skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Do you have data on this? Anecdotally it isn't hard to think of Asians in the upper echelons (e.g. Satya Nadella)."

In the same way Barack Obama is evidence that black people have it pretty easy around here ;) There are definitely some high-profile Asians in tech, they're not exactly rare like unicorns, but the underrepresentation is plenty real.

I dug up the original article I was reading: http://the-toast.net/2014/10/23/asian-americans-media/view-a... - btw, this is IMO the most approachable/parseable summary of where Asian-Americans fit into the greater American race relations landscape I've seen yet. It's well worth a read.

It's a more general look at Asian-Americans, but there is a section specifically addressing tech.

More concretely giving numbers to the representation deficit:

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23100254/glass-ceiling-asian-a...

Even in Google's own numbers Asians represent 34% of the tech workforce and 23% in leadership roles.

Facebook's a bit worse - 41% of tech workforce Asian, 19% leadership.

Yahoo is particularly egregious - 57% Asian, 17% leadership.

Even Twitter isn't particularly great: 34% Asians in tech, 24% in leadership from their own report: https://blog.twitter.com/2014/building-a-twitter-we-can-be-p...
I outfitted my house with 5 wifi cameras by buying some prepaid Android phones like that from Boost Mobile on clearance. Why pay $150 per Dropcam or some other dedicated camera when you can get one with an attached computer for a couple bucks?
Assuming this to be true(and I generally do), you end up with a different problem - that of resentment. There are groups of people who will be upset that they couldn't get into a school because they were the "wrong" race. So you still have a racism problem at the end of the day; just a lesser-known version. This is where I prefer things like BlackGirlsCode.com to try and work on these issues "on the side"[1] to raise academic performance, so the school in the big public spotlight like Harvard don't have to take sides in the controversy and just admit people based on scores, achievements, whatever... just not the controversial stuff like gender, race, etc.

_______

1. When I say "on the side", I basically mean that probably nobody is going to be upset at BlackGirlsCode.com enough to actually file a lawsuit(and have a chance at winning) the way Harvard is getting sued now. Is this fair/right? Probably not, but I think this is the best way to navigate the shaky terrain of public opinion & racism.
Well nested data parallelism generally applies to hierarchical structures like trees, whereas flat data parallelism applies to things like arrays and whatnot. You might want to watch this (similar in some ways) talk by SPJ on Data Parallel Haskell http://youtu.be/NWSZ4c9yqW8
Nina Teicholz's book "The Big Fat Surprise" has gotten good reviews, but so has Thomas Campbell's book "The China Study" ... they both seem well researched, but very at odds with each other.
That's a really great find, wow. I wonder how the author concluded that Caltech didn't consider racial status then.
Agreed. But, diversity is not limited to race alone, there are many kinds of Asian people, with diverse backgrounds and different beliefs. Is that not worthy of consideration?
For peak storage, vanadium accumulators are well established. Lithium cells give you an advantage in density, but for peak storage you are looking at capacity first, and then you consider the footprint. With vanadium you are only limited by the size of your electrolyte tank. The additional advantage is that vanadium reserves are much greater than lithium reserves.
there was an x11 port to plan9. it's still there:

$ cl -addr sources.cs.bell-labs.com:564
9p> ls -l extra/X11.iso.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- rsc sys 24878378	X11.iso.bz2
9p>

that didn't sink plan9. what sank plan9 was that linux was there and was "good enough", and that it took a full decade to realize that the concepts of plan9 can't be backported to unix/linux piecemeal. that they fit much better together in a coherent system that didn't carry the baggage of unix (the root user, for example). this is what the original plan9 papers were trying to say: it's a rethinking, you have to cut the cord to eliminate the baggage. the baggage has proven sufficiently heavy that more than 20 years later you're not seeing private namespaces in linux. instead you see fully virtualized instances of the operating system -- with all the baggage that they carry -- and most efforts are focused on making them work efficiently, rather than on inventing something truly original.

that said, if plan9 was open sourced in 1995 and had taken over, we wouldn't be talking now about a linux behemoth bolting systemd onto itself, but a plan9 one. successful software grows itself into morbidity. plan9 would've been no different.
The author's definition of foldr is wrong, which makes the post pretty much impossible to understand if you don't already know what it's trying to say.

