skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But IBM, and many of the big corporations in the USA, followed very liberal policies that promoted diversity in the work place.

A meritocracy based on raw intelligence and skill (measured by standardized testing) is not exactly what people mean today when they discuss "promoting diversity". In fact, nowadays people typically criticize such practices as inhibiting diversity [1].

As for culture fit, it's a complicated thing. There are some culture issues that can be a real problem - for example, my company really can't deal with people who don't believe in "let data make the decision". Similarly, there are companies out there which highly value civility and team spirit over correctness - my "this is broken, here is why" style would not work for them.

A lot of culture fit is just "do I think these guys are cool" silliness, but don't let that overshadow the fact that culture matters.

[1] http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-th... http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D16HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gend...
The browser is still WIP, a lot of pieces are still missing(Content Picker, Download manager, Private browsing) they will be integrated in the next months, also the browser will switch to Oxide(based on Chromium Content API).
> Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code.

Well, yes, I suppose this is true. If you pick a random woman who cannot code, that is probably the reason.

What about the women who have been driven out of coding simply because they happen to be female? It's something I have personally witnessed, both in the education system, and in commercial settings. There are real problems here, problems that you through your good fortune are not adversely affected by and in fact could go through your whole life without even knowing that they exist.

> Instead we can put our efforts into teaching everyone to code: "We Code."

If that's something you want to exist, then go make it - no one is stopping you, and the existence of "Girls Who Code" is in no way an impediment to your goals. I find it a little distasteful to ever say someone should give up on their personal project just because you think they should be doing it differently. Go do it then, if you're so sure you have the answers!
Absolutely.

But that's a completely different thing than what happened here, in this specific case.
How many Chromebook models does Amazon sell? How many Windows models? How much percentage of total laptops sold does Amazon sell?

Lumia 900 sales were topping Amazon too.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/532392/

>Something is going on

Could be just some good weekend PR work. Certainly worked well with almost no one checking the real numbers.
why is rap genius the best for lyrics? if i want lyrics, i want a simple print out of the lyrics
Does this not prove the incentive to win at SEO at all costs?

Has google disclosed other sites penalized for the same behavior?
> Google had a monopoly and exerts market power over the internet. They legally do have a responsibility to the public.

Not really. Certainly not a responsibility to abide by the whims of random people who want their content ranked higher.

And if we decide to burden them with "responsibilities", what about their responsibility to keep my search results free of spa^W SEOers' crap?
On the other hand, if we're talking security, while USB drives are "unknowns", at least they don't have DMA like an optical drive.
They're using this as a punitive measure to prevent SEO abuse from happening in the future. I don't see much of a problem with it. Google is doing everyone a favor here - including helping out other search engines.

Users who care enough can just go directly to the site.
I greatly prefer AZLyrics - they give me the lyrics on a page with just the lyrics, that's all I want nearly 100% of the time.

It's not even a contest: http://i.imgur.com/H1QixcN.png
There really needs to be some checks and balances here. Perhaps an opensource search engine? I think an entity like Google having so much control over which businesses die or survive is a little ridiculous.
Sent you a tweet, please check.
> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses.

Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it.

Definitely it is well known that there is a shortage of men in nursing as well as in clinical psychology for example, and many in those industries think their industries would be better off with more men, and make efforts to change things. Some random links:

https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?p...

I have a background in psychology, so I know less about the nursing situation, but in psychology it's definitely a topic that comes up. Which is not surprising, the gender disparity is very large: When I was an undergrad, I was in a small minority, somewhere in 10-20%, and it can be an odd feeling.
The Pancake Problems (1975, 1979, 1973)
I think we need to be very clear that the programming jobs of that era are not todays programing jobs. It was 1980, general society wasn't very progressive, why would computer programming be the magic beacon of equality? And, of course, it wasn't, it was considered menial work fit for females.
Thank you for this. OP seems to be in denial of the fact that there is no "War". Whatever is going on is just to keep the massive industrial military complex running funded by tax payers. Fighting against Hitler was war. Running after a bunch of helpless people in the desert to test latest weapons and keep the bottom 10% of the population employed is just evil.
Meet the workspace designer for Dropbox, Instagram, and other Internet startups
Is it though? Though I may be making an assumption that a substantial amount of traffic is retention, if people aren't coming back does that mean that RapGenius really didn't offer that much over other lyrics sites?
Is the search interest attributed to people wanting to see how low rap genius is ranked now on google, or people who actually want to visit the rap genius site? I suspect it is the former.
Your use of "us" is adorable. There have always been more of "you". Who else would make up the wave assaults, mass labour pools, and factory employees?

