skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I loved reading Robert Kanigel's biography - "The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan." Recommended for people who want to know more about the genius mathematician.
I didn't re-read it, but from what I remember, they started an intensive effort to both retain women who started in computing classes as well as understand the reasons why less women start computing and continue.

They had a smaller usegroup they used for their study and show that women drop out thinking that they're not doing as well as men in the same classes when really, they're doing about above average.
What is depressing is that Google likes that kind of content, when a lot of cheap articles are pumped in furiously. If they were after quality, they could de-rank Demand and that would make them out of business quickly. But they wouldn't do it, since advertising dollars are at stake.

But on the other side, it isn't that terribly depressing, since their site will occupy only one slot in the search results. So it is still a chance for others to come up with better content for such keywords. But as it seems, it is inevitable for online media producers to play the keyword game.
You'd be amazed how much isn't obvious. Your insticts on the technical chess game are probably much better than most on wall st. Read the tech analysis in a top notch investment rag like Barrons. You'll be shocked.
It would be a valuable to rank them somehow, using the behaviour of users. How to do that?

I'd be surprised if Google wasn't using Analytics to do that for many of the sites that use it.
Is it a Good Idea to Have Ads in Tweets?
If it continues, this is what all music will sound like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E
Afer I got my punching bag, I really had a lot more respect for boxers. :)

From my understanding, they do not go out, but make breakfast in a conference room. Basic stuff is somehow organized.. and everybody brings small stuff like special marmalade once in a while to spice things up. I guess that they are about 20-30 people. They do talk about business all the time. But as it is not enforced anyhow, it does not feel like work.

They seem to have a very nice working culture. To quote from his (german only blog): 'Meetings are very important. Showing up late is strictly forbidden and would result in drastic punishment. Meetings are so important, that we would never ever let the times overlap with our foosball table tournaments.'
While the lack of a strong editorial voice can be a negative, the pay surely isn't. As you note, $50 a pop for "short posts." For someone who's skilled in an area (as most Weblogs Inc writers were, at least) $50 to put out a 300-400 word post in 30 minutes or so is pretty good pay.
wow. so, now they "get it". the tie thing, that is.
Fear caused by truth is very healthy thing. But who is right or wrong on the subject of flu vaccines itself is an entirely different matter on which I have no opinion.

I got the impression that even researchers who are in favor of the vaccine accepted it was uncertain whether it worked, but at the same time found it unethical to test whether it did actually work.

If that is really the argument and not just a distorted picture presented by incompetent journalists, then I think ethics is either an excuse for some vested interests or just incompetence in field of ethics.

I talked to a philosopher yesterday who specialises in ethics. He confirmed my view that _if_ we didn't know whether the vaccine was effective it cannot be unethical to test it on volunteers.

But I think you are right to move on to the question of whether it is actually uncertain that the vaccine works. However that's a debate that I'm not competent to have.
Mass web infections spike to 6 million pages
Haven't seen something this intriguing on web since the guy who claimed that he has travel back in time from 2038 to obtain a 70's IBM portable computer.
Games? Sometimes I take a break with some video game, but then again I'm kind of young so I don't know if this works for older people.

Also if the thing I'm working on is mentally stimulating and challenging, it motivates me by itself and keeps me from burning out. So something like a couch to sit on or a place with a great view is good to go to and just think.

If you can put in windows, put those in. A TV would work too, and a place for snacks like a fridge.
Spr interviews
Consultant Medical Interview: Provides medical interview courses, preparing for medical communication skills, medical pre-interview and the medical interviews, Spr interviews, consultant interview questions, medical consultant interview and help of all the trainees appearing for interviews.
A variety of things.

Discrimination against ubernerds
In addition to demonstrated academic competence, the Admissions Office
began giving more weight to non-academic factors, looking for applicants with leadership
potential and a commitment to give back to the community.

Mentoring Programme
The most extensive single activity of the Women@SCS Advisory Council has been the
Big Sister/Little Sister program, which pairs upper-class and graduate students with firstyear
and sophomore CS majors.

Changing emphasis/delivery of (introductory) courses
Even more, insights provided by the Council are likely to have profound impact on the
curriculum. In her green paper circulated at a meeting with faculty, senior Ting-Chih
Shih clearly pointed out that the current CS undergraduate curriculum serves male
students far better than females. For one, the entry programming courses favor students
with more experience (usually men) who seem to get better scores effortlessly As a
result, many women begin thinking that learning computer science takes innate talent
and no amount of hard work will pay off They start to lose confidence and forget their
initial interest in computer science Moreover, the way lectures are presented seem to
appeal to men more. In general, females feel that the birds-eye view of a problem, and the
end result, are more relevant than the coding details in between
It's only 6 pages, and clearly says:

"The findings of this study have been well documented elsewhere and we will not go into details here."

