skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Case for and against U Waterloo

I did my undergrad as well as my master's in Mechatronics at UWaterloo. Thought I'd pitch in to shed some light on two of the key themes of this conversation, Co-op and Academic research.

1. Co-op -
The Waterloo 4 month alternating Co-op program has its pros and cons. On one hand you get the chance to go out and sample a bunch of different kinds of jobs (if you proactively choose to do so), travel, fund your own education without drowning in student loans and get a taste for what engineering outside the classroom might be like. Currently with a large number of start-ups in Waterloo a lot of Co-op students work with start-ups which, for this forum, should undoubtedly be a good thing.

On the other hand, the obsession with co-op chips away from the culture of learning that a University should harbor. I remember freaking out about jobs, interviews and my resume from the 3rd week of classes in first year. It seems to be a common theme here. You spend most of your actual time on campus, preparing to get off campus and it creates less of an impetus to pursue deeper learning and research. That being said, as with everything in life, you get out of it what you put into it.

2. Academic Research -

Most schools, In my opinion, have good pockets and bad pockets. The fact that the model of scientific research worldwide is pretty broken is well known. Industrial partnerships drive research because that's where the money is. At least until we all become millionaires and donate money back to our Universities for no-strings-attached research :D It also depends on the professor. Some professors choose to fund themselves off government grants that give them less money and more freedom while others choose to work with large companies like GM on industrial research projects. You need to find the professor that aligns with your interests. I was lucky enough to work on robotic path planning and multi-robot cooperation without any industrial interests breathing down my neck but that doesn't always happen of course.

The good thing about a Waterloo master's is that it is guaranteed to be fully funded by the University and, based on merit, you can choose to do either a course-based master's or a thesis-based master's. This is unlike American universities because we drive our own research for the entirety of our program. Being just a master's student I've published as a first author in most of the major robotics conferences and journals (ICRA, IROS, JFR, TRO, WAFR) and not many master's students in other Universities have the opportunity to do that.
I don't know if it's that black and white, but that's certainly each end of the spectrum. I think the most important thing is to stay away from aggregators and blogs and focus on websites that are making good content that can stand on its own.

Ars Technica and Forbes Technology are two good examples of this that come to mind, and until recently I would have counted The Verge as well. The problem is that instead of supporting the types of sites we want to read, we are complaining about the ones we don't.
I have uninstalled Flash from my system. A great many videos on YouTube give me the "you need the latest flash player to watch this video" error.

Yes, several years ago, I was getting MP4 video, and today, a portion (say %30-%40) just launch with MP4. But most of the time I get the "you need flash".
You have this a bit wrong.

If ability is normally distributed for a given sex (and the mean of the ability of the same), then it is true that there would be more above-average male programmers than female programmers - just as there are more male programmers than female programmers at any skill level. If you are provided a skilled programmer, they are most likely male. And if you are provided any programmer, they are most likely male. However, If you pick a random male programmer and a random female programmer, the woman is just as likely to be a good coder as the man.

This means that if you are talking to an anonymous person online and they are a good coder, you should assume they are male (if you're going to assume anything). This does not work backwards - if you are talking to a female programmer and you do not know their coding ability, it would not be particularly likely that they are a poor coder.
If you actually do a null check all of the languages work the same. Since in all but the prototype cases you will be doing a null check does it really matter?

> ObjC simply ignores the message

Don't quote this like a benefit please, it is a horrendous design.

> Java raises a catchable NPE

Only difference between this and a crash is in theory you can log. In the majority of cases a NPE is bringing you down anyway.
iPhone 6: Four things we need, but may not get
My advice: be more professional. What you posted makes you sound childish with how you might "get even" for them doing this to you.

Remove this post, walk away from the job, gain other employment and try and get paid from them for the work you have done.

Have you seen the movie "Office Space"? There is a scene where they just stop paying an employee in hopes they get the picture and just leave on their own. A non-confrontational way to part ways....
This one renders much better than BBC's as well. Although I'm still undecided on this newsgraphic trend.
Aand about building your brand vs. being the brand
Or, you know, chill out, enjoy life, make what you need and dream about more money for no extra work.
No one, since no one takes Rand Paul seriously.
Evidence for Water Ice Clouds Outside Our Solar System
Or they decided to skip Haswell, and are now waiting on Broadwell, which is substantially delayed. I'd say a Mini early next year might be a good bet.
It is more or less a collection of puzzles used in programming interviews (in that particular book, at Microsoft). He has another titled "Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?" Similar concept, both focused on programming interview puzzles.
None of those things are open standards. Both Mpeg4 and "Bonjour" require a licence to utilise. Maybe that answers your question, people don't want to pay Apple oodles of money?

> Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash.

Everyone can turn on HTML5 for YouTube if they wish. They offer both. They give you the choice, the default is Flash (but Flash still has the widest support on older platforms).

> Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?

Because people would have to pay licensing fees several times for the same stream (e.g. sender and receiver both have to pay $$$, sometimes the sender, browser vendor AND OS vendor have to pay $$$).

> Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.

And Apple copies everything their competitors do also. Just look at iOS 8, that was just copying some of the best features from their competition (not that I blame them, they were right to do so).

The new keyboard (Android), third party keyboards (Android), "Handoff" (everyone else), Spotlight web-search (everyone else), etc.

Apple hasn't done anything original since Jobs died.
Never if Blizzard has anything to say about it. Every time somebody tries to port SC, Blizzard shuts them down. Their lawyers are bloodthirsty.
> Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s

I think that honor befalls the ITU with their H.261. It's only a few years difference and it definitely was never as wide spread as Quicktime but that's the first format that I remember that actually worked. It never succeeded on the web though there were a couple of companies that tried to do this using so called browser plug-ins.

Live streaming is mostly the domain of RTMP these days, HTTP doesn't lend itself well to live (but works just fine for streaming stored content).

As for why browsers don't all do MP4, you could ask why browsers do not natively support RTMP, that would solve the whole problem in one go.
Every site should be able to function normally without JS. Granted that doesn't necessarily hold true for web apps, but for regular sites they shouldn't lose functionality because somebody has JS disabled (or doesn't have it at all!)
Why not use that page? The link is buried in the "writing" dropdown. To even find the link I had to "view source", which I only did after you pointed it out.

I went to your homepage, and "programmer" is just a small piece of the subtitle. I look at your first 6 panels, 4 of which (the leftmost 4) are about recruiter/interview stuff, 1 is programming, and 1 is "other". I scroll down to your blog and books, and everything on the homepage is about recruiting or interviewing.

If the vast majority of your homepage is recruiting, it's hardly unreasonable to think you are a recruiter. That's true even if you slap the word "programmer" and "CS degree" in a couple of places.

If you believe your webpage portrays you as a programmer, I suggest you might want to work on your messaging. Consider the possibility that your in-person messaging is similarly off.

(Of course, you seem pretty successful as a recruiter/author/interview coach, so perhaps leave the messaging as is and just be more aware of it.)
The video started for me a few minutes ago, anyone else notice that there seems to be two songs playing in the background at once?
Do you think Apple's been desperately saying to itself for the past 3 years "gee, I wish we had the technology to make a larger phone!"
BSD and GPL are actually compatible and can be distributed together. It's my understanding that the advertising clause is the bit that makes them incompatible, and that regular BSD and GPL code can be bundled and distributed together.

What else I got from the OP thread is that if you do this (lets just assume the two licenses are incompatible) then you are not the violator, since you haven't distributed these as one binary package, but the users might be (only if they go on to redistribute the pre-built confabulation of binaries/processes as one package, or even just in uploading them together to, say, a hosting provider.)
How to Jailbreak iPhone 6 with PanGuiphone,ipad and Ipod JailBreak Updates
I don't think it's really true. Do you think all those parking lots and single story buildings in downtown Mountain View are the attraction for tech workers and entrepreneurs? I think replacing all that junk on the Caltrain corridor with 3 or 5 story apartments and townhouses would solve the housing problem without consuming any more open space.
Iphone 6 jailbreak with evasi0n7iphone,ipad and ipod JailBreak Updates
Came here to ask if anyone else had that problem. The combination is really strange.
I knew I liked vispy after I spent some time to write this Mandelbrot set example [1]. I only knew a little bit of OpenGL, and it took me less than a day to understand vispy's API and create it. This was also before the new scenegraph functionality was rolled out (the example is based on the core app and gloo modules).

The core development team is very receptive to issues and pull requests. They all also have experience building their own Python visualization libraries, so it's exciting to see how their ideas synthesize into vispy features.

[1] http://vispy.org/examples/demo/gloo/mandelbrot.html
I don't know if you meant for your argument to be applicable to Gayle, but if so... well, it is not applicable. People only knew her gender and assumed she was not skilled because of it.
No. They want the islands as a means to claim the surrounding waters, which which have a lot of real and potential value in fisheries, sea lanes, and offshore oil. The islands themselves are not very valuable.
On the official stream?

http://www.apple.com/live/2014-sept-event/
Same here. It's very annoying.
For some reason, this game and Shadowbane have always been timeless for me. I am guessing its the amount of customization for each toon.
I'm guessing that the mics are picking up the hall music, and some technician had instructions to play background music on the web feed.
Independently of being a bad idea from the entrepreneur's point of view, it is a very negative signal to a potential investor if you can raise your own early-stage round (per loumf's comment).

Fundraising is harder than it looks on techcrunch, though, and it's understandable that anxious and/or desperate founders would get to a point where they'd try anything that sounds good.

