skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds to me like you believe that some ethnic groups have intrinsic (genetic) advantages over others in some areas.

Like most things to do with race there is a tiny, tiny sliver of truth in this, but not enough to explain the outcomes.

sigh

Lets look at sports.

Sprints: The ACTN3 gene[1] is associated with the fast-twitch muscles, and is more prevalent in people of West African descent. Out of the last 7 Olympic 100m mens finals all 56 finalists have been of West African descent. Only 2 out of the top 500 100m race times are by people without African descent.

Case closed? No. The proportion of sprint wins by West Africans is much higher than the prevalence of the ACTN3 gene would explain, and other power sports (notably weight lifting) are dominated by other ethnic groups with a more average distribution of the gene.

Distance running: The Kalenjin tribe (mostly from Kenya) has dominated distance running since the late 1990s. Most of their competition has come from Ethiopian runners and the occasional North African (especially in the women's events)[2].

They do have a genetic advantage: they tend to be very skinny, with long legs and short torsos. But you can find these attributes in any population group. More surprising is that elite non-African runners performance has decreased over time: For example, of the top 10 Marathon times by British athletes only 1 (in 8th position) is since 2000, and 6 are pre 1990 (including the 2 fastest times).

This indicates something else is going on, that can't just be explained by genetics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACTN3

[2] http://www.iaaf.org/records/toplists/road-running/marathon/o... - the best place person without a African heritige is Ronaldo Da Costa at 57.
I agree. I'm not very good at getting my point across. People are often confused by what I say and I can tell they didn't quite get what I meant. I wish I could get past that.

Thanks for your comment (and the other guy's). I'll look through all the links.
Can you please qualify the "neglected projects" statement? Looking at the commits on both projects show that they are not neglected.

phantomjs: https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commits/master

phantomjs-node: https://github.com/sgentle/phantomjs-node/commits/master
I wrote this comment on an earlier soylent thread that got buried, but I think it could find a big market in people who care A LOT about eating specific nutrient proportions.

I'm working on the website Eat This Much (http://www.eatthismuch.com) and a huge portion of our audience are people that want to eat EXACTLY 40% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 30% from protein (that's part of the zone diet, as an example). Our meal plan generator allows you to request those proportions, but sometimes it can't meet the exact targets due to any number of other constraints, and it's a huge source of complaints from our users. It's a pretty complicated problem to solve while trying to give people a varied and interesting diet with real food, but Soylent makes it very simple. I use my own site as much as possible, and I'm excited to have it give me half of my calories from Soylent (probably my breakfast and lunch).
Condoleezza Rice - Neo-con and socially liberal

Christine Lagarde - Neo-con internationalist banker

Robert Birgeneau - Lifer academic liberal

Conservative... I do not think this word means what you think this word means.
Would be akin to using a band saw to make an intricately carved figurine. Sure, it is doable, but probably more effort than it is worth for a person. "Right" tools for the right job and all of that.

After that, I can't resist linking this:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xoe7yc_whitetail-365-seriou...

It probably helps the analogy that even though I saw every movement he made, I had no clue what he was making until I saw the actual product.
WebBot – Build Web Apps as Easily as Native Ones using Python
Like most open source software, no?

Apache 2.4 is a pretty solid web server. So is nginx. They both have their ups and downs, but unless you have highly specialised needs, either will do the job.
Indeed it was.

As was its ability to encrypt, apparently. I don't exactly count those as one in the same.
Why have dozens of steps and seventeen screenshots detailing how to migrate a Windows partition and only a joke line for the Linux version? And why Bitlocker? Then there was the license change, new version with different features... This imbalance of effort strikes me as incredibly odd if the author was merely rushed.
If you define "educated" as being a college graduate, more educated people voted Republican than Democrat in the last presidential election:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/245886/voter-turnout-of-t...
https://wukix.com/mocl (for Lisp)
Not even Mercurial :) Haha j/k I actually don't mind Mercurial, but I'd still rather work with git.
Your comment is confusing. How could there be literally no combination of fruits and vegetables that would match Soylent? Is Soylent using nutrients found only in beef and mineral water? I'm ignoring ginseng and ginko biloba. And despite my playful question, I am seriously asking.
demo on http://socket.computer - err, I knew new TLDs might be fairly annoying but didnt think they would totally break my brain's URL parser.

At first I thought that the article's author forgot to replace an intranet link.. nope its a new tld here to mess with our heads!
I disagree strongly with this, and I disagreed in 1981 as well :-) I feel that if the programming language is your operating system then you're doing it wrong because programming languages are fundamentally verbs to express computation, not to express resource management. Of course it won't surprise anyone that I'm also a big fan of interface contracts and being explicit about the invariants the use/require. Early in its life (and much to the chagrin of the Smalltalk community[1]) Java was a "single system image" language, basically Java all the way down. And that concept worked well on embedded/appliance applications but was a poor fit for multi-function/purpose platforms.