The correct definition, in the author's style, is

foldr :: (a -> b -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b
foldr f = go
where
go z (x:xs) = f x (go z xs)
go z [] = z

It's better written with the cases for go reversed, so the base case comes first, or without the helper function at all, as

foldr :: (a -> b -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b
foldr f z [] = z
foldr f z (x:xs) = f x (foldr z xs)

But I suppose that if you're reading this then you already knew that. I'm really writing because I noticed that this submission, like another submission that made the front page of HN twice in the past two days [0], touches on the same material as Ch. 6 of Richard Bird and Philip Wadler's book Introduction to Functional Programming [1], which I happened to be re-reading a couple of nights ago. And I want to tell you to go read it.

Really, if you find this sort of thing interesting, you should read it. The book isn't strictly a Haskell book—it was published in 1988, just as Haskell's designers (the book's authors among them) were getting going. But their book remains one of the best, most timeless introductions to programming in a lazy functional language. It's written in a sort of functional pseudo-code (which Haskell aspires to be) and captures all of the excitement and optimism of the coming of age of functional programming in the years after Miranda.

Bird and Wadler's book is quite different from standard contemporary recommendations like Learn You a Haskell for Great Good; it's more like an extended version of John Hughes's famous paper Why Functional Programming Matters [2], which is to say that it makes the case for functional programming over imperative programming and illustrates the strengths of lazy evaluation. The book continues on from the basics to discuss evaluation strategies, efficiency, and other practical mid-level topics in some depth, without breaking stride; it doesn't touch much of the algebraic or categorical underpinnings of Haskell, which is the relative strength of an introduction like Learn You. That makes the two together a great one-two punch for learning Haskell.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8645292

1. http://www.nlda-tw.nl/janmartin/vakken/TFIT/Extra%20materiaa... [PDF]

2. http://worrydream.com/refs/Hughes-WhyFunctionalProgrammingMa... [PDF]
During a recent visit to SF, I noticed some red scooters with the Scoot logo on them: http://scootnetworks.com/

I don't know if they have plans to expand to San Jose.
The deeper you go, the higher the pressure. The higher the pressure, the smaller the (trapped) air bubbles. The smaller the air bubbles, the lower the upward force.

As a result, the deeper you go, the more air you will need to pump into your tank.

Or in other words: with a given amount of air inside your tank, there's a maximum depth you can go. If you go deeper, the air bubbles will no longer lift the tank.
When talking about Asian's stereotype, one thing is always ignored: the stereotype of Asian in the U.S. is a direct result of the education system and immigrant policy. Most 1st generation Asian immigrants are students who come to the U.S. for grad school. They (and their children) are better at STEM simply because they (or their parents) are/were grad students in that area. As an Asian, I saw lots of students who are not good at STEM and simply did not get an offer from any U.S. university. The immigration policy and universities' admission procedure are intentionally designed to select foreign students who are good in those majors.
How to avoid falling victim to BadUSB
ProgeCAD Download
I have been using a Motorola "FONE" (or F3, or "MOTO FONE") for the last 2 years. It does nothing but make calls. Well, I guess it has an alarm and it also has redial.

It also has an e-ink screen, which is mildly interesting.

It was designed and built for emerging markets that might not have reliable electricity, hence the e-ink and other battery saving measures.

I love it. Very small. The only problem is that it is 2G and I have some trouble in some places. I suspect that 2G service is not well maintained or observed these days ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone
Except that then we have run out of available lithium, which means that solutions that require lithium will be inaccessible. Running out of chemical elements is a problem. The helium shortage is a serious problem. High-energy physics is made from helium.
I can summarize your point of view as, "pay me a million dollars and I'll blame others for the problems"

Who wants to hire that attitude?
You shouldn't be comparing the percentage of Asians in leadership positions to the overall percentage of Asians in the country, but to the demographics of the companies as a whole. By that comparison, Asians aren't overrepresented in Google's leadership team - checking out their own diversity stats, 30% of the company is Asian but only 23% of their leadership team. (http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html#tab=leadershi...)