A better approach would be generating traction ;-).
seventeen songs at once are playing
Late reply, but I was using Chromium. And yes, I was unable to move the Education above/below Employment, or something similar. When I grabbed something to move it, it would move the highlighted word (within subsection) to another subsection.
Homemade Tank Powered by Game Boy
Yeah, it's quite bothersome. I've muted it until the show starts. Interestingly though, they seem to be playing a Tycho album in the background.
Octopart (YC W07) Is Hiring a UI/UX Designer in NYC
It is entirely possible that she spent an hour talking about code from the perspective of programming interviews. Were I to have heard such a perspective I might have assumed the talker was an expert in tech recruitment rather than a programmer/coder by trade. It wouldn't be a sign of disrespect, an expert in recruitment and interview techniques is hardly less worthy than an expert programmer.

The real question is If a male and a female talked about coding interviews for an hour, would the audience ascribe to them the same title, I suspect the answer is probably "no".
Digital Ocean launched  new community system
The most entertaining example is arguably the Coati, which due to a widely-picked-up piece of wikivandalism arguably now is "also known as the Brazilian Aardvark"... except, after editorial discussion, on Wikipedia where the name was coined
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Coati
Ship from lost Franklin expedition found
Now it supports user profiles, notifications and voting system. Pretty neat.
Why student debt is a race issue
How the Franklin wreck was finally found
Yup, seems a few people hear it as well.
Japan has one of the worlds largest stockpiles of plutonium. Nine tons stored at home, and thiry five tons stored in Europe waiting to be reprocessed into MOX fuel.
I used to love reading The Economist. It was the only printed newpaper/magazine I bothered to read. I always thought they were so insightful about topics I wanted to learn about but knew very little.

Then they ran two articles on topics I did know something about: space tech and bitcoin. And it became plainly obvious that the authors and the editors had absolutely no clue about the subject matter and were merely repeating already debunked pseudo-intellectual arguments from the popular press.

I canceled my subscription, and have basically stopped reading news, except the headlines here. If sometime really peaks my interest I'll take the time to research it myself thank you.
Sounds right, I just heard a voice over the PA system.
That's likely to be more true at startups than at mid-to-large companies. There, the CTO is often further from the center of power and responsibility. It's even possible to have a CTO who is not an "officer" of the company in a legal sense.
Bonjour was released under an open source license, part of it the Apache license, and does not require a royalty to be paid to Apple.

I turned on HTML5 video for youtube and I still have this problem, because they don't encode all videos in MP4.
Argh, yes...it's really unpleasant.
Why not get one of the many other mITX computers, or even an Intel NUC?
The example referenced is actually about someone asking "So when you were a recruiter at Google, ..." This is after a talk I gave on coding that covered data structures, algorithms, etc.

If someone refers to be as an author now, that's totally fine.
Roombot robots assemble themselves into furniture [video]
I'm fairly certain they just want you to land on the live page, even if you can't view it in the current browser. It's about eyes on page to spur you to either stay tuned or move to a browser that works with it.
I agree with you. I have js disabled by default and every time I run up against a site that uses client-side templating I find it incredibly annoying - I understand the rationale behind it but it's still annoying how many things tend to break without javascript.

However, you can't design a browser around an expectation of what the web should be like.

And anyway, it could be worse. If there were no javascript we would all be complaining about the dominance of VBScript in the browser.
Everybody knows the future of technology is bigger everything. Just look at the giant iPadds on Star Trek.
A lot of time was spent fleshing out the core "gloo" module, which is an object-oriented abstraction of OpenGL. If you know OpenGL, you can create very high performance visualizations.

There is currently a lot of work on fleshing out the vispy.scene module, which will add more high-level interfaces for plotting data.
But you were responding to a quote ">Woman. Probably not a good coder"

Which would imply the probability of a woman being a good coder was lower from the probability of a man being a good coder.

This is quite different to the probability of a good programmer being a man being higher than the probability of a good programmer being a woman.

I mean, the probability of a good programmer being swedish isn't that high but it doesn't tell you much about the quality of programming in Sweden.
Welp, time to go recreate my Sniper and go MVPing.

Thanks for the post, definitely going to check it out!
I can't believe I'm actually tuning in to watch this.
I would be really really careful with Phoronix benchmarking. If I recall correctly, I've seen them 'benchmark' and compare a FreeBSD system with a recent (at the time) Linux release. Issue was, they weren't even running the tests on the same hardware. <sarcasm> Really?! you saw performance differences between and i5 and i7?! Each running a different OS?! Get outa here!! </sarcasm>
> edit: downvoters can't handle the truth?

No, your logic is flawed. Let's say there is a population of 1,000 male programmers, with a normal distribution of IQ (mean 100, S.D. 15), and therefore 15.87% are at or above 1 sigma. That's 159 male programmers, more or less, regarded as exceptional.