The paper is a summary and synthesis of an entire project, see some of their publications here:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/

Their approach is multi-pronged and involved:

1) Meticulous study of male and female CS students' attitudes towards computer science education. "Funded by Sloan, the project consisted of hundreds of interviews with both male and female CS students about their histories with computing, interests, motivations and aspirations, reasons for majoring in CS, and their experiences in the undergraduate program. Conducted over a four-year period, the project was able to track many students throughout their time at Carnegie Mellon. By interviewing students once a semester."

2) Education of new teachers of Advanced Placement (AP) Exam for Computer Science in a teacher summer school and alerting them to the gender gap in computing. This summer school took place in CMU, and since it was addressing gender gap, CMU became some sort of Mecca for those who who care about women's involvement in computing.

3) Revamping of the admissions process. "In addition to demonstrated academic competence, the Admissions Office
began giving more weight to non-academic factors, looking for applicants with leadership potential and a commitment to “give back to the community.” These broadened criteria
also became important in awarding financial aid .. About the same time, Allan Fisher also conveyed to the Admissions Office his goal of a gender-balanced program. He felt it was important to get the message out that “no prior programming experience is necessary” to enter the CMU computer science program. The image of a CS student as someone (usually male) who has played with computers since
early childhood is widespread. This often discourages many otherwise talented students from applying to a computer science program."

4) "A Supportive Community: The Women@SCS Advisory Council: The Women@SCS Advisory Council was created in the fall of 1999 and has since met weekly during the academic year. Membership includes undergraduates representing all four years and graduate students representing the various departments within SCS*".
9
They'd better start learning more and faster than just to wear ties.
huge improvement! i'd say it's almost up to par with firebug (which makes firefox practically useless to me except for the purpose of testing)

a few suggestions:

- replace the light blue with the yellow (or maybe purple) highlight when you're traversing over DOM elements in the "inspect" mode

- stick the search button at the top of the bar, or create a shortcut for it so i can use it quickly and easily

- yeah, nice move on getting rid of rgb values
Changes hugely appreciated. Firefox on mac has become a pig. But I keep using it because of firebug (which has tons of features still lacking in web inspector). These changes bring things closer, but not quite enough.

We need an "edit" button (to edit html text). Plz
Howcast actually seems fairly good.

I'm optimistic about eHow (and the rest of those). A mining company is happy to get 6 grams of gold out of a ton of ore. The world's internet community will collectively sift through the sewage looking for good content, and pagerank / Twitter will bring it to the rest of us.
Could someone who has time to kill to go through the "Microformats Process" please add the "parody" keyword? This would be a great help for the next time xkcd wants to demonstrate the beauty of HTML5.
My intro to him was http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1051838/

God bless the bbc.
[...]Hardy contacted the Indian Office to plan for Ramanujan's trip to Cambridge. Secretary Arthur Davies of the Advisory Committee for Indian Students met with Ramanujan to discuss the overseas trip. In accordance with his Brahmin upbringing, Ramanujan refused to leave his country to "go to a foreign land."

So much for being a Math genius.

Disclaimer: I am an Indian.
> blocks on content

Perhaps you didn't understand how GFW works. The content is delivered to you after the RST signal, it's just the standard TCP stack ignored it. You browser may loading a page in half then suddenly Page-Not-Found, but if you have sniffer like tcpdump you can see the rest of the packets were still sent to you correctly.

Another phenomenon to help you understand the mechanism is that GFW fails from time to time. Why? Because the RST packets arrives too late.

HK has its own Internet infrastructure, it has nothing to do with mainland Internet. In fact lots of inner-China Internet connections are routed to HK then to the rest of the world.
If you scroll down a bit, there are some quotes from Heroku about their service (and some other interesting comments) here: http://www.rubyinside.com/heroku-gets-add-ons-serious-ruby-w...
According to Google's VP of engineering it's also headed to the iPhone.
There are some cool elements to this system - the algorithm for determining what content to create and the ambition of the founder but overall the system seems to be designed to produce the video equivalent of sludge.

Incentives are structured so that quality, in-depth content will be penalised while terrible, quick to produce movies will be rewarded highly. The only check on the terrible videos is the fact checking process but if you think you're going to get any kind of quality fact checking for a dollar then I have a bridge to sell you.

Given the rewards are much higher for the latter kind of video, these videos are going to grow to dominate the service. The producers of these will make videos about anything they can, not anything that corresponds to their field of expertise so essentially all you'll be getting (at best) is educated guesses about your topic of choice.

In fact there's probably a nonzero amount of money to be made in creating an automatic video generator which automatically composits videos and submits them under various names; remembering, of course; that it doesn't have to have actual information, it just needs to be good enough to get past the dollar per video filter.

