skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What company is not going to check that box?

I've worked for a company that claimed they did and it was always talked about internally in their "look how great our culture is" corporate-speak. Some developers even had the title of "mentor," but there wasn't any actual time allocated for it and no one ever took it seriously. In my entire time there I never met with my "mentor."
Internet.org app is now available in India
> Have any white men on this site ever been on the receiving end of a campaign of intimidation and fear?

Yes. I find our macho, heteronormative culture very intimidating at times. Just asking someone out comes with the risk of assault (or worse). It's not a campaign, exactly, but it is something a lot of guys go through because of how they were born.

Intersectionality is a valuable concept because it handily avoids pointless discussions over who has it worse. We all find ourselves in situations where whatever privileges we have because of how we were born are meaningless.
While short term, this sucks, I also think that in the way that eBooks work these days, this ruling is actually fair and it might well fix the situation for us consumers in the mid- to longer term.

For all intents and purposes, eBooks are services. Between DRM, vendor lock-in and other consumer hostile "features" of ebooks, seeing them as services and consequently taxing them as services totally makes sense.

As an ebook publisher, you can't have it both ways. You can't ask for the lower VAT of the easily lendable and copyable books and at the same time rent out a product that has none of these "drawbacks".

What will come out of this long-term is much more user friendly ebooks.
You're right but it's still vague. It wasn't made clear on how or if they went about getting new jobs. How many resumes sent out? How many interviews? We don't know what their experience level is...etc...etc. Those questions miss the point of what you are getting at (gender/minority bias) but there is still a technical angle in getting a job.
The brain is an antenna. A poorly tuned radio connected to a large antenna picks up a lot of nonsense - but it sometimes also picks up novelty. It can sense and concentrate the signals/ideas that others miss.

Creating an intelligent thing is like creating a garden, all that is required is to prepare the soil and remove those plants/ideas which do not serve the purpose of the garden.

Perhaps the idea that is contained in this message will find a home in the garden of another mind - give it a chance to grow, it needs a particular kind of soil. But once you get it started it's a corker.

Perhaps someone with a different set of skills to mine can make this idea manifest. I strongly believe that formalising this notion will lead to strong AI.
For me, Common Lisp will always be Howl's Moving Castle.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-int...
...it was a application builder for people who don't code...

People have been trying to build application builders for beginners who don't (yet) code at least since Kemeny and Kurtz invented BASIC in 1964. Successful intentional examples of this include BASIC, Logo, Hypercard, and PHP.

History shows that people are willing to use these until they realize that programming is hard, and then they hire someone to do it for them. History also shows that developers are completely oblivious to the actual challenges that end users will face until they put it in front of them. For a random example, most developers will hapilly expose the file system to users without realizing that in usability studies, most computer using college graduates do not understand the idea of a file system with directories inside of directories, files at every level, and two files named the same thing in two different directories actually being different files.

You can't develop something for people who don't code without putting it in front of people who don't code and accepting harsh feedback. By their own admission, they failed to do this basic thing. Without even looking, I can guarantee that their half-million lines of code and whiz bang technology is entirely unusable by their target audience. And anyone in their target audience who decides to stick with the technology will quickly want to hire a programmer. Whose first question will be whether they can rewrite the application in a more familiar environment. Which they will as soon as they dare. Therefore no matter how much you don't think you're in competition with mainstream programming environments, you really, really are.

Don't believe me? Excel has proven to be an insanely successful technology for getting non-programmers to write useful applications. Ever talked to a programmer who inherited a complex application written in Excel by a non-programmer? My point is made.

I am sure the YC person is as aware of this as I am. What do we have? We have a team that devoted an insane amount of time in creating a piece of cool technology which certainly is useless for its target purpose. This team clearly has no idea how to make something that customers want. Furthermore they don't show any sign of caring about how to make a successful business. They may be fun to talk to about technology, but is this a group you want to invest in?

YC made the obviously right choice here. And asked the right questions.
In the non-fiction sphere they could do worse than to read:

- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

- Neuromancer by William Gibson

Both books have had a huge impact on hacker culture, as well as doing a good job of documenting it. They will convey aspects of the culture that more traditional startup books can't convey - hacker language, attitude, motivation etc.

They are both great reads too.
What Do Unions Know About Running Schools?
what, Ruby is not in the list? Is Harry Potter popular enough?
You're making fair points. I think I understand the equation you're setting up here (harm of false positive vs harm of false negative, along with probabilities for each). I'm just starting to believe that the damage of so many false negatives to avoid the occasional false positive may be harming the industry more than we realize.

