skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh please, the amount of math and (physical) science a typical CS major goes through is pretty laughable compared to a math, physics, or chem major. It's usually on par with biologists with a bit more calculus.

It's not that CS majors are magically people who love science and math and English majors don't. It doesn't even matter most of the time. The fact is Google wants CS majors because should be able to hit the ground running. That's not even the case for the average college of science major applying to the average job at google. Yeah, maybe they know matlab, maple/Mathematica, and enough C++ to implement the Newton-Raphson method, but they've never even touched a database before.
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that, were I you.

My education is in science. My particular science is one in which I had to learn a lot of mathematics--everything from real analysis to quite advanced analytical geometry and a wide variety of other things. I forgot more math by the time I took my qualifying exams than most CS people I've known ever learned. So for my part it's just hilarious to see the unbridled arrogance showing its head here. CS majors like to think of themselves as being paragons of logical and intellectual rigor. I think the downvotes we've accumulated here shows that some, at least, ought not.

That's not to excuse or defend the author of the article. I happen to agree with the argument he claims the Googler makes (even though the Googler doesn't apparently actually make that argument) in a very broad sense, based solely on my personal experiences. It's a sense broad enough that it ought not be applied to individuals.
I'm not particularly looking forward to a slew of poorly coded alternatives to TC, or to endless discussions about whether or not something actually is FDE.
> Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that wiggle room.

CS grading is not the same thing as just programs working (and often that's not even the most important part of it), and, in my (obviously limited and potentially not representative, I'll admit, but there's not a lot of structured evidence being presented on any side here), the variability between institutions and individual classes within institutions in CS grading is more alike than distinct from that in any other field.

The scope of the curriculum, OTOH, in CS is probably more consistent between institutions and individual students within institutions than is the case in most non-technical fields, particularly for CS taught within an engineering rather than liberal arts institution (e.g., at UC Davis, the difference between a degree from the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science), and, further, while there are certainly kinds of analytical skills that are central to most courses of study in English, its not at all unreasonable to expect that the kind of analytical skills that Google is more concerned about are more likely to be central in CS programs.

But, overall, I think people are generally overplaying this. The stated preference for CS over other degree fields even with a slightly higher GPA in the non-CS field isn't anything like an absolute bar. Its saying that a degree in CS is one signal that is relevant to the Google hiring director that has some weight, not that it overwhelms all other information.

As an aside, though, it is worth Google examining whether this signal is given more weight than it should, especially considering their recently-posted diversity numbers and their stated concern for diversity -- since their overall diversity matches fairly well the diversity of CS graduates but clearly doesn't meet what they want, they might want to consider whether part of their diversity problem is overemphasizing having a degree in CS in their recruitment material and selection processes. If it is overweighted -- and I'm not saying that it is -- that would be a lot easier for Google to fix than many of the other things they are trying to do to address diversity (not that those things aren't valuable to pursue even if addressing the weighting of CS degrees can address some of the problem more easily and in a shorter time frame.)

Full disclosure: I am programmer whose only degree is in Political Science.
there are jobs where men are genetically more suited for but we don't have to hunt bare hands anymore so it's not a big problem nowadays
Crap, thanks for letting me know!
>1. 7.2 just disabled things. It didn't introduce a vulnerability.

I had a look at the diff; I have neither the time nor crypto-specific skill to do an audit, but there are plenty of code changes that aren't warnings in there.

>2. Warrant canary makes no sense. There is nothing for a warrant to grab.

No, but they could have theoretically been asked to introduce a backdoor from a Lavabit-style order.

>3. Forking is legally troublesome. Just because you can see the source doesn't mean you can distribute the source.

Do you think that will stop people? Even if there is some legal issue, the Streisand Effect always overcomes it. So what if a TrueCrypt fork can't use Github because of that issue? Is the world suddenly lacking good hosting providers, perhaps in Switzerland or similar? Has everyone forgotten how to set up a public git repo themselves? Somehow, I think not. So what if many devs will probably have to contribute anonymously? With a product such as TrueCrypt, they probably should anyway.
Code Mood
Technical people often underestimate the value of good communication. Technical does not necessarily refer to programming, but also to other fields like statistical financial modelling (which I do). And complain about the fact that people less qualified than them are in management.
I'm not suggesting that communication should be the sole criteria for management - a lot of software companies need programmers at the helm (as advocated by Joel Spolsky), but there are situations where an analytical liberal arts major with maturity and leadership skills will do much better than someone whose primary skills is technology.
Ask HN: Hobbyist Cross Platform App Development
Most enterprise app dev shops are going with paid systems such as Appcelerator Titanium, Xamarin, CoronaSDK where if you buy in, you get all of the goodies.