Let's further say that we have a population of 100 female programmers with exactly the same statistical breakdown, with 15.87% above 1 sigma, reflecting the IQ stats for the population as a whole, male and female. This makes 16 female programmers, more or less, regarded as exceptional.

This means (a) there are more exceptional male programmers by count than female programmers, but it also means that (b) statistically, a selected male programmer is likely to be equal to a selected female programmer, and the more programmers you compare, the more equal the outcome becomes.

Mathematically:

emp / tmp = efp / tfp = 15.87%

Where:

emp = exceptional male programmers

tmp = total male programmers

efp = exceptional female programmers

tfp = total female programmers

This means that your claim above:

> So the male candidate is probably better a coder most of the time.

Is perfect nonsense, and coincidentally calls into question the presumed intellectual superiority of males.
Not to mention legal issues, liability, zoning, and insurance and all of that stuff.
The tools to decompile starcraft were released on github. The next step is to recompile it to HTML5 instead of ARM. You can read about it here:
http://pandoralive.info/?p=3089
>Does anyone have full-bodied markup that uses sexpr as a source and translates to everything?

Check out Skribilo.

http://www.nongnu.org/skribilo/
Show HN: TrueVault (YC W14) SDK for iOS – HIPAA compliance made easy for iOS apps
> I wouldn't be able to afford my own house right now.

Sounds like a good time to sell!
Sure, but that point is completely irrelevant to the discussion. Which is probably why you keep getting downvoted.
Is this sexism or is it just generalization? The vast majority of (white) women I've spoken to from tech companies are recruiters. And generalizations are very useful, in general. I doubt everyone thinks about how much coding knowledge a recruiter would have. At what point is it "sexist" (and, presumably, bad) to assume something given past experiences?
Nimble – Gesture Control at Your Fingertips
A shallow response. It's unrealistic to expect news suorces to be right all the time, especially about abtruse technical topics (it's the Economist not the Scientist). But you can easily rate how good their coverage is overall over time, by comparing the quality of information received with subsequent historical developments and seeing whether the one would have helped you you predict the other.

Also, interest is piqued, occasionally in fits.
"idempotent no-op"

Isn't that the only kind?
why am i getting bars
... but that wasn't the situation described. This isn't about someone going to my webpage - or to a particular subpage - and concluding "recruiter".

This is about someone talking to me AFTER A TALK ABOUT CODING and starting a sentence with, "So when you were a recruiter at Google, ..."
Anyone else seeing the TV Truck schedule instead of the keynote right now?
I don't think you can use the HTML5 player for videos with ads. It's an elephant of a caveat.
Surely the choice will be between a Scottish passport and a British passport, not and English one.
so silly, could really make or break my opinion of apple's future
Five DO's and DON'Ts on Building Your Robotics Startup
> This is what I meant. Given a skilled programmer, it's more likely to be a male.

That might have been what you meant, but it isn't what you said. You said:

> Then we can conclude that there are more male programmers that are above this mean.

Not as a percentage of their cohort, which is the only rational way of expressing this idea.
Yeah, someone is about to be in trouble

Edit: Now getting "Access Denied" on http://www.apple.com/live
Yes, No idea why.
I am. Music is still playing in the background.
People do dispute that reasoning, but I think this statement is correct that if you don't accept that reasoning, Debian also needs to stop shipping proprietary drivers [1] that depend on the same rationale (Debian currently considers such drivers non-free, but not GPL-violating).

[1] e.g. https://packages.debian.org/sid/nvidia-driver
The Twitter feed at the bottom says "It's showtime" but I'm just seeing the color bars and truck schedule, too.
OpenPanzer – HTML5 Remake of Panzer General 2
I can't wait for the day when sports statistics are easily accessible to amateurs. I'd rather not illegally scrape basketball-reference and just pay somebody to get an api.
Yes. :/
How to give your boss negative feedback (and not get fired)
OK, fine. The next two Amazon books I get for "programming interview", "Elements of Programming Interviews" and "Programming Interviews Exposed", both have three authors each. In both cases, only one of the authors is actually employed as a programmer. The others include an EE professor, a radiologist and two executives. The field is rife with non programming authors.

"I wrote a book about programming interviews" does not signal to me that you are, in fact, a programmer.

I am happy to believe Gayle is a programmer, but I wouldn't use her book as a credential to support that claim.

(And I just realized that I'm replying to Gayle. I didn't read your username before posting. oops. The "you" above wasn't meant to be directed at you personally.)
Thanks. I have such a group of people, friends I have an email circle with. I try to read back through our emails over the years every once in a while. Things are definitely better today than back then. It just doesn't always feel like it.
Switched to a crappy pre-recorded ad briefly, now back to the bars :(
press pause and then live