[1] I was looking at real estate in 1998 and the old ParcPlace systems buildings were up for lease, in one of the offices was a whiteboard labelled 'Adele's whiteboard' and on it in dried white board ink was 'Java subsumes Smalltalk' and under it was written in another hand 'and the world weeps.' I expect Smalltalk to outlive Java though.
Are you sure? He does say "binaries when run make no unexpected...".

And matching binaries is not a trivial task because of OS, compiler and SDK versions. The last time someone did this for Truecrypt it made the news: https://madiba.encs.concordia.ca/~x_decarn/truecrypt-binarie...
To be fair, the (real or perceived) opportunities for women and minorities at major tech companies like Google could very well influence the majors college students choose to pursue. If I were an 18 y.o. woman who read news articles or talked to family/friends in the industry who told me women are treated poorly at Google and the like, I might opt for a different degree. I have no idea how much of a factor this actually is in the proportions of college graduates, but I think it's worth considering as a possibility.
Trust me, your phrasing wasn't even bad -- the problem is literally just how sensitive the actual subject is (as I'm sure you've noticed). It's worse than debating race/politics/economy/etc, we just have to tread lighter than walking on eggshells when bringing up these matters in our society unfortunately.

And as you can see, this thread itself has already been flagged from the front pages as a result...
They are also very self-congratulatory.
That is why my production terminal windows are red background with yellow text, because I sometimes "space out" the prompt.
Founder Confessions: The Biggest Mistakes I’ve Made
I don't understand why everyone has focused so much on the beats headphones side of the acquisition instead of the fact the this is a way for apple to get into the streaming market without having to negotiate from the get go with labels who have been weary of them gaining even more control in the music market. When they negotiated the deals for iTunes they were not even a blip on the radar in the eyes of record labels. Sure, the headphones are the immediate value with the price margin, etc. But, in the end, I see the biggest benefit being gained from an apple backed streaming service.

REMEMBER, Apple didn't create iTunes, they bought it.
it's mostly envy.
Not necessarily.

You're assuming that the factors which drive women out of engineering do so independent of ability.

I would hypothesize that this is false, that the most interested and passionate women are least likely to be nudged out. Google should be comparing its ratio to that of their potential pool, which is presumably skewed high. If that's true, they should be expecting to get closer to 50%. (Not exactly 50, but better than the holistic ratio at least.).

Also, they can look at their specific source pools to get a less hypothetical target. Berkeley is ~50/50, for example. (http://www.wired.com/2014/02/berkeley-women/). But retroactively
No, it doesn't. Soylent doesn't solve the social problems of distribution, which are the real problems in developing nations.
Yet they need expertise in marketing?
I'd be inclined to agree with you in some cases ("any port in a storm"), but otherwise I would view a VSS or ClearCase shop as one that's possibly on the wrong side of the technology curve. I have worked with VSS, p4, cvs, svn, hg, and git (and arms length with evil things like ClearCase and more primitive stuff like RCS). Everyone should have an idea of the minimal toolchain they want to work with.

But that aside.. massive props to the Git team on 2.0!
"If people listen to rap music enough, they start to emulate the language, treatment and other thought patterns being drilled into their brains (it's voluntary brainwash/ thought programming really)."

I think Ben Horowitz will disagree with you, a couple of other VCs as well!
Google self-driving car has no steering wheel or brake
Thanks, for the link.

But you are talking of another 2+ years. That's a lot of time in software.
For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome
Sure you can.

I offer as much proof for my statement as this blog post does. Snowden had access to basically every NSA program, if you are going to disagree with them you'd better at least speak from authority, or better, offer specific proof.
> Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints.

I don't agree with that statement. At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other. (Source: Approx. 50% of all jokes, also science) I think that ethnic diversity will also result in more diverse viewpoints, even when passed through "purifying filters" such as elite college acceptance standards.
I'd be really curious to see the gender/ethnic breakdown of just the Google software engineers. As it stands it's hard to make a meaningful comparison between Google and the overall US population of CS majors.
I didn't knwo about this site, a true find: the writing and witticisms are fantastic, e.g.

"As [sic] unspecified assistant with quick reflexes reversed the helium valve, but he turned it either the wrong way or too far, because instead of halting the flow of helium, he caused it all to be vented into the laboratory. Dewar's notes do not indicate whether a high-pitched apology was offered."

(Although some proofreading would have been useful.)
The fundamental mistake that audio geeks make with Beats is to think that the best headphone delivers a flat response.

Beats headphones are not designed to deliver music accurately, they are designed to make it sound cooler.