War may not be necessary from an emotional standpoint, but from a technological standpoint it is the only game in town. The recent developments in peaceful IT are unique in human history, and they themselves are predicated on war technology and research. In fact, i challenge you to name one area of technology that is not based on war research and military development. I don't think you can name a single device that is not built off of something war related. I have a special place in my heart for the myth of pure science and research. I also believe it could become a reality. I posted ITT about how it might be possible to counter the militarization of our air. I think a few successive generations of scientists who are not affiliated with war making could bring about peaceful advancement, but as it stands now, technology absolutely requires mistrustful nations, reckless generals, and politely amoral science and tech workers.

All of that AI and "machinery" has a military background. They control the purse, so they dictate the purpose.

Surely you are canny enough to know that petty appeals to my "intelligence" only serve to make you seem desperate to be right. All 3 of those things, hell all things, are neither good nor bad. They are merely titles given based on context. Context is everything. A civilian sees a RPV as a killing machine. A EOD tech sees a drone as an insurance policy. A president sees a Predator as a solution. I see a way for normal people to enhance their effect in shaping their world. All of us see the same toy, but we all have a different use for it. Surely you are intelligent enough to understand that context can bring new light to any topic or situation...
Hi - I would be thrilled to hear more about the social product review & recommendation app! Looking forward to hear from you!
great feedback ! kindly do remember we are just testing out some of features to learn what would enhance pdf reading experience!
+1. Even if RapGenius did cheat, they are still the best solution for Google's customers (i.e. those sheep whose data can be mined and sold).

So I don't get why Google essentially fucks up with their customers.
There's actually a feature built in to mimic cross-fading; it must have not worked for you, and that worries me a little. What browser and OS are you using please?

It's not possible to do true seamless looping with HTML5 audio, but the site tries to achieve it by crossfading, as you say, using two tracks for each sample. On my setup the transition is imperceptible. I'd like to work out why it didn't work for you.
Michelangelo’s Handwritten 16th-Century Grocery List
If you want to get girls coding, get Windows OSes out of schools. They kill interest in computers before you have time to get interested in them.
Google is a corporation. If you want to do business with them, you follow their rules, or face the consequences. RG didn't follow those rules.

How is this ridiculous?
1. Work in coffee shops.
2. But every so often choose ones where wifi is flaky.
3. Most importantly: org mode.
If you were Google, knowing that someone is gaming the system, what would you have done differently?
I wonder what the odds are that the microcontroller in an optical drive contains bugs that can be exploited with a specially crafted disc.
But valleywag's point -- in the new, unfortunately Owen Thomas less incarnation -- is to find a quote from an engineer or executive associated with silicon valley that could be construed as sexist, or racist, or discriminatory to someone (and no worries if said quote must be taken wildly out of context) then pitch a fit about it. For a perfect example from [1], see [2]. So Nitashu happened upon Paul wondering about the low presence of women in the engineer pipeline and it was perfect. They are people who stole the fox news business model and pointed it at silicon valley.

Even when the complaints are legitimate, there's plenty to complain about in the valley, but characterizing us via the worst examples you can find is their stock in trade. A good 2014 resolution is to stop hoping Sam or Nitashu will turn into Owen and to ignore gawker.

[1] http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-de...

[2] http://valleywag.gawker.com/twitter-employees-dont-talk-abou...
>The notion that all life is sacred and killing for a living is wrong is a very, very modern notion.

Since time began, humans have been trying to stop it. So I don't think you're thinking this through ..

>Members of the military kill because it needs to happen.

Members of the military kill because they are ordered to do so, and no longer have the ability to express their own inherent free will. Nowhere in the history of war has it ever been true that 'to kill a little now means not killing more later' - if it were, the killing would have stopped.
I'm confused. Do you think RapGenius visitors are children or adults?
It's always called a "read" error. If you're working at the REPL, it's detected at the Read phase of the Read-Eval-Print-Loop. It is, of course, a read-syntax error.

But the fact that the Read phase can be usefully separated from the Eval phase is a distinguishing feature of Lisp, and why it makes sense to say, at least, that Lisp has no concrete syntax, only abstract syntax. Lisp programmers fluently think in terms of the abstract syntax their code generates, because they read and write in the string representation of that abstract syntax. That's why it makes sense for the Lisp eval function, unlike the eval function in other dynamic languages, to take lists as input rather than strings. That's why a metacircular interpreter in Lisp will be written to input lists. That's why a DSL in Lisp written as a custom evaluation function will be an interpreter for lists. The Lisp language is defined with respect to the list data-structure, rather than strings.

