skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is that in reality Google is not 61% Black. If it were, you'd have a point.

And people do complain about lack of diversity in the NFL/NBA, on both sides.

These are such small percentages that you wouldn't even need to reduce head count to increase representation, just hire a few more workers. But even if they did have to replace, why are you so focused on saving every last White or Asian soul to the detriment of addressing the problem?
Not many, and they would mostly be acqui-hires or early hires. Google strongly prefers candidates from a list of preferred universities. If you didn't graduate from one, you'd need to be coming from another employer in order to get hired there (and even then, my understanding is that those with degrees from those universities have a better chance of being hired, all other things being equal).

They also hire (or at least recruit) based on Open Source work (I've gotten recruitment letters from them based on a book I wrote and some Open Source software I've been involved in), but I doubt that I would have been hired just on the strength of that. I've never taken them up on the offer of an interview, as I liked working for myself too much, but I suspect I would not measure up during the process, given my self-taught background and unimpressive education history. I know several folks who have been hired by Google, including folks who got the recruitment letter based on Open Source software work, and they tend to also have the strong college background.

In short, I believe that for those folks who end up at Google, they very likely got there by way of a good university. So, the upstream needs to be fixed for the diversity at Google to be fixed.
Well, only one side of the queue was wait-free. The other side, the consumer, was a whole mess of queues and buffers. It's simply the process of putting something in the queue that is fast. Getting out of that queue is a terribly slow operatino.
The problem the US has in this regard is the blunt, stupid way we do it. "Race" is an example.

I work at a consulting company with very competitive hiring. Many of my teammates are "African American" according to the standard US classification, but guess what? Most of them, although born and raised in the US, are the children of Nigerian immigrants.

A candid discussion with one of my co-workers on a recent business trip revealed his issue with this. He is a descendent of slaves, and has roots in Alabama and Georgia. The policies of correcting for slavery, Jim Crow, and its resulting consequences are benefiting people who, due to immigrating in the last 30 years, weren't affected by it. My company is getting credit, the universities who admit these students are getting credit, and none are actually addressing the true group of people who were historically forbidden the right to read, to work, to own land, or to get an education of any kind. He isn't at all angry at our wonderful Nigerian-American coworkers.... he just feels that these hamfisted measures could easily be adjusted to help the groups they were designed to.

Having a broad spectrum of people with different levels of melanin may be one indicator of diversity, but it can be a poor one. I have never, ever worked on a software team with another person who grew up in a trailer park or even has Appalachian roots. But its cool. Another white guy who grew up in Sunnyvale is going to be exactly the same as me, because we both have northern European ancestry. Problem solved.
Cryptome Global Archives Kickstarter
Thanks! Added to the wishlist.
“you’re a chick, leave this crap to REAL developers”

Seriously, what kind of a dick says that to anybody - even if it was nothing to do with gender, it's an egregious offence.
The per-platform pricing is ridiculous.

Would someone please build an open source competitor and put these jerks out of business?
Over 50% of this article is a job posting... I find it a little messed up to take a real issue and spin it as a hiring campaign. A footnote about the positive work environment at Netguru? Sure. But this is just plain advertising.
I think he's happy with the engines he has, as well as the ability to say "here's what we're doing" without someone else having the final say.
"26,000,000 is the commonly agreed on estimate of USSR deaths from the war."

At one level you should temper this appalling statistic: a whole lot of it was "self-inflicted", by the games and machinations Stalin played. Mass slaughter of the USSR's own people was a policy long before the war---that the people who did their 1939 census were sent to the Gulag should be sufficient telling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) ---and the war just enabled a continuation if not increase in this.

Note also how the continuous purges of Army officers left the Red Army in a crippled state prior to the invasion.
Honestly, I don't know how this interacts with cache lines.

As far as I know, Intel has not released any official details about what the PAUSE instruction does other than that it slows down spin loops to a reasonable rate. The best source I know of for this information is the Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Optimization Reference Manual (http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...). It is fairly vague about what the instruction does, but gives some useful information in 13.5.3 "Spin-Wait Loops", as well as 8.4 "Thread Synchronization", and in particular 8.4.2 "Synchronization for Short Periods" which says:

"On a modern microprocessor with a superscalar speculative execution engine, [a spin loop] results in the issue of multiple simultaneous read requests from the spinning thread. These requests usually execute out-of-order with each read request being allocated a buffer resource. On detection of a write by a worker thread to a load that is in progress, the processor must guarantee no violations of memory order occur. The necessity of maintaining the order of outstanding memory operations inevitably costs the processor a severe penalty that impacts all threads."