Beats is like the Instagram of music. Yeah, you'll get an objectively higher quality from Photoshop, but Instagram is easier to use and makes things look cool.

Apparently there are quality issues with Beats, but that is exactly the sort of problem that Apple is well-equipped to solve.
My grandpa, Richard Williams, lived next door to me when I was a kid, and he helped raise me like a parent. He taught me carpentry, plumbing, and electricity, and through countless days together in his workshop he was the one who got me excited about hardware engineering.

I hope to live as he did: to travel every part of the world; to meet and befriend people of all cultures; to be easygoing, and full of childlike wonder; to be a friend even to former enemies; to be driven and hardworking to the point of exhaustion; to cheat death repeatedly; and to make the absolute most of our incredible time on this wonderful world.

:)
News flash! Generally liberal college students prefer liberal commencement speakers. Hardly a surprise, really. How many college students do you know who are looking to hear from George W. Bush or Ted Cruz?
This is my first time posting. Was it flagged by a moderator or did it just finally slip off the page?

I'm politically incorrect, and I kind of like it that way. It can cause issues, and sometimes I hurt people I know when I don't want to, but it's hard to have a real discussion when one side is whispering and the other is yelling.
People interested in experimental Lua type systems might also want to check out Typed Lua, André Maidl's ongoing dissertation project. He will be doing a presentation soon at the Dyla workshop:

http://www.lifl.fr/dyla14/
You can bet that as soon as they solve all the technical problems, Google will be lobbying to make them mandatory.
Google is pretty famous for letting Android contributions sit in a review queue forever to die. They effectively don't accept.
I'm not sure I would want to take this to its logical conclusion. Imagine if it was mandated that every female engineer had to participate in university events. Now the job responsibilities are different between the genders, and you've made the problem worse on a different axis (equality of job responsibilities).

Think about all the articles and blog posts written by female engineers who attend conferences and are insulted that they are perceived to be non-technical, or just a recruiter, and how such an initiative would make that worse.
Yeah, it seemed weird to me the conflation of conservative and Republican. I mean, how is Timothy Dolan not a conservative?
"Ensure" is a whole line of different products with different roles. Ensure Complete seems to be at least as much of a meal replacement as Soylent.
FWIW, git will never store two copies of the exact same file in the same repository, since the blobs will have the same SHA-1 hash.
Race is US, Gender is Worldwide.
I would have preferred George W. Bush over my commencement speaker. Hell, who'd say no to a former president?
Firstly, I'd appreciate it if you could tone down the personal insults and inflammatory language. Discrimination is inflammatory enough on its own. Thanks.

What does white-guilt mean, exactly?

I believe that economic gains made by whites at the expense of other races because of past racist policies reinforced by a historical power imbalance should not be reinforced.

I believe it is appropriate for active steps to be taken to make sure this power imbalance is not reinforced.

I do not believe this is a zero-sum game.

As if that makes it less racist. You know the story you just told me about the hiring manager throwing out a female's resume based on assumptions about her gender? You should re-read it. It applies to your views on white people.

I don't believe it does. I cannot see anything in my story or approach that excludes anyone based on colour, creed or religion. Instead it is explicitly about making sure people are included, not excluded.

To be clear, I think the story would have gone like this: Hirer sees white person's resume, says "oh, this person is white. They will probably drink too much coffee (not sure of a racist stereotype for whites). Damn, we'll have to interview them anyway because of diversity policy and they are qualified"

How does that make it racist?
Sadly TLDs are really getting out of hand. I was notified today that .ninja is now available. This coupled with Dr. Dre potentially joining the Apple board and the TrueCrypt announcement has made for a pretty surreal day in tech news.
Interesting.. my point is pretty valid then.
Bottom Line, if this was beats by Jack Dorsey, everyone would be jumping up and down but its a black rapper and everyone is confused. The first thing everyone said was a difference in culture. My experience at a fortune 50 marketing firms let's me know right away that this is a premium brand across the globe. Their headphones are priced at such a high premium and their brand recognition as cool and worn by celebrities and top sports stars, across sporting lines from european soccer to swimmers coming out at the olympics.

Lets cut the bullshit, we all know why everyone is scratching their heads, because this is not a 22yr old hoodie wearing white hacker. Close your eyes and picture "Beats by Jack Dorsey" and u will know what i am talking about. Some fool will post how this is not true, downvote the post et cetera, but it is what it is!
I think you really don't know what Perl 6 is, and are incorrectly inferring from some statements here that you "can run perl 5 code in perl 6" what that means, and what it's purpose is (library support, utilizing the massive amount of CPAN modules that already exist).

Perl 6 is not Perl 5, in the same way an iPad isn't still an Apple ][.

