skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really get it.

Why's it matter that some of the first people entering programs on a computer were women.

Does the converse hold true too - that we should focus on the "engineers" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bartik, "after learning how the machine worked only by reviewing diagrams of the device and by talking to its engineers: there was no manual") who were presumably* all male (?). And say to everyone look the predecessors of today's computer engineers were all men, and they wore suits to work.

Seems weird.

What also seems weird is that in all the ENIAC articles and the biographical details linked from the ENIAC stuff (eg http://quest.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/bartik.html) when the programming is mentioned it's not mentioned that Mauchly and Eckert were part of the programming team. Indeed it's said in a few places (that NASA link) that the women had no help other than logic diagrams in creating the programs. But elsewhere - Jean Bartik article in Wikipedia - it mentions that they talked with the engineers. It seems they are making pains to say this was a team of females, alone, with no male members; but Mauchly and Eckert were part of the team, no?

Didn't they all work together? Was there segregation that prevented Bartik, McNulty, and the other female workers from being considered peers in the effort along with Mauchly and Eckert. Did they really prevent the programmers from learning from the engineers how to program the machine somehow; didn't the engineers get involved at all in the design of programmes?

- - -

* - as it's not mentioned and surely would be; not because I think all engineers are male.
"given that everyone was happy to keep using TrueCrypt up until 1 day ago"

The same was true for OpenSSL a few weeks ago.

One of the most plausible theories is that the TrueCrypt developers found a gaping security hole (ala OpenSSL) and realised that releasing a fix for it would reveal the bug and compromise every TrueCrypt partition in existence, so they chose to kill the project rather than risk the safety of all of that currently encrypted data.

If that scenario is true, there's a big rush to switch to something else before the bug is discovered by other researchers.
The idea that somebody must have logically thought about sexism before they can be sexist is bizarre. If I just feel in my gut that women are inferior and never give it any further thought, how on earth is that not sexist?
I have one humanities degree (Japanese Studies) and one STEM degree (Aerospace Engineering), both from good schools in those respective domains. So, I feel in a unique position to comment on this.

I enrolled in the engineering program second, after I was sick of the poor employment opportunities associated with the first degree. During my engineering studies, it sometimes felt like my brain was being rewired, making it more suited to meet the rigors of the coursework.

I don't know if this was "in my head" or if something was actually happening on a neurological level. But, I know that the course work went from being ridiculously challenging in my first semester (pulled teeth to get B's and C's in the early days) to manageable and often fun in the last (mostly A's).

I am eternally grateful to the research and writing skills that I honed during my first degree. However, it was definitely the engineering courses that made me into the "analytical thinker" I am today. So, I think there is something to be said about what a STEM degree signals.
This is not true any more. The Dodd-Frank act of 2010 allowed retailers to set up to $10 minimum purchases and lower cash prices.
Define missing methods at runtime by googling them on rubydoc
We're donating 5% of our revenues to Open-Source and you have a say
Agreed, RubyMotion is appealing if you prefer a fast development cycle. I tend to use C++ for most of my programming projects but every time I've used a more "dynamic" language (Python or JavaScript in my case) I was amazed at how fast I can try/drop/improve on an idea and see the code running. The only problem I had with the "dynamic" languages was the speed of the resulting code, RubyMotion seems to be in the sweet spot between a statically typed language and a dynamic (usually interpreted) language.
Is there a new canonical lab manual ?
Anyone know what this is?

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/14152861486_...
+1 for the refreshing positive stance on the topic. I testify I'm personnally very upset for being pointed out as collectively guilty of discriminating, although I really try my very best to treat people equally.

I sometimes wish we could just forget about sex altogether, rather than point the finger to men in conferences and blogposts. I have seen a man being fired after a debate about the harm of illustrating a blogpost about marriages in the company with ball-and-chains, and I keep thinking the solution was extreme. I am now wary of legal consequences whenever I speak with women at work. Which isn't good, compared to my original intent of treating people regardles of their sex.
So at what point have you worked with enough women to be allowed to make inferences?

When the difference has an over 95% confidence level you usually have enough ground to start making inferences on new individuals. Just don't cherry pick the data, i.e. "good male programmers" versus "all female programmers".
That is one way to spin it but not what I mean. My point of the post is that it is unfortunate that the EEO-1 doesn't care about age, because age is a problem in Silicon Valley and it's going to be worse as the workforce gets older. The EEOC doesn't care about age, so we can't count on EEOC to require companies to talk about age. It's going to have to come from the companies.
I really respect the humanity with which this story is told; kudos to the dad, and Jamie, of course. This heartfelt story makes you realize how little we know about people with mental handicaps and the struggles they face, even is the best of circumstances. It only saddens me to think that similar children/young adults/adults out there, do not have the access to some of these programs because of they do not have such resourceful parents.
I agree that a better empirical-source-to-anecdote ratio is desirable, but let's be careful to draw a clear distinction between I'd like to see more of this and HN should impose a concrete "barrier to participating in discussions about gender".

