skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'll one-up you: indeed, the chance of a male writing such a book is much smaller than the chance of a female writing such a book. Acting as if gender wouldn't influence choice of content and style is ridiculous."

So what aspects of it are female specific? Because women would be more likely to worry about educating children?

Seriously, answer the question instead of relying on prejudice, please.

I'd consent that female heroines might be more likely for female authors (didn't check, though), although in this case I suspect gender of author's children might be more important.

Edit: I have to go further - sorry, but you made me think about it. Of course the odds of a woman writing such a book are significantly smaller, simply because there are much fewer female programmers than male programmers.
Author here. Yes, at the time of writing the blog post, I really did not know much about mining difficulty, or how dogecoin's difficulty matched with other scrypt-based currencies.

I should probably update the post a bit!
This is, I think, the biggest hurdle for Julia.

R's strength is not its language, it's the people. You need methods articles with supplements written in Julia, not R, for people to switch.
Note that of the fairly sizable group of high-profile, well-informed SV people who frequent this site, you never see one of them comment on a post related to this scandal.
Awesome :)

We developed our own system like this (also based on iPXE), and it's been wonderfully helpful.

The mildly tricky bit is getting Windows installs working, which they haven't seem to have done here. That's probably more due to licensing issues rather then technical issues.
I agree it would be a mistake for the layperson to infer strong causation, especially in the middle of the issue - I was more musing that this is the sort of opportunity where a student in law or economics could someday get a Ph.D attempting to answer it properly with data. (It doesn't seem impossible to normalize for the impact of fed policies across industries, for instance.)
I hope someone does it and shares the paper with me. :)
> After all, if you're legitimately offering a free trial, there's no reason you'd actually need my credit card number.

One possible justification: Asking for credit card info can act as a means of verification, preventing people from repeatedly creating new accounts to obtain a virtually limitless trial.
What astounds me by all this is the idea that the HR people in all these companies seemed to have no issues with going along with these highly illegal schemes. Must make for an interesting work environment to know that your HR people were willing to screw you over for little or no personal gain.
The lawyers and doctors who get paid a whole lot are partners in a firm. It's not much different than founding a tech company.
To anyone just starting their tech career in the US, pay attention to the parent comment.

Edit: parent deleted the comment, so here it is: (I sincerely hope the parent is not getting hauled off in handcuffs as we speak.)

As a former Intel engineer the only thing that surprised me
is how high up these abuses went. These companies and their
leaders are scum to the highest degree. Between refusing to
consider american candidates, mandatority never ending
"crunch" time and suppressed wages I can only warn others
to stay as far away from the companies listed in this
article as possible, especially if you have an engineering
degree.

If you don't actually do anything its can be a pretty
rewarding career assuming you have a knack for abusing
others... such actions are highly rewarded at these
companies. The number of H1-B visas I saw pleading for
relief would astound even the Foxconn taskmasters.

H1-B visas are one of the major motivations behind the "immigration reform" being talked about in Washington DC. The purpose is to drive down tech salaries.

Don't believe them when they claim they are trying to improve labor conditions for minorities or something. To truly help non-US-citizens they would be requesting more green cards and US citizenship. H1-B leaves a person in a limbo world where they are essentially an indentured servant of the company. And the result is lower wages for everyone.

Intel's hiring and HR fiasco has been a running joke in the industry for decades now.

Read iWoz (by Steve Wozniak) to find out about Jobs' behavior at Apple.

Intuit appears to be at the center of this class action suit.

The real surprise is that Google joined them. Good thing Facebook didn't!
Offsite backups are a must

Depending on your threat model, they don't even have to be outside the house. If petty burglary is what you are defending against, a disk in a quiet corner of your basement is probably plenty.

I bring up threat models a lot, because I'm still fascinated with the model of data security as an adversarial relationship in which you can characterize your enemy, and thus qualify "good enough".
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
Actually, it gave up on performing _everything_ client-side, and now renders the first page server-side, and then handles subsequent rendering client-side.

It found a performant happy medium, which is something I hope React will enable a lot more people to do with a lot less work.
The Dead Hand is also worth a read.
Alternative blog platforms based on Dropbox
The reason behind the deliberately obtuse system of paying is tipping. Unless you change your culture you're not going to solve the problem.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (2012)
More information:

Analog clocks have always annoyed me, so I decided to make my own. This is the logical solution I think. There's only one hand, which moves round once a day and shows where the sun is on the map. In the photo it is nearly 10pm in the UK so the sun is over the Alaska timezone. The 6am-6pm line is your horizon, so the top half is your daytime.