Other than that, the main problem I see is you taking a lot of opinion on what you think are good language features and transposing those desires onto "people" who decide what a modern language is. Many of those ideas are based in opinion, or in a language philosophy that is orthogonal to Perl's guiding philosophies, which are very strong and influenced it's design very much.
And likely a bug. Did you think to contact Evernote before sharpening your pitchfork?
I was under the impression the most common architecture for mobile devices is to support DMA (direct memory access) from the baseband to main memory. This would obviate the "finding an OS exploit" step described, as operating systems do not attempt to be secure against attackers with full memory access. Can anyone with knowledge of these phones' architectures clue us in on the specifics of the situation?
Agreed on Birgeneau, but I don't understand your comment regarding the first two. You realize "neo-con" is short for neo-conservative right?
If you want to learn more about Joshua Norton, I make a history podcast, and I talked about him (and Jose Sarria, another San Francisco celebrity) in episode 8:

http://bornyesterdaypodcast.com#episode8
Why is soylent not having a billion dollar DoD contract at this time?
In the super-low-price range, there is the OpenIntro Stats book[1] which costs < $10 in print. I haven't finished reading it, but so far it's been a good intro book for the material covered in a first-years stats---we used a different book in our class, but the material covered is the same.

[1] http://www.openintro.org/stat/
The veracity of each of those statements would increase substantially with a well placed "some".
My first job out of college happened to involve me working tangentially with the folks who maintained Visual SourceSafe. They didn't particularly like it either ;)
Apparently, plenty of people.
I don't have the statistics, but my impression from the Googlers I interact with is that they are generally older than the average developer.
They can at least track location while the phone is 'powered off'. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130723/12395923907/even-...

"According to Ryan Gallagher at Slate, the NSA, along with other agencies, are able to something most would feel to be improbable, if not impossible: track the location of cell phones even if they're turned off.
On Monday, the Washington Post published a story focusing on how massively the NSA has grown since the 9/11 attacks. Buried within it, there was a small but striking detail: By September 2004, the NSA had developed a technique that was dubbed “The Find” by special operations officers. The technique, the Post reports, was used in Iraq and “enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off.” This helped identify “thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq,” according to members of the special operations unit interviewed by the Post."

And possibly capture data...

"The FBI's use, in which cell phones' microphones were remotely activated to record conversations (even with the phones turned off), probably had some bearing on Snowden's request that journalists power down their phones and place them in the fridge. "
I agree - I certainly did leave that out. I still think we need to have consequences for crimes with victims, especially violent ones. But that's still only part of the equation: we need to have deterrences and corrections in the same way that there's preventative medicine and treatment.

Even for violent crimes, I don't think that locking people up should be the only response. Victim-centered approaches, like restorative justice circles for example, could and should be used more where applicable. The victim is mostly left out of the equation in our current justice system. We should also try to view instances of violence not as deliberate evil actions taken by people, but instead culminations of bad circumstances and bad choices. This is not to say there shouldn't be repercussions for the bad choices, but we should also offer support and rehabilitation to try to improve the circumstances.

Of course, there will always be the people who are beyond rehabilitation. Even then, for these kinds of people, 'prison' doesn't sound quite right to me.. 'mental institution' seems more appropriate.

On [1], I don't support the death penalty because there are so many errors made in sentencing. Even if we managed to make the error rate much lower, I personally don't think the cost of innocent lives would be worth the potential extra deterrence the threat of death provides over life imprisonment. Hell, even if the rate were 0%, I still wouldn't support it for moral reasons.
Oh sure they can. All you need is the capability to escalate from a remote buffer overflow in the baseband processor (e.g. in its networking stack) into a flashrom r/w capability.

Then you just reprogram the bb firmware to never switch off the baseband and to automatically start it upon insertion of a battery, and you're done. If you're good, intercept PIN usage so that you'll even be online without the user inputting the PIN.

Also, I don't buy the "the NSA doesn't have an 0day exploit yet for the new processor that comes with the phone" argument. BB firmware is usually built "take the shit from the previous version/family, put some more shit on it to support the newest feature, done". So once you have an 0day for any version of a BB chip/family, you most likely can also use it against later or derived ones.
You're equating making it to the NFL with success, which given the number of players who end up out of football within 2-5 years, with serious physical or mental damage, without a viable career path because they have been forced to neglect their education, and in many cases bankrupt, seems like a not very strong argument.
The OSX instructions are particularly hilarious: encryption - none..
Once upon a time, I actually thought VSS was the shit. But that's because crappy source control is better than no source control.
I don't know what you are talking about, but all of those vegetables are delicious if cooked properly.
It's a great site. This is one of my favorite articles on it.

http://www.damninteresting.com/nineteen-seventy-three/

Summary: A guy tries to build a networked central economic planning computer system.... in 1973.