This article contains numbers for a lot of companies: http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/In-tech-even-Asians...
Under $12, with camera, bluetooth, FM, radio, flashlight and dual SIM

http://www.ebay.in/itm/Q-Tel-Cheapest-GSM-Dual-Sim-Mobile-Ph...

There are more available in B&M stores for $6-$7 with a reasonable lifespan (easily greater than 1-2 years)
Yes. This is a well known problem. See (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbiter_[electronics]). It's not possible to build an arbiter which will reliably decide who wins in a fixed time. It is, however, possible to design one which can detect that the arbiter hasn't stabilized yet and delays until it has. All multiprocessor shared-memory systems need this.
How to eat and drink in New York City in 5 days
That is a poor analogy. The question isn't is the cat in the house, the question is will the cat be in the house tomorrow? How about next week?
Why not? If nothing else, the new news site is, itself, news, which could serve as a PR boost to attract new contributors. Wikinews is old hat, nobody is going to start contributing there now.

A new site with a fresh start has a better chance of widening its contributorship.
The hole for this has different requirements than holes for water and petroleum: you'd not want to drill one of these holes into an aquifer, because then it would fill up with water. Oil and gas wells have to be drilled in specific places where the oil and gas are, naturally. In this case, you'd want nothing but a dry, empty hole. A dry, empty hole would be the kind of hole least likely to interact with anything underground.

I'm not sure this has much to do at all with water and energy drilling. They're talking about using abandoned mine-shafts. Those are much wider and shallower than the kind of holes used to reach petroleum.
Are the slurs really necessary?

The "it works for me" fails to address those for whom it hasn't worked. Which includes, I'll note, any number of people who might generally be considered somewhat past beginner status with Linux: Alan Cox, Ted T'so, Bruce Perens, John Goerzen, among many others: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2dgy45/if_systemd_is_...

Equating them to Donald Trump and a mob of Koch-backed disinformation shills isn't simply wrong, but trolling, of the level of Donald Trump and a mob of Koch-backed disinformation shills.

I'll note once again that the focus on insults and lack of addressing specific points and issues really cheapens the case for systemd, and its proponents.
Ha, what a coincidence. I see this on Hacker News a day after reading this¹ (found here²).

――――――

¹ — http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=904577#p904...

² — http://www.ebikes.ca/news/Electrafest/
I would say that fairness is more important than diversity. Setting different goals for different races is a racism no matter how diverse you could get in the end.

About GPA/SAT: According to Goodhart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." However, a measure is required and should be consistent.

Asians are not born to be good at GPA, American Asians are good at that because the universities admission system and immigrant policy are specifically designed to select students who are good at school. The first generation of Asians in the US are most grad students from foreign countries.
Thanks for the input! I suspected that Java would be a frontrunner.

Scala is really interesting, but I'm concerned about likely having to train every new developer. I know that a powerful tool takes time to learn, but I don't know if we'd have the budget for new devs to be unproductive.

I'm also concerned about tooling. Having really deep IDE integration is a huge productivity boost in other languages like Python. Is Scala still weak in IDE integration?
Next, take the Gifify output, upload to gfycat to get a optimised video file. Repeat until convergence.
Ask HN: What options are there for executing untrusted code in Node.js?
Over the past couple of weeks while prototyping various ideas I've kept on running into a hurdle when it comes to trying to run untrusted JavaScript code in Node.JS.

One solution I found early on was Sandbox (http://gf3.github.io/sandbox/), which seems to be fairly safe security wise, but doesn't offer much else.

Node.JS also has a vm module (http://nodejs.org/api/vm.html), but it it is 'Unstable'.