On your Python idea: the problem is that no-one would ever use Python code as the literal representation of Python's abstract syntax.

It would be entirely backward, anyway. Lisp starts as a notation for a data-structure rich enough to represent abstract syntax (symbolic expressions) and then defines a language in terms of this data structure. The philosophy of this is understood when we realise that the roots of Lisp are in metalanguages and logic.
Perhaps there is a market for a curl or git based lyrics downloader in the terminal.
> On what timescale does "never" apply?

Non-temporal colloquial "never". "Never in their wildest dreams" never.
If you're at home use privoxy to filter the ads out. You can also use privoxy to filter out onswipe garbage too.

http://misctechmusings.com/ipad-ad-blocking-using-privoxy/
What is this crap about patenting yoga classes?
> No, making it into a game complete with an Xbox controller abstracts the realness from it.

False. This is exactly what the article was addressing: unreported suicides and clinically depressed drone pilots. It definitely doesn't feel like a video game to those people.
Doesn't Austrian economics also disregard reality?

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm
"there is no such thing as bad publicity…" would be really interesting to see their analytics data / wonder that will be down 80% as well
No, but they do have "I'm really a hub with a keyboard and a mouse (and a mass storage device) behind it". Or, if you go for simple but (too often) effective, "please autorun evil.exe". (Also, how well-secured do you think your USB stack is? It's been exposed to tons of shitty devices, of course, but proper attacks?)

USB isn't to be trusted, either.
Hustle. Schlep. Market. Tell people. Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

There are a lot of things to launching/marketing a product, but it always comes down to hustling and marketing hard consistently over a long period of time. Think 3+ years to be an "overnight success"
I mostly agree with you. However, I think the parent comment was referring to the economic sense of "cartel"[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
RapGenius visitors are probably adults or young adults, but the fact that the average "visitor" visits NPR and pbskids is indicative that the visitor has children or siblings, which means that a child and an adult are on the same browser on the same user.
The abuse already goes on, and it's much more involved and 1,000% more effective than trading links.
He isn't a sack of shit for having an opposing view point. He is a sack of shit for this middle ground all sides have a valid point and the truth is somewhere in the middle bullshit.
For those of you who are saying the Music Cover isn't a good device for making music, I don't think Microsoft was trying to make a music product, but rather an example. A while ago, some people from the Microsoft Surface team did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit. I think the idea was that different "blades" could be made for different tasks [1]. Microsoft made the first blade to show what was possible, and this is what they came up with.

[1] "This unique digitizer platform we built can enable a number of different blades and unique interactions. We are super excited about the possibility." - http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1mz20e/hi_im_panos_pan...
I may have misunderstood him, in which case, apologies.
They have added value in their annotated lyrics, which comes in handy especially with cryptic word play/slang in rap lyrics.
What I find shocking is a single company (Google) has the power to cause such a dramatic decrease of a website it deemed "unworthy".

Sure, it can justify its actions by saying they broke the rules, but pressing the a "death button" for a website is not a solution.

I feel as though Google needs to re-examine their core principles and determine how to better handle an issue like this. Otherwise, I suspect Google might have anti-trust and anti-competitive issues and the government might set the rules for them, and we all know how bad that would be.
schadenfreude by who? Certainly not by Google or the media.
Can't wait to get Google Glass...
Please email me (in profile) I could not find your contact info.
In reply to your edit to the parent post: robots won't take over for us. If they are ever in such a position of power, they'll get rid of us.

I'm not exactly looking forwards to it.

Among other things, human history is the combined evolution of sociological and technological progress.

Societal progress has peaked a while ago.

Technology has been riding the curiosity and mental ability of the most brilliant among us, and is currently busy building its next vehicle.

The tragedy of the commons means that it will be very, very difficult to impede that trend, assuming it is possible at all.
Kind of like Too Big to Fail. Hmm...
I feel that the situation is worse now than in the past.
I don't think it's fair to make that kind of teleological evaluation... Yes, RapGenius may be the best solution for google's customer. However, if Google permits shady SEO tactics simply because the ends justify the means, then what kind of precedent are they establishing? They would be encouraging that kind of behavior. As a heavy RapGenius user, I'm upset with what occurred, but from an objective standpoint, it makes sense why Google made its decision.
Note that all of the above arguments can be fixed by a "disable backdoors in production builds" policy. It's requiring field-updatable devices that really kills you here. (You can implement high-quality public-key crypto, but that is hard.)
Do you have any idea how easy it would be to game an open source search engine?
What we seem to be seeing now is a wave of commentary from people who are familiar only with what other people have said about the Graham interview at The Information, but who have not themselves read that interview carefully.
I only ever search for lyrics if I want to understand a nuance I think I'm missing. RapGenius has always been my go-to for that.
pg says founders start programming when they're thirteen, and concludes that we have a ten year lag time.