So it seems that the concern here is that (without a PAUSE) the speculative execution engine effectively unrolls the spin loop and executes a sequence of reads on the sequence variable. This queues up a list of pending memory operations that need to be unrolled in order to ensure that the result is the same as if they were executed sequentially -- even though in this case it wouldn't make any difference.
Google and Tech's diversity challenge
Thanks! As it turns out, progress tracking is at the very top of our feature list. :-)
Lol. Why on earth do they do this?
on level 5 i tried to modify the url, but my quotes are automatically encoded, also tried encoding it using %22.. but didn't work.. I'm using chrome on osx, could it be a browser thing, i managed to get it to work by manually modifying the html using the developer tools :p
If You Work in Silicon Valley, Odds Are You're a White Man
Both situations involve someone with money taking a bet on a currently non-profitable venture hoping it'll pay off in the future. SpaceX wasn't profitable when Musk put money in.
Low-skilled work is a poverty trap that drains people of energy they might otherwise be using to learn more valuable skills. In fact, it's an anecdote not uncommon that more high school graduates are going to college because filling out FAFSA forms has a greater expected payout than a job search for part-time fast-food wages.

Perhaps the GP didn't get the causality quite right, but we are entering some kind of a dystopian twilight zone with regard to employment. Not too long ago, there was the story about a Walmart opening up in the D.C. area, and that one single store received __25,000__ job applications. That's a lower acceptance rate than Harvard, getting a job at Walmart is literally more cut-throat than getting into Harvard.
Wow, that is well hidden. Also: I don't get "Live" form. Wouldn't a "hey you wrote Ruby, but here is your .jar" form make more sense?
There are some people who loathe eating, and derive zero pleasure from their taste sense. They perceive meals as a chore. Those people are their very small target market for the complete-meal-replacement aspect of their product.
There are English professors who are legitimately hard to game, people who are smarter than most or all of us but have chosen to focus on something different. Yes, there's more noise in the system in the humanities, but don't underestimate them just because they have a different skill set.

However, the game-the-system students generally avoid those professors, who get a reputation for being difficult graders. So your point has validity. I just object to the idea that all humanities professors can be "hacked". Yes, there are some who grade highly any students who confirm their biases, but quite a few of them are smarter than any of us.
This article is ridiculous. While there are certain areas (e.g. pattern matching) where a typical English major is likely to do well, rigorous logical thinking of the sort needed when we program computers is simply not developed as well as it is in CS, EE, and various other programs.

As a third-year undergrad I took a 400-level course on logic from the humanities department. I remember being blown away by how inept the average students there seemed at first. They were simply unprepared for the torrent of proofs, deductions, tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc. The way of thinking required to get through that class easily was one which most second-year CS students had, but not the student body at large. I came to realize I had been groomed for this class for years already.

In a 200-level CS course we learned to use Karnaugh Maps. This was not optional. There is a difference between analyzing digital logic and writing papers outside CS. Not that one is better than the other, but you don't hear CS folks claiming they're well suited for writing poetry.
So much nostalgia. It's funny but looking at these fonts reminds me of the good times programming these machines.
If you find yourself at a company that sucks, for whatever reason, kick their asses to the curb and find a new one.

And don't forget to call them out for it, publicly. I know that's easy to say, and in reality it's going to be hard to deal with the inevitable onslaught of abuse you're going to take for it. But companies have to make an effort to ensure that toxic environments are eliminated.
Simple customer here as well.

Enjoy the service, thought I'd add on to the downsides as well:

Some merchant accounts view your Simple account as a Pre-paid card, which may (has for me) caused issues with refunds & deposits. From simple's fantastic (they really are fantastic and responsive) support:

"We share a BIN (the first 4 digits of your card number) with a lot of prepaid cards, and a lot of merchants have policies about anything that looks like a prepaid card. That being said, your Simple card is not a prepaid card -- it's associated with a personal checking account at our partner bank."
> In “Dante’s Hell and Its Afterlife,” an undergraduate course I teach at my university, students have to work hard to achieve good results (not to mention an A-level grade) on a research essay. The “excellent” paper will contain a substantive thesis that is appropriately focused, coherent, and interpretive, not merely descriptive; a detailed analysis of well-chosen examples to support the argument; a logical ordering of parts, each contributing to the whole, with transitions and topic sentences that advance and crystallize the main points; an effective use of information from credible sources, correctly cited and documented; and all expressed in clear, concise, grammatically correct prose.

So true. Writing is highly technical and very difficult. Just before I started at my state university, it added a writing test that all students had to pass before receiving a degree because employers complained about the lack of writing skills. Several years in, most people were still failing on their first try.