Let's not forget, we're an industry where employers very consistently claim a serious and economically harmful shortage of talented developers. At the same time, we're an industry that accepts an interview process they open acknowledge will result in the rejection of good candidates because they feel that the damage of a false positive is so high.

Is there a chance that there is a strong "negativity bias" at work here?

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

In other words, is it possible that the bad memories of a false positive is masking the thousand paper cuts that are inflicted on the high tech workforce though grueling interviews? What overall harm does it do to an industry when a programmer who would have been successful gets rejected from a promising job due to a poor performance on a one hour data structures problem at a white board? I think there's the harm you see, and then the harm you don't.

This one line suggests the harm may be serious and extensive. I'm not making any particular prescription here, I'm just saying that when developers experience repeated rejections due to repeated false negatives, this may be vastly more harmful in a global sense than people currently realize.

EDIT: false positive/negative switch (vonmoltke mentioned below).
> On the other hand they can't go around claiming to have a deep seating sensitivity to offenses.

Why not? I can be scared of ax-wielding murderers while still enjoying a haunted house where people in an ax-murderer costume jump out at me.

You expect offensive stuff in a CAH game. You don't expect it being mumbled behind you during a keynote.
Self-Driving Cars Will Be in 30 U.S. Cities by the End of Next Year
> We learned that accidentally sticking a server with nothing but naked IIS into rotation is really bad. Sorry about that one.

Wait, does that mean what I think it means? Did someone get an IIS splash page when visiting SO?

I was going to say they should live-blog during their next upgrade but it they did it on twitter which is awesome.
>Being created by Pike, Thompson, and whoever else does not in and of itself make Go better than any other language.

which is why I called your parent useful and informative.
and it doesn't have smartphone apps
Management letting engineers build whatever cool toys they want instead of features customers want and need sounds like it ought to be a textbook example of what not to do.

Maybe you can't herd cats, but you can at least train them to use the litter box and not scratch your television.
This is why the incident and all reports of it is so hard to navigate, there don't seem to be enough facts - just the differing perspectives of three people, which we have to judge on the merits of their plausibility.

In the linked article, I got curious about this paragraph:

"Everything was seemingly resolved, and there was no public reaction on Twitter. It was only once the man "posted about losing his job on Hacker News" that the pushback started, and then escalated exponentially, with even ostensible allies abetting the abuse by tone and choice policing."

If I recall, and I might well be wrong, the discussion was already underway when that guy posted. I'm also having trouble with identifying anything in the content of his post that would put him at fault for what happened afterwards (which was deplorable).

Can anyone with a better recollection than me weigh in on this? The article doesn't sound particularly unbiased, and neither does it have to be, but are the facts right here or not?
Roughly related to their XMPP implementation too. Really broken, and hard to co-exist with. To make things worse, they have Hangouts too now.
I honestly can't figure out what he's attempting to do here.

It sounds like he doesn't want to force a work email account on his employees. I don't think many people would have a problem with a work email, it's the norm after all, but fine.

But he also doesn't want to add their personal email addresses to his address book (is this why he wants the @dnalounge.com addresses?)

I'm not sure what this setup is attempting to accomplish.
So there was a DARPA initiative to do stuff like this back in the 90's/early 2000's:

http://archive.darpa.mil/darpatech99/Presentations/dsopdf/ds...

Turns out it's easy in controlled environments, and doesn't work at all outside. Once the animal sees something it wants to eat/mate with, it's just going to leave.

The claimed contribution of this work is direct ganglial stimulation as opposed to the antennal stimulation which was used previously. But I'm not seeing anything new in terms of capability/new science, and their data collection methods seem hinky:

The controllability of a roach, in terms of success rate, was subjectively rated based on user observation. If the user was able to successfully have the cockroach turn in a desired direction, then a run was deemed successful.
Source 2 Is Actually Free, Like, for Free
For the record, ignorant does not equal stupid, being a master does not mean you are old, and ignoring negativity (which I should have done here) does not mean I refuse to listen to you. I was simply trying to convey that the rocket has left the launch pad and people will be exposed to the language professionally whether they like it or not. I am finally free of feeling like I need to defend the language to others. It is somewhat liberating.
>I tried mongoDB on a couple projects and found it has a place in the world, but a fairly narrow use case where it actually simplifies things rather than making them more difficult.

This was exactly my experience. I see the usefulness of a flexible schema, however only in the right situations.
I haven't freelanced since starting my current position, but I was charging a flat $125/hr for the previous couple of years. I mostly do JavaScript/Node.js stuff and turn down the majority of the work that comes my way.
I am sorry you were disappointed in what you saw in comparison to what you expected. But I think it's very important to get feedback in such an early stage of development, even for a storyboard explaining the idea. This post proved really useful for us.