The internet doesn't suffer from a shortage of information (we're already drowning in it); it suffers a shortage of quality. I can't see this doing anything to solve that.

That said, perhaps there's a market for sludge. If people want a few factoids about 'the best vodka' or something else that's utterly irrelevant, well maybe this will satisfy that demand. At least it's doing it cheaply.

Finally on an unrelated note this seems to be video for videos sake. Unless there's something being conveyed in the video that can't be done easily in text (for example recordings of the Dean Kamen robotic arm) I'd much rather stick to text - it's faster to consume, easier to parse and much more in depth.
Echo Star Sling Player For iPhone and Mac HD
Perhaps Yahoo needed a bit of discipline at the top, but "I wear a tie now" is a really bad example to illustrate "We have learnt from our mistakes".
Tons of updates to Webkit's Web Inspector
Those Fusion IO cards are wicked fast, so long as you don't mind paying like $8K for 160 GB.
Microsoft cancels Family Guy deal
He is the most well-known "unknown" mathematician...:)
Is free web hosting good?
But does he have his MCSE?
I, too, grew up in a small Midwest town and have since lived in Miami, New York, and Silicon Valley. I guess you could say that I'm being insensitive, but I tend to see things a bit differently. Change is inevitable, and thinking that you can hold on to things forever is foolhardy at best. Yes, small town America has an ever so slightly different culture, and loosing it might be painful (much like loosing traditional print media, I should think). But I always think back to when I was 8. I had a stuffed toy animal that I loved and vowed never to give up. Then I realized that, while that stuffed animal represented a certain part of my life that I valued, it was time to move on. There will always be new things to value in the future.

Now, as for the issue you raise of language, at the risk of sounding hypocritical I must say I've always been a strong proponent of preserving dialects and less common languages. I think it ultimately comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. I don't think that small town America represents a culture unique enough, or hard enough to recreate, that it's worth extraordinary attempts to preserve it. Languages, on the other hand, often represent hundreds or thousands of years of collective cultural knowledge, and once that's gone, it's gone.

A last point I feel I should make: if there is some "intrinsic value" to small town America, I think attempting to preserve small towns by creating artificial incentives to keep headstrong youth from leaving would probably do as much or more to destroy that intrinsic value than just letting nature take its course, so to speak, and gradually reduce the number of small towns.
It would be much better if you could hum or whistle a tune, and it would recognize it. I saw a PhD thesis once about this, with an actual implementation that worked pretty well. The only problem was that the database of songs was very small. It's probably hard to scale this type of search.
As someone making his money from failed fashions of technology history (i.e. data integration), I welcome the idea of inventing yet another pointy bracketed syntax for HTML 5 in the name of beauty.

We came dangerously close to removing huge amounts of nasty incompatibilities and integration issues by converging on XML as a syntactical standard for document formats. Now that HTML breaks away from this trend I look forward to vendors and in-house developers inventing all kinds of crazy new money making (for me) syntaxes!

Beauty peddlers I love you!
Shakes & Fidget - The Game (s1)
"Snake Charmers" is not a brand image "We" wanted nor created. It is the product of ignorant western minds.

Compared to other eastern cultures (chinese and japanese at least) India has suffered from mis-understanding and underwhelming understanding for a long time.

You only have to read English literature on India from 18 and 19th century to realize the extent of misinformation generated by the British to legitimise their occupation of India. "Victorial Morals" were not helpful either.
1. Windows brand does not connect with a particular demographic.
2. Microsoft sponsors Family Guy special in order to connect with this demographic.
3. Microsoft realizes content this demographic finds funny does not align with the Windows brand.
4. Fail

Seems like this whole dance could have been prevented.
I'd like to be able to keep one in my pants.

But wait, aren't they used in pacemakers??? So why aren't they commercially available now?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...
As one of the people who could actually review your app ...

In that case, you should recuse yourself.
Thanks for the nice feedback =)

Usually half the reactions are "hey I didn't even read the frontpage but I know all about your language and you're mistaken because you're not the same as C++/Objective-C/D/my mom".

Why isn't Reddit/FriendFeed more like HackerNews :/ ?
Google Maps Navigation Demo. It's Good.
Firebug 1.5: Break On Next
My university used a rather simple bait and switch trick with the degree names and changed the name of power engineering to a more friendly energy and environmental engineering.

It actually worked pretty well. There was a significant increase in female students and they didn't change to another degree later.
Heroku is the only business critical service I use that makes me smile almost everyday. I wish my telephone company, ISP and bank could provide such an excellent product with the same levels of customer service.