I've also come across sandboxed-module (https://github.com/felixge/node-sandboxed-module), however I can't figure out what it actually does, and also js.js (https://github.com/jterrace/js.js), but it's much too slow to be of much use.

So, does anyone else know of any other solutions?
My understandings is that the plan calls for the bus lanes to be in the median. And the traffic lights will be synchronized so the buses won't have to stop.
OpenBSD has a remarkable history of identifying key and crucial elements and providing replacements on its own where necessary.

It's also working on a set of Systemd shims as a replacement for systemd:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc4MjQ
I am a fan of autonomous vehicles too, and that's why I'm also a fan of BRT.

2 years ago, I would have advocated ripping up el Camino and putting BART underneath, all the way from San Jose to Millbrae.

Now, we can do the same route with BRT for much less money. Why would I advocate this? It's still a waste, but much less money than something like light rail, which is a disaster.

So, go ahead, spend some small millions on BRT, but at least make it cheap to rip out in ten years.
You can set up on the poles where it's steady.
I thought Dropbox was a good idea until all the files I put there mysteriously disappeared. (I think what may have happened is that they started cleaning up the machine I used at a former company and it was still connected.)
MIT and Stanford both use race as a significant factor in making admission decisions. They have explicitly stated this [1]. Caltech much less so (I believe it can be used as a tie breaker). Hence, Caltech is a better control than Stanford or MIT to compare against when you are trying to see what things should look like if race were not a factor.

It's not a perfect control, though, because of Caltech's focus on STEM. Caltech does actually offer non-STEM courses (and majors). In fact, it requires students to take about 1/4 of their coursework in humanities and social sciences, which is similar to what a science major at a good liberal arts school would take. Nevertheless, no one chooses Caltech for the humanities or social sciences, whereas people DO choose Harvard for them.

Although undergraduates are generally not admitted on a department by department basis, surely the schools have to try to get some idea from the application what fields the student is interested in majoring in, and they have to take that into account in making their decisions. If you have facilities for 50 new chemistry majors a year and 50 new English Literature majors a yer, and you get 500 applicants from people whose application suggests they might go into chemistry and only 60 applicants who appear likely to go into English Lit, you are going to reject a lot of those potential chemistry majors, even if their applications look better (grades, tests, and so on) than those of many of the people you accept from the group that looks interested in English Lit.

Since many high achieving Asians are driven by pressure from their parents, and parents push their kids toward STEM a lot more often than they push toward English Literature, it is possible that Asians could be getting effectively discriminated against as a side effect of them concentrating in STEM.

[1] http://findlawimages.com/efile/supreme/briefs/02-241/02-241....
By those numbers, Asians are overrepresented in both tech and leadership. The real question is why they aren't more overrepresented in leadership. It's a valid question, but a different one than I was asking.

Apriori I would not expect the demographics of leadership to look like those of tech. My simple model (with allusions to michaelochurch) is that tech is generally not the path to leadership. I.e., if 3% of techies go into leadership vs 5% of non-techies, then leadership demographics will look more like non-tech demographics than tech demographics.
> You shouldn't be comparing the percentage of Asians in leadership positions to the overall percentage of Asians in the country, but to the demographics of the companies as a whole.

Why? It's only in the context of the rest of the country that complaints about the underrepresentation of other minorities makes sense.
If those physicists hurried up with cold fusion that helium shortage wouldn't be such a problem.
The US has a similar deal, with E-1 and E-2 visas. You can buy your way into the US by investing $500K. This tends to be used more by people who made money outside the US and want to live there than by people doing startups. This is a treaty arrangement available only to citizens of countries which offer a reciprocal deal to Americans. Spain and most of the EU are is on the list; China (mainland) is not.
Lying to people is not allowed, because you're tricking them into paying you based on false data. Lying to programs is allowed, because you're tricking them into working properly when they would otherwise fail. The first browser to do this had the same motivation as modern browsers do.
My understanding is that peak power availability is at least as important as total energy storage. (The main use of grid storage is to handle spikes in usage, or similarly to fill in for dips in generation - like from wind turbines. Either way, peak power available is important.) One big weight would give you significantly more peak power than several smaller ones. Yes it would require more or stronger cables, motors, and other infrastructure, but the cost of all those is small compared to the shaft, so I imagine a single weight would maximize peak power / cost.
How to Choose a Teaching Programming Language
Some places along the route the distance from the Caltrain tracks to El Camino would take 20+ minutes to walk.
FourShadows.js – Time-aware algorithm driven shadows for icons
That's a devastating critique. The idea seemed a bit too good to be true, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why. Thanks for posting that.