What is the best solution for hobbyist app developers who want to build cross-platform apps from a single code base and don't want large up-front costs?
Yep, that's why I mentioned file encryption specifically. :)

My use case is wanting to have an extra layer of paranoia before I upload anything important to the cloud.
How true and ironical. The author manages to prove exactly his inability to think logically by misunderstanding what Block was saying. And then he goes on being reactive instead of providing any meaningful arguments, even against his straw man...

I see this mode of thinking very often in people that I call "mud-minds" (shortly, people incapable of clear, cold, abstract and detached thinking, or at least incapable of performing thinking in a way that exhibits all these 4 attributes simultaneously, without loosing their intuition while they do this), even the well educated ones with probably high IQs: they totally fail to understand the real meaning of a message, and attack strawman ideas or follow dead-end reasoning paths, even if they do this with great skill and intelligence and the arguments they use may actually be very logical.

The sad thing is that seeing someone with a CS and math background think this way destroys my hope that exposing children early on to technical, abstract and logical thinking can prevent them from becoming "mud-minds". This even makes me pessimistic about humanity's future :(
Doing well in an English major at a good school is hard work, requires strong critical thinking skills, etc. But it doesn't reflect the level of analytical precision and rigorous correctness that doing well as a CS major does.

The humanities as a course of study are primarily interpretive and creative, and most schools of thought will support the idea that many different interpretations have value.

By comparison, while there are many different approaches and creative and engineering opportunities in CS, in the end the computer Does Exactly What It Is Told To Do And Nothing Else. And the level of precision, exactness and rigor necessary to support that environment is alien to most humanities curricula.
Its like the author of this article never compared an English major to a CS major. Yeah, I'm sure the top 1% of English majors are pretty smart guys, but on average they are not very good at thinking logically. And yes, the bottom 25% of CS graduates are probably not that good either.

But the fact remains, if you take a top 25% CS graduate from almost any program in the world, that guy can probably understand a business case quicker than a top 25% English major from an equivalent institution.

Its just far easier to get a humanities degree than it is to get a CS degree, if you aren't a structured thinker to begin with.
The algorithm, in a nutshell:

1. We have unconscious bias.
2. We won't commit conscious bias, because it wouldn't be "fair".
3. The result - a hiring process biased against everyone who isn't an attractive white male American.
4. Bonus result - a horde of guys who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.

So I'm saying yes, there should be some conscious bias in our hiring process. "Qualified" isn't the hard black-and-white line we would like to imagine it is. I'm not saying hire people grossly underqualified or unprepared for a role, but if you have a candidate you would find good enough if there wasn't someone else you like better, and the differences are reflected at least in part by gender/race/appearance, stop and think really hard about why you like the more privileged candidate better.
Shortcuts for the Xcode 5 toolbar
"Is not crazy to say that the internet wouldn't work as efficient ".

'Efficient' qualifies the noun (to) work. It is therefore an adverb and is written as in '... work as efficiently'
This is a neat presentation, but boy does it reinforce my lack of desire to relearn Perl..
I would change your assertion to "choose a degree that requires heavy duty math and succeed/graduate". Sampling after the choice is initially made is clouded by kids choosing what is popular and/or being forced to go to college because of social pressures and/or choosing only what will hopefully make them the most cash.
If I'd have gotten into YC, I'd be at #14 right now.
Weekly rate converts to $523/hr.
"Gaming the system is a lot harder to do in, say, linear algebra or real analysis or quantum mechanics."

To some degree, but I definitely recall some dramatic differences in difficulty from various professors or classes that purportedly covered similar material and met the same requirements. When someone gets all A's, I always wonder whether they were one of the students who said "Why are you taking the second compiler course? That's hard. XYZ is a much easier A..." Of course, someone who doesn't have all A's could still be someone who tried that and failed, which would be kind of the worst case...
Rolling my eyes the whole post. Is overly dramatic for something so mundane, and to be honest i don't even believe it.

“you’re a chick, leave this crap to REAL developers”.

Who say stupid thing like this on this day of age or even get dramatic when someone say that to you?. Please give yourself some pride, you are better than this.
since twilio is so cheap, it's almost always better than email-to-sms. For example, you don't need to figure out which gateway to send to, and google voice users won't be prevented from getting sms.
Some of the inflammatory statements have been taken out of context. The B vs. A+ quote was used in the context of students changing majors due to difficulty -- i.e. changing from a CS+English double major to Economics due to the difficulty of the double major. It is a discussion of the phenomenon described by "Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay." written in the WSJ.

Bock further explains that analytic thinking skills, whether or not they were derived from a CS degree or another degree (Statistics in his case) or not from a degree at all, are the important factor.
White men can't play basketball. Japanese people are good at math. Black men just aren't as intelligent.