Either way, thank you for the honest comment :)
It's easy to see how transactional email providers have made money these days. You pay them for 70% of the brain damage, then take on the other 30% for your own.
> When most people discuss the patriarchy, they're not referring to conscious, willful agents. They're talking about systemic sexism.

In my experience, that's the minority view.

I've had a number of people tell me out-right that they're "opposed to the patriarchy, which is a system where grey-haired white men rule the world".

Great. Are they "opposed to zionism, which is a system where jews rule the world"?

They label the second statement as bat-shit insane. So do I.

They label the first statement as reasonable and above board. I don't.
That is exactly why tweetshaming is so bad. Because you're basically throwing chum in the ocean and disclaiming that you're responsible for the shark frenzy.
>>just to start

One place I worked at had a senior dev slash architect who really enjoyed mentoring green developers. This company did tend to hire people straight out of college, and this guy was really good at bringing them up to speed. It was really quiet nice to behold.

The problem was, the hires that were 'good' tended to leave after a year or two, leaving the less talented and motivated to muddle along. I think this is why you rarely see this nowadays.
Introducing Airpal: web-based query execution tool
The Ops Manager tool does a lot of tasks for you automatically now. Upgrading, taking backups, recovery and deploying new servers into a new or existing cluster. These were the types of tasks that were a pain to do manually and even using config management/scripts, wasn't always easy to do.

I don't know where they get the 95% number from, but Ops Manager tool does make operating MongoDB many times easier.
What's the best solution for spam filtering if self-hosted emails?
Windows 10 will include FIDO U2F support
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_piracy
Why not just opt out of the emails? Each one should have a link on it, so that you don't even have to find the page in the site, if I'm not mistaken.
I don't think you appreciate the impact. Services are something you lease and use for a specific period and you never own. This seems at least to be an affirmation that ebooks cannot ever be owned by anyone but the publisher and there will now need to be legal mechanisms for revocation of ebooks from your device and reporting and even penalizing and prosecution of anyone who prevents revocation or even simply does not delete a book that is a service and therefore possibly being used illicitly.
I'm trying to understand what has to do the VAT class with anything Stallman has said
31 Go-To Security Forums for Free Malware Removal Help
I have a very small consulting company. Both of my employees right now were non-traditional students when they finished their CS degrees. Actually, I'm not even sure the one guy has finished his degree yet. Regardless, neither of them had their degrees when they started working for me.

And honestly, I didn't really even know. I never asked them for a resume and they never provided one.

I don't really test the people I hire. I get to know them on a personal level. I meet them at parties, at meetups, conferences, etc. I then ask if they'd like to make a little side money with a freelance gig. We talk about the work, and if the person says they can do it, I give them a task. A real task, it goes right into the project I'm working on. It usually takes about a week or two.

And if they do a good job, I ask them to do more. If they don't, I pay them for the work they did, thank them, and don't mention they were ever interviewing for a more long-term relationship.

This has been so incredibly much better of an experience than the hiring processes I was involved with as a working stiff. Resumes that don't say shit. Stupidly simplistic coding tests. Interviewing anxiety. All of it, a nightmare.

And it didn't seem to make any difference. We would put more and more effort into hiring, to the point I was spending 10 to 15 hours interviewing and reviewing candidates a week, for weeks on end. It was having a detrimental impact on my performance, without any correlated impact on the performance of the people we hired.

So when I went independent, I decided that, if the results are really, actually random, then that means the inputs have no impact. So I threw away the interviewing process. I just ask people, "can you do this job"?

And really, I don't need to know anything else. That's what it all boils down to. They can lie on their resume just as much as they can lie to the question. They can cram on interview questions the night before. They can be really good at regurgitating academic theory but complete crap at thinking creatively. So I just ask, "can you do this job?"

And then I let them prove it.
Is that saying that the easier you are to distract, the more likely you are to be a creative genius?

Sweet. There's still hope for me...
Apache Cordova Node.js plugin
Easy target response I know, but hey it's open source so fork it.
I used to charge different rates for different things, but then I realized my time is what's valuable, not so much the task I'm doing. So I switched to $200/hr and stopped wasting time and energy figuring out whether I should be clocked in for this rate, or "that task really falls under that category", or classifying tasks/justifying rates. It's all so much more simple and the client really doesn't care either way I've come to find.

Also, I am based in the SF Bay Area and most of my freelance clients are in California for reference.
Frankly I think you'd find a lot of people would happily move into denser areas if they were more pedestrian friendly.

And so much of the sprawl in the US is not about residential housing taking up lots of space, but about separating shops and other essential parts of infrastructure from housing in a way that is only tolerable because of the car culture.

