skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case you haven't noticed, both men and women (including prominent women like Caterina Fake) called out Yahoo on this event. And previous occasions have been no different, with plenty of women raising their voices. For example, after last spring's CouchDB talk we heard from several women:

http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2009/04/25/why-rails-is-still-a...
http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-...
http://dyepot-teapot.com/2009/04/25/dear-fellow-rubyists/
http://www.renaebair.com/2009/04/27/perform-like-a-frag-sta
http://lizkeogh.com/2009/04/29/i-am-not-a-pr0n-star-avoiding...
Does Microsoft price Windows higher OSX? What is the average OEM price of Windows? What is the premium that Apple targets based on the OS part of their user experience? I think the OEM price of Windows XP on my NetBook was something like $15.
ChinesePod: Giving away your product to sell it
The best way to find out how a normal person drives a car is to put a normal person in the drivers seat. Watching usertesting.com videos has shown me how cluttered and slow a normal person's computer can be. It also showed me the interesting ways those people interact with their clunkers.

Instead of having a second crippled computer for testing, I would rather use tools like Charles (http://www.charlesproxy.com/) to cripple my computer in a tweakable and consistent way.

This way I can develop, optimize for certain controlled conditions on the same machine, and verify my optimizations with real people.
In fairness, C is a much nicer configuration language than sendmail.cf. For that matter, so is INTERCAL.
I have this feeling that we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

That may be, but before you abandon the question, I suggest watching that Google Techtalk.
If you can't be bothered to author your code using only ONE JavaScript library, then yes, name space "pollution" is not very friendly. But if you write all your code using one framework, then the name space is yours to use, which to me is not pollution. It's only a pain when you want to use several frameworks, and the only reason I can imagine to to do that is to use plugins from more than one. That's laziness if you ask me; rather than ask your users to download two libraries, you should author your own version for your framework of choice.
This is not a game about shapes. See the description on the video page or at http://www.dropzap.com.
With Google Adwords I can bid on "Apple", "Wii", "Star Wars", "Microsoft", "Salesforce"...etc.. Whatever I want as long as it's relevant..

It's a keyword right? Am I missing something?
I think the best argument against the dancers is that it is tasteless -- or at least seems so to most of the readers here. I honestly don't know if it seemed tasteless to conference attendees or not. I also don't know if it was a major part of the conference or could easily be skipped by those who didn't like it.

I try to be an easy-going guy. Nobody is being harmed here. More troubling is the tendency to mouth-off about "easy" things like this while saying things like "every culture is okay" when it comes to things like the secret police or freedom of information. That just seems completely moronic to me.
So set up another Hack Day without Go Go Dancers and go there instead of the Go Go Dancer day?

Or somehow trademark the "Hack Day" label so that you can enforce a "no go go dancers" rule. I suppose atm anybody can call an event a "Hack Day", so there is no point in trying to enforce any particular style.
While I don't think what they did was a good idea. Saying it causes a gender imbalance seems unsupported.

Here's why: Which country has a great gender imbalance among technology workers the USA or Taiwan ?
I'd add a third point:

- It makes male programmers look socially inept, weak, and sophomoric. I don't like the perception or suggestion that I'll appreciate bought eye-candy at a technology conference.
R for Programmers
... a super handy dandy resource for programmers new to R.
Exactly. Tell me how this practice is any different from, say, keyword spamming on eBay?
Biggest positive difference.
I find DVDs incredibly annoying, and never could use them. Mainly because I was so used to the ability to remove VHS tapes, put them aside, and re-play them from the exact position with zero wait time. That's fixable on DVDs (I imagine) but not on my player.

DVD FBI warnings, animations, menus, etc, are all pointless and (usually) unavoidable.