What you said is just as stupid, also you just did this:

https://xkcd.com/385/
NIH, DRY, Whatever....
Despair in Software
Incoherent ramblings of a depressed software engineer.
both lessons are valuable and complementary. If I have kids I'll try to teach both.
As the article mentions, there are also people who lack the money or time to eat healthy all the time. College students in particular are pretty famous for their ramen meals because they're cheap and easy. They're also not filled with nutrients you need.

Soylent proposes an alternative to cheap $0.50 noodles that is a lot healthier. I know if it was available when I was a college student, it would probably have been in my pantry. I haven't tried Soylent yet, but probably will give it a shot to fill in those meals I can't make due to time constraints.
E4M – The Software TrueCrypt Came From
Exactly. It makes you think about what you want to happen if that command fails. Die hard, or try to salvage it. You have to write shell scripts with set -e in mind from the get-go, and that is a good thing.
This is easily done with Zapier, too.

Love my Zapier.
using mongo for middleware/webapp caching layer, distributed statemachine workers coordination, basically anything can be thrown away without disastrous outcome.
[UP] stable enough (never caused trouble, yet);
[UP] enjoying its easy setup, backup, migration;
[DN] still not planning to store anything that currently in MSSQL.
A footnote about the publishing industry
Please Calculate Badly
Single handedly is a bit of hyperbole. To quote the man, "my family supports me unconditionally, they help me if more trees need to be planted."

We need to stop relying on this super man concept. Community creates change through support and encouragement, no man is an island.
I concur with the sentiment that the ruby homepage over-emphasizes news people get from other places. Most of the news are release announcements and CVEs where ruby-lang.org is the prime source - it is good to emphasize that.

Another thing I'd like to point out about ruby-lang: while the site is not as huge as other pages, it is translated into many languages and easy to change: just send a pull request. https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org

(full disclosure: I am part of the german translation team)
This is the reason I made this! Strangely we'd be at 14 as well! I was quite impressed and surprised at how low most ranking are. Alexa isn't exactly the most accurate measure but still, I've seen ours rise suitably with traffic.
Why the need to explicitly police the discussion? Doesn't HN's system of up-and-down votes already accomplish that?
It's easier to find CS majors who can communicate effectively than English majors who have the logic skills to read, write, and debug code. Especially at the level demanded by a company like Google.

If you're a consultancy that writes CRUD apps I can see emphasizing communication skills over technical skills but you're not Google.
The domain "phon.li" is seven characters. If such a service would to take off, it would become irrelevant after aproximately 630 permutations in which case all the case-insensitive two-letter subdomains would be taken. At best, this shortener would only fulfill it's purpose if the subdomains were case-sensitive, in which case it could only fulfill 1,326 permutations for two-letter subdomains.

After two-characters, it's not exactly a shortener since it would be the same length or more characters than the average telephone number.
Figuring out a SMS gateway for your phone is pretty darn cheap.
Your use of "demand" is misleading. Your own words at the time say "drafted sweeping legislation." Did that legislation pass?

Anyone can "draft legislation." I can draft legislation right now. That doesn't make it U.S. law. Getting it passed is the hard part.

Phone companies are required to enable wiretaps. But that happened through the public legislative process, and the legislation even lets the phone company bill the government for costs to comply. (Your linked article explicitly points out CALEA.)
You could use identical priors for each variant, with the mean equal to the empirical mean of your existing system, and the variance controlling how plausible big improvements are.

In this case your prior mean could be something as simple as an average conversion rate for all your past articles.

Remember that by using frequentist statistics your are implicitly assuming a uniform prior---I think it's quite easy to find weakly informative priors which are more plausible than saying that any conversion rate is equally likely.
From the post:

"Tomorrow I'm going to feature the very last Google Maps on Google Maps Mania,

The blog now gets 10% of the Google search traffic it did just 18 months ago. With Google attempting to kill off Google Maps Mania it would be like a turkey voting for Christmas for me to continue to promote Google Maps and the Google Maps API.

Last week I came very close to giving up completely. But despite Google I still think there is an audience for the blog. So from Wednesday Google Maps Mania will be featuring maps created with Open Street Map, Map Box, Leaflet and other map providers.

If you have any Google Maps you want promoting you have about 24 hours left to submit them to Google Maps Mania."

----

The blog is at: http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.co.uk/
Your last line is telling. I know Many programmers who have no CS degree, or no degree at all. They are some of the best.

