it was already gone. But the guy bent over backwards for me trying to find a new one at other dealerships in the state that matched what I wanted and he eventually found one.

I always wonder how the second dealer would have treated me if he would have seen me before we made the deal.
This does not prove anything. Even if fewer smart but less attractive females were hired due to the discrimination we would still expect to see intelligent women that did get hired, attractive or not, end up making it.
New Details On Apple’s Budget iPhone 5
This is a great policy. Sometimes a follow up at just the right time can really help too. Always be respectful, after all it's the client's choice, and be understanding that they are going to feel a bit embarrassed when the first results come back from the cheap place. Have a supporting story that lets them save face "I can see you're really a cost conscious guy, that usually correlates with a good sense of value too, while my stuff is a bit more expensive let me share with you what we do to make sure you will be satisfied ..."
I don't think I could even count how many contractors I've worked with that were on H1-B's and yet were doing basic Struts and Dreamweaver code monkey work for my place of employment. Work so basic that it doesn't even need a software engineering or computer science degree. I have absolutely no idea if we have a shortage of "highly skilled" workers, but I've seen with my own eyes that H1-Bs are abused for work that definitely could be done by a citizen. So I'm not inclined at all to be sympathetic to the call for more H1-B's that will lead to just as much abuse, and leave the same shortage of actually highly skilled workers.
Are you shipping printed badges yet?
Agreed, there is a small possibility that the patching might break the app in a major way, but for the majority of apps (especially those developed by one person just for fun), the benefit of being patched will likely outweigh the chance that the app breaks.

For those with larger organizations and larger apps, it would be the same process that big companies do whenever a windows operating system patch comes out: they test, test, test, and once they are sure the update will work ok, they deploy the patch.
Beware of using biology to explain behaviours when those behaviours re-enforce the status quo. Evolutionary psychology is struggling to seem legit and using it to make 'that's just how things are' statements sound scientific is not helping at all.
Win a ticket to MDevCon on March 14-15, 2013
Experts Say Facebook Hackers May Be Infecting Your Computer
I know attention spans and principles tend to morph into some crazy shit in the perception of those who are not as blessed with them, but this one I haven't heard before.
The same trend occurs for designers:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=web+design%2C+graphic+desi...
A few hours cycling is nothing - when I grew up in the North East of Scotland people from the coastal fishing villages had quite different accents to people from farms maybe 1 km or so inland.

[NB When the BBC did a TV series featuring fishermen from near where I grew up they had to give the show subtitles so it could be understood in the rest of the UK ;-)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_%28TV_series%29
A Beginner’s Guide To Making Your First Video Game
I think the suggestion is much simpler: That when everything happens electronically, it is less likely that discrimination will happen because people aren't even given an opportunity to apply their biases and stereotypes to you because they've never seen you in person, just read your text (or perhaps spoken with you over the phone/skype).

In my experience this is true, even if it doesn't wholly eliminate discrimination.
This makes me think. Is there a way to avoid being tracked by mobile iOS/Android apps (other than not using them)?