This one is for GMT/UTC - you'd need to rotate the map for different timezones, to put your location at the top under the noon marker.

The map is an azimuthal equal-area projection, made with NASA's G.Projector: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/gprojector/

I bought a 24-hour clock and simply inserted the printed map in place, after removing the minute and second hands.﻿

Make your own!
The typical response I hear to the idea of more widespread labor unions or AMA-like professional associations for programmers and network/systems/storage/database administrators is that if someone is really talented, they can negotiate a good salary, and that labor organizing together would just protect the lazy and the slackers.

You hear this same thing when someone is lowballed a salary number, or has to put up with some other annoying workplace condition, it's said the person should negotiate this all up front with the employer, and that the person's lawyer should get involved in the negotiation.

As if one person has any chance negotiating against a Fortune 500 company's HR department, legal department etc. (or the equivalent forms coming from some venture backed firm whose VC's lawyer's help with the HR legal forms). Especially when the heads of tech companies are united ( http://www.fwd.us ) to trying to flood the Valley with low-paid workers chained to the H1-B visa, driving down wages and shortening the careers of programmers ( http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html ).

Now on top of that, we see that the companies are united in trying to drive down wages. It's not just one Fortune 500 company doing this, it's the management of all of them doing it together. Yet the idea of programmers and admins organizing to defend their interests? Well only complainers do that. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt organize for their collective interests, but any tech who did that must have something wrong with him - he's a complainer, lazy, whatever. We shouldn't be organized to have our interests defended.

It's a zero-sum issue with two potential beneficiary sides. There are those of us who work, and create wealth being screwed by this. There are those on this board who benefit from this exploitation and thus will pick at points in this article, in this post and so on. Why wouldn't they, they're the ones who parasitically benefit from this expropriation and exploitation.
You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
A NAS is my preferred choice, over a PC. Smaller than most any PC I could cobble together, lower power, quieter, unassuming. They even make WiFi-equipped models.

Which just made me think of something- if you are concerned about network security and isolating your backups, what's to stop you from keeping the NAS unconnected to your WLAN, and at time of archival, explicitly establishing P2P WiFi connections with the NAS from the client PC...
This. The amount of code I write that never gets touched again after a paper goes to press is staggering.
I assume you're aware of who raganwald is, the person you're replying to? Not technically Silicon Valley, but close enough.

I've deliberately kept my account "low-profile" for exactly this reason.

I'm in SV and frequently rub shoulders with these people. Trust me, they're not ignorant. They've picked a side already.

But it's so much easier to play hardball with a new hire who doesn't know anything; thus this kind of thing is "ignored."
I am doing the same thing right now. I had a lot of trouble billing. I'm just horrible at recording everything.

Now I have something like a retainer. The idea being that I get paid X dollars per month that includes 15 hours of work. If I end up working more than that, I bill $150 per hour. Because this customer is very low maintenance, I've never done anything near 15 hours in a month.

I think I actually get paid slightly less but it's more predictable for both parties.
I strongly disagree that the average tech worker is on the "beneficiary side" of the inequality gap. This is a case of people looking around themselves and seeing they seem to be above average, and concluding that they are on the rich side. Reminds me of a ten-year-old article [1] that presented the remarkable finding that 39% of Americans believe they are or will one day be among the top 1%.

It's certainly in the interests of those REALLY on the right side of the gap to have tech workers believe they are on their side.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hop...
Same here. I didn't know OS X had disk encryption. And I went ahead and enabled encryption on my Nexus 4 as well.
Hi Jonas, we did! Thanks for your wishes, you still in Chiang Mai?
I'm not sure DAU is the best stat for looking at engagement.
I agree with your dissatisfaction with the dearth of data. Unfortunately in bio(chem) fields, pre-prints are rare. Usually theory papers are too.
> Depending on your threat model, they don't even have to be outside the house. If petty burglary is what you are defending against, a disk in a quiet corner of your basement is probably plenty.

Being outside of the house protects it equally well against fires/floods/earthquakes/pets too. Protection against burglary is an added bonus.
I'd go that route except I'm not around to help him through much of anything. I'm probably going to buy him the Prag's book on learning to program with Minecraft extensions or one of the entry level books geared towards kids.

But it'd still be helpful if he could e-mail me questions, look up things on Stack Overflow or something, and so on.
So, anyone who has any sort of income at all should be humble and content, because while someone may be artificially hindering their income and networth, at least they aren't a homeless person on the street with no income. I guess . . .?
Inspiring Quotes for Startups
And surfacing every so often to see if Radio 4 is still on the air :)
Pope Francis Declares the Internet a 'Gift From God'
True, but as the article seems to point out, the people at the top tend to be major shareholders of the company they work for, as well for the other companies in the group that they were board members.