The author says founders can be much older than 23, so given that we have a ten year lag time, we can start with people will over 13.

pg:
x=13
y=23
Therefore z=y-x=10.

Author:
No, y=40
Therefore x=y-10=30.

There's a pretty clear flaw in the author's reasoning here. Why say x=10 when you've just rejected the value from which that ten was calculated?
Right, neither is trustworthy, so we agree :)
google may be 30% women overall but I would be shocked if that where true of engineering; Rachel of rachel by the bay definitely didn't have that experience
The only shameful thing about it, is that it doesn't happen more often. It took some major tech articles which showed the way RapGenius gamed the system, in order for Google to man up and step in.
Couldn't find your email either - you can tweet me @alincatalin
Why is RapGenius the best result for Google searchers? I just want lyrics, if Google can get me to them I am happy. RG has a ton of bloat that I don't want or need.
Psychology is still very male-dominated, at least in terms of employers, teachers, and researchers — i.e. people in power in the industry.
What a weird comment. How would this be worse for girls than for boys?
http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-tao-ant.pdf
What dumb logic. Rap Genius are just a piss in the ocean compared to all aggregate traffic. Making a statement that suggests "if you're big enough or we like you enough, you can cheat the system as much as you want" is infinitely more harmful in the long run.
My feeling is that Google is acting like a monopoly. It's wrong that a private company is able to exert this much power over others, even if the others are being shady.
It's a game theory thing. There have been and will be a huge number of sites that would do anything to be #1 on Google.

In an iterated game, punishments must have a deterrent effect. They might seem disproportional, but Google's goal is not "do what's best for the world in this one instance, ignoring the long-term effects". Google's goal is "make sure nobody will try to cheat Google's algorithms, now or in the future." This is how you build the best search engine in the long run.

It would be the same if Google didn't dominate search, though they'd have to be more careful about optimally calibrating the punishment.

(N.B. This argument remains true even if other people are gaming Google right now.)
That's not exactly true, but there is no public research that shows the contrary. I worked on a research project at INRIA earlier this year that focuses on that topic: http://stopfingerprinting.inria.fr/

AFAIK the project it's still active, but no definitive conclusion has been obtained.
If you believe the judicious provision of weapons is a worthwhile humanitarian endeavor, then by all means create an NGO dedicated to the task. I can certainly envision donating to such a charity. Please don't involve the USA military-industrial complex in such a Faustian manner.

Also it isn't so convincing to link to a wiki section that supposedly proves your point about reducing bloodshed, while the very next section on the page describes 5 million people killed in the same area in the following decade.
my thought exactly, why not just buy a smaller screen and get on with code?
Almost no one will notice as long as they get their lyrics.
Maybe not the people piloting, but the people ordering them to. It makes it a lot more trivial for everyone involved than actually hopping in a jet and blowing up some weddings that way.
Paul, you really need to stop being honest in public. The world doesn't want honesty, it wants lies. It wants to feel good. Wake people up from their politically correct Utopian dream and they will attack you viciously. Just go with the flow and speak freely only to a close group of friends.

As I recall last time PG was honest about founders with heavy accents not doing well due to communication problems he attacked as well. American culture (founded on freedom of expression) has turned into a culture of witch hunts and public shaming. Leading more people to simply stop talking about important and many times controversial topics. From freedom of expression to fear of expression, who's the witch hunt's next victim?
> To argue that women can't make it as hackers is like arguing, post-Jackie Robinson, that blacks can't develop professional baseball skills.

You might want to reword that last part slightly, maybe? winces

I feel I should warn you that if you use that argument, you may in some cases get a "Bell Curve" inspired response to do with average ability or performance of the genders / races. To enter the merit argument is to risk being bogged down in it unnecessarily: Even if women were 10% as likely as men to be good programmers, one still should not and should not be allowed to discriminate programmers on the basis of gender. Instead they should have their actual ability assessed, without anyone taking probabilistic short-cuts in thinking. (In other words, equality of opportunity)
Men do better than women at the Math SAT[1]. The male/female ratio is especially high in the higher Math percentiles, where you would expect your best engineers to come from. The polite way to explain this is some kind of "expectations effect", which is possible, but females do dominate at all other aspects of education. We cannot rule out simple innate ability, combined with higher male interest in abstract things.

[1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
By people who are not fans of Rap Genius, of which there are many. (I like the site, for what it's worth).