SO clearly a CS degree as a bar is going to miss an important demographic (potential hiring population).
But a CS bar is also clearly useful in an effort to weed out inappropriate hires (vs one that filters for hiring the best).
Haha thanks, that was just a fun side project when we were applying to YC S14. :-)
That article raised a frown with me. It presents some Java code, then shows the Ruby version, which ends up being much more concise. But the Java code is needlessly verbose. Here's how i'd arrange it:

@Override
public boolean equals(Object object) {
if (!(object instanceof Gallery)) return false;
Gallery other = (Gallery) object;
return (this.gid != null || other.gid == null) && (this.gid == null || this.gid.equals(other.gid));
}

Apart from the cast, which you need because Java has static types and Ruby doesn't, it's the same length. It's basically the same code, token for token.

Actually, the logical structure of the final line is a bit obscure to me; i'd write it:

return this.gid != null ? this.gid.equals(other.gid) : other.gid == null;

Or, in Java 7 or later:

return Objects.equals(this.gid, other.gid);
In that case, the appropriate conclusion is "there exists programming geniuses that are men", not "women genius programmers do not/can not exist". The conclusion that you are proposing (that people jump to) is basically the black swan problem.

But the topic is not about genius programmers, anyway. It's about competent women programmers. If you have never seen women programmers, or the amount that you have seen is not great enough to draw conclusions from, then it is unfair to jump to the conclusion that they do not or can not exist.
In the statistical, average sense, those things are true, aren't they? So why are they stupid? I mean sure, it would be stupid to ignore someone's actual, demonstrated basketball skill just because they're not black. But it's just as stupid to stick our heads in the sand and pretend these patterns don't exist.

Generalizing from a sample of 1 girl would indeed be stupid. But at some point you have to start making inferences.
Their phrasing. When I got to their town tourism office and asked where Eamon Farrell's pub was, I was asked "You're here for the clan rally?"

In context, it was actually humorous in an reminds-you-of-decades-of-historical-terrorism kinda way.
Then just use test instead.
Emulating a 6502 with cycle-perfect timing
Inner Circle Club"
I don't understand what you just said here. Because homeowner's insurance policies allow riders for defense against defamation lawsuits, you shouldn't talk about your experience at a company? Why?
CoreOS logging to remote destinations
>>Technical people often underestimate the value of good communication.

Not just underestimate, even outright condemn. Like the people who defend Linus's form of "communication" on the kernel mailing list as "to the point" or "efficient". Anyone who thinks that's an acceptable style of communication from/to any human being is wrong and a perfect example of why the tech companies in general should probably make their engineers attend a speech and/or social relationships class. Somewhere along the line, "engineering culture" decided any communication protocols outside of TCP, UDP and syscalls are a waste of time.
Experimenting with WebRTC in Firefox Nightly
I'm not so sure about this. Maybe if you've graduated from a good school. I've known at least one person who graduated with a CS degree but didn't actually know how to program. There are many schools where students get by just by copying each other's homework and the professors never punish them for it. My own major (electrical engineering) at the school I went to was almost nothing but students like this. It's a systemic thing and way more common than a lot of people would think.
I was with you until the last sentence, which packed a low and somewhat unfair punch. There's plenty to do with an English degree besides writing poetry. Law is a typical exit path. So are lucrative positions in media, entertainment, publishing, journalism, and public policy. To excel at these fields, one needs to be pretty smart. It's a different kind of smart from the kind you need in technology jobs. No question about that. But one is not inherently superior to the other. And practitioners of one path are not incapable of pursuing the other.

There's a trend towards convergence, however, and formal logic has had a profound effect on the English curriculum in the last several decades. Hofstadter, Tarski, Quine, Levi-Strauss, et al., are becoming required reading in forward-thinking English curricula. Your typical English course isn't going to touch the type of logic discussed in your typical CS course. But advanced linguistics is, more or less, formal systemics. Unfortunately, you can encounter a fair amount of fluff on the way there.

English education is in need of an overhaul, and it's starting to get one. But there should be no battle between the humanities and the sciences. Instead, we should do a better job bringing the average in the humanities up to par and rigor.

We should also do a better job coaching students on career paths before we ask them to choose majors. If you're studying English because you like reading books, and you have no clue what you want to do when you graduate, you're in for a tough road ahead. If you're studying English because you want to get into Yale Law School, or write for the New York Times, or become the next Michael Lewis, that's great. (But in that case, you'd better be good.)

Ultimately, what matters isn't the content of the two paths, but the application of them. CS is a directly practical degree. You can put to work what you learn almost immediately and unambiguously. You can trace a more or less direct path between the input (education) and the output (skill). English is more indirect. You can learn extremely valuable skills in an English program, but those skills aren't immediately applicable to any particular job. That's because English is a really old curriculum, which predates the modern job market. If you want to make something of an English degree, you'll need to develop skills above and beyond what you learn in the classroom. Generally speaking, schools don't do a great job teaching those ancillary skills. And so the English degree is not, in itself, sufficient for positions to which it's very well suited.
Bitlocker is also closed source. Truecrypt is (was?) open source.