Unfortunately, writing doesn't have debugging tools, tests and output for feedback to let you know if what you put together works. Rather, you need someone who is a good writer to provide honest feedback.

Also difficult is that developing good writing skills requires good instructors / mentors. I have had too many writing classes with instructors who would give praise for just about anything. All of my instructors in my first year of taking writing classes told me how great I was. It wasn't until I took a technical writing class in which my first paper came back a mess of red ink that I finally felt like I was learning something. That class was one of the most valuable I have ever taken. She told us at the beginning of the class that few people can write well, we probably won't ever be able to write well either (true for me,) but she would help us become passable enough to get through the writing test.

Granted, most writing classes don't focus on the same items as technical writing. But with as much effort as this instructor put into every one of my papers, this can't be something many instructors are willing to do.

How do you become a good writer and get good feedback? I don't know.

Compare this to many other classes in which the instructor is largely a guide and you do most or all of your learning on your own.

ETA: I think the instructor and the quality of the course is extremely important. Many subjects in college can be setup to be easy to coast through or rigorous. The name on the course isn't as important as the contents.
Such as managing complex build processes.
To clarify, I was not endorsing "the right to be forgotten", just saying that while it's probably nearly impossible to actually scrub some information from the internet, scrubbing it from the top tier search engines is good enough for most practical purposes anyway, since most people are likely to be primarily concerned about their superficial web presence.

That said, the attitude I'm attributing to your post (and I could be mis-reading you) underscores why people would want to be "forgotten". I specifically said "accused", not convicted or even tried. Anyone can make an accusation and too often there's a "where there's smoke there's fire" attitude which is antithetical to the presumption of innocence. It's exactly the kind of thing that you don't want to show up in cursory searches, because there's no context and usually there's not a lot of context in these stories.
What's more likely:

a) White males are better at software engineering and that's why the majority of software engineers are white males (there is no scientific evidence to support this whatsoever).

b) There are socio-economic factors that lead more white males into software engineering than anyone else (there is ample scientific evidence to support this theory).

Clearly there is a bias at work somewhere. It's not necessarily a hiring problem, but rather one that starts further up the "supply chain" (if you will). We're trying to fix that.
Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that wiggle room. CS degree definitely signals something - a minimum competency that is uncertain in a humanities student.
I was unaware of the PAUSE function. It certainly did belong inside my spin-loop. The other recommendation of cache-line alignment I was following, and it does make a difference.
Punnery and funny titles are probably contrary to HN ethos?

In any case the thrust of the article appears to be the race to be the first to produce liquid helium; that could easily have been incorporated if the HN editor wanted to make the title better.

Personally I'd favour an editorial subtitle for cases where the HN editors deem the title to be less useful.
No, mid 90s, not too long after the curtain fell. I'd add that we didn't know anything about where we were going which turned into some hilarity when we arrived with winter clothes expecting cold and permafrost (being in Siberia and all that), and instead getting 100 degF weather with 90% humidity. The exchange was loaded with these kinds of cultural and environmental learning experiences, neither group knew anything about each other. It was really a meeting of two complete alien cultures. It was really the point of that kind of thing though wasn't it?

The Russian families who took us in were some of the warmest, most hospitable people I've ever met. They really worked hard to integrate us as well as they could and give us a memorable experience. In fact almost everywhere we went, even out into the deep countryside, we were treated incredibly well by almost everybody.

We got to return the favor later when their kids came to stay with us, and apparently that particular exchange program continued on for many years after that. I'm almost sad to say I don't think the Americans they met were as universally warm or welcoming.
Staging isn't free. While true that the second stage vehicle will be simpler, the combined second and first stage together could be more complicated/heavier than the Skylon.

Noticeably, the point of the Skylon and SABRE is that it's possible to use a common engine core in airbreathing and pure rocket mode, thus potentially generating weight savings.

I'm sure someone sat down and did the calculations. I have this feeling that a lot of the times when you actually sit down and work out the math for a range of assumptions, you generally come down to 'eh, maybe A, maybe B, so may as well try A'.
You don't merely need engineers to design the thing. You also have to actually build what you design, custom manufactured out of exotic materials in small batches, and then test those components (often to destruction) before building a slightly-more ambitious prototype. A test or launch also involves a large land area for safety, significant support staff handling hazardous material, and miles of red tape to secure the firing range and airspace.

This build-test-debug loop costs millions and may take months or years, and a single spectacular failure can sink the entire project (e.g. DC-X).

Most engineering is not like software! For example, most of the cost of a bridge is not the civil engineering to design the structure...
I've been using it full-time for the past 2-3 years, in teams of roughly half a dozen devs. I still use SVN for my part-time open source work out of choice.