So, in that train of thinking, they double-dipped by helping the bottom line of multiple companies of which they profit from with their illegal agreements.

Remember how Jobs was considered such a good person for taking a $1 (or something low like that) salary at Apple? How much stake in the Apple stock did he have? He wasn't benefiting from a salary from Apple, but probably was from Apple's profit margins. Profit margins that likely benefited from such agreements.
People riding the bus have always been able to do things like read, study, write, etc., whether or not they were knowledge workers.
Oh yes, being somewhere other than your house has very clear upsides, but an appropriate location is not always forthcoming. For example, I would consider it pretty poor form to plug in a personal networked backup box at my desk at work. That kind of move can also pose a risk to my sustained employment!
Cyphertite[1] works very will for encrypted backups.

It splits your data in chunks, encrypts them on the fly while sending them to the cloud. It doesn't use much space, apart from a little metadata, and you don't have to worry about the NSA, as the encryption keys are only on your local machine.

[1] https://www.cyphertite.com
It doesn't matter how convincing it is or isn't as long as you are just choosing to pretend you believe it.
So choose to work for a startup that doesn't do that. There are plenty of profit sharing companies out there. Or become a quant where you can eat what you kill.

Inequity, really has nothing to do with fairness. If the startup can't hire, they will offer more until they do hire (or go out of business or worse never achieve). What you can negotiate is based on your position. If you are ex-Google or Facebook you can make bank at a more established tech company looking to turnaround (cough.. cough.. Yahoo) or at a startup looking for "top talent" or get access to VC funding. It is the same dynamics you see in professional sports.
They should have just incremented on the F-16, now that is an exellent fighter - so elegant and simple. One of the F-16 designers has some great insights on the F-35: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQB4W8C0rZI
It might work. Chrome already saves all your passwords on Google's servers (if you allow it too) and Apple does the same with Keychain on iCloud. So it's definitely going there, and if you can get users to trust your service, it might take off.

Think of it like an emergency service for your digital life (both private and business).
NIH paylines are, for many areas, in the single digits. There are a hell of a lot of good, "legit" ideas that aren't getting funded.
I wonder what the average value of computer hardware is vs the average exploitable value of the data on that hardware and how it's changed over time.

I've never heard of a thief who's tried to use the data from a randomly stolen computer for further profit. Maybe with bitcoin and other technologies, the calculus will start shifting and thieves will become more interested in stealing data than hardware.
My only gripe (so far): I don't think "eventhough" is a word (though I suppose it is now!).
A founder appeals to Chicago to let go of Silicon Valley-sized dreams
Hmm. Then you have to have your encryption key after the catastrophy, which might be problematic.

On the other hand, if you don't require that, then somebody could spoof you...
You can get the bytecode in Ruby too: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.0/RubyVM/InstructionSequenc...
Whenever I read about software that needs to be perfect I think of this article [1].

> But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
I agree with the offsite backups, but I find it to be impractical for a lot of my data.

I have over 8TB of data at my house, and getting that backed up offsite is not trivial.
But then where do you safely backup/store the encryption key?
This conduct is obviously despicable, though certainly not out-of-character for Steve Jobs (all due respect for his talents). However, I generally believe this will resolve (and has been resolving) itself via market mechanisms. The mistaken assumption is that the only competition here is between Apple, Google etc and that it is focused primarily on income.

The market is a lot more subtle than that:

1. Hackers are not simply mercenaries, esp. the best.
2. A decent % of the best are involved in startups, either as founders or early hires.
3. "Acquihires" are a mechanism for the best engineers to get paid more "outside" the system.
4. Aside from industry, there is competition from academia etc.
If the encryption keys are only on your local machine, how do you recover the data when you lose your local machine?
I think that's a good idea. I know I'll be looking for some examples in a couple of months when I have enough time to dedicate setting one up properly.
As long as enterprise continues to shift to a no-install web application based IT infrastructure, fad driven client based "web dev" will continue to increase in frequency and prominence. If (when?) people realize that the browser actually can't do everything this might change, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It's too easy to save a buck now by minimizing application development and support costs (browser-based web app vs. native) and let the poor idiot who takes over management five years from now worry about the fallout.
Is this a claim that your colleagues in construction are the same housing activists your OP is demonizing?
I don't agree that these agreements are ethical, but can someone explain how they're different from the way a professional sports team manages the rules for players transitioning from team to team? Perhaps the leagues should have more oversight too?