Inappropriate comments can be downvoted, abuse can be flagged. Comment-policing is another matter, and we don't want that.
Swedes test a future of less work, more play
I think you might be missing the point of his comparison. The claim he's discussing is that your workforce overall should reflect your customer base, not that your product testers (much more directly related to the customer base) should reflect it. What throwaway54984 is saying is that this claim doesn't seem to hold water, through the counterexample of diversity of IQ. Dismissing it with "it only works if you limit them to product testing" is really just strengthening his argument.
What makes you confident that Google doesn't manually adjust weighting and ranking for individual sites? I've always suspected they might -- both increasing and decreasing ranking -- although they won't want this to be well-known for legal and other reasons.

The legal reasons _might_ be enough to keep them from doing it at all, it's true, but I've always suspected they do it anyway.

I mean, we know they do it to penalize certain sites they believe violated their ad rules, right? So we know their systems at least possess the technical ability to manually penalize sites.

But I'm not an expert in this stuff, which is why I start with a question (it wasn't rhetorical!).
In a Two-sided Marketplace, Build a Hen House
the fact that it uses the magic __callStatic probably means it's out of the running for "fastest"
Documenting Law Enforcement Notifications
> after PRISM

People seem to keep forgetting this (I'm sure it's simply unintentional), but PRISM was and still is nothing much more than an automated warrant/NSL compliance system.

You're basically saying that Microsoft is complicit in divulging information in response to specific requests made under specific legislative authorities, which was standard hat since even before Smith v. Maryland.
Thank you for having written this. I'm really enjoying reading it and seeing the process of acquiring a whole new domain of knowledge and skills by a person who already has one mastered (rather than one fresh out of college).
You use an non-informative prior, like a Jeffreys prior.
Good luck! Another feature of my router is that the method name converts snake_case to camelCase, so that resource/list_actions calls ResourceController::listActions(), but some of the features I mention will most likely incur a performance hit, but it shouldn't be significant once opcache comes into play
It looks tidier with the global.
I like the curation of free educational content in a specific area because it eliminates the guesswork, and duplicated effort, of filtering for high-quality resources. Thanks to Claudia Gold for the amazing amount of work she put into this. My main gripe comes with the majority of these data science courses/tracks.

It appears that no comprehensive treatment of applied data science exists. For the past few months, I've been searching high-and-low. I understand collaborative filtering; I've heard about the Netflix recommendation challenge ad nauseam; I grasp machine learning, bayesian statistics (prior, posterior, conjugate prior distributions, etc.) on a superficial level. Conversationally, I can hold my own with practitioners', albeit on a beginner level.

But what I, and others, want to learn is how to apply these techniques in a scalable way on a real production system. Right now, it's easy to conjecture about what could/should be done, but there's a lack of confidence in how to achieve the goals. I'm experimenting with a collaborative filtering problem using Cassandra as the data store for thumbs up/down ratings on products, and Hadoop for the MR pipeline; it'd be great to have more visible examples available. Is there any place I could find detailed information on real, online machine learning/statistical inference systems?
Founders confess the biggest mistakes they’ve made
This post captures a lot of the tone I was thinking about:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-she...
The last time I tried this (4 years ago?), there were significant delays getting messages to some people. We were all on AT&T plans with work phones but some took 8-10 hours to get the alert.
I wrote a blog posting with similar products to TC:

http://nothingjustworks.com/so-long-truecrypt-what-now/

Nothing really turn-key but you can mix and match a couple different products and get the same results.
Utah startup bringing reactiongif type humor to mainstream audiences
https://vmevids.com/

Everyone relates things we see in media (movies, tv shows, youtube videos) to real life experiences. Redditors have figured out how hilarious this can be with reactiongifs.

We are bringing this quick, reference type humor to mainstream crowds by providing users with an easy way to search and find quality clips (the actual videos, not the gifs), video embedding on all platforms.

My cofounder and I are college students in Provo Utah. We and our friends quote movies, tv shows and youtube videos all the time. We were looking for a better way to quote stuff over texting and social media so we came up with Vme and we're running with it.

We're still working out a bunch of things but we'd really appreciate some feedback on the user experience specifically browsing/finding videos. Also feedback on how to get our first hundred "power users" would be helpful.