I did a little more research, and I'm not sure anymore that it's a complete deal-breaker. But it's definitely going to put limits on how far this can scale.
If we had a dyson sphere around something heavy then the crank part could be in space with the weight dangling into the atmosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Actually 1/2 the shaft filled by weights is optimal independently of material, considering only raw energy. (E=p A h(H-h), respectively density, area, payload height and shaft height, Eopt=p A H^2/2 ). Pretty surprising to me that the energy increases quadratically with depth.
One of my systems uses the user agent "Sitetruth.com site rating system". This breaks some Coyote Point load balancers. Their parsing of HTTP headers breaks if the last letter of the header is "m". I had to stick an unnecessary "Accept /" header at the end to bypass that.

I suspect that one of their regular expressions has "\m" where they meant "\n".
I would encourage our competitors to only support modern browsers and encourage them to use pure feature detection: because their solution will work poorly, or just not work at all (about 20% of our users are on IE8).

User-agent sniffing is a necessary evil, even with careful use of feature detection. I use pure JavaScript rendering on the client side, and feature detection is not enough.

Feature detection cannot detect many browser quirks: quirks with <input> elements; quirks with viewports; quirks with keyboards; quirks with focusing; quirks with display:fixed etc.

Examples
* We detect Samsung phones because you can't type a decimal place into a numeric input on a Samsung. Users need to input decimal numbers fast (show numeric keyboard on focus) but we show the alpha-numeric keyboard to Samsung phones.
* Android Chrome doesn't tell you if the backspace key was pressed (or what key was pressed in general, for good design reasons).
* Firefox has event quirks when the Escape key is pressed in an input.
* Webkit has quirks with selecting text and focus.
* IE10 (Metro mode only) displays borders wierdly with disabled inputs

I admit that browser sniffing is a bad code smell. Most times a better solution exists that doesn't need sniffing or the design changed to avoid the problem... But it is not always possible (e.g. some keyboard bugs), not always desirable (e.g. critical high-usage areas that we don't wish to compromise), or not always practical (I don't always have the time free that it takes to discover the "perfect" solution).

Fundamentally, we try not to tell our customers what browser they "should" use. When they ask "we use X, will your solution work" we try to be able to say yes even if it is makes us work harder... X was IE6 a few years ago (competitor developers couldn't hack it), or X could be Android, or iOS4 on iPad1, or Windows Mobile (large customer happy to hear that we had app in mobile store).
FTA:

> The key requirement is a deep hole in the ground; it could be a disused mineshaft brought back into use, or it could be a purpose drilled or sunk shaft.

So, apparently, "sinking" a shaft involves making a hole using some technique other than drilling. What technique is that?

Dictionaries are no help. Wikipedia[1] says:

> Shafts may be sunk by conventional drill and blast or mechanised means.

"Mechanized means" is pretty vague. Can anyone clarify?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaft_mining
How about the Moon? :D
What app / software do you use to manage the cameras?

How do you keep them powered, have you had to run extra power cables?
Yeah, I thought about that, but there wouldn't be enough gravity and it might be a bit too far to beam the energy back.
Add text to YouTube videos to create video memes and animated GIFs
I never ended up using it but take a look at https://code.google.com/p/google-caja/wiki/JsHtmlSanitizer

and there is a node wrapper here https://www.npmjs.org/package/google-caja

Funny about Node Sandbox. I was fluctuating from grasping it completely to asking wtf is this myself, lol.