The weird thing about DVDs was the ENORMOUS marketing push for them when they came out. The industry was desperate to transition to this medium, for clear reasons:

1. To get everyone to re-buy their favorite movies.

2. Better copy protection.

3. Cheaper production.

There was very little for the consumer, but he fell for it. By contrast, the ancient (late 1970s) analogue Laserdiscs were genuinely better than anything else, but didn't work out.
Speaking coyly, I'd say that depends on what djb's editor of choice is.

Might have an inheritance conflict there. ;)
Yes, I think this is the answer. There are two choices, so being human, we chose both. Then eventually chose one of those two. I used to have an email address jmsd@uk.ac.cam.cl
i.e. with the domains reversed.

~Matt
Many American technology conferences and trade shows are just as bad, and the same debate happens about them. (Yes, even in the U.S. some companies hire go-go dancers for their customer conferences.)

And since this event was sponsored by Yahoo, you would think that Yahoo management would be concerned about how it would be viewed not just by the Taiwanese attendees but also their worldwide employees (and employees' families), customers, and shareholders.
Actually, they would be prosecuted for banking without following the relevant regulations.

That's like saying, "if any other professional did what proctologists do, they'd be prosecuted for sexual assault".
Want your new smartphone to fail? Market it against the iPhone
I don't know whether it's legal, but http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/altair/index2.html has an annotated disassembly of Altair BASIC. I haven't given it more than the briefest glance myself, but allegedly there's some very nice stuff there. (Of course it's from a different era and no one outside deeply-embedded-land writes that sort of code any more other than for a twisted kind of fun.)
Go go dancers are not really racism and sexism, though. Maybe you could argue about the sexism, but still, I think you are creating a straw man argument here.

Edit: if women don't like it, why do they work as go go dancers? Don't tell me they are being exploited, because for example cheer-leading seems to be highly desirable to middle class high school girls (judging from movies and MTV documentaries). I don't think they are all slaves or drug addicts.
The Mystery Of The CSS Float Property
This is the kind of article for which I used to subscribe to New Scientist. If only I had the time to read them every week... fascinating stuff.
Dude, it's like when you think you're thinking, what you're actually doing is thinking. Woah.
Posted this on the article's comments:

I have been following Clojure with some interest lately. I'm still a Common Lisp guy though because Clojure is still in flux and evolving rapidly from what I see.

I also see the fact that all Clojure programs are Java programs as a plus and a minus: a plus because you get access to all the Java libraries and JITs and whatnot out there, but a minus because there can't be any independent Clojure port. In the real world to make an interesting port of Clojure you will also have to port all of Java so applications work. It's like if no one wrote Unix/Linux applications but only Windows and counted on Wine always being there.

With regard to state -- and Paul Barry already touched on this -- I recently started implementing a small app which needs some persistent state. I thought to try doing it in Clojure but found out that while Common Lisp has tools like Rucksack and Elephant and CLSQL, if I wanted it in Clojure I would need first to create all my data structures as Java objects (albeit with (. blahblah) wrappers if I wanted) then run them through some clumsy Java ORM, or deal with raw JDBC or Java Berkeley DB.

If I missed something that's already out there and available I would love to be pointed to it, but it seems to me Clojure could benefit from a native persistence mechanism or library that takes advantage of its concurrency strengths, or at least a native API for something like Berkeley DB that can deal well with it.
> However, it's foolish to judge a conference in a far-off land by our system of morals.

I tried to re-frame this as a practical problem rather than a moral one, since cultural relativism is a rabbit-hole this thread could disappear into for decades.

Do you believe accepting go-go dancers at events is likely to discourage Taiwanese women from wanting to get involved? That's the basis of my disapproval, cause and effect.
Really? I can't carry around a VHS in my laptop bag and watch the VHS in my laptop whenever I want it. So, from my perspective, as someone who's never owned a TV other than his computer, VHSes are almost completely useless. Of course, a usb flash drive is much preferable to a DVD...
Well, my wife is also in technology (a developer, not games) and isn't fine with it. I'm glad you're OK with it, but there's nothing wrong with those that aren't.