E.g. I used to travel to Palo Alto and Menlo Park a lot for business a few years back. I don't have a drivers license, so I experimented with how possible it was to stay at various hotels while walking as much as possible (didn't want to depend on co-workers or cabs to get everywhere, and I like walking).

At one point I stayed in Atherton and walked to/from offices in Menlo Park. People probably thought I was pretty crazy, but to me the distance was no more than what I'm used to, and the "commute" length was shorter.

But what got me was the structure of these - by US standards - quite reasonably pedestrian friendly small towns. If you lived right next to Menlo Park or Redwood City or Palo Alto town centres, a lot of things would be within walking distance. But basics were missing. Such as grocery stores. I soon learned to pick hotels in suitable locations to be within walking distance of somewhere where it'd be possible to actually find a decent selection of food nearby (eating out every day gets boring surprisingly quickly).

On top of the distance, the pedestrian friendly areas were "islands" not linked in any reasonable way. E.g. from Menlo Park to Atherton or Redwood City it seemed to me I had the choice between walking down El Camino Real, including a long stretch with pretty much no roadside lighting (fun walk back late evenings) and no sidewalk (for those unfamiliar, El Camino Real is one of the main roads in the area and heavily trafficked), or taking a huge - 3 times the walking distance or so - (but scenic) detour through back roads past Atherton estates.

(Amusingly, as I tried the backroads through Atherton, everyone I met greeted me as I walked past. It seemed like people assumed I must belong there, because why else would I be walking there? (I'm used to people being more friendly in California than I'm used to from London, but this was a huge step up).)

This is not about density, though density helps, but about a culture where everything is centralised because everyone drives, and where everyone drives because everything is centralised.
Right.

My understanding of history is compiled Algol wasn't nearly as fast as compiled C, which was needed for operating systems and performance-critical code.
It looks like gmail is broken, and your employees should just switch service-providers.
Ireland even has a 0% rate on books according to wikipedia.

Lower than 5% tax rates seem to be pretty common: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_value_added_tax#...
Basically, yes. This happened: https://twitter.com/atimmer10/status/560568418945236995.
Whenever a corporation gets caught breaking the law, the penalty has to be greater than the amount they saved by breaking the law. Otherwise, why bother following the law?

This settlement fails that test.
Good point about the "significance" thing.

However, the word "exercise" probably covers many different regimes here. If you take a pair of twins, put one on the couch for 3 years, and give me the other to train for 3 years with Starting Strength/Texas Method or similar, I will make him into an unstoppable monster in every dimension you can measure: Bone density, neuromuscular function, 1 rep max squat performance, bodyfat percentage, lean bodymass gained, whatever. He will even look conventionally "ripped" by the end of it if you let me control his diet a little bit. Same story if you subject him to the training regimen of an elite sprinter or something like that for 3 years.

If that same twin does Nautilus machine circuits for three years, he will probably be ~pretty much unchanged, depending on various genetic factors pertaining to sensitivity to light exercise.

Probably all of the options above would be colloquially called "exercise," but they're not even approximately created equal.
My approach avoids recompiling the program every time you run it, and it also makes it much easier to debug crashes. At least when I was doing this, running `swift` directly produced really bad crash info when things went wrong.
> Women can do whatever they want to do, if they aren't in tech, they probably don't want to be there.

This is so far from the lived reality of women in tech or any of the data on hiring that you should be embarrassed to open your mouth.

On HN most people get that before opining on the merits of functional programming, they should have tried it. Or at the very least spent a fair bit of time reading about what people who have tried it see as the pluses and minuses. But somehow we get to questions of discrimination in tech, an article can't be up for 10 minutes before somebody feels free to opine based on no knowledge whatsoever.

I find it maddening. Partly because so many of these people seem to think it's somebody else's job to argue them into an understanding. (Rather than, say, their responsibility to do a Google search and read for a whole hour.) And partly because it traps these discussions at a level of "let's explain Discrimination 101" over and over and over.

But to answer your direct point: your hypothesis that "people do what they want to do" is obviously worthless when you look at actual data on what people do. Consider this graph, for example:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

By your interpretation, in 1965, women wanted to be lawyers at 1/10th the rate that men did. But 40 years later women suddenly wanted to be lawyers a lot more. Why? Well, who can know what people want? They just want things. Or they don't. But it definitely, positively, absolutely couldn't have anything to do with the millennia of structural oppression of women or the dramatic changes over the last century in the status and legal rights of women. Nope! Not a thing.

It's ridiculous. Which you would know if you had bothered to put forth any effort. Now ask yourself: why didn't you?
It is the exact same thing as with slow cars driving in the middle or outer lane. They can really spur up some road rage in people.