Thanks
About a techer and her life
We've been using the file-oriented, shell-based map-reduce model for a while with Joyent's Manta, and it's been a great fit for a variety of tasks. We've used it internally for everything from log analysis to video transcoding to Mario Kart analytics[0]. Map-reduce is a great model for distributing work, and the shell is a great model for expressing what that work is.

Disclaimer: I work at Joyent and helped build Manta. :)

[0] http://kartlytics.com
FWIW at Etsy I built and subsequently helped completely dismantle a minimal PHP routing framework. We just used .htaccess and php files.

PHP/Apache affords you a fast, simple alternative, and what you gain with a framework (route lookup for an object) just isn't compelling enough IMO to justify the added overhead and complexity.

I think the endless proliferation of PHP microrouters (including mine, RIP) is people porting Django and Rails features to PHP without applying critical thinking first. (Myself included.)
Pyrasite: Python code injection
Good article. Author takes on what so often turns out to be a overly simplistic and poorly thought out "white paper" put out by these research firms. Glad to see someone respond with more insightful points.
Exactly. Discussions on these topics inherently require subjective value judgments on top of "more objective qualitative and quantitative sources", and I can't imagine trying to limit the comments to only the latter.
Is there something at that Bullrun link that shows the USG uses legal methods (or even illegal methods) to force product makers to insert backdoors into their equipment against the product makers' will?[1]

The NSA inserting backdoors into the product without the cooperation or maybe even knowledge of the vendor -- while troubling for any number of reasons -- is vastly different. Especially when giving advice to developers about how to stay in bounds with the law. If the metagame becomes "the government can legally force you to insert backdoors into your product" any developer faced with this threat might believe it, when he should know it's bunk.

[1] RSA allegedly got paid $10 million to make a change the NSA wanted. RSA customers should demand an answer, but that's not forcing the RSA. People get paid to do things all the time.
That sort of thinking is part of the problem.

50% of the people in the world are female, so why are they under-represented on these teams? It's a sign something's out of balance here.
If I understand your suggestion, that only works when all the threads that share a critical section can only run on the same core.

For instance, if you have a producer on core 0 and a consumer on core 1, even if the producer disables preemptions, the consumer can still enter the critical section (unless you protect it with locks).

Off the top of my head I actually don't know if you can turn off preemptions from userspace in Linux, I've never needed to.

You can give threads sched_fifo or sched_rr priorities that will prevent them from being interrupted by anything of lower priority (but that doesn't include the kernel itself... unless you are on preempt_rt and then there are things you can do).
What is ColdFusion?
Flash . . . or Fiction?
Google: Overwhelmingly white and male
Doing stack allocations in rust is actually really easy. Stack allocations in case your not aware are incredibly fast compared to anything else. The only thing faster is static allocations.

This is also the key to programming performant Go. However, you can't really entirely avoid heap allocations, just minimize them.
I wonder how significant the importance of the long-time/early female employee was in shaping a welcoming culture. It is easy for a group of extremely like minded and homogenous (male) group to start a company and grow to a decent size before any diversity is introduced. It might prove to be a powerful strategy to consciously introduce diversity before most would start thinking about "company culture". (Obviously I don't mean this as something only white male founders should worry about, I think it could be powerful for all young companies)
Google does engage in manual actions, but such actions are always reported in webmaster tools.
I've spoken to friends who've played with billion+ row Oracle RDBMS installs, and we (at Next Big Sound) have an offline snapshot MySQL instance with tables of up to about a hundred million rows (with over a hundred columns).

That said, I agree that distributed columnar stores end up being much more useful for large-scale analytics, and the power of high computation parallelism seals the deal. We've mostly moved on from those snapshot MySQL databases to Impala running on top of our Hadoop cluster, so you're preaching to the choir :)

That said, a hell of a lot of analytics can be done in a properly-structured SQL database, and schema changes aren't a big deal as long you don't need to do them online in a production system.

More info:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14733462/can-mysql-handle...
Thanks, Kirill!
> The EEOC doesn't care about age

"The EEO-1 doesn't include age" is a readily verifiable fact.