As a man, I'm not fine with the perception these ridiculous stunts create -- that men in technology are so socially retarded that we need organizers to hire strippers and booth babes for us.

You wouldn't see this behavior at another professional conference -- you'd see it from a subset of the attendees AFTER the conference, where it's appropriate.
Huffington Post Passes WashingtonPost.com in Unique Visitors, in September
Do you seriously think the fewer number of women in IT is because of strippers and lap dancers? Even though this is the first IT event I heard of that includes lap dancers. But I guess all these years women were fearing this day that there might be strippers at an event with computer nerds, at the other end of the world nevertheless, so they chose to study history of arts instead.
> Do you mind sharing some examples of what some of those dominant vendors might be?

Sorry - that stuff isn't intrinsically interesting to me so I stopped paying attention when I figured out that there wasn't any way for me to make money in the area.
I have seen many senior programmers who think their code is doing X when it is really doing Y. I've seen a very small number of programmers whose code is always doing what they think it is doing. Every member of the latter group of programmers spends considerable energy double-checking themselves.

Therefore if you're taking short-cuts, the possibility that your code is doing something other than what you think it is is realistic, not ludicrous. Now it may be appropriate for you to take those shortcuts. But you shouldn't take them without being honest with yourself about the risk.
Top Ten UX Mistakes on Consumer Websites
You'd need some sort of new law. And for it to work, you'd need a breakup to actually be in the interest of the shareholders. This shouldn't be hard, since owning stock in JP Morgan Chase is a worse deal than owning stock in 10 diversified smaller banks which you can freely mix and match with other stocks.
> (ie: limited University seats, and other various competitive factors that we have between students in North America, starting a very early level),

The USA has a much better university system than Finland (or any country in Europe). So they must do something right.

> smarter kids in the room to normalize the average at a much higher level, which is exactly what happens in Finland.

The USA does a lot better than most countries with mathematics achievement. See here: http://nces.ed.gov/timss/table07_1.asp#f2

Notably excellent results are Russia. Unfortunately Finland isn't on that list - but I doubt that the performance will be better.

I personally don't think that having peer tutoring will help - it will only hold back the competent and hard working. Peer tutoring sounds (IMHO) too much like some Outcomes Based Education ideal/pipedream.
What exactly is 'day dreaming'? The author seems to make up his own definition for it, interpreting it to include activities such as reading Wikipedia and watching YouTube videos. Personally, I find many of the tasks he mentioned too interactive to allow my mind to wander while doing them. (I'm actually trying to learn something when I read a Wikipedia article.) I think I'll stick to three-hour walks.
I dabbled with investing in Apple stock a few years back and it turns out I don't have the stomach for it. I hear ya.
Recycling Goes From Less Waste to Zero Waste
or perhaps it's more accurate to say that they are the pound of cure that an ounce of prevention obviates.
>Smallest square disappears when shrunk.

I meant shape as in size! Clearly it's not about shapes as they are all square. My English gets poor right around time for food.
I hear what you're saying, but I'd personally rather work more quickly than experience my users' pain. Most of my users won't have a 24" monitor either, but it's worth every penny.
As usual, they are trying to fix government meddling with austerity measures. As usual, it will not work.

"Meanwhile, tuition has soared, leaving graduating students with unprecedented loan debt."

Because the government subsidized interest rates and abolished underwriting standards. The latter was done by making it impossible to write off student loan debt in bankruptcy, meaning lenders could give a student loan to anyone with a pulse and still write it down as an asset on their books. Higher education is just another part of the monetary bubble.

"Because of the recession, Harvard is laying off workers and Stanford is selling a billion dollars of its endowment."