Note that this completely ignores the NFL's non-profit status ... why was that ever granted?
Ask HN: What malicious things can someone do with a copy of your passport?
In a currently popular HN article about someone getting all of their stuff stolen[1], they mention that a person likely got hold of copies of their passport. I have also had concerns about someone potentially getting their hands on one of the many copies of my passport I have floating around. Should I be concerned though? What malicious things could a person potentially do with the information on a passport (US or otherwise)?

[1] http://levels.io/100-to-0-things/
> He also has, or at the very least had, a Top Secret security clearance.

Top Secret clearance is reviewed every five years and in theory is revoked once the person no longer has a Need to Know. Since Bill is no longer active at Microsoft, I would guess that he does not have a Need to Know.
When clicking on the comments link I get an "Unknown." message.

Looks like you have extra forward slashes in the comments link.
"https://news.ycombinator.com//item?id=7111627"
Fenwick trees demystified
I actually don't see a point:

1) why should i publish my financial data?
2) how can i be sure, that it does not leak?
A very large amount of weight, at least in NIH grants of the size we'd be talking about, is preliminary data.

One paper that's not even in press yet isn't going to set off any fireworks in a grant review committee, especially with funding as tight as it is right now.
The problem is less about the technique, but about the flawed assumptions about the data that they used, and how they assumed that it was a valid basis for a paper. That undermines the whole thing, no matter the rigor of the analysis.

The medium matters, too. I'm all for people discussing crazy ideas and seeing what sticks, but when they wrote a paper about it and submitted it to arXiv.org ("Submissions to arXiv should conform to Cornell University academic standards."), they staked their reputation. Why wasn't this just a blog post?
I keep a USB stick in my cube. This requires manually rotating it out every so often, but it doesn't get me fired.
You should print it or write it down and store it in a secure place.
He has always been there.

"Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350. Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak
Ask HN: Do you find value in FoundersCard?
The entire premise of this is flawed. I posted a huge ranty comment on Anil's page, but the TL;DR:

* Tech companies have no expertise providing social services.

* It is a very bad idea to have public services delivered at the whim of private companies.

The answer to this is taxes. You want to criticize Google? Criticize them for using offshore tax shelters.

There also seems to be a longing for Google to swoop in and somehow fix politics, but really, unless money or technology solves the problem, Google is not the answer.
Interesting. I have not seen this. Nor have I seen any vitriol whatsoever directed at these equally important members of the "herd."
I love my Surface 2. I have a couple iPads and Android tablets (if you count the Kindle Fire) in a drawer here and wouldn't trade my Surface for all four of them if I had to choose.
UniPress Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs aka Soft Hoarder Emacs) had a VI emulation mode, that when you went :q, switched you back into a shell buffer that had its mode lines hidden, with all the keyboard bindings set so you couldn't tell you were in Emacs.

The only vi command I know is :q!
I think modern software engineering really needs to start banking on provable languages with strong type systems. Instead of hoping and testing with Monte Carlo sims, let's prove an algorithm once as correct and move on from there.
> Oh yes, being somewhere other than your house has very clear upsides, but an appropriate location is not always forthcoming.

It's not too hard to find one. Unless you're completely anti-social you probably have at least one tech-savvy friend that can understand the need for this kind of setup. Even better if you have more than one friend (hopefully not too be an "if") then you can have a "round robin" approach with a group of friends. An open source (so the crypto can actually be vetted) version of BTSync[1] would be great for this.

> For example, I would consider it pretty poor form to plug in a personal networked backup box at my desk at work. That kind of move can also pose a risk to my sustained employment!

Haha. Yes plugging in random networked boxes at the office might arouse some (just!) concern. When I wrote that piece I was thinking specifically of my company as I'm the boss :D

[1]: http://www.bittorrent.com/sync
I was talking about Minuum, not Swype there. For Minuum, "maximizing alternation" is not a priori obviously the same as "maximizing the information theory distinction" between two subsequent keypresses. In fact, the fact that you are trying to maximize separation tends to imply that you are thereby tending to make the next keystroke more predictable than it should be, which is to say that the likely next keystrokes have clumps where too many of the most likely "next letters" are all on one side, which is suboptimal from the information theory perspective. QWERTY is not likely to be optimal for this use case; it may even turn out that the optimal keyboard resembles it as little as QWERTY resembles Dvorak.
Something that I think gets forgotten in tech salary discussions is inflation. Consider that a $122k salary in 2001 would be $160k/yr in 2013, adjusted for inflation.
It's here: http://creatingplugins.com/book

Like I said, it's mainly for beginners but I'm working on another one (using LeanPub they're awesome!) which will be much more in-depth.
did some searching... turns out you can get medium content as rss feeds as well.