This week I finished migrating the last of my clients' applications over to Heroku from SliceHost. This has dropped the hosting fees for most of them down to zero while at the same time really impressing my clients with significant speed increases. I might have been able to get the same performance increase out of SliceHost if I was more skilled at sysadmin but I'm not a sysadmin.
It's just a variation on speech recognition, which has been around for a while.
The majority of people doesn't have an ear for music to correctly repeat melodies :(
>In general, females feel that the birds-eye view of a problem, and the end result, are more relevant than the coding details in between

Doesn't this suggest that men are more likely to be wired for programming?
Not exactly, you would have some capital to start. If you start with 50 points you get 50 upvotes or 25 downvotes, plus it evolves every day from your visits and the upvotes you received.

The main point is to force people to be more cautious with their upvotes and downvotes. My theory is that if you have to pay from your reputation (your karma), you'll mainly upvote/downvote what you're really convinced about.
JavaScriptMVC 2.0 Released
The Book The NBA Doesn't Want You To Read
You're joking right? There are plenty of quite nice larger cities in the midwest that aren't at all costal and have a much lower cost of living than the coasts.
Google is killing what we don't need: pests.
Could A Real Apple Fan Completely "Go Google"?
Seconded, a great read.
hmmm ... for whatever reasons the link was broken. Trying it again: "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+-+2+%2B+3+-+4+%2B+5+-...
Their custom SSL is very pricy at 100$/month! Don't you only need a unique ip which probably cost around 3$ a month or amazon lease them for much more?
Track website visitors using PHP.
The fact that RST is sent mid stream in no way lessens the point that the content monitoring leads to a narrowing of bandwidth which slows things down.

HK's Internet Infrastructure maybe its own but it is still this side of the Pacific and it is a lot faster to access US sites from HK than it is from China. And if, as you said, China traffic is routed through HK then the only difference is the GFW which is slowing things down.
How To Become A Hacker (repost)
here is a PDF snapshot.

"http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/pdfGet.jsp?id=MSP55619821e...
After all this, I am more sympathetic towards her than before. I.e, making this post and being direct about this, shows she has something that I think many lack: balls.

If you will pardon the pun.
50Mbps is a bit on the slow side these days, we have 120Mbps over coax here...
Hands on with Ruby and MongoDB
Being a Genius in Mathematics does not necessarily mean being a genius in everything else (including bringing an exciting future forward in time). Galois, another mathematical genius from France (1800s), died at twenty because he fought a duel and got killed. It may be tempting to call him 'stupid'. He may be somewhat irrational in his love affair but that does not make his mathematical genius any lesser.
You should most certainly not be in the judging pool, because you are already biased now. And you know, you may in some way have shown her to be right : she stated something that is only valid from her perspective. I.e, you don't face the same problem. You did not attempt to empathise and think, why would someone in her position want to make this statement in such a public manner? Rather, you attack the statement on the content without any attention to the context.

To judge fairly, context is as important as content. A man who steals because he has nothing to eat and would die is different from a man who steals because he feels like it.
Yes, you need a unique IP per custom domain, but unfortunately Amazon only allows a single IP per EC2 instance, so they have to rent an entire EC2 instance just for you.

SNI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication) attempts to fix this problem with SSL, but XP (and Chrome) don't support it yet.
It does not take much to be hyper-atuned to prejudice. How many times does a dog have to bite a man before he starts becoming afraid of dogs?

A woman who works in tech will be bitten a lot more times. I don't think it's being hyper atuned, it's more of being wary based of past experience. The people who you know seem like they don't care about prejudice work hard to make it seem that way. It's not the normal way.

The human way is to learn very fast with very few experiences. It takes extra-ordinary people to pretend they have not learned so as to keep people like you comfortable.
What does your disclaimer mean?

Ramanujan was a tremendously talented mathematician. Just because you come from the same country as him or find his religious beliefs archaic and/or irrational doesn't mean you can just dismiss his achievements.
Well known. Now, do you know Slava Pestov?
No more mySQL?
Oh, that's simple: the simplified set is ugly. Traditional writing is so close to being an art form onto itself, the difference is negligible. Furthermore, the change's fairly recent too, so you have three or four generations being told they have to relearn their own native language, and... yeah, organic evolution's preferable.
Actually, doesn't that mean that women don't have what it takes to actually be a programmer? The devil is in the details, as they say.

Not stating a fact, just pointing out that in the context of a technical profession, that citation actually sounds derogatory.
Maths and Culture are not related in any way.
Hyundai Seat Covers
The word 'Hyundai' means 'modernity' in Korean and the name fits well to the automobile from this company. The Hyundai Motor Company is today the world's fifth largest automaker, and the Hyundai group has become the largest conglomerate company in South Korea.
The Music of Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy also has an excellent chapter on Ramanujam.
Quite funny anyone would argue it wouldn't work. It's pretty similar to speech recognition algorithms which have been around for a while now.