No, that's because their money managers stashed the grocery money in derivatives, turning a liquidity crunch into an insolvency crisis. (And thus answering the question of whether the MBA and quant muppets were trained to be thieves or trained to be idiots.)
You don't need Apple RAM. Check out Other World Computing for an Apple-friendly RAM shop.
The problem is that it's often (or always?) limited to only one carrier per country. That sucks.
Still not slow enough - you'll only be using the second computer for testing. In real life, not only will it be underpowered, it will be running lots of software stealing performance from your app. And don't forget the full disk virus scan at boot.
There is a Berkeley DB wrapper for Clojure. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like the nicest Clojure persistence library I've seen so far.

http://github.com/gcv/cupboard
The idea is to shrink the squares until they disappear. There are seven sizes. The smallest size disappears when shrunk.
No, I think that the lack of women in IT is partially due to an endemic lack of social inclusion, amply demonstrated by hiring strippers to give lap dances at a technology conference.
I wish Java would adopt len() and the like. Or perhaps a more general concept like Haskell's type classes.
Not covered by their dataset, but any trait that lessens the effective use of birth control is definitely being selected for as well.
The last tip should be the first. I'd also add UI testing on real users - not doing so is a common mistake!
Toktumi.com is another service. I had much better luck with them than Grasshopper, FWIW. We eventually moved on to our own platform (based on Asterisk initially, then FreeSwitch) for more flexibility and control. RingCentral should be avoided.

[We also frequently hire FreeSwitch and Asterisk consultants, if anyone on HN wants to be added to our vendor list.]
Geek pranks: 15 high-tech tricks to haunt your co-workers
Microsoft Moves Visual Studio Towards The Cloud
OpenSSH - Tearing Down Corporate Firewalls
From http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html, March 2005, AAPL = $40-41:

"So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these."

3.267x return over 4.5 years = 30% annualized. Mr. Graham must be happy.
"If you want to be part of the technology community, but feel uncomfortable with strippers and lap-dances, too bad?"

Um, just go to any of the thousands of other conferences that are not "Hack Day in Taiwan"? You are interpolating too much - there was ONE event with dancers (not strippers it seems), and you seem to think it is common to all events.

Here is a thing about the media: only unusal stuff gets reported. The dancers are unusal, hence they make a blip on the radar. Just try any other event or conference and you should be fine.
Advice on Writing Effective Web Content
These days web content is far too dull, boring, and unexciting. We all need to focus more attention on our online copy and look to keep our visitors more involved and interested in what we have to say.
I've suffered through the "have the smart kids help teach the dumb kids" thing in American schools. I've come to the conclusion that it is too easy to screw up to be a workable large-scale policy. In my classes, it degenerated to the point where my assignments were no better than busy work, and I had nothing more to learn from picking up the teacher's slack by tutoring other students. (Teaching can be a great way to learn, but it can only get you so far.) In the end, I dealt with the problem by leaving the public school system entirely, so that it wouldn't get in the way of me learning new things.

In order for an educational environment to be stimulating for a gifted student, there has to be a critical mass of people who can learn and converse on the level of the gifted student. One teacher with other students to tend to is woefully inadequate. Having two or three other gifted students in your class still isn't enough. In my experience, there has to be a cohort of at least 6-8 gifted students before ideas begin to flow and an actual academic community forms. Once your group is that big, there really have to be at least some dedicated lectures that progress at their pace or at a greater depth than for the general student population, and the coursework needs to be adjusted accordingly.

It isn't necessary to completely segregate school populations, but there is ample evidence that for certain subjects (most notably, math), the difference in ability is too great to be handled by a single class without leaving behind a significant portion of the students.
Search Comments on YouTube in Real-Time
Just the assumptions that the difference in numbers is because of discrimination is wrong, or at least the numbers alone don't prove it.

It could prove the opposite thing: that men are in a bad position because they are forced to study hard and lonely subjects. (Not saying it does, just saying the numbers could be interpreted in any number of ways).
I have a theory that one of the things hurting the PC industry is the availability of cheap, easy, external storage. There was a time only a few years ago when the average mainstream PC user who is scared to open their computer had basically no options for expanding storage. They would just go buy a new PC every few years and get a bigger HD included. Today you spend $99, plug-in a cable, and you're all set.