"The EEOC doesn't care about age", OTOH, is claim which requires some argument beyond merely the observation that EEO-1 doesn't include age. [1]

[1] See, e.g., http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/litigation/selected/adea.cfm [2]

[2] which, I suppose, is also good evidence for the claim that "the EEOC doesn't care about keeping its website listing current cases particularly current", but that's a different issue.
> Another theory is that some component of the development environment to compile TrueCrypt requires XP

This seems unlikely: the screenshots in your link clearly show the source could be built on Windows 7. The trouble Xavier mentions is with the updates to VS2008 SP1, not Windows service packs.
Oh noes - my Obduction pledge was driven by nostalgia and fed to a for-profit company!
Dr. Dre as the voice of Siri
No blog post of this sort would be complete without a useless pie chart.
Race shouldn't matter, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. You can't fix racism by pretending it doesn't exist.
My current favorite insane/facetious conspiracy theory on this:

"WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as ..."
WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is (n)ot (s)ecure (a)s ...
TrueCrypt is (n)ot (s)ecure (a)s ...
(n)ot (s)ecure (a)s

TrueCrypt is (n) (s) (a)
Clean Code, Evolved
As a general principle, this seems like bad policy.

1) It means that a building owner has an overwhelming incentive to never allow graffiti on their building.
2) It means that graffiti artists have the power to retard residential growth in a city, worsening NYC's problem with affordable housing.

But judges don't make policy, so we'll see how this plays out.
What gets me is that Google employees like JohnMu (in the following thread) are actually telling authors to hide large portions of their sites from Google's indexer, in order to prevent all their pages from receiving penalties for "low-quality" content:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?hl=en#!mydiscussio...

That feels like a step back from Google's stated mission to "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful":

http://www.google.com/about/company/

Apparently, only the information that maximizes search advertising revenue is worth organizing and making accessible. I understand that fighting SEO spam is an important part of keeping search usable, but there must be a way to do it that doesn't lead to completely cutting out large parts of the "indie" web (e.g. posts in discussion forums, and other sites that host user-generated content).
Even worse, the link goes to some dude who copied the blog so he could get page views instead of the author. HN posts it with a link to his page, not hers. He doesn't even talk about it, just "hey this is cool I'm gonna repost it so I get hits."
We block mobile phones with some similar rules to the ones in this web page
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/setting-up-nginx-to-redirect-mo...
Well, and discoverability/signalling. The more books that are available, the harder it is to choose a book to read. And right now, the major imprints are a signal of quality -- such-and-such publisher decided this book was good enough to spend money on. Not to say that can't be addressed in this new world, but it's unclear how it's going to be addressed and what the tradeoffs are.

Also, by democratizing books, you may end up drastically altering the compensation structure. Right now, you have a relative small number of people like Stross who are able to make their living writing novels, and a larger number of people who don't ever "make it." A more open book-publishing market may mean fewer Strosses can make a living as an author, and more and more people who are novelists do it in addition to their primary job, rather than as their primary job.

So yeah, there's a very real chance that this new world of publishing does "destroy" something. And something else will get built. And there'll be tradeoffs, and some people will win, and others will lose. Right now it's really hard to say whether or not society as a whole will be better off. The thing about Stross's argument is that historically, there's very little precedent for being able to stave off social changes instigated by technological disruption. So even if he's "right," I don't know what's to be done about it in the long run.
How and why to extend your network with power-line networking
This is not a Show HN, this is an advertisement.
"If Reading Rainbow is so epically popular, then why was the show cancelled to begin with? And now that it’s coming back — as a for-profit company, not a charity — is it really the best vehicle for teaching literacy to “millions of children”?

So the crux of the argument is that Reading Rainbow is no longer a non-profit. I really don't care about that.
Google wants 4chan to pay $150k per year to continue to use Analytics
Amazon would have to charge and book editing isn't a process that scales. At which point, authors just go off and find their own editors/etc and become a minipub.
I am curious why you pasted the entire content of the linked page as a comment. Is plus.google.com frequently blocked and/or unreachable?
The second question disallows the script tag.
Seems like buying a service that is explicitly tied to unique identifiables (ie. your address, satellite receiver, DISH tuner codes) with bitcoin as somewhat pointless. This comes off as a marketing opportunity for all involved.
The project was in contact with TrueCrypt developers (someone who could sign messages using the release keys, and provide images of the build machine that is nearly impossible to reproduce).

They reviewed the bootloader which is one of the most complex parts and touched all the crypto and found no serious issues. That suggests that the rest of the mundane code is probably in pretty good shape.

Of course it is not a guarantee that things are perfect, but it suggests that the developers a) knew what they were doing b) had no issues with an external audit.
We Have Work to Do: #yesallwomen and the Web
Change Team Conflict from a CrapShoot Into a Managed Part of Your Business Plan
We took "Show HN" out of the title because this site had a Show HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7501516.
Obligatory Half-Life 3 is confirmed, 9/11 was an inside job, etc. etc.
They modified the upper case characters to shave 1 pixel off the height tho - presumably to fit it in an 8x8.