At this stage I'd say I'm very comfortable with git at the CLI (I only ever use source control tools in CLI mode), but it took me a long time to get there.
Good luck with the pledging system. :) I'll do it at 75%.
That's not how demographics/statistics works.
We are in a golden age for journalism
> A key requirement for logging is to write statements, from any thread, in order, to a single log-file.

I do not agree that it's a necessary requirement that all threads must write to a single log-file.

> Formatting strings, required by a log system, is a slow operation.

I also do not agree that it's a necessary requirement that a log system must format strings. Binary log files have their uses. I've used Google Protocol Buffers quite happily. They may not be appropriate for extremely high-speed logs, like a low-latency trading system implies, but they have their uses. I'd be tempted to try something like Cap'n Proto, if I were taking a whack at it.
If you're using a gate keeping process, it doesn't matter what the committers even use then. They can just push a patch to the gate keeper.

You sound pretty close-minded and relatively inexperienced if you would turn down a great career because they used something other than git. It's borderline idiotic to make such a large decision based on something inconsequential. Maybe that's okay in the Web app industry where most of the jobs are just variants of the same thing so you have plenty to filter through, but the idea of turning down a job at somewhere you've been hoping to work like NASA or Google just because they don't use a tool you like is one of the dumbest things I've heard in a long time.
That's essentially what pointers to string literals are. They are indexes into a constant data segment which contains the actual strings.
“you’re a chick, leave this crap to REAL developers”.

I really don't understand guys who say (or think) shit like this. Honestly, it annoys me not so much because it's sexist, or misogynistic, or bigoted or whatever, but rather because it's fucking stupid.

I've been doing this stuff professional for around 20 years now, and I've worked with oodles of female programmers over the years, and I've never seen any reason to believe that female programmers are in any way less competent than their male counterparts. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

It really boggles the imagination... where do these guys come up with this shit? Making crude jokes, sexually charged statements, some of these other things I can understand (that doesn't make them right mind you, I'm just saying I can understand the place some of it comes from), but I can't even begin to understand a mindset of insinuating that women are less capable as developers/hackers/programmers/whatever.

To anybody who believes that women are somehow inherently inferior at coding, let me just say that you're wrong. Absolutely, totally, completely wrong. Maybe you haven't worked with enough women, or maybe you had the bad fortune to work with the wrong women, or maybe you just weren't paying attention, but it's just not true.
Funny that a blurry stock photo changed your mind so fast. I wonder how you've been conditioned to respond that way.
Where Bars Outnumber Grocery Stores – Data Visualizations
I bet he'd be super good working in a library.
It sounds like what you might need is purpose. There is a formula for finding your purpose. Just answer these questions:

Who are you?
What do you do?
Who do you do it for?
What want or need is this intended to address?
What changes for them as a result of what you do?
OpenSSH, OpenSSL and NTP receive funding from Linux Foundation
Disagreeable or not, I find it amusing that he opens his piece with a rubric regarding what constitutes an "excellent" paper in his course, and your last sentence contains such a glaring fallacy that it seems entirely likely he'd dock you heavily for it (and rightly so). It's also incredibly ironic considering the context of the argument at hand.
I guess that's what happens when you go playing around with things you don't know anything about...

http://youtu.be/4-HOvQUL2zI?t=21m20s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Lost_(1974_televis...
The reason why craigslist is so successful is because people can buy anything depending on the need. So I am not sure if there is a way to quantify what people are buying "most". I would say "everything". Look at any "for sale" section. There are lot of ads on a daily basis. For example, I have bought furniture, laptops, cell phones, cars on craigslist but if I needed anything else, I would not hesitate. The only reason I don't buy on craigslist is if I need something new OR it is for my kids which I don't want used.
Your son improvising and making mistakes is a good thing. Mistakes are what cause us to learn. To make them in an environment with little downside is a great way to grow as a person as opposed to making them in the real world where you could get fired for them.
Not in the way you arrogantly and incorrectly keep suggesting.

Google is not going to in any way limit the intake of qualified candidates. It is mission critical for us to hire as many talented people as possible. Most teams at the company really need more people.
TrueCrypt 7.1a is still safe to use. So is GPG.
Why Hollywood Is Donating Big Money to an NRA-Loving Republican
Maybe without enough experience it gets hard to decide "holistically" indeed. On the other hand, going into "let's design some class hierarchy first!" without enough experience is just as bad; and most likely even worse.
What payload are you using on that level? Keep in mind that ";" is often treated as a parameter separator in URLs, similarly to &. If you put it into the mock URL bar it will terminate the value of your parameter (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string#Web_forms)

PS. Consider it reported, thanks!