The bigger issue though is there's no new technologies out there driving hardware sales. Arguably things like USB2, CD/DVD burners, decent sized LCD displays, etc were big practical things that could drive a customer to go buy a new computer. What do we have today? BluRay? 802.11N? Not good enough for the mainstream. USB3 could be an important technology to drive hardware sales but we're probably still a few years away from seeing its real impact.
Ding! Now if you're smoking and Jim forgets to remind you, that doesn't mean you are automatically allowed to smoke there anytime you want, as are any future guests. It only means Jim didn't catch you.
You should submit 10 apps, with minor A/B differences of one app, with minor branded editions (like pokemon pearl & pokemon diamond, a few color schemes, a few different pokemon, not much else). Statistically at least one will get through, and apple does not reject on minor variations like that (just look at iMob 100 respect points). App store reviews are like 10 pregnant women, if you start all at once, you'll get all your baby's at once. Also arguing how something is better from a user's point of view can help through minor things. For example, if they reject your craiglist app because it has craiglist as a keyword, you can argue that it would make it harder for users to search for a relevant functionality.

If you really don't want to "spam" the itunes store, you can "remove from sale" all the other apps that get through and just keep the best one. Or you can leave them there, see which one does best as a testing mechanism and keep that one.
Different stats tell different stories, your results clearly surfaced a different conclusion than what my quick google turned up when I was trying to find the original article I was looking for:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland

"In the OECD's international assessment of student performance, PISA, Finland has consistently been among the highest scorers worldwide; in 2006 Finnish 15-year-olds came first in science and second in mathematics and reading literacy, in 2003 Finnish came first in reading literacy, mathematics, and science, while placing second in problem solving. In tertiary education, the World Economic Forum ranks Finland #1 in the world in enrollment and quality and #2 in maths and science education."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/education/4073753.stm

BEST MEAN SCORES: MATHS
Hong Kong-China: 550
Finland: 544
South Korea: 542
Netherlands: 538
Liechtenstein: 536
Source: OECD PISA 2003 data

BEST MEAN SCORES: READING
Finland: 543
South Korea: 534
Canada: 528
Australia: 525
Liechtenstein: 525

BEST MEAN SCORES: SCIENCE
Finland: 548
Japan: 548
Hong Kong-China: 539
South Korea: 538
Liechtenstein: 525
Australia: 525
Macao-China: 525
And more beautiful!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6727710...
They both use epoll directly. Windows uses I/O completion ports for scalable polling.
It works for me- Chromium 4.0.223.5 on Ubuntu.
As for #1, there's a good reason why login forms shouldn't persist form state: it leaks information. Showing the successful username leaks information that that username exists. It also is a subtle, possibly incorrect, hint that the user typed their username correctly. It is just as likely that the user typed their username wrong, and as the number of users go up, the chance of a one or two character difference between usernames is increased. If the username field is filled in, users might realize that they entered it wrong and won't fix it, but rather just retype the password, the wrong password for the account given.
Increased interaction does have value because, as mentioned in the article, it keeps users coming back to the service -> more likely to find it useful -> more likely to use the paid service when their trial ends.

The two metrics given as examples are just that - examples. Various other more "bottom line" orientated metrics like which user account types interact the most, how often they return before the trial ends, are also being measured.

However, it's not all about "bottom line". The second of the two metrics doesn't tell you anything about how much revenue is being generated - as is explained, this is to help find out which fields users are requiring additional advice so they can potentially improved.

Measuring the "bottom line" is important, but it's not important for every single metric.
Most tech people never even have a chance to practice social inclusion with tech aspiring females. I think the problem starts before that (if it is a problem - just like the missing male nurses).
Not only are these lame, but this article spans a ton of pages.

This total lightweight ad-whoring content would be more appropriate for a Digg submission.